Poly

Polyamory. 800 words, 4 minute read. With Claude Sonnet.

Emily's fingers drummed against her thigh, creating a staccato rhythm that matched the pulsing notification on her holoscreen. The acceptance button seemed to mock her with its soft glow. Around her, the self-driving maglev hummed as it wove through New Haven Commune's crystalline towers, each one reflecting the setting sun in fractal patterns she'd once spent hours trying to photograph with Rachel and John.

Rachel slouched in her seat, head tipped back, pretending to study the maglev's ceil-screen, but her eyes kept darting to John. He sat with unnatural stillness, his usual fidgeting absent, hands folded in his lap like they were made of glass.

"Remember when we crashed the education pod's AI during final exams?" Rachel's voice cracked on the last word. She cleared her throat. "John's virus was supposed to make it speak in nothing but dad jokes."

"That's not—" John's shoulders relaxed a fraction. "It wasn't a virus. It was an elegant subroutine that just happened to have some unexpected variables in its humor matrix."

"It told the whole class their grades were 'byte-ing the dust,'" Emily said, the memory tugging at the corners of her mouth. She watched John's reflection in the window, the way his eyes lingered on Rachel's hand, inches from his own. The same way she'd caught him watching her tend to their shared hydroponics project last spring, when she'd spent hours nursing their strawberry plants back to health.

The maglev decelerated, its subtle shift in momentum sending Rachel's shoulder pressing against Emily's. Neither moved away.

"What if..." Emily traced the edge of her holoscreen. In the window's reflection, she could see all three of them, overlapped and intertwined like the vines in their garden. "What if the Algorithm splits us up?"

The question hung in the recycled air. John's hand twitched toward them both before retreating.

"Well," he mumbled, "I guess you could say our friendship is about to face its biggest bit of trouble yet." His weak laugh died as Rachel and Emily turned to him with identical looks of exasperated fondness.

"That was physically painful," Rachel said, but her hand found his knee, squeezing gently.

The Matching Center rose before them, its biosynthetic walls rippling with colors that reminded Emily of the aurora simulations they'd watched together during their midnight rooftop meetings. The building's quantum core thrummed through the ground, a bass note to their racing hearts.

Inside, the queue of eighteen-year-olds moved with glacial slowness. Emily watched a pair of girls emerge from their matching, one wiping tears while the other held her close, whispering something that made them both laugh. Another pair stood rigid and formal, their acceptance of the Algorithm's choice marked by tight nods and careful distance.

John's breath hitched as they approached the scanning platform. Emily reached for his hand at the same moment Rachel did, their fingers tangling together.

The holoscreen blazed to life, data streams reflecting in their eyes as the Algorithm processed their profiles. Emily thought of the countless moments that had led them here: Rachel teaching them both to dance in the zero-g chamber, John staying up three nights straight to program Emily a virtual galaxy for her birthday, the way Rachel's eyes lit up whenever either of them mastered one of her parkour challenges.

"Processing anomaly detected," the AI announced, its voice carrying undertones of what might have been curiosity. The holoscreen's display fractaled into new patterns, reminiscent of the gardens they'd grown together. "Recalculating optimal configuration."

Emily's grip tightened. Rachel's nails dug into her palm. John had stopped breathing entirely.

The screen erupted in a constellation of interconnected lines, forming an elegant triangle that pulsed with their combined biorhythms. "Optimal solution found," the AI declared. "Recommended configuration: Polycule formation. Compatibility rating: 99.8%."

The silence that followed felt like standing in the eye of a storm. Emily watched their reflections in the holoscreen, three faces showing different shades of the same revelation.

"I..." John swallowed hard. "I guess the Algorithm really knows how to process a relationship."

Rachel let out a sound between a laugh and a sob. "I swear to all the quantum gods, if I have to spend the rest of my life listening to your puns—"

"You'll what?" His voice was soft, wondering.

She answered by pulling them both closer, until their foreheads nearly touched. Emily felt the tremor in Rachel's hand, saw the moisture in John's eyes, and knew with sudden clarity that the Algorithm hadn't created anything new – it had simply illuminated what had always been there, growing in the spaces between their words and waiting to be recognized.

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