A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor Read online

  ALSO BY HANK GREEN

  An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Hank Green

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  DUTTON and the D colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Permissions appear on this page and constitute an extension of the copyright page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Green, Hank, author.

  Title: A beautifully foolish endeavor: a novel / Hank Green.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Dutton, [2020] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020006678 | ISBN 9781524743475 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524743482 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3607.R43285 B43 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006678

  ISBN: 9780593182505 (international edition)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, monkeys, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  For my patient and loving wife, Katherine

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Hank Green

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  April

  Maya

  Andy

  Miranda

  Andy

  Maya

  Miranda

  Andy

  Maya

  Andy

  Miranda

  Maya

  Andy

  Miranda

  Maya

  Andy

  Miranda

  Maya

  April

  April

  Carl

  April

  Miranda

  Maya

  Carl

  Andy

  April

  Maya

  Carl

  April

  Miranda

  Maya

  Miranda

  April

  Andy

  April

  Andy

  Andy

  Miranda

  Maya

  Carl

  April

  Miranda

  Maya

  Maya

  Andy

  Maya

  April

  Andy

  April

  Andy

  Maya

  Carl

  April

  Miranda

  Maya

  April

  Andy

  Miranda

  Andy

  Maya

  April

  Andy

  Miranda

  Maya

  April

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Permissions

  APRIL

  I’ve decided to stop lying to you.

  As far as I can tell there are only three kinds of lies: the kind you don’t want to get caught telling, the kind you don’t care if you get caught telling, and the kind you can’t get caught telling. Let’s go through them one by one.

  1. The kind you don’t want to get caught telling. This is just your average, everyday lie, whether you’re late for work or did a real bad murder. Getting caught in the lie, thus, is a problem.

  2. The kind you don’t care if you get caught telling. This kind of lie is about the lying, not about the outcome. You repeat the lie, stick to the lie, change the lie, re-form the lie, abandon the lie, come back to the lie. The lying might help avoid some negative outcome, but really it’s a tool for weakening reality, and thus strengthening yourself.

  3. The kind you can’t get caught telling. This happens when only you know the truth. This is the kind of lie I’ve been telling.

  For years now, that last kind of lie has felt, to me, like a kindness. I mean, it’s not a surprise that the story of your reality is incomplete. We all know that. Scientists don’t know where most of the matter is. I don’t know what it’s like to live in Yemen. Our imagining of the world isn’t fully accurate. But if you know something no one else knows, something that would change everyone’s story overnight, something that would make everyone else’s life worse, telling the truth might seem like the wrong thing to do, like exercising too much power.

  As I have discovered, there’s nothing special about me, nothing that makes me particularly suited to making that kind of decision for an entire planet of people. The only reason I get to make it, it turns out, is ugly, vulgar luck.

  A lot of people have said that I have a habit of exercising too much power, and one of those people is me, which is why I am about to do something I’m extremely uncomfortable with: let other people tell the story. Oh, to be clear, I don’t have any choice. I wasn’t there for a lot of this, so it isn’t my story to tell. Instead, my friends are going to tell it with me. Maybe that way we can share some of the responsibility of the power of this truth. It won’t be all on me: each of us have to agree that the words in this book are worth putting in here. Trust me, it wasn’t easy, these people can be fucking stubborn.

  All of this is to say, I’ve decided to stop lying to you. We have decided to stop lying to you. Even though the lie is easy to tell, even though I never really said it out loud, even though the lie, most days, feels like nothing more than self-preservation, it’s time to tell you about the lie.

  Here it is, in its most basic form: I have been doing everything I can to convince you that we are safe.

  We’re not.

  MAYA

  I am only doing this because I have to. Most famous people ask for fame, and then when they get famous and complain about all the bad parts, we are correct in calling them out on it. But I have always felt like millions of people knowing my name would be nothing but awful.

  It’s why I didn’t let April put my last name in her book. It is also not in this book. Of course, you can look it up on the internet, but neither I nor anyone who knows me has ever shared my last name. You can only find out what my name is due to the general erosion of privacy and the actions of people who have not respected my clearly-stated preferences.

  That’s how I want to start this out. I stayed out of April’s content on purpose. I wanted to be a private person, and now I’m not, but I’m accepting this because it’s the best way to tell this story. And while I’m not going to tell you my last name (it’s the principle of the thing), I am going to be far more open than I want to be.

  For example.

  My parents are pretty rich. I grew up on the Upper East Side in a town house they’ve owned for thirty years. It was worth a lot when they bought it, and it’s worth a LOT now. So I actually grew up with something like a yard, and when I was a little kid, we’d go out there and plant carrot seeds and tomato starts. At the end of the season, yanking a carrot out of the ground was like a magic trick. That t
iny seed, too small for even my little fingers to manage on their own, had become this big, beefy orange grocery store item covered in wet black dirt. It was like putting a bottle cap in the ground and pulling out a Coke. Those underground crops—carrots, beets, potatoes, onions—were my favorites. Even when we were growing things in pots and boxes, I loved the idea that things were happening out of view and that if you just scraped the surface, something as magical and perfect and tasty as food would just fall out.

  It never occurred to me at the time that gardening was something my mom was doing for me. But when I grew up and my interests changed, the gardening went away. And I didn’t even consider more than watering a houseplant until I called my mom a few months after April died.

  “I can’t let it go, Mom, she has to be somewhere,” I was telling her over the phone, explaining an obsession that had blossomed in me. “No one else is looking. They’ve all just moved on.”

  “Is it doing you any good?”

  “Me? What does this have to do with me?! They haven’t found her, Mom, I don’t think she was in there.”

  “Maya, love, where would she have gone?”

  “I don’t know, that’s the point. Outer space? Hoboken? I don’t know. But I do know that life is not back to normal. Everybody thinks the Carls are gone and the Dream is gone and it’s all normal now, but it’s not. I know how this sounds, but there are a lot of other people who think something’s up.”

  “How much time are you spending on the Som?”

  “They’re good people, Mom. I made a lot of friends there. It’s better than Twitter.”

  And that was, in several ways, true. The Som was a small enough community that the kinds of people who got off on making others miserable were promptly banned. But in one way, it was worse. We built the Som to be a social media platform just for solving sequences from the Dream. It was a place for mysteries. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and to a social media platform designed to investigate mysteries, everything looked mysterious.

  The Som was something I had been really proud to help build, it really had been a part of making humanity feel more like one big thing. Now it was the go-to platform for conspiracy theorists. But at least they were nice conspiracy theorists. And to answer my mom’s question here (though I didn’t answer it then), I was spending a lot of time on the Som.

  “Maya, maybe go plant something.”

  “What?”

  “Like when you were little. Or do something. Knit. Do a puzzle. I think you need to focus on something else for a while. Go make some space inside your head.”

  It seemed extremely condescending at the time. Like, yes, Mom, it would be great if I could get a hobby that wasn’t obsessing over my dead ex-girlfriend. That would be good for everyone, especially for you, since you wouldn’t have to watch your daughter spiral further and further from reality. But that’s not how it works, Mother.

  Except, to some extent, it really is. Because thinking about carrots existing somehow made me want to plant something, or tend something, or dig something. But I didn’t have a yard. So instead, I got on a train and, thirty minutes later, knocked on the door of my parents’ town house on the Upper East Side. My mom answered the door.

  “Fine, let’s plant something,” I said, smiling just a little. And she smiled back and hugged me and we went into the garden. She found a clay-colored plastic pot, about a foot across, and I dumped a bunch of potting soil into it. Then we went into the kitchen and cut up a couple Yukon Gold potatoes, making sure each piece had an eye. Then, together, like when I was five, we stuffed them down into the soil.

  “Mama, do you know how messed up I am?” I asked, fingers covered in dirt.

  “Honey,” she said, her big, worried eyes seeing all the way in, “you’re just as messed up as you should be.”

  I hadn’t cried in a few weeks at that point, which made this one bigger.

  * * *

  —

  April knows I’m private, and I like to think that’s why you know so little about me, and not that she just couldn’t be bothered. It’s probably a little of both. But, look, there’s a lot of talk in the last book about how together and successful and smart and solid I am. That’s bullshit. We’re all pretending, and April maybe wanted to be extra nice about me because of how she completely ditched me the moment something shiny caught her attention. But before the Dream, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing with my life. I was letting my girlfriend sleep in the living room because she was too fragile to admit we lived together. I went in to a job that a bunch of my coworkers thought I only got because I was Black. And I knew that no matter how hard I worked, I would never make anything like the amount of money that was already in my bank account because I had chosen (much to my dad’s chagrin) to get a degree in design instead of an MBA.

  I had not been totally open with April, or really anyone, about my financial situation, on account of the deep, burning shame.

  Like, I’m supposed to own it for everyone who doesn’t have it. I’m supposed to show that Black people can be rich, and that you’re racist for thinking we can’t be. But also, I’m supposed to rage at the system that made me rich. Like, can a girl get a break?

  Whatever, the thing I was trying to say here is that I didn’t have to work, which made working at jobs I didn’t love a little bit empty. Obviously, this is a profoundly unrelatable frustration, but we all only have our own lives to live inside of.

  The Dream was bigger than me, and it was a real contribution I was making. Every time I solved a sequence, that had nothing to do with my money. On the Som, I was respected entirely because of my contributions. No one knew anything about me. They didn’t know I was rich, they didn’t know I was Black, they didn’t know I was April May’s ex-girlfriend. I was just ThePurrletarian. My friends there only knew my words and my actions. It’s the same reason I did a web comic about leftist cats in college. It was a way to feel respected outside of my identities.

  So there was one hole left in the wake of the Dream, and then there was the other even bigger hole left by April. I spent a lot of time filling those holes with being angry while looking at the internet, but I also filled them on the Som, where I found posts like these:

  MORE DOLPHINS IN THE DELAWARE

  Yesterday twenty dolphins were found in the Delaware River, well into the fresh water. They’re north of the outage points described in this thread [OUTAGE-POINTS-NJ-DE-PA]. The dolphins showed up outside of Trenton, NJ. They then spent several days just north of Trenton before dying. Some folks were able to rescue some of them. This is the second pod that ended up this far north in the river in two weeks and it’s basically unheard of. Also very nearby the break-in at Rider University, see thread [RIDER-U-LAB-BREAK-IN].

  So, of course, I clicked to see the thread about the lab break-in, which quickly led me to this post:

  JOHNS HOPKINS LAB BREAK-IN

  This is the fourth since April disappeared—see threads. This one was way crazier. Not like the little ones at Rider University [RIDER-U-LAB-BREAK-IN] and the hospitals in Philly [NAZARETH-HOSPITAL-BREAK-IN] [MERCY-HOSPITAL-BREAK-IN]. No one’s linking it to those, but Johns Hopkins (yes, that Johns Hopkins) in Baltimore was broken into. They’re saying it was an animal rights thing because a bunch of monkeys escaped. The article also says a couple of unrelated pieces of equipment also disappeared. Johns Hopkins is huge, it has 24-hour security. PETA has been after them for decades, they know how to not have this happen, but it happened. Something is going on with these lab break-ins, so I’m starting an omni-thread specifically to add information and specifics re: any break-in of a laboratory, hospital, or university [LAB-BREAK-INS-OMNI].

  My first thought upon seeing this was that it seemed like a reach. People got robbed, animal rights activists freed monkeys, that was the world. But also, it was a little weird. Like, why would animal rights people steal monkeys and lab equ
ipment? Were they financing their monkey stealing? I was not well versed in how monkey stealing worked.

  But what I realized was that the Som was the place I was most comfortable in the world now that the Dream was gone . . . now that April was gone. A lot of the names were the same, and the culture of investigation and sleuthing was the same. But best of all, these people didn’t think everything had gone back to normal. Not a single one of them believed that April had died in that building, and I badly needed to see people say that.

  Losing the Dream, for a lot of people, was like losing a drug. Even after every sequence had been solved (except the 767), I would go to sleep and solve sequences all night. Real dreams seemed so chaotic and unstructured. I loved the Dream, and then it just got ripped out of my head. There were even services that promised to be able to bring back some amount of the Dream with electrical pulses aimed at your brain. There were threads about it on the Som a lot, but it always seemed like the people who said they got it back were either trying to sell the service or maybe just had a really good dream about the Dream.

  But this had the feel of a Dream sequence to me. The first robbery was in Trenton, New Jersey, then two in Philly. Then Johns Hopkins. That made it seem like they were moving south down the coast.

  The labs were all pretty close to each other. The Johns Hopkins robbery was the farthest from the break-ins at hospitals in Philadelphia. And then there were a few weird cell phone outages outside of Philly. And then, a couple weeks after that, the lab break-ins had stopped, but a bunch of dolphins swam up the Delaware and died outside Trenton, New Jersey.

  * * *

  —

  “I have to keep looking, Mom,” I told her.

  “What if you don’t find her?” she asked.

  “Then I’ll keep looking. She’s not dead.”

  She looked down at the soil, and the little pocket of rage in my heart started to leak into the rest of me. Everyone wanted me to give up, even her.

  “Just take care of your potatoes,” she said.