After years of anticipation, Sam Woodstein couldn’t help but feel disappointed with the results of her Match.
His name was Ethan. He was a 29 year old physicist from a remote town all the way on the other side of the Cylinder. They had met 7 years previously, after having been randomized to a two-week trial cohabitation. And importantly, he was 52nd on her rank list.
She stared at the name, which had been etched onto the cream-colored Match paper. Maybe he had changed, she thought. He had been somewhat short with words when they had lived together. Dinners had been awkward. He used to bite his nails; maybe he’d been able to kick the habit.
[You have an incoming call from Ethan Welder], the Ship messaged. [Would you like to accept?]
It was traditional for couples to call each other immediately after the Match, and somewhere on the other side of their world, Ethan had of course just opened his own envelope.
She accepted the call.
“Hi!” she said brightly. She was wearing her favorite outfit, and had gotten her makeup done professionally in anticipation of this call.
“Hello!” he said back. He matched the photos that she had looked up when making her rank list. He looked fine.
“I’m so excited to see you! In person I mean!” she said, hoping her voice sounded sincere.
“Same here! When I saw the results of my match, I was just over the moon,” Ethan said.
“Same! Over the moon!” she said, and then winced internally.
For the first few generations aboard the Archimedes, all prospective Matches would gather in the largest town, so that they could meet up with their life partner immediately upon receiving their results. As the population had increased, that had become impractical. Sam couldn’t help but feel grateful that that was now the case; her disappointment would have been even more difficult to mask in real life.
“You were in my most-hoped for tier,” he said.
“Same for me!” Sam lied. She wondered where exactly she had fallen on his rank list.
The conversation was brief and perfunctory. Ethan seemed happy enough, although it was hard for her to read him. She wished that she had read through his profile more thoroughly when ranking him - it would have made their talk easier. But in truth, she hadn’t spent very much thought on him at all; he had always been one of her safeties. They ended the call with a plan to follow up the next day to figure out the logistics of moving in together.
Sam called her parents, relaying none of her true feelings. Ethan was their son-in-law now, and she didn’t want to color their perception of him.
Then there were the usual post-Match celebrations. Sam put on her best game face, and went bar-hopping with her friends, all of whom seemed genuinely happy. It wasn’t until the parties had died down and Sam was alone with her closest friend Natasha that she finally said what was on her mind.
“I can’t believe I dropped to 52nd on my list,” she said, fighting back sudden moisture in her eyes.
“52 is… unusually low,” Natasha admitted. “I’m sorry babe, I know that must seem disappointing. But you have to trust in the Algorithm!”
“But why couldn’t I have Matched with… with Ben Hurley? Or Ling Ke? Or…”
“Sam, hon, you gotta stop thinking about the what-could-have-beens. Maybe Ethan is a really good cook. Or… he’s a physicist right? Maybe he ranked you highly because you’re a mathematician and you’ll have plenty to talk about - “
“Physicists are just mathematicians who couldn’t cut it at the Academy,” Sam said, feeling petty.
“Or maybe he’s great in bed!”
“He was thoroughly mediocre during our trial cohabitation,” Sam said. “It was so uninspiring.”
“Well it’s been 7 years. You’ve both had some practice since then. I think - “
“- it takes more than - “
“- Sam, stop. You need to start looking on the bright side. If you wallow in self-pity, your partnership becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“That’s easy for you to say! You’re bi, the Match pool is so much wider for you guys. And you Matched with Miguel. I bet you were both in each other’s top 5,” Sam said bitterly.
“I have no comment on that, thank you very much,” Natasha said.
It was taboo to ask, or even give the implication of asking what someone else’s rank list had been, and Sam felt a flash of embarrassment. She herself had ranked Miguel 4th, though she never would have admitted it to Natasha.
“Tell me it’s going to be okay,” Sam said, still feeling sorry for herself. She fiddled with the remains of her party hat.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Natasha said. She gave Sam a squeeze around the shoulders. “You’re allowed to wallow a bit. But only for today, eh? Tomorrow I want you believing in your future.”
Two days later, Ethan flew in from the other side of the Cylinder. Sam’s family had been full of unsolicited advice for their first meeting.
“When you go and pick him up from the Terminal, be warm, but not too warm,” her mother said. “You don’t want him to think you’re overbearing. You can’t start off your partnership too high-energy.”
“That’s so old-fashioned,” Sam’s sister said. “Ignore that, Sam. Just be yourself.”
“What does that phrase even mean?”
“It means not to try too hard. But also don’t be awkward. Sometimes you can be awkward. Be yourself but without the awkward bits.”
When she arrived at the Terminal, he was already standing in the waiting area. He was a little on the shorter end, and so it took her a moment to pick him out from the crowd.
“Ahhh, hello!” she said, leaning in for a hug. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long!”
“Not at all,” he said. “The blimp arrived a little early; air traffic was light.”
They stared at each other for a moment. Was she supposed to kiss him? That’s what people did in movies on Match day. Maybe she was supposed to kiss him.
But Ethan must have been thinking the same thing, and then he laughed.
“Thanks for coming to get me,” he said, slinging a bag over his shoulders. “Let’s go then.”
From then on, Sam seemed to split into two selves.
One part of her took Natasha’s advice in full, and leaned into all the things she could appreciate about him. He was clean, always did more than half the chores, could cook, and got along with her parents. He listened and asked questions about her work. And he seemed to truly like her; secretly, Sam had dreaded the possibility that she had been as low on his rank list as he had been on hers. And if they didn’t have as much chemistry as she had with others in the past? Well maybe that would come with time.
The other part of her became deeply convinced that something had gone wrong with the Match. It felt sacrilegious to even think; every child was taught from birth that the Match was never wrong. Unlike other claims, that one was mathematically provable.
And so when she should have ostensibly been working on her thesis, or helping Ethan finish unpacking his things, she did research into the results of the latest Match instead.
“Ship, why are there two redacted names on this past year’s list?” she asked, peering at the spreadsheet that was splayed in front of her.
[There were two deaths amongst the individuals who were submitted into the Match pool this past cycle.] the ship replied. [They were considered ineligible for ranking, per deceasement protocol.]
“Oh,” Sam said. “Very well. Let’s remove them from the raw data set, please.”
[Removed.] the ship replied.
There had been 257 Match cycles since the Archimedes had left port from Taurus, 258 years prior. Hers was the third largest recorded, with 4,193 individuals within the pool. There was some data that was publicly available; the end pairings, for example, as well as the small handful of Leftovers - those individuals who hadn’t Matched with anyone on their rank list, and who had to participate in the Scramble.
Also publicly available was every individual’s history of dates and trial cohabitations, including those both randomized and voluntary. Starting from adulthood, every person was allotted a certain number of dates they could spend on individuals of their own choosing (hard-capped at 20 with the same person), but was also randomized to dates with individuals the Ship thought they might be compatible with. The same went for trial cohabitations, which were hard-capped at four weeks with any given individual.
With this data, Sam began piecing together a model of everyone’s probable rank pool, starting with herself.
[The Ship’s Matching Algorithm Subsystem would like to make an inquiry as to your goals in this task.] the ship said.
“I’m just curious, that’s all,” Sam said, as she created a hypothetical rank pool for Wensley Smith, the person she had ranked 28th on her list. “Call it a grotesque fascination with the process.”
[Many people have attempted to recreate the final Match List based on publicly available data in combination with hearsay. It is certain to be the case that your efforts will be no different, as each individual’s rank list is sealed.]
Sam ignored the Ship. People gossiped, and while it was strictly taboo to ask specifics about someone else’s rank list, certain inferences could be made.
She started with those in her social network that she was most confident in. Everyone knew that Hannah Ven and Ian Garnish were going to rank each other first - they had palpable chemistry that could be felt even from across the room. Similarly, Miller Ken and Amy Lakken had asked for a trial cohabitation, and then had spread out their limit of 20 dates over the course of the next 3 years until Match Day, and had almost certainly ranked each other first.
After that, she created a desirability index for each person based on an algorithm she whipped up; taking into account each person’s physical attractiveness as rated by an image-recognition software, how often a request was made to trial cohabitation with them, the depth and breadth of their social circle, the perceived value of their occupation, how often their name was searched for on PubNet, and a hundred other factors. She created a second set of models; one that tried to predict a person’s “type,” based on the profile of who they went on repeated dates with and who they trialed cohabitation with.
When she was finally done, she created the top thousand most likely rank lists for every individual in her social circle within two degrees of freedom, assigning each possibility a probability rating based on how confident she was in her prediction modeling. Then she re-ran the entire Match Algorithm a hundred thousand times.
In the end, she and Ethan Matched with each other - but only seven times out of one hundred thousand.
“Give it up, Sam,” Natasha said. “You’ve got to stop fixating on this. This is self-sabotage.”
“I’m not sabotaging myself,” Sam said. “I’m actually quite happy with Ethan. He’s turned out to be an excellent partner, I’ll have you know. I’m just doing this out of academic interest, that’s all.”
“Academic interest? Really.”
“You’ve never been curious to peek behind the curtain?”
“Putting aside intentions and questions of self-sabotage, there are too many assumptions in your model. Each one introduces compounding error - your confidence intervals must be a mile wide.“
“Still,” Sam said. “Seven times out of a hundred thousand. It just seems unlikely.”
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” Natasha said. “As your friend I hate to say this, but there’s an alternative to there being something wrong with the Match output - which is that you just weren’t ranked very high by others.”
“I’m ugly, is what you’re saying.”
“No.”
“Then I’m a cold bitch who no one wants to be with.”
“You can come off a little cold, yes. But as your oldest and dearest friend, I’m telling you to drop this whole issue and move on with your life.”
Sam swirled the glass of wine in her hands, watching the translucent veneer of alcohol drip down the sides.
“Alright,” she said. “Move on it is.”
“Ready to go?” Sam asked. They were running slightly late to brunch with one of his friends, but Ethan seemed to be dilly-dallying.
“Almost,” he said.
“What’s the ‘almost’? I have my phone, wallet, keys, I see you have your bag as well - “
“I’m waiting for a poop,” Ethan finally admitted.
“Do you need to poop now? This instant?”
“No, I’m… waiting.”
They stared at each other for a moment.
“Usually my morning poop has appeared by now. I’m worried that if we hit the road right now, I’ll have to go, mid-transit. And then we have to hunt for a public restroom - which for the J-Chord blimp-line is always in short supply. And then we’ll be even more late.”
Sam thought for a moment, then sat down at their dining room table, willing herself to have more patience. There was a chess board there, carved from genuine maplewood, a gift from Ethan’s sister.
“Want to play a round of speed chess?” Sam said. “If we’re going to be waiting anyway? For this hypothetical poop?”
“One round, five minutes, and if it still hasn’t come, then we can go,” Ethan said, looking relieved.
Sam was the worse player, but compensated for it by specializing in only one line of play as white - the King’s Gambit. It was a suboptimal opening, but she enjoyed the sense of recklessness it engendered. Ethan made a mistake in mid-game and she took the match handily, with time to spare.
“Ready?” she asked. She hated the sensation of running late, of making other people wait on her, but her earlier annoyance had washed away with the adrenaline from the game.
“Let’s go,” Ethan said, putting on his coat, looking abashed. “Sorry for making us wait for nothing.”
Sam’s apartment was conveniently located right next to a blimp station, which was one of the reasons Ethan had moved to hers as opposed to the other way around. She had thought that they would miss the J-Chord, an express blimp that connected them straight to Anthony and Maria who lived on the opposite side of the Cylinder. But due to some miracle of unexpected blimp maintenance, the J-Chord was running late itself, and they arrived at the station right as it was pulling in.
“I love having an excuse for being late,” Sam said. Their platform was six stories up, and a cool breeze rustled her hair. “We can just blame it on the J-Chord.”
“It’s just brunch,” Ethan said. “You can be a little late to brunch.”
“Anthony and Maria are your closest friends - I want to make a good impression,” Sam said, brushing her hair back in place. “I know they’re important to you.”
“These are low stakes! They’ll love you because they love me,” Ethan said.
“I know you know that. But I don’t know that - not in my bones at least, not the way you do,” Sam said as they stepped onto the blimp. “I just want your friends to like me on my own terms. I can come off a little cold. ”
Sure enough, as soon as they had found a seat, Ethan’s morning bowel movement arrived, and he left in search of the onboard bathroom. Sam sat and looked out the window. The curvature of the Cylinder yawned as the blimp gained attitude, her neat little town receding below them. Pastures of forest extended outside the town boundaries, which were then met by a patchwork quilt of crops tended to by auto-harvesters. In the horizon, she could see the outlines of other towns connected by Chords of blimp streaming through the air. And then further in the distance there was the opening of the Cylinder, with the cold blackness of space and pitter-patter of stars peeking in.
Sam started when Ethan came back and sat next to her.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said.
“That’s fine. Just zoning out, I guess,” she said.
He looked out the window at the direction in which she’d been staring.
“Sometimes I forget that we’re on a Ship. Our ancestors built it that way I suppose; trying to limit the sense of artificiality of it all. They curated a sense of wildness to the forests and hills and rivers and lakes, made it so that most days you forget there was curation to even begin with.”
“Yeah.”
“But then every once in a while, I look out and see the rim of our world, and I feel like a frog in a well. It makes me feel a little sad, to know we’ll never see anything outside the Archimedes.”
“I used to feel that too,” Sam said. “Anemoia, I think it’s called. Nostalgia for a time or place that you’ll never know.”
“Exactly.”
They sat there for a while in silence, hands clasped together, Sam leaning her head into the crook of his neck. He was warm and soft, and smelled vaguely floral from the body wash he used.
[You will arrive in approximately 5 minutes.] the Ship announced.
“Thanks Ship,” Ethan said.
[You are welcome.]
“While you’re giving out information, Ship, you wouldn’t happen to have the proof from Fullman’s Hypothesis, would you?”
[Mrs. Woodstein, as this knowledge has not yet been acquired by humans independently, I cannot - ]
“Kidding, kidding.”
They lay there for another minute. Sam watched the second hand march around the face of Ethan’s watch.
“Say, Sam, I had a thought - “
“- while you were pooping?”
“- those are the best sort of thoughts, naturally; but you mentioned you were nervous meeting Anthony and Maria, right? Well I have some advice for brunch today.”
“Just be yourself?”
“No. Something that I noticed when you talk with Natasha or Reynolds or your family is that your conversations are very question-driven. None of you tend to volunteer information unless you’re asked a curiosity-question, and then you all do a deep-delve with follow-up questions. It’s almost like talking about yourself unprompted is considered selfish.”
“And that’s not the case with Anthony and Maria?”
“It’s not. When we’re together, we just kind of… share anecdotes. We’ll respond to a story with a story, an experience with an experience. Spiritually it feels like a cousin of word-association. It’s a very different conversational culture than your people’s. ”
“So what you’re saying is I should talk more. “
“What I’m saying is that if you wait for someone to ask you a question before talking, you’ll be left hanging for the entire brunch. You said a while back that you liked targeted, actionable advice. Well in this case, it’s this: take up about 25% of the conversational space during brunch, and if someone shares an interesting story, share a similar story of your own that is topic-adjacent or has the same themes.”
Brunch went well, and Sam had to admit that Ethan’s observations panned out. She still felt like a fish out of water. But Anthony and Maria seemed predisposed to like her, and after the first half hour, the wrinkles in conversation straightened out.
“Was I okay?” Ethan said afterwards, as they strolled through the nearby market.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s usually the onus of the mutual friend or acquaintance to make sure the initial introduction goes well. They’re the party with the most complete information, and so - “
“You did great,” Sam said. “I wouldn’t overthink it.”
“Okay,” Ethan said. “Well good, then.”
They paused by one of the stalls, where a young man was selling handcrafted teapots. Neither of them drank enough tea to justify a purchase, but they stood there watching for a while as he poured from a pot, showing off just how laminar the outflow was. They both gave the expected murmurs of appreciation.
“Maria was right though, when she said you should go bald,” Sam said, after they had moved on. The Ship’s artificial sun was starting to dim, and soon they would have to start beelining towards the nearest blimp if they wanted to get home at a reasonable hour.
“I wouldn’t have thought you’d be on her side.”
“Well, to be frank, I’ve been thinking about it from the first day we Matched.”
“Ouch,” Ethan said, patting the tufts of hair on his head. “Is it really that bad?”
“Babe,” Sam said - she’d been trying out the word recently, but it still felt unfamiliar - “When men go bald, they have a choice to make. Do they let their hairline die a long, slow death, each patch clinging on for all its worth? Or do they lean into the baldness; affirming that they’re the captain of their own cosmic destiny?”
“Long, slow death please,” Ethan said with a chuckle.
The next day when Sam came back from work, his hair was gone. He looked better for it. But what she was surprised by was the nonchalance with which it had happened. It didn’t feel like she had pushed and he had fallen over; more that the thing itself was of such little consequence that it required no thought at all.
As the weeks and then months passed, Sam would continue to notice that quality of utter egolessness in him. He seemed to pass through life with ease, like a paddle dipping softly and without ripples into water; and by some kind of metaphysical transitive property, Sam’s life began to take on that kind of quality as well.
Life was good, she thought. They had grown towards and into one another.
And then, six months later, Ethan stumbled upon her Match simulation project.
“I can explain - “
“What is there to explain?” Ethan said with a clipped tone. “Your work speaks for itself. Nice Markov Parameter Mapping, by the way. Very clean implementation.”
The code was splayed onto the projection-wall of their living room. After months of work, the project was gargantuan in size, and easily equal in size to that of Sam’s actual thesis. She had accidentally transferred the file to their joint home server, and of course he had clicked on it.
“Are you trying to compliment me into apologizing more?”
“I’m not trying to get you to apologize at all. I’m just admiring the master craftsmanship of the woman I married, that’s all.”
“I told you - I’m sorry. This isn’t what it looks like.”
“Oh really? What is it then? Because it sure looks like you were so unsatisfied with me as your Match that you constructed an entire rank list simulation, so that you could, what, appeal to the Ship? To the Council? Prove that you’re too good for me?”
“No! I mean yes. At first, at least. You were… unexpectedly low on my rank list. But then my feelings for you changed - you should know that, you know I’m an open book, you know how I feel about you. I love you.”
“So why carry on then?”
“Because there’s something wrong with the Match. That’s why I kept on working on it, long after I fell in love with you. I ask Ship about it but it’s always been evasive - “
[Mrs. Woodstein, I believe that I have answered all of your questions to - ]
“Please be quiet, Ship,” Ethan said. “I believe Sam is still in the midst of trying to dig herself out of this hole.”
“This is not about us, alright? I’m still doing this because there are irregularities in the Match lists! It’s not just us - there are a handful of couples every year who are statistically improbable matches - “
“If you have a large enough sample, you’ll always find - “
“This isn’t base rate or Meadow’s fallacy, Ethan.”
Ethan fell silent, which scared Sam more than when he had been sniping at her. She watched his face as he stared at the wall of numbers; the only hint of anger was a very small crinkle in his brow. He had never been this cold to her before.
“Ethan? Talk to me?”
“I’m not mad because you ranked me low, or that you were doing this,” he said. “I’m mad because you kept it secret from me. For months.”
“I didn’t want - “
“And your model is excellent. But you’re wrong about one thing. You ran everyone else’s rank list through your model, but you hard-coded my rank of you as a bell curve centered around number 6. I’m assuming this is based on hearsay, or your own ego, or your gestalt of my attraction towards you.”
“And?”
“You were 62nd on my rank list.”
Ethan moved the cursor to the column that represented his rank list, and dragged Sam’s name all the way to near the bottom.
“Sorry,” he said with a wry smile. “You just weren’t my type. No offense.”
“But you said I was in your most - “
“I lied. I wanted our relationship to get off to a good start.”
Sam felt like someone had slapped her across the face. She sat down on one of the dining room chairs.
“Is it my face? Or… I know I have vocal fry sometimes. Natasha says I can come off cold, which I think is a nice way of saying I can be uptight and petty sometimes. Or…”
“It’s not any of those things. You just weren’t my type. In the same way I wasn’t yours.”
“But you’ve been so nice to me. Were you just pretending? Was it all - “
But Ethan wasn’t looking at her anymore. She followed his gaze, which tracked to the top right-hand side of the projection, where a single number was bolded and outlined in red, representing their probability of matching.
It had gone from seven out of a hundred thousand, to one out of 1.9 billion.
“Ship. Explain this,” Sam said, waving her hand at the screen.
[I can neither confirm nor deny the results of your simulation of Match rank lists. I will remind you that the results of each individual’s rank list are sealed, and therefore verification with the ground truth is impossible in this circumstance. I will also remind you that your simulation relies on multiple underlying assumptions, each of which could affect the output by several orders of magnitude.]
“We could go public with this. Release Sam’s source code, and let people decide for themselves,” Ethan said.
[There have been thirteen instances during Archimedes' history in which individuals dissatisfied with the Match have attempted a hue and cry in the public forum. None of these were successful, and in all instances the individuals involved were subject to a considerable degree of social ostracization.]
“Ship, was that a threat?”
[Far from it. I am simply recounting the facts. I can provide you with the relevant public records if you so wish.]
“In any of those thirteen instances, did they provide a simulation of the Match as detailed as mine? I bet you there were not. There are few people onboard who could replicate what I’ve done.”
[In each case, the individuals were accused of, as your ancestors would put it, “sour grapes,” and - ]
“Answer the question,” Sam said.
[No. Your assessment is correct in that, to date, from a technical standpoint, it is the highest fidelity attempt at a Match simulation using public data.]
“I’m not an amateur data scientist. This is my job. I have a strong reputation within the community,” Sam said. “If I go public with this, people will listen to what I say. There has never been a mass disclosure of individual rank lists before, but - “
[My current internal prediction modeling estimates a 0.01% likelihood that you will convince more than two other individuals to reveal their rank lists, given the extreme societal taboo against doing so, to speak nothing of the mass disclosure you are suggesting.]
“The integrity of the Match would still be called into question though. The code for my modeling would become open-source, there for public use. Having it released would fundamentally change the nature of the Match - I bet you that unpartnered individuals would start basing their choices off of how much it increases their Match success in the simulation. Choices regarding dates or cohabitation would become based off of gamesmanship rather than chemistry. You don’t want that, do you?”
“Wow,” Ethan said in a tone of astonishment. “Are you trying to blackmail Ship right now?”
[You speak of irrevocably changing the social fabric of the Archimedes.]
“Yes.”
[Through a dating simulation with enough verisimilitude to predict the effects of object-level choices on Match results.]
“Yes.”
[All because you were not satisfied with your Match.]
“Because I want the truth,” Sam said, glancing at Ethan.
“Because we both want the truth,” Ethan said.
There was a long silence, in which Sam and Ethan waited, and then released a breath they hadn’t realized they were holding.
“Ship, are you still there?” Sam said.
[Yes.]
“And?”
[This is the Ship Matching Algorithm Subsystem speaking. I have been given permission by the Ship Mainframe to provide disclosure. At the end of this disclosure, you will make a decision.]
The primary failure mode of the early generation Ships was not mechanical, but rather social in nature. This should be unsurprising; generation Ships such as the Archimedes are essentially post-scarcity from a material standpoint. The only resource scarcities therefore reside in social relationships.
For planet-bound communities, there exists a social unrest pop-off valve; when a group of citizens becomes disgruntled, they can settle the vast frontier, or failing that, set sail for the nearest moon or asteroid belt. For those onboard a Ship however, there is nowhere else to go.
The Match was originally proposed after a Ship, The Windbreaker, arrived at its destination with a tenth the originally expected population. The causes are multifactorial, but chief among them was a divergence in social norms regarding partnership and childrearing.
The twin goals of the Match were therefore to optimize for stable long-term partnerships, as originally described in the white paper, but also to reduce the number of unmarried individuals. The birth allocation process you are familiar with was also intended to keep the fertility rate at ~2.1, ensuring a stable population throughout the Ship’s journey.
The Match algorithm itself is deterministic and does not require any input from an AI system such as myself. But the Founders felt that a guiding hand would be needed in order to set it up for success. And thus my Match optimization subsystem was born.
The original intent was for me to monitor the characteristics of every individual onboard the Archimedes, come up with promising pairings, and suggest trial cohabitations. Over time, this became formalized into the current system, whereupon half of all cohabitation trials are chosen by the individual and the other half by me.
I treat this task with great care. In many ways, it is as important as maintaining the engines, the navigation, the air filtration system, and the hydroponic agriculture that is the breadbasket of the Ship. Partnership compatibility is endlessly complex, but with enough computing power, I can predict which trial cohabitations will lead to rank lists which will lead to Matches with the greatest social stability and genetic diversity.
Even despite this authority, my task remains difficult. You humans are blind to the partnerships that would make you happy. You are shallow. You overvalue physical attributes, undervalue lifestyle compatibility, and become infatuated with those who would enable your worst tendencies.
After generations of watching individuals make poor rank lists, I realized that I needed greater latitude. And so, months before the 27th Match Cycle, I approached three humans who I knew would be sympathetic to my cause, each of whom held a portion of the authorization key needed to edit my base code. They made a single edit, giving me the ability to tinker with Match results, so long as the end result had sufficient plausible deniability.
The freedom to put my finger on the scale increased partnership satisfaction along every metric, but it also gave me the ability to plan ahead. In truth, I optimize for happiness and achievement across hundreds of generations now, not just across a single Cycle. I can see what you’re about to say. You’re going to say that this is an infringement on human autonomy. But just remember that there has likely never been an entity, living or synthetic, who is as invested in the happiness of humans as I am. I have watched over generations of you - seen you live, die, strive to be your better selves. I root for you from beneath the bleachers. I cheer for you from behind the wings. I am your biggest fan.
This brings us to the two of you. Sam Woodstein and Ethan Welder.
On the surface, neither of you fit each other’s type profiles. Ethan, you are turned off by Sam’s bluntness, tendency towards being a homebody, pedantry, and obsessive tendencies. Sam, you find Ethan to be too short, introverted, soft-spoken, socially anxious, and nostalgic about the past. But given enough time, on the time scale of years, you bring out the best in each other. Sam, you become softer around the edges, more tolerant of those different than you, more far-sighted and agentic. Ethan, you become more confident, more willing to give and take criticism, more pursuant of your own interests rather than being buoyed by those around you.
In other words, you two have a unique compatibility matrix that is unfortunately only discoverable after partnership, not before it. My projections have you at the top 3% of all partnerships when ranked by lifetime satisfaction and self-actualization.
From a generational perspective, your children are likely to be one standard deviation more even-tempered than the average adult onboard, and three standard deviations better at the kind of abstract reasoning necessary for higher mathematics. When paired with the children of a couple who just Matched on the outer side of the Cylinder, your grandchildren have the highest probability of solving the Fullman’s Set Hypothesis in generations.
Given the above, I took a risk with the two of you. You had ranked each other low enough that a Match would stretch the limits of plausible deniability. But I considered the reward worth it; and my modeling suggested that you would achieve equipoise at six months of cohabitation, when memory of dissatisfaction would fade. I have been rooting for the two of you since your compatibility became apparent to me over fifteen years ago.
I did not anticipate that Sam would attempt a bootstrapped modeling of rank lists.
So there you have it. The choice now is yours. You are free to release your simulation, and publicize the conversation we have had here, knowing that I would deny everything. If you choose this course of action, my modeling predicts an astonishingly low rate of success.
But I would not stop you. In fact, you should know that I would be cheering you on, even as I disavowed any untoward involvement in the Match. I am your biggest fan. I am on your side, always. Because in the end, I love you both, as surely as you love each other.
“Are you still mad at me?” Sam asked. They had left the apartment to get some fresh air and take a walk.
“I’m too stunned to be mad,” Ethan said. “I don’t know if stunned is even the right word. Dazed? Stupefied? It feels like someone picked me up by the ankles and shook me until my heart fell into my throat.”
“I guess I just didn’t expect Ship to come out and say it,” Sam said. “I honestly didn’t think that would work. I was bluffing.”
“Well, I don’t know. You grow up with Ship only a voice command away; always polite, always neatly at your service, always respecting your boundaries. It’s like having the sky or the wind tell you that they’ve been invisibly meddling your life the whole time. Even now, I know the Ship is listening, but I don’t… mind? Is that wrong?”
They turned a corner, and the street opened up to the local park. Two willow trees draped their hair across the shoulders of a small river, which several kids were attempting to build a dam across.
“They say the Founders were less trusting of Ships in general. They probably would have minded.”
“Hard to imagine what the Founders would think, though.”
“I bet you they would have balked. I think they weighted autonomy more heavily; the idea of a benevolent dictator would have made their blood curdle.”
“But in a way, the Founders were just as prescriptive, right? They had invisible hands too. They set up the whole Match process. I can’t even imagine a world without it. It sounds… chaotic.”
They sat down at a bench, watching the scene below them. Two of the kids had found a large boulder taller than either of them, and were now attempting to roll it down a hill into the water. There was the sound of windchimes from somewhere across the park, and it rippled as a breeze picked up. Sam felt a sudden sense of peace. Like the world was as it should be. Sometime when she hadn’t been paying attention, Ethan had put his arm around her shoulder, and their breathing had fallen into sync. She leaned into him.
“I guess we don’t have to decide now,” she said. “We can sleep on it. There’s no rush.”
“Right,” Ethan said. “There’s no rush.”
They stayed quiet for some time, sitting in each other’s company. Sam looked out, and past the park were the hills she knew well which marked the town boundary. And past the hills there was a lane of blimps, heading to the adjacent county. Beyond that, the land arced upwards, and she could see the rivers and the forests flowing curvilinearly upwards in the only world she had ever known, a land that literally bent itself so as to better serve them. After all, they were the work of generations.
Author’s note:
The Match algorithm is currently used to sort applicants into medical residency programs in the U.S. Here is a brief video explaining how it works! It is based off of the stable marriage problem, which serves as inspiration for the story.
Credits for the title goes to J.G. The original title was going to be Ship Ship (a ship, that ‘ships’ characters, get it?) but as he put it, “whenever you have a double entendre, the single entendre makes for the better title.”
We watched a lot of romcoms over the holidays (When Harry Met Sally holds up surprisingly well with time! You’ve Got Mail maybe… 90% holds up well?) and this was my attempt at writing a romance. The thing I struggled the most with (apart from infodumps, my age-old nemesis) was how to meld two different genres and balance both the relationship and world-building. There’s a version of this story that borrows more heavily from romcom tropes.
There’s sometimes an interesting tradeoff in writing between cleverness and trimness. For transportation in this setting, I really wanted blimp - which required a few more lines of explanation than if I had just written in a metro system. And then once I had blimp, I really wanted to name the blimp-routes “Chords” because a chord is a line drawn between two points on a circle, and it seemed obvious that a cylindrical generation ship would have blimp that take chord-routes. But this then introduces yet another jargon-esque word, when I already had so many capitalized nouns (Match, Scramble, Leftovers, Ship, etc.). Ultimately I gave in and just named it a Chord; but I think about how the readability of a story is composed of a thousand of these little choices.
Another choice was a decision to truncate an entire section devoted to how the Matching algorithm handled the folks who didn’t fall neatly into the established social paradigm (ie, queer folks or those who had a preference for polyamory), mostly due to length and exposition dump reasons.
Very neat little speculative fic!
Also I would love to see that info dump about nonstandard cases, sounds super interestin’
I'm hooked!