Jules has tried to get me to take my own office—he and Gaby have side-by-side ones downstairs—but I want to be with my team, so I just perch wherever suits me. Right now I’m trying to focus on what I’m doing, but I keep looking over and wondering what Cyrus is up to. I have a bad feeling. Finally, I decide I can’t wait.
“Sorry to disturb,” I say, knocking on the glass door. “May I borrow you for just a minute?”
“Sure, we’re done here.” Cyrus turns to Ren. “So send me those mock-ups by lunchtime.”
Ren nods, drifts away. I see a large drawing pad on Cyrus’s desk. He’s attending to it with a thick pencil. “What’s that?” I ask.
“The redesign of the platform,” he says.
“Which platform?”
He looks up from his drawing. He is not smiling.
“It’s cluttered,” he says, turning his screen toward me. “I don’t like the copy at the top. The messaging part is buried below the line. And the colors don’t work.”
It takes me a moment to realize what is happening, and once it dawns on me that Cyrus wants to redesign the entire platform I built, I have to try very hard not to throw a chair against the glass wall of his office. I take a deep breath. “Maybe you could’ve run this by me?”
He pauses. “Right, yes. I’m sorry. But I want it to happen before the raise, and there’s not a lot of time.”
As it turns out, even though we have real people sending us real money every month, if we want to keep growing, we have to raise funds. This time Cyrus isn’t opposed; in fact, he’s the one driving things. Gaby and Jules have drawn charts, and all the arrows are pointing up—more users in more countries doing more things with WAI—but we can go further, reach more parts of the world, if we pour money into the platform. And Cyrus wants to get to everyone.
Now that we have a steady source of revenue, investors want a piece of WAI. Woke VC is only one of the funds that come calling, except they don’t call, they send texts, emails, emissaries, and sometimes flowers. One offered to set up a meeting with the pope. Would Cyrus be interested in meeting His Holiness? The only His Holiness Cyrus is interested in is the Dalai Lama, and they will be appearing onstage together in two months, at a conference in Aspen. We have been offered money at sky-high valuations, and when people cotton on to the fact that Cyrus is not swayed by money, they start bigging up their other forms of cred. We are now up to 2 percent, Woke VC tells us proudly. A full 2 percent of their funds go to minority women. They donate to Black Lives Matter. They’re all Democrats. Some of them are even socialists. Would Cyrus like to meet AOC?
Cyrus is still busy doing Cyrusy things. He attends the Mami Wata Society the first Friday of the month. The Athena Club every alternate Saturday. He has become friendly with a group of Shinto priests. Comic-Con is a big commitment, because so many people on the platform ask for superhero rituals. Cyrus has a personal assistant now, a bloodless woman named Eve whom I have come to dislike intensely because she is the guardian of his schedule, and if I want to get a dinner date, there are three competing Google calendars to wrestle with, and Eve’s placid face telling me that two Fridays from now might work for a ninety-minute reservation no more than four blocks away.
Cyrus and I are fine—mostly we just laugh about the ridiculous attention he’s getting, the army of people who suddenly work for us, the millions who crowd our platform. We do this thing where we look at each other and say “Am I me?” And the other one will say “You’re still you, baby.” But once in a while, like right now, Cyrus is frustratingly incomprehensible. It doesn’t seem like there’s time for a single new thing in our lives, but apparently, on top of everything else, he’s redesigning the platform.
“You went ahead and gave Ren directions on the design?”
“It’s just a mock-up. You can come to the meeting this afternoon.”
“I was not invited to the meeting.”
He smiles. “That was an oversight. Please come. I would love to have you there—you have a great sense of design.”
“It’s fine, you do it. Ren can catch me up later.”
“I love you, Asha,” he says. “You know I like to improvise. Let’s try it and see what happens?”
“Sure.” When he raises his fist for a bump, I bump him back.
And that’s me getting Cyrused, where I roll up, fully dressed, to my own irrelevance.
* * *