“I am a fool for saying this, but I can’t believe I just hooked up with April May.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, a little worried.

“Oh, I know that we’re friends and that you’re just a normal person. I think I’ve actually gotten to know you pretty well”—there was a hint of pride in her voice—“but you’re still April May, y’know. Champion of our alien visitors, initiator of First Contact, initiator of the Dream.”

“We did that last one together,” I reminded her.

“Oh, April, we’re all just satellites in your orbit.”

That made me very uncomfortable.

“That’s ridiculous, Miranda,” I said seriously. “You’re a genius. I can’t believe I just hooked up with Miranda Beckwith.”

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.”

That’s when Petrawicki broke in. “Cheryl, you say the question is, ‘Are the Carls dangerous?’ I don’t think that’s the question at all. For me, the question is, ‘Might the Carls be dangerous?’ I’m simply saying that I don’t know the answer to that question. I also don’t know how hard it would be to fight them if we had to. I just think it’s wise to not just sit back and assume the best of this technology that is not just passive. It’s inside our minds and it’s somewhere running loose in America.”

This was a reference to the fact that Hollywood Carl’s hand had still not been seen since it dropped off in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. None of the Carl hands in other countries (or in the US for that matter) had dropped off and run away; it was clear that all the rest of them had simply vanished. This was just another freaky mystery to puzzle scientists and scare Defenders.

In any case, the fact that Peter Petrawicki, who, when on the internet, never stopped shouting fake alarmist nonsense, seemed calm and reasonable threw me off guard. This wasn’t the conversation I’d prepped for.

Cheryl, the anchor, took back over.

“There is a certain reasonableness to that, April?”

“I’m fine with practicing care, but the hatred and animosity that comes out of the Defenders movement—”

“You’re fine with practicing care?” Peter shot back, interrupting forcefully. “You are the reason Carl woke up. You might have caused this invasion into our minds with your meddling. It’s clear to me, April. You said it yourself that you shouldn’t have done that, that you should have let someone qualified make that call, but you didn’t. You and your followers are just blindly tumbling forward without any regard for the safety of the people of this country.”

Why was it always “this country” with this guy, as if the whole world wasn’t in this one together? But I had already realized my misstep, so I got back on message.

“Here’s what it comes down to. I think we have a visitor knocking on our front door and you want to point a gun at it.”

“They didn’t knock, dear, they walked straight inside without a word, and if that’s a home invasion, then this is an invasion as well.”

This was going badly. The presenter took back the reins. “Peter, April brings up a good point. What can we do, really, when faced with a technology that is so clearly superior to our own?”

“Figuring that out is not my job, that’s the job of the commander in chief. All I want is for us to consider the threat, and not roll over at the first sign of a dominant life-form. Have we learned nothing from history? What happens when a dominant group meets an inferior group? Every single time, they’re slaughtered and everything they have is taken away from them.”