“No way.” I shook my head back and forth. “If people ended up with their soulmates that easily, we wouldn’t have such a high divorce rate.”
“Wow, you right. It didn’t match him with his wife. It matched him with a girl he went to high school with.” Violet tilted her head and sighed. “This app is dangerous. It could ruin someone’s life.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” I nodded and leaned back in my chair. “Okay, can you program it to completely eliminate married people from the equation?”
“I could.” She leaned forward and opened up her code. “I could add something that says: Oops, you’re already married to your soulmate.
“That would probably keep us from getting sued.” I smiled and slumped into my chair. “Holy shit, you really did it. I think this calls for a celebration.”
“Celebration? I think this calls for a freaking nap! A long one!” Violet’s face spread into a wide grin.
“We’re going to have a drink first.” I patted her on the back and walked towards the door.
I had kept her apartment stocked myself while she was working, but I hadn’t stocked a single drop of alcohol. Luckily, I had plenty of that downstairs in my office. I was practically walking on clouds when I got to the elevator and hit the button to take me back down to my office. The soulmate app was going to be huge. If it could actually match someone with their soulmate, then people wouldn’t need to waste time on other dating apps. I would obviously have to charge a premium price to make sure their one-time use was reciprocated. I would also need a team to reach out to the other half of the soulmate pair, in case they weren’t already on the app. I was counting dollars when I headed back upstairs with a bottle of wine in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. When I opened Violet’s door, she had a really worried expression on her face.
“Um, I think I might have spoke too soon.” She hit the button to turn off her monitor. “This needs more work.”
“You said it was working.” I tilted my head. “What happened?”
“I don’t know, I just need to work on it some more.” Her words were hurried and her face reflected panic.
“Show me what happened.” I sat down the bottles and pointed at her computer.
“No, I don’t want to. I just need to work on this some more.” The same hurried tone continued as she spoke.
“Violet, come on.” I exhaled sharply.
“Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She flinched as she hit the button on her monitor.
Chapter 5: Violet
I thought I had the algorithm working perfectly, but something went seriously wrong. I ran tests and matched hundreds of people in the span of minutes that seemed to be perfect, and I even added a line to stop married people from getting matched. Curiosity was my downfall. With such a powerful tool in front of me, I couldn’t help but enter my own name. I watched as it pulled stuff I didn’t even remember posting. It found my poetry website from when I was an angst driven teenager, it even snagged my old MySpace page, which was quite hideous. After the algorithm had finished, it spit out something I never imagined.
“What the hell is this?” Mr. Prince walked and sat down next to me.
“I put in my own name.” I cringed and pointed. “You see the problem, right?”
“Uh, yeah. I would say that is definitely a problem.” Mr. Prince nodded and swallowed hard.
“It says I have seven soulmates. That isn’t even possible.” I shook my head in disbelief.
“Yeah, well, maybe something went wrong.” Mr. Prince nodded. “Can you tell what it was?”
“I haven’t gotten that far yet.” I scrolled slowly. “I kind of stopped when I saw the last one and luckily I didn’t fall out of my chair.”
“Wait a minute.” Mr. Prince’s face immediately got dark. “You have my information in your database? This app says I’m one of your seven soulmates?”
“I didn’t really pick and choose. I just scraped everything I could find. Like I said, something is obviously wrong.” I shook my head back and forth quickly. “I’ll figure it out.”
“I’ll wait.” Mr. Prince stood, walked to the counter, and started pouring whiskey into a glass.
I ran through my tests as quickly as I could. I set it to match up ten thousand profiles with their soulmate and watched as they each matched with one person—except mine. Every time I ran it, the result was the same. It found seven matches and the last one was Mr. Prince. I ran the seven profiles individually and they each matched up with only one person—me. I kept loading sets of people into the app and ran the tests. Every single one of them seemed to run flawless except mine and the seven guys that were supposedly my soulmate.
“I’ve got an idea.” Mr. Prince walked up and sat down next to me again. “Take yourself out of the system completely.”
“Okay.” I nodded and did as he asked.
“Now, run that same algorithm on the seven guys.” He pointed at my screen.