by Kevin Nguyen
The CEO, another white man, attempting to soften the blow, harped that African Americans were, on average, poorer than the rest of the population, and therefore were a less valuable demographic than those with higher disposable incomes.
The second consultant clicked through his slides to land on his closing point. If Nimbus’s user base grew only in the sector of African Americans, the business would become unsustainable within six months.
This was when Margo lost it. She stood up at her seat, began shouting, her voice frustrated and incredulous and confrontational. It was one thing to say that black people were less valuable than everyone else. To her, it was another to declare that black people were unworthy of technology.
When Margo emerged from the meeting, she found me at my desk and asked me to follow her into the hallway outside the office. Once we were out of the view of other Nimbus employees, Margo embraced me and began to sob. I hadn’t yet realized what was going on. She just kept saying “fuck this place” over and over. I awkwardly rubbed her arms and told her everything would be fine. Margo pressed her forehead into my shoulder, and we embraced more deeply. We’d never held each other this way, and I was surprised how natural it felt. Her crying didn’t last long—the whole thing must’ve lasted a minute at most—and once she was done, she took a step back, said thank you, and headed to the bathroom to clean herself up. I remained there, stunned by how intimate that had felt, and confused by what had just happened.
Several HR complaints were filed against Margo for the outburst in the meeting. Some of them felt her tone was disrespectful and hostile; others declared her behavior aggressive, specifically toward white people in the office. When she was eventually let go, the event wasn’t cited. Nothing was, except the general “fit” of Margo in the workplace.
“It was probably that,” she said. “But I have no way to really know for sure.”
That’s what racism in the workplace looked like. You could feel it everywhere—in your brain, in your heart, in your bones—but you could never prove it. And that wasn’t even the worst part. At the bar, just hours before we’d made off with Nimbus’s user data, Margo conceded that she had played right into their hands. She was frustrated, chose to speak out about it, and had accidentally become the thing white men had always expected she was: an angry black woman.
“What was the alternative?” Margo asked. “Not saying anything at all?”
I wasn’t sure why she was asking me. There was no universe where I would have the answer.
* * *
—
I OFTEN WENT TO the movies alone. New York was a great place to be alone because there were so many people. You were alone but in a dark room for a couple hours, together with strangers. Plus, the longer I was in my apartment, the more tempted I was to open Margo’s laptop.
Like many things in the city, the cineplexes of Manhattan are built vertically. The layout of a movie theater resembles a maze of escalators. It was easy to purchase one ticket and spend the rest of the day sneaking into showings of other movies. But it turns out that if you see three or four movies a weekend, you can watch nearly everything in the theaters, even in a city that screens every movie. So I just started seeing the same films again. They wouldn’t even be ones I liked. But what was important was that I was watching a movie, which means I couldn’t be thinking about anything else.
I had so little going on during the weekends that I started spending all day at the multiplex. One Saturday, after waking up early and being unable to fall back asleep, I headed straight to the theater. I was there at 9 a.m., an hour before the first showing. I just waited around outside, doing nothing until I could enter. The earliest movie was an animated kids’ movie that I had no interest in, but I watched it anyway. An hour and a half later, I snuck into a period drama that I’d already seen twice, then a new action movie that I hadn’t seen but missed the first half hour of. When it was over, I found the next screening of the same movie, watched those missing thirty minutes, and sat through the rest of it. Again, I bounced around from theater to theater until there were no more showings. I emerged from the building and it was dark out. I went home and, the next morning, repeated it all over again.
The first day of movies had kept me distracted enough. But the second day, I left the theater feeling a new kind of emptiness. But maybe I was just hungry from subsisting on popcorn. The subway ride home from Midtown to Astoria was long, and it was already past midnight. All the Greek restaurants were closed. I passed low-rise after low-rise. Most of Astoria’s buildings were described as “prewar,” a term I’d always found strange, as if things occurred before or after the only war that has ever happened.
As soon as I was home, I ordered Indian food, more than enough for two people, thinking it polite to offer some to my roommate. Sometime between the time I placed the order and when it arrived, he left the apartment. I was thankful to be alone, although I wasn’t sure why, because I’d been alone. I hadn’t really interacted with another person in days. And so I ate the entirety of the food by myself.
* * *
—
THE REASON YOU DON’T feast on Indian takeout late at night is because no one wants to wake up at 4 a.m. with the sensation that your bowels are about to empty themselves all over your bed. I rushed to the bathroom and thankfully made it in time. I didn’t have time to lower the toilet seat, so I sat uncomfortably on the rim of the toilet bowl, trying not to think about how long it had been since I’d cleaned it.
I got back into bed but couldn’t fall asleep. It was dark out, and would be for another couple hours. It was never a comfortable temperature in the apartment. It was always too hot, even in the winter. The heat was controlled by the building manager, who cranked it all the way up, turning the entire building into a sticky, humid sauna. But summers were even worse. I hadn’t saved up enough money for an air-conditioner, so every night I lay on top of my bed, sweating. I tossed around. I looked at my phone. I tried pulling the covers over my head.
If I was going to be miserably warm and feeling as if every calorie had just emptied out of my body, I might as well do the miserable thing I had been putting off. In the dark, I searched for Margo’s laptop. I felt its shape on my desk, its smooth, hard edges against my palms. I opened the screen and the blue light was almost cartoonish, an oyster opening its bivalve to reveal what had been growing there.
The computer asked me to log in again. Margo’s password had been burned into my memory. I carefully typed out “M4v15B34c0n” and hit ENTER. In the weeks since, I’d felt bad for taking Margo’s laptop against Louise’s wishes. But she’d tasked me with one job—to deactivate Margo’s profile—and at least I could do that for her. I opened the browser and began to type in Facebook, but as I keyed an F and then an A, the browser auto-completed the URL, suggesting instead a website called Fantastic Planet.
I course-corrected to Facebook, typed “M4v15B34c0n” again—it worked—and suddenly I was looking at her profile. She had over two dozen unread messages. I clicked into her inbox.
These weren’t old, neglected messages. All of them had been sent in the past few weeks. I didn’t recognize the names of the senders, but the messages were almost all the same. Things like “I miss you so much but I know the Lord is taking care of you now.” Anecdotes about Margo. Some of the senders were family; others were people Margo had gone to college with. None of them had been at the funeral, as far as I could recognize.
I didn’t understand why anyone would message Margo after she had died. It seemed strangely performative, only it was completely—as far as they knew—private. Each one left me with a hollow feeling, though it could also have been the place in my stomach that once contained two servings’ worth of Indian food.
One message caught my eye. It was another name I didn’t know. He was a fratty-looking white guy. I assumed he was someone Margo went to college with. His profile picture
was him drinking a beer on a yacht, eyes hidden by sunglasses, his expression equal parts arrogance and smugness—a bad stereotype of a white guy, the kind of person Margo would never be friends with.
The message read: “You were always kind of a bitch, but I’ll miss you.”
What the hell? What comfort did this person get from calling Margo a bitch after she had died? I thought about replying and telling him that he was an asshole. That would be a wake-up call, having a ghost tell you to go fuck yourself. Maybe the message was some kind of inside joke. Was this person close enough to Margo to call her a bitch? I didn’t want to think about it. I deleted the message.
I was stalling.
Once a Facebook account has been permanently deleted, there is no way to recover it. Are you sure you want to permanently delete your profile?
Facebook’s language was grim. It was as if permanent deletion was a prospect greater than death. I clicked YES.
You know once you commit to this there is no going back. Please check the following box to acknowledge.
I checked the box.
You know what you’re doing, right?
I did.
Are you really, really sure about this?
I wasn’t, but I proceeded anyway.
KILLER_PERFORMANCE.WAV
The powers that be were midway through their quarterly metrics presentation when Daniel stumbled into the meeting, bleeding everywhere from a large hole in his chest.
“You’re really getting blood all over the place,” said the CTO.
“Ugh, there is blood all over my shit!” the CFO barked, trying to gather his printouts before they could be soiled by Daniel’s bodily fluids.
The CEO stepped in. “This is quite inappropriate. Daniel, get yourself cleaned up,” he said, before telling the CFO to continue with his slideshow.
The CFO tried not to be jarred by the interruption. He clicked his clicker thing, and the screen moved on to the next slide.
“As you can see, killings are up 11 percent year-over-year, which is just shy of our target of 13 percent,” he said, worried that the room would be disappointed.
The CEO interrupted. “We set those targets to be ambitious. The fact that we’re still seeing double-digit growth—in THIS economy—is nothing short of impressive.”
The room clapped politely to acknowledge the feat. Then the CEO stood up, to further emphasize just how great these numbers were. The CTO, CMO, CPO, and CLMFAO followed suit, standing and clapping. Daniel continued to bleed all over the table.
“Did anyone call the medical team for Daniel?” the CTO asked.
The CMO pulled out his phone and summoned a medic, then gestured to the CTO that it had been taken care of. “They’ll be here in, like, two minutes.”
The CFO moved on to the next slide.
“We attribute this 11 percent year-over-year growth to two factors: one is an improvement of efficiency of killings, which obviously has a great deal to do with the progress that the CTO has made in both our technology and our processes.” The CFO nodded to the CTO, who smiled back, appreciative of the callout. (The CFO knew this would come in handy later.)
“We’re not just killing more, but we’re killing smarter. That’s what keeps us ahead of our competitors.”
Next slide.
“The second reason we’ve been able to maintain such steady growth in killing is because we’re improving the way we manage our killers. All killers are held to a rigorous set of standards, and measured against one another to foster a sense of competition among them. We incentivize better work with bonuses, and we punish—well, sorry, that’s not the right word.”
The CFO gestured toward Daniel. “Let’s just say we de-incentivize poor performance.”
As if on cue, Daniel let out a groan, then a gurgle, then coughed up a small pool of blood on the glass conference table. The room erupted in laughter.
“I…was…There was an ambush,” Daniel said, weakly.
“And this failure to kill will show up on Daniel’s daily metrics report, which we send out by email each morning,” the CFO said.
Finally, the medic arrived. He apologized for the interruption, grabbed Daniel by the feet, and dragged his limp body out the door. Just before exiting the room, the medic cautioned that people should be careful of the streak of blood that Daniel’s body left behind, god forbid anyone slip on it and get seriously injured.
To close out the meeting, the CEO stood up to make one final statement. Y’know, rally the troops, really motivate them moving into Q4.
“It’s easy for all of us to sit in this conference room and look at a slideshow and appreciate a chart that has a line sloping upwards. But I don’t want anyone here to lose sight of what we have accomplished here. When I started this company, people said it was a crazy idea. But we showed them that—through hard work, hiring the right people, moving quickly but intelligently—we could change the world.”
The CEO continued: “I mean, guys, we did it: murder at scale.”
More polite clapping, just before happy hour.
Daniel got fixed up quickly, and the next morning he was back at his desk, ready to work again. The day before had gone badly—reinforced by the performance metrics email Daniel received that morning—but he felt motivated to improve, to climb back up to the top of the killing board, where he’d been just a month before.
The timing wasn’t great, though. The following week brought Performance Reviews, and Daniel’s had a lot of red flags on it: “hostile,” “inappropriate,” “not a team player.” They were damning words to appear on a Performance Review, and Daniel suspected they’d come from his intrusion into the CFO’s meeting. He hadn’t intended to interrupt—it was just difficult to find the medic’s station after losing so much blood.
But Daniel suspected that the CFO, always known to hold a grudge, had torpedoed the Performance Review. It didn’t take much to sink someone at the company. You could always file an unsolicited evaluation of an employee, and it had to be acknowledged and assessed by HR. Combined with his slipping killing performance, Daniel was put on a Performance Improvement Plan, playfully called a PIP. The document laid out a long list of things that he would have to do in order to keep his job. Many of the instructions were vague and involved things like having a better attitude and showing more collaboration with team members. But you couldn’t measure that. So, of course, there were numbers associated with it: increase shootings by 20 percent, stabbings by a whopping 50 percent—knifework was always Daniel’s weakness.
Because it wasn’t just a matter of showing improvement of soft skills, but proving that you were putting in the effort. As Daniel ate a sad-ass salad at his desk, he wondered if he was up for it. He could spend the rest of the day trying to kill a whole lot more people, or, instead, update his résumé.
III
Personal Effects
THE ONLY THING IN my room that scared me more than Margo’s laptop was the sticky note with her password. I should have thrown both away. I’d deleted Margo’s Facebook account. What use did I have left for her laptop and password? I had never had trouble throwing things away. When I moved to New York, I’d only taken enough clothes to fit in a single suitcase because I couldn’t afford to pay the sixty dollars the airline charged to check a second bag. Everything I owned could be replaced.
A week had passed since I’d disposed of the Facebook account. I’d decided that maybe it was time to cool my movie-watching habit, so I replaced those long hours on the weekend with…nothing. Just drinking beer in my room, imagining what Margo and I might be up to if she was still around: getting day-drunk and wandering around the park, eating until we could smell the spices in our sweat, more Pac-Man of course. My eyes kept returning to the laptop, which I still could not bring myself to throw away. I still had one lingering question: What the hell was Fantastic Planet?
“Fuck it,” I said out loud to no one. I opened another beer and swiped Margo’s laptop from the desk.
Again, when I typed in F and A, Fantastic Planet auto-populated in the web browser. I clicked through.
What appeared was a log-in screen. I looked at the note. M4v15B34c0n. It worked again, and Fantastic Planet revealed itself: an old-school message board, not terribly different from PORK. But outside of that, it was not immediately obvious what I was looking at. There was some activity, though not much. Unlike PORK, these threads weren’t neatly organized. It was more of a mishmash of topics, ranging from discussions of specific books to news stories to collections of JPEGs of optical illusions. I didn’t really get it.
I clicked around for a while. Though no clear overriding subject emerged, there did seem to be a few consistent themes. There was a love of science and technology, an almost outdated romanticism of it. Most messages involved a lot of ponderous writing about the mysterious wonders of space. In fact, many of the images posted were from the ’50s and ’60s. Preserved on Fantastic Planet was an appreciation for the space age—tomorrow, as imagined by the past.
I discovered from Margo’s history that she’d been on Fantastic Planet almost every night. She contributed to certain threads regularly, particularly in conversations about science fiction authors. The strong-willed, no-bullshit Margo I’d known was nowhere to be found. This afronaut3000 was anything but combative. She was earnest and enthusiastic. Her presence on Fantastic Planet was oddly peaceful. It reminded me of the afronaut3000 of PORK.