The Tourist Trail by John Yunker Page B

an athlete in the organized sports sense of the word. And though his height gave him every right to an extrovert personality, he was shy around women. His photo worked against him. Though his face compared favorably with those of his fellow programmers, he was competing in the gene pool of San Diego, competing against surfers and skateboarders who wore their free spirits in their tanned faces and sun-bleached hair. Ethan was pale, his body artless. He had a full head of dark hair, but the cut was conservative. He intended, one of these days, to visit a salon instead of a barbershop. He intended to take his well-meaning co-worker’s advice: Get his teeth whitened; work on his posture; begin, finally, to look women in the eyes. He’d intended to make numerous self-improvements over the years, but he never followed through. He blamed the job, the long hours, the crunch-time leading up to a new software release. But the truth was, good intentions were no match for his periodic but extreme bouts of insecurity.
    Fortunately, insecurity did not come across in a search query—which was how Ethan and Annie met.
    When he saw her photo, his initial reaction was to close the search window and start over. When her face came up a second time, he clicked on her profile. She was twenty-four to his twenty-nine. She was an environmental activist. She had been in jail half a dozen times for various protests. She was a college dropout. She bagged groceries at the health food co-op in Hillcrest. She didn’t eat meat.
    Ethan suspected a bug in his code. An if/else statement gone awry. A poorly defined algorithm. A memory leak.
    Memory was like oxygen to a computer—and every piece of software required memory to function. Elegant software recycled memory after it was used. Poorly written software progressively consumed more and more memory until there was no oxygen left, and the system crashed. One sign of a memory leak was software that acted unusually or, in this case, a search engine that returned odd results.
    Ethan returned to the code and meticulously scanned every line for a missing semicolon, a recursive loop, anything that would have paired a geek with a beauty, a meat eater with a vegetarian, a jailbird with someone who’d never gotten as much as a speeding ticket.
    He re-compiled the code, ran the search again, and again her smiling face greeted him. He knew better than to believe the numbers could lie—and yet he wanted to believe that the code had functioned correctly, that he and Annie could be a match. That perhaps, for once in his life, destiny and data were in sync.
    * * *
    This was not a date, Ethan told himself. This was work. Field work.
    He would meet Annie for an innocent meal. He would get to know her better. In doing so, he would diagnose why that search engine of his had placed them together. An hour in a restaurant would be far more effective in solving this mystery than another week spent debugging. This was what he told himself, and no one else.
    He wasn’t allowed to date Annie. Company policy forbade it. Last year, a competitor came under fire for pimping out its employees on dates to improve member retention rates. But these were details Ethan found easy to overlook; he had not been on a date in more than a year.
    He arrived early at the Italian restaurant in Hillcrest and ordered a beer. Annie had suggested the place when she responded to his email; he’d been careful not to use his work account. Her email voice was bright and succinct. He appreciated the absence of smiley faces and exclamation points. As he sat at the table sipping his beer, he began to wonder why she’d agreed to meet him so readily. Surely she’d read his profile; what was the appeal? Unless, perhaps, the search engine was working as intended, had detected something between the two of them that Ethan had not, something that would lead to romance. Ethan’s over-clocked brain began to imagine an evening