Startup Wife

by Tahmima Anam

Genres: Coming of Age; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

“Tahmima Anam deftly uses humor to explore both start-up culture and the institution of marriage in an utterly charming and genuinely thoughtful way.” —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind Newlyweds Asha and Cyrus build an app that replaces religious rituals and soon find themselves running one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. Meet Asha Ray. Brilliant coder and possessor of a Pi tattoo, Asha is poised to revolutionize artificial intelligence when she is reunited with her high school crush, Cyrus Jones. Cyrus inspires Asha to write a new algorithm. Before she knows it, she’s abandoned her PhD program, they’ve exchanged vows, and gone to work at an exclusive tech incubator called Utopia. The platform creates a sensation, with millions of users seeking personalized rituals every day. Will Cyrus and Asha’s marriage survive the pressures of sudden fame, or will she become overshadowed by the man everyone is calling the new messiah? In this gripping, blistering novel, award-winning author Tahmima Anam takes on faith and the future with a gimlet eye and a deft touch. Come for the radical vision of human connection, stay for the wickedly funny feminist look at startup culture and modern partnership. Can technology—with all its limits and possibilities—disrupt love?

Release date: July 13, 2021

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 304

Sample

Prologue

NO SUCH THING

People say there’s no such thing as Utopia, but they’re wrong.

I’ve seen it myself, and it’s on the corner of Tenth Avenue and Fifteenth Street.

Jules and I are summoned on an unseasonably hot day in April. We sneak out of the house, and six hours later we’re standing in front of a wide industrial building. Across the street is the High Line, then the West Side Highway, and beyond that, the joggers and the piers and the flat expanse of the Hudson. There’s no sign and no doorbell, just an enormous metal door, so we mill around and check the address. Minutes pass. I tell Jules we shouldn’t have lied to Cyrus, and Jules reminds me of all the ways Cyrus would have made this trip impossible. Finally, after what feels like an eternity, the door sighs open and we cross the threshold into a pool of biscuity sunlight.

The reception area is magnificent, the square angles of the warehouse tamed into undulating curves. Everything gleams, from the polished wooden floorboards to the metal-framed windows that soar upward. “I love it,” Jules sighs, collapsing into a chair. “Please can we have it?”

I look up and see a giant hourglass suspended from the ceiling. “We are never going to get in.”

Jules is relaxed, like he walks into this sort of place every day. “But our platform is amazing. No one in the history of the world has ever built anything like it.”

I laugh. “It looks expensive. Are you sure we don’t have to pay anything?”

“Nope.”

We’ve been called for an audition. If we pass, we get to come here every day and call ourselves Utopians.

Someone comes over to tell us it’s time. We go up a flight of stairs, and then another, the light getting paler and brighter as we climb. On the third floor we are led through a corridor festooned with hanging plants. The air is cool but not too cold. There are repeating patterns in bright colors on the walls; there are paintings in frames and jagged sculptures bolted to the ceiling.

In the boardroom, we are greeted by the selection committee. A woman with long straight hair and the most beautiful neck I have ever seen approaches us. “I’m Li Ann,” she says. She gleams from every angle and I have to resist the urge to lean in and smell her perfume.

We shake hands. My grip is overly firm and sweaty.

Li Ann invites us to sit. “You’ve heard of us, I imagine.” She smiles, managing to appear confident but not mean.

Of course. Who hasn’t heard of Utopia? There are the BuzzFeed stories, What is the secretive tech incubator that boasts support from Nobel laureates, past presidents, and the elite of the startup world? The hidden camera shots taken from inside. The outlandish claims by people pretending to be Utopians who say that the labs have successfully cloned a chimpanzee and invented a pocket-size carbon capture machine that cleans the air faster than you can take a selfie.

“It’s like winning the lottery,” Jules had said on the bus ride over. “It’s like getting into the Olympics. It’s like turning on your computer and finding a secret cache of cryptocurrency.”

---

“Why don’t we introduce ourselves,” Li Ann says. “I’m the head of innovation here at Utopia.”

“Hey, I’m Marco,” says a man with deep-set eyes and a sharply trimmed beard. “I created Obit.ly, a platform that manages all the social and public aspects of death.”

A woman with bright pink hair waves hello. “I’m Destiny. I’m the founder of Consentify, a way to make every sexual encounter safe, traceable, and consensual.”

A thin, stern man in a lab coat leans against the table. “My name is Rory. I run LoneStar.” He speaks with a clipped Scandinavian accent. “I want every single person in the world to stop eating animals.”

We would never fit in. First of all, it would be impossible to find a cute, vitamin-gummy way to describe the platform. And then the rest of it, the confidence, the hair, the way they all look as if they slid into place like a synchronized swim team—I cannot imagine ever being that comfortable in my skin. Cyrus likes to call me the Coding Queen of Brattle Street, but right now Cambridge and my graduate school lab seem totally irrelevant. For the last six years I’ve been working on an algorithm designed to unlock the empathetic brain for artificial intelligence. After a drunken night with Cyrus (more on that later), I had the idea of turning the tiny fragment of code I’d written into something else—this—and that is why Jules and I are here.

“We’re ready when you are,” Li Ann says.

That’s my cue to start the presentation. I fiddle with my laptop. Jules passes me his cable, and the sight of his hand, steady and unshaking, is reassuring. Whatever happens, we’ll go home and laugh about it with Cyrus.

“It doesn’t have a name,” I begin, explaining the blank title page.

“We’ll come up with something great,” Jules says.

There’s an image of the landing page, with the Three Questions. “This is our new social media platform. We have devised a way of getting people to form connections with others on the basis of what gives their life meaning, instead of what they like or don’t like. It does this by providing rituals for people based on their interests, beliefs, and passions.”

“Like custom-made religion?” asks Rory, the Scandi vegan.

“Sort of. But imagine if you could integrate your belief system with everything else in your life. A system that embraces the whole you.”

“Maybe you should call it Whole You,” Destiny suggests.

“How it works is, you answer a short questionnaire about things that are important to you. Not just the traditions you’ve inherited but the things you’ve picked up along the way. The life you’ve earned, as it were.”

Marco nods. “Cool. So, if I were about to die, would it be able to come up with a way for me to have a special funeral?”

“Yes, it would. Would you like to give it a try?”

Jules passes his laptop to Marco. Marco types for a few seconds. “Game of Thrones, The Great British Baking Show, and Ancient Egypt,” Marco says. “Let’s see what it does with that.”

We wait the 2.3 seconds it takes the algorithm to go through its calculations. Then Marco starts to read from the screen: “ ‘I would propose that you be buried, in the style of the Ancient Egyptians, with your most precious possessions. Then, if you wanted, you could have your loved ones perform the Opening of the Mouth ceremony.’ ” He looks up from the screen. “There’s an Opening of the Mouth ceremony? Is this real?”

“Yes,” I reply. “All the suggestions are based on real texts: religious scripture, ancient rites and traditions, myths. Here it gives you an option—sometimes the algorithm does that—you could choose to be cremated, like the Dothraki and the Valyrians, but if you wanted your family to perform the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, you might choose to have your body displayed, your hands clasped over a sword, as was the tradition in Westeros. In that case, you could also have stones placed over your eyes.”

“Yeah.” Marco smiles, rubbing his hands together. “I sometimes fancy myself a Dothraki, but I’m more of a Seven Kingdoms guy.” He keeps reading. “ ‘The Opening of the Mouth ceremony is a symbolic ritual in which the body’s mouth is opened so that it can speak and eat in the afterlife. This would enable you to integrate any number of baked goods into the ritual.’ ”

Jules and I exchange a glance. How did we manage to make the platform so goddamn awesome, is what I’m thinking.

“I can’t believe it,” Marco says.

Jules leans over and reads the end of the ritual. “ ‘Someone in your family might recite the following incantation… I have opened your mouth. I have opened your two eyes.’ ”

Marco grins. “I’m totally going to put that in my advance-directives Dropbox.”

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.

OneCYRUS 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.

The rumor was that Cyrus failed all his classes—the AP Lit class in which he’d written a story without using the letter E, the European history class in which he made a 3D diorama of the battle of Algiers, even Drama, where he submitted a short film. Everyone in school knew Cyrus, but no one could claim to be his friend; he was always alone, and he never stayed after school or turned up in the cafeteria at lunchtime, so the mystery of his final exams remained just that.

Cyrus disappeared. He didn’t come back for senior year and he didn’t graduate. Eventually I went to college and forgot about him. I blossomed. I was miles from Merrick, a world away from high school, and I stepped into my brain like I was putting on a really great pair of sneakers for the first time. My brain-sneakers and I sprinted through courses and seminars and got me summa-cum-lauded. I cut my hair very short and got the first six digits of Pi tattooed on my left shoulder. In the meantime, I made a friend—a girl called Lynn—and I had a handful of casual hookups and lost my virginity in my dorm room while Constance, my roommate, was at a double feature of Blade Runner and The Big Sleep.

Lynn was an actress who was cast as the only woman in the drama department’s all-male production of Macbeth. We bonded over our late blooming. Lynn had spent the summer before college at fat camp and emerged nymphlike just weeks before orientation, but the high school scars were still raw, and over kale chips, which she dehydrated in a toaster oven that she kept illegally in her dorm room, we put Band-Aids over all the slights, sneers, and total invisibleness we had managed to escape. I told her about Cyrus—possibly the first time I had ever said his name aloud outside of my bedroom walls—but even then I downplayed my attraction to him, noting him as just another piece of flotsam from the shark tank that was high school.

I can’t remember when I came up with the idea of the Empathy Module, only that it had been lurking somewhere in the back of my mind for as long as I could remember. Maybe it was all the apocalyptic sci-fi I was reading that made me want to figure out a way to live without a fear of machines. They were going to be smarter than we were someday, we all knew that. They were going to beat us at chess and cook our meals and drive our cars. Someday they would paint and write operas and sing them back to us in perfect harmony. But what if they also had the one thing that humans possessed only on rare occasions? What if they had an intrinsic, automatic, unflinching, couldn’t-be-switched-off understanding of other people? What if they had empathy? Then they wouldn’t be our rivals, they would just be better versions of us. We wouldn’t have to fear them, and we wouldn’t have to subjugate them. We could just try to be more like them, because they’d be the best of humanity.

I went straight to grad school and started working in Dr. Melanie Stein’s lab. Dr. Stein had pioneered the reverse engineering of the brain. She was one of those formidable women who seemed to flourish in academic departments, her awkwardness hardened into a kind of opaque, terrifying brilliance. She was not mean, she was just never nice, never talked to fill awkward silences, and always made me feel as if I had said the dumbest thing ever. Before I met Cyrus again, I wanted nothing more than to grow up and become her.

---

My first encounter with Dr. Stein was not terrible. It was the start of the year, and I had just moved to Cambridge and into my tiny apartment in Ashdown House. She asked to meet me at a bar on Mass Ave, and when I turned up—I couldn’t believe how cold it was, I was already in my Michelin Man jacket—Dr. Stein was sporting a sexy poncho. She said, “I need to know right now that you’re not going to drop out or slow down, because if that’s anywhere near the horizon, you should go and join Dr. Li’s lab, which is full of the well-intentioned but only moderately ambitious.”

“I’m fully ambitious,” I said.

She ordered a vodka martini, extra dirty, and I was so nervous I ordered a Diet Coke even though I hate Diet Coke.

“So tell me about this Empathy Module.”

I shrugged out of my giant coat. “You know far better than I do that the last parts of the brain to be mapped are the ones that control our emotions.”

“I do know better than you do,” she said. The blue of her eyes was so light, I felt like I was looking into a church window. I couldn’t help staring. “I’m a cyborg,” she said, taking off her glasses and inviting me to look deeper.

“What do you mean?”

“My eyes. They’re transplants. I would’ve gone blind without them.”

“Wow.”

“His name was Hans Eikelheimer. His wife sometimes emails me.”

We raised our glasses to Hans, and I thought at that moment that she had decided to make me her friend.

“I don’t think we can get to the ultimate reaches of the brain by mapping,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think that’s the only way. It needs to be paired with other types of modeling, especially when it comes to emotional intelligence.”

“We already know that.”

“But how do we reach empathy? If we want our robots to be like us, we need to get beyond the algorithmic layers of intelligence and ensure that the AI of the future has the ability to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. It’s not just a way to make them more human. We should focus on making them better than us, not like us.”

“Okay, that’s novel. You think that’s how we’re going to survive the Singularity?”

“Yes, ...