On the counter next to the cash register was a Chicken Bacon & Swiss sandwich, a large drink, and one of those folded apple-pie things. I went behind the counter and punched the corresponding buttons on the cash register to ring up the meal. The cash register tray opened, revealing a bunch of money that I would not have recognized but knew from reading about it online was from Pakistan. The money, to my eyes, was useless, but a Pakistani Dreamer who Maya had found online determined that a number of letters were missing from the notes. Those missing letters spelled out the Urdu words for “floor” and “under.” This remained a mystery for a couple of days until another Dreamer had the idea to bring a pry bar from a nearby auto shop and start prying up floor tiles. Just by the cash register, where you would stand if you were ordering, they pried up a tile where, underneath, a passkey glowed in bright blue letters: “Double picture day.”
I didn’t need the pry bar. If you knew which tile it was, you could just lift it with your fingernails. I had the passcode now, but I didn’t see any reason to go and turn it in. That would just wake me up and give me a hex sequence that everyone had known for weeks. Instead, I started walking around the city. I recognized the styles of about one in every three buildings. There was a craftsman home, a brownstone, a bunch of churches—some old-looking, some very old-looking, some new. There was a strip mall and an Italian villa, and there were temples and mosques. I did my best not to go in a straight line. I got myself well and truly lost. I turned down alleys and wound through streets both narrow and broad. Eventually, if I did this all night, I would just wake up.
So that’s what I did. I walked and walked and walked until I hit the end of the city. It was abrupt; it ended in grass, grass that went on forever. I walked out into the grass. There was no path, no trees, no hills, just an infinite flat plane of close-shorn grass. Like the most boring golf course of all time. I looked up at a noise in the sky. A jet plane was coming down for a landing. Was there an airport in the city? I didn’t know where you’d put it, but I also didn’t see why not. It was odd, the first moving object I’d seen. The eeriness of the Dream city was mostly its lack of occupants, but there was also no weather—no clouds, no discernible temperature, even. The sun was locked, unmoving in the blue sky. Nothing moved. Except that plane, I guess.
I set out into the grass and kept walking until I woke up. It was morning. My feet felt fine, I was well rested, and more than anything I wanted to talk to Maya.
The Dream, this creation of the Carls, it had been there for me to enjoy and I’d been ignoring it because I didn’t feel like I was going to get anything useful done. So what, though? It was marvelous. Just working through what other people had done gave me a feeling that this was all actually worth it. When you get stuck fighting small battles, it makes you small. Hopping from cable news show to cable news show to discuss controversy after controversy had made me small. I thought only about the fight, not why I was fighting.
I opened Skype. Maya was online. I clicked on her name and then closed my computer and, instead, recorded a video about how we weren’t going to let the Defenders’ tactics close down the open discussion of the Dream, and that we were going to be working with some well-known Dreamers to create a tool that would help with just that effort.
The month of April, generally
@AprilMaybeNot: What if there was a place designed for Dreamers by Dreamers to help solve through sequences, what would your top feature requests be?
By this time, there were millions of people active in the Dreamer community, and keeping track of not just the solved sequences but also which were unsolved or in progress was a lot of work. There were also hundreds of message boards where people went to seek out people who might have useful skills or information for in-progress sequences. Some of these sites were built on existing platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and Quora; others were hacked together from forum or chat software.
All these efforts were duplicated across literally hundreds of sites. Maya had the idea that I (and Andy) had two things no one else had:
The attention of far more Carl aficionados than anyone else in the world, as well as the credibility to go with it.
A huge pile of cash.
Of course, there were tons of developers and engineers and coders who were happy to try to cobble together something useful for the Dreamer community in their spare time. But as long as no one was getting paid, everyone wanted to be in charge. Maya had identified this problem, but Miranda (along with money from me and Andy) was the one who solved it.
Miranda kept telling me she was a shit coder, and honestly it really wasn’t her area of expertise, but as we tossed around this idea, it was Miranda, over and over again, who would say, “No, that’s not feasible” or “Yeah, that will take like fifteen minutes.” She knew the difference between a hard problem and an easy one in a way that perplexed the rest of us. And when we brought on our first programmer, Andy’s roommate, Jason, Miranda was the person who understood both the vision and the practicality enough that it made sense for her to be managing Jason.
And that’s how we (and by “we,” I mostly mean Maya, Miranda, and money) created the Som.
The Som was a centralized location for Dreamers to share their skills, their projects, their theories, their failures, and their successes. It started out just as a website, but Jason coded it so that it could easily be integrated with an app. We started poaching people from my old job.
Soon, a Som app could be set to notify a user instantaneously if someone was looking for their skill set or if a comment was added to a theory thread they were following. By the end of a month, the whole thing was so interconnected and bloated with features that it was impenetrable to the average user. But it wasn’t for average users; it was for hard-core Dreamers, and it may have been a little glitchy, but it was better than any of the other cobbled-together solutions by a wide margin.
Plus, we just kept throwing money at it as the user base grew. Every time I mentioned the Som in a video, the influx bumped exponentially. And whenever that happened, we needed more help to keep the site running, not to mention just the cost of the servers. Luckily the cost didn’t matter much. Robin and Jennifer Putnam had landed me a ridiculously large advance for my book and I got a quarter of it on signing.
As the Som got bigger (and it got bigger fast), Miranda just kept being in charge. She was managing Jason, and then she was managing Jason and a couple of app engineers, and then she was bossing around user interface people, data engineers, stack developers, database designers, graphic designers, mobile app developers, and even a couple of accountants. Miranda, it turned out, was not one to focus her expertise. She knew a lot about a LOT.
Whenever I hung out with Miranda, she never felt like a very confident person. It wasn’t that she was shy; it was more that she was deferential. So the fact that she somehow wrangled this mess together, becoming the twenty-five-year-old CEO of a pretty large tech start-up, astounded me even more than it astounded her. When she was dealing with people who weren’t me, she was friendly and thoughtful, but she was also firm and authoritative. Turns out, she could manage the fuck out of a project. And by working closely with Maya—who was extremely well respected in the Dreamer community and had a huge amount of insight into the kinds of tools they’d need—the Som became the most-used hub for Dreamers within weeks. Peter Petrawicki’s pathetic plan to wrangle secret sequence solutions was also constantly messed with from within the Som. Whenever people were bored, they just went into a private chat and churned out a fake sequence solution.
By the end of March the Dream had taken over so much of our life that the Carls mostly dropped off our radar. But we rented office space across 23rd from Carl to keep an eye on him anyway. It was amazing how fast we spent money. We weren’t really in danger of running out, but it also didn’t take long to realize that “rich” is very relative. I maybe had $2 million in the bank at that point, and we burned through a full $300,000 of that in the first month of development. The money was officially going out faster than it was coming in, but everyone seemed confident that that would change as soon as the book came out, so that’s most of what I was focusing on.
The good news was there was a solution to the money problems just on the horizon.
April 24