I never text Ale because I never know where he is. It’s easier to wait and respond to his messages when he’s in town and calls me to do something. Ale chose the most adventurous path for someone with our education — working in cybersecurity for private clients — while I entrenched myself in the more stable, less morally ambiguous, very much less paid path of teaching at the national university. He at least understands how our worlds have drifted apart, and he always pays the bill when we meet. This last time, he was back after two weeks in Vietnam and messaged me with his desperate hope that if he drank enough he would be able to sleep through the jet lag.
That morning, a student came to my office hours complaining about another professor in my department. The student had a small child, and the professor refused to let her retake an exam she had missed because the child was sick, hospitalized with a fever. I’d just been promoted, and as much as the student was in the right, I told her there was nothing I could do. I’m sure she came to me because she thought, as a woman, I’d have more sympathy for her situation—but of course, I have the most to lose. This would be the first year in my adult life where I’d have a little saved by the holidays, not just breaking even, or worse, just desperately waiting for my annual bonus to pay off my credit cards.
These days I feel like I’m sending lambs to the slaughter. Maybe ten years ago an engineering degree meant a good job at a good company, benefits, the chance to save and buy a home. And the girls, I hoped that they might save the world. Now, all my graduating students are just cogs in the machine, underpaid, and the tech companies are better at skirting labor laws and harassment suits than even the old school corporate giants were. The best of the best end up living paycheck to paycheck in the US on an H1B1 while they work on surveillance tech, class traitors without any benefits, drinking the kool-aid to fit in and feel wanted. I guess, in a certain way, I felt like it was better for this student to learn now to keep her head down or end up with it chopped off.
So I needed a drink as much as Ale did. I told him to meet me at a new spot near the campus, an illegal pop-up in an old car shop that would surely be vacant and covered in municipal signs saying “SUSPENSION OF ACTIVITIES/NO PERMISSION TO OPERATE” any day now. I walked over at five, and Ale arrived shortly after.
The new place was a kind of mezcalería, but one that only offers a small menu and cares more about the semi-grunge aesthetic — all brushed cement and wrought iron — than a complete experience. Everything was “small batch,” that is to say, expensive, except for the option of ordering a thirty-two ounce bottle of Carta Blanca. I ordered one to share with Ale while he had a long conversation with the waiter about the rest of the menu. He was delighted to learn that they had his favorite mezcal, one that can’t be produced on a large scale because the tepextate agave must be harvested wild and takes decades to mature. Between climate change and hipster demand, the plant is surely nearly extinct. Each bottle could be the last. He ordered two shots.
Ale always eats well when he travels. His clients like to show off and are happy to pick up the tab at the best hotels and restaurants, but he also likes to book a few days before or after his meetings to explore on his own. He enjoys corporate excess, yes, but he also considers himself a disciple of Bourdain. He likes to go out, walk around, and ask a taxi driver where he can eat something good and cheap. It is a universal truth that taxi drivers always have a cousin who just opened a spot, just around the corner.
“What was the best thing you ate this time?” I asked. I always ask this, even though I’ll never go to half the places Ale has gone. A long weekend in Puerto Escondido is about the extent of my resources, but I’d rather talk about imagined food than anything tangible, certainly not my grind through the academic year.
“Oh, you know, I’ve already been to Ho Chi Minh so many times,” he said. He told me that the best thing to do was go to the night markets, only now some of them are ruined by TikTok. Ale doesn’t have any social media. “I don’t understand why anyone would have a bun cha photoshoot instead of eating it fresh.” He complained that, in addition to the traffic jams of people posing with their selfie sticks, he noticed that there were more and more stalls trying to gain digital fame with exotic offerings: frog skewers, coconut worms, fertilized duck eggs — anything that could get some extra likes abroad out of morbid curiosity.
“There was even a stand that was really just a photo booth. They don’t actually sell the food, they just rent you a seat so you can pose with it and make your content.” He almost choked on the last word and wiggled his fingers around it in the air. “They even had cobra hearts and worms made from silicone — these kids just hold them up and pretend to eat them for a photo, then return them to the stand.”
“I don’t think I would know what a real cobra heart looks like,” I replied. It all sounded a bit retrograde, more Indiana Jones than No Reservations. “If you’re going to play with your food, you might as well eat it.”
“At least have the balls,” he agreed.
“Have you ever ordered something you couldn’t stomach?” I asked.
Ale paused and took a sip of mezcal. “It wasn’t something I ordered, but yes, it was something they served me. And guess where? In the US. In the West, we all want to act like the ‘freak show’ is in Asia or Africa, but I’ll tell you, the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen on a plate was an hour outside of Denver.”
I laughed. “What? Prairie oysters?” I asked. “Or a Twinkie?”
“First, let me explain a bit,” he said. “So you don’t think I’m a monster.” He winked and smiled. No one ever thinks Ale’s a monster with those dimples. He ordered another round of mezcal and began. “I didn’t think they would be like this—that they would present themselves this way, all backwards, until it was too late.”
“This happened shortly after the pandemic, when I started traveling again to see my clients. It was a relief for a while to be home, just having phone calls. At least it was easier. But after the vaccines were available everywhere, everyone wanted to get back to in-person meetings, mostly because the people who hire me are people who believe that all calls are probably being tapped, and, well, they are. All this is just to say that I was still getting used to traveling again and being around strangers. Something like this wouldn’t happen now, and it wouldn’t have happened ten years ago, or even when I was starting out in my career. It was just another example of that particular time when the whole order of the world felt gelatinous and strange.
“I flew to Denver after a conference in Vegas. You know I love Vegas. I love how raw and extravagant it is. I even suggested to these clients that they meet with me there instead of forcing me to travel to them. Most big spenders love the excuse of booking suites at the Bellagio, but not these ones. An old friend from Samsung who moved to Boulder during the lockdowns recommended me for the gig, but I couldn’t understand anything about the real business in our preliminary calls. I only learned that they had something to do with a project in the metaverse. They sent me a deck with the usual bullshit: some headshots, some buzzwords, some numbers.
“I hate flying to Denver, especially at night. Have you seen that hideous statue? It’s a giant blue horse with eyes that glow red at night. It fell on the artist and killed him, I think, and people say it’s cursed, but it’s really just bad art. And there’s all that crap about the Illuminati, lizard men, and tunnels under the airport runways. As if the people running things would announce their evil plans by putting a demonic horse right over their headquarters. I think the tourism office knows there’s nothing to do in Denver except drink craft beer and eat overpriced bison burgers, so they started the rumors to attract the conspiracy theorists.
“Anyway, I flew out after my last conference cocktail party and landed in Denver just before midnight. My clients sent a driver to pick me up after security. I dozed off during the ride, so I was pretty confused when we finally pulled up in front of a ski lodge. I had booked a room at the Four Seasons downtown. Of course I’ll spend big when the client is paying, but the Four Seasons was also just a few blocks from the office address the clients had included in the NDA I had signed. I was sure I had given the address to my clients and to the driver. I even watched him type it into his GPS before we pulled out of the airport pickup. But there we were, deep in the hills, and my cell phone had no signal. The driver assured me that my clients had insisted on an upgrade. The whole thing was unsettling, but I was too tired to argue. The lodge was smaller than the main resorts I know in the area, but it was well-equipped. I checked in and went to my room, which turned out to be a considerable upgrade: a penthouse suite with a fireplace, balcony, and mountain views. I fell asleep immediately.
“In the morning, a bellboy knocked on my door and offered to escort me to a corporate meeting room. I dressed quickly and followed him downstairs, past the lobby, into a large, wood-paneled room with leather chairs and a massive mahogany table. My clients arrived, two of them, with a typical high-end buffet spread. Our meetings proceeded as planned until midday, broke for lunch, and then continued our discussions until close of business. All fairly ordinary.
“My clients usually like to win me over by booking a meal at an upscale, trendy place for a final meeting. I was surprised when they announced we would be dining later at the hotel’s members’ club. I excused myself to freshen up.
“Back in the suite, I had my first moment alone all day to think. I still didn’t have cell service, and my phone’s battery was almost dead from seeking a signal. The lodge had an open network, but I never connect to that kind of security nightmare. Our meetings had been informal discussions anyway, all superficial bullshit, so I hadn’t needed to go online. I often don’t even bring a laptop to these kinds of meetings—both for cybersecurity reasons and to give the impression of a “white glove” service. These days, you have to show the client that they’re meeting a real human being, not just someone desperately seeking answers in a ChatGPT tab.
“After pouring myself a glass of wine—a Napa Malbec—I took my laptop out of its Faraday bag in my carry-on (I would never travel in the US without one) and discovered that its battery was also totally drained. I should have been more concerned with this—my travel devices are designed for rough conditions—but I wrote it off to the kind of shoddy workmanship and planned obsolescence that is turning everything to trash. What’s that word? Enshittification. Anyway, I plugged in both devices and sprawled out in an arm chair with a view of the mountains.
“By the time the bellboy fetched me for dinner, around seven PM (at least my watch is analog and doesn’t need a network to tell the time), I’d drunk almost all the wine. I left my useless cell phone in the suite and followed him to a club in the basement. Like all the rooms I had seen in the hotel, the walls were paneled in dark, gnarled wood. The only light came from several Tiffany pendant lamps with a dragonfly pattern—real ones I’m sure. Did you know you can tell by the welding? The bellboy led me to my clients, who were seated in leather chairs in a corner of the otherwise empty club. I took a seat and ordered a negroni. I could spot a bottle of Michter’s Barrel Strength behind the bar across the room.”
At this point, I was livid. “I don’t care what the lamps were like or what you were drinking. I just want to know what they were feeding you!”
“If I were as impatient as you, I’d never book any work.” Ale laughed. He took his time ordering another round of shots and even asked to take a photo of the bottle this time.
“You can post it on Instagram,” said the waiter. “Just don’t put the address. We’re trying to keep out the influencers.”
“Oh, don’t worry. It’s just for me.” Once the waiter was safely out of earshot, Ale continued. “With these big shots—the real weird money—you have to be restrained. It’s like catching a muskie: they don’t come around very often, and you don’t want to spook them when they do. I was still waiting for that strong tug on the line, waiting to be sure I had them hooked, and, quite honestly, waiting to be hooked myself. After a whole day of meetings, I still couldn’t work out the business model. I’m in security, not investment, but I don’t sign contracts with companies I think will fail. I don’t send invoices that can’t be paid.
“As best as I could tell, they were doing the same thing everyone was at that time—throwing money at building a virtual world, poaching as many designers and devs from the big gaming studios as they could afford. But I’m no jackass. I spent the flight to Denver scouring my networks. I like to see what my potential clients exclude from their official materials—that’s usually where the real security work is anyway. In my research, I had noticed a few key names on the payroll that they still hadn’t mentioned in any of our conversations: a psych PhD from Stanford, a Harvard MBA, a kid who was already rich from selling off his Silicon Valley AI startup, an executive poached from Ogilvy. Typical A-list desirables for a startup, but then why not shout that from the rooftops? There was another strange one, a restaurateur from Miami. I didn’t think much of her at first—probably just someone finally looking to pay off her debts by getting a desk job in tech. I’ve seen people like her pivot into an overpaid consulting role at a startup with more money than sense, and you know, the margins on food service are so thin.
“They insisted on an omokase for the group, which I dreaded. Who orders sushi in a landlocked city, let alone in such a remote location? I know I can be a snob about these things, but it felt like a real error in judgment.
“A waiter began to bring out tray after tray of sushi and sashimi, and it was fine, mostly edible, or at least almost tolerable thanks to how much and what I was drinking. My clients ordered a bottle of sake, a decent junmai that elevated the whole experience slightly by proximity. Elegance by osmosis. We continued to talk business—the clients still dodging any question that picked at their bottom line. Sure, they had plenty of investment for now. Sure they had some users. They were even clever enough—maybe thanks to the startup kid—to introduce some generative avatars designed to form emotional bonds with their users. But I’ve been around long enough to see how these virtual worlds pan out: most of your users sign up for the novelty, get bored, and return to the real world as soon as you try to charge them a membership fee. Sure, you’ll have some one percent who are so devoted, so obsessed, that they’ll pay almost anything to stay online, but how much can you even charge these losers? A hundred dollars a month? No one who falls in love with an avatar is rolling in cash.
“All this time I was picking at the food without a glance, eating just enough to keep myself from falling over from the alcohol. Like I said, barely tolerable. I’ve had better sushi here from a 7-11 in Ecatapec, let me tell you. Actually, have you been to Tori Tori yet? A bit fresa, but we should go sometime. The omokase at Sushi Kyo is decent as well. Anyway, I was getting tired, literally tired, but also just tired of their bullshit. Our preliminary contract — I never meet without one — would cover my expenses and time for the trip, but a negotiation that doesn’t end in a sale is still a loss. Even after a bottle of wine, a negroni, and a third of a bottle of sake, I could do enough mental math to see that there was no way for their business to become profitable in the long term if all they were offering was a souped up Second Life. And, quite honestly, I couldn’t see why they would want to waste so much money on someone with my expertise. My clients usually have, let’s say, more interesting systems to protect.”
Here he paused and signaled our waiter for one last round, the last of the bottle. “To think of it, have I told you what these clients were like? No, right? Well, a third of a bottle of sake because there were two of them plus me. I know you’ve probably been imagining the typical Silicon Valley bro this whole time, or at least, his Denver counterpart: the Patagonia vest, the Allbirds shoes, the suspiciously engineered hairline, the whole deal. But they weren’t that at all. I suspected once I was on my flight home that they might have been actors, maybe they were hired thinking it was all just some immersive theater gig. If so, they could make it on Broadway. Both were women, both White, both petite, both wearing simple business casual dresses, simple makeup, simple jewelry. Neither Mar-a-Lago face nor all-natural, just something in-between and bland. I suppose it helped me to feel disarmed, not that I’m a machista by any means, but some things are ingrained, you know? You’d meet these women at a party and never remember their names—neither pretty nor ugly enough to make an impression.”
Ale is right. He’s not a machista, but he’s no feminist either. He’s not really anything. Back in our university days, back when we bonded over late nights in the lab, he was involved in something of a political scandal in the Computer Science department. It had started with a personal grievance. Ale believed that one of the senior professors was giving him a hard time just for the sake of it, just because he had joked around too much during lectures. He was so used to being so impossibly charismatic, so beloved, all golden curls and big smiles, always telling a crude joke and then picking up the check, that he couldn’t fathom the idea that someone would be immune to his charms. So, naturally, he hacked into the professor’s university account, scrounging around for something he could use.
He was hoping for something obvious like a misuse of grant funds—tedious but career-ending—but he stumbled upon a chain of inappropriate emails pressuring a female undergrad for sex in exchange for better grades. Ale leaked the emails to the university paper, and that was that: more women came forward, the campus erupted in protests, the professor lost his job, and we all got a passing grade in the course as a default for having the semester disrupted. Ale became a bit of a local hero, and he certainly took advantage of the boost in his dating life. The girl at the heart of the scandal dropped out, but she seems to have turned out okay. I’ve seen on Instagram that she sells real estate in Monterrey.
The worst thing was that, at least for some of us, the whole scandal wasn’t a surprise. There weren’t many women studying in the department in those days—there still aren’t—and we had a sort of whisper network for this kind of thing. We all already knew who the perverts were. The student in question had even asked me for advice about the situation. We were friends, or as much as you can be in a competitive program. I had told her just a week before that it would be best to keep quiet, at least until the end of the semester, at least until we found out about scholarships and placements for the next year. I always envied Ale after that, for doing what I was too much of a coward to do, for doing exactly what he wanted, even if there was nothing moral about his choices. He always kicks the hornets’ nest and wins when I’m too afraid to move.
“With the sake bottle empty and the plates picked clean, I’d had enough,” he continued. “I thanked them for their time, and told them I would be sending a first and final invoice by close of business the next day, once I returned to Mexico City. When I was younger, I would let these things linger. I would walk away from the table, letting them think we might still do business. I wanted to keep my options open, just in case I needed the money. Well, you know I’ve done well enough not to worry about the bottom line like that, and even if I hadn’t, I’m too tired for these games anymore. They thanked me as well, but asked if we might share one last cocktail. I’m not sure why I obliged. Maybe I am a misogynist after all, or just an alcoholic. I ordered another negroni, and they both ordered martinis.
“One of them—again, who could tell them apart? I don’t even remember the names they gave me—asked me if I at least enjoyed the meal. I lied and told them it was exquisite. My clients pay me for my honesty, but as far as I was concerned, I was already off the clock. She asked if I might reconsider if they were a bit more transparent about their planned revenue. Drunk and sour, I told her to try me.
“Of course a global metaverse would never work. Most people, no matter how lonely or depressed they get, crave real things they can touch, not a simulacrum. Better to eat cheap burgers on a bad date at your local bar than look at a pixelated gourmet meal while a virtual sex worker gyrates behind it. And, like I said, there’s only so much you can squeeze from the real losers, the kind of people who have nothing to live for anyway. But the product wasn’t the world. It was the losers, she said.
“At this, I scoffed. Everyone with any sense knows that if the product is free, you’re the product. Even Instagram and Tiktok sell FOMO for the real world, not the virtual. How could they ever scale enough by selling their users’ attention and data? No, she laughed at me, the product was the people themselves. The real addicts would pay anything to stay online, even if anything was a bit of flesh here and there, flesh they weren’t using anyway, flesh they could live without. There was some upfront investment in learning exactly how much flesh they could harvest while still keeping a brain locked in and satisfied with the virtual world. Apparently, she claimed, the meat tastes sweetest when the mind is relaxed and content and the cuts are fresh. But this was just logistics, no different than flying sushi-grade tuna to the mountains of Colorado.
“And from there, it was just marketing, finding the exclusive clientele, the burned out and bored who were tired of chartered yachts and Burning Man, but were priced out of Blue Origin space flights. A middle ground of the obscenely wealthy but still earthbound. The real moneymaker, she said, was marketing the liver as the most precious delicacy. You know they can regenerate almost completely? What a feat of advertising: to trick people into clamoring for the one thing that was easiest to harvest. But that’s why they paid for Ogilvy, I guess. The real work for me was not protecting their users. It was protecting their transactions with this clientele.
“I thanked them again for their time, but I told them I couldn’t be persuaded. I shook their hands and went to my room. The whole thing was so strange, and I was tired of trying to grok it. In the morning, really only a few hours later, the same driver took me to the airport. I flew home, watered my plants, and slept for a day. By the time I was up and running, my fee was already in my account. I never heard from them again, and their whole footprint—the website, the social media accounts, even the LinkedIn profiles of their public-facing staff—all of it was gone. I didn’t try to find them.”
I’m never shocked by anything Ale says. At least, how can I be shocked when I can assume nothing about him? After all these years, his most consistent quality is his unpredictability, and the charm he always has in delivering it.
“Do you think it was real?” I asked.
“Look, I don’t get on a plane just to waste my time. I can spot a gag from a mile away. Were they really cutting up shut-ins to sell as cold cuts? It wouldn’t be the worst thing I’ve seen in this industry. None of my business in the end.”
Ale waved to the waiter and gestured for the pay terminal. He paid the whole bill with a tap of his Black Card. “You know, if you ever want to make some real money, I always have more work than I can handle myself.” Ale makes this offer every time I see him. I don’t think he means it, or at least, he knows I’d never accept. My farce of academic martyrdom is part of what he likes about me. It lets him think he’s not too far gone, to have a friend like me, like how talking to taxi drivers makes him feel like he’s still a working man.
“Or are you asking if I think they served me some of their product?” He stood to put on his jacket. “If they did, it wasn’t worth whatever they were charging for it. Whatever I ate, it tasted like nothing going down, and I spent the better part of an hour throwing up what was left of it in the airport lounge. And maybe that’s why I really said no. I’ve had better organ meat for thirty pesos from a street cart. Ogilvy be damned, you can only sell a bad product once. But you know, the rich have no taste.”
I stood too, and he hugged me, kissed my cheek. “Always good to see you, Laura. Sushi next time, on me.”