The Startup Wife(15)

“Who’s Lingpa?”

“He wrote the Bardo Th?dol.”

This was the kind of conversation we were constantly having with Cyrus. Cyrus doubted whether the AI could replicate the ways his mind worked. “It’s going to be too linear,” he said.

Cyrus was consistently, encyclopedically brilliant. He made connections that no other person could ever make, between texts—religious tradition, history, fiction—and the world—movies, pop songs, memes. This was why he was the perfect test case for the Empathy Module. If it could mimic the workings of Cyrus’s mind, it would definitely be more human than any other AI platform ever made. I thought of Cyrus as Prototype 1, the subject after which all of my work would someday be modeled.

I wondered sometimes if this was part of my attraction to Cyrus. Was I in love with the whole him, or mostly his mind as a challenge for my algorithm? No, it was definitely the whole him. Either way, we were high on all of it, all three of us feeding off Cyrus’s big brain, his appetite for just about everything, and how it seemed to be making its way into zeros and ones, all with the little tap-tap-tapping of my fingers.



* * *



By the time the snow had melted and the apple blossoms had turned everything pink and yellow, I was ready to start testing the prototype. There was no design, no interface—it was just a series of questions on a blank page.

Name three things you love or that define you, it asked.

“Jules, you go first.”

“Chess, singing, and Kirk Douglas in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”

“I didn’t know you played chess,” I said.

“You want me to be the first guinea pig or not?”

The second question was Name the experience that has most shaped you as a person.

“I tried to dive into my swimming pool, but it was too shallow and I gave myself a concussion.”

Cyrus and I both knew this was not the experience that had most shaped Jules as a person, but we kept silent.

Are you drawn to any particular religious tradition?

Silence from Jules.

And finally: What occasion/important life event is this ritual intended for?

“I want a baptism,” he said.

I typed his replies into my laptop. We waited. The system took fifteen seconds, which felt like a long time.

I started to read the reply on the screen. “?‘Your body will be washed from head to toe, this time avoiding the injury that was caused the last time you tried to baptize yourself.’?”

“I was just trying to dive,” Jules interrupted. “I wasn’t baptizing myself.”

“?‘Your friends and family will gather around and sing “A Whale of a Tale,” just as Kirk Douglas did in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.’?”

“I totally forgot about that song.”

“?‘You will dip your head below the water, angled at forty-five degrees, the way a knight on a chess board might approach his opponent. You will be reborn into whatever faith you have chosen to guide you, or if you choose not to follow a faith, perhaps this moment will give you pause to reflect inward, to think about what you want to believe in for the rest of your life.’?”

“Asha, is this thing looking into my soul?” He laughed. And then, for about ten days, he sang “A Whale of aTale” until we had to beg him, for the love of God, to stop.

Got a whale of a tale to tell ya, lads

A whale of a tale or two





* * *



My spring semester coughed on like a pre-penicillin illness. Terrifyingly, Dr. Stein said nothing to me about how I’d been slacking off, she just lost interest in me at a greater rate than I was losing interest in her lab. I told Jules and Cyrus that once we beta-launched the platform, I really had to make up for all the idling I’d been doing. On the first day of May, we sent a link to a curated group of people we had cobbled together from friends of friends, random Facebook groups, and a site called Find Your User Testers. We sent an email with lots of exclamation marks. This will be fun! Help us A/B test our product! We asked them to send us anonymous feedback, tell us if they liked it, if it spoke to them in some way. Our initial outreach was to about three hundred people.

It was Friday. We barricaded ourselves in the house with the TV on a continuous screening of The Expanse and spent the whole weekend waiting for something to happen. Every few minutes, I checked the stats. By Sunday night, about a hundred people had opened the email. About fifty had received rituals from the platform. Eighteen sent their feedback.

This was fun! Thanks for the distraction from my Insta.

Thanks! Except I accidentally drowned my cat while trying to baptize him. Just Kidding! LMAO.

Whoever invented this thing, I don’t know you personally, but I am writing to say that I’ve just had a life-changing experience. It sounds stupid to claim this from just a few minutes on your site, but my mother died last year and honestly I’ve been to every priest, therapist, grief counselor, and shaman in greater New York and this is the first time I started to feel alive again. I put my palms together for you.

This sucked.

Blowing my mind, incredible tech.



“Well, that’s that,” Cyrus said, dusting his trousers as if he’d just finished off a croissant.



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