After starting the WAICast, the following goes from passionate to obsessive. It isn’t just that the videos rack up thousands of views or that there are letters—actual letters—in the mail every day. It is the language. Life-changing, life-altering, transformative. Saved my life. It’s as if people can’t limit their experience of him to a single moment or even a period; the experience has to encompass their entire time on the planet. This troubles me more than a little, and Cyrus, to my surprise, not at all.
* * *
Gaby and Jules are busy preparing PowerPoint presentations listing the details of the business. They call them decks. These decks make frequent use of the word “engagement.” Apparently, our engagement is off the charts, and this is the thing that indicates WAI may not be just another flash-in-the-pan business that’s going to crash as quickly as it rose. The decks include graphs and charts showing the number of hours people spend on the platform, how many times a week, a month, they return. The things people say about us. The number of times they use the word “love.” We love you, Cyrus! We love being WAIs!
Ren and I start to add features to the platform. First we create a way for people to group-message one another. They start to have conversations among themselves about the rituals we have given them. They talk about wedding dresses and baptisms and rituals to mark the day they start new jobs or fall in love for the first time. They offer suggestions—I tried walking around the fire eight times but we got a little dizzy so I would cap it at four. They riff on what we send them, make their own meaning, change the order in which the ancients did things. They iterate. They create. We are infinite, they say, our possibilities are infinite.
And they talk about Cyrus. Is Cyrus a shaman or a priest? Philosopher or prophet? Friend? Charlatan? Cult leader? Visionary?
And while, on the surface, not much has changed—we spend as little time in our apartment as we did before; our diets are just as questionable; our ability to keep plants alive as poor—in some parallel world, it seems, we are rich.
Jules is the first to break this news. “I’m crunching the numbers with Rupert, and it looks like we’re at about ten mil.”
Jules, Cyrus, and I are at a restaurant where everything is pickled. It’s called Pikld. The drinks are called vinegar and taste like soda. The vegetables are called kraut and taste like vinegar. “Our company is worth ten million dollars?” I ask.
Jules leans over to me and whispers, “Ten million each, Asha. You, me, Cyrus, and Rupert. Rupert figures WAI is worth about forty given our engagement.”
There was that word again. I wonder, not for the first time that day, if Cyrus and I should’ve gotten engaged before we got married. It’s not that anything is wrong, really. I still feel a little seasick whenever I see him, and as we get deeper into this thing, he continually surprises me, like the other day when I saw him add a thread to the algorithm. “Do you know,” he said, “about the Morrigan?”
“No.”
“She was a tripartite goddess of the Celts. She was a goddess and also three goddesses at the same time: a goddess of war, a goddess of the land, and a goddess of fate.”
I knew where this was going. “What are you telling me?”
“That you are the warrior of WAI. And you are the protector of our little tribe. And you are the holder of my fate.”
In anyone else’s mouth, those words would have come out like synthetically flavored syrup. But in his, they sounded sincere. Because Cyrus believed every single thing he said.
“What the fuck do you mean, ten million each?”
Jules raises a glass of vodka spiked with vinegar. “We are rich.”
Cyrus spears a piece of kimchi with his fork and shoves it into his mouth. This is his way of telling us how much he doesn’t want to be rich. Still, I find myself raising my glass and clinking it against Jules’s. I don’t mind being rich. In fact, I find I’m quite enjoying the idea of it, even though the money is imaginary and I’m still working to pay off my credit card debt.
The main courses arrive. I’m having cured sardines and Cyrus is having cured and torched sardines and Jules is having a steak that has been hung for several years and is probably more fossil than animal. “Mmm,” Jules says. “This tastes like burp.”
The vinegar starts to climb up my nose. “I can just feel my liver detoxifying.”
Cyrus is not participating in the pickle jokes. “Don’t worry, bro,” Jules says. “We won’t actually enjoy any of it. Like this food, see—we can afford it, but it tastes like shit.”