It had been three years since I had broken up with Lara. Three years of loneliness and just focused on work. I had been promoted to partner in the company and last September the company had gone through an acquisition that gave me just enough money to not worry about financial constraints for a time. Now, without work. There wasn’t much to do to escape the loneliness I had been drowning with work.

I scrolled mindlessly through the algorithmic feed of TikTok, most of the ads that I used to get were from dating apps. It was not surprising, as I had installed all the dating apps that had been made into existence since the acquisition. Finding love again had become my number one priority.

Most of the ads were for dating apps that I had already downloaded. Years of technology and algorithms were still incapable of stopping recommending things that you had already bought, like a pillow, or downloaded like, in my case, a dating app.

But this ad was different. A match-making agency. I had tried a few while working because I didn’t have much time to spend on dating apps and preferred someone who would take care of the match aspect. However, the outcomes of these agencies were usually very poor, as the incentives were matching you with someone but most of the time it led to nowhere.

The advert read: “We find your ideal partner through time. AI-powered match-making and time-travel findings”

“Time-travel?” I thought. “This is a hook I hadn’t seen before”. I clicked the ad that led me through the match-making agency website.

The agency would request from me many traits about my desired partner, both physical and personality-wise. Later, they would generated with AI a physical representation of these person and tweak it manually with extra feedback from me if the image was missing physical details that the AI couldn’t capture. The personality details would cover: education level, type of humour, desired negatives like traumas or flaws. The agency made clear that the perfect individual didn’t exist and they had a tool that would measure at any time the degree of perfection that I was requesting. A higher degree of perfection meant a person was harder to find, as there would be fewer people with those perfect traits globally across the entire timestream and more money to spend in the search.

Once the data has been collected and settled. The search would begin across the timestream. Any person that we can think of existed or will exist in the future. The agency would send a matchmaker across the timeline to search for your desired partner. They would start searching in the present time just in case that person would exist at the moment. In case of not finding it globally. They would start searching for them across the timestream.

Searching for someone in the past is easier than searching for a person in the future. The future has infinite ramifications while there’s only one past. If the desired person was found in the past, an analysis would be made of how possible was to bring this person to the present time and the consequence for the timeline. This process was called “extraction”. An extraction would only be made if it was one hundred per cent secure to not produce alterations in the present after the extraction was made. Any possibility of alterations was heavily fined by the government as it would be considered a possible existential risk. However, time travelling for matchmaking was a minor use-case of time travelling and there had been enough regulations in place to make extractions quite secure.

The poor written records in the past are very useful for extractions. If a person disappears it is unlikely that it will leave lasting consequences. There were a few cases of extractions that left written traces, like the known cases of Jesus of Nazareth. The extraction happened three days after the cruxification but poor planned escape outcomes meant that there were witnesses. Even with this, the written records didn’t produce significant consequences and were attributed as just another miracle.

To be continued…