“How’s the warning system?” Jules asks.
“For WAI or for the world?”
“The world is fucked anyway.”
Jules is asking about the risk register that Ren and I have devised. It aggregates all the rituals produced by the platform and gives us a sense of where things are at, how heated up the community is. Elections usually raise the risk profile, as do major environmental disasters, like cyclones or the hurricane that caused one of the Hudson Yards buildings to close down last year. And this new thing, which is about to be declared a pandemic. “I would say we’re somewhere on the orange to dark orange spectrum.”
“How many death ritual groups are there?”
I check the latest stats on my phone. “Twenty-three thousand.”
“Any particularly weird ones?”
“They’re all weird. I mean, take your pick. The Cremation Club. The Ship Burial Society. There’s one guy who keeps asking questions about sati.”
“What is that?”
“It’s when a woman is burned alive on her husband’s funeral pyre.”
“Are you okay?” Jules asks, as if I am having thoughts of immolating myself. He tears off a piece of a Popeye plant and rubs it between his fingers. “It’s been over a month—I thought you guys would be back together by now.”
“Yeah, I guess I thought so too.” I don’t say more. Things between Jules and me haven’t been the same since that fateful board meeting. And it takes all the strength in my bones not to ask him where Cyrus is and where Cyrus sleeps.
Someday I know I’m going to ask myself what happened. How I put all my chips on this particular bet and allowed my life to be subsumed by WAI. And I will tell myself this: because it was the purest form of togetherness. Me and Cyrus, waking up every morning with the same purpose, walking through those doors together, dreaming the same dreams, working for the same thing—that was my joy. All the aloneness I ever felt, every dark sad thing I had inherited, disappeared in its bright light. And once I had done it, once I had fit together with Cyrus and put my thinking and my mathematics and my body’s wants all in one place, its power was so great that it was impossible to imagine taking apart even one small piece of it.
So when a piece broke off, the whole came crashing down.
I had always been ambivalent about how much I wanted to keep the work me and the me me apart. I wanted everyone to know Cyrus was my husband, but I also wanted them to recognize me and my brain-bending genius. I wanted to be a coder and I wanted to be his wife and I wanted to be his partner, but I also wanted to rule just the way he did, without a thought, without effort, as if I had been born to it.
For a while, it worked. We made something magnificent. We disrupted the very thing that was seemingly fixed—the way people handled the most intimate moments of their lives. We gave them something they didn’t even know they wanted, and once we’d given it to them, nothing was ever the same again.
We were revolutionaries. We were radicals. We had upended the order of things.
When people asked me and Cyrus and Jules about our friendship （had it survived the business, or had we changed, like a band who couldn’t stay together after four consecutive triple-platinum hits?）， Cyrus made much of how close we all were. “We’re like a family,” he would say.
Except Cyrus and I were family. We had stood up in front of that woman in the pantsuit and we had said things. And try as we might, we found it impossible to keep our family together when the rest of it shattered. It was all just too connected.
“You know I love you,” Jules says.
“I know. You just love him more.”
Jules doesn’t reply to that. “It’s okay, I don’t mind,” I tell him, even though I do. Jules has no family; Cyrus is it, and that was always going to matter more than anything else.
Then he says, “Gaby and I are getting married.”
I hug him and then I burst into tears. “That’s amazing. No, don’t do that—don’t look sorry. It’s great. Marriage is great. Maybe just don’t start a business together.” My sobbing turns to laughter.
“I’m really happy,” he says. “Even though the world is ending, I’m really fucking happy.”
We link arms and dance among the Popeye plants.
* * *
When he gets back from Washington, Cyrus suggests that maybe he should come over and get a few things from the apartment. I feel a knife going into my heart. Why does he need his stuff? Is he going to wear that blue suit to dinner with some other person? Is he going to read aloud from his paperback of Ulysses, the one with the taped-together spine, to someone else? I don’t ask him what it means and he doesn’t tell me.