“Under ten,” he says.
I’m relieved. We link arms, pick our way back through the house, passing another bar, a vinyl library, a man stirring a giant vat of paella, a circle of people chanting om, and finally, through the double doors in front. Our cab is here; we get in and fall asleep on opposite corners of the backseat in the hour it takes to return to our hotel.
Thirteen
BFFS
On the surface, Marco is a normal person. He can make eye contact and have perfectly ordinary conversations about things that other people might be interested in, say, the weather, or how lovely it is that we have our own nondairy mixologist called Mylkist at the cafeteria now. But a few sentences in—and I check this multiple times to make sure I’m not just being judgmental—Marco will always steer the conversation in such a way that he ends up telling a story about someone, or something, or all of humanity, dying. At times the transition is so subtle that you wouldn’t even notice it, but occasionally, it’s obvious that while he’s commenting on your shoes, he’s really thinking death/apocalypse/end times thoughts. Let’s say the conversation starts like this in the stairwell:
“Hey, Asha, how’s it going?”
“Going great, how’re you?”
“I was just heading to the seminar on work-hobby balance.”
“Work-hobby?”
“Yeah, you know, if you love something enough, it doesn’t even feel like work, so you call it a hobby, but really, it’s taking all your time and you’re totally obsessed.”
“I know what that’s like. Anyway, see you around—”
“The thing is, we talk about people working themselves to death, but we never say ‘He hobbied himself to death.’ Still, there must be a lot of people who do that.”
“Oh, okay.”
“My uncle Gennaro had this thing for gardening, I mean, he just loved all kinds of exotic plants, and so he set up a business selling seeds online.”
“And did he? Work himself to—？ I’m sorry.”
“No, heart attack. But everyone said he worked too hard. I think he hobbied too hard.”
Or this:
“If a pandemic wiped out ten percent of the world’s population, as a society, would we become inured to the loss of our loved ones? Would we just care about them less?”
Or this:
“I’m setting up a probabilities algorithm for all the ways humans are going to get wiped out, and I think climate change is definitely winning. Closely followed by antibiotic resistance.”
Cyrus does not see a problem because Cyrus and Marco have become instant best friends.
They’re together all the time, eating lunch at the café, hanging out on the rooftop among Rory’s Popeye plants, booking out the meeting rooms so they can close the door and hatch secret plans. Gaby and Jules are tasked with getting under the hood of Obit.ly’s financials. Ren and I look at the tech. Since Marco is always around, it’s difficult to get Cyrus on his own. He gives off a kind of hummingbird vibe, flapping wildly while appearing to stand perfectly still.
* * *
I try to warn Cyrus. “I think Marco is unstable.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He can’t stop talking about the end of the world.”
“I thought that’s why you liked this place. Because we’re preparing for the afterworld?” He circles his arm around to indicate the rest of Utopia and to remind me that I’m just as weird as Marco.
As far as I’m concerned, I am doing a great job of adjusting to the new situation. Craig has joined the board, and I’ve stopped trying to make the big decisions. Cyrus has a vision, and the WAIs are so devoted to him, they’ll follow him anywhere. I’m starting to think about other things—a mentorship program I might kick off to help young women get ahead in tech. I might even ask Cyrus if I can spend some of our WAI money on building a lab for the Empathy Module. Jules is encouraging me to stay in stealth mode. “Just let him do what he does best—talk to the brethren—and the rest of us can enjoy being mortal,” he says. Jules is also busy keeping the team steady; the talk of acquisition has made everyone a little jittery.
Jules’s advice is all well and good, except I have to go home with Cyrus every night, and lately, the office Cyrus and home Cyrus are starting to sound like the same person. I find myself organizing more and more of his life, even though he now has two assistants. I answer the door when the dry cleaner comes to take his shirts, and I run through his calendar to make sure Eve is scheduling his meetings in the right order, and Jules and I coordinate when to give him little bits of bad news, like if someone quits or posts a Glassdoor review about how Cyrus is a controlling micromanager with a God complex.