Also, I get to do really cool stuff now.
—
I went back to Berkeley, where Professor Lundgren had, once again, kept my lab bench in place and available. And there she and I started doing something pretty dangerous and very secret—we took Altus’s source code and tried to use it to figure out how it worked.
What became clear pretty quickly was that no one at Altus had written the code and, indeed, no human had written it. Much of it was completely indecipherable. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t find anything useful.
—
We were able to determine that the changes Carl made to our brains to allow us to receive and transmit data into their network were observable and permanent. And we were able to determine that even children born after the Dream stopped happening had those changes. What we were not able to find was any trace of the computational system Carl’s brother was, theoretically, still using to observe us.
We knew it was there, but whatever systems Carl used to turn our biosphere into a planetwide computer were too elegant for us to even perceive. You’d almost think it wasn’t there, which I guess is the point.
—
We all dropped our Altus nicknames when we got back to Berkeley. And I say “we” because the first people I hired onto my research team (yes, I had a research team now) were Paxton and Sid.
I was trying to get them to go for runs with me, though they were more successful in getting me to play D&D with them.
But I did succeed in getting them to help me do amazing research. We teased out the barest bits of how the Altus Space worked. From that, we got little insights that could potentially help push brain-computer interfaces forward by ten or even fifteen years.
And then, after we were fairly certain that we’d gotten most of the low-hanging fruit from our analysis of the alien code, y’know what we did? We destroyed it. We took every single hard drive that had ever touched that stuff, and we put them in a truck, and we drove that truck to a facility that can smash anything into powder. And then each of us took turns throwing drives into the maw of this giant grinder that was built specifically to destroy hard drives. The drives split and bounced and ripped apart until they finally fell through to the other side, where they were nothing more than jangling pieces of plastic, silicon, and metal. We each took one little piece back to the lab with us, where they sit above our lab stations.
Every day we come in and we do science. We do great science, and I actually feel like the leader of this little team. I feel like I belong to something again. We do it right, and we do it well, and in the morning I come in and I look at my little bent, mangled piece of hard drive and feel something lovely. I feel whatever feeling is the exact opposite of regret.
MAYA
You don’t get to know where April and I went. I’ve had enough of that. We’re just here on planet Earth with the rest of the humans. Did we make a couple of not-super-well-thought-out financial decisions? Yeah, but we had to make a comfortable life for ourselves and Paulette. Paulette is our monkey.
—
We did buy a house together. In general, I would suggest not having a very large, shared asset with a girlfriend who has not always been the most stable person in your life. But, I don’t know, it felt a little like she had changed. Or maybe that’s just my April-shaped blind spot. I think part of the point of loving someone is being able to deal with their brokenness.
April’s family was on the West Coast and mine was on the East, so we compromised and we live, well, somewhere in the middle. I am going to save the memory of our shared reunion with our families for myself. It was the first time my parents met April’s parents, and it was so normal that it could never feel as important as it was. It was not as big of a deal as saving the world, but it was close.
Mostly, though, it was just the two of us.
Time passed, and eventually, finally, it became clear that Tater was moving past its prime. We knew, down there somewhere, in the darkness, there were treasures waiting for us. One morning, I declared it was time. April and I sank our hands into the pot together, feeling the little magically formed nuggets of food there. Our hands met under the soil, and we laughed together.
And then April shouted with joy, “PAULETTE!” The monkey had popped one of the dirty taters straight into her mouth and was crunching it. We all laughed together. Except for Paulette, who didn’t like the flavor of uncooked potato and spat it out onto the ground.
April’s hands dug deeper into the pot to see if there were any other prizes to be found, and I just watched her. Her body, both new parts and old, working together to generate the tiny effort needed to push into the loose soil. She was beautiful. She had always been beautiful. Too beautiful for her own good, but now she was a literal technological marvel as well. I love to watch her body. Her hand came out of the bucket holding something that was not a potato. With a look of complete, abject amazement on her face, she held up a swollen and muddy book.
She pushed it toward me, and I, on instinct, pushed it back. Honestly, I was a little terrified of what it might mean.
“The Book of Good Times,” it said on the
