She spends marketing dollars we don’t have on T-shirts for the whole team. WAISER, they say, with the three-circle logo underneath. I wear mine till it nearly dies. Destiny is magnificent; just looking across the room at her gives me a thrill. We stick to our eleven a.m. donut habit and high-five each other all day long.

Craig rubs his chin. I wonder if he thinks this gesture makes him look older. “Yeah,” he says. “I think it’s great, I mean, I think it’s fantastic. But the question is: are you going to kill everyone?”

Cyrus, Jules, and I glance at each other. Is it the liberal thing again? Is he worried we’re a bunch of socialist murderers?

“I mean, are you going to kill everyone?” Craig asks again.

“We’re not sure—” Cyrus begins.

“You gotta be sure. You gotta be one hundred percent abso-fucking-lutely sure you are going to totally crush-kill everyone out there.”

“We really don’t have any competitors in the marketplace,” Jules says.

“You have to crush the church, and you have to kill Facebook. You’re like a church/Facebook mash-up. You gotta kill both of those guys.”

“I think, realistically, we would get a decent amount of growth even if we didn’t try to compete with Jesus or Zuckerberg.”

Craig springs toward Cyrus and eyeballs him. “I always check for the killer in everyone. The assassin. Are you an assassin?”

I see Jules give Cyrus an imperceptible nod. “I most certainly am, sir,” Cyrus pledges.

“Fuck yeah!”

“I will kill everyone and anyone.” Cyrus’s tone is like the EKG of a dead person. “I will assassinate all my enemies, and I’ll even kill a few friends while I’m at it.”

“I knew it!” Craig says. “You look like a hippie, but you’re a fucking ninja.”

Now that we have a steady source of revenue, investors want a piece of WAI. Woke VC is only one of the funds that come calling, except they don’t call, they send texts, emails, emissaries, and sometimes flowers. One offered to set up a meeting with the pope. Would Cyrus be interested in meeting His Holiness? The only His Holiness Cyrus is interested in is the Dalai Lama, and they will be appearing onstage together in two months, at a conference in Aspen. We have been offered money at sky-high valuations, and when people cotton on to the fact that Cyrus is not swayed by money, they start bigging up their other forms of cred. We are now up to 2 percent, Woke VC tells us proudly. A full 2 percent of their funds go to minority women. They donate to Black Lives Matter. They’re all Democrats. Some of them are even socialists. Would Cyrus like to meet AOC?

I had no idea. I still can’t quite get my head around the sheer number of people Cyrus cares about. Cyrus is a circuit board, lines of connection stretching far beyond what I can see. There are the people he knows or has met in real life, like Jed or Mrs. Butterfield, and then there are the others, the millions who are having relationships with Cyrus through the platform, asking him questions about how they should live their lives, receiving small coded versions of him on their phones every day. I have done this. I have expanded Cyrus’s reach to encompass everyone, and people everywhere are now getting a little piece of him, and he is expanding, like a cloud, covering the whole world. In the meantime, he is also my husband. And he is also my boss. How have I managed to make it all so complicated, and how have I managed to put myself on the margins of this story? There is no way to answer that, at least not without questioning the very bones of our life, and so I don’t, I just let Cyrus’s presence wash through me, and that, as ever, is enough.

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.

Crazy Craig is jubilant. “THIS IS GOING TO KILL EVERYONE,” he says when he shows up at Utopia. “I knew it, I knew you two were a force, a super-fucking-natural force.” He waltzes around the office hugging people and passing out cannabis-laced lollipops. All this because, to everyone’s horror and Craig’s utter delight, for the first time in history (drumroll, please) . . .

A dead person has sent a text message.

Yes, it’s true. Marco has used the WAI code—my Empathy Module—and combined it with Obit.ly’s database to get people to communicate with their loved ones from beyond the grave. Cyrus has named it After Light. It mimics the tone, the written diction, the vocabulary, of a person based on an entire history of texts, emails, Instagram comments, likes, memes, and retweets. It takes all of that and creates new texts and sends them as if the person were still alive.

In the taxi home, we make out furiously and then I tell Cyrus I’ve been thinking more about the mentorship program. We’ll launch it at WAI and then get other companies to sign up. When women are hired, they will be paired with someone senior, someone whose job it is to help them cut through all the invisible walls that might hold them back. I’m thinking of calling it Sister Outsider, after Mira’s favorite book. “I love it,” Cyrus says. “You have my full support.” We go home and finish what we started in the taxi and then we drift off into a sweet, spooning sleep.