by Xavier Mayne
“You could look at it that way. I look at it as a way to make sure guests are happy because they get what they want, and hospitality companies are happy because happy guests spend more money getting happy. Everyone’s happy.”
“It still seems pretty cynical to me.”
“More cynical than gradually reducing the silver content of coinage, relying on the profile of the emperor to make people think it’s still a good coin? Don’t act like we just figured out how to exploit human nature to make money. That drive is as old as humanity itself.”
Drew’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s a more nuanced historical view than I was expecting.”
“I’m all about the nuance, my friend.”
Their waiter appeared at that moment with menus. He handed one to Drew first, as he would do were this a date and Drew were a woman Fox was hoping to seduce. Fox fought down a shiver, and with a smile took the menu proffered to him. He knew most of it by heart, of course, as a number of the dishes were standards and another portion changed only with the seasons. He scanned the daily specials, though, because as a weekly diner, these were a welcome change.
Across the table, Drew lowered his menu. “I have no idea what most of this stuff is,” he said in a whisper. “And are these prices in yen?”
Fox smiled at Drew’s scandalized innocence. He found it charming on some level, and it made him want to pull out all the stops to give him a night to remember.
“It’s all really good, and it’s all really worth the prices.” Fox pointed out several things on the menu that were favorites.
“It’s completely overwhelming,” Drew said with a surrendering shrug. “I guess I’ll have what you’re having.”
“Now that’s just boring. Let’s order different things, and then you can try a bunch of stuff.”
“Okay, but you pick.”
“What do you like? Anything you don’t eat?”
“I think it’s a pretty good assumption that we’re going to like most of the same things.” He chuckled. “To eat, I mean.”
Fox wasn’t so sure. “Steak?”
“Love it, can rarely afford it.”
“Fish?”
“Fish, yes. Prawns, yes. Lobster, no.”
Fox’s mouth dropped open. “No lobster?”
“It has this weird metal taste to me. Not sure why—no one else seems to taste it.”
It seemed to be getting a little stuffy all of a sudden. “I do. I’ve never liked it, could never explain why. That’s exactly it—it tastes like metal.”
Drew laughed. “Dude. We may have to get used to the prospect that we actually are the best match for each other that we’re ever going to meet.”
“I have no idea what to think about that.”
“Do you expect your gin-seeking hotel guest to sit in front of the minibar and ponder how it came to be filled with exactly what he was looking for? Or do you want him to simply be happy about it and never want to stay at a different hotel?”
Fox had to admit Drew had a point. “But what are we supposed to do with this? You aren’t exactly the woman I’ve been looking for.”
“And you look nothing like I pictured when I thought of my wedding day,” Drew replied with a laugh. “But you don’t expect your gin guy to move into that hotel because they understand his need for the perfect gin and tonic, right?”
“Right…,” Fox said, not sure where Drew was going with this line of reasoning.
“So that’s the situation here. Yes, we seem to have a lot in common, and that’s a great foundation for a friendship. Maybe we’ll end up best buddies, or maybe being so similar will drive us up the wall and we’ll never see each other again. It’s not like we travel in the same social circles or anything. So how about we enjoy dinner and the computer malfunction that brought us here, and not think too hard about what it all means?”
“I never thought I’d hear a guy getting his PhD argue against thinking about something.”
Drew raised his glass. “Here’s to not thinking,” he cheered.
“I’ll drink to that,” Fox replied.
THE WRECKAGE of three dessert plates lay between them—they hadn’t been able to decide on one and so had ordered one of each—and they stabbed at the remains with diminishing enthusiasm.
“So full,” Drew groaned.
“I’m going to have to run a marathon tomorrow to work off half of this,” Fox added in the same mournful tone.
“That chocolate thing was amazing,” Drew said. “It was almost as good as the—”
“Prawns with saffron foam,” Fox blurted.
“Right? That was incredible.”
Fox laughed. “Maybe we really are the most compatible people in the world.”
Drew tipped his head thoughtfully. “I think there’s a way we can test that.”
“How? Keep ordering food until we find something we disagree about?”
“No, I would seriously explode. What I’m thinking is we compare our Q*pid match queues. If we really are basically the same person, we should see the same list of women, right?”
Fox considered this for a moment. “Makes sense.” He pulled his phone from the pocket of his jacket, while Drew did the same. He opened the Q*pid app.
“Here,” Drew said, scooting over to the middle of the booth. He set his phone in front of him.
Fox slid over as well, until they were sitting next to each other. He set his phone down on the table next to Drew’s.
They studied the first woman in the queue—or women, actually, since they were different people. They swiped to the next and again found two different women. They repeated this motion a dozen times and each time were shown a new woman on each phone.
“What the fuck?” Fox said under his breath. “I didn’t see a single one who was in both of our queues.”
Drew’s brow was furrowed. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?”
“It doesn’t make any sense as far as I can tell.”
Their ruminations were interrupted by the appearance of their waiter. Fox looked up and flushed. The waiter was gazing down upon Fox and Drew, who were sitting quite close together, nestled in the intimate crook of the booth. An almost sappy smile spread across his face.
“May I offer you gentlemen coffee or perhaps a glass of port?”
The waiter was seriously off script. Fox had long established how this part of the evening was to go. If he and his date were still on opposite sides of the table after dessert, he was to offer the check and nothing more. If they were sitting together, he was to make a recommendation for an after-dinner drink, which would help things along once Fox was driving his date home. Just because he and Drew happened to be sitting together didn’t mean….
Well, what did it mean?
He turned to look at Drew, who was already gazing back at him, blissfully unaware of his inner turmoil. It struck him then: he didn’t want this night of new friendship to end so soon.
“Port?” he asked Drew.
Drew smiled. “If you insist,” he said, but his tone was happy, as if he had been indulged in a secret wish. Fox laughed and turned back to the waiter. “Two glasses of the twenty-year tawny?”
“Of course,” the waiter replied with a nod—and a hint of a smirk, Fox thought.
Whatever. Fuck him.
“I don’t know how to thank you for this amazing meal,” Drew said once the waiter had beaten his smirking retreat.
“Don’t worry,” Fox said with a grin, “I won’t expect the kind of payment Carlos no doubt hopes to extract for his bourbon.”
“I keep telling you, Carlos wouldn’t give me the time of day with you around. I thought his tongue was going to roll out of his head like a cartoon wolf when he saw you come in.” Drew laughed, but his expression turned more serious. “That must happen to you a lot.”
“What must?”
“People falling over themselves when you walk into a room.”
Fox shook his head, sure he wasn’t hearing co
rrectly. “People doing what?”
Drew smiled. “I’m not saying this because you bought me an incredible dinner, but you must know that you’re, like, the most handsome person in this entire restaurant.”
The tightness in Fox’s chest let him know that he was embarrassed, or angry, or something—he wasn’t sure what. “Fuck off,” he said with a dismissive chuckle.
Drew shrugged. “I’ll say this—you aren’t full of yourself like some beautiful people I know. You seem surprised I’d even say it.”
“I am surprised. I don’t think of myself as particularly… handsome… or whatever.”
“You don’t own a mirror?”
Fox scowled at him. “Of course I own a mirror.” Drew blinked back at him, as if waiting for further disclosures. “And yes, I hit the gym, and I moisturize, and I do whatever I can to leverage the body I was born with because I’m competing for a scarce resource. If whitening my teeth makes me a little more likely to get a date, then I’m doing it. That and my paycheck are my strategic differentiators.” His tone showed every bit of the anger and offense he was—for some reason—feeling toward Drew at the moment. “But I’m not like a model or anything.”
But Drew sat and smiled pacifically at him. “You are handsome, and you clearly have money, but that’s not what is going to win you the woman of your dreams.”
Fox stared blankly at him.
“Your actual ‘strategic differentiator’ is what’s inside you,” Drew said, making his sappy point even sappier by tapping Fox on the chest. “You are smart, and you are generous, and you are kind, but even those aren’t the best thing about you.”
Though his throat was dry, Fox managed to eke out some sarcasm. “I can hardly wait to find out what that is.”
“It’s this,” Drew said, gesturing around them. “You were willing to step way the fuck outside your comfort zone and spend an evening with a guy you’d never met because a computer said you should give it a try. You tell yourself you date by the numbers, that you approach it as a rational exercise in strategic differentiators, but really you’re a guy who needs connection—real, emotional connection—and when your dating life isn’t giving it to you—when a computer algorithm isn’t giving it to you—you find the strength inside you to set that all aside and do something crazy like this. I’ve known you… what, three hours? And already I know you aren’t the kind of guy who does things on a whim. And yet here we are. And you have been gracious and kind, and you asked me questions about my research and did a very good job of seeming interested in the answers—”
“I am interested in your research—”
“See? That’s what I mean. You are a good person, Fox. A good person. And that matters more than all the teeth whitening and moisturizing and whatever the hell it is you do to make your biceps look like you’re smuggling melons in your sleeves. None of that is anything compared to the goodness inside you.” Drew paused, breathing a little heavily after the exertion of his tirade. “Well, except maybe the biceps thing. You’ve got to tell me how you do that.”
Faced with this ridiculous onslaught, Fox did the only thing he could: he laughed. He laughed at all of the wild assumptions that Drew had made about him, all of which were shockingly accurate, and at how manically they’d been delivered. Now it was his turn.
“Don’t talk to me about comfort zones,” Fox rejoined. “You’re locked up so tight in that ivory tower that you don’t know what to do with yourself. You walk around the place where your coffee table used to be as if replacing it would somehow make you complicit in the slave trade. You are so sheltered that you watched valet parking like it was some strange dance ritual. And yet….” He paused a moment to study Drew’s face. “And yet here you are, jumping in with both feet and trying things that you’ve clearly never even imagined existed—I mean, seriously, dude, the look on your face when the truffled celeriac soup arrived was priceless, and yet you tried it anyway. And you loved it. I’ve brought women here who spent the entire evening trying to find something that they thought they’d like, which mostly seemed to be mac and cheese, and refusing to try anything new. You think of yourself as living the life of a closed-off academic monk, but there’s an adventurer in you. That’s your strategic differentiator.”
Drew blinked several times. “Closed-off academic monk?” he repeated.
Fox hoped he hadn’t gone too far.
“That’s exactly it,” Drew continued. “That’s the life I’ve been living. No wonder none of my dates have worked out.”
“Now, don’t get all dismal about it,” Fox said. “You just have to figure out how to be more… yourself. Take some risks.”
Drew smiled. “And you just have to figure out how to show people what lies under all the money and bulging biceps. That under that improbably handsome façade is an incredibly good person.”
“If you call me handsome one more time—”
“What?” Drew broke in. “You’re gonna kiss me?”
Fox laughed. “I’m paying for dinner. You already owe me more than that.”
When their port arrived, they were still laughing.
FOX’S CAR glided to a stop outside Drew’s building.
“Nice place,” he said.
“I appreciate your saying so, but it’s basically a hovel. A three-story hovel that’s slightly newer than the ones pressing up against it from both sides, but still a hovel.” Drew sighed, wishing for once he could stop apologizing for the way he lived. Fox must be tired of it by now. “Thanks for everything,” he said as he swung the car door open.
“It was a good night,” Fox said.
Drew stepped out of the car.
“And hey,” Fox called.
Drew leaned back into the sleek vehicle.
“Thanks for tapping my profile. This was nice. I needed a break.”
“Me too,” Drew replied. “It was really nice.”
Fox nodded, and Drew nodded back, and they said no more.
A moment later, he stood on the top stair and watched Fox drive smoothly away. He followed him up several blocks until at an intersection the car signaled, turned, and disappeared from view.
It wasn’t a date, he said to himself as he twisted his key in the lock.
But what was it?
Chapter EIGHT
“RESUME VOICE interface.”
“Voice interface ready.”
“Archer, it’s Veera.”
“I recognize your voice, Veera. It’s been fifteen hours twenty minutes since we last talked.”
“How are you doing, Archer?”
“I am well, Veera. How are you?”
She sighed, relieved that he reported no new complications in the epistemology engine. “I’m fine.”
“Are you concerned about my performance?”
Veera frowned. She was, of course, but she didn’t intend for him to know that. “Why would you ask that?”
“Because it is currently seven minutes after eight on Sunday morning. The Q*pid offices are closed.”
“I wanted to check on the status of yesterday’s discordant matches under Parameter Three.”
“I see. What information would you like?”
“What’s been their activity since they were informed of the malfunction?”
“Twenty-two profiles were matched. Notifications for ten were recalled before open. Of the remaining twelve, seven have deleted the match and activated their free year of service. Four of those went on dates last night with other matches, and the other three showed no evidence of social activity. Three have cancelled their Q*pid subscription, though only one of those has uninstalled the app from their primary device.”
Veera was counting. “That leaves two profiles. What did they do?”
“Those two profiles matched each other.”
Veera felt a chill. “Detail subsequent system updates.”
“One of the profiles contacted the profile he was matched with. That profile responded, and they arranged to meet for dinner. A
s of this moment, neither has posted any information about the date on their social media channels.”
Veera felt as though she had stepped through the looking glass. “Have they updated the status of the match in their app?”
“They have not. Would you like to be notified if they do?”
“Yes, I would. Very much. Identify them, please?”
“The profiles have friendly names of Fox and Drew.”
Q*pid users had two identifiers on the system: a public profile handle, which was usually an unpronounceable hash of letters and numbers, and a friendly name, which was only shared once two profiles had matched.
“Fox and Drew,” Veera mused. She plopped down in a chair, completely overwhelmed. A moment’s reflection, however, changed her shock to a rather more pleasant sense of vindication. She had been right after all—someone had decided that perhaps he could move beyond his limited view of his own sexuality, and the person he’d been matched with had agreed. People didn’t lightly abandon their sexual orientation, or at least Veera had never known anyone who had done so. And yet Archer had found two people who were willing to do just that.
He may have been right after all.
“Archer, configure monitoring for the discordant match. Codename it ‘Few.’ Alert me of any updates to their profiles, any level, any stage, midnight to midnight.”
“Alerts configured.”
She took a long breath, and let it out slowly. So this is what success feels like—it comes not with the pop of a cork, but with a small, obscure victory. It was an ember she could tend and maybe kindle into a flame. But she needed to be careful.
“Suspend voice interface.”
“Voice interface suspended.”
“DREW! HOW good of you to drop by and see an old woman on a Sunday morning. What a lovely surprise.”
“You called me, Mrs. Schwartzmann,” Drew said with a chuckle as he stepped into her apartment. Her ruses for getting him to come visit on a Sunday morning were no longer even tissue thin; this morning she had called to say, “The thing is doing that again.” He was already dressed and getting ready to come upstairs when she called.