New Waves

by Kevin Nguyen

  There were a number of unread messages for Margo, almost all from the same user: mining_colony.

  The subject lines were:

  Hey

  Hello

  Haven’t heard from you in a while

  Everything ok?

  All of the messages were time-stamped days after Margo’s death. I scrolled through the inbox—the conversations between Margo and mining_colony went back over three years. And it appeared that they had talked nearly every day since they’d begun. I had so many questions. Who was this person? How come I’d never heard of them? What had they been talking about every day for the past three years? My face was suddenly hot, so I took another long drink of my beer. Who was this person that Margo talked to more than me?

  And then, in a strange moment of drunken clarity, the right question: Did I have to tell them what had happened to Margo?

  Which was followed by a predictable kind of drunken frustration, as I closed Margo’s laptop and tossed it in the garbage.

  * * *

  —

  WHY DO YOU LOOK so mad?

  I’m not mad. I’m just frustrated. All product managers do is nag me about whether I’m going to make my deadlines.

  Isn’t that their job?

  To annoy me all day long? Apparently. The worst one is Scott.

  Which one is Scott?

  Bald, has that weird thing on his face he calls a “beard.”

  Oh, he runs Board Game Night at the office.

  Scott is constantly “following up,” “nudging politely,” always wants to “touch base,” whatever the fuck that means. I know what I have to do at my job. I don’t need some unremarkable white boy reminding me.

  Well, are you going to make deadline?

  Not if I have to keep doing these needless “check-ins.” Like, if I am behind on my work, there’s nothing a product manager like Scott can do about it. He doesn’t know anything about code. He just knows how to talk around it so he can look nice in front of his boss.

  My new plan is to just confuse him. Last check-in, I told him a story about this Japanese marathon runner who set a world record in the early twentieth century. He was so good they called him the “Father of Marathon.”

  Why not “Marathon Dad”?

  Even though he was the best long-distance runner in the world, he’s actually most famous for vanishing at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. Back then, it was strenuous to travel. So it takes him eighteen days to get from Japan to Sweden, first by boat, then by train. On top of that, his stomach just doesn’t agree with the local food.

  Too many Swedish Fish.

  Come race day, he’s in terrible shape, but he runs anyway. It’s a disaster. He’s slipping in and out of consciousness. Midway through the race, he stops in at a restaurant to ask for a glass of orange juice. It’s there he realizes there’s no point in continuing on with the marathon. So he stays at the restaurant for an hour, enjoying himself. Even orders more food he hates. And when he’s good and ready to leave, he gets directly on the train, then on the boat, and is on his way back to Japan.

  The thing is: he never tells any of the officials. So when he doesn’t finish the race, they just assume he died somewhere along the way.

  At this point, I’m sure Scott has no idea why you’re talking about this.

  He strokes his crap beard and says something like, “What does this have to do with your deadline?”

  And what does it have to do with your deadline?

  I tell the rest of the story. It’s not until 1967 that a Swedish newspaper realizes the runner is alive and well. So as a lark, they invite him back to finish the race. Thankfully, more than fifty years later, the journey from Japan is not nearly as arduous. He finally completes the marathon: a time of 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes, and 20.3 seconds.

  That’s how long it’s going to take you to finish your work?

  Nah. I just tell Scott, “I’m going to stop coming to these check-ins. Assume I died.”

  And what did he say?

  He doesn’t say anything. He is so bewildered he just stands up, mumbles some stuff about “keeping up the good work,” and walks out of the room.

  Aren’t you worried that you’ll get in trouble for not making your deadlines, though?

  Oh, I am actually way ahead of schedule. I’ve been shipping code early without telling Scott. I am on top of my work. But this makes Scott look like a shitty product manager because he can’t keep up with me.

  That’s sinister.

  Listen, I don’t need someone to confirm I ran twenty-six miles. I’ll just go the distance myself.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I STARTED AT Phantom, I’d endured a lecture from Dennis, the marketing manager, who explained that user acquisition was a funnel. He drew a diagram on a whiteboard.

  “This is the top of the funnel,” he said, circling what was obviously the top of the funnel. He took the marker and drew a line down through the triangular shape, charting the progression of a user through the funnel. His explanation made the process look self-evident, like every person started at the top of his diagram and would inevitably end up at the bottom of it, making them an acquired customer.

  He circled the bottom of the diagram. “It’s quite simple, right?”

  The lesson stuck with me, mostly because Dennis had accidentally used a permanent marker on the whiteboard, his freehand scribble forever preserved on the backside of a ruined whiteboard we now kept in a storage closet—physical evidence that Phantom was being run by idiots.

  Every Friday, there was a company-wide meeting where Dennis would run through the acquisition numbers, usually cause for him to pat himself on the back. But when the news got less exciting and the graphs began sloping downward, he decided to cancel the weekly meetings. “I’m giving everyone back thirty minutes of their day,” he wrote in an email, as if he were doing us all a favor.

  I wasn’t surprised when Dennis was fired shortly after. We were still a small enough company that Brandon had to explain why they’d decided to “part ways” with their head of marketing. Brandon was diplomatic. Dennis simply “wasn’t a culture fit” anymore; he could “do better work elsewhere.” I wondered if, when Brandon fired Dennis, he’d phrased it like that to him too, like he was doing him a favor.

  Soon after, Brandon scheduled check-in meetings with everyone at the company. Apparently this was the first person that Phantom had ever let go, so Brandon wanted to make sure the firing didn’t affect morale. I told him it wasn’t necessary—I’d barely worked with Dennis anyway. But Brandon insisted.

  At the café during our one-on-one meeting, Brandon offered to buy me a coffee.

  “What do you want? My treat.”

  It was late in the afternoon, and I didn’t want anything.

  “Come on, let me get you a drink. Or do you want a pastry?”

  I felt obliged to pick something out of the case, even though I was too hungover to eat something sweet. Which is how I ended up picking at a raspberry-almond scone that I had no interest in putting in my body. I watched it crumble all over a napkin as Brandon talked. He’d had the idea for Phantom for years. In college, he’d studied computer science at the country’s top-ranked program, but his interest was always in the way technology could set people free. Democracy would spread through information; it was a moral imperative for Phantom to succeed. I’d heard this all before but it was different this time.

  Things at Phantom were going well and he seemed excited, like he was pitching. As a means of showing me the company’s humble beginnings, Brandon shared the original deck he had sent investors. (Naturally, he had brought his laptop to the café.) From what I knew of the venture capital world, getting funding seemed appallingly easy. I couldn’t get a loan to pay for my community college classes, but at twenty-two
years old, Brandon was able to secure a seed round of $200,000 to start Phantom, which at the time was just an idea. I couldn’t help but notice that there were typos throughout the deck.

  Still, I had to admire the story. He had used China as an example of an authoritarian regime, abusing over a billion people by limiting their internet access. Unimaginatively dubbed “the Great Firewall of China,” the web in China had certain facets that were made off-limits by the Communist party. All access was closely monitored, to ensure no one was organizing to topple the government. With Phantom, Chinese users could at least communicate with people outside the Firewall. Since the messages in Phantom disappeared, it would protect them from the consequences of saying the wrong things. At the end, there was a rough estimate of what growth would look like if Phantom could crack the Chinese market. There wasn’t a clear plan for how the company would do that, just the promise of potential. It was a mission, paired with a market opportunity. Investors could feel good about where they were putting their money, and feel good that they’d get it back too.

  For Brandon, technology wasn’t a mountain. It was the tectonic plates under the Earth, slowly moving and reshaping the landscape above it. When I asked him about that metaphor causing earthquakes, Brandon shook it off and explained that that was why we needed people in technology with a sense of responsibility. The way technology was right now—uncharted, unregulated—meant that it would cause havoc. I thought back on this conversation often that year as I watched the high-minded optimism of Brandon slowly erode as investor pressure mounted. If technology represented the landscape that people actually traversed in life, it was one that could be drastically shaped and reshaped by money—advertisers, investors, whoever had it. Even I knew that.

  * * *

  —

  AS FAR AS I knew, Margo didn’t have other friends. She wasn’t supposed to have other friends. If she did, more of them would have turned up at the funeral. But there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of messages in her archive at Fantastic Planet. This person, whoever they were, would want to know what happened to Margo, right? Maybe they would also understand how it felt to lose her.

  I woke up in the middle of the night, my body weak from dehydration, which was becoming a familiar feeling since I’d felt this way every day in the three weeks since the funeral. I stumbled to the dark bathroom and shoved my face under the faucet to drink. I turned on the light. My eyes were red, my face flushed, water dribbling from my chin. I looked like shit.

  From the garbage, I retrieved Margo’s computer.

  * * *

  —

  BY READING MARGO’S MESSAGE history, I eventually figured out that the username mining_colony referred to a book titled Mining Colony. The author had come to Fantastic Planet for help with her science fiction novel, and most of what Margo discussed with mining_colony was in reference to a manuscript. That must’ve been sent through Margo’s personal email, which I hadn’t accessed yet. I told myself I wasn’t going to break into any more of Margo’s accounts. Fantastic Planet was already too far.

  Margo’s notes for mining_colony, though, were detailed. As a lover of sci-fi, she had extremely specific ideas about how to evoke its pulpy bygone era. The two would joke often, and as I worked through their extensive message logs, their conversations veered toward the personal. I recognized some things. Margo made broad passing references to her job, her “asshole boss” (Brandon), and a boy she had been sleeping with (who? she’d never mentioned this). I admit some part of me expected her to reference me, though I never found anything. I tried not to be disappointed.

  mining_colony had stories of their own, equally mundane: the maddening solitude of working from home, how days could go by without leaving one’s apartment or interacting with anyone in person. mining_colony’s last message was still the most recent one: “Everything ok?”

  The sun was coming up.

  “Hi mining_colony, this isn’t Margo,” I typed. “But I wish it was.”

  * * *

  —

  I PASSED OUT, AND when I woke up again, there was a reply.

  “Who’s Margo?”

  I’d combed through nearly three years’ worth of messages and hadn’t noticed that not once was Margo referred to by name. She’d kept the handle from her PORK days. It was funny: Margo had talked to this person every day, at length, for three years and they never exchanged any real, identifying information. It wasn’t much different from the friendship that Margo and I had developed on PORK—anonymous, but not really anonymous.

  I drafted several responses, but none of them seemed right. How do you tell your dead friend’s online pen pal that she’s died?

  “This account belonged to Margo,” I wrote, and attached a link to the obituary. In some ways, it seemed like a cheat. I realized that this was how I’d operated my entire life. My feelings and sentiments were represented through files, through things made by others on the internet: links, mp3s, JPEGs. Employing the work of others to get around having to convey it yourself was a huge crutch of communicating on the internet. From the obituary, I had ready-made language to use to tell a stranger that Margo had stumbled out of a bar, into the street, and been hit by a speeding cab.

  mining_colony’s reply was nearly instant.

  “Oh my god. This is terrible.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I typed.

  I waited for another reply, but a few minutes passed. I was ready to be done with mining_colony. This would be the last time I opened Margo’s laptop, the last moment before I would throw away the sticky note. But their next question sucked me in.

  “So who are you?”

  Hi

  I’m glad we switched to email. This is a little less strange, yes?

  RE: Hi

  For sure. It felt wrong to be on Margo’s account.

  Okay, let’s start with the basics: what is your name?

  RE:RE: Hi

  Oh right, I guess formal introductions got lost in the whole “hey this person you know isn’t replying to your messages because they…aren’t around anymore” thing.

  Ugh, this is so weird. But I’m Jill. And you?

  RE:RE:RE: Hi

  Lucas.

  RE:RE:RE:RE: Hi

  Despite the truly awful circumstances, it is nice to meet you, Lucas.

  She confirmed what I’d deduced: she was a novelist. It turns out I knew a lot about her already, just from reading through her messages with Margo. But I let her explain.

  RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE: Hi

  For my second book, I knew I had a rough idea for a science fiction story. But I had no idea how to do it, to tell a story in a reality divorced from our own. So I signed up for the Fantastic Planet message boards. I was in conversation with Margo (I’m gonna have to get used to calling her that) and we got along really well and started messaging each other every day after that.

  I told her Margo and I had worked together for the past two jobs. We were close friends.

  RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE: Hi

  You know what the craziest thing is? Until reading the obit, I never realized that Margo lived in Brooklyn. It says she lived in Crown Heights. I’m in Cobble Hill, which means that we’ve been talking for years and lived, at most, a mile or two apart. I wonder if I might have passed her on the street or sat next to her on the subway, not knowing that she was someone I talked to every day.

  * * *

  —

  JILL HAD AN UNENDING stream of questions about Margo. Some were specific:

  How tall was she?

  5’4”? 5’3”?

  Others harder to answer:

  What did her voice sound like?

  Firm.

  I could sense a curiosity, but also a desire to understand how much Margo matched the afronaut3000 she h
ad been imagining for years.

  Do you have a picture of her?

  Margo wasn’t really the type to take photos. I searched her hard drive for images. Very little surfaced. Eventually I found a picture of her, posed coolly outside of a bar, basking in the light of a neon sign advertising a cheap brand of beer, not smiling (of course). She had on a patterned head wrap and a solid mustard dress. If you squinted, you could make out the hints of a lit cigarette in her hand. The photo wasn’t recent—dated five years back—from sometime in college. It was the best I could find, so I emailed it along.

  Jill replied immediately: “She was beautiful.”

  “She really was,” I said, realizing just as I hit ENTER how weird that must sound. I’d never thought of Margo as beautiful. Like, she was. But that wasn’t what our friendship was. It was one of trust, a closeness that two people felt when they lived in a world that fundamentally did not understand them. It wasn’t romantic. Besides, if I had truly—

  Do you want to meet up?

  I was surprised by the question. But I didn’t want to show hesitation, so I didn’t.

  * * *

  —

  THE INSTANT MESSAGING SERVICE Margo and I used kept an archive of every conversation we’d ever had. I searched our shared history for any reference to “Jill.” Nothing came up, which made sense, since Margo had likely never learned Jill’s real name. I tried a second search, for “author” or “novelist,” which yielded a few results, but nothing relevant, just scraps of loose talk. Last, I tried looking for “mining colony.”

  About a year ago, Margo had recommended that I read something called Mining Colony. She had described it as “Raymond Carver in space,” a campus novel on an asteroid. I added it to a list of other books Margo had told me to read. She read at a superhuman rate, and I was adding things to that list faster than I was crossing anything off. But I remembered distinctly the excitement with which she’d spoken about Mining Colony: