New Waves

by Kevin Nguyen

  “How come you never wanted Margo to move out?” I asked.

  “Is that what she told you? That I kept her at home?” Louise looked incredulous. “Margo got a full ride to college on the West Coast, but she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving home.”

  “So she never talked about, like, moving to Japan?”

  “Sometimes I wondered if she was even my own daughter. I left Haiti in the ’80s and never even thought about returning home. My son, who was born here before Margo, couldn’t wait to get out of this house. He lives in Oakland now. But Margo—she wouldn’t leave even after I insisted she find her own place.” Louise laughed. It was nice to hear her laugh. “Japan? Forget it. She’d never leave the neighborhood if she didn’t have to. She’s like her father. He chose to stay in Haiti rather than leave with his family.”

  We walked back to the kitchen. She poured more hot tea into my mug, which I had almost forgotten I had been holding.

  “Where is your family from, Lucas?”

  “My dad’s from Vietnam. Mom is Chinese, but her family has been here for a bit.”

  “And your father left after the war?”

  “Right at the end of it. I think that makes me second generation, though I’m not sure how the definition applies to someone like me.”

  “Don’t worry,” Louise said. “It’s all just a lot of…terminology. It means something, but it doesn’t mean much.”

  Then came the reason she’d invited me over: “So I have to ask you a favor. Can you turn off Margo’s Facebook? I check Facebook on my phone all the time but I have no idea how to make her profile…”

  She set the kettle back on the stove.

  “It would be better if my dead daughter’s Facebook was not always showing up when I’m harvesting my crops and trying to not think about her.”

  I’d never seen the game before myself, but Margo had always complained that her mother was completely addicted to a popular farming game. Hours a day lost to it. When she was annoyed with her mother, Margo used to say, “You know who used to work the fields, right?”

  The aroma of the tea was comforting. I took a sip. It was too hot.

  “I don’t know how I would do that,” I said. “Could I take Margo’s laptop?”

  “What? Why?”

  “Maybe her password is saved there.”

  This was true. But there were other things I was curious about, things I wouldn’t be able to explain to Louise.

  She thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know, Lucas, that feels a little bit…personal.” She went on: “You’re an engineer, right? I am sure you can figure it out.”

  It just seemed easier to agree than to explain that no, I was not an engineer, and no, there would be no way for me to break into the world’s largest social network. Louise kissed me on the forehead and thanked me.

  “Oh, I think I left something in Margo’s room,” I said. “My phone.” Which was a lie.

  Louise gestured toward the hallway, indicating it was fine. I quickly made my way to Margo’s room. Her laptop was resting on her desk. I grabbed it, tucked it uncomfortably under my jacket, and headed out the door. Louise had no clue what I’d taken.

  On the train back to Queens, I thought about what I’d done and immediately regretted it. I had lingering questions about Margo, and maybe the laptop would have the answers. But it would be too weird to use the computer of your dead best friend. Looking at the same screen. Typing on the same keys. I imagined how guilty I would feel watching porn on the same laptop where she, well, also probably watched porn. At home, I struggled to decide on a place to put it and ended up leaving it tilting precariously on top of a pile of mail on my desk, hoping it would disappear by morning.

  Thinking about Margo, I couldn’t sleep. I still didn’t understand why she had died. I’d been told she was hit by a car, late at night, after wandering out of a bar. A random, senseless death. That couldn’t be it. I’d been drunk with Margo hundreds of times before. She wouldn’t just stumble into the street. She wouldn’t have died in such a meaningless way. She wouldn’t.

  There had to be more. I had no proof, but I suspected there must be a connection to Nimbus. She’d spited the company, and maybe they’d gotten back at her. It had been months since we stole their user data. After we’d taken it, we both promised to delete the file, to never speak of it again. But I had a suspicion that Margo had not. The only way to find out was to see if it was on her computer. There must be answers there.

  I was still awake when my roommate strolled in drunk at 2 a.m. and turned on his music, indicating he was coming down from a club drug (who knew which one). As the bass drops reverberated through the wall that divided us, my eyes kept catching sight of Margo’s laptop across the room.

  At 3 a.m., as the music still blared on, I stumbled to my desk and opened the laptop. I was anxious, unusually sweaty. I was afraid of what I needed to do, but also desperate to find an answer, something that might help explain why Margo was no longer here. I turned on the computer and waited as the loading screen bathed the room in startling, bright blue light. I had been drowsy, but now I was wide awake.

  When the laptop was done booting up, I hit a log-in screen. It asked for a password, of course.

  I had no idea what Margo’s password was. Sleep-deprived and lacking imagination, I tried her first name. Then her last. Then them together, as if anyone—let alone Margo—would be stupid enough to use their own name as a password.

  In a moment of insane wishful thinking, I typed in my own name, as if I would be the key to unlocking every mystery of her life. Also no good.

  Margo and I met at Nimbus. But it wasn’t until a few months in that we discovered we had previously been in touch for years. In the early 2000s, we’d both been members of an exclusive online community dedicated to the distribution of pirated materials. Sure, that doesn’t sound particularly cool, but at the time, PORK meant everything to me. You had to be invited, and even then, there was a weeklong screening process to ensure you weren’t a narc.

  If you got in, you discovered that PORK was nothing more than a message board. But it had a stringent set of community rules, active moderators who policed behavior, and a sense of elitism and purpose. As a teenager, I felt more welcome there than I ever had anywhere in my real life. There, you were identified solely by an unconventional username and usually an even more obtuse avatar. Your worth in the PORK community was determined by what you said and how you acted, not how you appeared to your peers. Online, I was not the chubby, acne-covered Chinese Vietnamese kid who moved through the halls unnoticed, invisible. On PORK, I had a voice.

  I’d been allowed in because I was able to rip a few albums from my father’s CD collection—most of them were compilations of Vietnamese ballads, a prospect so unexpected that the administrators were immediately interested. The music wasn’t good, but it had a higher currency: obscurity.

  You quickly learned the ropes or you were toast. It turns out all communities—whether in real life or on the internet—function mostly the same. There were rules and hierarchies. I joined as lucas_pollution, a name I thought was cool because I was fourteen. My avatar was a picture of a Japanese actor from a ’60s gangster movie, chosen so I would appear culturally invested in something virtually unknown. Margo went by the name afronaut3000. At the time, that was all I knew about her. Her avatar was a photograph of some Brazilian author who was also a model. The photo was intriguing, but I knew it didn’t tell me shit about who afronaut3000 was in real life.

  What I did know: afronaut3000 was an intimidating and revered figure in the PORK community. Her area of expertise was called “city pop,” an era of Japanese music from the late ’70s and early ’80s.

  I’ll never forget the way she described it:

  City pop is a mutant genre—funk, disco, soft jazz—driven by cultural assimilation of Western music. It w
as fueled by Japan’s economic euphoria in the ’80s, a celebration of capitalism. Everything about this era of art has detestable roots.

  And yet, I can’t stop listening to it. Its rhythms and tones evoke night-time cityscapes. Singers—mostly soft and soulful women—conjure the ecstasy of youth. Warm new-wave synths signal the promise of technology, basked in Technicolor. City pop embraces an optimism toward the future.

  Simply put, the music is undeniable.

  —AFRONAUT3000

  One day, years later, at Nimbus, Margo accidentally sent me an email from her personal email instead of her work address. The FROM line read “afronaut3000@gmail.com,” and when I immediately recognized the name, I quietly freaked out at my desk. For months, I’d been sitting mere feet away from afronaut3000. By this point, we were both nearly a decade removed from the heyday of PORK. Maybe she wouldn’t remember me. But I definitely remembered her.

  Margo was a server engineer, and her team rarely interacted with the customer service people. (Well, no one did, really.) But I saw her later that day in the kitchen. She was reading one of her sci-fi paperbacks and crunching on a bag of plantain chips. I had a whole plan to be cool and subtle, but instead I just blurted out, “I know you!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry, this is weird. But I’ve known you for years.”

  Margo put down her book and swallowed.

  “From PORK.” I was anxious, excited. “I know you from PORK. You’re afronaut3000.”

  Margo’s face softened and she looked surprised, maybe even a little delighted.

  “I have not thought about that in years. That is a real throwback. How did you know I was on PORK?”

  I didn’t really answer her question. “You were afronaut3000, right? You probably don’t remember me, but I was on PORK around the same time.”

  “What was your name?”

  “lucas_pollution,” I replied sheepishly, realizing this might be the first time I’d ever said my PORK handle out loud.

  “Oh my god. Of course I remember you. You helped me find so many city pop records. And you were always requesting Brazilian music.” After a moment more of consideration, she said, “And uploading all those Chinese ballads.”

  “They were Vietnamese, but yeah.”

  “Those were good.”

  “No…they weren’t.”

  Margo began to laugh. “No, they were really bad.”

  It was strange, to remember each other without ever having met. I had spent so many years of my life reading things Margo had written, messaging her, admiring her as one of PORK’s heroes. We’d worked on projects together—she’d sent me to various libraries to find obscure recordings to rip and upload to PORK, since I’d lived nearish to a couple large universities in eastern Oregon with Japanese music in their archives. Margo had, in turn, dedicated a lot of time helping me track down rare bossa nova records, even though she wasn’t a fan of it herself, the music too nostalgic for her taste.

  In those days we mostly talked about music, but sometimes we’d talk about movies. Margo watched science fiction almost exclusively—and a specific, old, retrofuturistic kind. It was all consistent with her obsession with art that looked forward. I had a clear idea of who Margo was before I’d even met her, cobbled together from hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of interactions. And until that moment, I’d never known afronaut3000’s face, let alone her real name.

  At first, the perspective of afronaut3000 seemed incongruous with the Margo I knew in the office. On PORK, she’d embraced all art with optimism, with openness. At Nimbus, she was a cynic, the office skeptic who challenged every new idea. But over time, the two identities reconciled themselves to me. Sure, a lot of people used anonymity on the internet to be assholes. For Margo, it was the opposite: the opportunity not to be burdened by the real-life things that weighed her down.

  We talked in the break room for the rest of the afternoon, not bothering to go back to our desks. She probably wouldn’t get in trouble, since she had flexibility and status in the office. But I would most certainly get scolded for not answering enough customer service requests that day. I didn’t care. Since I had moved to New York, this was the closest thing I’d had to finding a real friend, let alone rediscovering one.

  * * *

  —

  THE MORNING AFTER WE copied the Nimbus database, I woke up with a hangover, but was still desperate to see exactly what we had taken. Margo had made two copies of the Nimbus database: one for each of us. She’d named the file the-take.csv, and I was surprised to find that it was essentially one large spreadsheet. I suppose that’s all databases are: cells of information, organized into rows and columns. So much of the world’s information—from bank accounts to Social Security numbers, all the ways we define people’s lives—is collected in two-dimensional grids that can be opened by the free spreadsheet software that comes with your college computer.

  The file was bigger than I expected. It took a minute to load and, as it did, the columns appearing one by one, I realized we had made a horrible mistake. There was more here than we had wanted. Column after column after column.

  We hadn’t just pulled a list of email addresses. Margo’s script had pulled everything. Names, locations, profile photos, everything sensitive from Nimbus’s database that should remain private. Worst of all, we had passwords. Millions and millions of passwords. It was as though we’d botched an art heist and instead of stealing one painting had somehow cleared out an entire museum.

  I texted Margo, asking her if she was going to work. I waited anxiously for her to reply. She didn’t respond.

  * * *

  —

  PEOPLE SOMETIMES CALL THE subway system the arteries of New York, but that would presume the city had a heart. There is, instead, a mutual callousness among New Yorkers. Sometimes we see that hardened self in others, and we mistake that recognition for compassion.

  On my subway commute from Astoria into Manhattan, I usually read a sci-fi book Margo had lent me. If it was too crowded to even hold a paperback in front of my face, I’d listen to bossa nova. But that morning I was too tense to do either. I was starting to feel like Margo’s redemption was going to get us in a world of trouble. I still felt a little drunk from the night before. I tried to concentrate on the subway ads—this one promised to “tighten skin without surgery.” I looked around at the people in the car. How many of their passwords did we have?

  I’d debated whether I should show up for work at all, but thought it might be suspicious if I didn’t, so I arrived and pretended that nothing had happened. Everything seemed normal. I received an email from my manager that expressed his displeasure that I had left the office early yesterday. I was surprised he’d even noticed, since we hardly spoke. I emailed him back and lied about being at a dentist appointment, ending it casually: “Teeth, you know?”

  For the first few hours of the day, I worked very slowly, addressing the easiest customer service emails in my queue. Most questions could be answered by copy-and-pasting from a script we were supplied. We were encouraged to answer as many emails as we could as quickly as possible, but also to add “personal touches” to our communications wherever we could, to make the customer feel cared for. This meant pasting a robotic response from a script, then making it human by adding a ;) to the end. Basically, do things as efficiently as possible but also, please, have a heart about it.

  Shortly after lunch, I finally received a text from Margo. She wanted me to meet her at McManus’s again. I ducked out of the office, walked around the corner to the bar, and found Margo sitting on the exact same barstool as yesterday, peeling the label off an empty beer bottle. Déjà vu.

  “Margo, have you looked at—”

  She shushed me as the bartender approached. I ordered a beer.

  Margo took a big slug from her bottle and said, “Yes, I’ve looked at it.”r />
  I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. I didn’t understand why she wasn’t freaking out like I was.

  “We took way more than we were supposed to,” I said.

  “You’re never ‘supposed to’ steal anything.” Oh, now it was stealing.

  “The file has everything in it. There’s personal, private information. We’re sitting on millions of stolen passwords and it’s too much and it’s a problem and I don’t understand why you’re so calm.”

  “And I don’t understand why you’re so”—she looked me up and down—“whatever this is.”

  “Margo…”

  She put a hand on my shoulder. Her palm was cold and wet from her beer. “Everything is going to be fine. No one is going to find out. You just need to trust me.”

  I trusted Margo, but Margo also made a lot of decisions while drunk.

  “Did you do this on purpose?”

  “What? No, I just forgot a clause in the script that would filter to email addresses only.”

  This is how most technology is engineered. As servers became faster and storage less expensive, so grew the scope of what data you could keep around. This was thinking ahead. Track as much as you can and whittle it down to what you need later. Margo had forgotten the latter part.

  “So did you talk to the guy you know at Phantom? Did he want the user data?”

  “Yeah, I know him.” A weird pause. She went on: “The CEO, I talked to him. I emailed him this morning, and we met up.”

  “It was that easy to get time with him? This quickly?”

  “We’re, uh, friends.”

  “You don’t have friends,” I said.

  Margo, sensing my suspicion, deflected immediately: “I didn’t tell him about the Nimbus data. And we’re not going to tell anyone about it. Ever. What we did last night was very, very stupid and we will never do anything like that again.”

  Margo’s raised voice drew the attention of the bartender.