“This is not fair,” I replied, matter-of-factly.
“I keep wondering when you will notice that that’s how everything is,” she said with a smile.
So I signed up for Twitter, and we linked to it from the YouTube channel, and I tweeted some things, and by the end of the day I had five hundred real, human people waiting to hear my every word . . . as long as they only came a few dozen words at a time. My Instagram, on the other hand, had been blowing up all week. I had ten times more followers than I had before. It was a weird mix of exciting and stressful. I freaked out a little bit and went through and deleted a bunch of stuff I was less than proud off. Everything that had a border had to go. I thought way more about every post, and I felt like I couldn’t put anything up if it wasn’t really high quality. Suddenly my posts had gotten much better (and required much more work).
Seven days in, I had stopped calling in to tell work I wasn’t going to make it, and instead, I just didn’t go. Don’t do this, it makes it way harder to get another job in the future if you quit by just not showing up, but that’s what I did. It helped that, by that time, I had made tens of thousands of dollars. But that income stream was drying up. We weren’t being paid for our appearances; we were being paid for the use of our video, which they had already paid for. They were happy to have us keep coming on shows, but they weren’t going to pay us. And if they weren’t going to pay us, then I had more important things to do.
What eventually became known as the Freddie Mercury Sequence remained a total mystery. I ran through the sequence on Wikipedia dozens of times. Each time, the edits produced the same three additional typos before it reset. A single note had appeared on the Wikipedia page commenting that a persistent typo wasn’t allowing itself to be fixed, so at least one other person had noticed.
As the days passed, the search for the artist marketing firm shadowy government agency responsible for the Carls got more intense. But knowing that there was more to it was leading me in different directions than the rest of the world.
Googling “IAMU” certainly wasn’t helping. It seemed unlikely that this had anything to do with the International Association of Maritime Universities or the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities. It seemed most likely that it was a hint, just far too vague a hint for us to figure out.
“What if we ask the internet?” This was us, again, on my living room bed. The sun had gone down while Maya and I had been engrossed in our various laptop-based activities, and we hadn’t stopped long enough to turn any lights on. Life with no job was wonderful. I could see her mostly by the light of her screen.
“Huh?” Maya replied, hammering away at her computer on some work email. Maya didn’t seem to see Carl as a life-disrupting force so much as an event that would someday be a great anecdote to tell at a fancy cocktail party with a bunch of executives while wearing a cute outfit. She had always been as much into the business as the craft, which was extremely valuable and probably why she had the coolest job of any of us.
“I-A-M-U. I could just tweet out the weird Wikipedia clue and let other people try to figure it out. As they say, ten thousand minds are better than three!”
I had been building my Twitter following with posts about Carl and politics. I had also developed a new and voracious interest in growing my number of Twitter followers, which had become a fun game. My brain liked seeing the numbers go up.
“I do not like this idea.” She didn’t even look up from her laptop.
“Why, because you’d rather I stop obsessing?”
I had been bugging her with a lot of dumb ideas, even though her one-word replies had given me the impression that she was just about done with all this hoopla.
“No, April.” She turned to me. “Because it’s weird. It’s already weird and impossible, but this makes it more weird and impossible. Plus, what if the answer is something big? Do you want to give that up?”
I got the distinct feeling that she added that last part because she thought it would convince me, not because she thought it was a good argument.
“But someone else is going to find it, and they’ll talk about it first! It makes sense that the world should know about it, and I want to be the one to tell them.”
“Would you rather be the first person to reveal that there is a mystery? Or the person who solves the mystery?” Maya continued to appeal to my newfound sense of self-importance to get me to do what she wanted.
I noticed.
“Ugh, OK, I get it, I’m fully psychoanalyzed. I want to be both, but I have a 100 percent chance of being one of those things if I tweet about it right now.”
I tend to get obsessed with things when I’m first learning about them, which had happened with Twitter and was starting to happen with YouTube and even to some extent the news media. There was a part of me that just wanted to tweet about the Freddie Mercury Sequence so I could have more opportunity to use and understand the platform and just . . . see what happened. That’s a terrible reason to tweet something, but a pretty common one.
“OK, maybe we need more than three minds, but I don’t think we should have ten thousand yet. Who else do we trust?”
“Uhhh . . .” I was somewhat upset to find that no one was coming to mind. We had our three-person team, two people I trusted and me. Adding anyone to the inner circle felt wrong in a way that adding ten thousand did not. My parents? My brother? Some of my friends from college, some of my friends from high school? No one was popping out as a trained puzzle solver.
“Well,” I said finally, “there are a few people I’ve seen over and over again online who seem cool and interested and supportive. It’s like they’re starting a little community around my video. They . . .” I stopped, not wanting to continue.
“They . . . what?” she asked skeptically.
“They call themselves Carlie’s Angels.”
Maya’s smirk turned into a chuckle and then she just burst out laughing. And then I did too. The constant feeling that she would rather be talking about literally anything else finally washed away.
“I know,” I continued. “They seem to be almost all women for some reason. And the guys don’t seem to mind the nickname.”
“But ‘Carlie’?”
“Anything for a pun, I guess?”
She smirked. “Can’t argue with that. Do you feel like you know any of them?”
“No, but I see a lot of the same names pop up over and over again. There’s a Carlie’s Angels Twitter account that they all follow and that I have interacted with. I’m surprised none of them have stumbled across the Wikipedia thing yet. I could DM their account, I guess.”
Maya seemed concerned. “Are they fans of you, or of Carl?”
“Both, I guess . . . It’s weird to think that I have fans. They get really excited when I tweet at them.”
“Yup, that’s how Twitter works.”
“Do I sound like a complete idiot when I talk about this stuff?” I asked.
“It’s just a little surprising how fast you’ve gone from zero to sixty.” She did not seem enthusiastic.
“Because of how slow I was in figuring out other stuff?” This was a not-so-subtle reference to the solid year of living together it took for us to hook up.
I crawled over her laptop and kissed her.
“You are a little manipulative, you know that?”
“Uh-huh, but you? Never.”
“Let’s make this decision later,” she said.
The next morning, I had to get on a flight to LA for a late-night show that Mr. Skampt had booked us on. Even though we weren’t getting paid anymore, he thought it would lead to other things, and he wanted us to take some meetings in LA anyway. Maya couldn’t just skip out on work, so we had some saying good-bye to do.
* * *
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