by Kevin Nguyen
I went to the fridge and returned with a couple beers. Jill was unceremoniously placing the empty beer cans by my bed into the trash. I signaled with a nod that I hoped conveyed both my embarrassment and thank you.
“Do you think there should be rules to this?” Jill said.
“Rules to what?”
“Just because we have Margo’s password, it doesn’t mean we have the right to use it.” Jill paused, the obvious question coming to her: “How did you get it anyway?”
“It’s a long story. But I only first logged on as Margo so I could deactivate her Facebook account.” I stopped, then added “at the request of her mother” to further absolve myself.
“Have you signed into any of Margo’s other accounts?”
“Nothing else. Just Fantastic Planet.”
“Never her email or anything?”
“Never her email.”
“And why did you log into Fantastic Planet?”
“Honest to god, I was just typing in ‘Facebook’ and ‘Fantastic Planet’ came up.”
“Did her mom tell you that was okay too?”
“No, but I wouldn’t have found you if I hadn’t. And if I hadn’t been lucky enough to have her password, I would never have been able to tell you what happened to Margo.”
Jill took a slug of her beer. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have rules about this. Margo might be dead, but she’s still entitled to her privacy.”
I hadn’t considered this. I mean, what was privacy to the dead? But maybe Jill was right. I’d have to think about it. In the meantime, I nodded along in agreement.
“So after we find her music from PORK, that’ll be it,” she said. “We’ll put M4v15B34c0n to rest forever.”
“But, like, you’re not even a little curious about her email?”
“Lucas, we cannot look at her email. Email is, like, the center of the universe.”
Again, I agreed. Mostly. “So once we’re done today, I am throwing away this sticky note.”
“Yes, we’re done,” Jill said. “After this.”
It seemed a little late to be moralizing about this. The floodgates were already open.
“Okay, here we go.” I typed “M4v15B34c0n” in the password field for the last time. Then I tore the piece of paper in half, then quarters, then it was in the garbage bin.
I did a search for audio files but didn’t find anything that resembled music.
“Do you think she kept it all on a separate hard drive like you?”
It was possible, but I hadn’t seen anything like that in Margo’s bedroom. I kept scanning the computer. No music whatsoever. But a search of audio files did reveal a curious folder named “Fantastic Planet.” Inside it were a series of WAV files: uncompressed audio. All named and dated. I clicked one and…
“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.”
“What is this?” Jill asked.
“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.”
“It’s…Margo.”
“The man weeps for the billions lost.”
“What?”
“This is Margo speaking.”
“The woman is looking forward, her eyes taking in the vastness of space.”
The voice was unmistakable. Margo’s. The file continued on, telling the story about Earth’s only survivors. By some miracle, they crash-land on a habitable planet. The man expects that the two of them will do their duty and populate their new home to assure the continuity of the human race. The woman has no such plans. They’ve arrived on a new planet, free of expectations of what a woman should do.
“And the woman leaves the man behind. She sets off toward the jungle to live her own damn life.”
The audio file ended. I looked over at Jill, who had been staring at me the whole time.
“That was Margo?”
“It was.”
But what was this? What the hell had Margo been up to?
“There’s an entire folder of these,” I said. I brought the laptop over to the bed and planted myself next to Jill. Together, we scrolled through the Fantastic Planet folder. There must have been hundreds of files. I played another. It was a story about a woman who discovers that she can turn invisible—and that, as a woman in a society dominated by men, it doesn’t change her life in any meaningful way. After that, another. This one was about a planet exactly like Earth, but all of the people of color have been eradicated by disease, so the world begins enslaving people with blond hair to maintain a social hierarchy. We listened to a third. Scientists cure death, allowing people to live forever. With no stakes left in the world, everyone starts murdering one another for fun. And the stories kept going.
Some were better than others. Some were more complete than others. Nearly all of them had a dark, cynical plot twist. Neither Jill nor I could make sense of it, but we knew we would have to listen to them all.
Grief isn’t just the act of coping with a loss. It’s reckoning with the realization that you’ll never discover something new about a person ever again. Here it was, though. Something new.
Hours passed as we indulged in the treasure trove of WAV files, both speechless. We let Margo’s voice fill the room with tales of far-flung planets and alien civilizations and interstellar travel. It was less like hearing a ghost and more like witnessing a message from an astral plane, a different dimension, the future. Margo’s stories were told with confidence and poise. And yet, she’d occasionally screw up on the recording—she’d misspeak and the tone of her voice would break, maybe she’d laugh a little to herself before starting over—and in those moments, I couldn’t help but think that she was alive.
THE_FOLLOWER.WAV
There’s this woman on Mars who lives a normal life in the city of Neo Port-au-Prince. She leaves early in the morning to go to work at her menial day job in the city and, in the evening, returns home to the outskirts. The commuter train is fast—it’s a hyper-rail, after all—but it takes her two hours each way. She doesn’t mind the ride. She spends most of it gazing out the window, admiring the vast expanse of red desert. The mountains are multiples taller than anything on Earth, the valleys exponentially deeper. It is all a wash of crimson sand and dust. The weather systems are violent. Sandstorms and lightning are never far off in the distance. It’s a landscape that is somehow at once both bleak and beautiful.
The woman lives alone, which is the way she’d prefer to live. Her apartment is small and on the edge of the sprawling suburban colony just outside Neo Port-au-Prince, but she likes the peace and quiet. At night, there’s hardly a sound. She makes dinner for one, and either reads a book or watches a little television before falling asleep. It may sound like a dull existence, but the woman is happy to be alone. But, of course, she is a woman. And women are never just left alone.
* * *
—
One day, on her way home from work, the woman catches a man staring at her. He is seated across from her on the hyper-rail. He is an average-looking person: middle-aged, dressed in business casual, most of his body hidden behind a copy of the Neo Intelligencer. They briefly make eye contact before the man looks back down at his newspaper, and the woman thinks nothing of it. The man gets off at the next stop, and she rides another hour and a half to get home.
The next day, she sees the man again—catches a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye. Again she thinks nothing of it, but he gets off at the stop after the one from the previous day.
On the third day, the woman wonders what the likeliho
od is that she will see the same man on the same train again. It doesn’t seem unlikely, she concludes. Commuters are consistent. She takes the same train home every day; maybe this man does too. And on top of that, what is she even worried about? This man isn’t bothering her. He hasn’t even said a word to her. She wonders why she’s being so paranoid.
Still, she decides to indulge that feeling the following day. She stays an extra hour late at work—to the surprise of her boss, who remarks that he’s never seen her there that late. (She explains that she’s trying to show initiative, a little more work ethic, and her boss takes a strange, smug satisfaction in hearing this before telling her to keep up the good work.) When she leaves the office, the woman is surprised just how empty the streets are. Apparently no one stays around the financial district after hours—all the businesses are closed. The silence makes the walk to the hyper-rail feel longer than usual. She thinks about the sound of her footsteps as they echo off the skytowers that block out the sun.
She finally boards the train. It’s empty. She takes a seat. But just as the doors are closing, who should appear? The woman’s follower. He looks as innocuous as ever, like it was by design. He sits down on the opposite side of the hyper-rail car and opens his newspaper. The train starts moving, and the woman can’t take her eyes off him.
The hyper-rail crawls to its first stop. A handful of people board. The man turns the page of his newspaper. Next stop, some people get on, some people get off. The woman still has her eyes on the man, waiting for him to do something. He minds his own business. Several more stops go by until the woman can’t take it anymore. She approaches the man. He doesn’t seem to notice her. She tears the paper out of his hands and asks why the fuck he is following her. Now she is yelling, and everyone on the train is staring. The man says nothing, does nothing. He stares blankly, as if he doesn’t understand. The hyper-rail pulls into another station and the man scurries off.
* * *
—
In the decades following the Great War for the Red Planet, the governing bodies of Mars maintained peace through rigorous and constant surveillance of its citizens. Holo-cameras were installed in every corner of the planet’s major cities, allowing the government to record and monitor public spaces at all hours of the day. It is supposed to make everyone feel safe at all times. The woman does not feel safe.
There are many places you can buy a gun legally on Mars. There are just as many places you can buy one illegally, only you can get it faster. The woman asks a friend, who asks a friend, and that evening a dealer appears at her door offering a small arsenal of weapons. She asks for something discreet, something pocket-sized. She explains that it’s for self-defense and the dealer says he doesn’t care. A small ray gun will do. It’s a single shot. Once you fire it, it’s done. The woman asks what happens if her target doesn’t go down after a single shot. The dealer assures her that there’s no chance of that.
She takes it.
On her next commute home, she sees the man again, of course. The woman thinks about the gall this man has to follow her, even after their confrontation the day before. She had warned him. She told him that if he followed her again, she would make him sorry for it. And yet, here he was, as if nothing had ever happened.
The hyper-rail makes its usual stops. The car gets emptier and emptier. The man is still reading his newspaper. What a prick, the woman thinks.
Finally they reach the woman’s stop. She gets out of the car. The man follows. She can hear his footsteps behind her. She picks up her pace, and so does he. She can hear him getting closer. And closer. And closer until—
She spins around, withdraws the ray gun from her purse, and fires. It lets out an earsplitting blast, illuminating the dark corridor for a moment in a brilliant swirl of pink and green. The laser pierces a hole right through the center of the man’s chest. His final expression is one of surprise, of bewilderment. He doesn’t scream, just tumbles to the ground limp.
The woman calls the police, but it doesn’t matter. They are already on their way. The holo-cameras have captured everything. The authorities have been alerted.
* * *
—
The woman’s trial doesn’t last long. Most trials on Mars don’t, since they rely almost entirely on surveillance footage. Here’s what the holo-cameras show: a woman walking; a man behind her, probably minding his own business. The judge informs the defendant that there is nothing illegal about this behavior. It doesn’t matter that he followed her home. There is no proof that he ever intended to do her harm. Feeling unsafe is not a justifiable cause for obtaining a firearm and killing someone.
The woman is found guilty of murder. She will be sent away for a long time, to a prison fortified by impenetrable crystal walls.
But the woman knows that this was her only option, the only possible recourse. Because in the end, Mars is just like any other planet: a giant mass of garbage that orbits through space, barely able to sustain human life.
IV
Inventory
AFTER TWO YEARS OF freelance writing, Jill finally landed a full-time staff writer job at a luxury trade magazine. 2002, 2003—those weren’t great years. 2004 was going to be a good one. The pay wasn’t life-changing, but the consistency of having a check delivered into her bank account every two weeks was. Direct deposit almost felt like cheating, as though it didn’t count if she didn’t have to deliver the money to a bank herself. Jill no longer scrambled to make rent anymore, and for the first time since college, she had health insurance.
The irony didn’t escape her. Her job involved projecting a high-end life of luxury to people—multimillion-dollar apartments, first-class travel, reports from lavishly bland parties—even though she would never be able to possess that life herself. Her days were spent in a small, quiet office, among only a handful of other staff writers and editors, but evenings often took Jill to press events, gaudy affairs thrown by PR agencies trying to get people excited about a product by handing out free drinks and access to a handful of barely recognizable D-list celebrities.
When she started covering these events, Jill felt the pressure to dress and act the part. But as she eased into the job, she realized nobody cared. She retired cocktail dresses and started wearing jeans (black). She would indulge in hors d’oeuvres (something she never got tired of, no matter how mediocre the spread), and talk to a few people for quotes. The success of a night was measured by Jill’s ability to eat an entire meal’s worth of canapés before the waiters stopped coming around. A bust of a night would end with Jill stopping for a dollar slice on her way home, so starving by this point that she would impatiently burn the roof of her mouth on hot cheese. On the subway, she’d tongue at the soft, pained parts of her gums.
Like many of their friends in Brooklyn, Jill and Victor had moved in together partly because they loved each other, partly because of convenience. They’d met at a party—Jill drawn to the tall half-Japanese, half-Brazilian with perfectly tousled hair. (It turns out they’d both been raised largely in Connecticut.) They’d been dating for just four months when they realized both their current leases ended at the same time, and it seemed like the sort of New York luck that only an idiot would pass up.
Summers were hot in New York, but they seemed particularly hot in Jill and Victor’s one-bedroom apartment in Bed-Stuy. The neighborhood was famous for that one movie that Jill had never seen but always meant to. What was it called? The one about the heat wave? It didn’t matter. Jill and Victor had a single air-conditioning unit, but it never seemed powerful enough to keep the apartment cool. Victor’s computer—a massive black monolith of a thing—was an unwelcome and powerful heat source. Jill had only ever owned tiny, thin laptops, but Victor had explained, more than once, that to power the 3D rendering engine for his work required a workhorse of a machine.
To be a video game designer, you had to be many things: an architect, a physicist, a novelist, a
ll in one, Victor liked to say. He had mapped out elaborate blueprints to be modeled in three-dimensional space, the evidence of which was scattered about the desk, spilling over onto the dresser and bookshelves and any other flat, elevated surface in the apartment. Jill often saw Victor writing out formulas, doing shorthand math on loose paper—receipts, flyers, drafts of her bad short stories—anything was fair game. He had even scrawled notes on the back of junk mail envelopes; once, after Jill had brought home a couple bagel sandwiches, she found all the napkins from the takeout bag absorbed into Victor’s landscape of mad-scientist scrawlings.
Sometimes Jill tried to make sense of the notes to better understand what Victor was working on. He was making a video game, that she knew, but Victor never said what kind. When Jill pressed him on it, just out of loving curiosity, she wouldn’t get much more. It wouldn’t be like the ones she had played before, he said. Victor wanted to make something more personal. He wanted to create a game that was intimate and quiet. She admired his focus—she was jealous, in fact—so she left him alone to make whatever it was he was making.
With the new stability of Jill’s staff job, Victor was able to quit his day job teaching middle-school kids math. As long as he’d make enough from freelance web design to pay for his half of the rent, Jill didn’t mind paying for the rest of their expenses. It would be a fine arrangement for a few months while Victor completed his project. They rarely ate out, rarely went out at all, really. And Jill had never seen Victor more thankful than the day she urged him to quit tutoring. Over a long sushi dinner (Jill’s treat), a celebration of her first paycheck, he volleyed between saying “thank you” and “but are you sure?” and Jill was filled with a kind of pride she’d never felt before. She could provide for the person she loved, and that delighted her. Even if, when she got home from work every day, the loud hum of the black computer tower always greeted her before Victor did.