“No, it has nothing to do with who they are. This won’t be possible for me to explain in detail—would you like me to try to do it metaphorically?”
“Yeah,” she said, annoyed, “that would be fine.”
“OK.” The monkey sat with one of its feet crossed over the other, leaning toward Maya and me. The voice came louder to power over the road noise, but the tone didn’t change at all.
“You have millions of nerves sensing your surroundings, but you don’t feel a signal from any of them individually. How cold are you, where are you, do you need to stretch or yawn or sneeze? Those impulses are felt in aggregate. My brother and I are like that. We can see and feel, but if one nerve stops working, we have no idea, it’s too much data. We aren’t looking out of every eye and monitoring every camera. We have tremendous processing power, but the systems that make the data understandable are fairly opaque to us, just as your systems are to you. You don’t know how your body decides you have an itch. You just know you do, and you scratch it. If a bunch of people at this school noticed something weird, that would increase the chances that my brother would notice. As long as we stay off predictable paths and do not look exceptional, we should be fine.”
We shifted around in the back of the truck as it made a turn, Maya letting her bag slide but holding on to Tater (which is what we had named the potato plant) with one hand. There were no seats for us, just our stuff and, latched to the side, a four-foot-high wooden crate.
“Can your brother control people,” Maya said, “the way . . .” Then she looked at me and finished, “The way you can?”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“He can, but it is difficult. Operating a body is complex, especially if you have not spent time operating it. It takes time to get to know the body.”
Maya looked concerned. I had no idea what was going on.
“So, when you offered to use April’s body to drive us to the school, would you have had to learn then? Or . . .”
“When you offered to do what?” I said, my heart speeding up.
“I will explain. It is not sinister. It is not a broken taboo.” Even with the increased volume, it was a little hard to hear them over the noise of the road, so both Maya and I were leaning in.
“When your bodies are unconscious, they can be used and manipulated to keep them healthy and safe. That is all I have done. And yes, April, I did it while you were unconscious, to use the bathroom, to eat food, to keep clean, to keep your muscles strong. I’m sorry, I know that it is creepy, but it was necessary to optimize your health and speed your recovery.”
Somewhere inside of me I had already known this. There were no bedpans in that bar. My muscles looked more toned after months of unconsciousness when the opposite should have been true.
Carl reached out their little hand to me, and despite myself, I took it. “I would never and could never use a human body to do something against its mind’s will. It is outside of my programming.”
“I don’t know if I needed to know all this,” I said.
“That’s why I didn’t bring it up. Patients are often upset hearing what doctors have to do to them while they are unconscious.”
Maya shot me a look, then crossed her arms. I think she wanted me to be more pissed off at Carl.
We traveled for a long time, the humming of the road indicating that we were now on an interstate. Then, after what might have been hours, Carl uncurled himself, stretched, and said, “It’s time for me to show you what’s in the crate.”
OVER 50% OF LUXURY APARTMENTS NOW ON THE MARKET
The New York Times
The massive boom in construction of luxury apartments in the early 2010s was intended to capitalize on the billionaire class’s seemingly insatiable appetite for the high-rise lifestyle. But now, that growth is looking more and more like a bubble.
“Many of these apartments were purchased not as places to live, but as investment assets,” said Margot Laurent, senior economist at the New York Real Estate Board. “As the economy has eroded, illiquid assets like apartments have been less desirable, which has left many apartments not just vacant, but perpetually for sale.”
ANDY
There’s a package in here for you,” Jason called. I mean, he probably did. I didn’t hear him. I was in the Open Access Altus Space building a tree so that I could put it into Breezy Spring Day. So far, I’d been able to hold on to my place in the top ten since launching, but that was only because I was working on building and marketing items like sixteen hours per day.
I felt the muted thudding of Jason smacking my chest and sighed.
“Exit,” I said, and I pulled off the headset.
“You have mail,” he said, throwing a padded envelope at me. “Also, you look like shit.” He flipped the light switch on the wall.
That was definitely true. I also had been outside for roughly the same amount of time I’d spent showering in the last three days, which is to say not at all.
“Thanks, you look cute,” I said, blinking in the light. He walked out of my room, knowing I was probably going to go right back into the Space.
Except I didn’t, because inside the envelope was a new volume of The Book of Good Times.
It told me I needed to clean myself up because I would need to be prepared tomorrow morning to complete a
