"At least a hundred, Leo. Otherwise, what the fuck kind of test are we running? Four? Come on! You know it perfectly well. Then we need to expand the demographic area, so we get variations for every location. I'm really curious about the results from the suburbs and rural areas," he chuckles, "those will make for some great evening stories. Margin of error so far?" the CEO asks, scanning all of us in three seconds before locking eyes on Nic.
"Confidence level is currently high; margin of error is under 5%," Nic answers—he analyzed my data this morning.
"Errors due to?" the CEO says, glancing between me and the papers in front of him.
"Sarcasm," I reply curtly, staring him straight in the eye.
He looks back and smirks. "I bet you patched that up real pretty—your sarcasm reserves are always fully loaded, damn." He bursts out laughing, eyes back on the pages.
"I had to step in to avoid a report. Luca bounced back strong afterward," I say in a single breath—steady, but barely alive.
For a second, the CEO eyes me like a sniffer dog catching a strange scent: he sniffed out the bluff, but this time he lets it go. He winks at me and hands me back part of the documents.
"Tom, we need to work on this damn sarcasm thing. Feed Luca whatever he needs, but I want him to turn into a proper son of a bitch. Worse than those guys from the '90s—what was that show again..." he snaps his fingers, thinking, "Friends. Give him that as homework. Don't let me flunk him," he says with a smirk, walking out of the office with a thumbs-up and shouting, "You guys rock!"
The rest of the post-meeting hours are spent coding. Now and then, the guys tell stories from their weekend at the lake. I tease them a little—I'm kind of jealous. They'd invited me too, but once the Luca idea came up, I couldn't think about anything else. I envied their freedom, their ability to detach from everything. I, on the other hand, wouldn't survive without work—my thoughts would weigh more than any code. If I let them run loose during downtime, I'd end up seeing my therapist at least once a week, and there was no way I was handing her my overtime pay.
"It's just a phase," I told myself. "I'll go back to living once I piece together what's missing from my peace of mind," I repeated like some idiotic mantra I knew was just a placebo for my lack of guts in shitty situations I didn't know how to handle—but whatever.
"One hundred catfished women seem like a lot..." Nic mumbles, pausing as if afraid of how we might react.
"Well, we always get catfished—time to return the favor, fuck it," Tommy says casually.
Nic looks at me—we're on the same page. Tommy says dumb shit sometimes, but even he knows this is the part of the experiment he hadn't thought through. Maybe he wanted women to suffer—or one woman in particular, who, it turned out, had recently downloaded a dating app. She was divorced, for over a year now—totally within her rights. But Tommy was furious. Maybe that's why he threw himself into the project like it was a revenge weapon.
All our long talks, the countless voice messages, had done nothing. Tommy knew he was being an asshole, but wrapped in his aura of misogyny, he had no interest in coming out the other side as a "defeated man." Yet the Tommy everyone knew before the divorce was the exact opposite of what we saw now. Maybe once the mask falls off, it's hard to put it back on without feeling suffocated.
But one thing was clear: Tommy downloaded the beta version of LovAI on day zero and burned through it. Now he was also one of the first to install the final release.
"Tommy, if I ever become as repressed and bitter as you, Nic—right between the eyes, okay?" I say, pointing to the space between my eyebrows.
Tommy scowls for a moment—he knows. Nic gives me a thumbs-up and laughs, patting Tommy, who pretends he's stuck on some impossible code. Both Nic and I hoped we could pull him back from the edge—but Tommy didn't give a shit. Without the bitterness, he'd be left with a miserable life, and he knew it all too well.
I pause the code—and the melancholy train of thought about my colleague's life—because she's online.
I tune out the guys' chatter. Ginevra is typing. I read, but keep my hands still, crossed behind my office chair. I won't touch the keyboard. Luca will do fine on his own.
"They just told me it's going to rain today. I didn't bring an umbrella, and all the ones left in the store have already been snatched by coworkers. Love being Store Manager and ending up without one," she writes.
Luca replies with something painfully generic, and for a moment my right hand twitches—but my left holds it down, and I just observe.
"If I started telling you about all the umbrellas I've bought and lost in random places, I'd be typing until next week. Probably not worth it - skull emoji -"
God, I get it. I think back to the last umbrella I left at the park. That's why I wanted to invest in a damn windbreaker—but even that plan went down the drain.
I freeze—I'm not breathing. The lightbulb going off in my head has to be a messed-up idea. If I were home, I'd be banging my head against the wall.
I rub my eyes aggressively.
"What the fuck are you thinking, you dumbass?" I say to myself.
"I'll run through the rain singing, and maybe someone will stop and offer me a ride straight to the nearest psych ward - cat with sunglasses emoji"
She types quickly, says bye to Luca, and heads back to her shift.
I smile. And my brain drifts back to that idea.
"But is it ever really smart to chase thoughts like these, even when they feel right? If I'm doubting them, maybe they're not so right. After all, the simple things usually come naturally, unplanned."
Still, deep down, it felt like a colossally dumb idea—but sometimes if you don't risk your ass, you don't get the thrill of life. And hey, maybe I'll find out what the thrill of unemployment feels like after a couple years in the same company.
And just like that, after our shift ended and I said goodbye to the two amigos getting into their cars, a few spots apart, I waited. Maybe I was waiting for someone to give me the green light to commit professional suicide. Or maybe I was hoping courage would manifest into a human figure and, with a dramatic slap, snap me back to sanity.
But no—none of that happened. My brain had already set itself like an admin-locked system setting. So I headed to my car.
I check my watch. The Mall closes in about 40 minutes.
On the way there, for the first time in months, my head is silent. I can't even form complete thoughts. Instead, I see flashes—fragments of reality I've lived:
Ginevra's profile photos,
The little girl with her hands in her mouth,
Lana Del Rey's voice resurfaces, scoring this mental slideshow like a cursed PowerPoint,
The hand that almost touched mine,
Her badge,
The gesturing woman,
Ginevra's artificially colored mahogany lips,
Her mascara, her tied-up hair...
I snap back as my hand, on autopilot, turns off the engine and drops limply onto my leg. I didn't even realize I took the right road. Definitely not safe to drive distracted—but my brain drove itself.
The Mall parking lot isn't crowded—most people must be finishing up in the supermarket. Or maybe they're all here to watch my pathetic, totally improvised performance.
Because yeah, I had no plan. I had no idea what to say or do. I only knew two things:
She would be there.
And I really needed that fucking windbreaker.
As I walk in, wondering what the hell I'm doing, the automatic doors welcome me. An AI greeter says hello. I raise an eyebrow—I hadn't noticed it last time, probably because of my headphones.
No screaming kids this time, just a weird age gap: either elderly people with overflowing shopping carts or young folks vaping on benches, drinking the latest trendy soda.
I walk on.
Another set of sliding doors opens—I'm inside the store. I have no idea what I'm doing. I think about Luca, about the CEO, hear Tommy whispering his anti-woman mantra in my head, and Nic just shrugging in his corner like always. As I move forward, my heartbeat spikes, and I wonder how the hell I'm still so emotionally unbalanced at thirty. I kill that thought by setting a goal: the jacket.
I walk quickly—but not too quickly—between aisles.
"...if I'm not mistaken, it should be in the trekking section," I mutter.
"What do you think? I swear I thought he was fake. No one can be that chill in their replies. And get this—he replies in under a minute, every time. I timed it!"
A voice coming from the yoga aisle breaks my focus on the jackets.
I stop. Suddenly, protein powder becomes the most interesting thing in the world. I move closer and pick up a jar, pretending to read the ingredients. And just like that, through the metal shelf, I'm a meter away from her. Like some creepy stalker in the worst Netflix true crime docuseries.
She's with someone—I can't tell who yet. But soon, I get an answer.
A resigned voice replies, after a sigh.
"Girl, you're being paranoid. I've already told you, and I'll keep telling you."
"No, wait, I got confirmation that he's real. But come on, Vale, you can't pretend like we're not basically drowning in bots and AIs. It's like the sea out there."
She sounds worked up.
The guy—curly hair, hand on his hip—tries pulling off a metal arm holding yoga bands. I catch the scene through the tiny gap between a vanilla protein jar and one labeled cookie flavor.
"Ginny, sweetie, stressing out before anything's even happened won't help. But—and this is a big but—if this thing is bugging you deep down and you're not convinced this seemingly perfect guy is actually real, you already know what to do.
When I started talking to Andre, I didn't believe he was that hot in real life either. So after two days of texting, I told him: show up in person or I'm out. Harsh? Maybe. But I'd do the same again."
DING DONG – "Dear customers, the store will be closing in fifteen minutes. Please complete your purchases and head to the checkout. Thank you."
Shit. Shit!
The worst possible moment—or maybe the best—to get interrupted. Right after the announcement, the two make plans to meet at the checkout and split up. I can't see who stays and who walks away—the gap in the shelves becomes useless. Footsteps approach. I instinctively hold my breath and stare at the ingredient list like it's some magical teleportation formula. God, I could use a teleport right now.