An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(42)

This hit me pretty hard. I mean, not that there was a subreddit, just the realization that I was behind. I had been ahead of the game for so long. The fact that the world knew things that I hadn’t figured out . . . that I should have figured out! It was unpleasant for reasons that I, in the moment, did not understand.

“Hold on, I’m getting another call.” It was Jennifer Putnam. I clicked over.

“Is this about the Dream?” I asked.

“It both is and is not,” she said with absolutely no nonsense in her voice.

“I want to get on some shows today—can you talk to Robin about that? I’m also going to need to get debriefed on this Dream.”

“Yes, I can make that happen. In the meantime, the president would like to talk to you.”

After about ten seconds of silence I said, “The president of the United States?” just to clarify.

“That’s the one. She is going to be calling you soon.”

“Why?” I suddenly felt calmer, which was bizarre.

“I got a call from the White House asking for your phone number and that is 100 percent of what I know. I wish I had more. Best of luck, April. This is a pretty wonderful occasion. Expect a bottle of champagne from me.”

“I’m more of a hard-lemonade kind of girl.”

“Yes, well, maybe it’ll be a chance to develop a taste for finer things. I’m going to clear your line so they can call you. Good-bye, April.”

I switched lines back to Andy.

“Tell me everything you know about the Dream,” I said. “Quickly.”

“Your wish is—”

“QUICKLY!” I interrupted.

“Sheesh, April, OK. Some people have been having the Dream for as long as three days, but most people have only had it once. Miranda and I have been having it for four days, so I get the feeling that it started when we messed with Hollywood Carl. No one knows how it spread, but it starts out the same for everybody everywhere. You’re in an office lobby, the same music is playing, the same robot receptionist. Everyone is compelled to ask the same question, though in different languages if they speak different languages, but if you don’t have a passcode when you ask the question, you wake up with nothing.

“If you go to sleep right after waking up, you won’t have the Dream again. But if you stay awake a while, you will have it again.

“Outside of the office building there are hundreds, if not thousands, of buildings. People are trying to catalogue them all, but it’s complicated because the city is so fucking big. There are buildings of all different eras and styles, and at least some of them appear to have real-world analogues. The office building that the spawn point is in definitely doesn’t. It’s a massive building, over two hundred stories high—bigger than the Burj Khalifa.

“People are guessing that every building has at least one puzzle in it. And some of the puzzles are impossible unless you speak a certain language or know a lot about Shakespeare or the rules to some obscure Iranian sport.

“But if you solve a puzzle you get a passcode, and if you speak it to the receptionist in the building you get a string of letters and numbers that people think is hexadecimal, or hex.

“And like Miranda said, hex is a computer-programming thing. So you know how there are ten single digits, zero through nine, before we put the one in the tens’ place and start over again?”

“Uhhh . . .” I said.

“Like, after nine, numbers become two digits long.”

“Sure,” I said, not entirely sure about my sureness.

“Well, computers don’t like ten for some reason and, agh, Miranda should explain this, but basically, instead of going to two digits at ten, hex goes to two digits at sixteen. And the numbers after nine are letters . . . A, B, C, D, E, F. So, zero through fifteen would be zero through F. And then sixteen would be ten.”

“Maybe?”

“Whatever, the point is that people think that the bits of information that are being spit out when people discover a passcode are hex code, and that if they’re strung together correctly and inputted into the right computer, it will be a program and that program will do something or contain some information. At least, that’s the idea.”

“How many of these code chunks are there?”

“No idea. Hundreds, maybe thousands.”

“Thousands?!” I said. “Thousands of passcodes? If you got one every night, that would be years!”

“Maybe, but people have already figured out a couple dozen of them, and they’re sharing. One person—ThePurrletarian is their screen name—has figured out six of them all by themselves.”

My heart jumped into my throat, but I didn’t make any noise, so Andy just kept going. That screen name was . . . familiar.

“There’s no way one person could do this alone. People are taking credit, of course, but there’s already a Wikipedia page of discovered puzzles, their locations, and the code they spat out if they’ve been solved.”

“Oh, that’s pretty cool of them,” I managed.

“Yep, not everybody is as stingy with information as we’ve been, it turns out.”

My phone booped, causing my already-elevated heart rate to shoot higher.

“OK, thank you, Andy, I’ve got to go.” I clicked over.