We sat there for a while. I stayed quiet, even though I didn’t really get where he was going with all of this sad dog talk.
“That’s what I’m afraid of, that we will become like that. I&m worried that we will outsource our satisfaction, and that our lives will get sucked into the nothingness of video games and television and shockingly realistic virtual pornography. We will just get satisfied, and never drive ourselves forward. Society is fraying—the impact of the Carls, whatever you think about them, is clear. We’ve lost our way, we don’t have a vision for the future anymore.”
As he continued, it starts to feel like a speech he’s given before.
“I don’t think that the last two hundred thousand years of human suffering will be best brought meaning by humans today living like dogs—accepting what has been given to us as unquestionably inevitable and, ultimately, when it gets taken away, seeing that as just another part of life. I want to fight every bit as hard as my ancestors fought to keep my lineage alive, to make me possible. I don’t have to fight”—he gestured to his daiquiri—“but I owe it to everyone who came before me, and to everyone who will come after, to push humanity forward, maybe to even redefine what it means to be human.”
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get goose bumps when he finished that monologue.
While reading this, I also got goose bumps. The kind you get when you go to pee in the middle of the night and suddenly start wondering whether there is someone in your house. The article continued a while, fleshing out PP’s ideology, but then finally they got to the point. Or at least near it.
Peter’s house is not just a house; it’s part of a compound. There are dorms for workers, offices, server rooms, laboratories.
“That’s where we’re doing the mining.” He gestures toward a huge cinder block building with no windows. He means the cryptocurrency mining. “Before we make our initial offering, we want to have a fairly significant supply on hand to match with our ability to supply our service.”
He only calls it “our service” during the entire meeting. The fact that I am writing a feature article that is about a service that is secret and has not yet been launched is more than just unusual. In fact, it’s something I would never do and, if I did, something my editor would literally fire me for. But Peter Petrawicki’s “service” has received investment from some of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world. His first round of funding came in at over a billion dollars. And he’s not doing it alone. Researchers in neurophysiology, cellular neuroscience, quantum computing, transistors, biomedical engineering, optoelectronics, optogenetics, data science, artificial intelligence, and robotics have all left tenured faculty positions or jobs at Google, Microsoft, and Apple to come work for Peter Petrawicki and his partners.
I leave Puerto Rico with a lot of useful thoughts, but my overwhelming emotion is confusion. Dr. Kress’s contributions to neurology are undeniable, but he remains a complicated and controversial figure. And that, of course, is true of Mr. Petrawicki as well. The combination of celebrity scientist and celebrity pundit is certainly unusual, but it might be, like a reality TV president, the sort of thing that isn’t as surprising as it seems at first glance. I am not convinced that whatever they have going on is not a colossally huge scam. When I asked, Peter didn’t even try to convince me. Instead, he replied with his newfound relaxed demeanor but his traditional bravado: “Real or fake, either way, this is going to be huge.”
You probably have some idea of how upset I was feeling after finishing this article. It really wasn’t that Peter Petrawicki was the sympathetic protagonist of this fluffy magazine article; it was that he was winning while April was dead. He was getting everything he ever wanted, which was mostly other rich white dudes telling him how amazing he was. My response wasn’t anger, though. It was just pure, sweaty anxiety.
I don’t have to explain most of the reasons to you. It sucked hearing anything from Peter aside from “I screwed up, and I owe it to the entire world to live a quiet and anonymous life donating money to global health charities.” But I had another reason. I had some idea of what scientific advancement might require the breadth and depth of talent Petrawicki was acquiring and would also get a lot of billionaires very excited.
I read and reread the section that described the kinds of people they had been hiring, trying to decide whether it was just anchoring bias convincing me I knew more than I did, but no. My heart pounded and my armpits prickled because I knew what Peter Petrawicki’s “service” was.
ANDY
As I pulled the book out of the trash and read the cover, all of the usual clichés—“my heart leapt into my throat” or “my stomach dropped” or whatever—were inaccurate. I had to poop. While I started moving toward where I thought the closest Starbucks might be, I opened the book and began to read.
The first line was:
There is a bathroom in the park. By the basketball courts, in the brick building.
I was freaking out even more now, but so was my colon. I closed the book and half jogged to the brick building, which, indeed, had a public bathroom in it. I was wishing I had taken the risk on a Starbucks as I walked into the gray-tiled, booze-soaked mess. I slid into a stall and, as soon as I was safe, opened the book back up.
I’m just here to help, I promise. I know this is a lot. But the point of this is just to give you a little of what you need, whether that’s a walk or a sandwich or directions to the nearest bathroom. I know that doesn’t seem super important right now, but no mission gets done without people, and no people survive without taking bathroom breaks. I understand that you don’t really trust me yet. That’s fine. But it’s also why I, right now, have to deliver information in such small packets. You’ll read ahead, even if I tell you not to, which would break the process. Just give me a chance and I’ll prove myself to you.
And don’t you feel better now that you’ve had a walk? Sorry I scared you with the trash can thing.
My brain kept trying to make this some kind of street-magician/prank-video/mind-freak thing. This seemed impossible, but it obviously wasn’t because it just kept happening. Unless it wasn’t. Unless I had a brain tumor or it was all a dream. But the smell of the bathroom didn’t seem like the kind of thing my dream mind would subject me to. I looked back down at the book.
Now that we’ve gotten you out of the house and proven that this is something you should take seriously, I’m going to ask you to do something weird. I got you two tickets to STOMP. I know it’s silly, but go, and find someone to go with you. After you’re done watching the show that David from Denver, Colorado, called “one of the best things I have ever seen!” you can start reading this book again. But until then, do not. Go see STOMP and take someone with you, because sometimes you have to be a tourist in your own town.
That’s where the text on that page ended. The temptation to turn the page and see what was next was intense. I mean, either it was just the same line repeated over and over like last time, or it really would give me a look at what was coming next. But then I noticed another thought biting at my brain. If I was going to invite someone to go see STOMP with me, who would that be?