Syboleth ch. 25: Good Kid

Jess was sitting on the couch at home. She was alone, because her mother worked nights now too. The years had not been that kind to her family's finances, and this wasn't helped by the fact that her father had set his eyes on a major slot architecture upgrade to their home two years ago.

The contractor they had hired to do the installation initially did a hack job, and the repairs that ensued after the trash disposal system fell apart far outstripped any budget her dad had originally set aside for this project.

Jess wondered why her dad had pursued the purchase. Were trash cans not good enough for him? Her mom had shouted at him that nobody cared how you threw away trash once, when the bills were first starting to become an issue.

She remembered that in old movies and books men would often purchase large fancy automobiles to demonstrate their wealth. Had her father wanted to demonstrate his wealth through trash disposal? Were slots the new bragging rights material in a city that no longer used human-driven cars?

More important to her than her father's bragging rights, though, were her bragging rights. She had managed to accumulate a cozy friend group over the past three years, but they had started noticing that she never dated anyone.

Tonight she was going to try and change that. A friend a couple years older than her had lent her a social media account with age verification that the friend was willing to let her use to sign up for a dating website without running into the age gate.

She had already entered a username, an age, and other biographical information. You could thankfully set the age to anything, so she was able to set it to 18 despite her friend being 19. She tried not to think about what motivations the owners of the dating website might have for allowing that when they had access to everyone's real ages anyway.

Now she had to add a biography. She was stumped for a few moments, then began typing.

I prefer Addison over Charli, Carrie and Lowell over Illinois, and good kid over TPAB. If that sounds like you too

Did this come off as too pretentious? She weighed the pros and cons of screening it for automatic feedback. It wasn't like the dating site wouldn't automatically scrape it all for at least four different corporate partners as soon as she saved it, anyway. Maybe they already had scraped her words as she typed them. She considered this, then—

then we might be a good fit. I also enjoy underwater cigars and walks along the side of the Sun.

Not that that would help much. Computers pretty soundly solved the sarcasm problem like a decade ago. She sat on her hands and considered the idea of trying to meet a romantic partner in the real world. Briefly, but she did consider it. Nobody did that anymore. Sometimes it felt like romantic advances really were verboten among Gen Alpha in the real world; like the thing older generations had insisted, straining credulity, was the case with millennials and Gen Z was now simply true of her own. Even casual flirting rarely happened that she was aware of, unless it was in pursuit of casual sex. Everything happened on apps.

Though Jess wasn't cognizant of this, it had already been proven in countless scientific papers by this point that social media companies had done their best to engineer society to turn out like this. And despite court rulings about the matter starting around the middle of the previous decade, nothing had really been done afterwards to stop their insidious takeover of romance.

How long did these bios have to be, anyway? Jess wished she could see some of the other people's profiles on the platform before she finalized everything for public consumption.

She had an idea.

Still here, somehow.

No. Deleted. More articulate.

Reluctant participant, enthusiastic

...Enthusiastic what? Deleted.

Still here. Somehow.

Good enough. She saved the profile, and she was off and away viewing other profiles.

The first one she saw was what seemed just vaguely poetic at first but upon a closer reading turned out to be an oblique solicitation to a suicide pact. Next to that was a profile that seemed to be entirely made up of song lyrics.

Unsettled, Jess reported the suicide pact profile and involuntarily shook her head a little. The song lyric profile didn't interest her either, so she declined the pick.

She looked over an array of other profiles. Dating apps used to limit you to swiping through one profile at a time after Tinder changed everything, of course. But eventually they too were drawn in by the allure of presenting as much content as possible to the user at a time, and so they had mostly all changed their user experiences one by one over the turn of the decade.

None of the profiles she was seeing actually divulged much information about the person. At least she gave musical preferences.

It was as if they all wanted to seem like blank slates.

There was one profile she saw that had a fleshed out bio, but unfortunately his pictures seemed to indicate that he wasn't very good at personal hygiene. She rejected the entire batch and more profiles popped up for her survey.

The algorithm clearly took into account that she hadn't liked any of those profiles, and tried offering selections from a different clade of accounts in the categorization system. She was now presented with more detailed profiles. With some sense of bashfulness, she realized that her lazy profile was likely the reason it had decided to trial so many other lazy profiles first.

She started reading the first profile, then got a bad vibe and moved to the next one. It opened with a two-stanza poem that was allegedly original, and Jess liked it. The boy in question was reasonably attractive too, so she approved his profile and another popped up in its place. This one was inviting people to go exploring abandoned buildings with him.

That didn't sound very appealing to Jess, so she rejected the profile. Then she did the shallow thing, and first zoomed out to an array of 25 profiles in a five-by-five grid. Then she looked them over and zoomed in on the hottest boy she saw.

This profile was different. Instead of some miniature biography, he had shared his taste in media like Jess. Without spending that much time reviewing the things he had shared, she liked the profile after ensuring that there was nothing too objectionable on his lists of music and movies and books.

Then she closed the app and laid down.

Before she knew it, she was opening her eyes to a notification ping. She hadn't realized how tired she had been, but a few hours had passed. She was going to be up all night now.

It seemed that someone had matched with her on the app.

Opening the app, it turned out to be the boy that had the poem on his profile. He had sent her a message inquiring about how her day had gone.

She replied, and they carried on a brief conversation, then agreed to get coffee a couple days from then.

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