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Was this some kind of prank?
My gut tightened, then released in a burst of laughter. Ben? My best friend Ben? Impossible.
My thumb tapped on Ben’s picture, which led to his profile.
Objectively, it was a good, if basic, dating profile, which made sense given that we threw them together in a bar after a few beers, and neither of us really cared much about impressing our potential matches.
Height—average; Body type—athletic; Political affiliations—none
One by one, I looked at each category and saw that Ben hadn’t marked anything the same as me, except for Smoking—we both selected No.
How could Mangle have found anything that we had in common to suggest that we were a 99.9% love match?
“Well, that’s downright foolish,” I muttered, swiping back to the main screen. But as I set my phone down, an uncomfortable chuckle bubbled up. What if—
I shook my head sharply. Where were these thoughts coming from? I didn’t see Ben that way. I was straight, or at least straight-ish. I liked women. I dated women. Curvy, soft women with long hair and full lips.
Not men. Certainly not Ben.
Just when I was about to text Ben and discuss the outrageous match, my phone rang, and Ben’s name appeared on the screen.
Speak of the devil and he shall appear. My mother used to say that.
I answered with a chuckle, wasting no time in diving into the topic that occupied my mind. “So, did you see our match?” I asked, unable to contain my amusement as I sliced my bagel.
Ben’s deep voice resonated through the phone. “I’m still laughing. It’s quite the shock to wake up to, seeing your pie face as my top match.”
“You could do a hell of a lot worse than me, asshole.” Yet my cheeks grew warm, and I scratched at the back of my neck, feeling a mix of relief and embarrassment. “Must be some sort of glitch, right? Though, as a software engineer, I’d think you’d find it intriguing from a technical standpoint.”
“Believe me, I already have a few friends I want to consult about this,” Ben said, his voice laced with amusement.
We joked about the situation, wondering how the AI could have possibly made such a strange mistake. “So what I want to know is who else Mangle paired you up with?” Ben’s deep voice rumbled with a playful tone. “You get more bears looking for other bears, or twinks looking for bears to take care of them?”
“A fair bit of both.” I glanced back at the app and saw what Ben meant. My matches definitely fell into one of those two categories. “Who knew that a chubby guy would be so popular on a dating app?”
Ben snorted. “I’m not saying I told you so, but I know a couple of guys right now who would let you—” But Ben stopped talking. “What are you going to tell Samantha?” he continued, changing the topic.
My face flushed, a mix of surprise and discomfort washing over me. I had never thought of myself as sexually attractive in a conventional way before, especially not in the way Ben described—and especially not compared to Ben and his perfect body. But now, I wanted to know what he was going to say. “I’ll tell her that most of my matches looked good, with one oddball mismatch.”
“Tell her the oddball had the same screwy results. Lots of guys who like sports and then my teddy bear.”
I flushed again. Time to get off this call. “We still on for Saturday morning?”
“Fuck yeah. You owe me tacos.”
Trust Ben not to forget about the fucking tacos. “See you then.”
Traffic that morning was light, and I arrived at work early. But as I settled down to work on my winery project, the odd match with Ben still played on my mind as I tried to make sense of it. Had the computer just noticed that we did things together and set us up? We both lived in the same city—maybe there wasn’t a wide enough sample?
But that couldn’t be it, or there would be cases all over the places of best friends or family being accidentally set up.
Was it more than that?
What had those lines of code seen in our profiles that found us almost perfectly compatible?
Or was the universe speaking to me?
Once Samantha arrived, I pounced on her. “Your dating app is broken.”
