Cyrus has gone ahead, but we are still inside with the other three. Yellow jumpsuit is holding the door open for us.
“We had to read all the workplace laws, remember, when we started hiring.”
“No one is even pregnant yet, Asha.”
“It’s just important to make sure we mitigate all forms of risk,” I say. And then the boardroom doors close behind us and I glimpse the last of the beige decor. “Bye, Larry!” I call out.
In the elevator Jules pounces. “Jesus, Asha, what the fuck was that?”
I tell him the story about the woman in the bathroom. “She was like a cow. In a cow stall.”
“You mean a barn.”
“Whatever. They’re not going to invest in us, anyway.”
“I thought it went well,” Cyrus says. “A liberal echo chamber. Now why didn’t I think of that?”
We step into the lobby. My knees are extremely cold.
“What makes you think it went well?” Jules asks Cyrus.
“They were really impressed with what we’ve built. I think we might get there.”
A second ago Jules was ready to throttle me, but Cyrus has a way of bringing us together. “Were we at the same meeting? They just broke up with us.”
“You heard them. They said they hate the status quo as much as we do.”
Cyrus is heading to the parking lot. “He drinks his own Kool-Aid,” I say to Jules, stating the totally obvious, which is that Cyrus is the smartest person in the world—except when it comes to getting rejected.
On the drive back, Cyrus tells Jules to run the financials again. “Just model it with a lower burn.”
“It’s too risky. If anything goes wrong, we’ll never be able to bounce back.”
Jules and I have run through all the scenarios. What if someone does something awful with one of the rituals from the platform. Uploads photographs of unspeakable things. Forms communities around racist bullshit. Ren promised me, swore there was nothing that happened without his knowledge, that he had built eyes into every corner of the platform, but we had all been taken aback by the speed of growth. There was something out of control about it already—that’s what Larry was alluding to. And if we didn’t spend a truckload of money assuring ourselves that everyone was behaving, sooner or later people would start to do bad things and it would be our fault.
Cyrus doesn’t see it this way. The platform is built around him—and the community, by extension, is also a part of him. Believing that the people who join WAI are inherently good is important to Cyrus—or, rather, imagining that people might do terrible things to each other in his name is admitting a personal defeat. He can’t do it. Now Jules has to recalculate all the numbers and claim we can monitor the site with half the staff and half as much money devoted to customer support.
“Did you know,” Jules tells us, “that there are entire warehouses full of people in the Philippines who are hired just to sift through the human trash that’s put out on Facebook? I mean, all day long people have to look at photos of the kinds of dark shit you and I don’t even have the words to describe, and they have to scrub all of it from the pretty blue-and-white-bannered site so that we can believe we live in a world of unicorns and cupcakes.”
“That’s never going to be us,” Cyrus says. “Asha would never let that happen, would you, Asha?”
I’m touched that he thinks I can solve the problem of human degradation with an equation. “Sorry, love,” I say, “my genius has its limits. Or rather, people are so fucked up that even I can’t build a code to fix them.”
Jules glances at me in the rearview mirror. “It’s not that we think anything terrible is going to happen. It’s that when it does, we need to be prepared.”
* * *
When we arrive at the offices of Play Ventures, at the top of a hill overlooking the San Fernando Valley, we are given electronic bracelets and asked to surrender our shoes, then led through a corridor, beyond which is a trampoline the entire width and breadth of a high-ceilinged room.
A small man hands us each a pair of socks with little plastic buttons on their soles. We understand that we are meant to jump up and down on the trampoline in order to cross over to the other side of the room, beyond which is our meeting. We step onto the trampoline with our bags. The small man, whose name is Craig, leads the way. He is clearly practiced. He leaps, flips, lands on his feet, and leaps again. He apparently feels no need to explain. I attempt a medium-size jump. Craig does a somersault in the air with his hands clasped under his knees. Cyrus dumps our stuff on one corner of the trampoline and starts to jump quite high. Jules just stands there, wobbling with the ripples of other peoples’ jumps. Our bags wobble too. Cyrus attempts a flip and lands on his butt. He laughs, gets back up. I’ve found a comfortable rhythm with my medium-size jumping and try not to think about how much longer this will continue. Cyrus keeps attempting the flip until he gets it right, then he does it again and again.