The cafe downstairs is vegan, nut-free, gluten-free, and actually free. All you have to do is fill out a survey on your way out. We get three coffee hemp mylkshakes with extra CBD shots and settle ourselves in a corner with a view of the Hudson.
Cyrus is gazing out the window at the pier. I can feel him silently judging me. He’s here but he’s not here—he’s said yes, he’s shown up at Utopia, he’s moved into my parents’ house, and now he sees the whole thing for what it is, a shallow and pointless adventure.
“I’m going to start working on v2 of the platform,” I say, falling back onto what I know best. “That’s obviously the next step.”
“I’ll get into the business plan and start thinking about fundraising,” Jules says.
Cyrus breaks away from staring at the Hudson and turns to us. “I think we should take a step back and put everything on the table,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I want us to talk about our deepest fears. Jules, can you take notes?”
I say, “I’m worried my parents will hear you and me having sex.”
“I’m not going to write that down,” Jules says, groaning.
“Please take it seriously, Asha.”
“Okay, fine. I’m worried Li Ann is going to kick us out when she finds out how normal we are.”
“I’m worried I’ll embarrass myself again,” Jules says.
“I’m worried we’re going to become evil like everyone else.”
“This is great,” I say. “This is super productive.”
“You don’t just become evil,” Jules says. “It’s not contagious.”
“I’m worried it will get away from us and we’ll lose our moral compass.”
“With you in charge? No way.”
“I’m not in charge, remember?”
“Right.”
Cyrus continues. “I’m worried people won’t have anywhere to turn to if something goes wrong, if the ritual they get isn’t right or they want to change something,” Cyrus says.
At least he’s trying. “Good idea,” I agree. “We need some way for people to talk to us, and to each other, about how the ritual is working for them.” I scribble Messaging service on a piece of paper to remind me later.
“Maybe they can upload photos,” Jules suggests.
“I don’t want to turn into Instagram,” Cyrus says.
“It’s not Instagram, it’s insta-religion.”
“It’s not religion.”
We have the debate all over again. The whole point is that we are giving people an alternative to religion, but we always have to skirt around religion in order to do that. And every time we mention it, talk about God or fate or creation, Cyrus freaks out, as if we’re handing him a crown of thorns.
“People need to hold on to something,” I tell him. I am thinking about my mother, how for years she had refused to enter a mosque, but lately, I’ve found her peppering her sentences with “Inshallah, God willing,” and once I even caught her kneeling on the carpet in her bedroom, her body angled in a direction which I assumed was east, toward Mecca. “When they get old, or when something bad happens to them, people need belief systems.”
“So we’re just going to create one more thing for people to blindly follow.”
“Think of it as a set of choices.” I don’t have to explain it to him—Cyrus knows exactly what we’re doing.
“This is important,” Jules says. “And only you can do it.”
Cyrus nods. Once again, he is dragged off the fence. But just barely.
* * *
Destiny reads me the gym schedule. “Upside-down yoga at six a.m.,” she says. “Water yoga at seven. Hot yoga at eight.”
“What time is the Very Hot Yoga?”
Instead of saying “There is no very hot yoga” or, worse, “Should I put in a request to the Wellness Committee?,” she says, “It’s right before Unbearably Hot Yoga,” and so we become friends. Around eleven, when I start to get hungry, she brings me an overpriced donut from the diner across the street.
“I love New York,” I say every day after the last bite.
“I love bread,” she says, nodding.
After a few weeks I get up the courage to ask her about Consentify. “So, what’s your app going to do?”
“It’s going to make you sign a contract every time you want to touch someone.”
“Hm. Do you think, maybe—” I start to say.
“That we’re killing sex?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the question everyone asks.”
“Sorry.”
“I really don’t mind. It’s good to get your fears out—it’s the only way we remake the world. First of all, every sexual encounter should be consensual—agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“But the very basis of our culture tells us that the gray zone, the space between what you know and what you don’t know about your partner—that’s the sexy part.”
“Isn’t it?”
She looks down at her hands, brushes an imaginary bread crumb from her leg. “No, it isn’t. We have to unlearn the meaning of seduction. We think it’s all about mystery, that it’s about what we don’t know, rather than sharing something we agree to beforehand.” There are little patches of red climbing up her neck. “Feeling that bit of tension, where you don’t know what the person is going to do, are they going to unbutton your shirt or put their hands on your crotch, what is that?”
“Anticipation?” I ask.
“Fuck no. I want to live in a world where women aren’t afraid.”
I can’t disagree. “Tell me how it works.”
“You list all the things you’re consenting to, and then you both do a facial-recognition thing, and that’s your signature.”
“You write it all down?”
“No, you just swipe over the parts you consent to having touched.”
I want to ask where the idea came from, but something about the way her voice seizes up tells me I should leave it there. She pulls out her phone and points to her screen, which has a diagram of a body. I roll my finger over the chest, the abdomen. Breasts pop up on the screen. Upper diaphragm. Touching, kissing, fondling. I press on all three words and they light up.
“Maybe you should give her a name.”
“It’s gender-neutral.”
“Maybe you should give them a name.”
“Maybe.” She taps on her keyboard. Turns to a woman on her left with curly red hair. “What do you think, Maisie? Should we give the consent image a name?”
Maisie pulls the headphones from her ears. “Sorry, I was watching The Sound of Music. It relaxes me.”
“The ditched baroness was the best character in that movie,” Destiny says. “What was her name?”
Maisie Googles. “Baroness Elsa von Schraeder.”
And that’s how Von is born. A few days later Maisie brings an inflatable doll to the office. It leans against the Pulp Fiction poster and wears a sweatshirt that says BRAINY.
* * *
Sometimes Cyrus, Jules, and I take our packed lunches to Hudson Yards and judge the terrible people it has attracted. “One day we are going to be just like them,” Jules predicts, watching the tourists with gilded shopping bags heave themselves up the metal spiderweb.
“Cyrus won’t let that happen, will you, Cy?”
“I won’t, I promise.” His hand is warm on my hand.
We gossip about the other people at Utopia. Jules was on the admissions committee for the first time last week. “You will not believe the crazy shit people are pitching.”
“Did any of them get in?”
“Li Ann gets final call. But I voted for Buttery.”
“Please say it’s something to do with cultured milk.”
“No, Asha. It’s buttery as in Buttery.”
“If I ask you not to tell me, you’re going to tell me anyway, right?”
“Yup.”
“Go on, Jules, just say it.” Cyrus laughs.
“It’s simple, really. First, there’s a jet spray that cleans your asshole. Then there’s this other squirty thing that moisturizes. Hence the buttery.”
“That’s it?”
“You subscribe to the moisturizer. Customized scents.”
“Well, at least after the apocalypse, your people can aspire to have the clean buttholes that brown people have had for centuries.”
“You’re telling me your people have cleaner butts?”
“You’re telling me you don’t know about Muslims and ass-washing?”
“I can attest,” Cyrus says. “She washes her butt. Now I do too.”
“When I went to college, my mother was like, ‘If I’ve taught you anything, it’s to wash after you go to the toilet. Please don’t just use paper, that’s disgusting.’ By then I was already indoctrinated.”