“No, he just made it impossible for people to feel like we’re investigating some great caper as a species. I want that as much as you do, but I can’t encourage people to post discovered codes publicly. If he has access to all the secret ones they have, plus all the public ones everyone else has, the Defenders really will decipher the code first, and be in control at that point.”

“Maybe that’s a race that it’s OK to lose.”

“Fuck that,” I parroted back to him. “I’m not letting him win.”

“Let’s take some time to think at least. Assemble the brain trust.”

So we did. We got Miranda and Robin on Skype and explained Petrawicki’s plan.

“That is not good,” Miranda said. “This is a genius move on PP’s part. Not only does it give them a chance at winning, just framing it as a competition instead of a collaborative effort helps their cause. It slows everyone down and it pits us all against each other.”

“Yeah, I get it, dude’s a genius and he sucks. So what do we do?” I asked. No one said anything for a moment.

“Well, I have no idea,” Robin said, which must have been physically painful for him. Not being able to help was his least favorite feeling in the world. “To be honest with you I don’t even know very much about the Dream.”

“Me either,” I replied. Everyone looked surprised.

“Really?” Robin said.

“Yeah,” Andy added, “I would have assumed you’d be all over it. Mysteries are your thing! You were a freaking pet detective.”

“What?” Miranda and Robin said simultaneously.

“I’ll tell you guys about it later. It’s just . . . It’s weird when there are billions of other people on the case. I just feel like my efforts are better spent elsewhere. The chances of me uncovering a unique passcode are, like, nil. So, Miranda, I guess you’re the only one of us who spends much time in the Dream.”

“Uhhhh . . . no, it stresses me out. Once I start on a puzzle, I can’t stop, and then I stop having normal dreams. You still wake up rested, which doesn’t make any sense and is probably impossible, but I don’t like waking up frustrated. I just wake myself up and then go back to bed and sleep like a normal person for the rest of the night.

“I’ve felt like my time is better spent working on the output. The passcodes are spitting out hex code, which people have figured out can be compiled sensically into a vector image. That’s, like, an image that is made up of math.”

“Hah, yeah, Andy and I are VERY aware of what vector images are.”

“Oh, right, designers!” Miranda said. “Well, anyway, the problem is that every time a new string of code gets added, the image changes shape completely. It’s basically a big mess of interrelating math, so whenever anything is added, everything changes. No piece of code is at all useful without all of them.”

“Do they know how many there are?” I asked, genuinely surprised that I didn’t know any of this yet.

“Probably,” Miranda said. “There’s no way to know if it’s actually following the image format perfectly, but if it is, then there are 4,096 total fragments of code. But, again, I don’t know anything about the Dream itself, only about what it’s been spitting out.”

“OK, so none of us spend time in the Dream. Do we trust anyone who does?” Andy asked.

There was an active Wikipedia page of completed puzzles. So far more than five hundred had been solved. I kept tabs on it both because I wanted to see how it was going and because the list contained the names (or screen names) of people who had assisted in solving puzzles. If you sorted by that number, the top ten names or so had become fairly well-known among people who even peripherally followed the Dream. At number three, with sole or shared credit on eleven confirmed passcodes, was ThePurrletarian.

“Um, well,” I said, “never mind.”

“OK, that’s not how sentences work,” Andy said. “Once you say ‘um, well,’ you’ve committed yourself to finishing the thought.”

“I think Maya may be ThePurrletarian.”

“What?” Andy almost shouted.

Robin and Miranda were quiet. They knew of Maya, but they’d never met her.

“And why do you think this?” Andy asked.

“It’s a secret?”

Robin broke in here from inside the computer. “Do you want to contact her, to ask what she thinks about this situation?”

“Is she online?” I asked.

“Um, yeah, should I go chat with her?” Andy was hesitant.

“Good god, she’s my ex, not a hell demon. Just add her!” I half shouted in a loud monotone.

And then there she was. She was sitting on her bed in our apartment. Or, rather, my old apartment. I suddenly worried about how she was paying rent. Had I screwed her over? I hadn’t even thought about it. Sweat leapt out of my skin.

She was leaning on the same big blue pillows with the same Hundertwasser print hanging up over her bed frame. It was just so . . . the same. I wondered if she had a new roommate. I wondered how things were going at her job. I wondered if she was bitter that Andy and I had gotten rich and she hadn’t. I wondered if she hated me. Then I realized, of course she did, and wondered how much.

“Hello?” she said, looking around at all of us with a mix of concern, skepticism, and maybe a bit of resignation. It was the first time we’d talked since I left her apartment. She didn’t look angry; she did look annoyed.

“Hey, um,” I replied, unable to think of what else to say.

Andy took over for me: “Are you ThePurrletarian?”

“Goddamn it, April,” she almost whispered. “What did you tell them?”

“That you might be ThePurrletarian, that’s all.” If weakening her secret identity was what she was going to be mad at me about, I felt like I was getting off very easy.

She looked resigned, not angry—at least, not at that moment.

“After . . .” And then she had to restart. “I got the Dream before almost anybody. The first night I had it, I solved four sequences. I knew it wasn’t just a dream. It’s . . . It’s amazing in there.”

I felt a little guilty that I had spent so little time exploring the Dream then. I spent all my time defending it, but also I avoided it.

“Are you going to introduce your friends?”

“Oh god! I’m sorry. Maya, this is Miranda, a materials scientist at UC Berkeley who we’ve been working with, and Robin, who is my assistant,” I said.

Andy then cut in, “It’s really good to see you, Maya.”

“It’s good to see you too.”

If you want yet another example of what a shit I am, I hadn’t even considered that I’d basically made Andy choose and that he had chosen me. Another wave of heat and sweat hit me. Luckily, Andy took over and told Maya the situation with Petrawicki.

“Oh, yeah, do not give into that rat-faced shit. Seriously, if every person got a nickel every time someone else thought something nasty about them, that guy would be the richest man on earth.”

“Right, no one wants to give in, but we have to do something or he’s in control.”

“First of all, no, he’s not. All the more complicated clues require collaboration now anyway. Yesterday there was a passcode uncovered and the key was to have someone who spoke a particular dialect of Hindi and had knowledge of their region’s creation myth working with someone who knows abstract mathematics. I was following the whole saga and I still don’t really understand. It was something about circles, both geometrical and mythological. It really shows an amazingly detailed understanding of human culture. And, for all their strengths, the Defenders don’t necessarily seem like the most culturally aware group of people.”

There was a round of agreement.

“But more importantly,” she continued, “we can fuck with them.”

“Oh, I like the sound of that,” I said.

“It takes time to check a passcode to ensure that it’s real. You can’t just pop into the Dream, say the passcode, and get the data. You have to go through the whole puzzle sequence, get the password in the Dream, and then deliver it. Some of the puzzle sequences take hours.”

“Oh, this is delicious,” I said. “So we just have to set up a racket of people who send Peter Petrawicki fake puzzle sequences and hex codes hundreds of times a day.”

“No,” Maya said, “you don’t need to do anything. People active in the Dreamer community are already working on it. When I say ‘we’ can fuck with them, I mean us, not you. No offense, but I don’t think you could come up with a convincing fake puzzle sequence to save your life.”

I did not take offense. I saw myself as a leader of the community, not a member. I had no idea what a messed-up perspective that was at the time. “Oh, so, we don’t have to do anything. This problem will solve itself.”

I saw frustration bloom on Maya’s face. “No, April, this problem will get solved by people who just happen to not be you.”

Everyone got a little wide-eyed with that rebuke. Miranda blushed bright red, while my guess is that my face went a shade whiter.