Amid all of this, there was a relief. I had honestly not known that I would ever be able to feel again. Out of all of the new things about me, that dull dampness of my soul had been the worst. But now every new panic and terror and joy and swell of love was slaking a thirst that I hadn’t been able to even feel.
I was different, but I at least was human. This frustration was human, the loss, the fear . . . At least that part of me was human.
I cried until I fell asleep, and then I woke up and I cried more, and each time Maya was there.
It was cool in the room—apparently the boiler wasn’t in use anymore—but together, under the blankets, we stayed comfortable. As hours crept on, I began to feel something like normal again.
“Where do you think Carl went?” I asked Maya while we were eating cold turkey sandwiches from the mini fridge.
“I’m sure they’ll be back exactly when they want to be back.” Maya was clearly displeased not just with the whole situation, but with Carl in particular.
I wanted to ask her what she thought they should have done because it seemed to me like they’d saved our asses again. But I knew that Maya’s counterargument would be bulletproof: None of this would have happened without Carl.
Instead, I decided to be, for once, a bit empathetic: “What are you worrying about right now?”
“Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
“I want to text my mom. I’m not worried about her, I’m just worried she’s worried about me. But you threw my phone into a gas station parking lot.” She took a bite of her sandwich, her eyes unfocused.
“I’m sorry . . .” I was going to keep talking, but then I heard, muffled but clear, the opening lines of “Don’t Stop Me Now” coming from up the stairs.
“Is that supposed to be an invitation?” Maya asked.
“I mean, I guess I know Carl better than anyone and, like, yes.” She smiled at me, but there was a little pain in it. She didn’t want to stay down here, but she also didn’t want to leave.
When we reached the top of the stairs, we saw what we hadn’t when we first went down them. The lights were on now, and it was clear that the boiler room was in the basement of an auditorium.
We walked out onto the stage, the music faded down, and Carl’s unmistakable voice came over the auditorium’s PA system: “Please sit.”
We stepped down the stairs into the audience and sat together on two of the several hundred folding wooden seats that curved around the stage.
“I’m feeling pretty jittery right now,” I said.
“That’s good. Normal,” she told me, and then she reached out and put her hand on mine.
“I was born on January 5, 1979 . . .” Carl’s voice came out over the theater’s sound system as an image of Queen playing a concert in some giant stadium appeared on the screen.
“Uggghh,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“What!” Maya sounded shocked that I wouldn’t want to hear this.
“It’s just, I’ve heard it before. But you haven’t. Let’s watch.”
And that’s how Maya found out the whole story. Everything. About Carl’s self-assembly, about humanity’s rareness, and about the “high likelihood” of the collapse of our “system.” That it wasn’t imminent, but it was increasingly inevitable. Focusing on efficiency for the sake of fewer and fewer powerful people would make us more vulnerable to shocks from catastrophes both expected and unexpected. Power grid failures or pandemics or cyberattacks all layered on top of the rapidly escalating pace of power concentration would, in the next couple hundred years, cause some kind of permanent breakdown.
And then Carl told us about how they converted some massive portion of the world’s life into, basically, themselves. About how nearly every place on Earth is observable by Carl because every place on Earth has living cells they are inhabiting. About their awakening to the various parts of their mission and their abilities.
“When I was first able to run accurate simulations of your system, I showed a more than 90 percent chance of collapse over the next two hundred years. I had to find ways to improve your chances.”
The music transitioned. Lucinda Williams was now singing backup for Carl.
“I created a sequence of events that had the highest probability of putting humanity on a stable path that I could engineer. Humanity completed that sequence, but it did not work. It would have, but in the process, the sequence’s host, April, was injured gravely. That sent your odds of collapse skyrocketing, and that’s when I found out about something terrible.
“While I inhabited something like 20 percent of cells, another 70 percent was being inhabited by another person like me. This was hidden from me by my own programming. I was designed to not know. I can only assume that knowing makes entities like me behave erratically. That assumption is based on my own erratic behavior since finding out. The first question I asked was: Why? Why would my parents create me, but then also create a much more powerful, secret version of me? Why wasn’t I given that power? My only answer is that it must be that I am meant to be weaker than him. And the only reason I would be created to be weak is because I was created to be destroyed if I failed. I am designed to be destroyed because I would never allow them to do what they want to do to you now.”
The slide changed to an image of Moses holding the Ten Commandments.
“I have rules,” Carl said over the loudspeaker. “I cannot violate your norms, and I cannot change
