The Startup Wife(59)
Li Ann bounds up to us. “I have something for you,” she whispers, taking what appears to be a pillbox out of her handbag.
I tell her I can’t do drugs. “It would interfere with my genius.”
“Shut up, no one does drugs anymore.” She opens the box, and inside there is a tiny pink hair clip. “Meet Flitter,” she says.
“It’s a vibrator, isn’t it,” Destiny says.
“We are going to need a lot of orgasms in the afterworld.” Li Ann lifts it out of the box and holds it up for us to see. “You just clip it to your clitoris.” She presses on the sides and it opens its tiny mouth.
I tell her it looks painful.
“It’s a hundred percent not painful.”
“I can’t believe you made a sex toy,” Destiny says.
“It’s not a toy. It’s a handbag essential.”
“You’re going to carry it around in your handbag?”
“As far as I can see, there are three distinct use cases for this product. Number one, you have sex with your partner, and he comes and you don’t. What are you going to do? Run an entire bath just so you can hump your showerhead? No, you just clip Flitter on and lie there, and boom. You can rest peacefully beside him instead of tossing and turning because his tongue got tired.”
“I hate men,” Destiny says.
“Use case number two. You have a stressful meeting at work. Your colleagues are repeatedly ignoring you and backslapping each other. ‘Excuse me,’ you say, and you run to the bathroom, get your Flitter out, and while they’re congratulating each other on the size of their dicks, you can have a totally silent orgasm.”
“You want me to come in the office bathroom?”
“It is called Utopia.” Destiny laughs.
“You don’t think the guys are jerking off constantly at work?” Li Ann says.
I really don’t want to think about that. “Gross.”
“Men have orgasms all the time. That’s why they walk around looking like they own everything.”
“They do own everything.”
“What’s the third use case?”
“Thanksgiving.”
I’m starting to feel queasy. “That is just wrong.”
“If your family is anything like mine, you need a little something to get through the holidays.”
“So you’re telling me you would just have an orgasm in front of everyone.”
“If you can keep a straight face, yes. Because Flitter is totally noiseless. It doesn’t even really vibrate. It uses centrifugal force to tug on your—”
“Okay, that’s it,” Destiny says. She plucks the box from Li Ann’s hand and strides toward the Disabled toilet. Li Ann and I talk about other things, trying not to look at our watches to see how long it will take for Destiny to return. After approximately seven minutes, she reappears. “I’ll be keeping this,” she says, putting the little case in her pocket.
Li Ann squeals. “I told you! I told you!”
And with that, one of our many problems is solved.
* * *
“We won’t need to replace Destiny,” Cyrus says. “I’m going to run marketing.” He turns to Eve. “Eve will help. She’ll schedule everything and I’ll make the decisions.”
Everyone agrees Cyrus has an excellent eye for marketing. Those changes he made to the platform—the redesign—have proved successful. Our user base is going up, and our surveys have come back positive. Cyrus starts drawing and writing copy and booking digital ad campaigns. People start to wonder if there’s anything he can’t do.
There are two hundred and forty-four employees on our payroll. We have hired programmers and designers and creators of apps, and also, historians and anthropologists and graduates from seminaries and madrassas and astronomers and psychologists and futurists. Jules knows everyone by name—he prides himself on walking past the rows of desks and calling out individualized hellos to Lydia, James, Sachin, Brian, Murtaza, Sophie, Selina, Richard—and he has promised not to stop until we get to three hundred. He takes everyone out to baseball games and throws parties on boats floating in the Hudson and keeps employees feeling like they work more for the sheer fun of it than for the paycheck. Cyrus still does his WAICast, but the production values have gone up significantly, and instead of standing against a bare brick wall, he has a purpose-built VR studio so that people with headsets can be right there in the room with him. The whole thing lasts about an hour, so Cyrus has to get to the office by six a.m.
I enjoy being alone in the apartment in the mornings. Sometimes I take a long bath, and other times I just pad around and allow myself to be surprised by the very white walls or the very tall windows. I marvel at the kitchen, how effectively it gleams. Boiling water out of a tap. Ice cubes on demand. Cyrus has his own study/meditation room, which is immaculate and smells like patchouli. I think of that room as the Old Cyrus room, the tatami mats, the calligraphy on the walls, framed photographs of his mother. I have a room to myself too, an office that looks like a meth lab. We talk a lot about inviting people over, but we never do; we are always working.
My mother told me a story once about the first time her parents had an indoor bathroom installed in their house. Before that they used an outhouse built against the back boundary wall outside, and before that they lived in one third of her grandparents’ ancestral home and shared a toilet with her cousin’s family, and before that, before my mother was born, people like her grew up in villages where the women walked out into the fields early in the morning and didn’t piss again until after sundown.