130 replies 5.1K retweets 23.6K likes
Francisco
@Fahm90
April May is “back” and of course I’m happy she was not killed, but I think there are a lot of questions that are not getting answered, and I think it’s important that we start asking them.
4.3K replies 1.2K retweets 6.5K likes
Death BoY
@MrDeathLad
Lefty-twitter is creaming itself over April coming back as if she hasn’t proved exactly what she is. We all said she was a traitor to humans and maybe not even really a human herself, and now look at her. Nothing will convince these people.
351 replies 4.3K retweets 16.4K likes
MAYA
DAY TWO OF NINETEEN
Finally, after thinking and talking and fretting, we made the video public.
The world changed and it didn’t.
The comments and tweets of support and love flooded in. Everyone from the president of the United States to Howie Mandel was in April’s mentions. The direct replies to April were almost all extremely supportive, but out there, almost immediately, we were seeing little quiverings of frustration and angst from the people who wanted to capitalize on people’s natural fear of April.
The worst thing about these people is that they didn’t usually feel fear themselves; they were just using it to get attention and grow their influence. As long as this tactic worked, they would never stop.
Weirdly, we spent a lot of that day trying to keep the survey site from crashing. The survey included an opportunity for participants to give us their email address (and allow us to email them if we wanted to). And we asked them some basic questions about what they were worried about or struggling with. And we also asked a very general question—“How do you feel about Altus?”—and that question became . . . important.
In addition to internet stuff, we also had text messages flooding in. April had already agreed to bring Robin back on to manage her life. Every kind of press outlet wanted April on. An interview, a quote, a single individual strand of hair. Most of those requests had been either declined outright or she had offered up Andy to discuss the Altus Space instead.
Robin had pointed out, correctly, that usually people want to give quotes and be on TV to get their message out. Right now, April wasn’t having any trouble getting her message out all on her own. So instead, the plan was to sit tight, respond carefully to positive things on the internet, and Ignore. Everything. Else. In our free time we would enjoy Mr. Crane’s ludicrous apartment, watch Netflix, read Agatha Christie novels, craft careful and cutting communications that weakened Altus, and dive deep into our survey responses.
Except there were just too many. Even with the survey page being down for most of the first day, we had literally millions of responses to go through. No matter how we filtered, there just wasn’t a good way.
April and I were griping about this around the black marble countertop in the kitchen when Carl came in and overheard us.
“Just do a search,” Carl said.
“The searches take forever and we don’t know what to search for,” April replied. “It’s just a bunch of dumb data. Most of the useful stuff is in text responses, which is impossible to parse.”
Monkey Carl made a little hissing noise with their actually monkey throat, which was what went for laughter for them.
“No, with your mind. You have this power, but you barely ever use it.”
“It hurts her,” I said defensively.
“It’s not that,” April replied carefully. “It’s just . . . it reminds me of . . . that I’m different now.”
“April, you are different now whether you use it or not,” Carl said.
“But what would I search for?”
“You are tapping into my processing power. You can ask for anything you like—my systems will process it for you.”
“What?” April said incredulously. “I thought I just got raw data.”
“No! Lord, no, a system collates and returns what you ask for.”
“So I could ask nonspecific questions?”
“Of course. How dumb do you think I am?”
It got strangely normal to talk to a monkey, but it never got normal talking to Carl.
“I don’t know how any of this works!”
I agreed with her frustration. We’d been living with Carl for weeks and they hadn’t mentioned this?
“What do you want to know?”
“I want to know what people don’t like about Altus.”
“OK, yes, that is an example of a question that would not narrow things down effectively.” Carl stroked their monkey chin. “What about ‘I need a summary of the main concerns people have with Altus’?”
“And that will work?” I asked, perplexed.
“I can predict the future,” Carl said, like I was being silly.
I looked over to April, and she had her eyes closed. Suddenly her jaw tensed and her head tilted forward.
“Holy shit,” she said.
“What?”
“Well, I know why people don’t like Altus. I mean, at least the people who responded to the survey. Holy shit. Like, exactly.”
“And?”
“Sixty-six percent cited economic concerns, 37 percent cited social concerns, like that a loved one was addicted, 32 percent cited concerns about inequality of access, and 12 percent cited concerns that Altus use would exacerbate the ‘cultural divide.’”
I opened a Google Doc to start writing things down, but it wouldn’t open. “I think the internet is down.”
“Yes,” Carl replied. “Well, that does happen sometimes with larger queries. It will be back up shortly.”
“So it was you,” I said, thinking of the internet outages in South Jersey.
The survey always looked a little calculated to anyone who knew how the internet worked. We were collecting email addresses and also information about people. That would be valuable, even if we just wanted to sell them shirts. But it actually turned out to be a lot colder and more calculating than we intended it to be.
We were able to segment people into groups and create different messages for each of them. People who were worried about their loved ones got one email; people who were worried about inequality
