Version Zero

by David Yoon

  “How much are you making?” said Dad.

  “Enough,” said Max.

  “I heard about this Vietnamese kid down in Spencer who made this app that was some kind of flying bird video game? Made five million dollars in one year.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “One year. Five million.”

  “Good for him.”

  “How’s everything else going, Flaco?”

  “Great,” said Max. “Doing what I love, just like you said.”

  The shifting blue-green water made Max think of a pool party back in high school, back before Akiko dated Shane. It was night. Max sat alone with Akiko at the far edge of the pool in its dim aqua glow, both of them the only ones not wearing swimsuits, and he remembered how her pinky finger crept sideways like a tiny creature seeking a tiny cuddle, and then simply stayed there touching his. They stared without a word at their two pinkies laying side by side.

  Then two strong arms lifted Akiko from behind and tossed her splashing into the water, clothes and all.

  When she surfaced she shot a sexyangry look at a grinning Shane, who, in nothing but his ripped shorts, gave a moon-howl and dove in to retrieve her.

  They’d been together ever since.

  0.10

  How much would you sell your soul for? A million dollars? A thousand? Certainly not free. Certainly not nothing.

  Yet that is what we expect from users every time they donate data to the internet: little pieces of their soul, for free. With every post, every like, and every share, the great internet eye in the sky, the iEye, builds a digital model of their very being. Maybe I sound dramatic. But think about it: You would never give such information away to a stranger on the street. Our phones, however, are a different story. They’re especially designed to make giving away information as effortless as possible. And then companies like Wren sell that information without the users’ knowledge to people who could use that information against them. And we profit from this transaction.

  Doesn’t feel right to me. Not at all.

  Our rights as human beings should not change with every app update or be subject to terms and conditions that no one ever reads. I believe privacy is an inalienable right. Which is why I believe all tech companies, including Wren, must behave responsibly and transparently with user data so that we can make money while still providing people with a healthy, safe experience. I believe that |

  Last saved 13 weeks ago

  0.11

  Akiko Hosokawa’s mother had a superpower. Her superpower was to make large men shrink in size. One man in particular: Akiko’s father.

  Akiko’s mother did this slowly at first. Little jabs in private, then only among friends, and finally out in the open, in public.

  Wide load, coming through.

  When I asked God for a hunk, he thought I meant this bread dough right here.

  The food at home ain’t doing it so I’m gonna eat out, if you know what I mean.

  Before she married Akiko’s father, Akiko’s mother had been captain of her color guard in high school. She threw parties. She got drunk for the first time at age fourteen, and the boy who nursed her afterward called her beautiful, and the boy after that, and the boy after that. There was never a shortage of boys.

  Into adulthood, she worked in sales in order to keep the party going. It did not matter to her what she sold.

  Of all the men she met during this brief, manic time, Akiko’s father was the strangest. Hair, dark. Stature, compact. Observing the world from behind a pair of heavy acetate Cary Grants. Akiko’s father moved about the world very gently, lest he break anything. He was not in sales. He did not do people. He was in the relatively new field of computer programming and knew languages only machines knew: COBOL, Pascal, assembly language. He was not her mother’s type.

  But Father loved Mother in a way no other man had done before. Earnestly. Without question. His sturdy loyalty gave the social butterfly a haven in which to rest her wings, and at the age of twenty-nine they were married. It was the happiest day of their lives.

  Quite literally, because every day after became worse and worse.

  Akiko’s father did not party. He liked to stay home. He worked from his den over a dedicated analog connection, a rarity in those days. He had a distrust for society’s emphasis on appearance. He let himself go while Mother watched in a fresh dress and makeup.

  Akiko’s mother began to flap wildly about her haven, now become unto a cage. Her first affair happened just months after Akiko arrived into this world; by the time Akiko was six, her mother was on her third.

  At the time, Akiko’s father called them Mother’s very good colleagues.

  Later, when Akiko was a teenager, he called them his own personal failures.

  With each failure, Akiko could swear the man shrank a few inches. It turned out the cage was not just for her mother. The cage was for her father, too, and was built of the most unyielding material of all: his own loyalty.

  She knew this because he would never defend himself against her mother.

  I can’t just tell her no, he would say.

  And so her mother wouldn’t stop. Akiko hated the woman for bringing so much pain into the family. Father absorbed it all, becoming numb. Watching television for hours and hours. Any show would do. It did not matter. He went from being a man of few words to a man of no words.

  Except when Akiko took up computer programming in junior high. They spoke to each other, not in English but in LISP, in the airless sanctum of her father’s den cluttered floor to ceiling with striped accordion printouts from years ago. He taught her object-oriented code. They played something called a MUD, or multiuser dungeon, in the Star Trek–themed realm. Father taught Akiko the Vulcan mind meld, which to her delight was a real thing that actually worked.

  The more father and daughter bonded, the more vicious Mother’s attacks became. Flying words became flying objects, flung through the den’s doorway, drive-by style. She smashed the computer monitor; he replaced it. She burned the printouts in the backyard; he printed more. Akiko’s gray, shapeless wardrobe wound up in the trash—Akiko shared her father’s disdain for appearances—and Father simply bought replacements.

  In hindsight, by the time the heavy coffee mug struck her above the left eye, Akiko reckoned her mother, the original abandoner, must’ve felt abandoned by her own daughter and husband and that horrible computer of theirs.

  I can’t just leave her, Father would say when Akiko urged him to. She has a good heart in there. We have to help her find it.

  He sank deeper and deeper into his chair, like the thing was unhinging its cushions to swallow him up. The word weak flashed in Akiko’s mind, and she suddenly had the horrific urge to strike his face.

  Disgusted with where she was headed, she chose instead to be home as little as possible.

  She taught herself how to go out every evening and not come back until very late. Parties, movies, more parties. Anything would do. It did not matter.

  She met a beautiful boy named Shane at a pool party. She called him Mr. Muscles behind his beautiful back. She was seventeen, a junior. She let him touch the scar above her left eye as the tourmaline water bobbed and warped around them.

  Shane asked about it.

  Who the fuck throws shit at their own kid?

  From then on, at every party she went to, Shane would happen to be there, too.

  One night—the final night—Akiko came home to find Mother wielding a fireplace poker, drunk and smashing every framed photo she could find.

  You pick all this shit up, she said. Look at this goddamned mess.

  This can’t go on, said Father. I think we need to find you someone.

  I already have someone, said Mother.

  You could say this was when the Trouble Time officially started. But it had been happening for ye
ars already, hadn’t it?

  Akiko ran far into the void of the night. When she stopped to catch her breath, she found herself in front of an apartment in Delgado Beach.

  Shane’s apartment.

  Shane took her in. He gave her his bed and his food. He gave her all his time, too, canceling his pool clients one by one.

  They stayed one night, then the next, then the next. Akiko reckoned they would only have to stay forty-two more before she finally reached eighteen years of age. In America, that was the age when a child became an adult and was no longer beholden to anyone.

  So Akiko waited forty-two days.

  At Shane’s urging, Akiko wrote letters every morning to her father.

  I’m having the best time ever with my good friends.

  Love you lots and tell Mom I love her, too. Can’t wait to be home.

  And so on, from a different post office every time, leaving a tidy paper trail in case her parents tried calling child protective services or—worse—a lawyer.

  They never did. A desperate, damaged part of Akiko wished they had, even if it put Shane at risk of being accused of kidnapping.

  Forty-two days passed without incident.

  Shane resumed with his pool clients. One of them, some BSD tech exec with a full-size Olympic, an indoor single-lane endless, and two hot tubs, said he couldn’t find good programming talent for shit. Which was how Akiko carried her father’s computer programming flame into Wren’s engineering department.

  BSD stood for big swinging dick.

  Forty-two days became a hundred, then a hundred more, then a thousand.

  Akiko’s father eventually left her mother, sold the house, and retired to a seaside suburb outside Tokyo, effectively deleting any evidence of Akiko’s childhood.

  But, as Akiko’s father would say during their programming sessions, nothing ever really gets deleted. Just flagged as inactive. Then it simply becomes hidden.

  0.12

  Max saw it while scrolling his feed and froze.

  Who is your ideal sexual partner? Take the quiz. This is most definitely not safe for work.

  And another: Could you do better as president? Click here to play.

  His Wren-friends were taking the quizzes and playing the games that he himself had designed. They were sharing their results, which got more Wren-friends to participate and share, which in turn got even more to do the same. Because it was fun.

  Social media was fun.

  Social media was not a bad thing, in theory.

  But theory was never reality, was it?

  It was Saturday. The Soul Project was live. And it was doing great.

  Max wanted a big rock to come out of the sky and crush him.

  “I want a big rock to come out of the sky and crush me,” said Max to no one.

  “What?” said Dad from the other room.

  “Nothing.”

  Max had moved back into his parents’ house to save money. He lay on his tiny high school bed before an open laptop.

  “Are you working?” said Dad. “You need a break, mijo.”

  Dad said this with a concerned pride that made Max’s heart go sour with guilt. YouPool was dead. He did not run an app for a living. He cleaned pools. He was a pool cleaner. It was not the thing he loved. But Max couldn’t tell any of this to Dad.

  Max wished he could be like Dad. Dad, who barely spent any time on his ancient phone or ancient computer. Dad, for whom social media meant calling friends on the yellow touch-tone phone.

  Max wanted to yell and scream at his Wren-friends, to tell them they were unwittingly building a psychographic profile for government use. That instead of the feds spying on us, we were doing the spy work for them.

  But then again, what was the point? Max himself was guilty of giving away personal information to corporations. Like everyone, he skipped the Privacy Policies and Terms and Conditions when signing up for some so-called free video game or whatever. Like everyone, he tagged every photo he took with its location. Like everyone, he scrolled the feeds every day, blithely liking this or sharing that, even though he was aware it was all being tracked and categorized.

  If Max didn’t care about his own soul, how could he expect others to?

  He thought about his vision statement from three months ago. He could imagine publishing it, maybe earning a few likes, and not much else after that.

  His room felt hot and stuffy. He requested a taxi and went to Shane and Akiko’s place. He had to talk to someone. Not just someone. He had to talk to Akiko.

  * * *

  * * *

  Max squinted out at the blinding white beach just beyond the bike path, already filling with families setting up barbecue picnics. The faint arpeggios of corrido music floated in on the ocean breeze. The sky had become tea colored, with embrivant views extending to the black silos of the oil refinery and the mountains beyond. Max stifled the urge to post a photo.

  Why did he always want to post a photo?

  “You want a beer?” said Shane, and rifled a can at him. To Max’s surprise, he caught it without even looking.

  “Holy shit,” said Max.

  “Everything okay?” said Akiko, still in her pajamas.

  “Yeah,” said Max.

  “No,” said Max.

  Finally, Max said, “You know that secret project I worked on at Wren?”

  “What about it?” said Akiko slowly.

  “It was called the Soul Project.” Max explained it. Every detail.

  “I don’t get it,” said Shane, crushing a can and opening another.

  “Baby, they’re selling to the government—”

  “No, I get that,” said Shane. “I just don’t get why people go along with it.”

  “I don’t, either,” said Max. “Even me, just now I wanted to post a picture of the beach. What is wrong with me?”

  Like everyone, Shane was registered on Wren. But unlike everyone, Shane never used it. He was a year and a half older than both Max and Akiko. When it came to smartphone culture, he was about as ignorant as Dad.

  Old Man Shane.

  “You’re addicted,” said Akiko. “Everyone is. I am, too. We post, we get likes, we get this little rush. The Soul Project gives Wren users a new way of getting fresh new likes. And I work at Wren, yay. I’m part of the problem. So I should just shut up, right?”

  “Hey,” said Max. “We tried to do our own thing our own way. It just didn’t work out.”

  “It’s not that it didn’t work out,” said Akiko. Her eyes grew cloudy with regret. “It’s that there was never any room for YouPool in the first place.”

  Max looked at Akiko, who sat seiza in a parallelogram of sunlight.

  “You’re saying it’s all go big or go home,” said Max.

  “Yep,” said Shane.

  “Or hope to get noticed by one of the big guys and get acquired,” said Akiko. “Everything’s just an exit strategy. I need a strategy to exit Wren. We should just quit tech altogether.”

  She stared at the ocean for a moment, growing cloudier and cloudier.

  “You know how the more you drink, the more it takes to get you drunk?” she said. “That’s Wren. The more you post, the more likes you need to get that rush. So you post more, and so on et cetera infinity. In a vicious cycle I help build every day.”

  “Baby,” said Shane, reaching out to her.

  “The internet’s this big turd I keep polishing,” she said.

  They all nodded at this.

  “Okay, so, but,” said Max. “What if we could fix things instead of quitting it?”

  “How?” said Akiko.

  “That vicious cycle you’re talking about,” said Max. “We could break it.”

  “Wren would never let that happen,” said Akiko. “Their whole motherhugging business model depends on
that vicious cycle.”

  “I’m saying you could do it, technically,” said Max.

  Akiko and Shane watched Max drink his entire beer in five long gulps.

  Akiko smiled. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Open your laptop,” said Max.

  0.13

  Here’s User Master, the great big user database,” said Akiko, her eyes dancing. She typed some commands, rainbow-colored text on black, and waited with two fingers pressed to her lips: a leftover gesture from her smoking days.

  Max leaned in. Shane peered from over his shoulder.

  “There I am,” said Max. “1,449 posts, 2,005 shares, 14,280 likes given, 20,606 likes received, blablabla.”

  “Affinities: tech, entrepreneurship, politics, immigration,” said Akiko.

  “Everywhere I’ve been, all the stuff I’ve bought on A2Z,” said Max. “You’re here, too, Shane. We’re all here.”

  “Damn,” said Shane.

  “Do you think we can do it from here?” said Max.

  Akiko typed and typed. “No remote permissions. Gotta go hardline at the office.”

  Max looked at Akiko. “They’ll log your gate entry. You’ll get fired.”

  Akiko touched her lips and thought. “No, we could do it.”

  “Are you sure?” said Max.

  “We could do it,” said Akiko, rising. “Bring hats. And let’s go buy cigs.”

  “You’re not seriously going to smoke,” said Shane.

  “Just trust me,” said Akiko.

  * * *

  * * *

  They wore identical black tee shirts and black jeans: the uniform of the Wren programmer. They wore black boonie hats and black caps.

  It was night. Late.

  They turned off their phones, lest their locations get tracked. They parked a quarter mile from the Wren parking lot. And when they approached the darkened glass village, Akiko led them into a back alley full of grease bins and recycling.

  “Mushin no shin,” said Max to no one.