An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(19)
“Is everything OK?”
“Shhhh.” She shushed me. She shushed me like I was a five-year-old who wanted a Popsicle and she was on the phone with a very important client. She was clicking and typing and clicking and typing. I just sat there because, obviously, Miranda was hitting this problem way harder than I had the ability to. After a full minute of me being completely silent, she picked up exactly where we had left off.
“HAH!” she shouted. I startled. “Sorry! Yes! Omigod, April, I am so sorry. I shushed you. Oh god.” She was turning red, and then she seemed to remember other things were going on. “April, everything is fine. But Carl definitely meant elements when he said ‘I AM U’ because everything on this Wikipedia page has reverted to normal except the original typo . . . and about”—and here she started frantically scribbling in pen on her own hand—“nine numbers from the citations. Nine numbers are gone.”
She held up her hand, on which was scribbled, “127243238.”
“How did you figure that out so fast?”
“I have a proxy IP set up so I can watch BBC shows. I was able to open the page from my IP and a British IP simultaneously. Comparing was easy once I noticed numbers were missing.”
“OK, so what is it? It’s not enough numbers for a phone number.”
“Hah . . . no. They’re the most common isotopes of those elements. Iodine-127, americium-243, and uranium-238. Do you know what an isotope is?”
“No, but maybe I don’t need to?”
“No, maybe not right this moment. Suffice to say, Carl is asking for elements, and though there are more common elements out there, he’s asking for the most common isotopes, which, if we’re going to be his couriers, makes our job easier.”
“Are you for real right now?”
“In what ways?”
“Did you just, in five minutes, solve a puzzle that has been devouring every ounce of my mental energy for the last two weeks? I can’t believe I never looked at the citation numbers!”
“No one ever looks at the citations, don’t worry. Sometimes you just need a fresh pair of eyes.”
“Yeah, a pair of eyes that have heard of americium.” I didn’t even know that americium was a thing. It was another few days before I saw it written down and realized it was an element named for America, since it’s pronounced like “amer-ISS-ium.”
“Eyes can’t hear, April! So you’re on TV tonight, right? That’s exciting.”
“OH MY GOD NO IT’S NOT!”
She grinned. “Yeah, I guess not.”
“Hey, Miranda?”
“Yeah?”
“You want to go to Walmart with me?”
* * *
—
It was midnight. Our show was on TV, but now that seemed like the least interesting thing in the world. The mystery had eclipsed my obsession with strangers analyzing my performance. I had made a date to meet up with Miranda. She would drive down from San Francisco to meet me at Hollywood Carl after our fancy agent meeting. She was excited to meet Andy as well.
I got into the big, silky, soft, cool hotel bed and turned off the lights and stared at the insides of my eyelids for about an hour before giving up.
Miranda was right: I had had the thought before. When something is impossible to explain, you post the GIF of the guy with the hair saying, “ALIENS.” It’s just what you do. I mean, “Don’t Stop Me Now”? No video footage of them showing up? The fact that none of the Carls had been moved, though no one seemed to have tried super hard? The fact that no one, after almost two full weeks, had taken credit or spoken out about what must have been a massive logistical undertaking?
I think a lot of people thought “extraterrestrial,” and of course plenty of people were saying it on the internet. But no one wanted to be the weirdo advocating for the “It’s aliens!” theory on cable news. You can’t say the word “aliens” without teasing your hair up and bugging your eyes out first.
So the thought had been there, but it seemed like just a normal “my brain is thinking stupid thoughts” thought.
But Miranda didn’t seem stupid. She seemed really cool and smart and like she knew an awful lot about material resonance and thermal conductivity . . . things that sounded important and legitimate. She also was clear that maybe it wasn’t aliens; it was just maybe not a bad idea to operate, at least privately, as if it were.
I would probably have been more skeptical, but I remembered what it was like to touch Carl and it did feel weird—like nothing I’d ever touched before, like when I got semielectrocuted when my house got struck by lightning and I unplugged the TV while the wires were still all overjuiced. Not painful like that, just an entirely new sensation.
The only other thought I had was that it was some kind of top secret military thing, but why? What did any government have to gain from putting robots in a bunch of places all at once and then leaving an odd Wikipedia trail to three chemical elements? Just to say, “Hey, we can do this! Scary, right?! Don’t mess with us!”? That made some sense . . . but then they would have taken credit, right? I could already feel my eyes bugging out.
While I was unable to sleep in that glorious bed, I figured out the real reason I was freaking out. Not because we maybe weren’t alone in the universe or because my life was changing forever and I was going to need a new email address. It was because I needed to make a decision. The kind of choice that you only get to make once and you can’t take back and it makes your life totally different, and even if the path is clear, it’s still deeply unsettling.