Release Thé, virgins.

FPO's work for Taylor Dubois’ Thé, a fortune-telling startup that leverages technology and our greatest fears to produce eerily-accurate predictions.

“I meant to ask this in the survey,” Alex said, handing… Vincent?... a cup of coffee. “But are you a virgin?”

“You kidding?” the young man asked.

Alex sat across from him, “Sorry, no.”

Vincent cradled a wide, round coffee mug in both hands, never letting it drift far from his face. 

“No, man. No.”

His beard was perfectly groomed, glistening in the coffee’s steam, and almost long enough to mask the deep V of his plain-white tee and the scrollwork tattoo across his collarbones. He wasn’t quite guzzling the coffee, but he definitely wasn’t sipping it, either. And the way he kept his head tilted toward the steam somehow made Alex shiver even more in the frigid coffee shop.

“You don’t have to rush,” Alex told him.

“I’ve got a 9:30 in Midtown,” he said.

Alex nodded and sat back, trying to wait. But he just couldn’t sit still. His leg was bouncing, his eyes darting all over the café. He was so jittery, he felt like he’d mainlined a double espresso, not tossed and turned all night barely getting a wink. By 3am he was up and on Twitter, soliciting usability testers in exchange for coffee and $10 gift cards. And now, at 8:30am, he’d already sat through tests with four other respondents.

“Have you ever had your fortune read,” he asked, watching Vincent tilt the cup further and further with each greedy taste.

“Do fortune cookies count?”

Alex shook his head.

“Then no,” Vincent answered. He took another gulp of coffee before continuing: “My girlfriend used to be all into Tarot. But usually just with her EDM friends. They do that shit at festivals and stuff.”

He finally set his empty mug down on the long thin table separating them. Farther down its length, a dozen people sat scattered across from one another. Most were in tees and skinny jeans, hunched over MacBooks or tablets. One woman had a splash of blood on her collar, a crust of it under her bottom lip. A gray-haired man farther down had a shiny silver satellite dish perched atop his laptop screen, pointed skyward out the café window.

“Ok, now what?” Vincent asked.

“Awesomes,” Alex began, sitting forward so fast the young man flinched backward. “I’d like you to use my phone and look for an app called Thé.”

“This a real app?”

Alex nodded. “Drops later today.”

He handed Vincent an iPhone wrapped in a branded case—a Rorschach pattern of bright watercolor splotches surrounding a barely-legible lowercase “thé,” the letters overlapping each over, their thick stems, hairline crossbars, and tapered serifs mimicking black tea leaves on bone-white china.

“Got it,” Vincent said after swiping and tapping the phone a few times.

“Great,” Alex said, beginning the short script he’d sketched on a Post-It, earlier that morning. Four questions. That’s all it should take to get someone down the app’s happy path.

Question one: “Is it clear what the app is for?”

Vincent mouthed the words to himself as he read the small screen.

“Fortune telling?”

Genius.

Question two: “So how do you start?”

He read a few seconds more, then nodded a little to himself. “I take a selfie?”

Alex nodded, again. “Go right ahead.”

Vincent looked over his shoulder to check the background—a frighteningly tall man in an identical white V-neck tee was interviewing a woman half his age and size. If it weren’t for the metal irises tightening around her glowing red pupils, he might’ve even thought the interview was going well. 

But Vincent ignored them—most folks, Alex knew, didn’t see much of what went on around them—and smoothed his perfect beard with his off hand while lining himself up in the on-screen guides with the other. Then, with a quick toothy smile, he tilted the phone to a high angle and snapped a selfie. Alex always left the sound on the test phone so he’d know when the pics were taken, giving him some idea of the app’s—and the user’s—response times.

“Oh, cool,” Vincent said as the app processed his selfie through a series of colorful filters Alex had spent the better part of two weeks animating with the dev team. The 10-second processing time had lost them a lot of users in the early beta tests—before the fortune-telling algorithm was even complete—but that was a simple fix from a usability perspective. People loved to watch themselves. So much so, a 10-second animation had proved too short and they had to artificially lengthen the process to lucky-number 13 seconds.

“What do you think’s happening,” Alex asked, off script. That made it five questions.

Vincent smiled wide, his teeth impossibly straight. “It’s checking me out. Analyzing me and stuff.”

Sure.

Alex’s heart was racing, and he began to wonder if it was fatigue or anxiety. It was adrenaline, not caffeine, either way. He used to get like this when he worked all-nighters—before he started his own agency and put all-nighters to bed. But coffee would have to come soon. He was fading and his mind wasn’t as sharp as he needed it for the meeting that would follow this test.

“Ok, now it wants me to snap my… ‘tea, coffee, wine, or meal remains.’” Vincent started, anticipating Alex’s fourth question. “Oh, nice, this is why you bought me coffee.”

Alex smiled. Get on with it.

Vincent positioned the phone above his empty coffee cup, lined the cup up with the on-screen guides and level reticule, then snapped a photo of the dark-brown spirals and orbits residual in the mug.

A similar image-processing animation ran for a few seconds, but not too long—users had no patience when they couldn’t see themselves, especially when the alternative was only a #foodporn aftermath.

The young man’s smile faded.

Question five: “What happened?”

His face distorted into an ugly mask of shock and disgust.

“Is this a fucking joke?”

Alex shook his head. That was five negative reactions in a row. Six, if he counted his own, from last night.

Vincent thrust the phone at Alex, the screen a single bright watercolor splash with white letters reversed out across the deepest value.

“Your app says my girlfriend is fucking cheating on me? Is this supposed to be funny?”

“It really isn’t,” Alex answered.

“Fuck you, man,” Vincent said, dropping the phone and shaking his head. “This shit is supposed to be fun, right? Like fortune cookies, and stuff. It’s supposed to be good stuff, right? Like winning the lottery. This thing’s even recommending a PI to follow her around? What the fuck!” For a moment, he was at a loss for words, closing his eyes and turning his bearded face toward the ceiling. “This is bullshit. This is…” 

He shook his head.

“I fucking knew it.”

Of course, he did. Alex just really hoped the guy didn’t want to stick around and talk about it.

He reached into his backpack and pulled out a gift card.

“I really appreciate your time, this morning. This is really helpful—”

Vincent stood so fast he knocked the long skinny table, bumping a row of people and shaking their laptop screens like dominoes.

“Keep your damn card, I… I gotta go.”

Alex just nodded and watched the young man shake his head and mutter to himself as he walked out. Then Alex spent a few minutes jotting down notes before packing his backpack, grabbing a much-needed mocha, and heading upstairs.

He needed to find Taylor. Let her know what was going on with her app. These weren’t the sort of sentiments anyone wanted to see from users on the day a new app launches. There must be something wrong with the app’s… magic.

The Kula coffee shop was on the ground floor of a five-story office building in Buckhead, a wealthy commercial and residential district just a few minutes north of Atlanta—or an hour north, depending on the time of day. But this building wasn’t like most of the other office towers punching up from this burb. Silicon Peach was a startup hub, hosting more than a hundred companies in the same amount of space most buildings used to accommodate three or four tenants. And these startups weren’t like most companies in other ways, too. The Peach’s founder liked to call them extraordinary on account of their unusual business models, niche user bases, or mind-bending exit strategies. Alex was less prone to euphemism or hyperbole, however—something his clients appreciated. He preferred to call them unreal companies, since no one outside this building—or their shared Slack channels—would believe these startups even existed.

Alex didn’t have an office in The Peach, per se, but like most small-businesspeople in the gig economy, he worked from a wide variety of places—his bed, his couch, his sister’s place in Florida when he was on workcation, coffeeshops all over the metro. Sometimes even Lara’s place. And, of course, he went where his clients were.

Clients like Thé.

His mocha gave him enough energy to mount the stairs and zig-zag through the second-floor sea of hot- and reserved-desks. A swarm of entrepreneurs chattered into their phones or clicked furiously at keyboards, hustling to bootstrap funding and tech and staff to pull together their next great scifi—whatever. Mingling through them, he said “hi” to a few of his former clients. 

Like Charlie, a tall woman with a reserved desk right over the coffee shop. Alex designed the user-interface for her LGBTQ dating app. But that wasn’t why she was in The Peach. Sure, she was trans and very tired of operating in the margins of all the hetero dating apps on the market. But she was also immortal. And while her appetites drifted toward the young, her heart longed for something more eternal. She’d wanted to get to market quickly with a web-app but Alex’s user research showed a strong preference among immortals for native-smartphone functionality, like swiping and notifications and no browser history. That raised development costs—to be sure—but Alex reminded her: better to spend a little extra than to build something no one wants. Besides, she had all the time in the world.

Up on the third floor, Alex moved through a labyrinth of small two-to-three-person offices that looked more like fish tanks than workspaces. And each fish tank featured a small white vinyl logo on its door, even if the desks behind it were empty—or appeared empty.

Here, Alex knocked on the glass and waved to Janet and Jonas. They ran Silicon Peach and, back when they were getting it off the ground—at the same time Alex was launching his small design agency, FPO—he helped them with the research, design, and testing of their physical space and mobile app. Turns out, entrepreneurs like co-working spaces and startup incubators for all sorts of reasons. Some need heads-down time away from a distracting home office, a noisy lab, or a compromised secret lair. Others, the opportunity to socialize with like-minded mutants, supervillains, and mad scientists.

But it was up on four, though, things spread out. A dozen of the larger tenants combined multiple fish tanks into office blocs and generally kept to themselves. As a result, it was much quieter than on the more chaotic floors below. Except for the front corner, facing out over a permanently grid-locked intersection and a twenty-foot tall disco mural painted on the side of a grocery store. That corner was loud with the sounds of furniture dragging across the floor, masking tape ripping off the roll, and Kanye beating out of a pair of linked Echoes.

There, the abstract Thé logo dominated a glass wall in white vinyl—Alex had applied the decal, himself, to help keep costs down. Behind it, he could see Taylor—the company’s founder—and her assistant, Alexis, laying out a spread of booze, beer, and wine on a mid-century conference table and vintage phonograph cabinet. Alex had found those pieces at discount, too.

He shouldered open the conference room door. “Taylor, got a sec?”

She spun on one heel and pointed at him. “Now, I got my whole A-team, here! Alex and Alexis! It’s magical!” 

Alexis giggled. If you added hers and Taylor’s ages together, they might add up to his, but somehow Alexis seemed so much younger whenever they were together. It was hard to say why, but Taylor somehow possessed a maturity Alexis—despite her enthusiasm—couldn’t fake.

So instead of joining in their youthful fun, Alex just waited in the doorway, sipping his mocha to stay on his feet.

“In private, please.”

“Uh oh,” Taylor said to Alexis, grinning. 

We’ll see.

Taylor squeezed past him, winking as she did, saying, “Hope I’m in trouble.”

They took only a few steps toward her fish tank office before she stopped and ducked into the largest of their glass rooms. Alex waited in the hallway, unable to keep up with her energy.

Taylor leaned into the room, riding the door until her body was inclined at a forty-five-degree angle. Inside, five men—all as equally young as Taylor and Alexis—huddled around large flat screens and much smaller MacBooks. This was Thé’s dev team—iOS and Android developers Taylor plucked out of coding programs at Georgia Tech and General Assembly with the promise of quick money, exciting work, and being close to her.

“Virgins!” she yelled at them. Some of them even smiled back. “How are we? Still good for 9:30? Still want to make a fortune today?”

They grumbled. Only the lead developer—a young Nigerian Tech grad named Basil—spoke clearly above the din. 

“We found some last-minute bugs, but we’re good. The site’ll go live on schedule. The app’s actually already available on—”

“Awesome! Love you!” she said, shutting the door on them as quickly as she’d opened it.

Alex sighed when she winked at him again.

“You really shouldn’t call them virgins.”

She opened the door to her small glass office and held it long enough for him to follow. “But they are. I checked. It’s part of the interview process.”

Alex started to say something but she cut him off. “Nope. None of that. Anything below fifteen employees and I can discriminate however I want.” Her office had no desk, just plush mid-century furniture and French decorative touches that would’ve looked right at home in an Anthropolgie. 

She dropped into a low-back blue loveseat and smiled. “We’re doing magic here, Alex. You gotta have virgins to do magic.”

“It’s magic I want to talk to you about,” he began.

She picked up a cup of tea and began sipping, her face pinching tight. But she waved for him to continue with a circular swing of her hand.

Taylor didn’t look like any fortune teller Alex had ever seen. She was young, blonde, wide-eyed, and bubbly. She even wore the same white V-neck tee he’d already seen twice that day. And never a bra—with many of her wardrobe choices, everyone in The Peach knew it.

“I ran five people through usability testing this morning—” he started, sitting on a wooden screw stool opposite her.

“This morning?” she interrupted, her smiled fading. “We launch in 20 minutes, Alex. What exactly are you testing for? We’re not changing anything, today. We’re not waiting another two weeks for gApple and Google to approve—”

“Call it validation testing, then,” he said.

“Mmhmm,” she hummed, sipping her tea.

“Anyway,” Alex said, “I tested with five folks this AM. It didn’t go well.”

“Why?”

“It was their fortunes.” He flipped open his Moleskin, shaking his head at the results. “They got a cheating girlfriend, bankruptcy, divorce, a layoff, and dying alone.” He looked up at her. “Why do we even have dying alone in the algorithm?”

“Were they virgins?” she asked, very matter-of-fact.

Alex closed his notebook. “Why should that matter? A lot of people have had sex.”

She laughed. “So, I’m told. But haven’t you ever seen a horror movie? Ever notice how the last girl—the virgin girl—usually does ok?”

“Taylor—”

“It’s an app for telling the future. Not filtering it,” she said, her words fast but clearly unmoved by his report. “It’s tasseography. It’s science. Not crystal-ball bullshit.”

She stood up and pulled a weathered and faded wooden wheel out from beside the room’s only bookcase. “My Grand-maman figured out the first part of this system when she was a girl, telling fortunes near the Tuileries in Paris. Now—like then—it’s merely the calculation of probabilities based on what you can easily tell about the subject.”

She slid the wheel between them and gave it a spin. When it stopped, she opened a small door atop the wheel and withdrew a slip of paper.

“Write your name on this.”

He took the paper but didn’t move to sign it.

“This was her MVP, you could say. Her Minimum Viable Product. Except with post-war Paris tech. A prototype for what we’re making.”

He took out a pen and printed “Alex Decker” on the slip.

Taylor took the paper back, folded it in half, slipped it through the small door, and gave the rickety thing a riotous spin. Over the squealing of its un-oiled axle, she said, “But Grand-maman didn’t know about psychology or machine-learning. She didn’t have access to digital photography and a distributed network. And she certainly wasn’t scalable.”

She looked longingly through the glass walls at her small development team.

“And those beautiful virgins? God bless ‘em. She didn’t have them, either.”

“I understand how Thé works,” Alex said. “What I don’t understand—”

Taylor raised a single, long finger to quiet him. He sighed and took a gulp of coffee.

She opened the small door atop the wheel and withdrew the same folded slip of paper. She handed it to Alex without looking at it.

“Isn’t it our responsibility to be honest with users? Anything else is—what did you call it?—a dark pattern. Honesty is good business.”

He unfolded the slip of paper. On the top half, his name was written in tiny block letters. His handwriting. Below it, a flowing cursive spelled out just one word.

Cancer.

His heart began racing, again.

“Thé wouldn’t work if it didn’t tell the truth.” She said. “You can’t scale bullshit.”

He couldn’t take his eyes off the word.

“But why is the app only foretelling bad outcomes?” he asked, his voice far away.

“Is it? Or is it just a bias in your research?” She looked back at her dev team, busy at work in the neighboring fish tank. “You should test them, see how the virgins do.”

He watched her watching them. And as her focus drifted back to him, so did her train of thought. “Are you really surprised, though? You live long enough, shit happens.” She turned back and pushed the old wooden wheel back behind the bookcase. “At least we can pay for shit news with ancillary services like healthcare, legal, end-of-life planning, whatever. A fraction of a penny on each click? Adds the hell up.”

“People don’t want bad fortunes,” he told her. “The negative reviews alone will kill us.”

She shrugged. “Maybe consumers don’t want them. We’ll see. But enterprise? They just might. And even if we fail, Thé proves the magic is in the math. Getting bought or acqui-hired isn’t the worst way out. Gotta have a couple exit strategies lined up, right?”

He folded the paper closed and said nothing. She was smiling, but it wasn’t the same flirty grin she usually wore. It was an older, wryer, and much more knowing smirk.

“When did you first use the app?” she asked.

“I’ve used it for weeks,” he said.

“You’ve used prototypes for weeks,” she corrected him.

And she was right. He’d built experience prototypes from the very beginning. He’d started with sketches, photographed and stitched together on his phone, and gradually moved up through colorless wireframes to high-fi graphics that looked and animated just like the real thing. Always to test the app’s usability, its interactions, its messaging—even its errors—before the developers had to spend even a minute writing and rewriting code. And then, of course, he’d worked side-by-side with her virginal programming team—each of them more in love with Taylor than the next.

“I used it last night,” he said. “The approved build. I was thinking of trying it out on Lara but decided I’d better see how it worked on myself, first.”

He’d been fidgeting with his phone while watching HBO, the dog asleep beside him, legs in the air. Alex had just finished a few slices of pizza and remembered hearing one of the developers say they’d upgraded the imaging software so it worked on grease stains. Besides, it would be fun to learn if he’d ever fall in love again. Or have a kiddo.

He was 40. He never expected the app to kickback a death sentence. Or suggest an oncology center, just a click away.

He’d deleted his results and tried the app over and over again. With selfies in the kitchen, the bathroom, and after a fresh shave. With a dirty ramen bowl in sink; a coffee mug from yesterday morning; a paper plate with some residual icing, fished out of the trash.

But the result was always the same. Except when he used a pic of Lara’s used coffee mug from the other day. Then, it returned an error. Because it could tell. Because Taylor’s magic algorithm could tell the coffee stains and the selfie didn’t go together.

“In ten minutes, we’re flipping the site live,” she said. “Alexis has a whole social media blitz prepped to fire off. And I’ve got reps from Aliksir, Verily, Calico, Amazon, and Facebook all coming by for a stiff drink and a peek at the algorithm. Buzzfeed and Gizmodo will be plugging us. Janet and Jonas are even going to swing by. This is a big damn day.”

She leaned forward and took his hand. Her skin was soft and freezing.

“It’s a big damn payday. That’s what we’re all in this for, isn’t it?”

Her phone sang a quiet version of “La Mer” which she instinctively hummed along to before silencing it. Her full, youthful smile returned, wide and as lovely as he’d ever seen it. She leaned closer, one hand on his leg, the other brushing the stubble on his cheek.

“You’re creative as hell,” she said, whispering. “Whatever Thé told you, you’ll figure it out.”

She stood and walked out, going directly into the developers’ room. Alex heard her cheer for her virgins when she entered, kissing them on the cheek, each in turn. 

He sat there frozen for a while before taking out his test phone. 

Perhaps there was a bias in his usability testing.

Opening a fresh session in the app, it asked for a selfie. Bypassing the camera, he grabbed a profile pic of Taylor from the Thé website. The website he’d designed.

He heard Alexis join Taylor and the developers from the conference room. They began a countdown to the site’s launch.

“Ten … nine…”

Then, when the app prompted for a pic of tea, coffee, wine, or food remnants, he leaned over the loveseat and snapped a pic down into Taylor’s teacup.

The image-processing animation played for just a few seconds.

“Two… one…”

“Release Thé, virgins!” Taylor shouted.

The room burst into laughter. Then applause as the app launched. Basil switched one of the big flat screens to show the slowly rising number of App Store and Google Play downloads.

Alex watched Taylor’s fortune appear on screen.

And it was a fortune. And a link to a local wealth management advisor.