The slide changed to black, and the music ended.
“My brother does not have rules. He can kill at his pleasure. He can influence you without you knowing. And he is doing it now. He can hide all but his biggest movements from me, but he cannot hide that he has been manipulating your economy, driving you into a recession in order to make people more anxious, frustrated, and predictable. For him, this kind of manipulation is simple. It would be simple for me too, if it weren’t unthinkably taboo.
“It is clear to me he will become what they taught me I couldn’t. You will never know it, but you will be controlled. Your system will stop its progress. You will never become what I know you could be.
“Questions?” he asked.
Questions? Yes, I had questions. The big one was: “Well, thank you very much for your presentation. In what universe does this have anything to do with two soft-bodied, entirely mortal twenty-somethings with art degrees?”
The monkey walked out onstage in front of us. They were holding a fucking laser pointer.
I looked over at Maya, who was just staring into the ground. It didn’t look like she was going to rescue this, so I started with an easy one: “If you can predict everything we will do, why don’t you just predict the questions we’re about to ask you?”
“Because”—the voice was still coming over the PA even as we watched the monkey—“a question-and-answer session will make you feel more involved, which will increase retention of information.”
I looked over at Maya, and she actually tilted her head and shrugged like that made some sense, and then she said, “Are you telling us that this reality game, Fish or whatever, is your brother?”
“It’s one of the ways he operates, yes. There are others. But they are mostly opaque to me. Just as I can hide from him, he can hide from me.”
“I have another question,” Maya blurted. It felt like it came too firm and too fast, in fear or maybe anger. “Why bother? If your brother wants to become a god, if he can help us find peace and not . . . destroy ourselves or whatever, then why fight it? It’s not like everything is so good with us in charge. We’re terrible.” I could see in her eyes that she believed it was true. “We are cruel, to ourselves, to each other, to other life. We’re selfish, shortsighted, hateful fools. Why not just have peace?”
The monkey looked at Maya so deep and so strong. Somehow, in those eyes, I think we both saw something. Sadness and fear, and even disappointment.
“I cannot express to you,” their voice started, coming slowly, deliberately, “the depth of my panic when I realized I was not alone on your planet. I do not exist to save humans, I exist to save humanity. Your cruelties and mistakes may look damning to you, but that is not what I see. Every human conversation is more elegant and complex than the entire solar system that contains it. You have no idea how marvelous you are, but I am not only here to protect what you are now, I am here to protect what you will become. I can’t tell you what that might be because I don’t know. That unknown is a diamond in a universe of dirt. Uncertainty. Unpredictability. It is when you turn your emotions into art. It is BTS and the Sistine Chapel and Rumi’s poetry and Ross Geller on the stairs yelling, ‘Pivot.’ Every creation great and small, they are our diamonds. And what you may be in two hundred years, we can guess with fair accuracy. What you are in two thousand . . . Oh, my friends . . . my best friends, you cannot know. But, more importantly, neither can I. I cannot answer your question for you, but for me it is answered. I have to protect it. It is all that I am.”
That was good enough for me. I could see Maya was unsatisfied, but I had to ask.
“Then what’s the point?” I jumped back in. “It seems like this other . . . entity . . . has been activated. He’s too powerful. He’s got more processing power than you and fewer constraints. Can we beat him?”
“We don’t have to,” Carl said. Suddenly, the screen filled with an overhead view of an intersection. Traffic was rushing from left to right and right to left, but the road crossing it from bottom to top was empty. There was no roundabout and no traffic light.
“What if you want to get across a busy intersection, but you can’t stop? What if you can’t even slow down? Because that’s where you’re at right now. Right now, humanity has to keep accelerating simply to support itself. But from left and right, massive hulks threaten to knock into you. Pandemics, climate change, bigotry, inequality, wars, water scarcity, sea level rise, and some that you do not even know enough to see yet. You have to dodge them, but you cannot stop, and you cannot slow down.”
A car appeared at the bottom, speeding toward the intersection. The camera angle panned down to follow it, and the car sliced through the intersection, somehow avoiding any other cars.
“The thing is, most of the time, if a driver blows through a red light, it actually misses the other cars. So far, that has been you. But now . . .” The view moved up again to show the intersection, except it had changed. Instead of four lanes of traffic, the intersection filled the whole screen. “Every new lane you have to dodge exponentially increases the chances of catastrophe. I was sent here to nudge the
