Carl had seemed pleased with the operation of my brain up to that point. I’d had a couple little pains in my eye, but they kept saying, “It is normal for now,” whenever I complained. It didn’t occur to me that that could honestly be said of anything that was currently happening.
Listening to Carl tell me that life is so common as to be a kind of chemical inevitability, but also that my species—my “system”—was doomed without intervention, wasn’t possible without a bit of emotional distance, which my subconscious did provide for me. I understood everything that was being said, but I did not have a strong emotional reaction to it. This didn’t seem odd to me at the time.
Part of that (definitely not all of it, as we shortly will see) was that the whole “you humans are fucking this thing up” part wasn’t 100 percent surprising. Humans do think ahead more than any other animal, but that isn’t saying much. The oceans are filled with plastic, and the atmosphere is filled with carbon dioxide. We’ve built enough bombs to destroy everything ten times over, but apparently solar panels were just one expense too many! Being told that humanity is doomed is a big deal, but this wasn’t the first time I’d been told that.
I had gotten a lot of answers very fast and with a fairly weird level of detail, but I was still left with plenty of confusion. What I didn’t know was that I still had only a fraction of the story. At that point, I thought we were only being threatened by ourselves.
Carl didn’t give me time to think.
“What is your favorite movie?” they asked, just after they told me of their third awakening.
“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” I said, which, like, I dunno, maybe it was, but mostly I just wanted to get to my question. We’d gotten to the part that I was, naturally, most curious about.
“Why me?”
“To provide your system with the highest chance for survival, the protocols that have worked best on other hierarchical systems all began with a low-impact intervention featuring a public-facing envoy interacting with a single chosen host. The envoy was me, in the form of the robot Carl. You were chosen as the host.”
That was a lot, and yet still my body refused to release the necessary hormones for this knowledge to kick me into panic.
“But why me?”
“A number of simulations were run. More were successful with you as host than with anyone else.”
“How many simulations?” I asked immediately.
“What was Yoda’s last name?”
“He doesn’t have a last name,” I guessed. “How many simulations?”
“Around seventy quadrillion.”
Seventy quadrillion? What? I did not then, nor do I now, have a good basis for understanding that number. But there was something nagging at me, and as long as I was getting information out of Carl, I was going to keep going for it.
“Do you wish to continue asking questions?” They must have been reading my facial expressions somehow because I was maybe getting a little lost in the size of it all.
“Yes,” I said.
“In what year was the first Ford Mustang produced?” They were using the terrible monkey voice now, which I was already getting kinda used to.
“I definitely never knew that. I don’t even want to know that.”
“What is fourteen times twenty-nine?”
“Can I have a pencil?”
“How many furlongs are in a mile?”
“Yeah, that one is also not in the ol’ database.”
“Who was Ronald Reagan’s wife?”
“Oh, I actually might know that. I feel like I should know that . . .” And then my head exploded in pain, my left eye filled with light, and I vomited on the monkey.
—
I woke up sometime later, still in the booth. The intro drumbeats to “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley thumped out of the Alexa. I had been cleaned up a little bit, and the puke had been wiped from the table.
The song faded a little lower and the speaker voice spoke. “That was unexpected.”
“Where did monkey Carl go?”
“Right here.” And indeed, from around the corner came the little monkey, wet but not sopping, with a small hand towel draped over its shoulder and a glass of water in its hand.
“Nancy Reagan,” I said. “Nancy Reagan was Ronald Reagan’s wife. She was born in New York City and met Ronald Reagan because they were both actors. She came up with the ‘Just Say No’ antidrug campaign. Wait, why do I know so much about Nancy Reagan?”
“Can you walk back over to your bed?” the monkey rasped. “This body cannot carry you.”
“Why do I know so much about Nancy Reagan, Carl?” I said more loudly. I could feel the pressure building as my heart beat faster.
“Things aren’t going exactly as expected, please come over to the bed,” the smart speaker voice chimed in. The illusion that there were two of them was disorienting.
Suddenly I felt way less scared.
“Can I have some water?” I asked. And then I thought: I wasn’t acting right. None of this made sense. “Carl, why am I not freaking out more? I feel like I should be angry or scared, but I’m not.”
The monkey reached out to me with the cup. I swished some water in my mouth, and then, not knowing where to spit, I scrunched my face and swallowed.
“Can you lie down, April?” The smart speaker spoke in a soft tone.
“Carl, please answer me.” I knew something was wrong. Every time I felt my panic surge, as I was sure it should, it ebbed out of me.
Finally, after a long time, it spoke: “When people are hurt and go to the hospital, doctors give them painkillers so that they don’t hurt. And
