New Waves

by Kevin Nguyen

  New Waves is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Kevin Nguyen

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  ONE WORLD and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Nguyen, Kevin, author.

  Title: New waves / Kevin Nguyen.

  Description: First edition. | New York: One World, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019034574 (print) | LCCN 2019034575 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984855237 (hardcover; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781984855244 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3614.G888 N49 2020 (print) | LCC PS3614.G888

  (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019034574

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019034575

  Ebook ISBN 9781984855244

  oneworldlit.com

  randomhousebooks.com

  Cover design: Zak Tebbal

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter I: New York 2009

  Chapter II: M4v15B34c0n

  Chapter III: Personal Effects

  Chapter IV: Inventory

  Chapter V: Mavis Beacon

  Chapter VI: Human Resources

  Chapter VII: Six Weeks at the Crystal Palm

  Chapter VIII: Tokyo 2011

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  “It is dangerous to go alone.

  Take this!”

  —THE LEGEND OF ZELDA

  I

  New York 2009

  I NEVER CONSIDERED IT stealing. If it was stealing, it would feel like stealing—illicit, dangerous, maybe even a little bit thrilling. Instead, it felt like exactly what it was: sitting in a dark room, watching a loading bar creep across a computer screen.

  Thieves were supposed to have the grace of a pickpocket, or the patience to plan a real heist. We’d just gotten a little drunk at McManus’s, the bar around the corner, and decided that this would be the best way to get back at our employer. Well, Margo had decided. And technically, she didn’t work at Nimbus anymore.

  She had texted me from the bar earlier in the afternoon to tell me she’d quit. Margo had needed someone to drink with, and I always obliged. I snuck out of the office when no one was looking, though really, no one was ever looking for me. When I arrived at the bar, she was already three beers deep—the bottles lined up neatly in front of her, their labels meticulously peeled off, not a trace of paper or glue. She didn’t say anything, just signaled to the bartender for two more.

  I sat down next to Margo and her whole body clenched. I’d known her for a while and she was often angry, but it was the good kind: usually a vivid, infectious sort of fury—smart, spirited, just the right amount of snarky—aimed at institutions, structures, oppressors. She was unintimidated by people in power. In fact, she was energized by them, since they were targets worthy of her wrath. That is, unless she’d had too much to drink, in which case her marks were more haphazard. Two more beers and she admitted that she hadn’t exactly quit.

  “Are you kidding me?” I said. “You’re the only remotely competent engineer at the company!”

  “According to HR, I wasn’t a good ‘culture fit.’ I wasn’t ‘getting along with the rest of the team.’ ” Margo began picking at the label on her fresh beer. “But that’s bullshit. I know what that means.”

  Even from my desk on the other side of the office, I could hear Margo arguing with her colleagues. She didn’t believe in collaboration if it meant compromising the best idea. She was a brilliant programmer, and still no one wanted to listen to her.

  Margo went on: “uncooperative,” “opinionated,” “not a team player.” It was laughable how their reasons were couched in the tired clichés of a high school football coach. To her, and I guess to me, it underscored the kind of laziness that had been bred by capitalism—an attitude that claimed to respect competition above all, but was completely conflict averse.

  “Did they at least offer you severance?”

  “I quit before they could fire me,” she said. “I told them, politely, to fuck off.”

  I was curious how polite Margo was capable of being in such a situation.

  “I don’t want their fucking money anyway. I’ve got plenty to live on. I’m a talented engineer and I can work wherever I want. Maybe I’ll just take a year off, get away from all this.”

  She often talked about money this brazenly. It bothered me, since she knew I always had less than her. But at least Margo usually paid for drinks. I would motion toward my wallet as a courtesy and she would shrug it off, usually saying something like “I got this” or “Don’t you fucking dare.” Once, just once, when she was really toasted, she joked that I would be allowed to pay for beers the day she didn’t make twice as much as me. (It was closer to five times, but I didn’t correct her.)

  Today, she wasn’t paying. Today, she only wanted retribution. Margo had been stewing on ways to get back at Nimbus during her first three drinks. She already had a plan.

  “What is any company’s most valuable asset?” she asked.

  “Its…money?”

  “No, Lucas, what’s more valuable than money?”

  This sounded like a trick question.

  “Code?”

  “No, its information,” Margo said. “And that’s what we’re going to take.”

  “Isn’t that stealing?”

  Margo pointed her beer at me. “What about copying it?”

  This was her proposal: Nimbus was a messaging service with millions of users. We would take their user database. Margo could easily access, duplicate, and download it. The whole thing would only take a few minutes. We would just take emails. No passwords, no personal information.

  “Why would anyone want a list of email addresses?”

  “Millions of email addresses,” Margo clarified. “Any company would kill for a list of people using a competitor’s product.”

  “Why?”

  “For marketing, or whatever.” Margo gestured at nothing in particular, like she’d just performed the world’s saddest magic trick. She casually mentioned that she knew someone who worked at Phantom, Nimbus’s biggest competitor. It was their CEO. Maybe they’d be interested in it.

  “It’s a bad idea,” I said. “It’s immoral. It’s wrong.”

  “In what way is this immoral or wrong?”

  “Because we’re taking something that doesn’t belong to us.”

  “Lucas, listen to me.” Margo looked me straight in the eye. “Nothing belongs to us.”

  It was the way she said “us.” Did she mean as employees of Nimbus? As suckers in a world that advantaged the wealthy? As two people who weren’t white in America? Just me and her?

  It didn’t matter. The truth was that Margo had already decided, and I was three beers behind and playing catchup. But I had logistical questions, ones that she had anticipated and spent those three beers considering.

  The
re would be some very light encryption on the user data, but every engineer had access to it. This was a common problem at startups. When you start with a small team of engineers, none of them are dedicated to security. The goal is to build something as quickly as possible, so nobody gets hired to protect user privacy. Even as a startup grows large and stable enough to support a security team, it’s already been deprioritized from the start.

  I was still skeptical. “And there’s no way for them to trace it back to us?”

  “There might be a log of it. But if they pursue us, they would be admitting that there was a breach.”

  Margo had a mind for systems. And to her, every system was vulnerable if you understood the incentives of the people who built it. She could disassemble and reassemble anything, including the hubris of men. A security breach would be a publicity nightmare for Nimbus, and for the people who ran the company. Margo knew she could exploit their greatest fear: embarrassment.

  It was strange that a company’s reputation for security was more important than its actual security. But having worked at Nimbus for the past year—my first job in any kind of real workplace, much less a tech company—it didn’t surprise me. No person should ever trust that their personal information is going to be protected by a company. The place was managed by a mixture of twentysomethings with little work experience and a handful of computer-illiterate adults brought in to babysit them.

  The office space was generic, but it had been dolled up with brightly colored furniture and some tacky movie posters, all for the sake of reinforcing the “fun” work environment. The kitchen had free snacks and a beer tap. Action figures and Nerf guns were scattered across people’s desks. There was a conference room dedicated to video games. Apparently investors loved these things. They’d tour the office every few months and take stock of the ways Nimbus physically embodied the tired notion that everyone could work hard and play hard, even if that meant the office looked like an eight-year-old’s playroom.

  All of the tasteless interior decorating choices were, at least, harmless and easy to ignore. But the office centered on the foosball table. People would play in the middle of the workday, and the sounds carried throughout the floor—four sweaty men grunting and hollering. Margo joked that, from a distance, foosball looked like four men jerking off into a box. No one ever asked Margo and me to play foosball. Not that we would’ve said yes.

  “We’ll find new jobs somewhere better,” Margo said. “Somewhere less fucked.”

  “What tech company is less fucked?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I just…move to Tokyo. Start over on the other side of the world.”

  “Why Tokyo? You don’t even like leaving New York City…”

  “Lucas, the point is that we should do something different,” she said, “that we can do something different.”

  I didn’t actively hate our workplace the way Margo did. It was a job, after all. But in a place where I had no love for my coworkers and no love for the office, Margo’s vigor was contagious.

  “Nobody at Nimbus cares about you,” she said. “Except me.”

  Because I didn’t know a lick about code, in this world I was worth nothing to places like Nimbus. I had moved to New York after barely finishing community college. I’d struggled for months to find a full-time job, and technically I never even found one. My position was in customer service. I was paid minimum wage to answer an unending onslaught of support emails, limited to thirty-five hours a week so the company wouldn’t have to offer me any benefits. I could barely afford rent.

  And then, to my surprise, Margo said, “I’ll only do this if you do this with me.”

  I thought she’d already made up her mind. But she needed me. I felt a swell of deep satisfaction rising from my gut as I imagined walking out of Nimbus for the last time. I’d thought that getting away from my old life and moving to New York would mean something, feel like anything. But the free snacks, the foosball table, the promise of working toward a greater good—these were all decorative things to disguise the fact that I could’ve been back at home, being paid the same, if not more. The office happy hours and the posture that this wasn’t a workplace, but a family—just ways the company could trick me into thinking I was valuable, instead of actually treating me like a person with any worth. I’d known these things to be true, but when Margo laid it out like this, she was undeniably convincing.

  “Okay, let’s do it,” I said. “Fuck Nimbus.”

  “Fuck every single person that’s disrespected us. Like, fuck every man that did not take my opinion seriously because I’m a woman. And especially fuck every white dude who has tried to talk to me about hip-hop.”

  “Fuck everyone that assumed I was an engineer because I’m Asian. But really, fuck all the Asian engineers who treated me like I was worth less than garbage because I’m not an engineer, like that’s all we’re supposed to be.”

  Margo had more. “Fuck every person who came to me to ask if something was racist, as if my job was to be the racism barometer.”

  (“Plus, I’m sure it usually was racist.”)

  (“Oh, I mean, of course.”)

  “Fuck every person that told me I was being ‘aggressive’ and ‘hostile’ just because I was a black person expressing an opinion.”

  “Fuck every time I was ignored in a meeting, and then later told that I should ‘speak up’ and ‘be more assertive.’ Fuck their condescending tone every time they talk to me. Fuck their even more condescending, passive-aggressive emails.”

  “Oh, and fuck that racist-as-hell office manager who is always asking me to organize diversity events, like I don’t already have shit to do.”

  (“Isn’t she, like, Puerto Rican?”)

  (“Dominican, I think. But she still sucks.”)

  I laughed. “But truly, fuck every single person that works there.”

  Margo clinked her beer bottle against mine and it was a done deal. We would have to go back to the office late at night when we were sure no one else would be there. So we sat at the bar killing time for another six hours, adding to the collection of unlabeled bottles in front of us, shouting out more people that could go fuck themselves.

  By most accounts, Margo was accomplished. She’d been raised by a single mother in a poor but stable household. She’d never gotten in any sort of trouble, had done well in school, and went to college on an almost-full scholarship. After graduation, she landed a good job with a great salary as a server engineer. Everything she was supposed to do, she did, and then some. But it didn’t matter how successful she was, even though she had carved out a space for herself in a field with virtually zero people that looked like her. Existentially, she would always feel like an outsider.

  “How do you solve for that?” she asked later that night, the alcohol slowing her words.

  I’d heard this rant many times before, especially when Margo was a certain kind of drunk—a dark and ponderous sort that led to slurry soliloquies.

  “You know, Lucas, being black in America means constantly being aware of who you are,” she said, as if she’d never told me this before. She went on: “People remind you all the time that you’re black. And if they don’t, you’d best remind yourself.”

  Her mind couldn’t escape this conversation when she was drunk, and neither could I.

  “Being black means you are merely a body—a fragile body,” she said. “To be black is the most terrestrial form of being, the lowest level of Earthling in the eyes of other people.”

  It was almost funny how many times I’d heard her repeat this exact phrase, talking about the black experience as if she were an alien. Margo always did love her science fiction.

  I knew the best thing to do was to let her keep going. But tonight, perhaps also under the influence, I pushed back.

  “At least you’re American,” I said. Maybe it was a weak attempt to get
her to change direction. Maybe I just wanted her to see me as equal. “You see black people on TV, in music, in politics, in some form every day. Asians are foreign, alien, otherworldly. We might as well be invisible.”

  Her reaction to this surprised me. She could talk circles around me—she knew this. But Margo listened—and, in fact, envied.

  “Imagine that: the ability to disappear,” she said. “I’d give anything for a day where I don’t have to be reminded of who I am.” Margo grabbed my shoulders, shook me a little. “If there was a machine that could do it, I’d change places with you right now, Lucas.”

  As we paid the tab and got ready to leave, I knew what was coming next.

  “I would be an Asian man and I would move through the world unnoticed and nobody would bother me.”

  True friendship was drunken body-swapping.

  * * *

  —

  PEOPLE TALK ABOUT ALGORITHMS like they’re magic. It’s easy to see why. They govern how the internet is shown to us, conjured from spells. Their methods are opaque, and yet we put our trust in them. Algorithms to answer search queries; algorithms to tell us what to buy; algorithms to show us what news matters. Even when the behavior of a service can’t be explained—an errant search result, a miscalculated recommendation—we blame the algorithm. We like to point the finger at computers because they are incapable of feeling shame.

  But an algorithm is not that complicated. It’s just a set of rules, a series of yes-or-no questions that a computer asks—really simple logic that could be represented by a very long flow chart. What’s impressive about an algorithm isn’t its intelligence, but its speed. A search query will go through thousands—hell, maybe tens of thousands—of questions in a matter of seconds. Because what do we value more: a thing done quickly, or a thing done well?

  At the end of the day, though, we never ask about the person who wrote the algorithm. We never ask who they are, or what perspective they bring to it, because we want to believe technology is neutral. No biases or fallibility should be allowed to infiltrate it, even if the authors themselves are biased and fallible (and they always are). An algorithm is just a set of rules that works in a system. A system that works quickly and without prejudice. Thousands of processes in a matter of seconds because it has to work fast. No room for bias there. Not enough time for it.