Chapter 15
Fifteen
Soulmail fallout had a rippling effect. Arrests, suicides, and homicide rates skyrocketed, stabilized, then plummeted lower
than before. Police had never been busier, people never more accident-prone. Law-abiding citizens hopped subway turnstiles,
then returned days later, chagrined, and paid double. No one knew how to behave, especially those whose lives had been questioned,
upended, instead of confirmed. Government expert Alanna Sorensonn, still stunning even with a grave expression, came back
twice in one week. “It’s nothing like we’ve ever seen,” she said both times.
Christian leaders denounced Soulmail. Buddhist leaders accepted it. Hindu ones nodded without surprise. Many others refused
to acknowledge it, citing individuality. How politicians treated the emails and notes became the single-most-important talking
point. The president’s Soulmail information was formally classified for one hundred years.
I interviewed a font expert, who noted the plain intricacies in the Soulmail letters. They were sans serif—without decoration.
Imitations poured in, were quickly debunked.
Worldwide, leaders joined forces and offered a reward to determine who was behind Soulmail. This was the key, the thing that
sent shivers across shoulder blades, lifted arm hair to attention. The unanswerable. Which government, which billionaire,
had enough money, enough power, enough expertise to predict this individual human experience?
Sixty-eight percent of book deals and movie options announced since Soulmail included the term regret, an enormous market shift. It made sense. It was suddenly a key theme in people’s lives, especially when childhood and college
and young adult ex-lovers realize they had, in fact, been meant to be. Or not.
All the while, the stories poured in, morphed, became larger than they had been. Rival gang leaders in Argentina were soulmates;
they joined forces and disbanded their operations. Those who turned eighteen after Soulmail dropped became louder, chattier.
This was unfair, they complained. We will be the new generation, the before-and-after Soulmail, the ones who saw what could
happen and could do nothing about it.
My interview list felt eternal. My agent’s assistant told me that Phoebe Habbit was complaining to the network heads that
I was getting too much attention. I told him she was right. I was officially verified without paying on social media, but
that surprised smile was snatched from my face when my dad’s cousin emailed, asking to borrow money.
I debated whether I should open my Soulmail. Everything in life felt uncertain but mostly exciting, and the more stories I
heard, the more appeal there was in the idea of a certain future. But still, something in me resisted.
One generational expert went viral for proposing new monikers for generation alpha, claiming the line was drawn in the before-and-after,
cleaving it into generation alpha and generation anima. (Latin for soul.)
All the while, a new question swirled: Would it happen again?
“Yes!” I whisper-shouted, pumping my fist in the air. The action rocked me forward. I tightened my core to avoid falling over,
thanks to the archaically thin-heeled on-air shoes I was sporting. I rubbed my knee.
“Good god, you’re an insurance liability.” Dola dabbed a brush into a small pot of touch-up lipstick. “What’s up?”
“I got the apartment,” I said.
“You and Wells are moving?” Samantha materialized from behind me. Her face was screwed into a frown.
My pulse spiked. “Near Gramercy.” I took a deep breath, exhaling, trying to reorient its rhythm. I’d replied to Yvonne’s From Yes to I Do email asking to meet, but her auto-reply had kicked me an Out of Office, so I was dancing in a truth limbo until I could
officially pull out of the episode.
“Go you,” Dola said. “Trent and I are moving in together!”
What a strange world. Dola and Trent were co-employed, received each other’s names via email as guarantee they were destined
to be, and now they had decided to move in together three weeks later. A veritable disaster pre-Soulmail, but after? Who knew.
“Go you,” I echoed. “And Samantha, what’s up? You look extra angry.”
“I’m not angry,” Samantha said. “Actually, that’s a lie. Your interviewee is being demanding. He says cashews are bad luck.”
I gave a quiet groan. Today’s interview was with the HeartString dating website guru who was all over Instagram ads last year.
Commercial music cued on, and ten yards away, Phoebe and Josef stood and stretched.
“Anyway,” Samantha said, her tone more brusque than usual. “You ready for the new Du Jour set?” She tipped her head toward
the hastily designed brown-beige-tan alcove. “You like it?”
“It works,” I said.
“It’s very neutral,” Dola said diplomatically.
“No reds or blues to stay apolitical, no blacks or whites or grays because they’re too cool for such a hot topic,” Samantha
explained.
My phone buzzed with an unstored number. Before I implemented the three-call setting on my phone, I would’ve ignored it. “Gotta love viewer psychology,” I said. “Excuse me.”
“Miss Adler!” a bright voice said when I answered. “Finally got ahold of you. Our calendar is filling up fast.”
I puzzled through the familiarity. “Yes?”
“We need to schedule your food tasting.”
The room went hot, or I did. This was the phone number from our wedding venue. This was—I put a name to the bright voice.
Leila. The venue coordinator.
“Have you spoken to Wells?” I asked, my voice as neutral as the new Du Jour set. I was within earshot of two people who still
believed I was engaged.
Leila’s laugh filled the line. “I’m sure your calendar is booked up with your new job. Are you ready to check your availability
now? Your future in-laws have given us open dates for tastings in mid-August.” Her tone dropped on the last sentence, conspiratorial,
as if we had an unspoken bond over the annoyance Wells’s mother could bring to a room. When I didn’t respond right away, Leila
filled my silence. “In light of all that’s going on, we wanted to confirm.”
A wave of annoyance at this ask. This task. “You haven’t directly spoken to Wells, then,” I guessed.
“We spoke to his assistant. She referred us back to you.”
I clenched my jaw. It was so unbelievably like him to pawn our wedding cancelation off on his assistant.
“HeartString’s here,” Samantha mouthed in my direction.
I held up a finger. “Let me call you back,” I said to Leila.
“You need a touch-up,” Dola said after I hung up, her brows knitting together. “I just put that on you. Why’d you wipe it
off?”
Samantha pocketed her phone. “Ready to go greet Enzo?”
“Huh.” My lips felt bee-stung, winter-chapped. I must’ve gnawed the pigment off. “I’ll meet you there in a minute. I forgot something in my office.” I ducked into in an empty office nook, seething, and waited for Wells to answer my fury-call. The line rang once, then punted me to voicemail.
Anger flared in my chest, wound through my shoulders. He’d iced the call. My stomach pinged with worry. Wedding plans were
a domino anxiety, and if Wells hadn’t taken care of this, then what else had been left hanging? “It’s me,” I said after the
prompt. “Just got off the phone with the wedding coordinator. For our food tasting. Thought you might want to know.” I jutted
my jaw forward. “You know it’s off, Wells. Please take care of this.”
“We all have the brain neurocircuitry to see another person as more special than anyone else,” the dating website guru said from
the brown-tan Du Jour set chair about an hour later. Enzo had tight curly hair and a very square chin. He turned to the camera.
“That’s the definition of a soulmate. And now, more than ever before, finding that person is important.”
“And as a result of Soulmail, you’ve split HeartString into two sites now, Enzo?” I prompted, using his name to persuade him
to look at me instead of the camera. Media training lesson two. “Can you tell me more about that?”
“I’d love to.” He leaned toward me. “Before Soulmail, HeartString had the best success rate in the country.”
“How does a dating website define success? Would that be marriage rates, number of dates, or something else?” My hunch was
subscription rates, but that callout would be bad TV.
“Well.” Enzo rubbed his chin. “It’s self-reported, of course. There’s no way to track number of dates, and marriage isn’t
always the best data point.”
“Right.” Off camera, a woman I vaguely recognized as part of the public relations department approached Samantha.
She cupped a hand around my boss’s ear, speaking rapidly.
As my guest launched into the meaning of strangers and soulmates, I couldn’t help but clock Samantha’s eyebrows vaulting over her amethyst glasses.
I shifted, uncrossing and then recrossing my legs to accommodate my twingy knee.
“. . . So now, we’ve created SoulString for the countless people who’ve opened their Soulmails to find a stranger’s name and
date of birth,” Enzo finished, lighting his face with a bright smile.
Out of the corner of my vision, the PR person retreated. I softened my features, a trick I’d implemented to hide the blink
I’d developed against the studio glare. “I’m sure our audience would be interested to know if there are any privacy concerns?”
He gave a vigorous nod. “An understandable worry. It’s a double-consent situation—first, by registering your Soulmail, you’re
consenting to the data being shared; then, by searching, you’re acknowledging you want to be connected to that person. And
from there, you meet on our secured chat site. Once we verify the users’ identities, they join the giant registration database
that strings together mates from around the globe.”
“So that’s where the name comes from.” I pretended to check the notepad on the bleached wood table beside me. “And that’s
$14.99 per day?”
“A small price to pay for a guaranteed match, wouldn’t you say? And for those who already had HeartString memberships, for