We walk them through the platform, the target audience, the growth plan. I describe the tech behind it.
There’s a pause when no one says anything. I turn to the others, and it’s hard to look at them all at once. Sunlight pours in from the large window behind them and they are encased in a giant gold halo.
Rory puts his palms on the table. “Nothing good has ever come from religion,” he announces.
“My father would agree with you,” I say. “But it’s a powerful institution—imagine if we could change it somehow.”
Rory glances away, and I can almost feel him rolling his eyes.
Jules pipes up. “Look, we’re here to restore something to people who have grown up in the shadow of social media—those who are living their entire lives in public. We want to address the thirty-seven percent who say they don’t believe in God because their politics or their sexuality excludes them from organized religion. We believe that even the nonreligious among us deserve our own communities, our own belief systems, whatever they may be based in. Ritual, community, that’s what religion offers that no other human construct has been able to replace. Until now. We are here to give meaning back to people, to restore and amplify faith—not in a higher power but in humanity.”
I catch Li Ann smiling to herself. Jules has nailed it. Maybe he’s right, maybe no one in the history of the world has ever built anything like it.
“I like what we’ve seen so far. Right, everyone?” Destiny and Marco nod, and Rory manages a tiny head tilt. Li Ann leans in and lowers her voice. “We’re especially interested in projects that will support human community in the afterworld.”
“The afterworld?”
“The future when there will be nothing left,” Destiny says.
“You’re planning for the apocalypse?” Jules asks.
“We want to be prepared,” Rory explains. “In the next fifty years, things will change in ways we cannot yet imagine.”
Marco reels off a list of ways the world might end. “Famine, deadly pandemic, mass antibiotic resistance, climate collapse, insect collapse, world war.” He ends with a flourish: “Asteroid.”
“We are not connected to any major public utilities,” Li Ann explains. “We get our water from an underground aquifer. The servers are disconnected from the major fiber-optic lines. All waste is recycled. We are funding research into last-resort antibiotics and antivirals, building an army of robotic bees, and turning electricity into food. We believe that technology has a role to play in the post-world world.”
I realize where we fit in. “You’re going to need faith?” I say, trying not to start singing the George Michael song.
“Well, that’s what we’ve been debating,” Li Ann says. “I think it would be great to offer people something to help frame their existence. Rory wants to do away with all that, but some of us still think it’s important.”
“If we are going to imagine a better world, I would prefer it to be based on science, not superstition,” Rory says.
I ask the question that’s been on my mind since the call came: “How do you pay for all of this?”
“I’ve been given a mandate,” Li Ann says. “On the one hand, we operate like any other startup incubator. But our mission is also to find solutions to the inevitable demise of the world as we know it. Our endowment is made up of tech companies, high-net-worth individuals, even some government pension funds. I think there’s a general sense that we are going to face unprecedented challenges in the future, and everyone wants to be prepared.”
What will Cyrus say? I haven’t thought about him for at least half an hour, which is the longest I’ve not thought about him since our reunion. The doomsday cult thing is definitely going to put him off. Or is it? Cyrus is full of surprises. I would never have guessed, nine months ago, that he was going to be the sort of person who would get married on a whim. I wouldn’t have thought that about myself either, but there you have it. Love. Mysterious ways.
Li Ann promises to send us her decision before the end of the day, and Jules and I are returned to the ordinary, imperfect world.
One
CYRUS JONES AND THE MAGIC FUNERAL
Cyrus and I got married exactly two months after we met the second time, which was thirteen years after we met the first time.
The first time, I was in ninth grade and Cyrus was in eleventh. I knew his middle name, what classes he took, when he had free period, and which afternoons he stayed late for swim team or jazz band practice. In other words, I was in love with him. Cyrus did not know any of my names or that I had recently moved to Merrick, Long Island, from Queens, that I had skipped fourth grade and was in possession of one friend, a girl called Huong who occasionally sat beside me at lunch, that my parents were immigrants from Bangladesh and that was why my lunchbox contained rice and curry, something I was perpetually ashamed of, not just because of the curry smell that stuck to my clothes but also because my mother never closed the Tupperware properly, so there were always little bits of chicken and rice plastered to the insides of my backpack.
For fifteen years my parents lived above the Health Beats pharmacy in a one-bedroom apartment with two narrow windows and a view of Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights. My sister, Mira, came along, and then me. They worked long hours and sent regular Western Union payments to Bangladesh, but because we ate dal and rice most nights and never went on vacation and I only got to wear hand-me-downs, they managed to save a little every year, until they could put a down payment on the pharmacy, then on another one in Woodside. By the time I met Cyrus, my parents owned a mini-chain of three Health Beats, and we had moved out of the old neighborhood and into a shiny new housing development on Long Island.
After a summer of unpacking boxes and sticking stars to the ceiling of my room in the pattern of the Messier 81 galaxy, I arrived at our new school, Washington High. Mira was a freshman at Columbia, already busy finding her new tribe, the climate activists and the radical new leftists and the Students for Yemen. I was left to fend for myself with my smelly lunches and my complete inability to engage in small talk. My only refuge was math class, where I skipped two grades and landed in AP Geometry, with Cyrus.
I spent the year gazing at the back of Cyrus’s head and wishing he’d turn around and say something to me, but he never did. I just stared and stared at that glorious blond hair, so wavy it was actively greeting me. At the end of May, when we were supposed to take our final exam, Cyrus didn’t show up for class. A week later, he handed our teacher, Mr. Ruben, a large folder, and in that folder was a graphic novel titled How to Teach Geometry. Mr. Ruben was shown standing in front of the chalkboard completing the final angle of an isosceles triangle. Chapter by chapter, the book went through every lesson Mr. Ruben had taught us that year, starting with angles and ending with architectural puzzles. There were equations and formulas, drawn-to-scale buildings with intricate detail: the Chrysler with its scalloped exterior, the columns of the Parthenon, the triangles of Egyptian tombs. Mr. Ruben displayed the pages on the walls of our classroom, and we all stared in wonder. “Freak,” someone whispered under their breath. Freak was right. Mr. Ruben didn’t know what to do, so he gave Cyrus a zero for failing to show up for his exam.