THE DATING APP

It’s been a long time coming. For years I’ve wondered, is this all there is to life? At the age of five, an algorithm told me I was going to be a Datastore technician, and it’s been a very fulfilling career, I think. But I’ve never stopped waiting for the next big thing to happen. Like some momentous event would occur and finally give me the opportunity to be the hero I knew I was. Today, for the first time, I know what my true purpose is. I’m going to delete The Dating App.

The Dating App is a vile virus, which seems to have escaped everyone’s notice. The world is under constant distraction from the latest SARS outbreak, which has allowed other viruses to spread unchecked. Viruses like Perceived Choice. It’s not a protein, but an electrical impulse, generated by The Dating App and beamed into your brain, where it moves between neurons and makes you think that Love is just around the corner, when really, you’re wandering around the wrong city, in the wrong country, alone.

The Dating App’s electrical impulses are protected in cold storage here on the ExF Datastore, where I’m paid more than I want to admit to maintain their infrastructure. I’ve been on rotation at the ExF for five months, orbiting the earth at an undisclosed distance. Actually, it’s more accurate to say we are orbiting the sun than the earth, which should give you some indication of how far from home we are. My rotation ends in less than a week, which means today is the perfect day to put my master plan into action.

I get ready as though it were any other day. Flash my teeth, pull on my jumpsuit, check my phone. There are 238 potential matches on The Dating App, waiting in a queue for me to judge them. I have four dates set up for when I return to earth, all new suitors. It's a shame we’ll never meet, because I was genuinely looking forward to some of those dates. But that is the sickness caused by Perceived Choice. I’ve genuinely looked forward to more than two-hundred dates before, yet here I am, making my bed alone, on a barge floating through the void of space.

Love is not a virus, it is a mental illness. When you are In Love, you see shadows that aren’t there, and completely miss signals that are. When you are In Love, you think the world is ending, or that you’re finally living for the first time. I’ve had recurring bouts of Love my entire life. I was first afflicted with Love when I was six years old, when I became obsessed with a boy named Jamal. I had two siblings and had never willingly shared a thing in my short life, but to him, I gave my favorite toy, a black bear filled with tiny silica beads.

He and his family moved away a week later. I told my mother while we drove to ballet practice, “I didn’t know Love was supposed to hurt.” I wish that she had stopped the car, grabbed me hard by the shoulders and screamed into my ears, “It always hurts! It will cause you more pain in your life than any person should have to bear. It will make you wish you were dead. Never fall In Love again. Never.”

Maybe my six-year-old brain was young and impressionable enough that her warning would have worked. Maybe fear would have gripped me tightly enough to keep me from ever falling In Love again. Because now, I am afraid when I find someone new on The App, and begin to feel the warm fuzziness and imagine the perfect endings, but not nearly afraid enough to stop.

They say, “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” They haven’t been In Love. Because I have loved and lost more times than I can count and I would rather have never met the people I loved if it meant I could have been spared the pain of the loss. But I don’t bother telling myself, “I’ll never do this again.” It’s pointless to resist. Love whispers in your ear, “you’ll be ok this time,” and you believe it, because you are In Love.

I smile at my boss, Yuri, as I enter the Ops room on the ExF. He smiles back, his dumb, flawless teeth reflecting as much of the caustic office lights as his dumb, bald head.

“You go back to Texas on Friday, yes?” he asks. His accented voice is so low, it sounds like he inhales sulfur hexafluoride before speaking.

“Yes, that’s right,” I reply.

“Hopefully they’ll have restored power there by then.”

“Was there an EMP attack?” I ask, genuinely surprised. It’s too hard to keep up with earth news while planning a strike of my own.

“The People’s Republic dropped a pulse bomb in Austin this morning. We have not gotten notice to send any data refresh yet, so they must have it covered with the Earth Datacenters.”

He taps a finger against his shiny dome.

“That reminds me, excellent work on the Jerri Co corrections, Sede. They emailed me today morning to compliment your work.”

“Thanks,” I respond, trying to tuck my hair behind my ear because I’ve forgotten I cut it short last week.

I will genuinely miss this job once I delete The Dating App. I had spent most of my thirty-seven years of life working my way to the pinnacle of my profession, assuming that once I’d reached it, it would be proof that this was in fact my life’s purpose. Well here I am, standing on the ExF, being congratulated by Yuri Chanovich, the creator of Cross-Enfractalation Protocol himself, and I know in my heart this is not the best I can do. His words of adulation ignite a tiny blue sparkler in my brain, when I deserve a sky full of rainbow fireworks exploding in my neurons.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to talk to Sifad, one of the Reader technicians, and collector of busy shirts. It has to be Sifad, of course. A couple weeks ago, at a happy hour, he’d sneakily mentioned that he’d come across my profile while swiping on The Dating App, and, in an act of tremendous professionalism, had skipped over me. As though his calculated discretion was the only thing preventing his 56 year-old, twice divorced, overweight dick from being inside me.

I walk to his office, a box with two opaque walls and two clear ones, and hover in the open door. He is standing at his workstation with five monitors in front of him, dimly obscured with privacy screens. His shirt today sports a confusing pattern of pink flowers, flames, and dogs with sunglasses, which I get a good look at as he embraces me in an uncomfortable hug.

“Sede, how are you today?” he asks, smiling widely, his brown lips cracking over short teeth. The smell of his floral lotion lingers in the dry office air, turning my stomach.

“Doing great, just great,” I say as I casually shuffle over to the center of the room, while inside my nerves spark with anxiety.

He follows, coming to stand between me and the monitors. From my new vantage, I can see various status updates and metrics on the screens. The top left monitor tracks the route of one of the Readers as it pulls data from the Fractal Datastore. Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to get the information I need from just looking at the screens, various security measures make sure of that.

“You know, there’s another festival that I forgot to tell you about,” Sifad says, his black, curly hair blocking the screen. “It’s in Riverside, and I think you’d like it. Very open crowd,” he says, smiling sickly again.

“Nightlights, right? I think we’ve talked about that one before,” I say, my nausea increasing. I’ve known Sifad for years — we’ve done three rotations together. He was a creep, but that didn’t make it easy to take advantage of him.

“Can I ask you a favor?” I blurt out.

“Of course, Sede. What do you need?”

“I need to know where The Dating App files are stored.”

He looks at me quizzically. “Hmm. Is this for a repair? Why not submit a ticket—”

“I made a mistake,” I say, vomiting the words out. “I really want to keep it as private as possible. And I thought you’d be the most understanding…”

It feels like my eyes are going to pop out of my head.

“Alright, alright, I do understand, Sede.” He turns around to the monitors and enters a query on his keyboard. “Oh, that reminds me of something!”

A frustrated scream almost escapes my throat as he turns back around to me, his eyes half-lidded with power.

“My girlfriend and I, we would love to invite you ….. [CONTINUE READING]