Chapter 4
Four
Even though it felt, for a few surreal minutes, like Soulmail was only happening to me and mine, it was a world event.
At first, world leaders believed the Soulmails were an elaborate prank. They arrived for everyone at three in the morning,
East Coast time, containing very little: One attachment with the name and date of birth of one’s own particular soulmate.
An estimated 376.8 billion emails are sent every day. With one communication delivered to everyone on earth, and a world population
north of eight billion but south of nine billion, that meant Soulmails created a fraction of extra overage in the everyday
shuffle. If on average, everyone on the planet received forty-two to forty-seven emails every day, what was one more?
Seemingly. Because math, like most things of value, is both simple and complicated. The truth was that only half of the world
even had email addresses, which meant that the real math worked out to eighty-four to ninety-four emails individually received
per day.
More questions began when email-receiving people heard that email-free people got their own form of Soulmail.
The next layer down received an encrypted text message.
Those without electronic devices received telegrams. Soulmails were shockingly accessible, too, we’d learn, arriving in Braille if needed, or via stripped-down robotic audio, or with explicit directions for a literate village elder to distribute accordingly.
Even that didn’t span all the bases, but it covered many of them.
On top of that, people who live on the East Coast of the United States often believe they are the first to hear of everything,
and the prevailing attitude was sour when they woke to their emails, as opposed to the evening owls on the West Coast who
were jacked up for the night when they received theirs, or the afternoon citizens from Saudi Arabia to Senegal to China who
snagged theirs in the middle of a workday, or right after school.
The first fact: The emails originated from an indeterminate IP address that changed every few nanoseconds. The texts were
not from a traceable phone number; they came from a thirty-six-digit address that would lead investigators nowhere. Soon,
lab tests would reveal that Soulmails delivered by hand were the same kind of paper, but the font varied. It was the one most
amenable to the population of the country in which it was delivered. Those hired to deliver physical Soulmails were difficult
to track down at first, and when they finally were, their stories were consistently inconsistent.
Another fact: The internet experienced a worldwide shutdown for thirty-three seconds, starting at 3:00 a.m. EST.
A last fact: They were coded in such a way that no matter what people did, they couldn’t be deleted, though most people hadn’t
realized that yet.
All that was just the how. The method of receipt. That didn’t begin to touch the who. If everyone above the age of majority
received a Soulmail, then that meant long-married couples either had one another’s name, or they did not. It meant single
people might learn the name of someone they hadn’t met yet. Some people opened theirs to read the name and date of birth of
someone who already had a date of death.
Some people—happily partnered or not—decided to never open theirs at all.
This was just the beginning.
There were other matters to be addressed, like whether soulmates even existed. And if they did, what it meant to be a soulmate
at all.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.