Robin: Yes, somehow I was hoping no one else in the whole world would find out about it.
Andy: People are still thinking about that shitstick?
Miranda: I haven’t seen it? Link?
So that’s how I found myself hunched over the lab bench by the GC/mass spec staring into my phone with acid churning in my stomach.
PETER PETRAWICKI IS SORRY AND HE’S GOT A PITCH FOR YOU
Peter Petrawicki still sees himself as both a hero and a villain. But now he’s traded in his suits and television appearances for life on the beach in Puerto Rico. He’s thriving in a society where he’s a little less recognizable, and a lot less in demand. He’s literally sipping a daiquiri in a short-sleeve button-down the first time we sit down to talk, but it isn’t long before the conversation turns from his Spanish lessons and his new beachfront property to his mixed feelings about the culture war he wasn’t just a part of, but helped create.
“I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t realize how much pent-up hatred there was in the country. I deeply regret a lot of what happened, obviously. I even regret a lot of what I said.”
It’s clear that that admission isn’t easy for him. Petrawicki has always been a zealous opponent of censorship, even self-censorship. He references the “free market of ideas” at least a half dozen times in only a few hours of chatting. Ultimately, though, I have to bring up April before he talks about her.
“I respected April a great deal. I still do. I think we were having a necessary debate. I never wanted anyone to hurt her. The fact that those people”—he’s referring to April’s kidnappers—“ended up being so tightly connected to Defender ideology is something I struggle with constantly, and that I’ll be struggling with every day for the rest of my life.”
I put down my phone and stood up. After August 5, when both April and the Carls vanished, anyone who called themselves a Defender was not going to have a good time. The FBI caught the guys who lit the warehouse on fire, and they were all obviously and proudly Defenders. They were still out there, but only the most scary and extreme ones still called themselves Defenders. They had been pushed deeper into private chats and seedy message boards and loosely affiliated angry YouTube channels. These were all things that I tried very, very hard to never think about or engage with.
But there were also all of the people who had been Defenders but just didn’t want the label anymore. They weren’t murderers; they just thought April was a traitor who was better off dead. They wouldn’t have killed her, and it was terrible she was murdered, but they weren’t exactly sad she was gone. If she was gone. Lots of people believed she was still around doing bad things for humans, and many more people were just on the edge of believing it. The only control in the world I had was over the Som, and anti-April conspiracy theories weren’t tolerated there. Everywhere else, though? I think the idea was, what’s the harm in attacking someone who’s dead?
I wasn’t running the Som anymore. We thought hard about just closing it completely—after all, it was built to help people solve puzzles in a dream we no longer had access to. I didn’t have a passion for it after April was gone, and I honestly didn’t have a grasp on how huge and deeply connected the community there had become.
But people made it clear that it was bigger than the Dream. Lots of people used it as simply an alternate social space, but it was uniquely suited to investigative work. Journalists used it to outsource research, conspiracy theorists used it to collect their leads, and then of course there were the reality games. That new class of gamers found the Som infinitely useful and were happy to continue paying a low monthly fee to keep the service alive.
So we didn’t shut it down, but I had to leave. I’m not even sure why. Part of it was that running a start-up is exhausting, but with the dramatically lowered stakes I didn’t have the same fuel. More importantly, I wanted to go back to my old life. Not because I missed it, just because it was less painful. So I passed the torch and went back to Berkeley.
PhD students who just vanish for a year aren’t usually welcomed back with open arms, but Dr. Lundgren, my advisor, hadn’t even fully packed up my space yet. We’d kept in touch a little bit, and she said she was keeping my slot open because my research was so promising. But was it? It was incremental. I know that’s true of most research, but I wasn’t changing a paradigm; I was adding to existing knowledge. The more I thought about it, the more I figured that the fact that I had done so many big, public things and become a little bit famous made everybody much more sympathetic. It felt a little like cheating.
I don’t blame April for not ever telling you anything about what I was doing in my PhD program, or even that I was in a PhD program, but basically . . . well, OK, I’m really bad at basicallys. You know how a computer chip is made of silicon semiconductors? Well, there are a bunch of other materials that aren’t silicon that can be used in the same way that have different advantages. They might be cheaper or more flexible or thinner or whatever. Well, the thing I was working on was a kind of organic semiconductor gel. The idea is to make it not just flexible but squishy and wet. This is only really good for one thing: putting it inside of living bodies.
Scientists have been working at UC Berkeley for a long time on tiny sensors and nerve stimulators that can be implanted into people (though mostly
