“We want WAI to reach every single household in the world.”
I roll my eyes. “That’s preposterous.”
“I’m with her,” Jules says. “What are you smoking, Cy?”
“My feedback to you two”—he looks at each of us in turn, and we shrivel up a little inside—“is that we lack ambition. If we’re really going to change the world, we need to reach the world in the first place.”
“Did you borrow that line from Crazy Craig?” I say.
“Please stop calling him that. You might end up saying it out loud.”
“I just said it out loud. Crazy Craig.”
“I mean in front of him.”
Jules puts a hand on my arm, and I know it’s time to stop.
“You’ve made up your mind, haven’t you?” I say.
Cyrus nods. “I believe this is in the best interest of the company.”
“So you were just pretending to ask our opinion?” Jules says, a notch of hurt in his voice.
Cyrus has made up his mind. I don’t know why I’m surprised—I should’ve seen it coming. Cyrus has always believed that tech companies are evil, that the whole system is rotten. But with WAI, he’s changing things from the inside, giving people a reason to be better. The only way to truly make it worthwhile is if it takes over all the badness, if it overwhelms the greed and the inequality with the sheer force of its popularity. He needs it to grow, and if he’s going to make it grow all the way to the stars, he needs Craig. He has found someone whose hunger matches his own. We of the small appetites have no choice but to step aside.
* * *
We take Craig up on his offer to meet before we sign the documents. The trampoline has been replaced by a swimming pool. “No way,” I say to Cyrus, so he leads us down a side entrance, and about twelve turns down a polished concrete corridor later, we’re in the boardroom, where Craig is waiting, looking blissfully normal in a polo shirt and shorts.
With a flourish, he offers Cyrus the head of the table, which Cyrus accepts. A young woman arrives with a tray and places steaming mugs in front of us. “Ginger turmeric toddy,” Craig says. “Always makes me feel invincible.” He looks meaningfully at me, which I take to mean he knows that my people invented turmeric and his knowing that makes him super enlightened.
I take a sip. It’s as if someone took my mother’s biryani, removed the salt, and added boiling water. “Mmm,” I say, dribbling some of it back into the mug.
“I want to hear stories,” Craig announces. “Make me feel good, Cyrus.”
Cyrus is prepared for this request, and he knows how to play to his audience. “Well, we created rituals for seven hundred funerals yesterday,” he says. “Thousands of weddings, birthdays, initiations, baptisms, commitment ceremonies, graduations. Every part of the human life cycle is touched by WAI.”
“Sayonara, church,” Craig says, waving his hand and bidding farewell to millennia of organized religion.
I look over at Jules, whose face is unreadable. I tell myself I’m the Miss Manhattan statue at the Brooklyn Museum so I don’t give away a single one of my thoughts.
“I think you’ll like this one in particular, Craig: the CEO of Einstein X, the driverless car company that’s about to IPO—”
“Jeremy Rubenfeld-Castro?”
“He’s a WAIser, has been from the start, and he says that next week, when they debut at the stock market, they’re not going to ring the bell. They’re going to perform a Jupiterian ritual instead.” Cyrus puts his hands together but slightly apart, as if he’s holding a ball, and he moves it around and says something about prosperity, kabbalah, and planetary alignment.
Craig stands up. “Goddammit, Jones,” he says, clapping. “Right there on the floor of the NASDAQ! That is going to be all over the news. Motherfucker.”
“It’s all due to Asha’s incredible algorithm,” Cyrus says.
I really, really don’t want to take credit for the Jupiterian ritual of Make Me a Lot of Fucking Money. “No, no,” I say. “It was a team effort.”
“Asha’s been working around the clock to deliver the subscriptions platform, and that’s what brought you to the table.”
Jules tells Craig the good news. Subscription revenue is holding steady. New users join the platform every day, and they are as loyal as ever. “Sticky” is what we call it, as if the thing we should be most proud of is having the pulling power of flypaper.