by David Yoon
I am not you, Max wanted to say. I’m supposed to be Salvadoran. But I was born here. My Spanish sucks. So, you know.
Max felt the constant need to explain himself. He felt it now.
He entered a glass building. He passed Maurice, the African American security guard. He waved to Aimee, the ever-smiling Whitewoman at Reception.
He passed through the large bullpen full of brown-skinned programmers from India and Thailand and so on. Max, though brown skinned, was not one of them. Wren put the programmers on the first floor as a show of prowess for visitors. The popular belief was that really good programming could solve all social problems, like housing or racism or bullying or sexism or deceit or greed or loneliness.
Anyway.
Max passed through Marketing with its many Whitewomen and arrived at Product, with its many tall and hale Whitemen. Max was not one of them, either. Max had long given up on being one of anyone. He decided to simply be one of himself.
This meant Max had no tribe to speak of, which Max disliked. But it also exempted him from the expectations and assumptions of a tribe, which Max liked.
So Max chose his own tribe: Product. And despite being the only brown-skinned one there, Max did not feel like a fly in milk. Maybe it was because Max was happily deluded. Maybe it was because Product was Max’s play space, a mental sanctuary where he could dream up new Wren features and generally make up his own rules as he went along, as conjurers do. Max was Senior Product, the youngest ever in Wren’s ten-year history to achieve such a rank.
“Mister Max,” said Justin Richards, a tall and hale Whiteman, Max’s boss only in title. Justin Richards, and Wren in general, did not believe in titles. Titles were a big pile of bull. Work was not work, either. Work was called hanging out.
“Mister Justin,” said Max.
They fist-bumped.
“Drop what you’re working on,” said cool-boss Justin Richards. “The Helix wants you.”
0.2
The Helix was a sealed office on the top floor of Wren. It was devoted to secret research and development projects. Being entirely made of glass, the Helix appeared to have no walls or ceiling. Just a square platform floating high above the brown chaparral hills of Southern California.
The Helix was named by Wren CEO Cal Peers after the Helix nebula, a cosmic body whose nickname was the Eye of God.
Justin Richards eyed a glowing spot on the glass to open it up, and led Max inside. The sky room had but a quartet of blond chairs surrounding a glass coffee table. Not a desk or computer in sight. Max stole a breath. He had just unlocked a secret level in the game of his life.
Two small behoodied Whitemen greeted Max with slack fist bumps. Brad Nason and Brad Barker. Few ever got to meet the Brads. It was whispered that the Brads met regularly with Cal Peers himself.
“Hey, Mister Max,” said Brad.
“Enough of this gay banter,” said Max, quoting a beloved comedy sketch. They knew it—all techies in the Republic of California knew it—and laughed.
“So, listen,” said Brad.
“Here’s this thing,” said Brad. “A whole, like, suite of programs. Personality tests, free games, do-it-yourself music videos for the kids.”
Brad touched the coffee table to illuminate it, and a dozen documents bloomed upon its surface. Max sifted through them without asking. This was something Justin Richards loved about him.
Mister Max just gets right up on in there, Justin Richards liked to say.
“Sixteen Faces, Inc.?” said Max, sifting and sifting. “YouTunes LLC? Are these third-party partners?”
“They’re our companies,” said Brad. “We just made them last week.”
Max frowned. He pushed his Buddy Holly glasses up and raised his eyebrows. “This is about the plateau, isn’t it.”
“You were right,” said Brad to Justin Richards. “He gets it.”
“Like, instantly,” said Brad.
Fist bumps all around.
“I get it, too, for sure,” said Justin Richards. “But just for the sake of double clarity, could you explain the plateau situation back to me in Luddite’s terms?”
Max tented his fingertips. “So you know how Wren users are giving us less and less data these days?”
“Sure,” said Justin Richards.
“It’s not like back during start-up Wren, when user data submissions grew all hockey stick,” said Max. When Max spoke, he made sure to make eye contact with everyone at regular intervals, like a sprinkler head. “Now that we’re Wren-Wren, users aren’t as eager. We’ve hit a plateau. Advertisers are all, sure, we can sell to style-conscious professional males aged twenty-four to forty in SoCal who play football video games, but what other intel can you get us? Can you get us more granularity?”
“Granularity,” said Justin Richards.
“So I’m guessing, and correct me if I’m wrong,” said Max, “that we’re using little decoy companies to get people to give us more data in a, um, indirect way.”
“Boom goes the dynamite,” said Brad.
Brad swept the table clean and brought up some site mock-ups.
“Hooking the decoys up to our master user database is the easy part,” said Brad. “We’re just short on ideas on how to get people to give up more info.”
“More info,” said Max.
“Stuff beyond hard knowables like music and movie preferences,” said Brad.
“We want the squishy stuff—an emotional profile,” said Brad. He counted on his fingers. “Classics like openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.”
“Then we want to go beyond the classics,” said Brad. “Sexual proclivities. Psychopathy index. Subrace. Patriotism. Attractiveness.”
Max realized his brow had become damp. He pushed his glasses up. “Huh.”
“We can’t just ask outright for that type of data,” said Brad. “Users would spook. Or they’d just give a bunch of self-conscious answers, which is useless to us.”
“Heisenberg principle, yo,” said Brad.
“We need decoy ideas,” said Brad. “Fake contests, fake articles, whatever.”
“Well, Mister Max can riff all damn day,” said Justin Richards. “Right?”
“Huh,” said Max again. The table before him glowed with rectangles.
“We’re calling this the Soul Project,” said Brad. “Work on nothing else; tell no one. Mister Cal wanted to be here, by the way. He had to be at a thing.”
Brad struck a pose. “Get that data so’s we can get paid, nigga.”
0.3
So Max worked on the Soul Project, and nothing else.
He brought his chunky black laptop to the sunlit Helix and set it next to Brad’s thin gold laptop, which sat next to Brad’s identical thin gold laptop, and did not leave for a week except to eat barbecue (prepared by the Mexicans) and pee in touchless travertine bathrooms (maintained by Mexicans).
The Brads were hardly ever there, leaving Max to work alone in silence.
Max came up with new ways of getting users to give emotional data to Wren without knowing it. This without knowing it part was important. For as it grew, Wren had garnered a certain reputation. Words—ominous words—like Big Brother and surveillance capitalism began being thrown about.
Coming up with ways of getting data was not the hard part for Max. That was the easy part. The hard part was those ominous words.
Max struggled with this hard part. He felt this hard part was the hallmark of his generation. Example: a college friend, not a friend-friend but a Wren-friend, scored a plum gig doing public relations crisis management and brand rehabilitation for a pharmaceutical company caught price gouging, and was able to buy a gorgeous seaside condo as a result. Max saw her post about it on Wren.
It’s probably super easy, Max imagined, to let yourself forget abo
ut the poor patients priced out of health care while sitting in a gorgeous seaside condo.
All of Max’s friends from college had jobs like this. They had studied hard. Things were paying off. Max, it could be easily argued, had a job like this.
The hard part was a contradiction. Abandoning your morals at the office. Abandoning your morals at the mall, where you might moan about the lack of a local mom-and-pop economy while buying nothing but the cheapest stuff made overseas by stone-faced corporations. Or on your smartphone, where you might give up bits of your privacy to avoid paying two dollars for an application.
In our day-to-day, Max thought, when did we actually live by our morals?
Morals: Be kind, be fair, don’t steal, don’t deceive, don’t bully. Share with those in need. Stuff everyone learns as a child.
Besides work and shopping and time spent playing with smartphones, the only time Max could see where morals were given proper attention was at night, in bed, in those few luxurious minutes before succumbing to sleep.
Anyway. Max gave a like to that post about his friend’s condo.
Max dealt his like by tapping an icon. Everyone had infinite likes and gave and received them without a thought. Likes were a worthless form of currency.
And yet: a perfect transaction log of these likes were maintained by Wren.
Why?
Max went outside to lie on the great hexagonal green with his eyes closed, resting, not sleeping, thinking about morals and stuff, when he startled at an insect crawling the rim of his nostril. He opened his eyes and saw not a bug but Akiko, inserting a blade of grass into his nose. Max lay there and let her do it.
Max would lie there and let her do anything she wanted, if only he could.
“You haven’t been at your desk, duncie,” said Akiko.
“Been working up in the Helix with the Brads,” said Max. “No big deal.”
“Shut up.” Akiko smiled and punched his bony shoulder hard. She could punch him again and again if she wanted, as far as Max was concerned. She could punch him all day forever.
Akiko leveled her eyes—eyes that could decimate a cursed horde—and said: “You have to tell me what you’re working on.”
The world tilted. Max wanted to tell her everything. But this was an impossible kind of want. He wanted, had long wanted, to touch a small smooth crease above her left eye. A small scar. A childhood collision, an epic misadventure.
“No way. The Brads would eat my face,” said Max. “Cal Peers would find out who this Max person was and eat my face. Cal motherhugging Peers.”
Motherhugging was an old joke of theirs, from a poorly censored movie they had stumbled upon as kids. Drop the motherhugging gun or I’ll shoot.
“Dude,” said Akiko, awestruck.
“Right?” said Max.
“Well,” said Akiko, still awestruck. “I guess high five for you.”
They high-fived, and Max held her hand for just a moment too long before releasing it. He hoped she hadn’t noticed.
Akiko was an elite programmer at Wren. She worked on the first floor, a pillar of focus amid a sea of men all staring at her for the usual reasons. She was the only female elite programmer at the entire company. She and Max had worked there together for three years now, which was equivalent to ten in the real world.
Everyone wanted Akiko on their projects. So she worked on everything, and worked late nights. As did Max, because everyone wanted him on their projects, too. They worked well together. People often said they shared a brain.
But that was not the real reason why Max worked late nights.
Late at night, the office was clean and cool and—if he was lucky—empty but for him and her, huddling over the same screen glowing blue-green. Solving problem after problem, except for the one unsolvable one within Max.
Akiko Hosokawa was Max’s beautiful and keen and astute and excellent friend since high school, and the one who got him an interview with Wren in the first place. She had a forever-boyfriend, Shane Satow, who was also Max’s excellent friend since high school.
Max, on the other hand, had a modest string of girlfriends come and go through high school, into college, and beyond. He had even taken some of them on double dates with Shane and Akiko on occasion. With every drama, every breakup, Max had turned to Akiko for advice and sympathy. She was in a forever-relationship, after all. She knew the most about love, and how to keep it.
But secretly, Max never wanted Akiko’s advice. He would tell Akiko, in fine detail, how each of his relationships was not as robust as hers and Shane’s.
Why can’t I have what you guys have? he would say.
What he really meant was: Why can’t I have you?
Akiko, oblivious, would say something like, One day you’ll meet the One.
But I already did, Max would think.
* * *
* * *
Back in the Helix. Passing clouds cast socclusing shadows upon Max one after another until the whole sky was billowy and gray. Max was grateful for the cool.
He saved his work—a simple text file—into a secret folder shared by the Brads and Cal Peers.
The file contained ideas with titles like:
Who is your ideal sexual partner? Take the quiz. This is most definitely not safe for work.
Could you do better as president? Click here to play.
Max gave the file the self-deprecating name of “Maxs_shitty_decoy_ideas.txt.”
I guess high five for you, Akiko had said. But what exactly were they high-fiving for?
Time to take a break. Max pushed back and stood. Something caught his eye.
At the table next to his, Brad’s laptop was ajar. He must have shut it in a hurry and not noticed that it had closed down on a plush key-chain fob—a fat little brown bird, the proverbial Wren—and therefore remained awake.
Max looked about the room. Were there cameras? He pretended to enjoy the view.
No cameras.
People in tech were always prognosticating the next big thing. Self-driving utopias, printable body parts, etc. Most people were slow-witted follow-fashions. Most people were not paid to sit in the Helix and dream up the future. People like the Brads.
Max had his own ideas about where tech should head. Was he as canny as the Brads? If not, would a peek—just a peek—lend him insight?
Or an advantage?
One day, Max would have his own thin gold laptop. He was pretty confident of it. Until then—
Max lifted the laptop lid. The glow of it dawned upon his face.
The screen showed an open spreadsheet titled “accounts_confirmed.nums.”
In it were listed the buyers who would be paying millions for the data collected by the Soul Project, buyers like the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.
Spooks.
“This is fucked,” blurted Max to the room.
He stood. The clouds above deserted him and left him once again alone under the sun and blue sky and brown chaparral hills and nothing else.
He nudged around the trackpad, found his own laptop on the network, and gave himself a copy of the file. He left Brad’s computer as he found it. He closed the lid back down on the little brown bird.
Max turned back to his desk. He slapped his chunky black laptop shut, clamped it under his arm, and hurried down from the Helix to knock on the door of Justin Richards.
“Yo,” said cool-boss Justin Richards.
“Soul Project is fucked,” said Max.
0.4
Close the door,” said cool-boss Justin Richards, sensing a Talk.
“So,” said Max. “I think I found something I wasn’t supposed to see.”
“Uh-huh,” said Justin Richards.
“It’s just, Brad’
s laptop was open, and I just saw it.”
Which was sort of true.
“Hey,” said Justin Richards. “You leave your fly open, people are gonna grab your junk. Not your fault. That’s on Brad.”
“You would grab Brad’s junk?”
They chuckled. Max sat, grateful for cool-boss Justin Richards.
Max opened his laptop. “So, dude. Did you see this accounts_confirmed thing?”
“No,” said Justin Richards, all eyebrows and question marks.
Max pushed the laptop closer.
“Are we selling out to spooks?” said Max.
“Well,” said Justin Richards, scanning the spreadsheet. “To be fair, this is mentioned in the Terms and Conditions that everyone accepts during sign-up.”
“Which of course everyone has read from top to bottom,” said Max. “Shouldn’t users know we’re basically building a Big Brother database?”
Justin Richards blinked at the words Big and Brother.
“Well,” said Justin Richards. “To be fair, all our user data is anonymized.”
Cool-boss Justin Richards was becoming a little bit douche-boss Justin Richards, and it made Max nervous. He knew what was coming next. Wren does not keep any personal identifiers and blablabla.
“Wren does not keep any personal identifiers like names,” said Justin Richards. He clicked around on his laptop to show Max an example. “Just their unique mobile device key. So while we may know that this user, 18800002-3ffe-02dc-w90a-78c44c20016c, is a single non-dating non-car-owning first-generation Salvadoran American male aged 26, with a recommended pricing tier of Premier Full Retail, living near or around 1004 Gullsnest Avenue in Delgado Beach, phone number 323-555-0055, with affinities for computers and internet and entrepreneurship and Japanese manga—did not know that!—and the only child of two immigrant parents with blank port-of-entry dates, we won’t ever be able to point a finger at that and say, That is Maximilian Portillo right there.”