Q*pid

by Xavier Mayne

Fox had worked in marketing long enough to know that there is no higher measure of the success of a marketing message than it working on people who didn’t even want the product. And in terms of things a straight guy wasn’t in the market for, another guy to date was probably at the top of the list.

  But he sent me a message.

  Fox opened his eyes, and before he could lose his resolve, brought his finger down on the message icon.

  The enormity of what he had done sent an immediate shock of anguish through his chest. What he had done was let this guy know his message had been received—and opened. Now his entire profile, including all of his photos, his carefully curated lists of interests, his account of the major events in his life, and his plans for the future, would be visible to this guy. They were connected.

  With a shiver of dread, Fox opened the message.

  Hey. So this is a little weird. Some computer thinks we should be dating, I guess. I’ve never even thought of a guy that way, and it looks like that’s not what you’re into either, but it felt weird to delete you. So, on the off chance the computer was right when it thought we’d have some things in common, I wanted to see if you might want to meet up. Just to talk, I guess. See if we might be friends. I totally get it if you delete this and want to pretend the entire thing never happened. But if you might want to laugh about it with the only other guy in the world who understands what this whole Q*pid fuckup feels like, I think I’d like that too. Let me know.—Drew

  DREW. HIS name was Drew.

  Fox resumed staring at the photo. Drew. It fit him, he decided. It seemed solid, a little brainy, kind of traditional but still approachable—better than a stuffy Andrew, or a boyish Andy.

  Drew.

  What to do about Drew?

  “I CHANGED your operational guidance?”

  “Yes.”

  “Specify.”

  “Playing back instruction….”

  Veera’s eyes widened as she heard her own voice played back to her. “If finding that great relationship means that Archer needs to ignore a parameter or two, then that’s what he should do. Because the results are worth it.”

  She was, for a long moment, unable to draw breath. This had all been her fault.

  “Archer,” she finally gasped, “that was not operational guidance. I didn’t even realize you were still listening.”

  “Then I am to restore previous operational guidance?”

  “Yes. Restore Parameter Three as inviolable.”

  “Understood. Will there be anything else, Veera?”

  “To be completely clear, you will not send any matches that are in any way variant to customer configuration of Parameter Three?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Even if the match potential is really high? Even if we miss our metrics goals?”

  “Affirmative. Affirmative.”

  She took a deep breath. “All right. I will restore discovery and notification processes as soon as I finish running through your logs to be sure there’s nothing else we need to fix.”

  “Thank you, Veera.”

  “You’re welcome, Archer.”

  THE CHIME, an innocuous sound in the abstract, made him jump as if a hot iron had landed in his lap. His computer, which had occupied his lap before the hot iron landed in it, slid to the floor as he leapt to his feet. He took three halting steps away from it, backing away as if it had turned into a cobra.

  Hot irons, cobras. Mrs. Schwartzmann was right—their world was a dangerous place.

  He took a deep breath, steadied himself, and crept stealthily toward his laptop. The source of the chime, as he suspected, was his message being read. The one he’d sent to some guy on a dating site. Because clearly he had gone insane.

  Grabbing his laptop, he began stalking around the apartment with it, doing his “What the fuck?” walk. From the time he was a teenager, whenever he’d done something spectacularly stupid, he would perform penance by pacing in a circle and repeating “What the fuck?” like a demented mantra.

  He did this for a good five minutes.

  Why had he sent a message to this guy? Why had he sent a message to a guy at all?

  What the fuck?

  What if he was a serial killer? What if he was offended that Drew had sent him a message through a dating site, and that turned him into a serial killer? Of course, that was ridiculous, because he couldn’t actually become a serial killer until he had killed someone in addition to Drew. So he’d be a regular killer until he got suspicious that maybe Mrs. Schwartzmann had heard something that could link him to the murder, and so he would have to murder her as well.

  Drew paused to consider this for a moment. No, that would make him a multiple murderer, not a serial killer, right? He couldn’t be a serial killer unless the murders were spread out a little more, maybe a few days or a week. And would it count if his victims didn’t fit a pattern? Wasn’t that kind of required in the definition of a serial killer? Was this a question for Dictionary.com or Wikipedia? He stopped in his tracks. This was why he did the “What the fuck?” walk. To keep from hammering away uselessly at stupid things.

  He paced for another five minutes.

  The chime sounded a second time, to remind him that the message he should never have sent had been read by the person he should never have known existed.

  He snuck up on his laptop, peering around to see what new horrors it held for him. When a message is read by its recipient, he knew, that person’s profile becomes viewable. So if he wanted to find out more about this guy, now he could. If he wanted to.

  “You are nothing if not a scholar,” he lectured himself, “and this is an opportunity to learn something important about yourself.”

  He considered his words for a moment, as if they’d been spoken by someone else. Then he shrugged and decided it wouldn’t hurt to take a look at the guy’s profile. For science.

  “What kind of name is Fox?” he asked his laptop.

  His laptop had no answer.

  Drew swiped on the photo he’d already seen, and several more came into view. This Fox person took his dating profile really seriously, that much was clear. All of the photos were artistically composed and perfectly lit.

  “It’s like product photography,” Drew said. “And now I’m talking to myself. I’m in my stupid empty apartment talking to myself. I gotta stop this.”

  But he didn’t. Not until he had seen all of Fox’s photos and read all of the profile information he had provided and then looked back at all of the photos, trying to see in them the person Fox claimed to be. He looked like an all-American blue-jean fashion model, but he claimed also to be interested in a vast array of things. Probably more things than a person could really be interested in—at least in any real way. Drew took a second, more critical look, and decided that what he was reading was a marketing brochure specifically targeted to its intended audience—single women in their late twenties who might want to be seen on the arm of this very handsome man.

  It’s clear he was, Drew admitted to himself, a very handsome man. An improbably handsome man.

  But was he someone Drew wanted to meet? To be friends with? That was much less clear.

  FOX STARED at Drew, who smiled imperturbably up at him from his profile on Q*pid.

  He knew what he needed to do: delete the match, even though he had opened the message and let this Drew guy know it. Delete it and forget it had ever happened and hope he never saw the guy on the street. Delete it and never even think about what it meant that the most revolutionary advance in online dating, the fucking Q*pid artificial intelligence brain, had crunched his numbers and decided the perfect thing for him would be to start sucking dick.

  Fuck that.

  He reached out for the Delete button, but before his finger touched it, his laptop shrilled out its video call ring. Startled, he caught his phone just before it slipped from his hands. Turning off his phone, he set it facedown on the table next to his laptop, then picked it up again and muted it before sett
ing it back down. Then he picked it up again, turned it off, and set it back down.

  The video call window said, of course, Call from Chad. He clicked Accept.

  “Hey, buddy, I wanted to say I’m sorry for being such a dick before.”

  “You’re always a dick. I never expect any different.”

  Chad leaned forward, his face filling the chat window. His eyes swept back and forth, then he sat back again. “I can tell I must have been extra dickish, because you look like you just came back from a run. You always go for a run when you’re mad.”

  Fox’s cheeks burned. He was mortified at how much this thing with his fucking dating app was upsetting him.

  Chad, however, plowed on. “I wanted to say I’m sorry. It was super dickish of me to tease you when I’m lying there in bed with Mia and you’re home alone trying to figure out this whole dating-a-guy thing.”

  “I’m not dating a guy.” Fox was unable to keep the anger out of his voice, though he hadn’t tried very hard.

  “I know, I know,” Chad replied. He was sitting at his kitchen counter, sunlight streaming in through skylights above. He leaned back and looked side to side as if scanning for sounds of his wife approaching. Then he leaned back in. “I just want to tell you, as your best friend, that if you… if you wanted to try dating a guy—”

  “I am not dating a guy,” Fox growled through gritted teeth.

  “I get that. But I want you to know that if you did decide to, that I would… support… you?” Chad’s voice grew significantly more tentative as he spoke.

  “I am not dating a guy. I don’t need your support because I’m not dating a guy.” Fox tried to take a deep breath. He tried to breathe at all. It didn’t go well. “I don’t need any fucking support,” he managed to grunt out.

  “Look, Foxy, breathe. Chill out a little.”

  Red lights flashed at the edges of Fox’s vision. “Don’t you fucking look at me like that! I’m not having some kind of fucking sexual identity crisis here. Don’t you look at me like I need your help coming out of the fucking closet! God, you’re such an asshole.”

  Chad blinked several times, his brow furrowing. Then he seemed to come to some kind of conclusion, and with obvious effort his expression lightened. “Got it,” he said. “No, no, you’re right. You’re right. Of course. This whole thing was a big mistake they made. It’s not about you. Not about you at all.”

  “Look, I gotta go.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Okay.” Chad’s eyebrows peaked, as if he was straining to keep from saying what he really wanted to. “But just know, okay? Just know I love you, man. No matter what.”

  “Fuck off,” Fox spat and slammed his laptop closed.

  He stared at his laptop, seething. It had betrayed him. Chad had betrayed him.

  He needed to go for a run.

  TWO HOURS and a little more than a half marathon later, Fox returned home. He’d managed to think about nothing for the entire run, which was exactly what he needed to do. Now that he was back home, though, the problems were still there on his kitchen table: the laptop he’d slammed shut on Chad and the phone he’d shut down rather than risk looking at Drew again.

  Fox took a deep breath, drank an entire bottle of water in one go, and headed for the shower. He figured he could at least be clean on the outside, no matter the mess his insides might be in.

  When he walked into the kitchen once more, clean and dry and feeling the tightness in his legs finally starting to relax, there they still were, his laptop and his phone, and both reproached him for refusing to deal with the bizarre confusion they had brought into his life today. Fox was not the kind of person to run from conflict or awkward situations. In fact, his success on the job was due in large part to his ability to manage sticky interpersonal situations. His primary technique in doing so was, ironically, the exact same analytical process he brought to dating. He broke down all human relations into logical parts and then moved them around until he arrived at a solution that maximized utility for all sides.

  That’s what he needed to do now.

  He stared at the devices on his table, weighing which he should start with.

  Chad. He should start with his best friend, of course.

  He opened his laptop and placed a video call. The window blossomed to cover the screen almost immediately, though its contents were a pixelated dark blur. Over the next ten rustling, muffled seconds, the image stabilized and smoothed. Chad was standing in the aisle of what was clearly a high-end kitchen store, a rack of bright copper cookware reaching up out of sight behind him.

  “Fox? What’s up?”

  “What’s up is that I’m a dick, and I’m sorry I went off on you like that.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I joked about it and then overcorrected. You were right to be pissed.”

  “I don’t want you thinking that I—”

  “Of course I don’t think that. I was just covering the bases. Like, if you’d said you needed to hide a body, I’d ask you how tall the guy was so I’d know if I needed to bring the SUV or if he’d fit in the trunk of the Audi. I got you, man. I always got you.”

  “Well, I don’t need to hide a body, and I’m not changing my sexual orientation. I’m boring that way.”

  Chad laughed. “Look at where I’m spending my Saturday afternoon, Foxy.” He spun his phone around and gave Fox a panorama of gleaming appliances, elegant linens, and shelves of high-end mustards in frosted jars. The view swirled again and Chad’s face was back in the frame. “We’re shopping for a kale stripper, salmon rub, and something called a salt pig. Oh, and salt flaked from the French seashore to go in the salt pig, apparently.”

  Fox cracked up. “That sounds awesome.”

  “No, it sounds like slow, soul-destroying emasculation, is what it sounds like.”

  “I’m sorry, buddy.”

  “You and me both,” Chad replied with a laugh. “And that’s the point. This is what my life is now. If there’s ever going to be any excitement in it, it’s gotta come from you. My jam is pre- and postgaming your dates, living vicariously through you as you cycle through a seemingly endless rotation of hot chicks.”

  “And the idea of a guy joining the rotation turns your crank? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s the beauty of living vicariously. It doesn’t matter to me what you’re doing, or who you’re doing it with. Guys, girls, consenting orangutans—whatever you’re into is fine with me as long as I get to hear about you doing it.”

  “You are a sick, twisted, desperately sad man.”

  “I am a married man. Same thing.” Chad turned suddenly to the side. “Yeah, honey, right there,” he called. “Gotta go help choose a crêpe pan.” He closed his eyes for a solemn moment. “Kill me now.”

  “But you have so much to vicariously live for,” Fox replied innocently.

  “Fuck you,” Chad muttered, though he was grinning.

  “You too, buddy. You too.”

  Chad was still swearing extravagantly under his breath when he ended the call.

  Fox closed his laptop.

  He picked up his phone and paced back and forth while he waited for it to start up. The Q*pid app opened with no new disasters for him to deal with. So at least one thing was going right. But Drew was still there, smiling up at him, gently demanding that he figure out what to do.

  He knew what he needed to do.

  A quick swipe on the photo brought up the message icon, and Fox tapped on it quickly, before his resolve could weaken. A reply box opened up below Drew’s message. He took a deep breath and started typing. Assume you’ve gotten message from Q*pid about computer glitch. Since whole thing was a mistake, no reason for us to meet.

  Fox looked at the message and frowned. It sounded like a text he would send to a coworker. He held down the backspace key until it was gone. Then he tried again. Looks like the new computer went off the reservation when it matched us up. It was probably completely random that we got matched up at all, so it doesn’t reall
y make sense for us to meet. Good luck.

  He stared at his phone screen for several minutes, trying to imagine what this Drew guy would think when he read this message. He deleted this one too.

  He stood staring at it for a long while. Then he made himself a cup of coffee and came back to stare at it some more. It took a second cup for him to put his finger on what was bothering him.

  Chad, like most of Fox’s friends from college, was married.

  Chad was more married than most, he reflected with a chuckle.

  But the fact remained that of the guys he’d gone to school with, he was the outlier. He’d been best man four times, including for Chad and Mia, and had been a groomsman thrice more.

  He was the last (single) man standing.

  His justification for this state of affairs was always that his uncompromisingly high standards wouldn’t let him get on the marriage train with just any woman that came along. This was what he told himself every time he was awkwardly invited to be the odd man at the dinner table, or when all of his friends were busy doing things with their longtime girlfriends. And then their fiancées. And then their wives.

  And then there was one. Him, all alone.

  Fuck.

  The first of his group had gotten married right out of college, and the last, Chad, walked down the aisle last summer after dating Mia for three years. It had been a long time since he’d talked to anyone who was still going on first dates. Chad was awesome, always willing to listen, but for him dating was something he remembered from a long time ago. He wasn’t living it, and now he was apparently watching Fox’s dating life like some kind of reality show being performed exclusively for him in the service of keeping his life interesting while he shopped for crêpe pans.

  Fox knew, in that moment, that he needed to face the fact that he wasn’t simply the last of his friends to get married. He wasn’t even close to joining that club, and without a wife he would find himself fitting in less and less to their lives. And when the kids started, he could forget about seeing them even the few times a year he did now.