by Kevin Nguyen
Margo had often explained that a sloppy algorithm could easily fall into a pattern of reinforcing small mistakes. A system eating itself. Bad decisions at scale.
But when the stakes don’t feel real, no bad decision feels that consequential at the time. In fact, it might even feel fun, like a high school prank. This certainly did.
When we finally arrived at the office, I insisted we keep the lights off, even though Margo pointed out that we would look more suspicious if someone came in and discovered us literally under the cover of darkness. I nodded in agreement, then ripped a drunken burp. Margo started cackling and soon we were snickering so much we forgot to turn on the lights, even though we’d just agreed we should. I bumped into just about every chair and table during the short journey to Margo’s desk, each bit of fumbling progress punctuated by the sounds of trying to hold in our laughter.
Since I was a contract worker, I was supposed to be scarce after seven hours of work. I’d never seen the office at night. In the dark, the dimensions seemed different—deeper, even. During the workday it was polluted with fluorescent light and the clamor of people talking over one another. Now it was silent, save for the hypnotic drone of high-powered desktop computers that hummed even while they slept. I should have been nervous, but no one was around, and I felt bolder than I ever had before in this place. It would be so easy.
Margo guided us to her desk. Her personal effects were gone, but thankfully no one had removed her computer yet. She booted it up.
It only took her a few minutes to write a script that would duplicate the company’s entire user database, but much longer for it to finish copying to a flash drive. And so we waited, staring at the monitor. Margo kept checking her phone and I kept my eye on the entrance.
“So this is what you do all day, huh?” I said, gesturing to her phone, where she had Facebook open.
“Coding is a lot of waiting around,” she said. “And long stretches of contemplation.”
“Is that true?”
“No, it’s just a lot of busywork. This is why I am better suited to a life of crime.”
“I’m starting to see why you got fired.”
Minutes stretched into tens of minutes, then nearly an hour. Suddenly it had been nearly two hours, and we were starting to get a little sick of each other.
“Never have I ever…downloaded the email database from the place where I work,” I said.
“That’s not how this game works.”
“Fine. Never have I ever…stolen anything.”
“I told you, it’s not stealing.”
“I didn’t say this was. I’m just saying I’ve never stolen anything.”
Margo lowered a finger, signaling as part of the game of Never Have I Ever that she had stolen something before.
“What did you steal?”
“In college, the virginity of at least two white boys.”
Margo laughed. I don’t know if I understood the joke, but I laughed alongside her, realizing that my voice was starting to sound more anxious. My confidence was beginning to fade as my drunk did. I’d thought the process would be faster, that we would be in and out in a matter of minutes. Margo was strangely cool about the whole endeavor. She told me to calm down and went back to reading something on her phone.
“Apparently ‘grand larceny’ is stealing anything worth over a thousand dollars,” she said.
“How much do you think this user data is worth?” I asked.
Margo laughed and made an exaggerated shrug. This did not make me feel better.
“Do you even know who you are going to sell this to?”
“Sell it? We’re not gonna sell it.”
“Then what are we going to do with this information?”
“It’s, like, insurance. Against Nimbus. So they can’t fuck with me.”
I began to panic. “Margo, by doing this you’re begging them to fuck with you.”
“I’d like to think I’m daring them.”
“You haven’t thought through any of this—”
“Just trust me,” Margo said. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it tightly. Her fingers were soft, cold, but slowly warmed as they became entangled in mine. Margo and I were as close as friends could be, but never would we have held hands like this. The feeling was comforting and intimate and I didn’t understand what it meant—if anything—and we just remained silent, not verbally acknowledging that we were touching. All I knew was that I didn’t want to let go.
There was no way to know then that, in a matter of months, Margo would be dead—struck by a car, meaninglessly—and I would carry both the weight of her loss and of what we had taken. And later, I’d fully realize it didn’t matter that the act itself felt trivial: it was stealing, plain and simple.
In the year to come, I’d be lost without Margo. And when I had no idea what to do with myself, I’d think about the night we made off with Nimbus’s data: the two of us sitting in silence, hand in hand, our eyes locked on the loading bar, waiting for something we couldn’t fully reckon with, watching it crawl slowly to the finish.
THE_LAST_ONES.WAV
The world ends and there are only two survivors: a man and a woman. They escape on a spaceship that exits the Earth’s atmosphere just moments before the planet explodes. As the rocket hurtles through space, the man looks back and sees his home crumbling. Fire consumes the globe until there’s nothing left to devour, and the planet disintegrates into an infinite number of little pieces, shooting out in all directions toward the unknown reaches of the universe. The man weeps for the billions lost. The woman is looking forward, her eyes taking in the vastness of space.
At faster-than-light speed, the ship hurtles through the galaxy. Days go by, even though the concept of a day is long gone. The woman prays that they land on a habitable planet. The man continues to cry.
Finally, the craft gets caught in a new planet’s orbit. It slings them around in a violent loop. The ship’s navigation is fucked by the new trajectory, and the vessel plummets toward the planet. As the ship spins out of control, the passengers are sure that this is their end. But miraculously, they hit water. The engines are destroyed by the impact, but the man and woman are safe.
The ship has landed in a ceaseless ocean. There is no land in sight. With no propulsion system left, they float aimlessly, guided only by the mercy of this strange sea.
A second miracle: after six days, the ship eventually beaches safely. The man insists on getting out first. He looks around. The island is tropical. Beyond the beach is a deep, intimidating jungle.
The man takes charge. First, they need to secure food and shelter if they’re going to build their life together. Second, they—
Life together? This is news to the woman.
It is their duty, he says, to have a family, to continue the existence of the human race. They have a responsibility. Father and mother to a new generation.
The woman laughs. Duty? Responsibility? This is what people believed on the old planet. This, here, is a new planet. This is an opportunity, not a do-over.
The man doesn’t understand. And the woman leaves the man behind. She sets off toward the jungle to live her own damn life.
II
M4v15B34c0n
Q: What will happen to my account if I pass away?
A: You can tell us in advance whether you’d like to have your account memorialized or permanently deleted from Facebook.
Memorialized or deleted. The only two states for a dead person’s Facebook account. A single click to decide whether someone would be remembered or forgotten.
“Memorialization” was a bizarre concept. Aside from updating the user’s profile picture, no other changes could be made to the deceased’s Facebook account. Old posts and photos could not be edited or scrubbed. Private messages were locked and remained inaccessible. A memorialized Facebook
account was preserved in stasis, frozen in time like a caveman in ice. Deletion was, on the other hand, a complete erasure.
So I asked myself: Would Margo rather be memorialized or deleted?
I couldn’t decide, and I was stumbling around the support section of the Facebook site. Which didn’t help because it was bullshit. I’d written plenty of similar Frequently Asked Questions copy for Nimbus, and had begun doing the same in the six months I’d been at Phantom. But an FAQ just looks like a website having a conversation with itself.
Q: What is a legacy contact?
A: A legacy contact is someone you choose to look after your account if it’s memorialized.
I imagined the hundreds of hours of meetings that the copywriters at Facebook must’ve spent coming up with the term “legacy contact.” I had to admire the cleverness of the title, even if it did seem manipulative. They might provide the option for account deletion, but it was never in Facebook’s interest to delete anything. The company wanted to be a part of your life, even after you had left it. A dead person’s account helped expand the empire.
Q: What can a legacy contact do?
A: Once your account is memorialized, your legacy contact will have the option to do things like respond to new friend requests (ex: old friends or family members who weren’t yet on Facebook).
In the cemetery of the internet, the legacy contact was the groundskeeper.
Q: How do I request the removal of a deceased family member’s account?
A: We’re very sorry for your loss.
A strange touch of humanity on a largely functional page of technical documentation. It was the only answer that didn’t immediately address the question. But I wondered: Who is the “we” in this case? The collective global corporate entity, Facebook?
The answer continued:
To help us remove your loved one’s account from Facebook, we’ll need you to provide documentation to confirm you’re an immediate family member or executor of the account holder.
The only way a non–family member could be a legacy contact was to have been assigned before the person had died. Margo had not assigned a legacy contact before she died because, at age twenty-five, few people do.
The fastest way for us to process your request is for you to provide a scan or photo of your loved one’s death certificate.
I didn’t have Margo’s death certificate, so I’d have to find another way.
* * *
—
I ONLY HAD ONE white shirt—my only dress shirt. I’d bought it, along with a blazer, shortly after I moved to New York. It wasn’t expensive but it was certainly out of my budget. It was my interview outfit; I thought I’d have more job interviews than I did. The only time I had worn it was when I went into the Nimbus office for the first time. I was told I was overdressed, but they liked the effort I was putting in. For a customer service job, you could never try too hard.
I realized the night before Margo’s funeral that the light-brown sweat stains around the armpits and the collar hadn’t come out in the wash. I brought the shirt to the laundry, sat in front of it for two hours and $1.75 worth of quarters while it washed and dried, but the stain persisted. Frustrated, I searched the internet with the phrase “how to remove collar stain” and stayed up late, mixing a careful concoction of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dish soap. I scrubbed at the stains with a toothbrush. First the armpits, then the collar. If I brushed vigorously enough, I could make the shirt look new.
The funeral was at a cemetery in Crown Heights I’d never noticed before, the ceremony an hour in direct sunlight. I could feel myself sweating through my shirt all over again. New York usually smelled like lukewarm garbage, but the cemetery was fresh. It was quiet, too. A haven of manicured greenspace sectioned off for the dead.
The service was sad and short. The casket remained closed.
I had expected to see Margo’s mother cry. But that never happened. Somehow, she looked strong and stable. I admired it. If she could keep it together, I could handle myself too. When the service was over, I found my way to her. I’d been sitting in the back, in an attempt to remain inconspicuous. I navigated between a sea of black dresses and suits and an array of white folding chairs to get to the front, where Margo’s mother was tending to an orderly swarm of people offering their condolences. I got in line, waited my turn. When my moment came, she identified me before I could introduce myself.
“You must be Lucas.” She told me to call her Louise.
“I stick out a bit here, don’t I?” I said. The funeral was mostly family, from what I gathered, and that made me one of the few people who wasn’t black. A couple of coworkers showed up, though our interactions were limited to acknowledging each other with a nod. My boss, Brandon, was there, though it felt like he was trying to go unnoticed. At one point I looked over at him, and he pretended that we’d never made eye contact.
I asked Louise who were relatives and who were friends. She confirmed it was mostly family, plus a few neighborhood kids.
“Margo never needed many friends,” Louise said. “She preferred talking to computers than to people.”
“Maybe she was talking to other people on the computer,” I said.
Louise didn’t respond to that. Instead, she linked arms with me and we slowly strolled across the wet grass, mostly in silence.
“Come by the house sometime,” she said. “I have a favor to ask you.”
I was reluctant, but you don’t turn down an invitation from someone who just lost their daughter. I told her I’d be more than happy to.
It felt strange to take the subway home. Couldn’t I, just for once, be entitled to a quiet, clean space, alone? On the platform, in the distance, I could hear the horrible screech of grinding metal. A century of black grime had crusted over the subway tracks. I watched a rat of mutant proportions casually wander the space between the rails like he owned the damn place. In a way, I guess he did.
I saw other people from the funeral, family members or people from a life Margo had never shared with me. Occasionally I would make eye contact with someone to share a moment of recognition—of sorrow, of grief, but mostly of having just come from the same place.
* * *
—
A WEEK LATER, AS promised, I arrived at Margo’s house. She’d lived in the same three-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights her entire life, but not once invited me over. It always struck me as odd that we’d eat and drink in her neighborhood and she never showed me her home, even when I’d asked. Margo would explain it away with “the house is messy” or “my mom is crazy.”
Neither turned out to be true. Her home was inside a gorgeous brownstone, the sort of building that becomes more beautiful the more lived-in it feels. Louise kept a tidy home, but everything looked as if it had been there for centuries, unmoved, permanent in its placement. Dust covered the glass of the cabinet containing fancy china, which clearly hadn’t been used in years. The leather couch, situated in front of an ancient TV set, had deep, deep creases—imprints from decades of asses.
Louise was warm and, this time, very talkative. The conversation was a bit one-sided, but I didn’t mind. She had stories of living in Haiti, growing up under dictators, eventually fleeing and seeking political asylum. Louise talked until my tea went cold, at which point she asked if I wanted more. So I finally asked the obvious question.
“Why did you want me to come over?”
Louise set a kettle on the stove, then guided me to Margo’s room.
Walking down the dim hallway, I remembered a guest couple that had stayed at my parents’ bed-and-breakfast a few years back who had also lost a child, their son, at a young age. They got very drunk at dinner, and the only way I could keep them speaking at a volume that wouldn’t disturb the other guests was to talk to them. The couple said they traveled frequently now, just to get away. It was hard to be at ho
me. They had left their son’s room untouched for years, but they would occasionally step into it to remind themselves of him.
Margo’s mom would have no such thing.
“I dearly miss my daughter, but I don’t want a tomb in my home,” she said as we approached the open door.
Margo’s room looked like the bedroom of a teenager. Maybe this was why I’d never been invited over. We only ever met at work and at bars—neutral spaces, never private ones. She’d been keeping me away from something. But what?
She slept on a twin bed and the walls were plastered with band posters—remnants from high school. There was very little space to navigate because the floor was covered with piles of old science fiction novels. The stacks were imposing, especially stuffed in a room as small as this one. Margo would buy these paperbacks by the dozen at secondhand bookstores, less interested in what the text contained than in the aesthetics of the cover—always a painted starship rocketing past a Technicolor palette of planets and moons and stars. “Science fiction makes me nostalgic for the future,” Margo used to say, cryptically, but here the evidence was everywhere. Her futures were informed by the past.
Louise said I could take any books I wanted. But it felt wrong to take anything. It felt wrong to even touch anything. I had the horrifying realization that Margo would never sleep in that bed again, sit at the desk, never rearrange these stacks of books. Her mother was right: it was a tomb.