13 July 2023 - Arthur Velnias's bedroom, in the house he shares with his best friend Ginie Russo, on Sycamore street

It was a dreary Monday morning at the beginning of winter semester and Arthur Velnias was in the early stages of recovery from last night’s raucous online-party. Ginie, his flatmate, and the only physical invitee to that party, was still sleeping it off and probably would be for days.

Arthur was exhausted too. A persistent breeze shook Arthur’s window in its flimsy frame causing it to rattle like loose teeth in a wooden box. He flicked on the little ceramic heater, but he knew it had no chance against the creeping cold of the drafty old house on Sycamore lane.

Today was Arthur’s first Moral Philosophy virtual lecture of the year. He was far too hung-over to engage with Moral Philosophy. And what’s worse, Arthur hated virtual classes. He would have much rather have attended in person, but the pandemic had made classes impossibly dangerous - at least en masse.

Even though Arthur’s headphones were set to overdrive, he could barely make out any of the words Professor Anderson was saying. All he could hear for certain was the pounding in his head and the muffled sounds of Ginie snoring from the Lunge room, on the other side of his bedroom wall.

Arthur particularly despised Professor Anderson’s lecture. Anderson insisted that everyone switch on their camera during lectures to ‘enhance the educational experience’. The professor’s assistant lecturer and virtual moderator Tim, a senior philosophy tutor, gleefully booted out any student crazy enough to disobey the Professor’s decree. Arthur had himself been kicked from a first year ethics lecture the previous semester, for stepping away from his screen to make a tea.

Arthur would have continued his self-pitying reverie when he suddenly noticed a young woman on his screen.

The woman, “MG” inhabited a small window on the bottom left hand side of his screen. He suddenly forgot about his aching skull, his snoring flat-mate and the droning monotone of the Professor. All he could see was MG.

The girl at the bottom left of the screen.

Arthur typed urgently into the private chat window.

“Stewie, are you seeing this chick?”

Woosh, his computer sounded as his message made its way to Stuart’s computer.

Ding, the reply came back.

“Which chick?” Stuart responded.

“Bottom left…Blond Hair…Come on man, as if you haven’t noticed her. She’s the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen…Handle is ‘MG’…like the car.”

Woosh.

He waited for a response and when it finally came, the answer surprised him.

Ding.

“I prefer brunettes mate. And she looks a bit on the tall side…Amirite?”’

“Cap. U Blind. She’s fire,” Arthur responded, vaguely annoyed by Stuart’s dismissive attitude.

Arthur turned the annoying sound-notifications to silent.

“Have you seen her b4?” He continued undeterred.

“Na bro,” Stuart confirmed. “N E way Arth. I’m trying to catch this lecture. Flunk’d logic and barely scraped through early mod-phil.”

Stuart wasn’t lying. He had failed Professor Anderson’s Logic course in the summer semester. He was struggling through the whole Philosophy program in general. He had chosen it, because Arthur had. He did a lot of things because Arthur did them. Since the lockdowns had begun, the endless string of online virtual-lectures and video-tutorials had created the perfect storm. Stuart didn’t know how to manage without accountability. Without in-person lectures, what was the point of getting up, or having a shower or attending class at all? That was Stuart’s philosophy. That was, until he’d received a call from the Vice Chancellor that he was on the verge of flunking out.

Arthur, on the other hand was doing very well. He was a natural. He just didn’t think what he was doing was going to lead him to any sort of a vocation. He had already begun to regret ignoring his father all those years back, who had suggested a solid law degree - before the relationship between himself and his dad had soured. Arthur had the marks to get into anything he wanted, but he was feeling rebellious at the time. Anyway, Arthur thought, there would be plenty of time to change majors.

The woman on the bottom left of his screen shifted ever-so-slightly to the left. Arthur tensed.

“MG - who are you?” He wondered out loud.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

He could feel his face getting hotter, wondering if she could sense his intrusion upon her; if she could sense him. He hoped she was looking at his feed, the same way he was looking at hers. Of course, hope is faith’s poorer cousin. He doubted she would have done more than scanned past his face with complete indifference.

There were at least a hundred other participants in the lecture that morning (which was only half of the students actually enrolled to be there). But if she did happen to glance at him, she wouldn’t stop to stare, he thought.

Arthur wasn’t ugly, but he wasn’t handsome either. Not conventionally. He was the guy you look through or around. He was the guy you push out of the way to get to the man of your dreams. He self-consciously fiddled with a pen, tapping it against his cheek to make that hollow noise people do when they’re bored. To distract himself from this new state of self-consciousness, Arthur tried to listen to Professor Anderson blither on about aesthetics and axiology, but his mind would not permit it.

MG shifted minutely in her chair again, an intense look on her face. Maybe she was watching a YouTube clip about kittens or something, Arthur thought. No one in the University’s history had ever listened to Professor Anderson with that level of concentration, so it couldn’t be that she was focussed on.

Arthur tried to concentrate on the lecture.

“The beast in us must be wheedled,” Professor Anderson droned, “Are we at our core animals, our souls held together by the thinnest ethical tape? Are we endowed with intrinsic morals, and if so by what mechanism?”

MG’s dark eyes seemed to pierce the electronic veil straight into Arthur’s soul. She stared unblinking. Her chestnut hair was tied back messily, fly-aways caught engrossingly in the morning light, streaming through the window behind her.

MG picked up her phone for a moment, playing with it lazily. To Arthur, this simplest of her actions was akin to those of Cleopatra, seductively eating grapes. She had the presence of a queen. She was so self-assured as to give the impression that her most trivial movements were rehearsed, refined, delivered with precision.

As MG put the phone down, Arthur caught a glimpse of the screen, and by chance the application she had been using. To his surprise – and if he was being honest complete delight – it was the dating application LTRN, short for Long Term Relationship Now. LTRN was a platform for those who weren’t looking for one night stands, but something more meaningful. Arthur didn’t have LTRN. He had SaySwaav, an application used by college-aged students looking to go on the quicker kind of dates; the ones that usually resulted in inebriation and regret.

He could no longer hear the Professor’s words, or see the string of new messages from Stuart who was already asking for Arthur’s class notes. Arthur was downloading the LTRN app to begin the process of finding MG in the real world. It was the only way. He couldn’t just cold message her on the lecture chat like some common sleaze-bag; he needed the two of them to match on LTRN.

He needed her to find him, to give him the chance to propose a date in the real world; the world outside of the shower of bits and bytes.

One day, he thought, when she told their children stories of their meet-cute, he didn’t want them to hear the words, “He private messaged me on a lecture chat.”

The first hurdle in finding MG, and half the reason he’d never downloaded the app, was LTRN’s infamous registration process. His room-mate Ginie had spent hours setting up the perfect profile; selecting the right photos, crafting and editing the right words, curating the lists of favourite songs, movies and dining spots just so - to attract the ultimate female.

But Ginie was still single.

Arther hated selling himself like a commodity on these apps. On SaySwaav he’d just attached a headless-torso shot, showing off his abs – easily his best feature – and the string of meaningless encounters followed. LTRN required something more like a sales pitch. It was as stressful as selling real-estate in Sydney, and the stakes in this case were potentially higher.

He resented having to sell his soul like this. It was cheap and reductive. But for MG - he would do it. What he really wanted to do was accidentally (on purpose) run into MG at a cafe or the University Library. A real meet-cute. Something she could remember him by. But the lockdown had robbed him of that opportunity too.

The app downloaded with a soft haptic throb.

Arthur opened the application. He flew through the initial questions with ease. Age, Date, Handle, Weight and so on. But the first real question immediately stumped him.

“What good things have past relationships taught me?” The first question read.

Always have antibiotics at the ready, he thought, chuckling to himself before typing in what he thought the app wanted to hear.

“Compromise is the real magic word. Be yourself no matter what and open up your heart without fear or regret.”

He looked at the words on the screen, imagining what Stuart would say if he saw them. But if he was being honest with himself, he didn’t have time to consider the social repercussions and potential embarrassment. He just needed an active profile now, so he could find MG. He pressed accept and moved on to the next question, and the next, and the next.

“What do I want to accomplish in the next five years?”

“What is your favourite book and why?”

“Describe your dream date?”

He entered each response with as much detail as he could in the time he had, until finally he’d completed the profile. Twenty Minutes, he thought. Not bad.

He pressed send and it was done. He was live. His profile, his photos, his thoughts, his dreams, all available for anyone to read.

“Bro…bro…bro. Hellllllllo?” He looked up at the screen to see the was lecture over, and his chat-screen the only one still visible, besides Stuart’s.

“Damn,” he said. “I missed the whole thing.”

“Sorry Stewie. I got distracted. Will send ya my notes - for what that’s worth…” he typed.

“Thanx bro. You know the Prof asked you a question right? But you got lucky though. The blonde chick jumped in and saved ya. Hahaha.”

Arthur looked at the screen incredulously.

MG had saved him? Why?

Dah Dah, the LTRN app sounded.

He looked down at his screen to see an auto-generated message from LTRN. The message was accompanied by a small thumb-nail portrait of the sender, who the message was from. The thumbnail, though small, was very clearly, and beyond all of his hopes, the girl from the bottom left of his screen. MG. The blond. The girl with the dark piercing eyes who had saved him from embarrassment.

“You’ve been matched with Madeline^^^. Do you wish to Match back?” The screen read.

Hell yes. Hell yes. Hell yes. I would love to match with Madeline.

He had never pressed a virtual button so quickly.