It was too much. “I have to go . . . Maya, we have to go.”
“We all have to go,” Carl said. “We’re going to Altus, now. Go pack.”
“No, that’s not what I mean, I mean I need to get away from you,” I said, staring into their eyes.
“If you go alone, you’ll both die.”
Carl lowered themself from the couch and walked to their room. The door closed softly behind them.
My phone buzzed on the couch. It was Andy.
ANDY
Jason had come into my room and started kicking me. I had been up all night watching the markets plunge and watching my AltaCoin explode.
“What the fuck, dude,” I said once my headset was off, blinking in the light of the day. I had no idea what time it was.
“Fuck you, get up and come with me,” he replied. I hadn’t recorded an episode of Slainspotting in weeks. I hadn’t even consumed a piece of media that wasn’t either inside of Altus or about Altus for weeks. I knew I was letting him down. I knew I wasn’t being healthy, and that he wasn’t sure whether to be more furious or worried, but I was convinced that I needed to know everything about Altus to be the leader I needed to be in the coming revolution, whenever that was going to be. Little did I know it would be tomorrow.
But I knew fighting Jason was no use. His jaw was fixed and his eyes were hard. Also, I needed to go for a walk—my body was aching.
So I got up and followed Jason out of the apartment, down the elevator, and onto our street, which was deserted, and to a coffee shop. We each got an Americano and sat down.
“Look around at the people in here, tell me what you see.”
“There aren’t very many people in here,” I responded.
“It’s 10 A.M. Does that seem strange to you?”
I never knew what time it was anymore, so Jason was right that he had to tell me. The place was usually packed at this time of day. I spent more time looking at each of the people in the coffee shop. “We’re the only guys in here except for the guy in the back, who looks like he’s been hit by a train.”
Jason was silent, but his eyebrows went up in a gesture I interpreted as “And?”
“Oh, is that what I look like?”
“Yeah, that guy is an obvious Altus hound, and so are you. You’ve all got the same look and it isn’t a good one.”
I rubbed my chin, which was past prickly and into hairy. I’d been trying to keep presentable for the TV cameras, but I hadn’t had any interviews in the last few days, and traditional news was feeling more and more irrelevant to me anyway.
“Why is it just women in here?”
“Oh, I dunno . . . Have you ever noticed how the Altus Space is largely about ‘intellectual debate’ and ‘self-improvement’ and porn? Jesus, dude, you’re supposed to be an expert on this stuff. Have you never noticed who your audience is?”
Of course I had—I’d even seen think pieces talking about how Altus was built by men for men and how it was a weakness of the company—but talking about that wasn’t good for what I was trying to do, so I hadn’t put a lot of thought toward it. I groggily sipped my coffee, feeling the pit opening inside me.
Jason didn’t know the plan. I was only setting myself up to be a leader in the Space so I would be credible when I turned my back on it. And I’d do that as soon as it was the right time. Except that “the right time” seemed further away every day. And every day I felt a little more like the Space was the next step forward in human consciousness. Yeah, sure, I looked sallow and unkempt. And yes, Altus was being run the wrong way, but still, it was so powerful. And I was a part of that, a part of something so big it was crashing the world economy and making me disgustingly rich.
Even while I sat there with Jason, my mind wanted to go grab my headset. I didn’t even know what I would do once I was there. I just wanted it.
The Space actually could make humanity better—of that I had no doubt. The way it was being run . . . Jason was right. It was mostly a bunch of dudes making stuff that mostly appealed to a bunch of dudes. And Altus had set it up so that they would be making money from every angle possible.
Everyone who had access was taking their first crack at a sandbox or an experience and spending all of the rest of their time mining AltaCoin so they could buy more.
Altus was now worth hundreds of billions of dollars. But that day there was a 20 percent stock market drop, trillions of dollars of value lost—if no one wanted or needed to buy things, if all of the best human experiences were inside the Altus Space . . . what was the economy even for?
“Can’t you see that Altus is just . . . bad?”
I found myself wishing I could experience Jason’s brain to know where that sentence had come from.
“It’s not good or bad,” I said. “It’s just another tool. We just have to do the right things with it.”
“And who’s going to decide who does the right things? Peter Petrawicki?”
I looked at him for a long few seconds and then said, “Yeah, fuck you, man.” And I stood up and walked out of the coffee shop and back up to my room.
There was a padded envelope on my bed. I stared at it for a long time and then finally opened it. The Book of Good Times. I threw it straight into the wall, screaming. But then it just sat there on my floor, open, showing words that I knew I was going
