“Right,” I stammered. “Of course. God, I’m sorry, that was a dumb thing to say.”

Maya just made that face where her lips disappeared in consternation. I hadn’t been called on my bullshit in a while. It was unpleasant but also a little refreshing.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” Robin said, “how did you get so involved in the Dreamer community?”

“Well, the first night I solved the forty-ninth-, fiftieth-, and fifty-first-floor puzzle sequences. The forty-ninth floor, that’s the floor you started on, was solved by hundreds of people by the time people realized that it was a shared experience. I had worked out those three and even a few outside the building when the first Dreamer communities started popping up. It made me a bit of a celebrity in those communities. It also didn’t hurt that I had the connection to April.” She nodded at me. “Now, I just like it, and the people are amazing, and from all over the world with different ideas and worldviews, all working together toward a common goal. It’s a pretty beautiful thing. In fact, you all should spend a little time in the Dream. Just look up one of the solved sequences on Wikipedia and go through it. It might give you a better appreciation for the Carls. I know it has for me.”

Then she sat there for a few moments with a thought on her face before saying, “And, yeah, I dunno, I probably wanted to stay involved in this stuff in some way. It wasn’t as easy for me to leave it behind as I thought it would be.”

I could tell she was looking right at me. I couldn’t find any words to say, and I was worried that, if I said them, she would be able to hear the lump in my throat.

“Speaking of which, I didn’t originally want to ask, but there’s something you guys could maybe help us out with, if you wanted to.”

* * *

—

That night, after mulling over Maya’s proposal, I decided to take her advice and spend some time in the Dream. First, though, I read through some of the more recent puzzle sequences that had been worked out. The one I picked was one of the last ones ThePurrletarian had credited, though there were two other names I didn’t recognize listed beside hers. They didn’t uncover it simultaneously, I found; they did it together.

When I fell asleep and found myself in the Dream’s lobby, I turned around and punched the down button on the elevator. The door opened, and I walked in and pushed the button for the lobby. I walked out, past the massive super-sized Carl, out the door, and onto the street. The Dream’s streets were not on a grid like Manhattan; they would spur off in diagonals, coming together in three-way or five-way or even six-way intersections. Alleys shot off in surprising locations, and none of the architecture made any sense.

I looked back to see the office building where the spawn point was located—so high that, from my vantage point, it looked like it went on up forever, more than two hundred stories. It’s weird to talk about these things as if they are fact since they were in a dream, but the fact that everyone experienced it in precisely the same way made it feel concrete. What is reality except for the things that people universally experience the same way? The Dream, in that sense, was very, very real.

Directly across from the exit of the office building was the Arby’s. This magnificent dream location was the best branding Arby’s had ever gotten; they’d become the unofficial fast food of Dreamers everywhere. Next door to that was the old wooden church and on the other side of the Arby’s was a train car that was definitely not modern, but I couldn’t tell you when it was from. Maybe the 1920s?

I headed straight across into the Arby’s. It was empty, as everything in the Dream was. This sequence relied on a fairly detailed knowledge of how the equipment in an Arby’s worked. Maya had worked at an Arby’s in high school and was also one of the first people to try this sequence.

On the counter next to the cash register was a Chicken Bacon & Swiss sandwich, a large drink, and one of those folded apple-pie things. I went behind the counter and punched the corresponding buttons on the cash register to ring up the meal. The cash register tray opened, revealing a bunch of money that I would not have recognized but knew from reading about it online was from Pakistan. The money, to my eyes, was useless, but a Pakistani Dreamer who Maya had found online determined that a number of letters were missing from the notes. Those missing letters spelled out the Urdu words for “floor” and “under.” This remained a mystery for a couple of days until another Dreamer had the idea to bring a pry bar from a nearby auto shop and start prying up floor tiles. Just by the cash register, where you would stand if you were ordering, they pried up a tile where, underneath, a passkey glowed in bright blue letters: “Double picture day.”

I didn’t need the pry bar. If you knew which tile it was, you could just lift it with your fingernails. I had the passcode now, but I didn’t see any reason to go and turn it in. That would just wake me up and give me a hex sequence that everyone had known for weeks. Instead, I started walking around the city. I recognized the styles of about one in every three buildings. There was a craftsman home, a brownstone, a bunch of churches—some old-looking, some very old-looking, some new. There was a strip mall and an Italian villa, and there were temples and mosques. I did my best not to go in a straight line. I got myself well and truly lost. I turned down alleys and wound through streets both narrow and broad. Eventually, if I did this all night, I would just wake up.

So that’s what I did. I walked and walked and walked until I hit the end of the city. It was abrupt; it ended in grass, grass that went on forever. I walked out into the grass. There was no path, no trees, no hills, just an infinite flat plane of close-shorn grass. Like the most boring golf course of all time. I looked up at a noise in the sky. A jet plane was coming down for a landing. Was there an airport in the city? I didn’t know where you’d put it, but I also didn’t see why not. It was odd, the first moving object I’d seen. The eeriness of the Dream city was mostly its lack of occupants, but there was also no weather—no clouds, no discernible temperature, even. The sun was locked, unmoving in the blue sky. Nothing moved. Except that plane, I guess.

I set out into the grass and kept walking until I woke up. It was morning. My feet felt fine, I was well rested, and more than anything I wanted to talk to Maya.

The Dream, this creation of the Carls, it had been there for me to enjoy and I’d been ignoring it because I didn’t feel like I was going to get anything useful done. So what, though? It was marvelous. Just working through what other people had done gave me a feeling that this was all actually worth it. When you get stuck fighting small battles, it makes you small. Hopping from cable news show to cable news show to discuss controversy after controversy had made me small. I thought only about the fight, not why I was fighting.

I opened Skype. Maya was online. I clicked on her name and then closed my computer and, instead, recorded a video about how we weren’t going to let the Defenders’ tactics close down the open discussion of the Dream, and that we were going to be working with some well-known Dreamers to create a tool that would help with just that effort.

The month of April, generally

@AprilMaybeNot: What if there was a place designed for Dreamers by Dreamers to help solve through sequences, what would your top feature requests be?

By this time, there were millions of people active in the Dreamer community, and keeping track of not just the solved sequences but also which were unsolved or in progress was a lot of work. There were also hundreds of message boards where people went to seek out people who might have useful skills or information for in-progress sequences. Some of these sites were built on existing platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and Quora; others were hacked together from forum or chat software.

All these efforts were duplicated across literally hundreds of sites. Maya had the idea that I (and Andy) had two things no one else had:

           The attention of far more Carl aficionados than anyone else in the world, as well as the credibility to go with it.

       A huge pile of cash.

Of course, there were tons of developers and engineers and coders who were happy to try to cobble together something useful for the Dreamer community in their spare time. But as long as no one was getting paid, everyone wanted to be in charge. Maya had identified this problem, but Miranda (along with money from me and Andy) was the one who solved it.

Miranda kept telling me she was a shit coder, and honestly it really wasn’t her area of expertise, but as we tossed around this idea, it was Miranda, over and over again, who would say, “No, that’s not feasible” or “Yeah, that will take like fifteen minutes.” She knew the difference between a hard problem and an easy one in a way that perplexed the rest of us. And when we brought on our first programmer, Andy’s roommate, Jason, Miranda was the person who understood both the vision and the practicality enough that it made sense for her to be managing Jason.

And that’s how we (and by “we,” I mostly mean Maya, Miranda, and money) created the Som.

The Som was a centralized location for Dreamers to share their skills, their projects, their theories, their failures, and their successes. It started out just as a website, but Jason coded it so that it could easily be integrated with an app. We started poaching people from my old job.