I moved over to kneel next to her so that I could see the words as she read them out loud.
Hey, you two. I hope you get this. If you do, then things will have gone as well as could be expected. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you more, but if you had known, you might not have succeeded. I’ve run a couple simulations, though, and in all of them you forgave me at the end, so that is bittersweet. I’m sorry I’m going to leave you.
I was never going to survive long anyway.
I’m even sorrier about the pain I have caused. It has ripped at me to be the source of such conflict and division. I set that plan in motion before I cared about people as individuals. It was cruel of my parents to deprive me of that care and then give it to me after there was nothing I could do to change my plans. But I suppose they did that for a reason.
I just want you to know that you people are wonderful and beautiful and terrible and foolish. I was given knowledge of the action of other agents like myself and of the different kinds of people they worked with. Maybe it’s reality or my own familiarity with you in particular or just my programming, but it seems clear to me, you are something special.
I loved to watch you. I loved to learn about you. I loved loving you.
You’re radically collaborative, profoundly empathetic, and deeply communal. Everyone who tells you anything different is selling the fear that is the only thing that can break that nature. They do that because it turns people into devices. My only advice: Never do that to another person, and do not let anyone do it to you.
Oh, and also, as a general rule, err on the side of caution and . . .
She looked up at me and then kept reading:
. . . listen to Maya.
In this book are a couple of explanations of how I work for you to put in an eventual book that you will make available. It will be a memoir of our experiences in this time, and I would like to tell people more about me. I think it will be good for people to know what happened here, how I came to you, and telling the ones who will listen about my brother will further push you toward a more stable path. I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but for you, knowing someone is watching does generally improve human behavior.
I don’t think we could have written this book if Carl hadn’t said we would. But it was their last request, so we didn’t have much choice.
I can’t tell you if you’ll remain free. I can only tell you that you’ve got better odds now than you did before. I was very powerful, and losing that power has been very hard. Literally painful, sometimes, but other times simply the knowledge of my own diminishment in the face of the greater power that now inhabits your planet was devastating. But my power was real, and while I am angry at the loss, I do believe that my parents did know at least something about what they were doing. I believe that because I have witnessed my own power and compassion, and I assume that theirs is even greater.
If you’ll allow me one final trick, Maya, you two should probably go to Costco. Around fifty people will be coming over for dinner tonight.
And so they did. Andy and Bex and Jason and Robin and Miranda all showed up, but so did a few familiar faces I didn’t expect. My parents, for starters, and April’s. But also Saanvi Laghari, the woman who I interviewed about the dead dolphins, the two pilots who flew us to and from Altus, and Jessica and Mitty, our ambulance drivers. There were people we didn’t know too, like Miranda’s advisor, Dr. Lundgren, and a bunch of people none of us had ever met.
And every person there brought with them a small, simple leather-bound book. These were the people who Carl had chosen. They were the people Carl needed to make the plan work.
They were business owners and servers and nurses and drivers and teachers, and we connected with old friends and made new ones. It was Carl’s last gift, and we drank of it deeply. We were awake until morning, laughing and talking about what we’d done and where we were going, and nothing seemed too heavy to carry because all of these people could share the burden. But we also just talked about our friends and our hopes and our scars. And the soundtrack, of course, was perfect.
APRIL
This isn’t another cliff-hanger, I promise. I’m done here. There’s no more story left after these last pages that is in any way interesting. You want to know what a day in the life of April May is? I don’t really care. You’re convinced that I’m using my superpowers to affect the world in fiendish and clever ways? Well, I haven’t been able to download information into my brain since Carl died, so that’s not happening. You want advice for how to live in the twenty-first century and not have humanity taken over by a sinister force that, as you read this, lives on inside your very cells, deciding every moment whether or not we are past saving? I also would love to have that guidance. Unfortunately, I do not have it to give.
That’s the whole reason I wrote these books. That’s why I wrangled my friends, racked my augmented brain, and suffered through the telling. Even in a world without Altus, the most sophisticated software in existence is tasked with figuring out how to keep you from leaving a website. That software knows all of your weaknesses, and while it’s only concentrating on individuals, exploiting individual weakness is also exploiting societal weakness. What that software
