“OK,” the man replied.
So I stuffed both phones in my jeans pocket. I grabbed the desk drawer and slammed it into the window. Smoke started pouring into the room. My next breath was excruciating. It didn’t feel like it contained anything except tiny needles, and the coughing fit that ensued made me involuntarily gasp in more smoke. I coughed more. I realized I wasn’t getting any real air.
I thought I would have time to clean off the glass, but I didn’t. I took my shirt off my face and placed it over the glass nubs sticking up from the window frame—some protection, at least. I plopped my right ass cheek onto the shirt and nonetheless felt the glass biting through the shirt, my jeans, and my skin.
But I was retching now. I rushed to get my body positioned to lower myself from my hands—to save those precious five feet between me and the ground—but then I just fell. Ungainly, and listing to one side, I fell into open air. I felt the sudden heat of the fire—the little room had been protecting me—but in those milliseconds before I slammed into the ground, I could see the smoke begin to clear.
I hit, left foot first, then left arm, then my head slammed against the concrete. Somehow, this wasn’t enough to knock me unconscious. I continued to cough, my lungs still filled with the evil particles of smoke. But now when I gasped, it didn’t get worse. My brain could tell that I wasn’t suffocating anymore, and so it moved to the more pressing issue of the screaming pain coming from my arm and leg.
The smoke was so clear down here that I could see the fire . . . It was licking every vertical surface in eyeshot. Several sensations screamed simultaneously through the fog of my concussion, but my leg was the loudest. I raised myself on my good right arm, getting myself into a rough sitting position. I looked down. The lower part—above the ankle—was very broken. Blood was already starting to soak through my pants.
“This Is God Damn Bull Shit!” I shouted.
I realized that everyone, seeing only the darkness of my pocket on the livestream, heard me say those words. Even now, I was still thinking about the audience.
I reached into my pants pocket, pulling out both phones. “OK, I’m OK—I mean, not OK. I’m badly injured, but I’m not dead yet. Let’s hold on to the fact that I’m not dead yet.” I could feel the heat beating on me from every direction, but more from the top and the right than from the left. So I started to move myself in that direction. There was a loud and persistent roaring filling the warehouse.
And then I had the dumbest thought that I’d ever had in my life. “Everywhere around the world! Guys. Not just one Carl at a time. Every Carl. At the same time.”
Very me of me to assume that no one else had figured this out yet. But I had something no one else had, an audience. Bigger than the Super Bowl. Bigger than Neil Freaking Armstrong.
The stream view count read more than seven hundred million viewers. What can’t you do with an audience that big? Well, sometimes . . . nothing.
I could hear the policeman shouting my name from my other phone. I picked it up and coughed a half dozen times before saying, “I broke my leg, but the air is much better down here.”
“Can you move?”
“Not easily,” I half yelled over the noise of the fire.
“Just move toward the back wall. There is less fire there.”
“My new favorite kind of fire,” I said, and the cop actually laughed.
At that moment, a call came in from Miranda. OK. That had to be important. “I’m getting another call, be right back,” I said to the emergency response professional who was trying to save my life.
“Things are not good here,” I said.
“I know, April, I’m watching. Maya is here.”
“I know what we need to do. We need every Carl to be touched with gold simultaneously. Like with the iodine, but every Carl at the same time. In fact, I don’t know why I’m telling you, I should be telling them.”
I picked up the livestream phone. “Hello, I don’t know if this will help me. Maybe it will, or maybe it’s just the best chance we have of getting this last step done, but if you are near a Carl, or know someone who is, could you touch that Carl with a piece of gold? Just some jewelry will do, we think. I’d really like to know how this ends before . . . well, you know.”
I picked up the phone Maya was on again and said, “OK, well, that’s something at least.”
“You’re actually one step ahead of us for once,” Maya said.
I laughed, then coughed.
“Miranda decoded the actual code with your passkey. It’s just the atomic symbol for gold sixty-four times.”
“Well, Carl clearly wanted to get his point across, I guess.”
“April, there are a lot of places where the Carls aren’t publicly accessible. There are fifteen Carls in China, and they’ve been under military guard for months. You can’t just walk up to one and put a piece of gold on it.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. Carl had sent us our instructions, but we were too damned stupid to allow ourselves to comply. Maybe in a few years, after treaties were signed, everyone would get on board and try it out, but probably not. Probably the Carls would just sit there forever, waiting for the Earth to get its shit together enough to do this one stupid, simple little thing.
I turned back to the livestream, moving in close to the mic so they could hear me over the roar of the fire. “Hello again, look, I’m not going to say this is hopeless. But there are sixty-four Carls in the world and a good 20 percent of them are under military guard. If the goal is to touch all of them with gold simultaneously, I honestly think we are being tested. The Carls want us to work together, they want us to be human together, to take a risk together, to make a choice together.”
I took a break to cough.
“I’m stuck in a burning building. But more than that, I’m stuck on this planet with you. And honestly, I’m glad. I’ve been exposed to a lot of awful people in the last few months, but I’ve met so many more that are amazing, thoughtful, generous, and kind. I honestly believe that is the human condition. And if the Carls are testing us, this final test is the hardest to accomplish. If you pay attention, there is only one story that makes sense, and that is one in which humanity works together more and more since we took over this planet. Yeah, we fuck it up all the time, yeah, there have been some massive steps backward, but look at us! We are one species now more than we have ever been. People fight against that, and they probably always will, but could there be any time in history when what Carl is asking us would be more possible? Asking dozens of governments to take the same action simultaneously with an uncertain outcome? Or at least asking them to allow their citizens to take that action?”
More coughing.
“I don’t know. I think maybe if we can’t do it right now, with eight hundred million people watching, we won’t ever be able to do it. So let’s try to do something together. Thank you. Thank you for doing this together.”
And then, I did something no sane creator would ever do. At the peak of my audience, I ended the stream.
Then I picked up Miranda’s call again, yelling, “I think that will help.”
Maya said something into the phone then, but I couldn’t hear over the noise the fire was making. It was starting to feel hard to breathe. I was gasping even though the smoke wasn’t so bad. The heat, I thought, or maybe shock. In fact, though I didn’t know it then, the fire was consuming all the oxygen in the building.
It was so hot. So blazing hot, but there was no escape. It felt like it was coming equally from every direction simultaneously. And since trying to move with a compound fracture was no fun, I just sat still.
“Is Andy there?” I shouted, suddenly wanting to talk to him.
“No, he’s currently holding one of my earrings against New York Carl,” Miranda said.
“You guys. I’m sorry. I’m going to leave it at that.”
And then I hung up to call Andy.