It has snowed—an early first snow—then rained, then snowed more, and my sister and I are clearing the driveway. As usual, she blurts out what I’ve been thinking. “He should at least help around the house more,” she complains, attacking the hard surface of the snow with the end of her shovel.
“I don’t want to make him feel like he’s not pulling his weight,” I say, defensive whenever the issue comes up. It’s been a week since the speed-dating event.
“But he isn’t,” she counters. “Why am I over here when I could be shoveling my own damn driveway?”
“You know Ammoo hates it when he hangs around the kitchen asking if he can help.”
She shakes her head. “Not super-psyched about freezing my ass off right now.”
I want to confront Mira about the real reason she’s in such a crap mood, but I know it’s because she isn’t pregnant yet. It’s been over a year, and though she never talks about it, I can tell it’s slowly breaking her heart. And she’s right, of course, about Cyrus. I say I can’t talk to him because he might be sensitive about the whole parents thing, but really it’s because I’m too much of a coward to tell him to get his act together. I’m worried he’s going to tell me that I’m the one who got us into this whole thing in the first place, and that if I don’t like it, we should possibly just go back to Cambridge and forget it ever happened.
I know I can’t do that. Despite everything, I’m thrilled by our life. I love Utopia, Destiny with her inflatable doll, Rory and his electrocuted vegetables, and the way it feels like at any moment our lives might be completely upended. I don’t miss the hush of the lab, I don’t miss the projections and the hypotheticals and the distant, untouchable future. This world is real even in its unrealness, perched on the edge of the city as if nudging something great, and that great thing could be us.
* * *
A month later, Destiny is up to three donuts a day. Her business cards have not turned up any real leads, and neither have the two hundred emails she has sent to seed investors, angels, VC funds, and other people known to drop money on ideas. She’s conspicuously reading every article and blog post available on raising funds as a woman, and proclaiming how the odds are against her.
“Only two percent of all VC money goes to female-founded companies, did you know that?” she bellows. I do know that, because she told me yesterday.
She is full of ideas to redress the imbalance. “Let’s scan all the correspondence we get from VCs through the Spoken filter,” she proposes to Li Ann. We are in the cafeteria trying Rory’s new vegan dish, faux fish pie. It’s weird, but also hard to stop eating. “That way we can get a snapshot of the problem.”
“What do you mean?” Li Ann says.
“You know, we just scan it for sexism, and then we do a whole exposé on how impossible it is to get funding if you’re a female founder. The New York Times will love it.”
“Oh, I’m not doing Spoken anymore,” Li Ann tells us, taking a delicate bite. “Is it me, or is this like baby food laced with heroin?”
Destiny puts her hand on her heart. “Why? It was such a good idea.”
“With all the data privacy issues, we’re not going to get anyone to buy a filter to read their emails.”
“And tell them what assholes they are,” Destiny says.
Li Ann nods, surprisingly upbeat. “I’m using the code to build something else, but in the meantime… ready?… cigarettes for asthmatics!”
“That was not how I thought you were going to end that sentence,” Destiny says.
“I’m serious. You guys gave me the idea when you said you wished they would bring smoking back. I’ve been asthmatic my whole life, and I’ve always wanted to smoke. People like doing things with their mouths.”
I tell her I can’t disagree with that.
“That was the whole point of actual cigarettes,” Li Ann says.
“But there was the small matter of cancer.”
“Exactly! But they were cool. I mean, everyone agrees they were cool, right?”
Li Ann is passing around a small metal case. When I open it, I see thin oblongs in various metallic shades. Like very expensive lipstick. I pick one up. It is satisfyingly heavy. “This is vaping, right?”
“No,” she says. She takes it from me and presses on the end, and when I inhale, the scent of rosemary fills my nostrils. It’s like my mouth is getting an expensive spa treatment. “Vitamin smoke,” she says. “And it comes with a microdose of pure oxygen—great for asthmatics. There are going to be way more asthmatics in the afterworld.”