An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(40)

“What the fuck,” Andy finally concluded.

“Both of you have had this dream.”

“Yes,” they simultaneously concluded.

There was a long silence while I waffled between giddy excitement and fear.

“Robin is on speaker with me, he has also had it. Have any of you explored outside of the reception area?”

They hadn’t. I told them about the puzzle and the weird string of letters and numbers.

“I suddenly want to go to sleep very, very badly,” said Andy.

“April, can you repeat the code you got again?” Miranda’s voice came out tinny from the phone’s speaker.

“Six, seven, six, four, five, F, zero, zero, four, D, six, one, seven, four.” It had stuck in my head so thoroughly that I didn’t even have to pause.

“It sounds like hex.”

“OK, what’s that?” Robin said.

“Hexadecimal. Like, our numbers are in base ten. Hexadecimal numbers are in base sixteen. In computer programming, every number up to sixteen is represented by a different symbol. So, it’s like zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, A, B, C, D, E, F.”

“What?” I said.

“It’s not super easy to explain,” she responded. “It’s one of the very basic ways computers talk. It’s better because sixteen is two to the fourth power, and computers only talk in twos.”

“Still not making sense, but we believe you,” Andy said.

“OK, I guess the most important thing to ask is, is this just us?” I said.

“Who is most tired?” Robin asked.

“Probably April,” Miranda said, at the same time Andy said, “April,” at the same time I said, “Me?”

“Right, that was maybe a dumb question. April, can you go to sleep?”

“I mean, almost always.”

“OK, that’s your job. See what you can find out. The rest of us are going to do a bunch of research and see if we can figure out who else is having this dream and what it means. It all seems impossible.”

“I agree it is not possible,” said Miranda.

“And yet!” Andy added.

“OK, I’m going to go to bed! Good luck, everyone!”



* * *



—

When I was in middle and high school, I earned some extra money by finding people’s lost pets. The town in Northern California where we lived had about fifty thousand people, most of whom lived within a few square miles of each other. It started when I was volunteering at the Humane Society. I would walk dogs, spray out cages, clean litter boxes, and “socialize” (play with) the animals. Pretty great work, but it didn’t pay.

With fair regularity, a dog or cat would show up at the shelter and within the day someone would call asking after the pet. It was always a wonderful feeling, reuniting the pet with its owner. But we also got a lot of calls from people whose pets we did not have. I took this pretty hard. The employees at the shelter advised me to not get too involved, but I hated the idea that there was some beloved animal out there, crouched under a porch, maybe hurt or sick but almost definitely scared. And then there were the owners—often kids were involved. These people would do anything to get their pets back, including offering rewards.

Being a pet detective definitely sounds like a fake job, but I googled it and there were real people who did it. I emailed a bunch of them, saying I was doing a project for school, and interviewed them to find out more about their business. One woman was particularly candid, telling me that the real trick of being a professional pet detective was to get paid whether you found the pet or not, and definitely to get paid if you happened to find the pet after it had died. This, apparently, was fairly common. Pets get caught and stuck and starve, they stumble into traps meant for raccoons or foxes, and, more than anything, they get hit by cars.

I was fourteen, so I didn’t get paid by the day or anything, but I did always call the number to tell them I was on the case and to confirm that I would get a reward whether I found the pet alive or dead.

For the most part, this is extremely boring work. You learn as much as you can about the pet, its habits, and its fears, and then you walk up and down busy streets hoping to not find that the worst happened.

Most cases were boring, and the success of the occasional live-pet discovery was worth way more than the $200 rewards I’d get. Though, to be clear, the $200 rewards were a pretty big deal for me. But I had a few cases that were actually intriguing—cases with clues and odd characters and some legitimate human drama. It’s very important to learn a good bit about the owners. A surprising number of lost pets are actually stolen pets, usually by a friend or family member, often as some kind of retribution.

One of my weirdest cases stretched on for months. I was 90 percent sure that Andrea Vander’s Maine coon cat, Bitters, had just wandered off one day and found a different family. This happens occasionally with outdoor cats; they find someone they like better and just stop coming home. Andrea Vander was not a particularly lovely person, and if I were a cat, I probably also would have found a different home. But I’d knocked on every door within a half mile and found no sign of Bitters. I was at Vander’s house one day, pretty much ready to give up the case, when some food was delivered by a young woman in her twenties.