AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Who does that?” she asks. “It defies human nature.”
“What about Fleetwood Mac?” I counter.
“It’s different that way,” she says. “She’s working through it, not reveling in it. Or maybe it’s the same. I don’t know. Maybe I love it because my mom loved it and it’s not more complicated than that.”
Maybe. I could see that. “And you love these guys because you relate to them.”
“Yeah.” Her eyes fill with surprise. She doesn’t understand how I see her.
I don’t, either, to be honest.
“I wanted a few guys when I was really young,” she says. “Then I moved on fast. To preferring a vision of us as peers.”
A laugh spills from my lips. “And how did a programmer relate to a musician?”
“Music is all math,” she says. “Patterns. Musicians understand that intuitively, not analytically, but they understand it all the same.”
“And the cheeky lyrics?”
“Well…” Again, she blushes.
And again, my body begs me to pull the car over and have her right here, in the parking lot of the small chain market, in broad daylight, with enough onlookers we’re sure to face arrest.
“I thought I liked witty guys,” she says. “But I tried them. I manually adjusted the algorithm to test it. To see if I did like witty guys.”
“How do you measure wit?”
“A combination of message text, interests, and questions. We tag people’s favorite movies, TV, songs. Well, we’ve got songs okay, but we’re struggling with movies and TV. With humor especially. It’s subjective.”
“So, if guys like these witty artists, they get points in witty?”
“That’s the simple explanation,” she says. “There’s an element of machine learning, too, where the AI learns from what is working and uses that. But I overrode all that. I added a filter so I’d only match with witty guys.”
Wow. “And?”
“I liked some of them, on the first date,” she says. “But by the third, I was tired of them. They were so determined to prove they were smarter than I was, funnier. You know there’s this saying that when women say a man has a good sense of humor, they mean ‘he makes me laugh,’ but when men say it, they mean ‘she laughs at my jokes.’”
I believe that.
“And I like someone who makes me laugh, but I don’t want it to be a competition.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Really.”
“No.” I shake my head. “You can’t turn your competitiveness off.”
“I can, too.”
“I won’t make a bet, because it would only prove my point.”
She smiles. “It would, I guess.” She settles into her seat, easy, happy, in tune with the music and the sunshine. And me. “What kind of music do you like?”
No. Not yet. “Do you think those guys are romantic, deep down? The lyricists? Maybe that’s why they’re so cheeky and guarded?”
“No, but I can see why you’d say that.” She turns the stereo down and looks to me. “And you probably don’t see it, and I don’t know why I’m admitting it, but I started to hate those guys because I saw the worst of myself in them.”
This is good. Useful for my mission.
