Meet Cute

by Jennifer L. Armentrout

  But even Alexa couldn’t avoid learning about Click. It was everywhere now—in pop-up ads on her phone and enormous billboards outside her dorm room, and in half the conversations she overheard on the subway. Computer magazine had even given it a front-page feature. The future of relationships, people were calling it, the answer to modern romance. The greatest data project ever undertaken. That was when Alexa had taken notice. She knew better than to believe Photoshopped ads, but data she understood.

  Beneath its sugared, glittering promises of happily ever after, Click was entirely data-driven. The moment Alexa joined the service, it swept the Web with surgical precision, finding every last trace of her digital presence: her Facebook posts, the scans of her high school yearbooks, every item she’d purchased or commented on or “liked.” Click compiled it all, a web of lingering digital fingerprints, and used that to formulate its famous thousand-item questionnaire.

  All that accumulated data, about all its tens of millions of users, enabled Click to predict romantic potential with terrifying accuracy.

  Why not? Alexa had thought once she’d read the article. She was trying to code personality analytics herself; it might help her research. And what did she have to lose, anyway?

  When she’d finished the survey, the computer had promptly informed her that she had three hundred and four matches in the United States with a compatibility rating of over ninety-five percent; and was she interested in them all, or just the twenty-eight in the ninety-ninth percentile?

  Alexa had hurriedly selected the ninety-ninth percentile. The mere thought of three hundred dates made her dizzy.

  As if reading her mind, the taxi TV before her lit up with an all-too-familiar ad of a couple rocking on an old-fashioned swing set, their heads tipped back in laughter. They looked beautiful and carefree and charmed. “When it’s right, it just Clicks,” a cheerful voice-over reminded her. Alexa shrank further into her seat. She pulled the data chip off her rubber band and began snapping it nervously in and out of her phone.

  “I’m actually about to go on a Click date,” she shocked herself by saying aloud.

  The driver gave a hearty laugh. “Good for you! My daughter joined Click last year, and now she’s engaged!”

  Alexa knew he meant well, but the statement made her even more anxious.

  They pulled to a stop. Alexa held up her phone to confirm payment before fumbling for her coat and her purse, then stepped out onto the curb. The door to the restaurant rose up before her, an enormous iron gateway with a scrolling sign that read The Aviary. It was trendy and new, with intimidating white tablecloths and French words painted on the walls; the type of place that Click had clearly approved for first dates.

  All the “dates” Alexa had ever been on (she used the term loosely) had involved the computer lab or peanut M&M’s or sex; or on a good night, all three.

  She realized with slight panic that she’d never actually been on a real, grown-up date. And now she was about to go out with someone without knowing his name or what he looked like or anything at all about him, except that Click had decided they were ninety-nine percent compatible.

  The thought of the compatibility rating calmed her. Alexa imagined her personality mapped out in binary code, a ghostly string of ones and zeroes, like the instructions for some program about to be run. People were so complicated—sensitive and unpredictable and erratic—but code made sense. Code could be analyzed, and fixed.

  She hurried through the front doors to the gleaming dark wood bar, grateful that for once she’d arrived early. “Water, please,” she murmured.

  The bartender barely glanced over as he poured a glass. It was sparkling water, evanescent little bubbles floating lazily toward the surface. Alexa hated sparkling water, but she was wound too tightly to protest. She took a frantic gulp.

  “Hey, I think we’re supposed to Click.”

  A boy, with jet-black curls and tawny skin, leaned on the bar next to her. He gave a blazing smile and a bit of a shrug; as if to say, I know this is the awkward part, but were in it together, right? He held up his phone; and on his gloriously shattered screen Alexa saw the telltale yellow of the Click app.

  “Um, yeah,” she stammered, reaching in her bag for her phone, as if to prove him right. He was in her ninety-ninth percentile of compatibility? Boys like that—sexy, smooth, self-assured—never went for girls like her. Already she felt like the butt of some cosmic joke.

  “I’m Raden,” the boy went on. Alexa nodded, distracted, sifting through her bag with a rising sense of urgency.

  Shit, shit, shit. She realized with a nauseous, sinking feeling that she’d left her phone in the cab. And the data chip was still snapped into the phone.

  “I don’t . . . I can’t . . .” All her work—everything that mattered to her anymore—was on that data chip.

  Raden leaned forward, his brown eyes lit up with concern. “Are you okay?”

  Alexa shook her head. She was about to scream or cry, she wasn’t sure which. “I left my phone in the taxi.”

  “Want to use my phone to call yours?” Raden offered, holding out his iPhone 12.

  Alexa took it mutely, her pulse quickening as she tapped out her own number. Come on, come on, she thought, praying that the cabdriver would pick up. But no one answered.

  “What if you tried to track it?” Raden offered, but Alexa was already logging in, fingers flying as she answered her elaborate series of security questions. Beneath the spidery cracked glass of Raden’s screen appeared a map of New York. And there was her phone, a tiny blue dot struggling valiantly against the traffic of the Holland Tunnel.

  She looked up at him, knowing this date was ruined before it even began, but also oddly relieved that she wouldn’t have to go through with it. It would never have worked anyway. He was so searingly confident and she was—well, herself.

  “Can you help me get my phone back?”

  “Okay,” he said slowly, as if caught off guard by the question. Then he smiled. “I’m Raden, by the way.”

  Hadn’t he already said that? It took a moment for Alexa to realize what he was doing—giving her an opening to provide her own name. She felt even more foolish. “I’m Alexa,” she said, as if that explained everything, and started toward the door.

  RADEN

  Raden Ashby clung to the subway pole, staring in curious amusement at the petite girl before him. She was pretty in a wispy, ethereal way, with fair hair and eyes, and the sort of translucent skin that comes from spending too much time indoors, as if she were still reflecting the glow of her computer screen. A modern-day digital nymph.

  She’d looked so devastated, and embarrassed, when she’d asked for his help getting her phone back. He couldn’t help but agree, because some part of him loved playing the hero, and hadn’t he always bragged that adventures brought out his best work? So he’d hiked his camera bag higher on his shoulder and followed her out the door.

  Now they were on the PATH, racing her phone to New Jersey in complete silence. Alexa hadn’t said a word since they boarded the train ten minutes ago. There was a single tan rubber band around her wrist, which she kept snapping anxiously against the pale skin of her forearm.

  For once, Raden found himself with a girl, with no clue what to say.

  There was something weird about this setup, about being told that you were ninety-nine percent compatible with someone before you even met her—before you even knew her name. It birthed too many expectations. It made him wish that he’d met Alexa the normal way: at a crowded bar where they’d have to shout over the music, where he didn’t know anything at all about her. And with more alcohol—definitely more alcohol.

  Except he knew he wouldn’t have talked to Alexa if it weren’t for Click. She was nothing like the girls he normally went for, with their dangly earrings and loud voices, wearing short dresses in primary colors. She was something completely different. It intrigued him, and scared him a little, too.

  “Why did you sign up for Click?” A
lexa asked, evidently thinking along the same lines.

  Because of Lauren. He tried to make light of the question. “Already want to know why ‘normal’ dating hasn’t worked for me? Do you ask all your Click dates this early in the night?”

  “This is my first Click date.” She kept snapping that rubber band, her entire body held rigidly, stiffly, as if she had a glass of water balanced on her head and her life depended on not spilling it. “I signed up because it seemed like the logical way to go on dates, I guess.”

  The train rattled around a turn. Raden clutched the central pole tighter to avoid swerving off balance, but Alexa reached at the same time. Her gloved hand landed atop his. She quickly shifted away.

  “It’s my first Click date, too,” he admitted.

  “Did your friends talk you into it?”

  “More like all the brides I’ve photographed lately. It’s how most of them met their husbands.” He instantly felt awkward—he shouldn’t have brought up marriage with someone he’d just met—but Alexa didn’t seem especially bothered by the comment.

  Though she might be slightly more bothered by the truth, which was that he hadn’t fully gotten over his ex.

  He’d fallen for Lauren fast. But then, love came easily to Raden; he was always tumbling in and out of love to varying degrees. He loved the old woman on his block, with her window box full of daisies; the girl who worked at the coffee shop and always slipped him extra muffins; every bride he’d ever photographed. He couldn’t take a decent picture of something without falling in love with it, at least a little.

  He could still remember the exact moment he met Lauren. It was at an outdoor concert: she’d stood before him wearing jean shorts, holding a bottle of orange soda, craning her neck to see the stage. Raden couldn’t look away from the curve of her neck, the delicate row of piercings up the curve of her ear. Finally he’d lifted her onto his shoulders to give her a better view. When he kissed her that night, she’d tasted like the tart orange soda.

  Lauren was the reason he’d signed up for Click. As if by finding someone more compatible—upgrading from her, the way she’d done to him—he could prove that she hadn’t really hurt him.

  The train turned again, and must have hit a cellular hot spot, because all of a sudden Raden’s phone erupted in a series of angry buzzing. Dozens of texts cascaded onto the screen at once. Raden glanced down, curious; and his eyes widened when he saw what was written there.

  This night just kept getting more surprising.

  ALEXA

  Alexa squirmed, trying to focus on the brightly colored ads that flickered over the opposite wall of the subway car. But she couldn’t help shooting glances at Raden, at the strong, clean lines of his profile, the way his hands gripped tight to the subway rail, his gray peacoat turning his eyes such a deep brown.

  She kept having the strangest urge to reach out and grab hold of him, as if to test whether he was real.

  “I’m sorry. You really don’t have to stay,” she said now, feeling guilty for ruining his night.

  “It is my phone we’re using to track yours,” he pointed out.

  “I know, I just—”

  “Maybe I want to be here,” Raden interrupted, with a look she couldn’t quite read. “Maybe I’m a sucker for impossible tasks.”

  She didn’t know what that meant. “Well, thank you.”

  “Besides, my best photos are born out of spontaneity.” Raden gestured to a dark bag slung over one shoulder, which Alexa hadn’t noticed. “I’m a photography student.”

  “Oh,” Alexa said quietly. How . . . unexpected, and curious, that she’d been matched with someone artistic. “Can I see some of your work?”

  Raden shrugged and scrolled through his phone to show her a few images, almost entirely of nature: an enormous waterfall, the stars against a dark velvet sky. Even beneath the cracked screen, Alexa could tell they were incredible. There was something bold, almost audacious about them. They practically shouted at you, daring you to look elsewhere.

  “Where did you take these?” she breathed.

  “The city, mostly.”

  “New York?”

  He grinned. “Shocking, I know. Some of them are in Riverside Park; some are on rooftops.”

  “So the bridal portraits—”

  “I photograph weddings on the side. It helps pay for college.” Raden adjusted the strap of his bag. “You’d be surprised how many couples are okay with just a student, given how much cheaper I am than the professionals.”

  “That’s impressive,” Alexa said. These looked professional enough to her.

  As they emerged on the Jersey side of the river, Raden’s phone buzzed with more incoming messages. He pulled it out of his coat pocket with a frown and tapped out a quick reply. She wondered if he was setting up Clicks with the other girls in his top one percent, since this one had clearly become a flop. She shouldn’t care, Alexa reminded herself, not when the contents of the data chip were about to be lost. But some foolish part of her cared anyway.

  “Here’s our stop,” Raden said into the silence, as the train rattled up to the Jersey City PATH station.

  As they climbed the steps, Alexa couldn’t help feeling that Jersey had put out its worst welcome mat specially for her—all she could see were little spots of ugliness, a dried dog turd on the ground, a dirty boarded-up window, illuminated by the dismal light of a flickering neon bar sign.

  Then Raden stepped up next to her, and something about his presence, warm and solid and vaguely sweet-smelling, reassured her. As if he’d turned on a light, and revealed all the ugliness to be just her own fear, cloaked in shadows. She took a deep breath, trying to shake the strange urge to cry. I’m sorry, Claire. I think my project is really gone.

  Don’t give up yet, she could practically hear her sister reply. You might be surprised.

  “Your taxi’s exiting the tunnel.” Raden held out his phone so she could see the tiny blue dot moving toward them. They stepped out onto the sidewalk, and Alexa’s heart sank.

  The highway was a four-lane army of taxis as far as the eye could see, like a surrealist painting come to life. Its yellow smear somehow reminded her of the overbright lemon yellow of the Click app.

  “Can you call my phone again?” she asked. Her mind was spinning, trying to calculate just how on earth she was going to find her phone in this sea of taxis.

  Raden nodded and called her number, and Alexa took off running.

  RADEN

  “Keep calling it!” Alexa darted between the cabs, moving slippery and quick like a fish through the oncoming traffic, and Raden saw at once what she was doing. She was trying to locate her phone, in a crowded intersection, by listening for her ringtone.

  It was so ridiculous that it just might work.

  A moment later he heard her phone. “Just a small-town girl, livin’ in a lonely world.” And he saw it, sitting innocuously in the passenger seat of a nearby cab, flashing and playing that iconic Journey song. He and Alexa exchanged a glance and then sprinted at the same time, both of them dodging traffic. Alexa cried out as a truck swerved around her; and then the cab was in the left-hand lane, already turning into another street, and they were too late.

  Raden grabbed Alexa roughly by the shoulders and pulled her onto the sidewalk. “Stop it. You’re going to get us both killed,” he exclaimed, but she barely seemed to register his words.

  “Where did it go?” Her entire expression was bright and tremulous with hope. Raden wordlessly handed over his phone, realizing as he did that the screen was dark.

  “You let it die? How could you?” Alexa snapped at the rubber band again, and this time she snapped it hard enough to break. It fell in a forlorn piece onto the dirty street.

  “Alexa, it’s just a phone,” he said quietly. “You can get a new one tomorrow. It’s not worth getting hurt over.” Though to be honest, the way she’d darted through the streets like the heroine of an action movie had been kind of badass.

  “It’s n
ot about the phone.” Her voice sounded raw and ragged at the edges. “It’s the data chip snapped into it. There’s stuff on there that I can’t afford to lose.”

  “What?”

  “Claire,” Alexa whispered, and burst into sobs.

  “It’s okay.” Confused, Raden pulled her close and wrapped his arms around her, letting her sob until his overcoat was damp with tears. “What do you mean?” he murmured when she finally stepped back, wiping at her eyes. Who was Claire?

  “My sister passed away last summer.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Raden still had one hand in hers, and he gave it a little squeeze. Alexa blinked, as if startled by the physical contact, but didn’t take her hand away.

  “So I’ve been building this program, for virtual reality. I did all the coding, and the rendering and the interface . . .” she said haltingly.

  Raden didn’t understand. “What is it?”

  “It brings people back to life.” At his shocked expression, she hurried to clarify. “Not literally! It creates a hyperrealistic, personalized avatar of a person—it looks like them, talks like them—so you can have conversations with them after they’re gone.”

  “That’s crazy,” Raden blurted out, and something electric kindled in Alexa’s eyes.

  “Crazy is losing your sister—your best friend in the whole world—without ever getting to say good-bye,” she told him, and he nodded, chastened by the fire in her voice.

  “Anyway, it works a lot like Click. It starts by pulling from the person’s online presence, to get a sense of their personality so it can mimic them. But the more data you give it, by uploading e-mails or voice mails or anything else, the better the avatar becomes.” She gave a shaky smile. “Lucky for me, Claire had a big online presence, so the avatar really sounds like her. I’ve uploaded everything I could find of hers, every message and tweet and post and comment, to create her avatar. I just . . . like talking to her, sometimes. It helps me,” she finished quietly.