“If we’re accepted, we’ll only have twenty-four hours to decide,” Jules says.
Cyrus makes tea. The kettle takes about a thousand years to boil, and while it’s boiling, we do some eye-contact Ping-Pong where we all look at each other and glance away multiple times. Finally, the tea is in front of us. “I understand why you didn’t tell me,” Cyrus says.
Jules mumbles something about how he wasn’t actually afraid of Cyrus.
“So, just to be clear—you both want to do this? Asha, you’re going to, what, drop out of grad school?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “The place is so cool. Everyone looks like they came out of a gene-editing experiment. And they are making plans—actual plans—to save humanity from the apocalypse.”
“And what happens to the platform?”
“We figure out how to make it faster and smarter and prettier, and then we send it out into the world.” Jules pushes his arms out like he’s freeing a pair of doves.
“A startup,” Cyrus says. “Like social media?”
I know how Cyrus feels about social media. “We don’t have to call it that.”
“People are going to sign up and make connections with each other and we are going to somehow profit from it. What else would you call it?”
“You can take a bad thing and make it better,” Jules says.
“This is all moving too fast.”
“Look,” I say, “we’ll try it out, see what happens—give it six months. If it doesn’t work, we’ll come back. Not like we have major things going on right now.”
“PhD not major enough for you?”
“People drop out of their PhDs all the time. I’ll get back to it at some point.”
“Well, if you want my blessing, the answer is no.”
“Aw, Cy, man, you’re being such a downer.”
“Technology is grotesque, you two both understand that, right?”
“Don’t patronize me,” I say. “I know it’s not perfect.”
“It’s not imperfect, it’s evil.”
“You sound like my sister.”
“It spies on you. It mines you for data. It extracts your soul and then sells it back to you. It’s designed to make you spend money so you’re too busy shopping to notice the world is burning down. The only way I’m going to be a part of it is if we’re doing something to fundamentally change it.”
“You want to be Robin Hood,” Jules says.
Cyrus leans against the counter, stares hard at Jules. “I am what I am.”
He has the zeal of a Scientology pamphlet, but I can’t totally disagree with him. Maybe the platform wasn’t going to take over my life, maybe it wasn’t all me, but it certainly was him. It was his person, his thoughts, all the things he’d read and learned, everything that meant something to him, and something even deeper, his ability to look into people and see what they needed, not what they said they needed but some kind of yearning inside them that they didn’t even recognize in themselves. “Li Ann wants us in the incubator precisely because we’re doing something new. That’s why she’s interested.”
“We take you for granted, Cy. All your weird ideas could actually blow people’s minds,” Jules says.
Cyrus shakes his head. “It’s just— We have to think about the impact. Most of the time I deal with people I have some connection to. If it’s remote, I can’t predict what’s going to happen.”
“What’s going to happen is that we are going to move to New York, and we’re going to launch the platform, and we’re going to do something amazing, and everyone will be like ‘Oh my God’ and we’re all going to live happily ever after.”
Cyrus shakes his head. “I can think of a dozen ways this can go wrong.”
“Be the change,” Jules says.
“Shut up, Jules.”
But Cyrus is considering it. He’s holding his mug with both hands, and looking out across the long table that must have belonged to several generations of Cabots, and allowing himself to think the same thing that has been going around in my mind since yesterday. What if we did something unprecedented, something novel and possibly even revolutionary?
Cyrus shifts his weight, leaning on the table. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll do it. But only because you’re promising me, right here and now, that we’re not just going to rewrite some neoliberal script and put a bow on all the fucked-up shit that happens in the world.”