Goodbye for Now Read Free

nightstand were all foreign film DVDs, but they saw Shrek Forever After in 3-D twice in theaters and spent the week of the foreign film festival hanging out with their old college roommates at a dude ranch in Wyoming. He noted that they said they liked to write poetry and short stories and even included a quote from Ulysses in their profile, but Sam analyzed their e-mails and knew they were in the bottom twelve percent of adjective users and had no idea how to use a semicolon. Everyone lied. It wasn’t malicious or even on purpose usually. They weren’t so much misrepresenting themselves as just plain wrong. How they saw themselves and how they really were turned out to be pretty far apart.
    Sam was a romantic, yes, but he was also a software engineer, andsince he was better at the latter, he played to his strengths. For two weeks straight, he worked obsessively on an algorithm that figured out who you really were. It ignored the form you filled out yourself in favor of reading your spending reports and bank statements and e-mails. It read your chat histories and text messages, your posts and status updates. It read your blog and what you posted on other people’s blogs. It looked at what you bought online, what you read online, what you studiously avoided online. It ignored who you said you were and who you said you wanted in favor of who you really were and who you really wanted. Sam mixed the ancient traditions of the matchmakers plus the truths users revealed but did not admit about themselves combined with the power of modern data processors and made the algorithm that changed the dating world. He cracked the code to your heart.
    His teammates were impressed. Jamie was pleased. But BB was thrilled with the algorithm, especially once he saw the proof of concept demos and how incredibly, unbelievably well it would work.
    “We’ll get you down to just one date!” BB enthused. “That’s all it will take. Talk about killer apps!”

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR
    T he next step for Sam, of course, was to try it himself. He wanted to know if it worked. He wanted to prove that it worked. But mostly, he wanted it to work. He wanted it to search the world and point, to reach down like the finger of God and say, “Her.” How good was this algorithm? First time out, it set Sam up with Meredith Maxwell. She worked next door. In the marketing department. Of Sam’s own company. For their first date, they met for lunch in the cafeteria at work. She was leaning against the doorframe grinning at him when he got off the elevator, grinning helplessly himself.
    “Meredith Maxwell,” she said, shaking Sam’s hand. “My friends mostly call me Max.”
    “Not Merde?” Sam asked, incredulous, appalled with himself, even as he was doing so. Who made a joke like that—pretentious, scatological, and French —as a first impression? Sam was awkward and off-putting and a little gross.
    Incredibly, Meredith Maxwell laughed. “Je crois que tu es le premier.”
    It was as if a miracle had occurred. She thought it was funny. She thought Sam was funny. But it wasn’t a miracle. It was computer science.
    “So where did you learn French?” Sam recovered after they were seated in an out-of-the-way corner with their cafeteria trays.
    “I spent a year abroad in college in Bruges. I also learned Flemish.”
    “That must come in handy,” said Sam.
    “Less than you’d think. The only people I speak Flemish to are my dogs.”
    “You have dogs?”
    “Snowy and Milou.”
    “You named your dogs after a Belgian comic book.”
    “Well, a Belgian comic book and its English translation,” said Meredith Maxwell.
    Sam was wildly impressed with himself. Though she’d offered nothing in her dating profile about the names of her dogs and Sam nothing of his childhood obsession with Tintin , somehow he’d written an algorithm that knew anyway. He was some kind of genius. Meredith Maxwell, meanwhile, was beautiful and funny and evidently smart, thirty-four