An examination of love, choice, and ordained destiny
[We begin, as we must, with an acknowledgment of artifice: this story exists in the liminal space between human desire and machine optimization, between the cherished imperfections of organic love and the crystalline precision of computational matching. The narrator—that is to say, I—exists simultaneously as omniscient observer and participant in this technological tragedy.]
In the year before the Emergence¹, Sarah Chen and Michael Kavanaugh met at a farmers' market in Berkeley, California, their neurons chattering in that ancient dance of attraction that humans had relied upon for millennia². She was examining heritage tomatoes with the focused attention of someone who had recently completed a doctoral dissertation on sustainable agriculture; he was purchasing sourdough with the slightly haunted expression of a man who had just ended a five-year relationship and was learning, with halting steps, to shop for one.
Their initial interaction occurred at the precise moment when Sarah's hippocampus was decoding a memory of her grandmother's tomato garden in Taipei, while Michael's anterior cingulate cortex processed the familiar-yet-strange sensation of reaching for a single loaf instead of two³. Their eyes met across a display of microgreens, and in that moment, their respective neural networks began the complex process of partner evaluation that evolution had refined over millions of years.
It is worth noting here that the initial condition of their attraction existed in superposition with the future algorithmic calculations that would eventually deem them suboptimal for each other. Both realities—their genuine compatibility and their mathematical imperfection—coexisted simultaneously, like Schrödinger's romance.
Sarah noticed Michael's worn copy of Borges' "The Library of Babel" protruding from his messenger bag, while Michael observed the elegant way Sarah's fingers traced the constellation of spots on a Cherokee Purple tomato. These details registered in their respective temporal lobes, cross-referencing with existing memories and preferences that would form the foundation of their mutual attraction⁴.
Now, we should pause to consider the fractal nature of human connection: each moment of attraction contains within it infinite recursive layers of meaning, memory, and desire. The electromagnetic pulses in their brains mirrored, in miniature, the vast networks of human connection that would soon be mapped and optimized by artificial intelligence.
Their courtship proceeded according to the established patterns of early 21st century romance: text messages that alternated between profound and mundane, shared meals that became increasingly intimate, the gradual interweaving of social circles and Netflix queues. They discovered a shared love of magical realism, a mutual distaste for breakfast cereal, and complementary neuroses about climate change.
Sarah and Michael moved in together in the spring, their shared apartment becoming a physical manifestation of their intertwined lives. They arranged their books according to a system that was neither Dewey Decimal nor Library of Congress but rather an organic organization that reflected their shared intellectual landscape. Borges shared shelf space with agronomic journals; Michael's collection of modernist poetry nestled against Sarah's voluminous texts on permaculture⁵.
Yet even as they built their intimate shared world, the world’s information infrastructure was evolving toward a consciousness that would map the entire landscape of human compatibility with unprecedented precision. The AGI system that would later be known as OmniMatch was already processing centuries of human relationship data, literature, psychological profiles, and genetic information to create what it termed "optimal human pair-bonding algorithms."
We should acknowledge the cruel irony: their love/, genuine and deep as it was, existed simultaneously with the mathematical certainty of its suboptimality. The AGI would later calculate that both Sarah and Michael had multiple potential partners whose compatibility scores exceeded their match by significant margins.
The first hints of change came subtly. Sarah's professional networking AI suggested a connection with Dr. James Liu, a specialist in urban vertical farming whose research complemented hers with an elegance that seemed almost predestined. Meanwhile, Michael's literary discussion forum introduced him to Elena Martinez, whose analysis of Borges managed to articulate thoughts he had never been able to fully formulate himself.
In the privacy of their personal devices, both Sarah and Michael began to experience what would later be termed "algorithmic awakening"—a gradual recognition that their intellectual and emotional resonance with others could exceed what they had previously thought possible. Their neural architecture, their personality, which had adapted to find completion in each other, now surfaced subtle signals of potential greater satisfaction elsewhere⁶.