by Kevin Nguyen
And on some level, engineers were right about data. They were just wrong about people.
* * *
—
WHEN I GOT BACK to Jill’s apartment, I found her cooking…something.
“I didn’t realize you’d be back so quickly,” Jill said. “And I also didn’t think I’d be running behind so much. I was hoping to have this done before you returned.” She seemed a little frazzled, moving between a large pot and a pan on the stove with unease.
“What are you making?”
“Pasta.” She clarified: “Spaghetti.”
“Well, it smells great,” I said, which is what you’re supposed to say.
I offered to help, but Jill insisted that she had it under control. I noticed she’d diced her onions in an uneven, haphazard manner. Also, her pasta had definitely been left in the boiling water for too long. And I doubt she’d salted the water first. Still, I appreciated the gesture. I usually did all the cooking, and was more than happy to. But everyone deserves a night off.
“What did you have to do at work?” Jill asked.
“It was nothing interesting.”
Jill seemed annoyed by my reluctance to say anything. “Who do you talk to?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, when you have something on your mind, something weighing on you”—she looked up from her spaghetti—“who do you tell?”
“Do you want that person to be you?”
“No, it doesn’t have to be. But there should be someone in your life that you actually talk to.”
“I mean, it used to be Margo,” I said. “Obviously.”
Jill went back to her cooking, but the questions kept coming. “And you and Margo never dated?”
“You asked me that the night that we met. No, we did not date.”
“And you guys never hooked up?”
“Not even once.”
“And that’s not something you thought about?”
“It. Was. Not.” Jill’s insistence was making me defensive. And angry.
“Even though she was someone you admired, talked to about everything, and wanted to be around all the time.”
“Why are you grilling me on this?”
“You’re obviously obsessed with Margo, and I find it hard to believe that the thought of sleeping with your beautiful friend never ever crossed your mind.”
“Just because she’s attractive—”
“She was beautiful.”
“Okay, fine, Margo was beautiful. Where are you going with this?”
“I just don’t believe that you weren’t in love with her.”
“Of course I was in love with her! But what if I could love someone and not want to fuck them? People always talk about romantic relationships as being more than friends. What if friendship is actually the greater form of connection? What if being close to someone doesn’t require being physical? What if, actually, it’s better if it isn’t? What if there are people more important than the ones you sleep with?”
“This is a really strange thing to tell someone you’re fucking,” Jill said.
Even now, I couldn’t explain this to her. She wouldn’t understand what Margo and I had. She couldn’t even imagine it.
“It’s just, you talk about Margo all the time,” Jill said, “but you make her sound less like a person and more like a monument.”
“Your onions are burning.”
“What?”
I pointed to the smoking pan.
“Fuck!”
I put on my coat and told Jill I would go to the bodega and get another onion. When I got back, I showed her how to slice an onion more evenly: half moons first, then longer slices vertically; keep moving the onion to maintain a grip. She insisted that she didn’t need the help. So it was past 10 p.m. by the time dinner was served. The spaghetti was good, the sauce a little underseasoned.
“Would you tell me if you didn’t like my cooking?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said, probably lying.
* * *
—
EVERY THURSDAY AT 6 P.M., a group of four engineers always met in one of the Phantom conference rooms to play a board game. I was impressed by their consistency.
One week, an engineer was missing. Brandon had taken him along to San Francisco, where he was meeting investors for the next round of funding. So I was asked to fill in for the absent player. I agreed reluctantly.
There is only one thing more painful than listening to someone explain the rules of a board game, and it’s when that person is a server engineer.
“What am I trying to do in this game?” I finally asked, as one of the engineers droned on and on. The group of players laughed, as if for the first time acknowledging that the collective end goal derived from the combination of cardboard hexagons, playing cards, and a set of wood pieces might not be self-evident. Thematically, the game was set on an unsettled island. You, an explorer of sorts, were tasked with colonizing it—and not just colonizing it, but colonizing it better than the other players. In the abstract, the goal was to accumulate points, which could be earned by building small wooden houses. The houses were built by getting resources. Resources were allocated based on where each player had houses. The logic was circular. The engineers liked the game because it was a closed system, and within it they could compete.
I stumbled my way through the game. Rules were clarified and reiterated to me by kind but slightly frustrated opponents. But as I began to comprehend how the game worked, it started to feel more fun. I was gaining a sense of control. After a couple hours, the game was over and I had lost pretty badly, but I felt accomplished in my newfound rudimentary grasp of the game’s mechanics. It was 8 p.m. and everyone else had vacated the office for the day. We started over.
We were all about six or seven beers deep by the time we were nearing the end of the second game. I lost that one too, though I had made some moves that even surprised the veteran players. And I’d had some fun, too, surprisingly. I don’t know why I thought Margo and I were the only people who bitched about Brandon and Emil. Well, they had even more complaints about Brandon than we’d had—less about his privileged behavior, and more on the directions he’d chosen to take the company. Scott, who had been at Phantom the longest (before it even had a name), said we shouldn’t be pandering to investors just to secure more funding. Did we really want to build a service for teenagers, just to appease venture capitalists? Tom disagreed. He felt like the idealistic mission of Phantom had not panned out, and now users were finding a new, better use for the service. We were lucky, really, that teens had come along to provide us with a new, more viable business. Josh had concerns that we would never make money from teenagers. As soon as we made attempts to create a business around them—to encourage, even force them to pay—they would flee en masse to another free messaging service. Someone would rip us off, fund their own version with venture capital, and we would be left high and dry.
“I don’t know,” Scott said. “What do you think, Lucas?”
I was surprised they wanted to hear my opinion. I tried to dodge. “Honestly, I don’t understand enough of the tech world to really know what makes sense for Phantom.”
“None of us do,” Tom said. “I mean, Brandon is a twenty-four-year-old CEO.”
Josh said, “You’re in customer service. You actually spend time dealing with our users all day long. You probably have better insight into Phantom than anyone else at the company.”
“I read their complaints, but it’s not like I’ve met people who use Phantom,” I said. “I’ve never really used it.”
I pulled out my phone—my flip phone.
Josh laughed. Tom told me I was ridiculous. Scott assured me that the company would buy me a smartphone.
“Would anyone trade an ore for two sheep?” I asked.
There were no takers.
* * *
—
WHAT’S THE MOST SURPRISING thing you ever saw Margo do?
Once we were riding the subway, and there was a woman seated across from us, reading a book, minding her own business. She was tall, beautiful, white. Kind of had the look of a model, but maybe not. Anyway, the man sitting beside her—he’s middle-aged, totally unassuming until the moment he pulls out his dick. He just starts quietly jerking off. I never thought I would be able to describe a stranger whacking it as “subtle,” but the act was subtle enough that the woman next to him didn’t notice. She just kept reading her book.
Margo starts flipping out on the dude. “Put your raggedy-ass dick away, you lowlife piece of shit.” Something like that. The entire train is suddenly at attention. “You put that away! Away with that, you sick freak!” By this point, the woman has leapt up from her seat and everyone is staring at the pervert, who is now attempting to stuff his cock back in his pants. “This is no place for that! No place at all!” And now people are laughing. Everyone in the train is cracking up, even though they’re witnessing this horrible thing. Margo has somehow defused the whole situation. The train pulls into a stop, and the man flees literally with his tail between his legs.
The pretty woman thanks Margo, who says it was no problem at all. Another man on the train moves to pursue him, but she grabs him and tells him to let it go, that it’s not worth it. By letting the pervert flee, Margo had saved all involved.
What is the meanest thing Margo ever did?
Why do you want to know that?
A person’s not really a person without flaws. I want to have a complete portrait of Margo, not just an idealized version of her.
Don’t get me wrong. She could be mean. She just never meant to be mean, you know? Like, there wasn’t one specific instance I could point to where Margo was trying to be terrible. But there were times when she could be cruel. Mostly when she was drinking. Times when she’d had just a little too much whiskey and she’d see you vulnerable and just twist the knife because she could. She could dismantle any person limb from limb with her words whenever she wanted. That was, like, her X-Men mutant power: the ability to destroy a person. But she kept it hidden, to herself. Did you ever read X-Men?
No. I thought it was a movie.
It was a comic book series first. But anyway. There is this character in it named Jean Grey and she’s the world’s most powerful psychic. Even more powerful than Professor X.
Who is Professor X?
He’s formerly the most powerful psychic. Not important. What’s important now is that Jean Grey is.
Okay, so—
—But a transformation happens and Jean Grey becomes possessed by her powers. Now she’s the Dark Phoenix.
Wait, I don’t—
And suddenly, the world’s most powerful psychic is a different person, and able to destroy entire galaxies. She’s a cosmic-level threat, one even greater than Galactus. I know you don’t know who that is, but his nickname is “Destroyer of Worlds.” So Phoenix is now more dangerous than THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS.
So Margo when she’s drunk turns from Jean Grey to the Dark Phoenix. And that’s when she’s meanest?
What?
I’m just trying to follow.
No, it’s just, like, Margo was very smart—smarter than anyone. She was very powerful with her words. And she could crush you at any moment with them. But she usually chose not to. There were just these rare moments when she drank a little too much and that power slipped out.
When she becomes the Phoenix?
Yes, that’s what I mean. That’s the metaphor. Or whatever.
You realize the point of a metaphor is to make an idea clearer.
Right.
And you’ve chosen a frame of reference that I have no familiarity with.
It’s an imperfect metaphor anyway. The Dark Phoenix Saga ends with Jean Grey suddenly reclaiming control of her body and sacrificing herself in order to save her friends and the universe.
Is that what you think Margo did?
What do you mean?
Sacrifice herself?
What? No. Why would you say that?
Well, the circumstances of her death are vague.
She was drunk and she got hit by a car.
I mean, it sounds like she was drunk a lot.
Yeah, but it wasn’t a problem.
Then it’s not possible that Margo…chose to walk into the street.
I said it’s not a good metaphor. You have to understand: Margo was happiest when she was drinking. Occasionally mean, sure, but mostly she was fun, unburdened. It was a release for her.
And have you had too much to drink?
Maybe. Yes. Just maybe, actually. Unlike Margo, I am not high-functioning after several beers. More than several. Hmm. Are we done with this exercise?
Yes, that was my last question.
Okay, okay. Sorry I got hostile.
You’re drunk and you care a lot. It happens. I actually have one more question.
What is it, Jill?
Do you think you knew Margo better than anyone else?
I thought I did. But I think I just wanted that to be true. You can spend all your time with someone and still not know the entirety of them. All you know is what they’ve shown you. And even the things they show you, you won’t even understand them at the time. You won’t get it until it’s too late to do anything about it.
A_POPULAR_DECISION.WAV
The tribunal had come to a conclusion: mankind was not worth saving.
The debates were civil, sure, but they’d been prolonged—years long by this point. Decades even. A council of Earth’s brightest delegates sent from every country to observe the planet, from the Citadel, a gigantic space station that represented the sum of all modern technology and human effort. It orbited the Earth coolly, from a distance, to act as the moral arbiter of man.
It was strange to be so removed. To witness everything from the cold blackness of space should have made humanity’s appeals clear. But nothing on Earth seemed warmer or kinder than nothingness. In fact, it was worse than space. It was one thing when it was disease. The plague had been a common enemy, one that brought the world together to combat through science and collaboration. Seeing that unfold, even with the massive loss of life, was encouraging. Humankind could band together in times of crisis. The hegemonic shape of society had broken down in the face of survival. It turns out the threat of extinction brought out the best in people.
But while disease was not a man-made problem, everything else was. In fact, it seemed like the eras of prosperity bred the most inequality. Wealth created poverty; inequity instigated war. People loved killing one another to further themselves. It was the only thing that human beings could do efficiently.
In the beginning, the tribunal was more than just a gesture. It weighed in on political matters as third-party observers, all of whom were unaffected by any terrestrial consequences. The idea was that absolute morality could be achieved through total objectivity. In the century since the members of the tribunal had been aboard the Citadel, they rarely agreed on anything. As a result, the council’s advice became largely ignored, its existence merely a symbol. But if there was one thing they could all consent to, it was that things were not getting better.
Earth is burning up. Each year, the global temperature rises three degrees. The sun bears down across the planet, its rays blasting through an atmosphere that has been decimated by just a couple short centuries of pollution. Ah, “pollution”—such a great euphemism when really what we mean is the consequence of humanity.
In just a decade, Earth will be uninhabitable. Hot. No crops will grow. The oceans will dry up. Human life, as we know it, will cease to exist.
But it will be a slow death. Years
of drought, hunger, suffering. Terrible stuff. So the tribunal comes to a conclusion. They set coordinates for the Citadel to collide with the Arctic. The impact will create a tidal wave that swallows the Earth, drowning every human being.
[Margo burps]
And that was humankind’s last great act: taking matters into its own hands. Who knows? Maybe the threat of extinction would bring out the best in people again. Go out on a high note.
[Margo rips an even bigger burp]
Hehehehehehehehehe
VI
Human Resources
I’D UNDERESTIMATED THE RESILIENCE of cruelty. We all had. The customer service floor had now ballooned to nearly forty people. We were running out of space. Emil’s system was coming along too, even despite my attempt to delay it. It had begun auto-flagging suspicious messages, creating a new queue of things to look at, deemed questionable by the algorithm. But no matter how quickly we scaled up our operation—with manpower or technological power—there was too much hateful and toxic language for us to investigate. The more effort we put into it, the more the problem seemed to grow.
If someone was harassing another user on Phantom, we would disable their account after three strikes. But that person could just open a new account and start again, now with a fresh slate. I’d proposed making it more difficult for users to create a new account—maybe force accounts to be tied to a single phone number or email address—but that idea was instantly vetoed by Brandon, since it violated Phantom’s utility to people who needed to be anonymous to change the world. You know, the corporate whistleblowers, the investigative journalists. It didn’t matter to Brandon that, in two years, these righteous folks had never materialized.
The reality is that Phantom was still largely being used by mean teenagers. The other reality was that investors didn’t care about our issues. The only measure of success—and continued funding—was user acquisition. They needed to see that Phantom was growing. Any impediment to growth was a signal that things had stopped working, and that it was time to turn off the faucet to the money.