An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(52)

“Yeah, I get it, dude’s a genius and he sucks. So what do we do?” I asked. No one said anything for a moment.

“Well, I have no idea,” Robin said, which must have been physically painful for him. Not being able to help was his least favorite feeling in the world. “To be honest with you I don’t even know very much about the Dream.”

“Me either,” I replied. Everyone looked surprised.

“Really?” Robin said.

“Yeah,” Andy added, “I would have assumed you’d be all over it. Mysteries are your thing! You were a freaking pet detective.”

“What?” Miranda and Robin said simultaneously.

“I’ll tell you guys about it later. It’s just . . . It’s weird when there are billions of other people on the case. I just feel like my efforts are better spent elsewhere. The chances of me uncovering a unique passcode are, like, nil. So, Miranda, I guess you’re the only one of us who spends much time in the Dream.”

“Uhhhh . . . no, it stresses me out. Once I start on a puzzle, I can’t stop, and then I stop having normal dreams. You still wake up rested, which doesn’t make any sense and is probably impossible, but I don’t like waking up frustrated. I just wake myself up and then go back to bed and sleep like a normal person for the rest of the night.

“I’ve felt like my time is better spent working on the output. The passcodes are spitting out hex code, which people have figured out can be compiled sensically into a vector image. That’s, like, an image that is made up of math.”

“Hah, yeah, Andy and I are VERY aware of what vector images are.”

“Oh, right, designers!” Miranda said. “Well, anyway, the problem is that every time a new string of code gets added, the image changes shape completely. It’s basically a big mess of interrelating math, so whenever anything is added, everything changes. No piece of code is at all useful without all of them.”

“Do they know how many there are?” I asked, genuinely surprised that I didn’t know any of this yet.

“Probably,” Miranda said. “There’s no way to know if it’s actually following the image format perfectly, but if it is, then there are 4,096 total fragments of code. But, again, I don’t know anything about the Dream itself, only about what it’s been spitting out.”

“OK, so none of us spend time in the Dream. Do we trust anyone who does?” Andy asked.

There was an active Wikipedia page of completed puzzles. So far more than five hundred had been solved. I kept tabs on it both because I wanted to see how it was going and because the list contained the names (or screen names) of people who had assisted in solving puzzles. If you sorted by that number, the top ten names or so had become fairly well-known among people who even peripherally followed the Dream. At number three, with sole or shared credit on eleven confirmed passcodes, was ThePurrletarian.

“Um, well,” I said, “never mind.”

“OK, that’s not how sentences work,” Andy said. “Once you say ‘um, well,’ you’ve committed yourself to finishing the thought.”

“I think Maya may be ThePurrletarian.”

“What?” Andy almost shouted.

Robin and Miranda were quiet. They knew of Maya, but they’d never met her.

“And why do you think this?” Andy asked.

“It’s a secret?”

Robin broke in here from inside the computer. “Do you want to contact her, to ask what she thinks about this situation?”

“Is she online?” I asked.

“Um, yeah, should I go chat with her?” Andy was hesitant.

“Good god, she’s my ex, not a hell demon. Just add her!” I half shouted in a loud monotone.

And then there she was. She was sitting on her bed in our apartment. Or, rather, my old apartment. I suddenly worried about how she was paying rent. Had I screwed her over? I hadn’t even thought about it. Sweat leapt out of my skin.

She was leaning on the same big blue pillows with the same Hundertwasser print hanging up over her bed frame. It was just so . . . the same. I wondered if she had a new roommate. I wondered how things were going at her job. I wondered if she was bitter that Andy and I had gotten rich and she hadn’t. I wondered if she hated me. Then I realized, of course she did, and wondered how much.

“Hello?” she said, looking around at all of us with a mix of concern, skepticism, and maybe a bit of resignation. It was the first time we’d talked since I left her apartment. She didn’t look angry; she did look annoyed.

“Hey, um,” I replied, unable to think of what else to say.

Andy took over for me: “Are you ThePurrletarian?”

“Goddamn it, April,” she almost whispered. “What did you tell them?”

“That you might be ThePurrletarian, that’s all.” If weakening her secret identity was what she was going to be mad at me about, I felt like I was getting off very easy.

She looked resigned, not angry—at least, not at that moment.

“After . . .” And then she had to restart. “I got the Dream before almost anybody. The first night I had it, I solved four sequences. I knew it wasn’t just a dream. It’s . . . It’s amazing in there.”

I felt a little guilty that I had spent so little time exploring the Dream then. I spent all my time defending it, but also I avoided it.