Reward System by Jem Calder

Author:Jem Calder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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In the week that followed, the two users exchanged thirty-five total messages spanning the standard big-three Wikipedia-entry subhead topics of early life, career and personal life. Finding their outward-facing personalities to be compatible, the users traded numbers and arranged to meet at a bar in an only recently gentrified area of the city within a quarter-mile of equidistance to their two places of work.

Both users had patronised the venue in the past, but, for reasons not entirely clear to her, the female user pretended to the male user, both in their messages arranging the in-person encounter and for the full duration of the in-person encounter itself, that she had never previously attended the bar.

The female user disappointed herself when she did things like this, which was often. Lying ran directly counter to her moral ideal of how a person should act in the world. In fact, when judging others, the female user counted honesty as her highest-priority virtue.

She couldn’t say with any accuracy when she’d become such a fluent liar. Her lies were never really thought out – the same way nothing she ever said was – which was probably the reason why she generally preferred to communicate via text than speech; a calculative solution to the comparatively freehand and chaotic risks of person- to-person interaction. A means of revising the kind of a person she was.

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