I try not to, but I can’t help reading the article about Cyrus. I see a photo of Cyrus against a dark blue background, his hair draped across his shoulders. The implication is not that Cyrus is a messiah, it’s that he is the Messiah: the Jesus, Abraham, and Mohammed for our age. I scroll through. More photos. Cyrus looking up at the sky. Cyrus with his arms out in the middle of a field. The organizer calls my name and I am nudged onto the stage. When I look out into the audience, I see a large crowd of hopeful women staring back at me. I attempt a confident wave. Destiny is onstage too—the organizers heard we were friends and they’ve paired us up. I’m happy to see her and trying not to think about the forty-five hundred words all about my husband, the Second Coming.
“Welcome, Asha Ray, we are delighted to have you here,” the moderator says. She’s the same woman who interviewed Manishala Brown all those months ago, a kind of Smart Barbie, bleached-blond hair, big smile, oversize glasses. Right now she’s in millennial-pink everything and holding on to a set of index cards with her gleaming manicure. She introduces me, pointing out all my excellent accomplishments: “Your platform needs no introduction. Many of us have become frequent users of WAI. Tell us, how did you and your co-founder Cyrus Jones come up with the concept?”
“WAI was totally Asha’s idea,” Destiny says. “She’s a genius, plain and simple. For the rest of us, things aren’t as straightforward.”
I shoot her a grateful smile. “Destiny is being overly generous. I’m here because my friends and I decided to take a chance on a crazy idea,” I say. “Cyrus, Julian Cabot, and I were just experimenting with the idea of using AI to give people a different social platform—we never thought we’d end up here.”
Pink Fingernails asks a few more questions about how we got started. I tell her about the s’mores, about working long nights at Julian’s house, about dropping out of Dr. Stein’s lab. Then she flips to a new index card. “And do you personally come from a business background? Are your parents entrepreneurs?”
“They are, actually. They came over here from Bangladesh in their twenties, right out of college. And now they run a small chain of pharmacies.”
“What a sweet story. So I guess you’re used to mixing business with family life? For those of you in our audience who don’t know, Asha and her co-founder Cyrus Jones are married.”
There’s a small rumble in the audience, and then a few people clap. “Woo-hoo!” someone shouts.
“So which came first, the marriage or the business?”
“The marriage, actually,” I say. “But the business followed shortly after. It’s sometimes hard to tell the two apart now.”
More laughter and applause. I’m starting to enjoy myself, but then I feel my phone buzzing in my handbag and I remember Cyrus’s article.
“Your office is in an unusual setting, isn’t it?”
“We beta-launched the product, and the team at Utopia invited us to join them. That was three years ago, and we’re still headquartered there.”
“What is Utopia like? I think some of our audience members are pretty curious.”
Destiny winks. “What happens at Utopia stays at Utopia.”
I gesture to her. “It’s been great to have a friend to share the experience with.”
I get a few more questions about Utopia, which I dodge, all the while resisting the urge to steal a glimpse at my phone. Then the conversation circles back to Cyrus.
“Asha, tell us about the challenges of working with someone and living with him at the same time.”
“Well, there’s not a lot of work-life balance,” I say. “But we like it that way. We’re committed to WAI and we’re committed to each other.” I knit my hands together. “It’s an integrated whole. Like our platform.” I smile, wishing this line of questioning would end.
Satisfied, she moves on to Destiny. Destiny entertains the crowd with a graphic description of how she came up with the categories for Consentify. “The anus is a very contentious area,” she says. “People want to be touched there, but they don’t want to admit wanting to be touched there. So we had to deal with it quite delicately.”
After that point, no one is interested in me anymore. The audience is invited to participate, and Destiny is showered with questions.
“What happens when people consent to being touched, does the consent expire after a certain period of time?”
“What if you are in the middle of sex and you end up doing something you didn’t explicitly consent to?”
“Do men hate it?”
There is a lot of laughter and whooping.
“Any more questions?” the moderator asks.
Someone in the back raises a hand. “My boyfriend and I are about to become co-founders. Do you have any advice for us about how we can keep our relationship and our business together at the same time?”
I decide to play it for laughs. “When Cyrus and I first started WAI, our lawyer told us our marriage wouldn’t survive, so we fired him.”
“Do you feel like people give Cyrus more credit than they give you?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head as if to mean Why would you say that? when really, I’m thinking, Yes, yes, of course, what planet do you think we live on?
“Not a lot of people know that you built the platform,” she says. “Does that bother you?”
The blood rushes to my face. “Not at all,” I say, attempting to cover up the fact that it bothers me like a mosquito bite on my eyelid. “Cyrus was and remains the inspiration for the algorithm. It’s his mind, his way of connecting ideas.”
The moderator says, “I think what our guest is trying to say is, do you feel like maybe he’s hogging the limelight? He does talk about you a lot in this article that just came out, doesn’t he? About how crazy he is about you. But not as much about how you built the tech.”
“We don’t want to be defined by the men in our lives,” Destiny announces. “If there’s a tiny amount of wisdom that Asha and I can impart, that would be it.”
* * *
Afterward, Destiny and I make the minimum amount of small talk, get a handful of business cards shoved into our palms, and we’re out of there and in a West Village café by nine, sharing a plate of truffle fries.
“I could read it so you don’t have to?” she offers, but I’m already halfway through. I start to read aloud. “?‘I had this vision for creating a platform that would help people to connect and coalesce around the things that mattered most to them. It was a natural extension of what I’d been doing for years. People used to call me a humanist spirit guide—I guess that’s what I’m bringing to WAI now, just on a larger stage.’
“He doesn’t even mention us. Doesn’t say anything about how Jules and I dragged him kicking and screaming into this. I wanted to create a platform. Cyrus just wanted to baptize cats.”
“To be fair, the Cat Baptism is one of the most shared rituals,” Destiny says, trying to lighten the tone. “Eight hundred thousand videos and counting.”
I keep going. “?‘I’m attracted to the solitary life, Jones says. You can imagine him in a monastery, although he’d have to cut off that halo around his head. In addition to creating a social network that millions of people are turning to for meaning and community, he is also taking care of his employees—he has just kicked off a mentorship program to give the women on his team the support they need to thrive in their roles.’?”
Destiny tells me to stop reading. “It’s just bullshit.”
I take a shaky deep breath. “That’s my mentorship program,” I whisper.
“Cyrus is telling them what he wants to hear. You and I both know that.”
I’m stammering now, but I keep going. “?‘He’s otherworldly but handsome in an almost comical way. His sentences are long, and when you’re in the middle of one, you wonder, where is this going? But he always manages to bring whatever he’s saying to a satisfying conclusion. Everything he says is mysterious and somehow obvious at the same time.’?”
At least this one is funny. I allow Destiny to laugh briefly.
I get to the last line. “?‘I have to say, I’m developing something of a crush.’?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, another woman in love with Cyrus. Take a number, sister.” Destiny leans over, reads the byline. “George Milos. Guess Cyrus appeals to all genders.”
As we get up to leave, she says, “I don’t think Cyrus is a bad person. He’s just basking in a sea of adoration, and it makes him think more of himself than he should.”
“Where does that leave me?”
“You have a tough gig. No one wants to be married to the guy everyone thinks is going to save the world.”
* * *