Four Reasons to Come

by Sarah J. Brooks

  Before I knew it, I was at my stop and quickly scurrying off the subway and toward the stairs that led up to the street where I felt more comfortable. The empty feeling of the station made the dirt and garbage stand out as I made my way up to the street. At least on the street I knew where all the hotels with doormen were; I knew the restaurants that were open late, and I had my walking path down to a science to get home safely.

  But as I was walking out of the subway car, I noticed a man in a sweatshirt that turned and started to follow me. It was odd to me because he had looked like he was waiting to get on the subway and then turned to follow me instead of stepping into the car.

  My pulse quickened at the idea something might be going wrong, but I kept myself calm and didn’t panic. There was no need to panic. My eyes focused on the door in front of me, and then the next one and the next one. The breeze gave me shivers as I felt it push me forward. I was simply walking out of the subway, and perhaps this guy forgot something and needed to go get it. There were times that I had been waiting for the subway and turned around to grab a coat or something like that from my house. It was fine. I was fine. Nothing was going to happen to me.

  The problem as I saw it was that everyone else seemed to have walked faster than me and were already out of the subway and off on their own journey home. I was left hustling up the stairs with this hooded man shortly behind me. When I finally reached the street, I desperately looked around to see if there was anyone walking. There wasn’t.

  My biggest fear about New York City was that I would be attacked by a man late at night. I had lived in New York for several years, but it was still a fear I held close, and it reemerged anytime I was alone on the streets, and there weren’t a lot of other people around.

  Instead of going toward my house, I turned and walked toward the bar that was just two blocks away. I could see the lights and kept myself focused, there were people out front and that brought a calm to my unusually nervous stomach. But the man was still right there, I felt his footsteps getting closer. Would he have followed me if I had turned the other way toward my house? I wasn’t sure. But all I knew was that he was very close to me, only two steps behind me, and that was too close for my comfort. Usually, at night, men didn’t walk that close to women. Men knew it made us uncomfortable, so they either stayed farther back or hurried past us. But this guy seemed content to terrify me by keeping equal step with me and walking with me in the direction of the bar.

  “Hey, do you know what time it is?” I said halfway out of breath as I walked up to the first man I saw standing in front of the club.

  I playfully wrapped my arm around his like I knew him and waited for the man in the sweatshirt to pass me by. He did pass me by. He didn’t bother to look at me and didn’t seem to even care that I had stopped to talk to some complete stranger in front of a bar.

  “It’s 11:15,” the man said with a grin as he looked down at my hand on his arm.

  “Oh, sorry. Thanks,” I said as I took off in the other direction.

  “That’s it?” I heard him say as I walked away.

  Yep, that was it. I quickly walked to my apartment, up the stairs, and locked the door behind me. Since my nerves were on full alert, I took the time to look through each closet in my apartment just to make sure there wasn’t some stranger hiding there and ready to jump on me.

  Normally I would have changed out of my clothes and put on some sweatpants, but my paranoia was still strong and I didn’t want to undress. As I finally put my head on my pillow, I was still very uncertain about sleeping. I had been scared, genuinely scared, but it had been nothing. The man had probably been walking back to his own apartment or something. I felt silly and scared all at the same time.

  Out of pure boredom, and a total inability to sleep, I clicked on the Date Tonight app to see if it was still frozen. It wasn’t!

  There were three new questionnaires waiting for me to fill out. I got to work clicking through them and finished them all within thirty minutes. It was weird some of the questions the app was asking, but it was weirder to me that the answers to those questions would have anything to do with a game I might or might not be playing on there.

  I answered questions about my family, my favorite places to visit, my favorite coffee shop, and even the places I liked to go dancing. Whatever this game was, it sure did seem like a big waste of time. I made a mental note to dress super cute when Emma and I went dancing on Friday. If this app weren’t going to actually connect me with a decent guy, maybe I would start making a little more of an effort on my own.

  Every time we went to Sin, I enjoyed it because we danced and didn’t look at the guys, but perhaps it was time that I looked around and saw who else enjoyed dancing. It seemed like a good first place to start. If I enjoyed dancing like a maniac, and so did he, then certainly we would at least have that in common.

  Chapter 7

  Wyatt

  “Why is everyone coming with us?” Merrick asked as we got into the big SUV.

  “Because, I’ve decided that the guys need to see you, and if that means they have to see you over drinks on a Friday night, then that’s what we are doing.”

  “Is the kid even old enough?” Merrick joked as he looked at Ren“Yes, Ren is twenty-four; stop teasing him. He’s the first one we are picking up, and he idolizes you. Plus, I thought you liked him.”

  “Unlike you, I don’t think I like you after forcing me to send Bambi away.”

  Ren was always dressed better than all of us in his high end clothing and designer shoes. He was young enough to feel like his clothing mattered to women and the rest of us knew that most women liked our money more than whatever clothes we had chosen to put on for the night.“Yep, unlike me. I know the real you. Nothing special.” I laughed. “What happened with Bambi?”

  “She decided I wasn’t the right guy for her.”

  “Well, good for her,” I said with a smile. “She deserves to find the guy who is right for her.”

  “Shut it.” He continued to laugh. “Is the Pennington kid from work coming too?”

  “Yes, Luke is coming too. You’ll just have to get over the whole thing about him working with us. He’s our friend now too. Plus, you never actually see him at work, so why do you care?”

  “This is horrible. I’ve got to spend the whole evening with these guys?”

  “I know. Isn’t it just the worst? I’m actually bringing three other guys with us out to a bar. I mean, how will you ever forgive me?”

  Merrick just laughed.

  He was the head of our company, and I suspected a lot of men thought of Merrick as their friend. But he had very few true friends. Most of the people in his life wanted something from him. They wanted connections, investing advice, women advice, or some combination of all of them. Our friendship was much more organic since we had known each other since college.

  “Hey guys,” Ren said enthusiastically as we pulled up in front of his apartment.

  “Hey. Nice outfit,” I said.

  “I know, isn’t it kicking?”

  “I have no idea what he just said,” Merrick muttered.

  We swung by, picked up Luke next and then pulled in front of Dean’s apartment. There were actually some paparazzi in front of his place which surprised all of us a lot. We sort of thought Dean had made that stuff up when he said they were out there.

  Dean quickly walked from his front door and into the SUV while the paparazzi took dozens of photos of him. It was clear they had been there just for him because they all hustled to their vehicles to try and follow us. I wasn’t a fan of paparazzi at all, but I was even more glad that I didn’t live the type of life that had to deal with them on a daily basis.

  “Let’s get going,” I hollered at the driver, as he sped down the street in our high end SUV. “We don’t want them to know where we are heading, and it looks like they are going to try and follow in their vehicles.”

  The driver dutifully stepped on the gas and even took a few ext
ra turns to make sure they didn’t know where we were. He appeared to be enjoying his new task of avoiding the paparazzi.

  “Does someone famous live in your building?” Merrick joked with Dean.

  “Yeah, I think there’s a washed up movie actor there.”

  Dean and Merrick actually got along very well. They both had a laid back vibe about them, and people tended to know who they were in many difference situations. I even thought of them more as equals to each other than I thought of myself as equal to either of them. I moved over to sit with Luke and Ren as we drove to Sin Dance Club. It was supposed to be a fun place with lots of pretty ladies, or so my Date Tonight app told me.

  “Ren, my app was totally frozen all week long, but today it popped up and said I should try out this Sin Dance Club that we are heading to. What’s up with that?”

  “It’s not actually frozen. There’s an algorithm that it’s working through, and I just didn’t want people to have access to their matches during that time or any time they were in the Game. So you found someone that you wanted to play the game with?”

  “I have no idea what I’m doing. It didn’t really give me a choice. We were one hundred percent matches, so I just went for it.”

  “What?” Ren asked in total shock.

  “I went for it. I mean I don’t know how the app decides the percentage, but the option was to play the game or lose the match, so I’m playing the game. I certainly didn’t want to lose a match as perfect as this one.”

  Ren looked totally panicked as he furiously started typing into his phone and completely ignored me. I watched as he messaged back and forth with someone and seemed to urgently need a response from them. He wasn’t interested in looking at me or responding to me at all. I looked at the rest of the guys who were all staring at Ren with me as we waited for him to tell us what the heck was going on.

  “You started the game?” Ren asked with a concerned look on his face.

  “Yes, like I said, the only option was to start the game or unmatch with her, so I started the game. You are looking a little sketchy right now. What’s going on?”

  “Listen, I need you to throw your phone away. I’ll pay for a new one. We need to take the battery pack out and the tracking chip. We’ll need to crush them both.”

  I laughed, and so did everyone else. Ren looked more paranoid than I had ever seen him. Normally, he was a fairly relaxed guy who enjoyed talking about his computers but never had I heard him act so strangely as he was at that moment. Computer guys got worked up about the weirdest things, but then I supposed that computer guys would think that investors got worked up about weird things too.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Just deleting the app won’t fix this. It already has your information. You need to destroy the phone.”

  Ren looked serious. He was more serious looking than I could remember seeing him, and it was actually starting to make me concerned.

  “You’re scaring me, Ren. What’s going on here?”

  “Yeah, what’s going on? This is weird even for you,” Merrick said.

  Ren was sweating. He didn’t look well at all. I was pretty sure he was going to pass out at any moment. Something was very wrong. Although Ren was normally a little neurotic, he certainly hadn’t been acting anything close to what we were seeing at the moment.

  “Um,” Ren said as he ran his hand through his hair and looked nervously at me. “The app is not designed ever to have a one hundred percent match.”

  He said this like it was going to make sense to me. But it didn’t mean anything to me. Maybe this woman and I were just a really good match. It didn’t seem like a big enough issue for me to have to worry about it.

  “Okay, well they are a good match. What’s the big deal?” Luke asked.

  “It happened when we were designing it. It is a form of artificial intelligence, and our coding only works up to ninety-nine percent. At one hundred percent, our coding is ineffective, and the game plays itself. I know it’s hard to understand, but basically, at one hundred percent the game is now playing all by itself.”

  “What’s wrong with that? I guess I don’t understand the issue.”

  “The game will do whatever it wants. I have no way of ensuring this is going to turn out well for you, and the app now has all your personal information. Your home, work, family, friends; it has everything.”

  “Like what could it do that would be bad?”

  Ren paused as he looked at me and then at the rest of the guys. I felt like there was a big secret he was about to tell us. He drew in a long breath and then let it out as he resigned himself to giving in and telling his secret to us. Ren was definitely making me nervous by how scared he looked. Nothing about his behavior was instilling confidence in how this app was going to match me up with the perfect woman.

  “I didn’t disclose the problem when I sold the app because I thought it was a fluke. I thought it was an error that I had fixed in the final stages,” Ren started to say. “The app, it will start telling you what to do. It will tell you where to go and where not to go; this part is the normal game. Sometimes it says these things to help you meet this woman; sometimes it’s testing you, but the game becomes very aggressive at one hundred percent. The testing of you and follow through with the games commands are required, and the app sort of gets angry if you don’t listen to it.”

  “So if I don’t listen to what it’s telling me, what is going to happen?”

  “You have to listen.”

  I laughed out loud and looked at the other guys too. I didn’t have to listen to a stupid app on my phone. I could simply delete the app and be done with it if I wanted to. When I stopped laughing, I managed to talk again.

  “I’ll just delete it if I don’t like what’s happening. Okay, can we get going to the dance club now?”

  Ren reached over and grabbed my arm. His fingers dug deep into my skin and actually hurt. His eyes looked afraid. Scared of something that he knew, and he wasn’t telling me. There was more; I saw it in his eyes. He looked like he was going to talk a couple of times before he actually managed to find the right words for what he was trying to say. It seemed very important to him, so I listened.

  “You have to listen. Or destroy the phone. The app is fantastic up to a ninety-nine percent match. It has helped thousands of people find the loves of their life. But this error that happens at one hundred percent, I just can’t explain it. The program becomes obsessed with the idea of making this perfect match.”

  “Obsessed?” I asked.

  “Yes, in my test it ended up freezing all my bank accounts after I refused to follow a direction one day.”

  “What!” Luke yelled from behind us. “What kind of crap program is that, Ren?”

  I tried to stay calm, but I was freaking out a little bit about the whole thing. How on earth had I gotten myself mixed up with this deranged dating app that had the ability to help me find the love of my life or freeze all my money and prevent me from living day to day? This was crazy.

  “It did other things too,” Ren reluctantly added. “My Facebook account was hacked. I think it was from the app, and all the females I was friends with were blocked.”

  “Come on, Ren. How the hell did you sell this program for so much money if it had all these issues?” Merrick asked.

  “The odds of getting a one hundred percent match are nearly non-existent. And I had started to think some of it was just in my head. I had worked for a year straight on the coding for the program. I went through and fixed what I could, but I never found the code that would have allowed for the things that happened to me.”

  “So if I destroy my phone, it won’t happen?”

  “I’m not sure. I destroyed the computer I had used for the test case and my phone, but only after my bank accounts were mysteriously frozen. I had to set up all new accounts. I guess I can’t guarantee the game won’t keep playing without you. It took me a week to get my accounts unfrozen and to get access to all my money
again. It was a very scary ordeal.”

  “I’m going to play devil’s advocate here,” Dean added. “Why not just follow the game and meet this girl of your dreams? What would be the reason for not following it?”

  “It told me to go to this club tonight,” I said reluctantly to Ren.

  “I don’t know what would happen if you just followed all the demands. I was tired one evening and didn’t follow them. That was when the system went haywire.”

  “Let’s drop all this crap and stop worrying about it for now. Wyatt, do what you want with that stupid app. Ren, you’re a horrible person for selling that thing with a bug like that in it, but I want to meet some women, and you all are bringing me down,” Merrick announced as we pulled in front of the dance club.

  Merrick, Luke, and Dean went ahead of us, and Ren and I continued to talk as we walked slowly into the club. His eyes avoided looking at me as he answered my questions about the app and the problems he had. To be honest, he sounded really paranoid, and I wasn’t sure the app had done the things Ren thought. From what Ren told me, it was just as possible that he had locked his own bank accounts after he followed the app’s demands and took a flight to Hong Kong at the last minute.

  Whenever I traveled, I had to notify my bank of my plans or they would lock my accounts because they assumed it was fraud. Ren could have easily had something harmless like that happen, and it wasn’t his app at all. Anyways, it seemed really farfetched that his app could have such advanced coding that it was basically thinking all on its own. I was sure that Ren was good at what he did, but artificial intelligence was something much farther into the future, or at least from the research I did on it for a client and their investing portfolio.

  I wasn’t willing to give up the possibility of a perfect match all because Ren was paranoid. I needed much more information than I had so far. For the time being, I was going to continue with the dating app in hopes of meeting this perfect match of mine.