Step Three: Understand Your Limitations.
People always skip this one too, but a solution that does not allow for real-world constraints is a bad solution. My limitations were . . . abundant. But limitations are also sometimes your own interests or values. Sometimes you don’t want to solve a problem in a way you won’t enjoy. Sometimes you know you only have a certain number of dollars or hours to spend and don’t want to spend any more. Limitations are fine, as long as you understand them.
Step Four: Stir.
Put your problem, your assets, and your limitations in your head, and shake them together until something falls out. In my experience, bad problem solving almost always comes from either not understanding one of these three things deeply enough, or just completely ignoring one or two of them.
This handy guide will also help you when no solution is presenting itself: You need to rework the problem with new inputs. You reimagine the problem, search for new assets, or try to adjust your limitations. If it still doesn’t work, do it again. And again. Find someone who can add to your asset mix, narrow the scope of the problem, and if that doesn’t work, eventually you give up.
It’s OK to give up sometimes.
But not this time, because I was on to something, and I didn’t get there by focusing on smaller, more manageable pieces of the problem. I did it by going bigger.
See, being in a mind prison was a big problem, but it was not the biggest problem.
Altus was a miserable, terrible, immoral thing, and it was gathering a huge amount of power and had to be destroyed. And if I wanted to fix that problem, I needed to think much bigger than just “How do I get out of here?”
Altus had kept me working. I could only guess why, but I could actually “enter the Space” and continue building the sandbox that I had been assigned. My guess was that they wanted to be able to tell people that I was “working” for them while I was imprisoned, and this would strengthen their case. They would just tell people I was lying about being held against my will, I guess.
While I did my busywork, I kept looking for new assets, trying to reimagine the problem, and waiting for something to fall out. Something had to fit, because I could not accept that failure was an option.
—
The goal of big American business is to monopolize everything. Amazon started out with books, but then they moved into every kind of shopping one could imagine, and then also audiobooks, and a streaming video platform, and in-home artificially intelligent butlers.
The goal is to lock every single person into one platform—to own them from sunup to sundown, to know everything about them and monetize their every thought. Altus took that beyond the biggest, sweatiest dream of even the most delusional Silicon Valley billionaires. You didn’t even need to leave to sleep! Aside from the frustrating needs of the body, you could live your entire life there. Your home, your work, your learning, your life could be in the Space. The only thing it didn’t have . . . and I wasn’t sure if this was good (because it meant people would have to leave) or deeply dystopian (because I’m not sure if they would) was social interaction.
The system Carl created and that Altus had hacked into just didn’t allow socializing. You could inhabit other people having social interactions, but you couldn’t have one of your own. What did that mean for the human race? I don’t know, but it seems like the kind of thing you’d want to do some science on before you converted the entire economy to it.
But instead it was being done by a company that thought nothing of converting humans to a cryptocurrency server farm and imprisoning a dissenting employee in her own mind. But what was going to stop them? They had their own country, their own currency, and an IT infrastructure that spidered through the Earth’s very ecology.
Me. I was going to stop them. Because I added new assets and widened the scope of the problem and I tossed it around. I thought of nothing else, and then, finally, something fell out.
MAYA
DAY ONE OF NINETEEN
Somehow I’m the one who gets this chapter. After we’d uploaded the video, we still had a lot of hours before the morning when we were planning to make it public. There was too much stress and worry, too much tension for sleep to come easily. And also, April had been . . . open with me. She’d been vulnerable. She had also been thoughtful, and she’d said a lot of things I’d only dreamed of her saying.
Everything felt too important to just turn on Queer Eye and zone out, so instead, I caught myself just staring at April while she stared at her phone. Her body was different and the same. She moved the same, but still you could sense the new power in her. And the set of her jaw wasn’t the same either. There was tension there, all the time. And in the little spot between her eyebrows, right where the new skin and old skin came together, was a little crease that almost never went away.
I tried not to look too much at the parts of her that were new, but they were hard not to focus on.
“It’s OK, you can look at me,” she said, looking up from her phone, where she had been texting someone. Probably her parents.
“You’re beautiful,” I said.
“But I’m also interesting, I
