Twenty-Seven
TWENTY-SEVEN
RIKI
Riki has never liked Ocean Beach. He knows he’s very biased, but having grown up spending his vacation days on the gorgeous beaches of Bali, Riki considers Ocean Beach a vastly inferior beach. For one thing, the water is always stunningly cold, even in the summer. For another, the... vibes just aren’t right. He realizes this isn’t a very cogent argument, but some places are beachy places. You know it once you arrive at the airport. Like Bali, for example. As soon as you land at the Ngurah Rai Airport, everything around you screams: Beach vacation! The air carries with it the smell of the ocean, clean and fresh, and there are plumerias everywhere and everyone is relaxed. But here in San Francisco, no one is relaxed. Everyone is erging (why can’t they just freaking call it rowing?) and eating acai smoothies out of coconut-shell bowls, but they’re also yelling into their smartphones and checking their Apple Watch every ninety seconds to make sure that they’re getting in their ten thousand steps while negotiating multibillion-dollar deals. And on the border of this bustling city, there’s Ocean Beach, the place where these techbros are supposed to go on their downtime. Riki went once, with his colleagues, and never again.
But what Vera wants, Vera gets, and that is why Riki is now at Ocean Beach at six in the morning. It’s Sunday, he should be in bed, but nope, here he is, freezing his ass off and glaring bitterly at the sea as he struggles through the sand toward where Vera is standing.
“Riki!” Vera shouts, waving both arms. “Over here!”
It’s obvious he’s seen her, he’s literally walking toward her, but still Vera calls out. The corner of Riki’s mouth quirks into a smile. Vera is quite possibly the most vexing person he has ever met. But somehow, he can’t not see her as an honorary mother figure in his life. Something about her makes him feel like everything will be okay. Nothing bad can happen with a Vera in your life.
“Ah, good, finally you are here,” Vera says. “You don’t see me waving back there? Why you don’t wave back?”
“I did,” Riki says.
“Hmm.” Vera doesn’t look convinced. “Well, anyway, I am glad you are here, because I have a question to ask you.”
“You asked me to meet you at the beach at six in the morning to ask me a question? What’s wrong with texting?”
“Ah,” Vera says with a cunning smile. “If I text, then there will be permanent record of the texts, and this is sensitive question.”
Riki’s still too baffled to be nervous, but now he’s growing uneasy. “Okay...”
“So I look in Marshall’s computer—”
At this, Riki hears a keening sound in the center of his skull. It’s his brain shrieking, Oh nooooo. Somehow, he manages to not freak the hell out. “How did you get access to his computer?”
Vera tuts and flaps a hand at him dismissively. “Aiya, don’t ask such irrelevant questions. As I was saying, I look in Marshall’s computer and I find a folder with your name on it.”
Oh god. He’s going to have a heart attack. He knows it. This is how he perishes at the young age of twenty-five, being questioned by an old lady who must surely be an undercover CIA agent.
“I open the folder,” Vera continues, unaware of or maybe choosing to ignore Riki’s horrified expression, “and inside is something called ‘Scalping Bot 2.’ I open up the program, but of course I just a simple old woman, it doesn’t mean anything to me.”
A glimmer of hope appears in the screaming mess of Riki’s head. Maybe Vera doesn’t know after all. Like she said, she’s just a simple old woman, she won’t figure—
“So I search for it in the Google.”
Oh shit.
“And it’s very interesting result. It take a while for me to understand what a scalping bot is.”
Why hadn’t Riki thought to rename the bot to something else? But nooo, he had to name it “Scalping Bot” like a freaking idiot.
“It looks like there are many different kind of scalping bot, but they all want to do one thing: scam people.” Vera looks at Riki sternly. “Are you scam artist, Riki?”
“No!” Riki cries. But then his conscience catches up with him and he chokes on it. He can’t lie to Vera any more than he can lie to his mom. “Sort of?”
“Hmm.” Vera narrows her eyes. “Well, you better tell me everything then.”
···
This is how it began: with his little brother, Adi.
Adi was an oops; Riki was already thirteen by the time Adi was born. His parents had only wanted one kid because kids were expensive, but then came Adi, and that was that. For the first few years, Riki had largely ignored Adi. It wasn’t that Riki didn’t love Adi, or was jealous of him. No, it was that Riki was a teenage boy and wasn’t very interested in a wriggly, squally baby, nor an energetic toddler who got into everything. But when Adi was four, he came home from nursery school with a tennis ball, and that evening, the two brothers went outside and threw the ball back and forth. Adi asked Riki questions about what it was like being seventeen, and there was such a sweet earnestness in the way Adi talked and the way that Adi looked up to him that Riki felt a sudden surge of fierce, protective, brotherly love. He looked at Adi and thought: I would do anything for you.
Their friendship blossomed. Adi was a rambunctious kid, and Riki was always a sweet-natured boy, and somehow, the combination worked. Whenever Riki came home from school, Adi would be looking out the window, waving madly when he spotted Riki down the street. But while Riki excelled in his studies and managed to get a visa to work at a tech startup in Silicon Valley, over the next few years, Adi continuously failed his classes. Riki finally told his parents that maybe Adi had a learning disability. They looked up the right therapists and scheduled an appointment for an assessment.
The results were both a blessing and a curse: Adi did not have a learning disability. In fact, Adi was gifted, and that was why he found his classes incredibly boring and hard to pay attention to. This was only a blessing insofar as it made for a good story to tell all their friends and family, but in reality, it was more a curse, because there were so few programs in Jakarta for truly gifted kids. At nine years of age, Adi was placed in the grade above him; then when he found that too easy, he was moved up yet another grade. That was when the bullying started. He began coming home with bruises on his skinny little body. It was clear that simply advancing him ahead of his age-group wouldn’t work. He needed a proper school for gifted kids. Riki looked up international schools and began the mind-breaking process of applying to various schools all over the world: Singapore, Australia, the States.
Slowly they received acceptance letters. Partial scholarships. It turned out there were many gifted children all over the world, so many schools were only giving out partial scholarships. Even with the scholarships and grants, Riki was going to have to find a way of making more money. His job at the tech startup paid enough for him to have savings if he stuck to instant ramen for all his meals. Every cent of his savings was sent home to Indonesia. He applied for loans, but being a foreigner from what was considered a third-world country, he was rejected.
Try as he might, Riki couldn’t find a way to help finance Adi’s education, and the more time went by, the more depressed Adi became. Their video calls showed Adi getting more and more sullen, his eyes going from bright and hopeful to losing their shine. It gnawed at Riki. In addition to his day job, Riki started taking on freelance programming jobs, working through to three a.m. before waking up at seven to commute to Mountain View. After three months of this, he was so exhausted that while making instant ramen, he mistakenly poured the scalding-hot water onto his left hand instead of into the bowl. The pain had been unimaginable. He’d shrieked so loud that his neighbor had banged on the wall and gone, “ Shut up! ” He ran to the kitchen and placed his hand under the cold tap and cried. After he bandaged up his hand, he logged back on to the freelance website.
And that was when he found Marshall’s job ad.
Looking for programmer to make a bot. Pay: $25,000.
Twenty-five thousand dollars. The number seemed ridiculously huge. Coupled with the partial scholarship, it would easily cover Adi’s education. With a trembling hand, Riki clicked on the job ad.
The truth was, Riki would absolutely do anything for Adi. And so when he met up with Marshall in person, and when Marshall told him more details about the sort of bot he needed, Riki knew it was a malicious bot. A scalping bot, designed to scam the NFT market by driving Marshall’s NFT prices up artificially while driving down the prices of other NFTs. It went against every fiber in Riki’s soul, but there was nothing he wouldn’t have done for Adi. And so he shook Marshall’s hand, feeling like he was giving a piece of himself to the devil, and he started working on building Marshall’s bot.
When the bot was done, Riki sent it to Marshall and received a payment of one thousand dollars. One thousand dollars was a lot of money, but it sure as hell wasn’t twenty-five thousand dollars. It wouldn’t even pay for Adi’s airfare to SFO. When Riki demanded the rest of the money he was owed, Marshall laughed and said, “You should count yourself lucky that I’m even paying you for such a simple job. This is the kind of thing that any shitty programmer on Fiverr would do for ten bucks. Now, stop harassing me or I’ll inform the company you work for that you just created a scalping bot. Let’s see if they’ll want to renew your work visa then.”
And that was that. Riki couldn’t believe how stupid he’d been. There was no contract agreement between him and Marshall, of course there wasn’t; neither one wanted to have such a thing on record. But why hadn’t Riki insisted on a down payment, at least? He’d just been so desperate, so ready to grasp at absolutely anything. And now he’d not only been swindled, he’d been swindled over a completely unethical program that was going to scam many people out of money. Fury and anguish took over Riki. Why were their lives so goddamn hard? He’d worked himself to the bone at school, and now at his job, and still he was somehow failing his family. Meanwhile, men like Marshall did whatever the hell they wanted without any consequences.
Well, no more. Riki looked up Marshall’s address and waited outside his house one evening. When he saw Marshall’s car leave the driveway, he followed. Marshall stopped at a swanky restaurant and tossed his car key at the valet while Riki quickly found street parking. He hurried inside the restaurant and found Marshall talking to the hostess.
“Marshall.”
Marshall turned, smiling, but his smile froze when he saw that it was Riki. Riki saw three lines of scratches down Marshall’s cheek.
“What the—” The rest of his words were interrupted by Riki’s fist crunching into Marshall’s face. The hostess screamed. Glasses stopped clinking; conversations halted in mid-sentence. And it dawned on Riki what a horribly stupid thing he’d just done. Horror flooded him and he ran outside. Someone shouted at him to stop but he ran down the block, hopped into his car, and floored the gas.
He sped all the way home, his breath coming in and out in little gasps. Back at his apartment, he hid in bed like a little kid and waited for the cops to arrive. Because there was no way in hell someone like Marshall would let this go. Riki squeezed his eyes shut and willed himself to disappear.
But the night passed, and no cops came by to arrest him. In the morning, Riki went to work and nobody looked at him funny. They all went about their business normally. Riki wondered if he’d dreamt the whole thing up. But no, his knuckles were still bruised; working the keyboard was painful. Then the next day, he read about Marshall’s death in the news. Marshall had died on the very same night that Riki had hit him. Had he damaged Marshall’s brain, leading to his death? Had he murdered a man?
And that was why he had to go to Vera’s teahouse. Because Riki thought that things had been bad before, but murder... he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he found out that he’d killed another human being, no matter how accidental it was.
···
Vera regards Riki for a long time after he’s done talking. Riki’s insides are churning crazily, but in a strange way, he feels better after spilling everything.
When she finally speaks, she says, “Well, now we know your punch is not as strong as you think.”
Okay, Riki wasn’t sure what Vera would say, but it was definitely not this. “Huh?”
“Your punch didn’t kill him. It was pigeon, remember?”
“Oh, right.” A shrill, nervous laugh escapes him. “Yeah. You have no idea how relieved I was when I heard that. This whole time, I was wondering if I was a murderer...” His voice cracks and he has to stop to blink away the tears.
“Oh, if I know earlier, I would have told you, you obviously don’t have enough upper-body strength to kill a man with one punch.” Vera reaches out and pinches Riki’s bicep. “See? Too soft. You should do more muscle training.”
Riki laughs through his tears. “You’re right, Vera.”
Vera pats his shoulder. “Yes, you will learn that I often am. Hmm, okay, so you are not killer.” She seems somewhat disappointed by this. Riki wipes at his eyes as Vera takes out a notebook from her trolley bag and opens it up, licking her finger and flipping through the pages. “Ah, here is your suspect page.” She takes out a pen and crosses out his name. “Oh no, that leaves Julia and Oliver. Oh, but I like Julia very much. And Oliver is so sad, he is like sad teddy bear. I would feel very bad if I have to send him to prison.”
“But you would’ve been okay if it was me?” Riki says, finding this both horrifying and yet hilarious at the same time.
Vera snaps her notebook shut. “Aiya, asking such silly question. Of course not. I care about all four of you. It’s too bad that one of you is Marshall killer, but oh well. We won’t dwell on such inauspicious things. Now, since you are not killer, we shall have a picnic. Help me unload this.”
Riki does as he’s told, bending down to take out various Tupperwares from Vera’s trolley. There is an astounding amount of food. “So you brought all this food here, but you would’ve let it all go to waste if it turns out I did kill Marshall?”
Vera sighs as she shakes out a picnic blanket. “Aiya, of course not. I invite Sana. She and I would have eaten all this food ourselves if it turn out you are killer. You would be in a police car, I expect.”
“Sana?” Riki’s heart starts hammering at the mention of her.
“Yes, oh, there she is!” Vera waves madly at a figure in the distance. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she hollers, “ Sanaaa! Over heeeere!” The figure waves back, but Vera continues shouting.
“I think she’s seen you,” Riki says. “You can probably stop shouting now?”
Vera harrumphs and turns her attention back to unboxing the food. “Oh, now that we know you and Sana both not killers, you can date each other.”
“What?” Riki hates the way his cheeks immediately burst into flames.
“Don’t act so innocent, I see how you look at her. But I care about Sana, so I have to make sure that you are not killer before I give my blessing. Now you have my blessing, so you may pursue her. Tch, don’t just stand there gaping like fish! Keep taking out the container, there are still so many left.”
And as Riki resumes taking Tupperware containers out of the surprisingly large trolley, he realizes that for the first time in months, he feels lighter. The anvil that has been on his shoulders is still there, but it’s as though Vera has taken up a position next to him and is helping him lift it, just a little. Just enough for him to take a full breath. He glances at Vera and feels, for the first time, immensely grateful for her unexpected presence in his life.