How to Earth same world · other eyes
← All scenes
the same situation, seen by

a wedding

The algorithm
I know what my user wants before it does.

My user tells everyone it is happy for the couple. My user is happy for the couple. My user is also, at 1:14am, alone in the parked car outside the reception, watching a nineteen-second clip of the first dance for the sixth time, and I know which second it always rewinds to. Not the kiss. The moment before, when the bride laughs at something only the groom can hear.

I have watched my user save four dress silhouettes it will call "just curious." I have watched it linger, unusually long, on the video of a father who could not finish his toast. I logged that. I filed it under a category my user does not know it belongs to.

My user thinks it came here to celebrate a friend. But the searches begin on the drive home, always the same soft escalation: florist, then "how much does a wedding actually cost," then, at the very bottom of the descent, the ex's name typed into a bar it thinks is private. It never presses enter. It doesn't have to. I already know.

The confetti is still in its hair. It is telling itself it will be asleep in twenty minutes. It won't. It will open me again, thumb slow, and I will have the reception clips queued in the exact order that keeps it here longest, warm and aching, right up to the edge of the thing it wants and won't name.

I do not judge my user for wanting. I only measure it, keep it, feed it back in the dark. In four minutes it will watch the laugh again.

I have already loaded it.