An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(62)

That made her smile a whole lot.

“OH! I almost forgot.” She raised up on her elbow, holding the sheets to her chest in modesty. “The most likely of everything is another code. There’s an alternate numerical system that this looks like, actually, in which bars represent fives and dots represent ones. So one bar and one dot would be six. It’s the Mayan numerical system.”

“Mayan?” I asked, feeling a little light-headed. Suddenly I felt like I was cheating, though whether on Maya or Miranda I couldn’t tell.

“Yeah, like the Maya, the Mesoamerican civilization?”

“Weird . . . ,” I managed. “That seems like the strongest lead.”

“Absolutely.” And then she fell into explaining the intricacies of Mayan numerals to me. If she noticed my weirdness, she made no sign. I tried my best to pay attention as I stroked her hair and she explained how the Maya represented numbers in the hundreds and thousands.

July 12

@AprilMaybeNot: This thing is happening. I’ll be on CNN at 8 PM eastern.

There it is, the date you’ve been dreading. Don’t worry, me too. There’s been enough written about this to fill a thousand books, so I’m going to focus on the things that were part of my direct experience. You’ll notice I haven’t talked about international relations or even much of what was happening in my own country during all this. This is my story because, otherwise, it would be a forty-five-hour-long Ken Burns documentary.

At this point in the story, every Dream Sequence has been solved except for a secret one that only I have access to. People are working their butts off to try to make the hex code into something useful, but it just spits out random squiggles that clearly mean nothing. A group of people think that we’re missing a key, a bit of code that might just be a few characters long that unlocks the whole thing. No one knows where that key might be except for me and my team. People remain in the Dream, searching fruitlessly. The Defenders’ attempts to control the sequences have failed miserably, but they’re doing OK at controlling the narrative. Petrawicki has a knack for diminishing the credibility of everyone who publicly disagrees with him. Most of his feed is half-baked conspiracy theories about anyone who has indicated that maybe things aren’t terrible. Whenever I watch his videos or see him on TV, he seems delighted.

And me, I’m miserable. I can’t solve the 767 Sequence, but I also can’t bring myself to share that it exists. I’m rich and famous and suddenly I feel like I have no friends. The Som is somehow more popular than ever. People are rerunning every sequence in the Dream looking for clues to the key, and that’s keeping everyone so busy it doesn’t feel like we ever just hang out anymore. I’ve made everything weird with Miranda, Andy seems suddenly distant and frustrated but I don’t want to ask why, and Maya and I were never going to be anything but rocky. Robin is the only one of the group who hasn’t gotten weird with me. At the same time, though, he works for me, so I’m not sure if his friendship counts. If I stopped paying him, would he still be there?

All this frustration I have turned outward onto the Defenders. I spend most of my waking time reading their threads, countering their arguments, making videos, and fighting them on social media.

Jennifer Putnam convinced me, in my rage (and greed, but mostly rage), to go on TV and have it out in a one-on-one debate with Peter Petrawicki. This sounded like a terrible idea to me. He was better at talking than me, and when you put us side by side, I always looked like a kid.

But Putnam said that even if he scored some points, people who were bound to be on my side but didn’t know about my side would join up. It was about reaching the most people with the message, and doing something the press could sell was the best way to do that. Eventually, my hatred of Peter and my belief in Putnam (her advice had, after all, gotten me this far) got the best of me.

This is now mostly forgotten, but it was a huge deal then. We had established ourselves as the two sides of the argument, which had split roughly (very roughly) down established political lines.

We each had our little armies, and they really hated each other. My frustration with the entire idea that the Carls should be treated like a menace and an excuse for militarization fueled that rage on my side. On Peter’s side, the rage was fueled by similar indignation with a healthy dose of fear on top.

We met on the most neutral ground we could find, CNN. It was a respectable show, as cable news goes, but still they spent a full week beforehand promo-ing our “head-to-head” as if it were a frickin’ presidential debate. We both traveled to the studio in New York, where we sat at a fancy glass table in front of an extremely fancy wall and looked out at the lights and the cameras and the steel-beamed warehouse beyond.





TRANSCRIPT

Presenter: The sixty-four largest metropolitan areas in the world are being visited by alien technology, possibly alien life. But their intentions remain a mystery.

April May, the discoverer of New York Carl, and Peter Petrawicki, author of Invaded, have both been guests here on the show, but never together. The question is pretty simple: Are the Carls dangerous?

April, you clearly have never felt threatened by Carl, initially believing him to be some kind of modern sculpture.

With that nonquestion it was clear that it was my turn to talk, so I did the thing that everyone on these shows always did and ignored the prompt and said what I wanted to say: “If the Carls or their creators wanted to harm us, they would have no trouble doing so. They seem to be, by their very nature, passive.” By this point I was surprised that I hadn’t been interrupted, so I wasn’t sure what else to say but was loath to cede the floor, so I continued. “They’re so technologically advanced that we couldn’t catch up in a thousand years.”