“I understand that this is important to you, Cyrus, but surely you can see that preventing people from grieving might also be dangerous.” I turn to Jules. “Jules, come on, you can’t let him do this.”
Jules shakes his head. “Technology allows us to stop doing the things we no longer wish to do. Like hailing a taxi on the street or sending faxes. Nobody wants to confront death. And now we don’t have to.”
“I don’t think death is optional.”
“But it could be.”
I want to bang my head against the wall.
“We have a board meeting in two weeks,” Cyrus says. “I hope you’ll agree that presenting a united front is the best approach.”
Cyrus will not change his mind. The young man who lost his mother will not be swayed. He’s going to take it to a vote, and I’m going to have to decide where I live: in peace with my husband or alone with my conscience.
* * *
I take the subway uptown to get some advice from Mira. She and Ahmed started dating in high school, got married young, waited for a long time for Gitanjali, and through it all, I still see them laughing at each other’s jokes.
“Having a kid is like throwing a hand grenade into your marriage. So we are not exactly loved up at the moment. But the small things make a huge difference—last week I actually slept through the night and when I woke up and I was like, ‘Damn, I am so nice when I’m not tired.’?”
I feel guilty. I’ve been so obsessed with my own life that I’ve hardly stepped in to help her. “I’m a shitty sister,” I say. “It’s just… the whole thing is getting away from me.” I tell her about Cyrus and Marco, how I feel like everyone is ganging up against me.
Mira sighs. She slides her hand across the table and squeezes my shoulder. “Do you think Stevie Wonder changed diapers?” she says.
“Why do all your stories involve poo?”
“Because they do. He has nine children. Do you think he changed their diapers? Do you think he stayed up at night and rocked them to sleep? Do you think he walked them to school in the morning and went to the parent-teacher meetings and cleaned out the crusty bottom of their backpacks?”
“No.”
“And would you want him to?”
I can’t pretend anymore that I don’t know what she’s talking about. “No.”
“No. You would want him to write ‘My Cherie Amour.’?”
The world would be a dark place without that song. “Yes.”
“Someone else had to do all of that.”
“You’re telling me that all greatness happens on the backs of other people.”
“Yes, that is what I am telling you.”
“This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard.” It’s not news to me, but it’s the first time someone has spelled it out this way, like she’s telling me the story of my own life, which is not just my story but a really, really old story that has been playing out for centuries.
“Let me tell you something,” she says. “Last week Ahmed went to a conference for three days in some small town in Louisiana. There’s a hospital, a Walmart, and a separate gun store even though they also sell guns at the Walmart. That’s it. He shows up and he’s the first brown person they have ever seen. I mean, the mayor of this town has actually banned CNN, so all they watch is Fox News.
“So Ahmed just puts his head down, goes to work, comes back, and goes to the gym. Every day he’s working out like a maniac, and then after the workout, he’s going to the sauna. One day he’s in there when this huge white guy comes in. The guy is holding an empty glass. He sits down next to Ahmed, and he holds the glass with one hand, and he points the finger of his other hand down at the glass. And then he starts to sweat. He’s sweating like a slab of cheese on a hot day. The sweat pours down his body and down his arms, and he’s still pointing at the glass he’s holding, which is filling with sweat. And in, like, two minutes, the glass is full. And do you know what he does?”
“What?”
“He throws that shit on the ground. It splashes up, and drops of it hit Ahmed in the face.”
“And Ahmed is just sitting there?”
“That’s what I asked. I was like, ‘Dude, why didn’t you get out of there,’ and Ahmed said he hadn’t been that relaxed in months, and I was like, ‘Fair enough.’ So finally, Ahmed gets up the guts to say, ‘Please, would you mind not doing that?’ And do you know what the guy says?”
“What?”
“He said, ‘I hate Hillary.’?”
Mira starts to laugh, and I follow. “Shit,” I say. “Really?”
“Swear to God,” she says. “I could not make that up. This is the world we live in.”
“Guess it puts things into perspective.”
“So the question is, are you Stevie Wonder, or are you the person who gave him all the time in the world to become a legend?”
* * *
Cyrus begins as only Cyrus can.
He puts up a slide of a white telephone booth in a meadow overlooking the sea. “This is Otsuchi, in northern Japan. When the tsunami hit this town in 2011, ten percent of its population was killed. One of the local residents set up this phone booth to talk to his cousin, who had disappeared in the tsunami and was never found.”
Inside the phone booth sits an old rotary phone.
“The phone booth has become a place of pilgrimage. It doesn’t connect to anything, yet thousands of people come here every day. It’s called the Phone of the Wind, because people’s voices, their messages to the dead, are carried through the air.”
Now he brings up a slide of the death messaging app.
“AfterLight uses Asha’s algorithm, the same one that powers WAI, to allow users to continue their conversations with their loved ones who have passed away. With AI and data gathered from the platform, it creates an authentic simulation of their online voices.”
He doesn’t present a sample of the tech. He doesn’t need to. Everyone is sitting silently, imagining what would happen if they could suddenly bring a dead person to life.
Craig looks tearful, but I can’t tell if it’s because of what Cyrus is saying or because he’s coming to an understanding of how much money this thing is going to make him. He gets up, walks over to Cyrus, and puts out his hand. Cyrus shakes it. They gaze at each other solemnly.
Then Gaby says, “With all due respect, Cyrus, this is not a good idea.”
Cyrus looks genuinely confused. “Why not?”
“Because the tech can easily get out of control,” I say.
“And because it seems wrong,” Gaby says. “Asha warned us months ago about Marco, and this is the evidence.”
“We have rigorous principles of consent around this thing,” Cyrus says. “First of all, the person has to agree to it while they’re still alive. This means, in the case of accidental death, the Obit.ly tech can’t be used.
“Then each person in their network has a choice. Do they want to hear from their departed loved one? If so, under what circumstances? How frequently? And of course, they can cancel their subscription at any time.”
I say I don’t think that’s enough. “If something goes wrong, the stakes are too high.”
“What we do can go wrong at any time,” Cyrus insists. “People have agreed to allow us into the most intimate parts of their lives.”
“Yes, and we cannot abuse that trust.”
“No one is abusing anyone’s trust,” Craig groans, waving his hand as if I’m turning something super-casual into something boringly complicated.
I’m not sure when I decide to dig in, but I find myself saying, “You can’t release this. I will vote against it.”
Craig leans back in his chair. “Then you will be removed from the board of this company.”
“Hold on,” Cyrus says. “You can’t do that.”
“Read the articles of association, man. I can call it to a vote. Majority wins.”
Everyone stops moving. We’re a canvas, captured in time by an artist, titled The Fun Is Over.
“I don’t think Asha’s a value add anymore,” Craig says.
Cyrus takes a deep breath. “If she goes, I go.”
“Cyrus, you’re not going to quit. First of all, your contract says you have to give us twelve months’ notice. And anyway, this is your flock. You’re not getting out.”