Romantic preference? (Women or woman-identifying.) Sexual preference? (Heterosexual.) Do you have experience with same-sex relations? (No.)
After you fill out your forms with complete honesty, seriously, honest in all details, I did not fudge these answers at all, I certify this with a signature and my fingers crossed behind my back while I sign, Mail Call Mates feeds them into their proprietary system. This machine intelligence then chews up your data with an algorithm, sorts it against all the other data it’s gnawed on, and spits out the perfect match with a soldier who has also filled out the papers, not lied, and agreed to this crazy scheme.
They have a ninety-two-percent success rate. Just eight percent of matches end in divorce.
Once we are accepted into the program (not guaranteed; the screening is rigorous and plenty get turned away), and while we wait for the computer to find our perfect Mail Call Mate, we endure orientation. We record introductory videos of ourselves for when a match happens. Those videos will be the first impression we make. We clean our houses so our soldiers don’t come back to the place where pizza boxes go to die.
Then, surprise! You receive a notification, or three notifications in my case (because my phone is an unreliable piece of crap so I turned on every notification available to me), that your match is made. If you consent to it, your phone or computer actually record the moment you receive that notification. The exact second when you read the app notification, or the text, or the email subject line, “It’s Mail Call! Congratulations, Your Mate is Waiting For You!”
Mine caught me in bed early, because I’d had a long day substituting for the chemistry teacher, and a longer night grading papers about the early Space Race for my history students. No shirt, hair tousled, not yet asleep but teetering on the precipice when my phone, in all its undead glory, exploded into sounds.
I had forgotten to turn on Do Not Disturb. Pretty sure that unexpected barrage of notifications knocked five years off my life.
As only two weeks had passed since my acceptance into the Mail Call Mates program, I hadn’t expected a notification at all. That shortage of women meant those of us who indicated we’d like to marry one often waited months, or years, before a match came up.
The light on my phone glowed so the camera would have enough illumination to catch my expression. It was a good picture, the right mixture of confusion, surprise, and a dawning delight. That pic would speed off to my future spouse so they could share the moment. I’d get one too, I assumed when the data made it to Earth from Mars and had cleared all security checks.
Then I opened my email. My new wife’s name would be there, along with the profile picture she’d chosen to share, and her location.
Sergeant Jackson Sadler, aboard transport from Mars to Earth.
Insert record scratch. Jackson. Sadler.Jackson.Not Jaqueline or Jackie or Jacinda or Jolene. Jackson. That sounded awfully masculine to me.
I scrolled down to the picture, which also looked damn dickly in my estimation. Short hair, not buzzed down tight but charmingly shaggy on top. Strong features that seemed drawn to a naturally serious expression. Despite that, a tiny smile tugged at the corners of his lips, as if he just couldn’t help it in the situation.
Tugged at my heart, too. That smile spun out a story of hurt, of wariness, of hard-fought vulnerability. A man who needed a spouse who would wait for him on the tarmac, all smiles and affection, to welcome him back to Earth. A soldier who’d seen too much, spilled too much blood, and wanted a soft place to land.
The transport landing date said five days from then. A note in the automatically generated email said further information, dossiers, and photos of my future husband would arrive in my inbox within twenty-four hours. Tiny digits provided a phone number in case of questions or concerns.
I had a few of those, though they boiled down to one of each. One question: Since I chose a wife, how did I end up with a man? One concern: Sergeant Jackson Sadler is a man, and I ticked the “heterosexual” box.
It still took me fifteen minutes to call the number at the bottom of the email. Fifteen minutes spent staring at that tiny smile on Jackson Sadler’s lips, imagining wrapping my arms around him on the tarmac and telling him, “Welcome home.” Fifteen minutes lost in a daydream of pulling back from that embrace to put my lips on his, our first kiss as a couple.
At the end of those fifteen eternal minutes, I had almost talked myself out of calling. The only reason I did so was because there had clearly been a mistake. What if Jackson Sadler expected a wife himself? I had no information, and no right to overlook this potentially egregious error because I thought he had cute lips.
Part of being a good mate, a good doctor, and a good person is standing up for someone when they can’t stand up for themselves. Jackson Sadler had already spent over two months on a cramped interplanetary ship, waiting to arrive home. He had limited communications, and that email stating he had a surprise husband had just eaten much of his personal bandwidth. If he didn’t want this, he could do nothing to set it right from where he was.
I could. So I called the number, and I ignored the weight on my chest as I did. They asked me to come to the office when I woke up in the morning.
Nice of them to assume I would sleep.
* * *
You’re not a personal information form, so I can be honest with you. I was pretty damn salty about this mistaken match. As I drove into downtown Colorado Springs, I brooded over how I’d managed to become what I decided was probably the only computational error in Mail Call Mates history.
My parents had given me a life plan before I turned ten. When that plan hit a snag, I rationalized that had happened to make room for aneven betterplan, one I didn’t just accept but embraced.Thatplan had gone awry in a spectacular fashion, left me hurt, deep in debt, and without any sense of direction or purpose.
This whole sign-on to Mail Call Mates had represented my best effort to reignite that purpose. After the initial settling-in period, it would provide me with solid medical care, a nice bonus and stipend to improve my quality of life, and forgiveness of my student debt. Not bad, right?
More than that, though, it would offer me a chance to do something really meaningful. I couldn’t fight on Mars as I’d once hoped I could, but I could give comfort and love to someone who did. I’d tend the home fires and raise the children until my warrior came home again.
If you summed up what I wanted in life at the broadest, most overarching level, it would be, “I want to help.” Perhaps, “I want to heal.” That’s it. I hadn’t realized how much I’d pinned on this chance to help and heal a spouse. Not until that explosion of phone notifications arrived, and then the sad trombones signaled a massive screwup in the system.
Or maybe I hadn’t understood how deeply I wanted it until I saw Jackson Sadler’s tiny smile.
This obvious computer error had been a kick in the gut. I’d signed up for Mail Call Mates as another attempt to steer my life onto the proper course, and that attempt had run off the rails from the start.
Thus far, I was proving my parents right. Do you know how much Ihatethat?