“Asha, is this thing looking into my soul?” He laughed. And then, for about ten days, he sang “A Whale of aTale” until we had to beg him, for the love of God, to stop.
Got a whale of a tale to tell ya, lads
A whale of a tale or two
* * *
My spring semester coughed on like a pre-penicillin illness. Terrifyingly, Dr. Stein said nothing to me about how I’d been slacking off, she just lost interest in me at a greater rate than I was losing interest in her lab. I told Jules and Cyrus that once we beta-launched the platform, I really had to make up for all the idling I’d been doing. On the first day of May, we sent a link to a curated group of people we had cobbled together from friends of friends, random Facebook groups, and a site called Find Your User Testers. We sent an email with lots of exclamation marks. This will be fun! Help us A/B test our product! We asked them to send us anonymous feedback, tell us if they liked it, if it spoke to them in some way. Our initial outreach was to about three hundred people.
It was Friday. We barricaded ourselves in the house with the TV on a continuous screening of The Expanse and spent the whole weekend waiting for something to happen. Every few minutes, I checked the stats. By Sunday night, about a hundred people had opened the email. About fifty had received rituals from the platform. Eighteen sent their feedback.
This was fun! Thanks for the distraction from my Insta.
Thanks! Except I accidentally drowned my cat while trying to baptize him. Just Kidding! LMAO.
Whoever invented this thing, I don’t know you personally, but I am writing to say that I’ve just had a life-changing experience. It sounds stupid to claim this from just a few minutes on your site, but my mother died last year and honestly I’ve been to every priest, therapist, grief counselor, and shaman in greater New York and this is the first time I started to feel alive again. I put my palms together for you.
This sucked.
Blowing my mind, incredible tech.
“Well, that’s that,” Cyrus said, dusting his trousers as if he’d just finished off a croissant.
* * *
On Monday, determined to make up with Dr. Stein, I spent twenty-three straight hours at the lab. Finally, toward the end when I was standing in front of the water fountain for several minutes without appearing to drink anything, she tapped me on the shoulder and told me to go home immediately. Oh! I thought, she loves me again! And I stumbled home and fell into a deep sleep.
When I woke up, Jules was waiting for me in the dining room with a cup of coffee that had been made disgusting by the addition of grass-fed butter.
“We have a decision to make,” he said. “But it’s up to you, Asha. We’ll only do it if you say yes.”
I took a sip. The butter clung to my lips. “You and Cy want to have a baby, and you want me to be the surrogate? The answer is no. I’m not giving birth to a white-on-white mash-up.”
“We’ve been invited to audition for a spot in an incubator. There isn’t any money—but it’s a space to get ourselves set up.”
I paused for a moment and let his words sink in. “You mean the platform? I thought we were just messing around.”
“We were, but you saw the demo. We could give it more time, find out what it can really do.”
“Why is this on me?”
“Because the incubator is called Utopia and it’s in New York.”
He let that sink in for a minute. Utopia. The holy grail of incubators.
“You’ve got the most to lose, Asha.”
“How did they hear about us?”
“I don’t know. But they want us to go down there and show it to them.”
I wasn’t sure. “Don’t we have everything we need right here, thanks to a generous donation from the Cabot family?” I swept my arm across the gleaming oak dining table. “And anyway, no one really liked it.”
“The sample size was too small,” Jules said. “And the UX was shit.”
“Aw, Jules, you’re hurting my feelings, calling my code all brains and no beauty.”
“Do you want to maybe just meet them, check it out, see if we like it?”
It was all happening too quickly. “I don’t know.” Then something occurred to me. “Why are you having this conversation with me and not Cyrus too?”
Jules rubbed his hand up the side of his cheek as if grating a wedge of Parmesan. “Because he would totally not let us do it.”
He was right. Cyrus would laugh, and then he would talk us out of it. “Well, you know what they say—hubs before grubs.”