The way this used to work was that Cyrus would close his eyes or walk around the room for a few minutes, but now he just asks the platform and WAI gives up its answer. Sometimes the partners ask Cyrus if he agrees with what the algorithm produces, and Cyrus always says yes, of course, he wouldn’t change a thing, but I wonder if he occasionally thinks he’d do better if left to his own devices, or if it annoys him that I’ve burrowed so deep into his thoughts that I’ve actually transplanted his brain to a code that is now replicating him to thousands of people around the world.
Despite Cyrus’s winning eccentricities, Rupert’s assurances, and the sheer success of the platform, three months before we are about to run out of money, we get interest from only two firms: Accelerate Capital and Play Ventures. Cyrus says we have to go back in and give presentations and that this time I have to come too.
* * *
Destiny has hired a small army of very young, very cheerful people to continue to spread the word about WAI and its many virtues. Whenever I’m online, I get chased around with ads telling me I need to bring meaning back to my online experience, that ritual, community, and contemplation—the pillars of WAI—will bring joy and sustenance to my otherwise empty shell of an existence.
Whatever they’re doing, it’s working. People are piling on like it’s the last express train to Bushwick, and Ren and I are working around the clock to keep it all running smoothly and with the speed that users now expect of every other device in their lives.
Destiny seems to have been born for this. She barks sweetly at her charges, waking them up in the morning with pallets of lattes, showering them with praise, posting their numbers on a giant billboard, taking them to late showings of Hollywood classics and then dragging them back to the office for one last push/sprint/stab.
She spends marketing dollars we don’t have on T-shirts for the whole team. WAISER, they say, with the three-circle logo underneath. I wear mine till it nearly dies. Destiny is magnificent; just looking across the room at her gives me a thrill. We stick to our eleven a.m. donut habit and high-five each other all day long.
One day she asks Li Ann and me to meet her in the cafeteria. Rory is there, having a meeting with his team, a group of somber scientists staring into their laptops. His vegan superfoods grace the menu at the cafeteria, and occasionally, Li Ann will talk about how Rory is going to disrupt the way we consume everything, but I’ve hardly spoken with him since we moved in—I can’t shake the feeling that he knows something I don’t, something dark and groundbreaking that makes whatever I’m doing totally irrelevant.
Destiny tells us she wants to take the sisterhood to the next level. “I want to start a thing for female founders.”
“There are already things like that,” Li Ann says. “I’m in the 24/7 Club, the Women@work collective, the Google Women working group. You can join if you want.” She scrolls on her phone.
I’m not sure the title applies to me. “I don’t know if I want to call myself a female founder.”
“Which part are you not sure of, the female or the founder?”
Li Ann takes something out of her bag. It’s about the size of a small tablet or a large phone. She opens it, and inside, there are five long metal cylinders that look like cigars except they are bright blue, purple, and orange.
“What’s that?”
“A hundred percent pure oxygen,” she says. “Little miniature oxygen tanks. You get high from the purity.” She passes them around and I take a blue one. “Tap twice to turn it on,” she says. I do and then inhale, and a cold hit of—well, air—flows into my mouth.
“I liked the other one better,” I say. “This one doesn’t have any flavor.”
“Yeah, but it’s better for you. And if the apocalypse hits super-suddenly, you can have twenty minutes of oxygen to get to your panic room.”
Destiny pulls hard on hers. “It’s like a blow job without some guy’s hand on your head.”
“Or the warm spunk.”
“That too.”
“Get this,” Li Ann says. “Smoking is out. Breathing is in. Breathe Life.”
“I’m in,” Destiny says. “So will you join Fucking Female Founders?”
“What?”
“Yeah, the 3Fs club.”
“It sounds like you’re pimping female founders.”
“Female Founders Say Fuck You? Fuck You We Are Female Founders?”
“How about just Female Founders Club?”