This was the evening I needed.
We sat down next to each other on the bed and chatted a bit about the adventures of the evening before settling into Dream interpretation. “The hexagons? I have no idea, that could be encoding anything. It could be binary, it could be some numerical pattern, I don’t know, April, I’ve worked through it a dozen ways and nothing makes any sense. But I do have a couple leads on the airline logo thing.” Since the hotel room didn’t have much in the way of chairs, we sat together on the end of the bed, our laptops in our laps.
“It felt familiar to me in the Dream,” I said, “but nothing we’ve gone through has turned anything up.”
“Well”—she lifted her laptop and leaned it gently on my upper thigh—“it probably looks familiar because it has the vague look of a flag. If you filled in the top, it would be a rectangle with a circle in it with bars of color. That’s, like, flag design 101. But not only is this definitely not a flag of an existing country, it just seems more likely that it’s representing something else.”
“Why?” I tried to make as much eye contact with her huge brown eyes as I could.
“I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem like the Dream to be referring to a specific country so blatantly. Usually it’s more abstract than that.”
She seemed both excited and nervous.
“I think it’s more likely that it’s either symbolic or representative. The symbolic feel is like the sun in front of the ocean, which might mean something to someone, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. But I’ve been thinking about it being representative. What if it’s not a single symbol, but two? It could be one dot and one dash of Morse code. If it’s just a dot and a dash, that would be just the letter A. But if it’s broken into two letters, that’s”—she checked her computer—“E . . . and T.”
I lifted up my finger to her. “E.T.?”
She lifted her finger up to mine. “Phoooone hoooome.”
We laughed and she blushed and I reached my hand out to grab hers as if that were a natural thing to do when sharing a laugh with a friend. Just a little extra physical touch. She tilted her head down and looked up at me, her smile gone, her face flushing red. I dropped her hand and put mine on her shoulder. As soon as my hand hit the fabric, she leaned into me with a kiss that was, ultimately, a bit of a mess.
I didn’t mind.
* * *
—
About an hour later (sorry for leaving out the fun bits—Miranda is a pretty private person) we were under the covers together, Miranda nestled in the crook of my arm. It was a little sweaty and sticky, but it was too nice to mind.
“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.