“We need to go,” I said. “The plane is waiting for us.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with Peter,” Miranda said.

“He is just unconscious, he’ll wake up soon. They’ll all wake up soon. So we have to go now.”

“How do you know that?” she asked. Leave it to Miranda to hold us up worrying about the worst possible guy.

“I’ll tell you on the plane.” My voice sounded flat in my own ears.

“Where’s Carl?” Maya repeated.

I remembered back when Carl had tweaked my brain so that I couldn’t feel things. This wasn’t like that. The emotions weren’t being pushed down, they were in a writhing tangled mess in the back of my mind, but they couldn’t get to the surface. Not yet.

“Carl died,” I said. I wasn’t letting myself feel it, and I saw Maya’s face shift as she did the same.

“But if Carl died,” Miranda said, catching up with us, “then why am I still alive?”

“Because we did it,” I said. “We did it.”

I gathered my friends, and we walked out of the building together, over the unconscious bodies of Altus security guards. I led them, moving straight and fast, a signal that I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want any of them to see my face as it bunched together in grief, snot running into my mouth, tears pouring from my right eye.

“We’ve got a few new passengers,” I told the pilots, the grief walled off for a moment.

“Is everyone OK?” one of them asked.

I didn’t know how to answer. I heard the sob bubble out of me before I knew it was happening. It was like vomit, unwelcome and uncontrolled. I felt Maya’s hand on my shoulder as she guided me back to the cabin.

“Yes,” I heard her say. “Everyone is OK.”

ANDY

The donations grew exponentially. From 6 to 7 A.M. we received $400 million. But then from 7 to 7:10 we raised $300 million. People were willing to take the risk. They had lost friends and family, they had lost their savings, they felt the hope that ten dollars really could change things forever. And it was now or never.

I told myself it would be enough, even as Stewart Patrick and Bex kept telling me it wouldn’t be.

And then the news started coming in. I almost went into the Space to check, but I stopped myself. If you went in now, you would be forced to experience body dislocation, and once you had that experience, your mind locked onto it and could never go in again.

Whatever April had done on that island, it had just destroyed the Space for millions of people who were currently logged in.

I got a text from Stewart Patrick.

Sorry I didn’t believe you. This is perfect. They’re going to start falling now.

And fall they did. By the time our three-hour deadline was up, we had received donations from more than a billion people.

Stewart started buying. And the moment one person sold at a new, lower valuation, other investors got even more freaked out and he could buy at an even lower price. Altus’s value crashed. He bought the entire Saudi sovereign fund’s 10 percent stake for $4 billion, setting the value of the company at just $40 billion.

After that, the rest of the investors would sell at any price.

I texted April, What did you do?

I wanted it to sound like maybe I was just curious. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Maybe it was temporary. There had to be a way to turn it off, right?

April: We’re on our way home. Altus is broken. From what we can tell, there’s no way to fix it. Spread the word. The investors will take any out we can give them.

April: But don’t stop taking money. This was the world’s decision, they need to feel invested.

That was April—there was no truth but the optics. I was having a hard time believing that we were actually going to raise $20 billion, but it looked like we were going to beat the goal substantially. Here’s a wild stat: If you distribute a billion dollars across everyone in the US, each person would only get $3. That doesn’t seem possible! But it works the other way too, every person only has to give $3 for someone to have a billion.

At 9:30 a.m. eastern time, Stewart Patrick texted me to let me know that we were down to our last $200 million, and we now owned a controlling interest in Altus Labs.

It turned out that we needed that $200 million, though, to pay severances to all of the Altus employees we laid off and to bribe the government of Val Verde to prevent Peter Petrawicki from suing us. Eventually, Val Verde kicked Peter off the island, and he had to go back to living in the California suburb where he grew up.

It wasn’t until he stopped that we could see the full scope of what Carl’s brother had been doing. After we broke Altus, a full 2 percent of active social media accounts never posted again. That included The Thread, but also a number of other similar YouTube channels. My theory is that Carl’s brother was building audiences all over the internet and was planning to pit them against each other somehow. Or maybe he was just going to use them, turn them into his followers and keep them perpetually satisfied.

But he stopped, and that meant we had succeeded. I think.

Whatever we were doing, we were on a path that didn’t include us destroying ourselves or being taken over by a relentless ever-present god AI.

So Altus was gone, The Thread had disappeared, April was back, everything was perfect, and I was so goddamn angry.

I did a pretty good job of ignoring my constant, smoldering frustration. But it was there, always grating on me, always waiting to be fed a little more fuel. I was so good at not looking at it that it took me a long time to figure out what it even was.

I have some fiercely amazing friends, and I’ve tried to follow in their footsteps, but I am not as smart as Miranda, or as self-aware as April has become, or as insightful as Maya has always been. Just for the moment, though, I’m going to try to be all of those things, even if I’m just pretending.

I spent the time between April’s death and the end of Altus trying out pretty much every way humans feel valuable.

I got famous, I got rich, I was adored, I hung out with fancy folks, I helped people, I tried to change the world for the better, I made my friends laugh, I had powerful people tell me I was worthwhile, I wielded tremendous influence.

I tried everything, so you’ll excuse me if, at this point, I feel like enough of an expert to present you with:

ANDY SKAMPT’S SIMPLE LIST OF THE WAYS PEOPLE FEEL VALUABLE

 1. Just Believing It

Sometimes this is religious; sometimes it is not. God cares for everyone, but society is supposed to as well. We strive to live in a world that places tremendous, even infinite value on a single human life. We do not live in that society, but I think part of the reason we strive for it is because we need to signal that our existence is intrinsically meaningful. This is the only source of meaning that does not rely on other people; it is also the hardest one to hold on to.

 2. Story

We understand ourselves in complex ways, but oftentimes that can be distilled down into some core identities. And we imagine these identities as part of a story, and that that story is some intrinsically positive thing. It might be being part of a tradition, or breaking free of one. It might be your race or height or hair color. Your status as a child or a parent. Being a job creator or a Star Wars fan or a snowboarder. We create positive narratives around these things, and when we fit in them, we feel like we matter.