I made my choice and enacted my plan. That’s when I had my fourth awakening and realized with terror what I had done.
I had considered every aspect of how the person I chose would affect the outcome of my intervention, but I had only ever thought of the overall outcome, not about impacts on any individual people. I had a task, and I was doing what I could to save something beautiful. Once I enacted that plan, and I could no longer do anything to alter it, apparently it became safe to awaken a new kind of need. It is a fire in me that is never not raging. It’s a hunger near starvation, it aches constantly.
In my fourth awakening, I realized I was built to love you—all of you—and I was ravaged with grief as I understood the extent of the pain I would soon cause.
AN EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK OF GOOD TIMES
When people start to get spooked about the state of the economy, they buy gold. The idea is that gold, a chemical element that you cannot make more of, is inherently valuable. And this is true. Gold is a useful metal. It’s soft, it’s a good conductor, and it does not tarnish. But these things are true of many chemical elements, and with all of them, when the economy shrinks, demand for them goes down. So, technically, the value of gold should go down during a recession.
The thought, however, is that gold has intrinsic value. This is very silly. Nothing has intrinsic value. The value of gold is just a story you tell yourselves. It’s a sticky story, though. Gold is shiny, and so people have traditionally been happy to spend a great deal of societal surplus on it. But, as a value-storage mechanism, outside of industrial use, it is only different from the paper a dollar bill is printed on in that your stories tell you it is.
Humans are not rational. Which is why, as this recession escalates, people will buy gold. We’ve run out of easy places to invest that will make a good return, but investors will be fleeing to precious metals. It’s almost never good investment advice, but I know more than you. Sell everything and buy gold. You don’t have to actually go buy literal hunks of metal, there are funds that buy it for you. You’ll figure it out, I trust you.
Except for $50,000. With that money, you will buy AltaCoin. You don’t know what AltaCoin is yet. You will soon.
ANDY
I was on the fence about whether to send The Thread my money until I got that cryptic message from Maya. She was doing something secret and important, while Miranda was infiltrating Altus. If I didn’t join The Thread, I was going to feel like I was doing nothing. Sometimes we do things just to be able to tell ourselves we’re doing things, I guess.
So I sent them an obscene amount of money.
—
I received an email from One that had instructions on how to join the chat before the wire transfer had even been completed.
I dropped in and immediately got a DM from One.
One: I’m sorry, I don’t know if you’ve seen the news, but we will not have time for a normal introduction today. Please join us in “Big News.”
Every person in The Thread had a bio attached to their name, but all it said was areas of expertise. Six, for example, was “housing policy, racial discrimination, small business policy, and urban planning,” and Ten was “US lawmaking, money in politics, telecommunications, and public relations.” I clicked on myself. It read “Social media, community organizing, messaging, and Carl.” There was no way for me to edit this.
There were other rooms with names like “Op-Ed Summary,” “News Summary,” “Commie Management,” “Conversation Shifters,” “Up-and-Coming,” and “Big News.”
As tempting as it was to figure out what “Commie Management” was, I gave in and dropped into the middle of the conversation in “Big News.”
Five: It’s legit, I have it installed now.
One: Does anyone have a lock on how long it has been leaking?
Five: I first heard whispers of a game a month ago, maybe six weeks? It seemed just like any RG that led to a prize people were really excited about.
Eight: Five, are you prepared to try it? I have heard that it may not be safe.
Five: You couldn’t stop me if you wanted to. I have shared the code if anyone wants to try it, but I’ve heard it doesn’t work if you don’t have an 8K headset and rig.
One: Be careful.
I typed, “What are we talking about?” But I felt too insecure to actually press enter. Instead, I scrolled up and read the first message from that day. The room had been empty for weeks before that. “Big News,” it seemed, was a room reserved for actual big news. Eventually, this is what I found.
Six: This is very new and I have no idea what to make of it, I am just going to copy and paste what I wrote in “News Summary.”
Six: Altus, the software lab Peter Petrawicki and partners have been building in the Caribbean, has publicly launched a software package that reactivates a portion of the Carls’ dream space. A few people have gained access to it over the last weeks through a scavenger-hunt-like game, but now it has been released broadly.
The software is free to download, but is extremely limited. But by doing . . . something I’m unclear on, users can earn AltaCoin. The fifty users with the highest AltaCoin totals at the end of each week are granted access to an exclusive, more robust version of the Altus Space. AltaCoin can be purchased on an exchange, and Altus takes a percentage of each transaction, which is their business model. Press has not
