As it turns out, even though we have real people sending us real money every month, if we want to keep growing, we have to raise funds. This time Cyrus isn’t opposed; in fact, he’s the one driving things. Gaby and Jules have drawn charts, and all the arrows are pointing up—more users in more countries doing more things with WAI—but we can go further, reach more parts of the world, if we pour money into the platform. And Cyrus wants to get to everyone.
Now that we have a steady source of revenue, investors want a piece of WAI. Woke VC is only one of the funds that come calling, except they don’t call, they send texts, emails, emissaries, and sometimes flowers. One offered to set up a meeting with the pope. Would Cyrus be interested in meeting His Holiness? The only His Holiness Cyrus is interested in is the Dalai Lama, and they will be appearing onstage together in two months, at a conference in Aspen. We have been offered money at sky-high valuations, and when people cotton on to the fact that Cyrus is not swayed by money, they start bigging up their other forms of cred. We are now up to 2 percent, Woke VC tells us proudly. A full 2 percent of their funds go to minority women. They donate to Black Lives Matter. They’re all Democrats. Some of them are even socialists. Would Cyrus like to meet AOC?
Cyrus is still busy doing Cyrusy things. He attends the Mami Wata Society the first Friday of the month. The Athena Club every alternate Saturday. He has become friendly with a group of Shinto priests. Comic-Con is a big commitment, because so many people on the platform ask for superhero rituals. Cyrus has a personal assistant now, a bloodless woman named Eve whom I have come to dislike intensely because she is the guardian of his schedule, and if I want to get a dinner date, there are three competing Google calendars to wrestle with, and Eve’s placid face telling me that two Fridays from now might work for a ninety-minute reservation no more than four blocks away.
Cyrus and I are fine—mostly we just laugh about the ridiculous attention he’s getting, the army of people who suddenly work for us, the millions who crowd our platform. We do this thing where we look at each other and say “Am I me?” And the other one will say “You’re still you, baby.” But once in a while, like right now, Cyrus is frustratingly incomprehensible. It doesn’t seem like there’s time for a single new thing in our lives, but apparently, on top of everything else, he’s redesigning the platform.
“You went ahead and gave Ren directions on the design?”
“It’s just a mock-up. You can come to the meeting this afternoon.”
“I was not invited to the meeting.”
He smiles. “That was an oversight. Please come. I would love to have you there—you have a great sense of design.”
“It’s fine, you do it. Ren can catch me up later.”
“I love you, Asha,” he says. “You know I like to improvise. Let’s try it and see what happens?”
“Sure.” When he raises his fist for a bump, I bump him back.
And that’s me getting Cyrused, where I roll up, fully dressed, to my own irrelevance.
* * *
To get my mind off of whatever Cyrus is doing to the platform, I take a walk around Utopia. The rest of the building is unchanged, except for the new companies whose logos adorn the walls. The latest one is Freud, a matchmaking service that asks people real questions about who they are instead of random ones about what books they like and whether they prefer skydiving or streaming. Freud’s questionnaire is like this:
Would you call your mother a) loving and largely present, b) loving but largely absent, c) unloving but largely present, or d) unloving and largely absent?
They have a small following (who wants to look at the painful stuff?) and a shocking success rate.
In the stairwell, I run into Rory. He’s holding a tiny metal box with great care. “Is that an engagement ring?” I ask.
“It’s much better than that.”
“Yeah, diamonds are not a girl’s best friend.” I follow him downstairs while monologing about the absolute terribleness of diamonds.
We’re at the entrance to his lab, and to my surprise, he touches his finger to the pad and invites me in.
Rows of long benches frame a large open area. Although we are in the basement, there are solar tubes bringing light from aboveground, and bright LEDs directed at the plants. One breathtaking wall is a spectrum of green, from pale moss to dense, bluey emerald. “This is our Popeye Project,” Rory says. “Lots of companies are trying to wean the world from its dependence on meat. We support all of those because, really, whatever it takes. What differentiates LoneStar is that we’re trying to increase the nutrient density of the entire food chain.”
He brings me over to another area, where there are three raised soil beds. One contains cabbage, another a tangle of tomato vines, and the third, he tells me, has potatoes growing underneath the soil.
“We can gene-edit the most eaten plants in the world and increase the protein content of those vegetables by fifty to a hundred percent without altering the taste.”
“Superfoods.”
“Yes, but that term has been hijacked by the upmarket food industry. With LoneStar foods, people can subsist entirely on a plant-based diet without purchasing expensive meat substitutes.”
“Wow. So I can eat a whole plate of french fries and it’ll be like I just inhaled a bowl of raw kale?”
He tilts his head and I realize he doesn’t know I’m joking. “Not exactly,” he says.” All foods will never be equal. But we can substantially increase the nutritional qualities of a vast majority of vegetables.”
I am reminded of his plastic-free commune and feel a surge of tenderness toward him. He’s a geek, just like me. “So what’s in the little box?”
“If I tell you,” he says, “when they come to arrest me, you can’t claim you didn’t know.”
I awkwardly laugh. But again, he’s not smiling. Is it because he doesn’t know how to smile or because he’s actually serious? Then I think, It’s very possible this man is part human, part machine, and that train of thought makes me sad all over again because if I had just gone ahead and built my Empathy Module, then all the robots would be able to smile realistically.
“I’m not afraid,” I say.
He opens the box. At first it looks like it might be empty, but in the corner, I see a tiny insect that looks like half an ant.
“This is the LoneStar tick,” Rory says. “If it bites you, you can never eat meat again.”
I pause. Is this a biological weapon? “Wait, did you engineer this thing?”
“No, it already existed. We are just making them more effective and less lethal.”
“Less lethal?”
“It gives you an allergy to meat-based products. We genetically modified it so that you also become unable to eat dairy, honey, or eggs. But whereas some people react to an allergen by going into anaphylactic shock, the bite from this tick just makes it so that meat makes you very, very sick.”
“Sick as in cancer?”
“As in diarrhea.”
I’m not sure what to think. On the one hand, Rory is insane. On the other, his version of changing the world is way more radical than my version of changing the world. I’m having changing-the-world envy. Rory is looking right at my mouth instead of generally in the direction of my face, and I wonder if maybe he’s leaning in to kiss me, so I jerk my head back because God that would be weird, and thankfully, before either of us tries to register what’s going on, I get a text from Jules. Come to the meeting room now pls. I bolt up the stairs, but by the time I get there, the design review is over. Destiny, Gaby, and Jules are huddled together around the conference table looking wilted and gray.
“It’s okay,” Jules is saying. “We’ll figure it out.” I peer over his shoulder and see a drawing of the site that is unrecognizable.
“What’s that?” I ask, even though I already know.
“It’s the new design,” Destiny says.
“But people like it the way it is.”
“Cyrus does not like it the way it is, so we’re going to change it,” Jules says.
“On the basis of what?”
“On the basis of he’s the CEO,” Gaby says.
I want to say, Oh, fuck that, but I know Destiny and Jules have already gone through the arguments with him and that he’s won. “Look,” Destiny says, “why don’t we mock it up, do some A/B testing, see what people say.”