The door slamming shut with such force told Dara her sister had just gotten home. Sagging footsteps plus the incessant tongue-clicking rang from the ante, followed by the random knocks and thuds of shoes and jangling of car keys. Her sister wasn't happy. Dara confirmed the case when a bedraggled woman stepped into view.

"Ah, by God, sis." Dara took in the woman who had almost the same features as her stride past the kitchen in an aimless wander. Hair stuck out in ridiculous directions as if a cow had nuzzled the back of her head. Her jacket was inside out, with one sleeve falling past the shoulder. It simply wasn't a pleasant sight to see in a warm, Friday night.

Dara slid from the dining chair and stalked towards her sister before she toppled over like a wobbly tower. The smell of alcohol assaulted Dara's nose as she bore her sister's entire weight on her shoulders and dragged the woman towards the nearest room. "You really need to cut back on your drinking," Dara grunted. "It's not funny anymore."

Her sister blubbered, limbs flailing as if blaming an imaginary deity. "Summons? Who the fuck cares for summons? I have work...and that bitch..." she muttered under her breath. The alcohol-stained gusts wanted nothing but to worm its way into Dara's ears and tickle the back of her neck."How dare that bloody AI think that bitch and I are compatible?" A scoff flitted out her sister's throat. "Compatible, my foot. The prick doesn't even like dogs. Who doesn't like dogs? Annoying."

Dara reached the bedroom door and expertly twisted the knob and pushed it inward. The number of times her sister came home dead-drunk over the past month was staggering. Her summons increased too, with her age creeping closer to thirty-five. And every time she went out for a date, Dara was sure to greet a drunk version of her sister in the evening.

She couldn't really blame her sister. In this metamodern age, with the population decreasing all over the world, governments came up with a plan to streamline baby production, no matter how icky that sounded. Said plan involved an artificial intelligence system taking every eligible citizen's data, processing it, and somehow coughing out a list of possible matches. Society hoped babies would result from this practice, so to salvage the population, AI-aided matchmaking inspired laws, protocols, and policies—all in a span of a few years.

Much to mixed reactions, of course. While people were still free to meet, date, and marry whomever they wished, being forced into countless meet-ups took precious time, energy, and resources. Some thrived with the practice, believing they could flaunt their beauty and standards in a process approved by institutions, but most people were simply done with it.

A few months ago, speculations about a glitch in the AI's programming started circulating the internet, reportedly resulting in thousands of failed meet-ups and skewed summons. With the laws in place, normal people like Dara couldn't ignore the summons without proper reasons, and securing a medical certificate for an almost-weekly diarrhea would seem suspicious in a while. At some point, even the most clever person would run out of excuses.

And in her sister's case, the date must have not gone well. Even their parents were concerned about how almost every summon ended badly, but Dara wasn't one to pry into her sister's dating preferences. Maybe she didn't want to go into anything and preferred to boost her salary for a comfortable retirement. Maybe she was waiting for the right one, and all the summons before that were just forgettable fodder. Whatever it was, Dara better be prepared to wash the sheets twice just to get the stench of alcohol out. More, if her sister threw up all over them.

"Dara, is that you?" a weak voice curled from the bed on Dara's way out of the room. She looked down to find her sister squinting at the darkness, her arms holding her weight up crookedly. "If you get a summon, expect the worst, little sis. That AI is whack. Much...whack."

Her sister face-planted into the sheets and started snoring.

Dara shrugged and retreated into the corridor. She has recently graduated from university, throwing her directly into a subset of the population eligible for the AI's profiling system. Common company policies required her to send in her data to the Predictive Analysis and Generative Expert System—PAGES for short—before she could start applying for openings. Messed up as it was, there was nothing she could do about it. Even then, she was yet to receive her formal summons, and a small part of her wished she wouldn't ever.

She pulled her phone from her pocket and aimed to open an app to scroll before going to bed. A notification pinged in the topbar, bearing the familiar and dreaded icon. She tapped the ping and read the message.

We hope this invitation finds you well. Your presence is hereby requested at Moondollar Cafe, 184 Thornby St. at 10.00 AM on November 30, 20XX, to meet Theodore Koldese, your potential match. The compatibility index based on your recent profiling is at 84%.

If, for some unforeseeable reason that you are not able to attend, kindly contact us at GenSol Help Center to file for your certificate of release of obligation in no more than 5 days from this notification. We hope for an eventful evening of friendship and connection for you and your potential match.

Regards,
GenSol Artificial Intelligence Operators

Dara glanced back at her sister's door. Oh, she was going to flip when she heard about this tomorrow, because, by the heavens, Dara was just summoned.