New Waves

by Kevin Nguyen

  I felt the overwhelming urge to correct her, explain that Victor was only half Asian and that Lucas and I hadn’t really been “dating,” but it seemed beside the point.

  “So what is it called when a guy only dates black women?”

  “That doesn’t exist. But there is a thing where girls only date black guys.”

  “And what is that called? Black fever?”

  “Jungle fever.”

  I waited for Jackie to show some self-awareness about using that phrase, but part of me knew she wouldn’t. I didn’t want to have to explain it to her. Maybe I should have. And I wondered if that was what friendship was: caring about someone enough to keep them from embarrassing themselves. But I didn’t want to take responsibility for Jackie, because I realized that I didn’t care. We’d been friends since college, and I just didn’t give a shit about her anymore.

  As I was leaving the Crystal Palm, I felt a strong urge to call Lucas. I’d wanted to talk to him every day since we ended things, but now I felt it more acutely than ever. I wanted to tell him about Jackie and Jeremy’s terrible engagement. And how she’d actually said “jungle fever” out loud, with zero remorse. I wanted him to hear about how I’d vowed to myself never to see Jackie again, knowing that he would have been proud.

  AFRONAUT3000: I have to be honest—I love it. It’s incredible.

  MINING_COLONY: What a relief! I am glad you like it. And you’re not just saying that to make me feel good, right?

  AFRONAUT3000: There are a lot of things wrong with me, but I have certainly never said a nice thing to someone just to make them feel better. What you have so far is very good. I have some notes, which I have also attached. But so far, it’s very exciting and I am thrilled that you’re even letting me give feedback on this.

  MINING_COLONY: You know you’re really doing me the favor here.

  AFRONAUT3000: If I am, it doesn’t feel like it.

  Week 4

  IT WAS A STRANGE impulse, but immediately after Margo died, I had gone to a copy store and spent upward of fifty dollars to print out our entire message history. I knew I could access it online whenever I wanted, but there was something more permanent-feeling about having it on paper.

  As I struggled to rework the draft of Mining Colony, I referenced my archived messages with Margo regularly, hoping that I could summon some of the energy I’d had to write the book when we’d been talking every day. Instead I’d get lost in the pages upon pages of our messages—reading and rereading just to hear her voice in my head.

  * * *

  —

  AS USUAL, THERE WERE no customers at the Crystal Palm, just Charlotte reading a book behind the bar, delighted to see me, she said, because the book was dreadfully boring. She showed me the beat-up paperback. The title page read The Redemption of Zora.

  “Fantasy? Sci-fi?” I asked.

  “Romance. Basically, a bunch of cyborgs fuck.” Charlotte laughed. “A friend gave it to me, and I tore off the cover because I was embarrassed about reading it on the subway.”

  From her purse, Charlotte revealed the torn cover: the lithe hand of a woman stroking a well-defined male chest, one pec made to look metallic by lazily coloring it silver, set atop an even more impressive set of abs.

  “Cyborg romance is a real thing?”

  “It’s a huge thing. Cyborgs are usually warriors—”

  “Of course.”

  “—and they all have inner conflicts between the cold logic of their robot programming and the desires of their human emotions. Plus, imagine a man technologically advanced enough to actually be good at sex.”

  “The dream, I suppose.”

  “Don’t judge me. I know it’s smut, but I love it.”

  “I thought you said it was boring.”

  “This one is boring.” Charlotte tossed the book to the other end of the bar, which she could do, because no one else was there.

  “I thought you had a girlfriend.”

  “Who do you think gave me these books? Anyway, I am a very complicated woman, who likes other women and men with robot dicks.”

  I stepped off my stool, crossed the room, and picked up the copy of The Redemption of Zora that Charlotte had so ceremoniously hurled across the room. And I started reading. It was…good. No, great even. I’d never read a romance novel before. The writing was effortless, and even though the plotting was fairly by the numbers, I was impressed by how it established characters, moved through scenes, never tripped over itself trying to express an idea.

  And the sex scenes! Sure, they were full of clichés and strange euphemisms, but they were effective, especially the one in zero G, which I was so taken by that I began reading it aloud to Charlotte. I finished the whole damn book at the bar that night, while she plied me with free drinks. She joked that maybe I should write a cyborg romance rather than whatever it was I was writing, and I told her that I would, if I ever thought I could do it this well.

  MINING_COLONY: Okay, this is a dumb question.

  AFRONAUT3000: No such thing as a smart question.

  MINING_COLONY: Why are all computer and internet terms so dumb? I’m obviously not that technically literate, but I don’t understand why everything is a metaphor. Like, as if all our data goes into a magical “cloud,” somewhere in that beautiful blue sky, waiting to be summoned again at a person’s convenience.

  AFRONAUT3000: The way we talk about technology is always in metaphor. It’s the easiest way to describe, somewhat functionally, how something works. But more often than not, I feel like it’s a crutch—a short-term way to explain something that robs a person of a full and real understanding of how a computer or the internet works.

  Like, we always think about files living in folders, a rigid hierarchy. That’s easy to understand because it has a real-life parallel in how we organize documents. But files aren’t actually organized that way. They don’t live inside things. And the image of a piece of paper with information living inside a manila folder inside a file cabinet—that establishes a kind of limitation of how someone understands what that file really is. It doesn’t have to live in one place. It lives everywhere and nowhere at once. It exists.

  MINING_COLONY: It’s funny you say that. In fiction, we use metaphors to simplify things—to make an abstract concept more…palatable? Less annoying? But sometimes I feel like relying on metaphors does a disservice to the reader. They’re useful, when properly deployed.

  AFRONAUT3000: “Properly deployed” is the key. Most people who write the language of user interfaces are not extraordinarily talented, humanistic authors, capable of showing empathy.

  MINING_COLONY: Now you’re just flattering me.

  AFRONAUT3000: Maybe I am.

  Week 5

  I NEVER THOUGHT I would see Michael again, but there he was, sitting at the bar of the Crystal Palm, alone.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Hey, Jill, how are you?” Michael said. “This is like…what’s that word? When something feels like it’s happening again?”

  I knew the term, but I pretended not to and shrugged.

  “Hmm.”

  I sat next to him. I didn’t really want to talk, but I also didn’t want to seem impolite. After all, we did fuck that one time.

  “I’m back in town for work,” he said, explaining himself.

  “Looking for more money?”

  “I sold my company, actually.”

  “You sold Panopticon?”

  “I did.”

  “Well, congratulations.”

  “Thank you.”

  It didn’t explain why he was here, at the Crystal Palm, clearly waiting for me. How long had he been here?

  “Do you want a drink?”

  “I’m at a bar, aren’t I?” I said. “I guess I should buy you a celebratory drink.”

  “Let me get the drinks. I mean, I jus
t sold my company.”

  “So I take it you made out pretty well in the sale?”

  Michael’s grin fell somewhere in an uncanny territory between self-satisfied and still shocked, like he hadn’t yet processed it.

  Charlotte wasn’t working that day. It was some other guy, a beardy dude with classic rock vibes. It explained why the speakers were blasting squealing electric guitars rather than the usual tropical elevator music I’d come to love. We ordered a couple drinks. Michael said he couldn’t get into the specifics of the deal, just that he had felt very lucky and grateful.

  “I can’t tell you who the buyer is,” he said. “I’m sworn to secrecy.”

  Two cocktails later, Michael told me it was a large U.S. defense contractor. He didn’t give me the specific name—not that it would have meant anything to me—but he assured me it was one of the big ones. The biggest, maybe.

  “What does a weapons manufacturer want with facial recognition technology?”

  “Facial recognition—you remembered!” Michael swirled the straw around in his drink. “I don’t know what they’ll use it for exactly, but you can imagine how useful identifying faces in photos and video footage would be to the government.”

  “I think there’s a word for that.”

  “Security?”

  “It begins with an s, but that’s not the word I was thinking of.”

  “Safety?”

  “Never mind.”

  Michael was starting to slouch. I wondered how many he’d had before I arrived.

  “Are you going to stay on with the company?” I asked.

  “Yeah, the deal is contingent on it. There are certain features we have to add and a few quality benchmarks we have to pass first.”

  One drink later and Michael spilled the beans.

  “It only works on white people.”

  “What?”

  “Like, we can identify a white person with incredible accuracy. But if they’re black or Latino or Asian, the technology has a hard time distinguishing them.”

  “So your software is…racist?”

  “It’s not software,” Michael said. “And it’s not racist.”

  “Okay, but it sounds racist.”

  “No, it’s just—it will be fine. The reason Panopticon can’t identify nonwhite faces is because of the original data set that we started with. When we were training the algorithm, we collected hundreds, sometimes thousands, of photographs of people we knew personally. Then we fed that to Panopticon and said, ‘All of these photos are Kristen. Now try and identify when people in pictures are or aren’t Kristen.’ ”

  “Wasn’t Kristen the name of your ex?”

  “Then Panopticon would train itself to know when photos contained Kristen’s face and when they didn’t. And we ran that with a few hundred different people, just to get started. The early days of the company were just me and a couple engineers asking friends and family if we could use images from their Facebook accounts, and also old family photos and any other pictures they had of themselves. Anything we could get our hands on.”

  “So I take it most of the people you trained Panopticon on—”

  “—Were white. Yes. Just at the start, but yeah, it was largely white people, and I honestly never thought about it in the early days.”

  Michael took a moment to collect himself.

  “Also, I can’t believe you called me a racist.”

  “I didn’t say you were racist, just…”

  I was about to make a distinction, but Michael returned to his drink, his fifth since I had sat down. He wasn’t taking the accusation too seriously. But at the Crystal Palm, I was supposed to be Margo. Or more like Margo. Or something.

  Michael laughed more to himself than to anyone. “Thankfully, this defense contractor has the means to supply us with rich data sets to use. And it actually won’t take much longer, since Panopticon doesn’t have to work on everyone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It just has to identify”—and Michael was very deliberate with his language here—“people of Middle Eastern descent.”

  It all made sense now. And what followed was not pleasant.

  “You made software that makes it easier for the government to racially profile people?”

  “Come on, that’s not fair. It’s not racial profiling technology.”

  “That’s what it does!”

  We kept arguing. Michael made technology; he wasn’t responsible for what people did with it. I told him he did if he profited. He said that was unfair, and, without a real comeback, that was the point when he decided to just be a dick.

  “I finished your book, Jill, and the ending sucked.” He drained his drink. “Why was everyone so unhappy?”

  I signaled for the check. We were screaming at each other, and the idiot behind the bar still took his merry time calculating our bill.

  “So why are you here again?”

  “What do you mean? I just spent the last two hours telling you about selling the company.”

  “No, I mean, why are you here. At the Crystal Palm?”

  “To see you, obviously. Is there any other reason to come to this bar?” Michael gestured toward the rest of the room, empty, save for our bearded bartender. “I thought you would be happy for me.”

  “I don’t even know you.”

  “We slept together.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Well, I thought you might want to do that again.”

  “You seriously think I’m gonna fuck you after this?”

  And at that, Michael slammed his laptop shut, tossed it in his messenger bag, and marched out. Poor Michael. Boo-hoo Michael. I imagined him storming off to his hotel room and scanning the internet for that old, magical photo of him and his ex-girlfriend, futilely thumbing through thousands of images, probably jerking off the whole time.

  He had come to the Crystal Palm looking for my approval, and I wouldn’t give it. There was a small victory in that.

  Then I realized that asshole had left me with the bill.

  “Motherfucker,” I said under my breath.

  The bartender thought I wanted another drink and asked me to repeat what I’d said.

  “MOTHERFUCKER!”

  AFRONAUT3000: I was thinking about what you said about technology.

  MINING_COLONY: Oh yeah?

  AFRONAUT3000: About how all the ways we dumb things down to make them seem safer and easier.

  MINING_COLONY: I remember. It was a very specific conversation. Which we had yesterday.

  AFRONAUT3000: Don’t be a jerk.

  MINING_COLONY: I can’t help it.

  AFRONAUT3000: Anyway, I wonder if we lose something else in that language. Like, in simplifying the ways in which technology works, we also lessen the seriousness of it, which allows an erosion of our morality. A transgression suddenly doesn’t feel real or of consequence because it’s talked about in phrases that make it sound like it’s just magic.

  MINING_COLONY: …

  AFRONAUT3000: I committed a crime.

  MINING_COLONY: Wow, okay. Now I’m an accessory.

  AFRONAUT3000: It’s not serious. Well, it is and it isn’t. I should take it more seriously.

  MINING_COLONY: Listen, I murder all the time.

  AFRONAUT3000: Okay, relax. I stole company data. I thought it might impress this boy.

  MINING_COLONY: You stole something to impress a boy?

  AFRONAUT3000: Shut up.

  MINING_COLONY: He must be a hell of a boy.

  AFRONAUT3000: But in the moment, even though I knew it was wrong, it didn’t seem *that* wrong, because what I was stealing wasn’t real. I couldn’t hold it. I couldn’t even really take it. I just had a copy.

  I sort of imagined myself as Indiana Jones in…whatever the first Indiana Jones movie w
as called. Remember the part where he steals the idol, and swaps in a bag of sand? The temple notices that he’s swapped the idol out, either because the sandbag is not the exact same weight, or something mystical about the temple knows that the real idol has been taken. Who knows?

  MINING_COLONY: Right, and the temple sends a boulder to crush him.

  AFRONAUT3000: So imagine instead, if Indiana Jones were able to create a duplicate of the golden idol. Like, a perfect replica. And the temple never even knew the original was gone.

  MINING_COLONY: Okay…

  AFRONAUT3000: And since the temple didn’t know, it never tried to drop a boulder on him.

  MINING_COLONY: Okay…

  AFRONAUT3000: Has Indiana Jones really done something wrong, then? He didn’t take what wasn’t his, so much as he copied what isn’t his.

  MINING_COLONY: This logic is sort of convenient.

  AFRONAUT3000: What do you mean?

  MINING_COLONY: Basically, you’re justifying Indiana Jones’s crimes two ways. First, the temple didn’t try to murder Dr. Jones, meaning he got away clean. Getting away with something doesn’t change the morality of it. Second, the idea that making a copy of something isn’t without consequence. There are now two of that golden idol in the world, meaning that the rarity of the original is lessened.

  AFRONAUT3000: Hmm…I see what you mean.

  MINING_COLONY: Sorry, that’s probably not what you wanted to hear.

  AFRONAUT3000: It actually was. It’s why I asked.

  Week 6

  I WAS THERE THE day the Crystal Palm closed, helping Charlotte more or less dismantle the bar. There were no customers to serve, which was exactly the reason the joint was going out of business, which meant Charlotte was mostly clearing out cabinets and drawers behind the bar. Her plan was to pocket anything that wouldn’t be missed: bottle openers, ice cube molds, scissors—things that she didn’t need but could at least serve as a conciliatory gift to herself, now that she no longer had a job. She stashed a few expensive bottles of booze too, though she knew those would be inventoried and maybe missed.