The screen shone brightly in his face as he clicked away incessantly and furiously at his keyboard. There was no time to waste; he just had to reach the next level in time before his allotted gaming time was exhausted for the day. He couldn’t just walk away without having made any progress.

Click, click, click, type, type, type. Down went all of the enemies before him. Only twelve to go before the wave was finished. After that just one more wave, though he only had less than ten minutes left on his timer. The video game would shut itself down when that timer went off exactly like how he programmed it and he also knew that the game did not automatically checkpoint his progress. If the game went down before he was done with the wave, all his progress for the day would go with it.

It was close, but he made it. Only a minute or two into the post-game summary screen, where he would digest the day’s statistics, and then the computer shut itself off, an abrupt blackness filled his vision and it took his eyes a short few moments to adjust.

It almost feels like work. It almost feels like a workout, he thought. The rush of trying to get something done so frantically in such a constrained amount of time, but he loved the rush. He loved the hamster wheel that this game had him on though he knew it wasn’t very good for him. He knew there was this void, this emptiness in him, gnawing at his soul and constantly beckoning him to be doing something more with his life, but he also knew how to ignore it with carefully structured and gamified tasks.

He woke up the next day and went through his normal morning routine: healthy breakfast, plenty of sunlight, cup of coffee, and then he was off on his way to work. He made his way to the elevator on this floor of The Tower and then was up to the office floor. He took pride in being one of the first few souls in the office and in being able to get his day started so early. It also allowed him to not have to spend too much time contemplating what else he should be doing with his life. Once he stepped into the office and plugged into his workstation, his mind was consumed with a constant stream of information and company updates, and he became absorbed into digesting them properly in order to be able to carry out his daily tasks.

Nine or so hours of this with ample breaks for food and to prevent eye strain and he was back on his way home again.

Life after work was also fairly simple and tended to be well-structured. Without giving himself time to feel tired from the long day of work, he went straight into working out. What was the point of wallowing around, he would think. It only made him less likely to complete his workouts, and then if he didn’t complete those workouts he would feel sorry for himself for not having done them. Better to just jump right in without so much time to think himself out of it.

Recommendation and generation systems are ubiquitous in The Tower. They nudge every aspect of your life into the next best thing to try or do. Workouts were no different. Based on a plethora of biometric data such as heart rate, blood pressure, etc. the workout algorithm knew exactly what to suggest to him for today. And he followed it to a tee. Why should he presume himself to be any smarter than the trillions of training data points on which the models were trained? There was no reason to think himself above the decades of scientific progress and countless workouts logged by countless other residents.

Rain pattering against the window, but the window is actually one of many of his computer monitors, the lights from the adjacent tower shine through the window and highlight words on the screens, but the colors of the words become progress bars and indicators, illuminations of the gamifications until the quest bars are complete and the rain turns to confetti raining down Monopoly money and sprinkles, so sweet, so very very sweet but the sprinkles fall to the ground, shattering the neat structure and organization of it all and now it feels so untidy and unfocused and scatter-brained and the fragments of the sprinkles turn to tacks, spread across the road for the unknowing drivers to drive over and pop their tires…

With a jolt he wakes up and is worried about those drivers and the rainbow sprinkles shattering against the pavement. The anxiety of it all is pernicious and pervades every corner of the darkness, until he realizes it was all just a dream.

The clock reads 5:43 am, only twenty-two minutes earlier than his normal wake-up time. There’s not much use in going back to sleep now so he decides to get up out of bed.

At work, the queue of incoming TODOs is full as usual, but also neatly organized by priority and difficulty as usual. It’s just so utterly perfect the way the machines have organized all of this. It’s hard not to appreciate it all. All of the human progress and achievement focused onto this simple system that allows more human progress and achievement, all by allowing the operator to choose one well-defined and well-sized task at a time. Sometimes just the thought of the elegance of it all brings a tear to his eye, as he opens up the work task item that the queue has pushed to his console and reads the contents of today’s work.

The elegance of the systems are truly hard to describe. Think of how much wasted human effort there used to be involved in the politics of the typical corporate workspace. Think how much was wasted in meetings, discussing what to do next and how exactly to approach it, hours and hours and hours sunk into discussing unimportant minutiae. What if we no longer needed to have these circular discussions and what if instead we could just know what it is we needed to do without having to argue about it? These intelligent systems did this for us, and as a result we became so much happier during the eight or nine hours per day we spend at work. We no longer needed to spend precious mental energy thinking about which ticket needed to happen before which other ticket, or which project had the higher potential payoff, since we just fed all of the input data to the machines and they made the calculations for us. And they were often correct.

Sure, humans were still needed to do some of the work, like for example checking the output of the machines and also providing the vision and values for where the companies were trying to go, but so much of corporate life required so many less people. And because of how enjoyable it was, work became a luxury, a status symbol. While the government programs amassed enough wealth to support the whole population at a relatively-comfortable standard of living with plenty of entertainment and hobbies and without much want, inequality was of course still rampant. It seems that no matter how hard society tries to remove the great inequalizing factor, it will still always remain. It’s just that stubborn. In fact, it almost seems like its magnitude is in proportion to how hard society strives to remove it. There remained a class of have-it-alls, those who have the few well-paying corporate jobs still left around The Tower, those whose human abilities were still in need. The exorbitant profits were split among so few people, their incomes were absolutely immense. They made so much money they didn’t know what to do with it. At first there were protests and eventually higher tax brackets were instantiated, but even with taxes taking nearly eighty percent of their income, they are left with orders of magnitude more wealth than your average citizen.

It was ruthless and cutthroat to obtain one of these jobs, and the sheer intensity of the search drove away many people. Your typical person who wasn’t very hardworking or competitive had no desire to obtain one of these jobs since the government handouts, the universal income fund, was sufficient to meet all of their desires. It funded many nights out, many movies at the theater, many video games, a reasonable number of reasonable vacations per year, etc. There was no shame in taking it, and many benefits to doing so for one’s peace of mind.

Those with jobs almost felt addicted to them. Not only were these jobs so hard to obtain, but they were also so hard to leave. The money and the power and the chase, the constant turning of the hamster-wheel drove them to a state of near-obsession. It was always one well-defined action item after the next, day in and day out. And how could one step away from the immense amount of money they were making?

He was one of those rare people, one of those elites who managed to get into the industry early enough when the level of competitiveness required to land a job was still somewhat reasonable. By establishing this foothold, he was able to gain enough experience to cement his role, to grandfather himself into this new automated world, so to say. Many of those just like him but only a few years younger were not so lucky: while the candidate and graduate pool remained just as talented, if not more so, the then shrinking of the number of jobs led to the cutthroat situation described above. Sheer luck landed him on the space-time continuum where it did.

It was often lonely being one of the few of those who had it all, though. It almost felt like those with employment and those without employment occupied two very different worlds and two very different cultures. Those with jobs found that they had much less free time, and their free time was typically structured around “recovering”, resting up for the next day of work in an algorithmically-optimized way through generated workouts, meditation routines, meals, etc. Those outside of the workforce found that much more of their time was spent in entertainment and play. As a result, these two groups of people tended to have very different interests. There was not much connection between these two groups. Dating “across” these groups was also relatively rare. For the jobless, dating was not much more of a problem than it was in the past. If anything, it may have been easier due to the algorithms and matching technology. But for those in the workforce, they typically only dated others who were also working and since there were not that many of them, it was hard to find a partner. This was even more so the case when you consider that certain sectors of the workforce have continued to retain a gender imbalance.

The same sort of isolation also applied to the social lives of this group. Your only realistic option was to converse with those you worked with, but if you weren’t a huge fan of them or if you were just different and didn’t connect then, well, you were somewhat stuck in this archipelago of isolation, ironically common among so many people these days. It’s such a strange phenomenon since nearly all of us lonely folk are very well aware of others who are lonely, but we just cannot seem to bridge this gap. It’s as if we’ve built ourselves and our personalities up to be too unique and too idiosyncratic, our daily habits and rituals too optimized to local maxima, to the point where it has created a sort of impenetrable emotional wall. We can’t let others in and we know it’s not good for us, yet we still proceed down this path because otherwise we would have to rip ourselves away from our perfect feeds, our perfect routines, our perfect algorithms. Technology has not yet solved this problem.

Video games, however, were the perfect escape for people like him. Tailor-made worlds, characters, and puzzles exactly how you like them at the perfect level of challenge based on how stressful your day of work was. All of this added up to a truly addicting experience. This plus the fact the games limited how much you could play them because they hooked into the same algorithms as those managing your health made them impossible to game too much at the expense of your sleep and workout regimen. You only played what you could and this artificially-imposed constraint just made the gaming experience oh so more savory.

The video games were typically MMOs, massively-multiplayer online games, though most of the time you probably weren’t actually interacting with other human beings. It was hard to tell since the artificial intelligence technology for generating life-like conversations and interactions had progressed to such a point that one often could not discern human from robot in these worlds. However, it almost did not matter, as one’s gaming experience was typically so different from anyone else that they knew. There really was no way to connect over shared virtual experiences, because each game was adjusted to each person’s unique tastes.

The worlds were often generated as one long, unfolding adventure. The game itself was multi-genre and it could tell when you wanted a change, so it would adapt by giving you side-quests that directed you towards a different part of the world, maybe even as a different character or even with a different playstyle. Sometimes those side-quests became your main quest if you became interested enough in where it was taking you.

They took you to worlds you could hardly dream of: fantasy realms or sci-fi planets so vivid they left you constantly craving to come back and explore more of this auto-generated universe. The systems knew very well what interested you and knew very well how to hit that sweet spot over and over and over and over again. It was truly an amazing experience and the guilty pleasure of many.

But of course it came with downsides for us. You never really interacted with other real, human players since you were never really inhabiting the same world as anyone else. Everyone had their own unique universe with its own theme and its own quests and its own set of rules; crossovers were just not really possible.

The scary thing is that this almost did not matter. Prior to all this technology, one would feel a deep sense of loneliness, a longing for other people, if they were to subject themselves to such levels of isolation. But the interactions feigned by the generated games were so lifelike and realistic that it felt not only fulfilling, but useful. People were learning relevant, real-world social skills from these games and this was not just a fluke. If it translates into people treating each other with more politeness and respect, how much does it matter that it was a robot, a bunch of ones and zeroes, that taught someone this?

In his fantasy world, he was making a stop in one of the main trading cities on this continent. It was the capital of a vivid elven kingdom, replete with imaginative and colorful houses terraced into the side of a hill overlooking a river. He stepped through the city gates and peered up at the guards on the ramparts, their lances glimmering in the bright sunlight.

He made his way through the wide, main thoroughfare to the market to grab supplies. He knew he was low on a few items, the typical items he needed to maintain his armor and weapons while out questing. He knew he also needed some alchemical supplies to make some elixirs in case he encountered anything unusually strong or difficult. That’s when she caught his eye.

It must have been the smooth green hair, which resembled a beautiful field, or maybe it was the headband of flowers she wore in her hair, which just seemed so fitting. Her blue dress was covered with an intricate patchwork of gold threads and she carried a staff topped with a resplendent emerald. She was beautiful, but more importantly she had the icon above her head indicating that she had a quest to offer to the player. Forgetting the alchemical supplies for now (they could always be purchased later), he made his way over to this mysterious woman whom he had never seen before.

Her name was Vivielle and she was looking for her sister, who was last seen exploring the countryside around the city. The countryside was known to have a lot of dangerous caves and she thought that maybe her sister was captured by one of the hill trolls known to inhabit these caves. She first went exploring herself and came up empty-handed for multiple days. That is, until she found a scrap of her sister’s dress wedged between two rocks at the entrance of a cave waving softly in the gentle wind. This cave was nearly seven miles away from the city and five miles from their countryside estate. What had she been doing so far from home?

Vivielle was looking for an adventurer to find and rescue her sister. And as usual, she was offering gold and experience points as a reward. She pleaded with him so earnestly; he could see a true and genuine concern for her sister’s safety in her eyes. How strangely and uncannily real this all seemed to him! She even gently touched his arm to make her request more known to him. And he felt this too, because the haptic feedback systems have developed such realistic gaming experiences.

It was at this point that the game yanked him so abruptly back to his futuristic reality. A feeling of frustration washed over him. Those cliff-hangers are such a tease, he thought. But he knew that the games were designed this way. It made you constantly crave what was going to happen next. It made you want to come back for more. It optimized the amount of enjoyment you experienced from the games for the amount of time that you put in. Plus, it wasn’t like he couldn’t disable this feature. It was boldly and blatantly right there inside of the settings menu.

Cliff-hanger experiences. Default: on.

He could very easily turn this off if he had wanted to. This wasn’t some dark pattern, some hidden setting buried secretly away or not even present. It was right there and he could turn it off and jump right back into the game. But he thought better of this idea. It was getting late in the evening, and he knew that if he spent too much time playing video games before bed, it would disrupt his sleep. And if his sleep was disrupted, then he wouldn’t be as productive at work the next day as he wanted to. And if he wasn’t as productive at work the next day as he wanted to be, he would fall behind on the multiple projects he was juggling. And he couldn’t fall behind on his projects because…

He didn’t really want to question this much more deeply so he acquiesced to the computed end time to his gaming session and proceeded with his normal pre-bedtime routine.

He was standing on a beach at what was probably close to or shortly after midnight. The moonlight shone down brightly on the gentle waves that rose and broke along the shore. Not far across the water directly in front of him lay another island, dotted with gigantic towers that pierced the misty gray skies. Another island lay towards his left and another was on his right.

It was dead silent except for the waves; nothing could be heard in either direction. No chirping of birds, no rustling of leaves, no splashing in the water. Just an empty nothing punctuated by the periodic soft crashing of the waves. The waves went up and then they came down.

He didn’t know where he was so he walked up along the coast. He thought it was strange that none of the Towers in the distance emitted any light. Not any of the windows as far as he could tell were illuminated from the inside by the prevalent fluorescent bulbs. As he continued to meander up the shoreline in the direction of the moon it occurred to him to turn around and catch a glimpse of the island he was standing on. Like the other islands nearby, a Tower shot up as far as the eye could see, its tinted glass reflecting the vapid grayness of the night sky.

Many stories up, there was one single light on. One single illumination from that marker of human ingenuity and progress. And in the window, he thought he could make out the silhouette of a woman.

His next day of work was mostly like any other. He woke up in the normal wakeup time range, then proceeded with the rest of his morning routine: a perfectly-portioned and healthy breakfast based on his weigh-in and hunger readings, a cup of perfectly-roasted coffee with the perfect amount of cream and sweetener, a short stretching routine targeting the muscle groups that he worked out the day prior, and a sufficiently different outfit from the day before to add just the right amount of variation into his wardrobe.

While sipping on his perfect cup of coffee he looked “out” at the “view” of the “countryside” projected onto his wall. He has seen real vistas of real countrysides before (there wasn’t anything preventing one from leaving The Tower to travel to other places), and he was always surprised to find how realistic and stunning these wall-projections were. Sometimes they almost felt better than reality because you never had to worry about the weather or the air quality or some other factor on that particular day. The projections just gave you the most rosy views they could, and of course this was touched up with a little bit of artificial intelligence because who didn’t like a little bit of makeup? And of course, all of this could easily be modified in the settings. Did you want to see what the actual weather of the location was that day? Or did you only want to see rainy vistas? How about hazy ones with low visibility, spires of buildings only faintly visible in the distance? Anything you wanted, was easily made available.

When he was done with his morning routine, he made his way to the elevator to take it to the office floor, and then proceeded to his office. He sat down at his desk and his computer already had all of the programs open needed for him to start his day. The Tower wasted no time getting its employees ready to work. It knew he was close to his desk based on when he scanned his keycard in the elevator, and from there it was able to calculate approximately how much time he needed to get to his desk, triggering bootup of his computer at just the right time.

His inbox and his ticket queue were open, as usual. Sorting through the usual slog of daily messages and updates, he finally cleared away enough notifications to free up his attention for his actual work: the tickets in the support queue.

The first one caught his eye immediately. There was a resident of The Tower who hadn’t seen her sister in multiple days. She was requesting access to her sister’s keycard access logs to try to find some clues as to where she could have gone and she was quite worried. She was identified simply as “V”.

He stopped and paused for a moment. What was the name of that character he had just interacted with only the previous night? Vivielle? No, this had to just be a very strange coincidence, he thought to himself. Strange, yet eerie and uncanny. He accepted the work assignment and proceeded to read the rest of the details: approximate date and time the sister was last seen, what information The Tower knew about her whereabouts, any anomalous behavior in the weeks leading up to the disappearance, etc. The Tower had all of this information and a request for a missing person was something it was prepared to handle, as this playbook had been run many times before. The computers would simply gather all of the background data and context, and supply it to the human driver, whose ingenuity would help put the picture together, help connect the dots for where this person could have gone. Usually they just ran away to someplace nearby, wanting to shed off the “burdens” of a hyper-futuristic society, wanting to be one again with nature. This almost always lasted for a maximum of maybe three days before the person realized that they would have to hunt for food, live in the elements, be cold at night, not have access to warm showers, etc. Someone in a poor mental state can forget all of these advancements quite easily.

Missing person tickets were only really given to operators when they could not automatically be handled. Unfortunately, this usually meant that the person trying to find the missing person was often dealing with a dire case. He or she had to remind themselves that this was but a small sliver of the actual cases of missing persons. This was a sampling bias, and most of the time missing people were found safely, or returned home of their own volition.

He was never a fan of these support tickets, but he understood that they had to be done. People were already so lonely in the Tower. Not many actually had many friends. So if someone cared enough to report someone missing, there probably was something there that had to be investigated.

No matter how serious the missing person report was in front of him, his mind kept going back to Vivielle from last night’s gaming session. Could this be the same person? Was who he was interacting with in the virtual world really a representation of an actual person in the real world? There’s no way such a thing could be true; it didn’t make any sense to him how such a thing could even be possible. Everybody had admin access to their own virtual games and this could easily be accessed in the settings menu. If he wanted to he could test this theory by deleting the character from the game and seeing what would happen. But now he thought about the actual consequences of doing that. What would happen if there were a real person on the other side? What happens to their gaming experience, their virtual worlds?

He did as best he could to focus on the work in front of him, but was able to make no concrete progress through the rest of the day. He couldn’t figure out what happened to this person.

After work, he made his way home as quickly as he could (though the navigation routes through The Tower were already very well-optimized). Cutting his workout to be slightly shorter than usual and making the fastest and most convenient dinner he could make (without compromising his health, of course), he proceeded to dive back into the virtual gaming world. Something was still bugging him.

He met Vivielle in the market square again and proceeded to ask her questions relating to the missing persons ticket. He mentioned how he had spent all day thinking about her missing sister and how he was unfortunately not able to make any progress. Vivielle seemed quite confused. What did he mean by “all day”? From her perspective, he had barely moved and they had spoken only moments ago. Time stood in-game still while he was off in the real world.

Of course, he thought. He forgot that the flow of time in the game does not match the flow of time in the real world. Though a whole day had passed since he delved into the gaming universe, time was frozen on the inside. For Vivielle, it had only been a matter of mere seconds since they had chatted last.

This threw him off. He was now confused. The missing person report seemed to align perfectly with how Vivielle described her sister and the timing felt like it had to be more than just coincidental, but here was Vivielle acting as if the information he spent his day poring through meant nothing to her. No, he thought, this couldn’t be. Could this really just be a virtual character with no real world roots? If so, why did she feel so real? Why was it that he almost felt a sort of attachment to her?

He paused the game, took off his virtual reality headset, and leaned back in his chair. Take a deep breath, he thought to himself. This is just a game. Maybe you have been working too hard or maybe it’s been too long since you’ve taken a vacation day.

But he just couldn’t shake the thoughts from his head. He knew for certain that something felt very real about Vivielle and her missing sister, but he just couldn’t put his finger on it. He put on the headset and went back into the fantasy world.

The actual quest that Vivielle was offering did not take him too long to accomplish. She escorted him to the outskirts of town where her family’s farm was and pointed the way to where her sister was last seen. He made his way to the cave and, after an hour or so of exploring, managed to find her sister trapped in a cage (with a few other children similar in age) in the bottom floor of the dungeon. As far as gaming experiences go, this was pretty typical for him almost to the point of being flat. Given how much he had spent thinking about Vivielle and her sister, this was pretty much a disappointment to him. He could appreciate how well-constructed the game was, with its variety and vividity of environments, enemies, quests, and such, but tonight he just wasn’t enjoying it. He returned to town with the good news, received his reward, and made his way to a local tavern for a (virtual) drink, though this wouldn’t actually inebriate him in real life.

Ending his gaming session that night, he sat back in his chair and wondered if this was really all there was to life. If this generated novelty really was what life had to offer, or if there was more. With Vivielle, he felt like there was some sort of attachment but another part of his brain knew that this was just a farce. This other, more logical, part of his brain understood that Vivielle was just a made-up character in a made-up world, probably generated for the express purpose of enticing his interest. He also knew that, lacking any sort of real-world intimate connections, he would find himself often deducing mutual attraction where there was none.

The virtual window showed a beautiful vista of a countryside at dusk, the setting sun casting long and slanting shadows across the amber fields. He had none of this. He needed to wallow in this melancholy for at least just a few moments. He changed the scenery to a thunderstorm, and also accelerated the time of night so that the view displayed scenery of a time later in the evening. The bolts of lightning and the very muffled sounds of thunder were strangely somewhat calming.

Tomorrow is Wednesday, he thought. It’s three more days of this same cycle and then what? It’s not like his weekends were too much different than his weekdays. Sure, he would spend a bit more time working out and sure he would ramble through The Tower using the algorithm that gave him randomly-generated walking routes. And sure he would do some more gaming, but all for what? Was it just to take time away from work on a regular basis so that he could be fresh and renewed for the next week? If so, then what was the point of that? He had just been promoted about a year ago and he knew that if he kept up his good marks in his position, then in approximately another two years he could reasonably expect to receive another one. It would come with more pay, more prestige, but what is pay if he already lived an incredibly comfortable life free from want? And what is prestige if there was no one to recognize it?

He didn’t like where this train of thought led. There must be some sort of physiological explanation for this. Maybe he hadn’t slept well the past few nights and just had not realized it? Had he been working out too hard and now his body was worn down? Was he malnourished in some way? Doing a quick scan through his biometrics, none of these theories checked out. Sleep, recovery, stress, and nutritional levels were all well within the normal range, some even erring on the side of showing a slightly healthier state than normal. This doesn’t make any sense, he thought. If all of the metrics say I should feel fine, then why don’t I feel fine?

She woke up late again. She had been sick with some sort of cold all week and today didn’t feel much different than the previous four days. She rolled over and checked the clock: 9:57 AM. That’s later than normal but at least it wasn’t the 10:32 AM of the day prior. Whatever sickness this must be getting better, she thought, though too slowly for her taste. She was getting restless and wanted to get back to work.

Like most residents of The Tower, she didn’t have any roommates. Sometimes she wondered what it was like to share an apartment with another soul, or even a room (sharing a bed with another person was so foreign that it wasn’t even conceivable to most). She figured that whoever she would live with would probably judge her for getting up so late. So be it. I’d much rather get up when I want, she thought.

Once her watch detected her morning routine, it slowly turned on the faucet of notifications that she missed. Text messages, emails, voicemails, daily streak reminders all came in one-by-one in a trickle throughout the next hour. That was how she liked it: she hated waking up and feeling overwhelmed by every app trying to compete for her attention and she wanted some semblance of control over it. Especially since she knew she was a late riser.

She was also one of the fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on the reader’s perspective) residents who were employed. Her line of work was economic forecasting. She was one of the maintainers on the automated tuning system that adjusted the prices of various commodities in The Tower based on the supply and demand of those goods. That was the more mundane part of her job. She also had responsibilities in trying to predict (and create) the next economic trends. Partly to keep profits equitable for different industries and partly just to keep the people entertained, she was part of a committee that attempted to brainstorm new trends. They weren’t always successful but they were successful enough of the time to justify the continued existence of said committee. One month, for example, blackberry brownies were the new, hot, trendy thing everyone was eating. The berry farmers in the surrounding regions had a rough harvest the past two years and basically everyone on the committee agreed that it was probably good for them to experience a surge in demand this season. This also made sense considering that the harvest was actually plentiful this time around. The point of the rotating trends was to help maintain those farmers’s livelihoods, even though they received considerable subsidies from The Tower’s government (as nearly all residents did).

She was on her way to work. To get a bit of variety in her commute she opted to have the commuter algorithms add some randomness. Rather than simply walking the hyper-optimized route that got her to her office as fast as possible, she configured the application to give a 10-15% allowance of spontaneity. Though it would only take her twenty minutes, there were a surprising amount of permutations one could experience with all of the different hallways, foyers, stairwells, and elevators.

She was walking down a quiet hallway and there was no one around. Turning the corner at the end she was facing, a very generic man was walking towards her. The two passed each other without a word and without more than a simple, yet polite, glance and then they were both on their way to the rest of their morning. A faint scent of cinnamon and nutmeg lingered in the air and this was pleasing to her. She turned around to take another glance at the man, but he was already around another corner and out of sight.

He thought it was strange to come across someone on this commute. He specifically configured his commuter algorithm to avoid other people; he preferred the quiet “back-roads” of The Tower to give himself some time to himself to just be with his thoughts and think. He was plugged into technology constantly and recognized that he needed to take some time to step back and just be a human.

He couldn’t explain exactly how he felt, but as he walked by her he felt this sort of connectedness, like there was some sort of implicit communication going on between the two of them. But on second thought this didn’t make any sense to him. How could there be “implicit” communication? It was literally just a chance encounter, walking by a stranger, with neither of them having said a word to each other. They barely even made eye contact for more than a split-second and that was purely just to be polite, right? Plus, he walks by strangers all the time. How could this be any different?

Like many of those who were still lucky/unlucky to be employed, she didn’t have much of a social life. Her daily routine was optimized for the grind of waking up (refreshed, of course), getting to work, being productive, working out, eating healthy, and going to sleep, all with just the right amount of leisure time to prevent one from going insane. But it was also not too much to make someone wonder if there was more to life than this machine-like cycle.

She was thirty-three and she knew she eventually wanted to settle down and start a family, but really had no idea how she was going to break this cycle to make time for it. While it was very much allowed by the employers, it would still likely set her back in her career, albeit only slightly. While many of the biases of the past workplaces are mostly gone, there still exists the fact that spending multiple months away from employment is multiple months of lost context that must be regained while other context emerges and evolves. It may not be held against you for taking time off, but you cannot get around the fact that things move so quickly and you end up behind.

She never had had a boyfriend or partner and often wondered what it was like to be in a committed relationship. There were plenty of movies, TV shows, and other media that depicted couples and love in general, and while there were no actual restrictions for the Employed to enter into romantic relationships, many just did not seem to have the desire for it. For some reason, the urge and desire to do so was just not there. It was as if being taken care of in every other way with the perfect amount of food, the perfect amount of exercise, the perfect amount of leisure time, and the perfect amount of work made one feel so perfectly balanced that they did not want another person to potentially mess it up.

Later that evening after work, she spent her leisure time doing what she normally does: listening to music. The radio stations in The Tower are very advanced and they adjust what they play automatically based on your preferences and your mood. You simply provide feedback to the station around whether or not you liked the song and it will adjust its algorithm accordingly. In this way, your radio stations would evolve over time and often helped you discover your new favorite artists or even genres.

She liked to just sit back and take in the music and nothing else. Some people like to listen to music when they work, or when they walk, or when they do chores, but she preferred that the listening experience be the primary focus. She wanted to absorb the music as best as she could, to let it sink into her very being. She wanted to truly cherish it.

She had an armchair by her window-projection and tonight it was displaying a modern cityscape with plenty of neon lights. Rain was pattering the streets. This was a common backdrop for her and she enjoyed the neo-futuristic vibe. Her radio station tonight was focusing on indie rock songs that were popular a couple of decades ago. Somehow this station seemed to always know what she wanted.

She synchronized the window-projection with the radio station so that the quiet and persistent pattering of the rain in the streets played with and as a backdrop for her music. It added to the ambiance of the evening. She took a deep breath and thought about her day and about how her week was going so far. It was Thursday evening, so just one more day of work until her day off and her mind was already starting to wander away from the music and the rain sound-effects and towards what she needed to do over the weekend. She was worried she wouldn’t be able to get all of her errands done before the end of the weekend, and then it would pile up, it would compound, before she were able to start her week leaving her with a “debt” of sorts of task items that she would then have to think about even more and leave her even further behind and unfocused on her work and her necessary daily activities and then she was worried that this would build up for too long a period of time and then she may have to take time off of work to dig herself out of this hole and

She realized she was not actually listening to the music. She was spending too much time in her thoughts. Okay, she thought, back to the music, you’ll be able to get all of those task items done this weekend. You always do. She was always so worried even though she truly did not have much to worry about. A lot of what she wanted to accomplish was arbitrary in a certain sense. A self-imposition of goals and structure which is good for keeping one focused on one’s goals, but one that also can be flexible. She never actually fell very far behind on her tasks and she was probably more worried about what that was even like. Not doing well in life was completely foreign to her.

The next day at work, she found herself pretty distractible. She found it hard to focus on her daily tasks, bouncing from stimulation to stimulation. She would check her email, then check her messages, check email again, check the news, maybe check her messages again. She would only focus on her work for a few minutes at a time but nothing really seemed to hold her attention. She was feeling pretty down but she wasn’t really sure why. Nothing really seemed out of the ordinary. How long had it been since her last vacation day? She checked her calendar: two weeks. Okay so it’s probably not burnout then. Is it possible that she just did not sleep well? No, the sleep metrics indicated a very average night of sleep.

Her mind went back to that person she walked by on the previous day’s commute to work. She wondered what he was like. What his interests were. Was he employed? What did he do in his leisure time? Who was he?

It was only when lunch was almost over that she realized that she had not even spoken to a single other person today. It was only shortly afterwards that she realized this was normal. Most communication these days was done over messaging servers, actual face-to-face interactions only reserved for the most crucial of meetings. But for her, as an individual contributor, she only met with her manager, and even then maybe only on a monthly basis. There just wasn’t much to chat about. Her performance reviews and feedback were handled automatically, and those systems (believe it or not) were actually pretty good at what they did. Even prioritization decisions were handled mostly automatically. There sometimes was a human on the other end who made adjustments to the algorithm’s output, but for the most part the work that was handed to her was well-defined. The requirements were clear and what she needed to do was also very clear. She didn’t really need to ask many questions. It’s not like she was told to keep her head down and not question anything about what she was doing. It was just that the work tickets answered all of those questions for her. It was as if they knew what she was thinking.

Back in the virtual world of video games, he was sent on a quest into a dark forest overgrown with moss and giant mushrooms in search of an ancient and enchanted bow. The mushroom forest gave way to a cave, which after descending for some time and fighting off monsters, opened to an abandoned dwarven city. It was deathly quiet and cold, more so than usual for his gaming experiences. Why did today’s adventure feel so solitary? A strangely painful and sorrowful emotion ran through him, one that he was yet unable to recognize as loneliness. It was one whose pain he’s felt many times before, but one he did not have the emotional vocabulary to properly identify. The cold breeze of the cave exasperated this. It was almost a true physical manifestation of how he was feeling emotionally.

He was at least able to realize that his emotional pain matched the virtual world and he was left wondering if the game knew how he was feeling and if it designed this experience for the specific moment in his life that he was facing.

Later that evening, when he was winding down for bed, he thought about that woman he passed on his walk the other day. He thought about people in general and was reflecting on his life. On paper, everything was fantastic. He was comfortable, yet challenged in his day-to-day activities, both mentally at work and physically through his workout regimen. His financial and health metrics were also stellar compared to most people his age. He was in or above the ninetieth percentile for basically every major, measurable category.

Yet, he was unhappy.

He knew there was more to life than self-optimization but it felt to him as if everything and everyone around him drove him towards this lifestyle. It was the norm, the direction that the environment nudged him towards, the beaten path, yet it was his beaten path, personalized and personalized again to the unique idiosyncrasies of what made him him.

He woke up the next morning feeling very similar to how he was feeling before bed, though he was able to escape the sensation for seven hours and forty-four minutes, according to his sleep metrics. The thought of going to work and jumping back on the hamster wheel of his life just felt so heavy and gigantic. The tasks required of him filled him with a sense of dread.

He rolled over and checked his calendar to see how many sick days he had taken this year. One. He had taken one sick day so far this year despite the fact that it was September, nearly October. Okay, he thought, surely I can take another. Though, he felt a sense of guilt for having done so. For having betrayed the very consistency that he prided himself for having.

Sending a communication to his boss and blocking off his calendar, he was free. The day was vast and open.

Not knowing what to do, he wanted to keep himself busy with a walk. He set out from his home and thought he would aimlessly wander to see what life happened to put in his way that day. However, he barely made it five minutes before he got bored and needed some sort of destination or goal to pin his attention to. He decided he would walk to the alley where he walked by that woman the other morning. It was only a fourteen minute walk.

On arriving, he wasn’t sure what he expected. It was a quiet alley, gently lit by the incandescent bulbs you find anywhere in The Tower. The alley itself was in between two quiet streets, with the backs of the storefronts facing the alley. There were no people, no garbage, no animals, really nothing whatsoever in the alley except its cleanness and quietness. He felt a vague sense of disappointment but was not sure why.

The day was still very young, he decided he would walk to a nearby park. There were a multitude of them around The Tower and he was slowly checking them off his list, trying to visit them when possible. There was one that was not too far from here that he had heard good things about, and it also had the benefit of being one he had not yet visited. He made his way over there.

On arriving, he was not sure what to do. He walked a lap through the small park, stopping for small moments to look at and nearly appreciate the flowers (being present with nature was not something he was used to). Feeling satisfied with having “completed” the park he checked it off his list and proudly declared to himself that he had now seen seventy-three percent of the parks in this quarter. Ok but now what, he thought to himself. He sat down on a bench and wished he had some book to read to keep his mind busy, but in his frantic desire to get out of the house he had not thought of it.

He sat on the bench and watched people walk by. Most did not stop to appreciate the scenery, they seemed to be in a rush to wherever they were intending on going. This made sense to him: the greenspaces were really only built because of a vague association between being in them and general well-being. The designers of these floors understood that previous floors were lacking in this regard and, as a result, the occupants of those lower floors experienced some unhappiness due to it. They designed these newer floors with a bit more greenspace in mind, even if it was not the most “efficient” use of space.

The flowers and plants were so neatly arranged, it almost looked as if they were copy-pasted. They all looked nearly identical too. He wondered if this was how flowers were supposed to look but he had never been out of The Tower to see actual flowers. Whenever he wanted a getaway, he went to one of the resort floors. There was no need for him to actually physically leave.

Continuing to people-watch, he noticed that everybody was walking alone. He did not notice a single group of two or more people walking through that park. In fact, almost none could be said to have been “walking” in the traditional sense. Many were borderline power-walking, trying to minimize the amount of time spent getting from their previous point A to their future point B. This all made sense to him as this was normally how he got through his day. It had the additional benefit of getting one’s heart rate a bit higher than if walking at a leisurely pace. This was additional exercise and everyone knew it was good for the heart and muscles.

After less than ten minutes of people-watching, he felt bored. He got up and left.

Later that evening, she was also feeling quite bored and didn’t just want to recline on her couch drowning in music like how she normally spent her nights alone. Taking her headphones and her curated playlist with her, she got up from the couch, opened the front door, and went for a walk.

Where she was going to go she had no idea, but what she did know was that there was something in her that was stirring her to action. There was a manic restlessness, inexplicable to her in its source, yet fervent and irresistible. It was one of those moods that is either painful to fight, or nearly pleasurable to submit to.

She could not remember the last time she went for a walk in the evening after work and after dinner; it was so strange and foreign to her to be doing this. It was just simply not part of her daily or weekly routine, which was normally very straightforward: after dinner, she would wind down by listening to music and then after an hour or so of doing that, she would read and then go to bed. It was a quiet and relaxing way to end the evening, to prepare the mind for its approximately eight hours of sleep and also for the upcoming day. To be out and about during this time when she “should” have been on the couch almost felt like a transgression. A small sense of guilt lingered in her mind and would continue to do so later that night when she would be lying in bed, trying to parse out the thoughts of the day. She also did not normally listen to music while walking anywhere, so the whole evening was made even more unusual by this double deviation. She normally, when on her commute to walk, would listen to absolutely nothing but her thoughts as it was probably the only time she had the chance to do so. Without this time to herself and the inner workings of her mind, she felt unbalanced and neurotic.

It was not long into her walk that the newfound evening walking experience combined with the music proved to be an over-stimulation. It made her nervous, though at first she resisted the urge to put the music away. She thought she just had to get through it, to tough it up, but maybe only fifteen minutes later she realized this effort was futile.

With her headphones off and no music being pumped into her brain via her ears, she felt alone. The pattern-matching part of her brain immediately associated this with a commute to work and without thinking she felt herself being unconsciously pulled in that direction, meandering towards her office. It was only when she reached the door and realized that it was not, in fact, time for work, that she was pulled out of this trance.

She stopped and looked around. There was not a single soul in sight. Why would there be? This was a corporate-industrial quarter of this floor and it was incredibly rare to find someone who worked this late in the evening. Maybe two hours ago she would find a night owl scurrying his or her way home but at this point it was past the reasonable stopping point for people’s work days. Someone would have to be working some fairly significant overtime and this was typically not something most people did. The employers in The Tower understood that this tended to borrow from future productivity.

Realizing how lonely and quiet this area was, she wondered to herself what it was that she was doing here.

Not knowing what to do now, he reverted to what was familiar. That is, he left the park and started to walk back home, thinking that this short people-watching excursion was enough of an adventure and a deviation from the routine machinations of his life. He felt a vague sense of accomplishment at having checked off this park from his list and briefly held this pity pride in his mind, though it was only a glimmer. The park being considered completed in his mind and the user interface on his phone showing it as erased from his backlog of parks to visit, the sense of accomplishment faded quickly. Maybe it was because he did not really take the time to be present at the park and notice what actually made this park different from the rest or maybe it was because he probably did not, deep down, truly enjoy these park visits, or maybe it was because he felt a disappointment at not seeing her, but he felt that all too familiar feeling of melancholy again.

After spending the rest of his day bouncing between different distractions and forms of entertainment, he found himself laying in bed staring at the hyper-realistic projected constellations on his ceiling and wondering what exactly the point of it all was. The day off from work really did not do much to refresh him and make him feel ready for the next one, though he knew from past experience that sleep is the medicine for most remedies. He knew he would probably wake up and be ready to jump back into his normal and familiar routine.

He hated this uncomfortable feeling of feeling like he was missing something, like there was a piece of him he was always aware of yet was always missing, a gaping hole in him, a void. A hole filled with sand but which at the bottom there is a small sieve. One could put as much in at the top as one wished and it may appear to stabilize and potentially even clog the filter at the bottom, but there was no escaping that a jolt to the system would dislodge whatever clumps may be causing the blockage. The sand would continue to flow through the sieve yet again.

He hated all of this because he could not escape it. It was something he knew too well but something he could not name. Without a name there was no association to other concepts he found more familiar and problems he knew to be more solvable. Without a name there was no cure.

The automated systems in his bedroom started to dim the lights. It detected that he was falling asleep, that his biometrics were shifting to a sleep state. He hated them in this moment and flung himself up from the bed.

The lights turned themselves back on.

This moment really bothered him because it brought such acute and sudden clarity. He finally realized what it was that he was so upset about and what it was that had been dragging him down, making him feel melancholous these past few days. It was that woman he walked by that one time. He had been spending so much time simultaneously thinking about her and forcing himself not to think about her that he didn’t realize how much of the former he had been doing. And now all of this came to him like a blinding light.

He wanted to know who she was but he also felt so ashamed at this manic desire to know more about her. He had literally walked by her one time yet somehow felt like he felt some sort of connection with her. It seemed to make no sense and perfect sense at the same time. What he was feeling was loneliness and he was only now finally able to put his finger on it, to identify it as the cause of this malaise.

Here he was in his perfectly-automated room nested within this perfectly-automated life he lived in this perfectly-automated Tower yet it was not perfect. It was clearly missing something though this void had been filled time and time again with various distractions, goals, and ambitions. A life of endless snacking, though one full of healthy snacks nonetheless. But this diet of his was missing something more lasting.

He wanted to meet this woman but now he was even more frustrated not knowing how this would even occur, if it even made sense to do so, and if she felt the same. For all he knew, it was a nothing encounter to her and she had not spent a single moment even thinking about him. Yet here he was searching for something more and grasping onto the idea of this woman as the way out of his misery.

He started to pace back and forth in his room as he did not know what else to do. It was past the hour that he ever left home and so doing so, even if just going for a walk to clear his mind, was not even an option he considered. He was so locked into his routine he went for that walk right there in his room, albeit in the form of walking up and down the length of the room countless times.

He started to go over that chance encounter in his mind. He was on his way to work when he walked by her. She seemed like she was dressed somewhat professionally. Was she going to work too? If they were going opposite directions then chances are they could walk by each other again on their respective commutes, right? The problem was timing this. He didn’t remember being particularly late or early that morning and he did remember where that alley was so that meant he could just leave at the normal time each morning and walk through there, hoping for the chance to see her again. But there was no way to guarantee she would be there. This was his quiet commute and he had only seen her there once, no matter how many countless times he made that walk through the Tower. No matter, he would try it. He needed something to hold onto, some sort of glimmer of hope, something he could identify as a potential cure for this rut he only just realized he was living in.

Her loneliness realization came to her in a slightly different way. She was going through the motions of her routine evening ritual when it occurred. That is, she was lying on her back on her sofa with earplugs in her ears and she was listening to her favorite radio-playlist algorithm. With her eyes closed, her arms at her side, and her focus resting solely on the music, the soundwaves flowed straight from the earbuds and into her brain. That big ball of jelly absorbing the layers and beauty of the sound.

A song came on that she was not familiar with. The playlist often “explored” for new music for her which she could choose to incorporate into the station or not. Over time, it became more and more adjusted to her unique taste.

The song seemed like a slow rock ballad with dreamy verses but built to a chaotic crescendo during the chorus. Heavy on the drums and with a ringing guitar riff, the singer belched those repeated words. The chorus went:

Lonely together,
Archipelago, archipelago,
Lonely together,
Do you feel it too?

She definitely did feel it too. Clutching for her phone as the chorus melted away into a beautiful guitar solo, she queued up a replay of the song so she could hear it again. She listened to it a third and a fourth time.

Halfway through the fourth listen, she was tired of it. There always came a point in her evening music sessions where she had had enough. She put away her earbuds and turned off the music. She sat up on the couch and stared momentarily out the window to the fake, projected landscape. Displayed was a picturesque view of the Mediterranean. The sky was as blue as it could possibly be, with only the very rare cloud dotting the air.

In the distance there were a multitude of small islands.

Getting up and beginning to pace around her room, she started imagining what she would say to him if she ever were to get the chance to meet him. She thought the whole exercise so enticing, the thought of meeting him and getting to know him so exciting, yet this whole exercise to feel so futile and ridiculous. There’s no possible way he could be thinking the same thing, is what she thought. She knew she was just feeling very lonely but she finally recognized that there was something she had to do about this. She could no longer just ignore that void within her; she had to act on it.

In the fever of the moment, she thought about what his interests were and about how they could share their experiences listening to music. She imagined them sharing a playlist and refining each other’s taste in music over time. She imagined late nights where she discussed what she liked about her favorite songs and where he would explain the same for his. The time would melt away and she would curl up next to him and eventually fall asleep.

She wondered what he did during the day. Was he one of the employed class or was he not? Did it matter to her? She thought briefly that it would be a bit strange if she were busy for most of her day working when he wasn’t but figured there was probably some way to deal with this. Maybe when she came home from work he would buy her flowers or cook her dinner, or both. Her mind went round and round and round gushing over the possibilities of what meeting this still-nameless man would be like.

She knew the whole thing was beyond silly. She was romanticizing over somebody she walked by one time on the way to work purely because she felt as if there was some connection. The logic part of her brain kicked in and she realized that she must truly be that lonely, much lonelier than she thought. She realized she was probably dreaming about something that may never occur and this line of reasoning started to make her feel blue.

She sat down and put her head in her hands and stared at the floor. She was confused and she was of two minds. She recognized that there was this desire, this curiosity, to meet this man even though he was only an idea and an abstraction. And then she realized that she did not have anything to lose. So what if he turned out to not be as compatible with her as she would like? So what if he were not actually interested at all? So what if he were taken? She would then just be right back where she was now. She figured she would take a chance, but she did not know exactly what to do. It was literally one time that she saw him. The only idea she had was to go back to that one alley to see, to just at least hope that he may return, and a part of her hated herself for feeling so weak and hopeful.

In this moment she was filled with self-hatred because she recognized, for the first time in a long time, how vulnerable she truly was. She recognized within her that something was missing, that she did not, in fact, have everything figured out and everything perfectly set in its proper place, automated away to perfection. This realization was painful, yet truly necessary.

She left her apartment and walked over to where she saw him. At this time in the evening there was nobody around, nor should there be: it was late on a weekday and most people who were regular to this quarter were on their way to or from work. It was dead quiet and she stood there by herself without moving for a few moments, maybe even not breathing. She put her hand to one of the painted walls of the alley and then rested her head against it. This random pedestrian alley, not more than thirty feet long and maybe not more than eight feet wide lay her only current hope for pulling herself out of this hole that had been dug for her.

She resolved to come back here the next day, then made her way home, cried for a bit, and went to sleep.

He knew it was a long-shot, but he wanted to see if by going to the alley, that she would just so happen to appear. He knew it did not make sense, that he was trying to cargo-cult his way towards his desires, but he was bored and lonely. He had nothing else that he wanted to do, so he figured he had nothing to lose.

On his walk over, he passed by other people, he passed by sights and sounds, but nearly none of them actually registered to him. He was solely focused on one thing: figuring out who this person was and getting to that alley in the most direct and quick way possible.

He arrived and, as part of him expected, there was nobody there. It was quiet, clean, and lonely. He paced up and down the short alleyway a couple of times and peered out around its corners on both ends, thinking that maybe she was just a few minutes away from arriving. After a few minutes of wrestling with this denial, he went back into the alley and sat down along one of the walls. Not knowing what to do now, he checked his phone and looked for somewhere nearby he could walk to. He figured that while he was out and about and away from home, he could at least check off one of the parks nearby. Looking at the map, he decided that it was worth coming back here because there were a few parks he had not seen yet. He made a note to return the next day.

She was looking at herself in the mirror, thinking about what he would think of this outfit. She grew frustrated with this, however, knowing that the whole mental exercise was probably just futile hope and a waste of time and energy. This was her favorite blouse and she did not wear it often. At work, someone might ask her what the occasion was and she definitely had no plans of revealing what was going on in her mind. She almost took it off and changed into something more typical for her, but changed her mind at the last minute. So what if someone asked, she thought to herself.

She checked the time and noticed that it was a few minutes until she typically left for work. Immediately, she went into a brief moment of panic. Did she leave early that day she saw him, or did she leave late? Or did she leave exactly on time? That day was just like all of the other days, so she could not remember. Finally, she took a deep breath and realized that the best solution was probably to leave at her normal time. She figured, with her analytical mind, that there was some bell curve, some random distribution around her normal departure time. The most likely representation of that day with the lowest expected level of error was probably to leave at exactly the normal time. She stood at her doorway and waited until the minute-hand struck the exact time at which she normally left. She flung open her door and off she went.

They both left their respective apartments and they were both on their way to the alley where they had only one previous time just simply walked by each other. Both of them felt a weird mixture of shame and hope, the former because of having so much of the latter for what seemed like no good reason. But yet, there was something in both of them that drove them on: pangs of loneliness long-felt but only recently understood.

They both turned the corner of opposite ends of the alley at just about the same time. They each saw the other approaching and both immediately felt nervousness and butterflies as a result. But it had been so long since either of them had interacted with someone out of a purely functional and utilitarian mindset that neither of them knew what to do. At first, they both just simply walked by each other. Both felt guilt for having done nothing, but both also had no idea what to do. At the opposite ends of the alley from which they entered, both stopped and turned back. Both looked at each other and they both held each other’s gaze for a few moments. But both were too nervous to proceed. There was still a massive gulf felt between them even if it were just a few dozen feet and heightened nerves.

The gaze was held for just a moment longer. She took a small notebook out of her pocket and unhooked the pen from the cover, opening it to a blank page. She wrote something down on a sheet, ripped it out of the notebook, folded it, and folded it again. She dropped the paper on the floor and with a quick trot, disappeared beyond the corner of the alley, making her way back home.

She didn’t know if what she had done in that alley was the “right” thing to do, if writing down her chat username on a scrap of notebook paper was really proper or even if he noticed it. And even if he noticed it, would he pick it up? And if he picked it up would he know what to do with it? And even if he knew what to do with it, would he follow through?

She realized she put herself in a tricky position here, into a sort of torturous waiting game, a limbo of sorts, still not knowing who this guy was and definitely not knowing when and if he would reach out to her.

But she also felt a mild sense of relief. The encounter actually happened! They both had the same idea to go back there and she felt that this could not have been a coincidence. Their gaze was held too long and he looked a bit nervous. He definitely was not in a rush to get somewhere like someone on their way to work or the grocery store.

She was nervous, excited, and nervously excited. A sort of mania is what came over her in those hours after reaching home that evening.

Just like that, she was gone. This was his chance to say something to her, to introduce himself, and to use some sort of clever line he was rehearsing over and over in his head again. But of course, that’s not how it all played out. In actuality, he was too nervous, too skittish to do much more than hold that gaze for a few seconds.

He was upset with himself, but he saw her drop a piece of folded paper before disappearing to what he presumably thought was the rest of her walk home. He went over, bent over, and picked up the piece of paper. It was folded neatly, a near-perfect crease lengthwise followed by a similar near-perfect crease widthwise.

He was too excited to wait until he got home to read it, so he unfolded it slightly. He recognized the pattern of a chat username, and snapped the paper shut again. He stuffed the paper into his pocket and nearly ran home.

He got home, opened the door to his apartment and quickly (and loudly) slammed it shut behind him due to over-excitement. He was slightly sweating from a combination of nervous energy and from the quick pace at which he trotted to get here. He put his hand into his pocket to make sure that the neatly-folded paper was still here. And of course it was, as he checked maybe two dozen times during the ten-minute walk from the alley to his place of residence. There wasn’t any reason why it might have disappeared in the twenty or so seconds since he had last checked.

He plopped himself down in the comfortable chair he had at his desk and put the paper on the desk just in front of his keyboard. He almost wanted to lean over and smell it, but felt like that was probably just too strange to do though it wasn’t like anyone was here in this room watching him.

There was really only one chat app that most people used in The Tower and it was already open on his computer. It always was since it contained many useful integrations into other parts of his life. It was almost an extension of himself in how he could message chatbots and then the conversations he had could automatically generate calendar reminders if he was trying to plan out a project and needed a nudge or playlists if he wanted to explore new music, for example.

At this point, he completely unfolded the piece of paper and stared at the name written on it. He typed the handle into the chat application and up popped what was presumably her profile picture: a bright red flower in a seemingly endless field of amber wheat.

He stared at that profile picture for a long time, trying to find some sort of deeper meaning in her choice of picture and in this whole wider situation. What profundity he was able to gleam, however, he was not quite able to articulate to himself; he was just too excited at what had transpired today.

He stared and stared and eventually he realized that something was staring back at him: the big green “Add Friend” button. He hovered his mouse over it, and then dragged it away, then dragged it back over, then dragged it away again. My God, he thought, what a flake am I right now, he thought. This woman literally gave me this information for me to message her, not for me to sit around and play games. But even with this rationalization of the whole situation, he was still so nervous.

He clicked the button and then immediately shut off his computer.

She was laying on her couch, listening to music as normal. She was trying to distract herself from the torturous waiting game she was playing, though she was frequently checking her phone in between songs. Even though she had turned off Do-Not-Disturb mode for chat notifications, she still obsessively looked and pined for the notification she was expecting and wanting. But it had not come yet.

The songs came and went. With them came passing thoughts of insecurity. What if he had not seen the note she had dropped? What if he had decided he was not interested in her? What if she were not pretty enough for him? What if he didn’t know what to do with the chat handle that was written on the piece of paper? What if something had happened to him? If he didn’t notice the dropped note, should she go back and see if he had picked it up?

It was hard to focus on the music with all of this running through her head, but she viewed it as an exercise in being present, an exercise in mindfulness. Despite the flurry and the pangs of guilt and expectation, she tried again and again to come back to focus on the music. It was difficult, but she managed it. She viewed it as something that would make her stronger.

Next up, one of her favorite songs came on the radio. For her, there was a lot of comfort in the familiar verses and the familiar chord progression. It soothed her to have some sort of sanity, some sort of constancy, some sort of stability in this moment.

But it was all interrupted with a notification from the chat app.

On hearing the familiar and expected jingle of the notification, she shot upright and flung off her headphones, nearly throwing them down onto the floor in this fit of excitement. Without even pausing the music, she looked at her phone to see what had just been sent to her. It was a friend request from a user she did not recognize. She thought it had to be him. It could not just be anyone else sending her a request at this time, on this day, after what has already transpired. It had to be him.

The username was fairly generic, though she was not really sure what to expect. Most people made their chat names when they were pretty young and so they often reflected some sort of previously-but-no-longer held sentiment about one’s identity. She did not bother reading too much into it. What she did find interesting, however, was the choice of profile picture that this person had made for their account. It was a samurai kneeling with his katana planted into the ground, blade down, in front of him. It was a somber picture and it was in a sort of Baroque-era style. It was a beautiful picture and she thought it probably was artificially generated, as she was not sure what artist from that era would have painted such a picture.

After spending a few moments analyzing this picture and what it might mean about this person’s personality, she realized she had not yet accepted the friend request. I mean, she thought, there’s no doubt I’m going to accept this. The issue is that I can’t be certain that this is actually him. What if this is just a coincidence or some sort of spam request?

Even with that small amount of uncertainty, she accepted the request. She had to know who this person was.

His computer was off, but his mind was very much still on. Very much still whirring and ruminating over what had just happened and what may still happen in the future. It was up and down, hot and cold, manic and depressive, and he needed to get a grip on himself. It was exciting but torturous, hopeful yet daunting, amazing and terrifying. Part of him wanted to turn his computer back on to see if she had responded, but he was also too terrified to do that. He had also shut his phone off and disconnected himself from any sort of notifications for the rest of the evening by enabling Do Not Disturb mode across all his devices. He wanted to look but he did not want to undo all of this. He just wanted to relax and escape all of these feelings.

Even though he had already worked out earlier in the day, the stationary bike sitting across the room was calling his name. He walked over and touched one of the handlebars with his hand, running it across the smooth surface. This is the escape I’m looking for, he thought. And so he quickly changed, stretched, and got on to churn out a workout.

She had accepted the friend request but obviously this was not enough for her. What use was there of this virtual connection if nothing was built on top of it? She clicked on the profile and pulled up the chat. She typed out various versions of different greetings, some with emojis and some without. All of these variants did not make the cut. They were typed in, stared at for a few moments of hesitation, and promptly cleared away. There were so many things she wanted to say but none of them felt right.

Soon it had occurred to her that she did not even know his real name; all she had was a chat handle. From that she also realized that he probably did not know her name, as it was not exactly easy to discern from her chat handle. So then maybe that’s what she would start with. Maybe she would just simply introduce herself and see where it went from there. But what if he did not respond? What if he found that to be too curt? What if he were expecting a more in-depth introduction or message? What if he had wanted to send the first message? A bevy of doubt ran through her mind but she forced those thoughts away. She had to focus and this wasn’t the time for insecurity.

She typed out a simple “hi, what’s your name?”, pressed the enter key, and sat back in her chair with her heart pounding.

Neither of the two of them slept that well that night. Their minds were fluttering with endless possibilities, both positive and negative. This was uncharted territory for both of them, a space outside of their respective comfort zones. They both tossed and turned, tossed and turned, though a relatively sleepless night.

He woke up the next morning bleary-eyed. It was not a great night of sleep and he was up maybe about thirty minutes earlier than his usual time; his mind was just too restless. As per his usual routine and by force of habit, he went over to his computer to check on a few different notifications. However, it was still off and this was when he realized why he had turned it off. His heart immediately started to race. What had he done, he thought. Was that a good idea to send that friend request the previous evening?

He booted up his computer and it seemed like it went through each step painfully slower than usual. Everything felt like it was moving through molasses. He finally got into the chat application and that is when his start started to beat even faster. He saw the flower-in-a-field profile picture he spent a lot of time staring at the previous day. Next to it was a red bubble with a white number one in it: he had one unread message from the red flower. He clicked on it and read the simple greeting that was contained therein.

He was overjoyed on reading this single message, this single expression of desire for human connection, that he nearly fell out of his seat. Now, through his mind were running multiple possibilities for how he would respond and how the conversation would unfold. It had been so long that he had done this that it made him nervous about how it would turn out. Would he say the wrong thing? Would he scare her off once she got to know the real him? He started to think that there was no way that she would actually like who he was, and became momentarily depressed. He went to lay back down in bed and covered his face with his blanket. He sat there in both a literal and emotional blackness for a couple of minutes before he realized what he needed to do: just respond to the message.

The two of them went back and forth for some time, exchanging messages in a way that was exhilarating for the both of them. Minutes and hours flew by as they got to know each other and the conversation stretched over multiple days. They would wake up in the morning looking forward to seeing where the conversation would take them that day, and lay in bed at night grateful for how it had gone. But it was still only a chat conversation.

They both recognized that there would have to be some sort of next step; they could not just maintain communication over this messaging app forever. They both wanted to meet again in-person and talk for real, human-to-human. After much nervousness and much delay, he finally built up the courage to propose something akin to a date. He went back and forth trying to determine what the perfect first date would be but ultimately realized that given where they were in their blossoming friendship, it almost did not matter so long as it was genuine. He decided that he wanted to explore a new park and check it off his list and so he asked if she were interested in joining him. She said yes, and asked if he were interested in listening to music with him.

With map and headphones in hand, the two of them met up at the park at the prescribed time. They sat there for hours and enjoyed each other’s company.