“We don’t have time to wait.” Samantha shifted toward the door.
“I didn’t answer your question before. I read mine,” Dola said.
Al poked her side. “Well?”
“I don’t know who it is,” she admitted. “Says ‘Trent Foster.’ His birthday is St. Patrick’s Day.”
Up front, the driver, who had been moving to get out of the door, halted. “Excuse me? Did I just hear you right?I’mTrent Foster. My birthday is St. Patrick’s Day. March 17.”
A shocked silence fell upon us, rolling into the car like steam in a sauna: barely there, then overwhelming. Something shifted inside me. The doubt I was accustomed to carrying dissolved, at least partway, the slide of ice cubes in a warm drink.
“Well, damn,” Samantha said finally.
Outside, uniformed people approached the vehicle. A security guard unlatched the door, then ducked to give instructions to his team. Nearly imperceptible dust motes swirled in the car.
“Have you opened yours?” I asked Trent Foster.
Trent of March 17 fame shook his head.
“Look at it! I mean, if you want to,” I added. “I’ll record you?” I navigated to my social media and hit the plus button. Some kind of base instinct in me wanted to capture this moment, and my phone storage had been embarrassingly low, soI’d hacked it by storing videos in my social media drafts until I decided whether to save or post them.
Trent popped the center console, retrieving his phone. Silence fell in the car as he tapped away. Dola blushed and clapped a hand over her mouth, the picture of a bride-to-be. Al pressed his palms together.
The driver held up his phone. “Dola Musa? December 13, 1989?”
“That’s me,” Dola whispered in awe.
“You and Taylor Swift were born on the same day, andyou never told me?” Al shouted.
The car door opened, heat blasting the interior. No one moved, except a halfhearted “go” gesture from Samantha. The scent of New York summer filled the car, pretzels and garbage and concrete, all UV-baked and ready for the day that sprawled ahead.
“This is real?” I whispered. “Did we really just witness two strangers learn they’re soulmates?”
“Oh, my god,” Samantha said, pushing me out of the car. “See?See?”
My teeth went numb. I felt like I was in a tunnel, which I sort of was: One comprised of suits. Security ringed the entryway, forming a barrier against people gathering outside the news building one by one, like little pieces of iron in a child’s magnet toy. We rushed toward the entrance.
“MY SOULMATE IS THY LORD AND SAVIOR,” awoman screamed beside us.
I ducked my head and ran inside, following Samantha to the elevator bay, thinking, if I hadn’t woken up, if I hadn’t had the tea, if I had remembered my melatonin, if my relationship hadn’t blown apart in that unbelievably coincidental period of time—would I have silenced the call? Would I have risen to the peals of my alarm and checked my own phone first, the way I do every morning at four? Would I have opened the email?
My phone. It was slick in my hand. I glanced at it, realized I was still recording. I pursed my lips, tucked my tongue into my lower cheek. My follower count was by no means exorbitant, but it had gone up enough after Wells’s viral box-top engagement video, so maybe it was worth posting.
SoulmailLiveFromNew York, I captioned it. With a few taps of keys, I hit Post.
Four
Even though it felt, for a few surreal minutes, like Soulmail was only happening to me and mine, it was a world event.
At first, world leaders believed the Soulmails were an elaborate prank. They arrived for everyone at three in the morning, East Coast time, containing very little: One attachment with the name and date of birth of one’s own particular soulmate.
An estimated 376.8 billion emails are sent every day. With one communication delivered to everyone on earth, and a world population north of eight billion but south of nine billion, that meant Soulmails created a fraction of extra overage in the everyday shuffle. If on average, everyone on the planet received forty-two to forty-seven emails every day, what was one more?
Seemingly. Because math, like most things of value, is both simple and complicated. The truth was that only half of the world even had email addresses, which meant that the real math worked out to eighty-four to ninety-four emails individually received per day.
More questions began when email-receiving people heard that email-free people got their own form of Soulmail. The next layer down received an encrypted text message. Those without electronic devices received telegrams. Soulmails were shockingly accessible, too, we’d learn, arriving in Braille if needed, or via stripped-down robotic audio, or with explicitdirections for a literate village elder to distribute accordingly. Eventhatdidn’t span all the bases, but it covered many of them.
On top of that, people who live on the East Coast of the United States often believe they are the first to hear of everything, and the prevailing attitude was sour when they woke to their emails, as opposed to the evening owls on the West Coast who were jacked up for the night when they received theirs, or the afternoon citizens from Saudi Arabia to Senegal to China who snagged theirs in the middle of a workday, or right after school.
