An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(65)

I shouldn’t have been so surprised when things started escalating. I mean, I knew people hated me. It was a real thing. Being recognized by fans is very different from checking out at the corner store and not knowing if the clerk is a Defender thinking about what a dirty traitor you are. I thought that I could only either run away from that or fight it, so I fought it. Fear is an even better fuel than anger. Also, it is even more destructive. Their constant attacks meant I never had to doubt my message. It must be right, because the people who disagreed with me were sooooo awful. The Carls were the perfect vector for disagreement because, through all of this, we still knew practically nothing about them. Governments were accused of hiding things because people just couldn’t accept that those in power were exactly as lost as the rest of us. Human beings are terrible at accepting uncertainty, so when we’re ignorant, we make assumptions based on how we imagine the world. And our guess is so obviously correct that other guesses seem, at best, willful ignorance—at worst, an attack.

Here’s a quick overview of what happens when groups of passionate believers start to define themselves in opposition to others:

A simple message seems obvious to a large population, and those people can’t understand what the opposition could possibly be thinking. They never or almost never engage with someone who holds those different beliefs, and if they do, it’s in the context of the discussion, not in the context of, like, also being a human.



The vast majority of those people nod appreciatively and then change the channel and watch NCIS and eat the tacos that they made. It’s their own recipe. They’ve developed it over years, and they like it better than any taco you could get at even a super fancy restaurant. They go to bed at 10:30 and worry a bit about whether their son is adjusting well to college.



A very small percentage get really riled up. They’re angry, but they’re mostly worried or even scared and want to cause some kind of action. They call their representatives and do a little organizing. They’re usually motivated not just by agreement in the message but by a hatred of the people trying to fight the message.



A tiny percentage of that percentage just go way the fuck overboard. They get so frightened and angry that they need to make something happen. How? Well, that’s simple, right? You eliminate the people who are actively trying to destroy the world. If we’re all really unlucky, and if there are enough of them, those people find each other and they confirm and exacerbate their own extremism.





The bigger the Defender movement got, the larger that fourth group became. Some of them were religious extremists who believed the Carls were a symbol of the coming apocalypse or rapture or whatever. Some of them were purely secular, deeply believing that America and possibly the world was going to be destroyed if nothing was done (no one was really clear on what that thing was, but NO ONE WAS DOING IT!), and eventually they came to believe that I was an active and informed participant in the government’s (or the Carls’) plans to make humanity submit.

This is the first time a truly international issue had hit our newly borderless world this hard, and no one knew how that might play out. The conversation was international—we all knew that. The comments on my videos were in Hindi and Japanese and Arabic and Spanish. We had a team of translators who would subtitle the videos within a day or two of them going live, and the Som was now operational in more than twenty different languages. I saw this as an unambiguously good thing. I felt very strongly that the Carls were a globally unifying force. For the first time ever, humanity was literally sharing a dream. It felt more like we were sharing a planet than ever before, and to me that felt like a gift given to us by the Carls.

I still believe the Carls were very good for the world, but obviously July 13 made that a lot more ambiguous.

The coordinated attacks in S?o Paulo, Lagos, Jakarta, and St. Petersburg killed more than eight hundred people and injured thousands. That the responsible group had managed to plan an attack in four different continents boggled the mind. This wasn’t radicals making plans in back alleys; it was a growing, worldwide, borderless movement. In the US, it was the Defenders, but every culture had their own name for it, and they found commonality and connection in pop-up forums and anonymous chat rooms. They had convinced themselves that the Carls would be easy to destroy and that world governments were lying about their invulnerability. They also convinced themselves that tourists visiting Carls were not worth saving or protecting or whatever. Whether they saw it as a pilgrimage to a false deity or an act of submission to alien domination, it didn’t matter; any positive connection to the Carls was a threat to the ideology they wanted to push forward. The Carls could not be seen as safe, even if they were the ones making the Carls dangerous.

The Carls, of course, were completely unhurt.

The attacks were synchronized at roughly 4 A.M. eastern time. That maximized crowds in Jakarta, Lagos, and St. Petersburg. It was still early morning in S?o Paulo, but they coordinated the time with the other attacks nonetheless.

At that exact moment, 4 A.M., when those bombs went off across the world, I awoke from the Dream, where I had been staring blankly at a 767, and shot out of my bed in fear and terror.

Was I somehow psychically roused? Had I sensed a great disturbance in the Force? Did Carl reach out to me through the Dream to tell me of the attacks? No. I had heard a loud CRACK from the direction of the sliding glass door that led to my little balcony. My blinds were closed, of course, so I couldn’t see what had caused the noise.