The Wired Man

15

Personal Entry: The Wired Man

The sweet aroma of Carissa's perfume mingled with the Chinese food I was carrying as I entered her apartment.

"Hey, babe," Carissa said.

"Hey," I said as I walked over to the kitchen table and set the food down.

The bright, white light dangling above the table made a sharp concatenated shadow on the wall behind us. We were joined on that wall and in real life now. The thought should have scared me, but I felt a warm sense of pride. I was starting to love someone, and she was starting to love me back.

Carissa's soft hands curled around my belly as she put her chin on my shoulder. "So what are we having tonight?"

I pulled out the tiny white boxes of rice from the bag. "Rice."

"Rice and?"

I turned around and grabbed her around the waist. "You don't like rice?"

"Usually I prefer something spicy with it."

I smiled and pointed to myself.

Carissa lightly smacked me in the chest with her palm. "You know what I mean."

I pulled a container of General Tso's chicken from the bag and set it next to the rice. "I know what you like."

"I must be a pretty easy read if it only takes three weeks to figure me out."

"I'm a fast learner."

I turned around and planted a kiss on her lips. She opened her mouth and softly bit down on my lower lip as I tried to pull away.

"You're not getting off that easy," she said with a smile.

She leaned her body into me and clasped the sides of my face in her palms, opening her mouth onto mine. She was soft and inviting. I couldn't get enough.

"Wow," I said without thinking after the kiss was done.

There had been a lot of wow moments lately. Every night was a new adventure. Neither one of us had ever been in love before, not true love anyway. We both had our fair share of significant others, but this was something different.

"You're welcome," Carissa said, wiping her mouth off on her wrist.

Everything that she did was mesmerizing. She was everything I was told I should dream of in a woman but had never taken the time to fully appreciate. I had been too wrapped up in my score and my career to even notice what was right in front of me.

The increasing pressure in my groin let me know what my original intention had been before I had become distracted.

"I have to go to the bathroom. I'll be right back."

Carissa nodded and started unpacking the food onto plates.

I marched my way down the hallway to the bathroom and turned on the light. The serious looking man in the mirror that I had come to admire was replaced with someone new. Gone was the permanent game face of someone who knew exactly what he wanted and would stop at nothing to achieve it. In its place was contentment.

For the first time in my life, I was satisfied. All I wanted was to be able to spend time with her, and as long as I had that, none of the other bullshit weighed on me. I was free.

After I finished using the bathroom, I turned on the sink to wash my hands and opened my social feed to check my score. I may have been free from wanting more score, but that didn't change the fact that to be able to see Carissa I needed to at least maintain my standing. Everything looked okay, but buried in the updates was another negative score hit. For the first week everything had been swell. We both maintained our scores and were still able to see each other almost every night, but it seemed like something changed after that. In the subsequent weeks, both of our scores had begun to erode, and at this point it, was starting to get dangerous.

Pretty soon we would have to return to our old lives, the ones where we linked each other a couple times a week and saw each other on Saturdays. The thought made me cringe. I had finally found something truly amazing, and as fast as I found it, it would be gone.

The hot water pouring from the faucet scalded my hands, and I pulled them back. Anger tightened inside my stomach. It wasn't fair. We weren't hurting anyone, and it's not like we had abandoned our jobs. We were still functioning members of society. Why punish someone for being happy?

My head swirled with rage as I dried my hands on the little hand towel next to the sink. There had to be a way to make this work.

//

I opened the blind slats and let the red-tinted light from the sunset in. I sat down on the carpet and gazed out at the cityscape through my patio door. Another week had passed and the situation had grown even direr. Carissa had ditched me for some work party, and I had been forced to participate in a morning workshop with a bunch of people I couldn't care less about. That stemmed the tide for now, but with the way things were going we would need to increase our social activity incrementally until we were living back within the parameters the system had defined for us. No matter which way you looked at it, we were trapped.

I stared down at the ants moving beneath my window. All these people scurrying around, trying to fill their voids with job performance reviews, status meetings, and team-building exercises. It made my stomach twist into a knot thinking about having to go back to that. I didn't want to spend any time away from Carissa, not even if it meant I had to live in the Lowers. As long as I had her, it didn't matter.

Did she feel the same way? I wasn't sure enough to bet it all, and with our scores eroding like they were I didn't have the time to find out. I needed to keep my head above the water, at least until I could figure things out.

I lay back on the carpet and stretched my arms above my head. I didn't want to take the chance of losing her, even if that meant she didn't feel the same way. I needed to make sure that we would be together, and there was only one way to do that.