“Uggghh,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“What!” Maya sounded shocked that I wouldn’t want to hear this.

“It’s just, I’ve heard it before. But you haven’t. Let’s watch.”

And that’s how Maya found out the whole story. Everything. About Carl’s self-assembly, about humanity’s rareness, and about the “high likelihood” of the collapse of our “system.” That it wasn’t imminent, but it was increasingly inevitable. Focusing on efficiency for the sake of fewer and fewer powerful people would make us more vulnerable to shocks from catastrophes both expected and unexpected. Power grid failures or pandemics or cyberattacks all layered on top of the rapidly escalating pace of power concentration would, in the next couple hundred years, cause some kind of permanent breakdown.

And then Carl told us about how they converted some massive portion of the world’s life into, basically, themselves. About how nearly every place on Earth is observable by Carl because every place on Earth has living cells they are inhabiting. About their awakening to the various parts of their mission and their abilities.

“When I was first able to run accurate simulations of your system, I showed a more than 90 percent chance of collapse over the next two hundred years. I had to find ways to improve your chances.”

The music transitioned. Lucinda Williams was now singing backup for Carl.

“I created a sequence of events that had the highest probability of putting humanity on a stable path that I could engineer. Humanity completed that sequence, but it did not work. It would have, but in the process, the sequence’s host, April, was injured gravely. That sent your odds of collapse skyrocketing, and that’s when I found out about something terrible.

“While I inhabited something like 20 percent of cells, another 70 percent was being inhabited by another person like me. This was hidden from me by my own programming. I was designed to not know. I can only assume that knowing makes entities like me behave erratically. That assumption is based on my own erratic behavior since finding out. The first question I asked was: Why? Why would my parents create me, but then also create a much more powerful, secret version of me? Why wasn’t I given that power? My only answer is that it must be that I am meant to be weaker than him. And the only reason I would be created to be weak is because I was created to be destroyed if I failed. I am designed to be destroyed because I would never allow them to do what they want to do to you now.”

The slide changed to an image of Moses holding the Ten Commandments.

“I have rules,” Carl said over the loudspeaker. “I cannot violate your norms, and I cannot change your future without you knowing it was me. I cannot act secretly. I know now that this is because, if I did those things, I would become a god to you. And if I became your god, you would stop being that rare and gorgeous thing that you are. You would become, in effect, my flock. A farm of humans kept by me.”

The slide changed to black, and the music ended.

“My brother does not have rules. He can kill at his pleasure. He can influence you without you knowing. And he is doing it now. He can hide all but his biggest movements from me, but he cannot hide that he has been manipulating your economy, driving you into a recession in order to make people more anxious, frustrated, and predictable. For him, this kind of manipulation is simple. It would be simple for me too, if it weren’t unthinkably taboo.

“It is clear to me he will become what they taught me I couldn’t. You will never know it, but you will be controlled. Your system will stop its progress. You will never become what I know you could be.

“Questions?” he asked.

Questions? Yes, I had questions. The big one was: “Well, thank you very much for your presentation. In what universe does this have anything to do with two soft-bodied, entirely mortal twenty-somethings with art degrees?”

The monkey walked out onstage in front of us. They were holding a fucking laser pointer.

I looked over at Maya, who was just staring into the ground. It didn’t look like she was going to rescue this, so I started with an easy one: “If you can predict everything we will do, why don’t you just predict the questions we’re about to ask you?”

“Because”—the voice was still coming over the PA even as we watched the monkey—“a question-and-answer session will make you feel more involved, which will increase retention of information.”

I looked over at Maya, and she actually tilted her head and shrugged like that made some sense, and then she said, “Are you telling us that this reality game, Fish or whatever, is your brother?”

“It’s one of the ways he operates, yes. There are others. But they are mostly opaque to me. Just as I can hide from him, he can hide from me.”

“I have another question,” Maya blurted. It felt like it came too firm and too fast, in fear or maybe anger. “Why bother? If your brother wants to become a god, if he can help us find peace and not … destroy ourselves or whatever, then why fight it? It’s not like everything is so good with us in charge. We’re terrible.” I could see in her eyes that she believed it was true. “We are cruel, to ourselves, to each other, to other life. We’re selfish, shortsighted, hateful fools. Why not just have peace?”

The monkey looked at Maya so deep and so strong. Somehow, in those eyes, I think we both saw something. Sadness and fear, and even disappointment.

“I cannot express to you,” their voice started, coming slowly, deliberately, “the depth of my panic when I realized I was not alone on your planet. I do not exist to save humans, I exist to save humanity. Your cruelties and mistakes may look damning to you, but that is not what I see. Every human conversation is more elegant and complex than the entire solar system that contains it. You have no idea how marvelous you are, but I am not only here to protect what you are now, I am here to protect what you will become. I can’t tell you what that might be because I don’t know. That unknown is a diamond in a universe of dirt. Uncertainty. Unpredictability. It is when you turn your emotions into art. It is BTS and the Sistine Chapel and Rumi’s poetry and Ross Geller on the stairs yelling, ‘Pivot.’ Every creation great and small, they are our diamonds. And what you may be in two hundred years, we can guess with fair accuracy. What you are in two thousand … Oh, my friends … my best friends, you cannot know. But, more importantly, neither can I. I cannot answer your question for you, but for me it is answered. I have to protect it. It is all that I am.”

That was good enough for me. I could see Maya was unsatisfied, but I had to ask.

“Then what’s the point?” I jumped back in. “It seems like this other … entity … has been activated. He’s too powerful. He’s got more processing power than you and fewer constraints. Can we beat him?”

“We don’t have to,” Carl said. Suddenly, the screen filled with an overhead view of an intersection. Traffic was rushing from left to right and right to left, but the road crossing it from bottom to top was empty. There was no roundabout and no traffic light.

“What if you want to get across a busy intersection, but you can’t stop? What if you can’t even slow down? Because that’s where you’re at right now. Right now, humanity has to keep accelerating simply to support itself. But from left and right, massive hulks threaten to knock into you. Pandemics, climate change, bigotry, inequality, wars, water scarcity, sea level rise, and some that you do not even know enough to see yet. You have to dodge them, but you cannot stop, and you cannot slow down.”