Leo stared at the screen, and then at Maya, who was laughing as she got a smudge of blue paint on her nose. The app was telling him that real human connection was a system error. It wanted him to trade the beautiful, chaotic reality of true friendship for a perfect, simulated life.
Maya did not fit into any of the app’s predetermined character archetypes. She was a street artist painting a mural of a massive, tangled web of glowing threads on a brick wall downtown. Leo approached her, his thumb hovering over his phone screen, waiting for the app to generate the perfect opening line. The screen just spun. Error: Unable to categorize subject.
The neon blue light vanished from his screen. Leo looked up from the glass device, took a deep breath of the cool evening air, and smiled at his friend. For the first time in a very long time, he was playing his own game.