It’s clear that that admission isn’t easy for him. Petrawicki has always been a zealous opponent of censorship, even self-censorship. He references the “free market of ideas” at least a half dozen times in only a few hours of chatting. Ultimately, though, I have to bring up April before he talks about her.
“I respected April a great deal. I still do. I think we were having a necessary debate. I never wanted anyone to hurt her. The fact that those people”—he’s referring to April’s kidnappers—“ended up being so tightly connected to Defender ideology is something I struggle with constantly, and that I’ll be struggling with every day for the rest of my life.”
I put down my phone and stood up. After August 5, when both April and the Carls vanished, anyone who called themselves a Defender was not going to have a good time. The FBI caught the guys who lit the warehouse on fire, and they were all obviously and proudly Defenders. They were still out there, but only the most scary and extreme ones still called themselves Defenders. They had been pushed deeper into private chats and seedy message boards and loosely affiliated angry YouTube channels. These were all things that I tried very, very hard to never think about or engage with.
But there were also all of the people who had been Defenders but just didn’t want the label anymore. They weren’t murderers; they just thought April was a traitor who was better off dead. They wouldn’t have killed her, and it was terrible she was murdered, but they weren’t exactly sad she was gone. If she was gone. Lots of people believed she was still around doing bad things for humans, and many more people were just on the edge of believing it. The only control in the world I had was over the Som, and anti-April conspiracy theories weren’t tolerated there. Everywhere else, though? I think the idea was, what’s the harm in attacking someone who’s dead?
I wasn’t running the Som anymore. We thought hard about just closing it completely—after all, it was built to help people solve puzzles in a dream we no longer had access to. I didn’t have a passion for it after April was gone, and I honestly didn’t have a grasp on how huge and deeply connected the community there had become.
But people made it clear that it was bigger than the Dream. Lots of people used it as simply an alternate social space, but it was uniquely suited to investigative work. Journalists used it to outsource research, conspiracy theorists used it to collect their leads, and then of course there were the reality games. That new class of gamers found the Som infinitely useful and were happy to continue paying a low monthly fee to keep the service alive.
So we didn’t shut it down, but I had to leave. I’m not even sure why. Part of it was that running a start-up is exhausting, but with the dramatically lowered stakes I didn’t have the same fuel. More importantly, I wanted to go back to my old life. Not because I missed it, just because it was less painful. So I passed the torch and went back to Berkeley.
PhD students who just vanish for a year aren’t usually welcomed back with open arms, but Dr. Lundgren, my advisor, hadn’t even fully packed up my space yet. We’d kept in touch a little bit, and she said she was keeping my slot open because my research was so promising. But was it? It was incremental. I know that’s true of most research, but I wasn’t changing a paradigm; I was adding to existing knowledge. The more I thought about it, the more I figured that the fact that I had done so many big, public things and become a little bit famous made everybody much more sympathetic. It felt a little like cheating.
I don’t blame April for not ever telling you anything about what I was doing in my PhD program, or even that I was in a PhD program, but basically … well, OK, I’m really bad at basicallys. You know how a computer chip is made of silicon semiconductors? Well, there are a bunch of other materials that aren’t silicon that can be used in the same way that have different advantages. They might be cheaper or more flexible or thinner or whatever. Well, the thing I was working on was a kind of organic semiconductor gel. The idea is to make it not just flexible but squishy and wet. This is only really good for one thing: putting it inside of living bodies.
Scientists have been working at UC Berkeley for a long time on tiny sensors and nerve stimulators that can be implanted into people (though mostly just rats so far). But hard chips can only get so small, and in any case it would be a better experience all around if the sensor felt a little more like soft organic bits.
It is very difficult for me to not keep explaining, but I think you get the point: squishy computer chips for use inside of living things so that you can have a tiny Fitbit inside of you telling you, in real time, whether your blood sugar is crashing or you’re having a heart attack. My research was an attempt both to gather signals from the nervous system and to send inputs into the nervous system. It was potentially interesting research in everything from diagnostics and scanning to prosthetics, and I could not for the life of me figure out how to care.
I got back to Berkeley, and somehow my lab had only partially been torn apart by people who needed equipment for their own experiments. I was able to put it all back together pretty quickly. But the thing I had been so excited about before now felt like busywork. Knowing that technology as elegant and powerful as Carl’s existed in the universe made me feel like a monkey banging rocks together. I’m sure part of this was grief, but I think part of it was the post-Carl depression that a lot of people were dealing with.
The day I read that Petrawicki article, I was working on assembling my little jellies using literal laser beams to push impurities into the perfect places before letting the gel solidify. I was basically making Jell-O, except instead of pears and marshmallows, I was pushing around individual atoms. With lasers.
It sounds cooler than it was. Someone else had built the laser robot; my lab just bought it. All I was doing was typing instructions into the program that would control the laser. This was not terribly cerebral work, so my mind kept drifting back to the article and Peter Petrawicki’s new island life. Was this his redemption arc? It was so nice of him to apologize to a magazine reporter who was doing a puff piece on him. Had he apologized to April’s parents? To Andy and Maya and Robin? To me? I must have missed the email. And it’s also nice to hear how many struggles he’s had. That’s definitely something people need to be worrying about.
Of course, I stopped filling in the numbers my circuit CAD program had spat out and went back to the article. The writer continued:
Peter Petrawicki is not a changed man, though. He’s driven, sure of himself, and believes that anyone standing in the way of the path he sees as right is dangerous. But now, without the Carls looming on the streets, his anxieties have turned elsewhere. I ask him what his biggest fear is, and he stays silent for thirty seconds before replying.
“You met Taggart on the way in.” He’s talking about the island dog that he adopted. It’s medium-sized, medium-haired, medium brown, and of medium disposition. If there is a purebred dog in Taggart’s lineage, it was many generations ago. “I love Taggart, and I think Taggart has a good life, certainly better than he had before we met. He gets fed twice a day, he gets to run on the beach, we cuddle up and watch TV. Taggart has literally everything taken care of. And when Taggart starts to decline and suffer, I’ll decide for him when he should die, because that’s the appropriate thing to do. Taggart does not even think to question his life. Everything that happens to him, he accepts, both good and bad, because he isn’t even capable of imagining that he can affect his own life. When we go to the vet’s office that last time, he will have no idea what is happening. He will just go to sleep, and it will be just one more thing that happened to him.”