Why Emotional Connection Feels Impossible Today

25 minutes. He jumped into the shower, changed clothes and tidied up the messiest part of his student dorm just in time for Nikki to show up. 

He opened the door when she knocked and there, she was standing in a white hoodie with her hazel hair resting on the white fabric and she was smiling. It had been four days since they had last seen each other and when he saw her now it felt like a month.

“Spartan,” she said when she saw the noodle packages on the sink and a t-shirt he had forgotten to put away.

He hurried to fix the last thing.

She looked at his computer where the code rested on the screen.

“Is that the one?” she said, nodding at his laptop.

“Yes.

That’s that algorithm…”

“…who will send me on the adventure of my life.

That those incomprehensible harangues can create it.”

“You can still choose just to be friends with them instead of making them your dates.

But I guess we pretty much do that too,” he said, and she looked at him.

“I thought you AI nerds meant that everything was thanks to AI.” There was nothing mean in her voice.

Maybe something mischievous and he didn’t like it because it opened that damned crack that should have been closed, locked and welded shut.

“Maybe.

Maybe not.” She shrugged.

“Can I see anything?”

“If you wait.

I’m not quite finished with the code.”

“Okay,” she said, sitting on his bed.

“I’ll wait.”

And she waited.

Not much more had happened than that sometime in the late afternoon he had asked her to go to an obscure website and download an app he was creating called G8KeyPR.

A nerdy play on the word gatekeeper, he explained.

It would help her communicate with her dates.

When the clock struck 10, she yawned and took the last of the pizza from the box she had bought for them earlier in the evening and considered going home.

But then he suddenly said:

“Now.

Now it’s done.” Nikki bounced over to the screen and her fatigue was gone.

” Huh?

What?

Where is it?”

“Here,” he said, pointing to a gray box and she looked at it suspiciously.

“That?”

“What did you expect?

GTA?” She flinched.

“How do you know I play GTA?”

“Do you?

Well, everyone who likes PlayStation does.” He didn’t actually know she did.

She hadn’t written anything about what she did in her free time in her Dating Line stories.

But he didn’t want her to think he was spying on her, so he quickly changed the subject.

“This gray box is probably boring, but when I click here,” he said, pointing to a button that said “Search,” “this AI will search through thousands of dating sites, match them against your social media profiles…”

“How do you match?

Does it know who I am by searching through my profiles?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus.

Okay.

And then…”

“Then it will suggest a date to you who, if you approve it, will be contacted by a fake account that you are behind and then it’s just up to you to set up the date via the app you downloaded earlier.”

“G8KeyPR?” she said.

“Yes, exactly.”

“Aha.

And the requirement for adventure?”

“The AI has it built in.

It will give you dates that will want to have adventure on their first date.”

She looked at the gray, ugly little box.

” Shit …” He looked at her a little worried.

“So what?

Do you want to drop out?”

“No.

No, absolutely not.”

“The app will also have a geolocation on you and yes.

It will also be deleted when this experiment is over.”

She nodded.

“You have an emergency signal on it too.

It sends out a loud alarm, a distress call to me and the police, and your location.

Are you sure you want this now?”

“Yes,” she said decisively.

The distress signal felt safe.

“You can click Search now.”

“I think you should do it,” he said.

She slowly moved her finger to the mouse button and placed her hand on it.

“Shall we do it together?” he asked.

“It’s only fair,” she said, and he placed his hand on hers.

“On three!

One, two, three.”

And so, the electrical impulse that was supposed to kill Nikki on her first date went straight through the wires to the digital highways.

But at the same time, another electrical impulse went through Joachim’s finger up to his brain, and he considered it to be infinitely stronger than the last one.

The silence between two people can sometimes say more than a thousand matches.