Jaime Hope has been an unlucky person since the very day he was born in the year 2014, his mommy had dumped him in a dumpster behind a restaurant during a cold autumn night in a big plastic bag. But thanks to some divine intervention, a homeless guy picked that particular dumpster while he was searching for food.
The young boy was rushed to a hospital with a nasty case of pneumonia, which caused his lungs to suffer permanent damage leaving him with extremely low stamina for the rest of his life. It also caused him to become unadoptable since most potential adoptive parents were looking for a healthy baby and not one that needed to have three separate operations before it reached its second year on this world.
He couldn't play too much with other children due to his condition, which caused him to become introverted and bullied for most of his childhood. Nature wasn't very kind to the boy either, by the time his puberty stopped he was left only 5 feet and 2 inches tall, pale and thin. He never had many manly features but when he left high school most would call him androgynous and some even outright girly.
In the year 2033 when he reached maturity and graduated high school, he was left friendless with only a small financial support for his condition and a small flat with hardly anything in it, but thankfully his social worker, Miss Graham helped Jaime a bit to get settled. She even managed to find him a calm job in a public library, which was a hard feat in this day and age.
You see back in 2024 there was a massive evolution in the robotic research, soon there were amputees with artificial limbs, first artificial pets for people with allergies and in 2027 the first robotic workers were put into use for manual labour. The research got only crazier from there on, in 2030 the robots did not only look like humans, but they were also able to serve as vessels for newly developed AI's and these new androids were quickly adopted into society as workers suited for pretty much any kind of job. This of course led to both the unemployment and crime rates skyrocketing.
Jaime was grateful for his job, because he knew that there were many unfortunate souls that had trouble even just feeding their families and it was not like he could just go somewhere with his non-existing degree and get something better outside some call centre and since Jaime was terrified of almost any social interaction, that wasn't really an option for him.
Jaime ran his fingers through his hair as he turned over a page of a book, he was currently reading. It was one of the upsides of his work. He always loved reading and now there were no smug kids to make fun of him for it.
However, he was quickly interrupted by a familiar sight. A young couple of female students sitting at a table maybe forty feet away from his own desk. They visited the library pretty often either to study or do some research and Jaime liked to watch them from time to time. He quickly realised that they were a couple after he saw them kiss a couple times, just as they were doing now.
It was no deep tonsil licking French kiss, just a little peck, yet it still made Jaime feel a bit sad and very envious.
Ever since he started noticing the beauty of women in his teenage years, he also noticed just how little attention these women paid him, and it didn't take him long to figure out why that was. The combination of his short stature and general weakness heavily lowered his self-esteem. He tried to fight against it but exercising just lead to quick exhaustion and some more negative results, since only muscles that seemed to be affected by this effort were his thighs and derriere which only made him look more feminine.
There was always this empty void inside his mind, which made him yearn for affection but also left him with pretty much zero confidence to even approach any potential partner. And so, he gradually became stuck in this state of longing.
That day ended like any other would. Jaime put away any books that were left unattended by the visitors, locked the entrance and went home.
His flat was nothing special. Just a bedroom, a small kitchenet and a bathroom, but it was enough for him, even though it made Jaime sometimes feel as if he was living in a box.
After taking a shower he put on his PJs and watched a movie online.
However, during his entertainment, he was interrupted by a commercial, which he had never seen before.
He was already used to "Don't let your girlfriend know that you play this game!" and "My dick grew by two inches in two days!" but this one was different.
"Ladies and gentlemen, are you tired of being alone? Does it seem like your love life is in ruins? Well, fear not! With the help of the new Courtship Possibility System developed by the Michigan Technological University you might find your perfect match in less than a week and since your data will aid the ongoing research, the entire service is completely free to use!"
During his relatively still short life Jaime came into contact with many scammers, especially on the internet and this commercial raised a few red flags for him, especially the "completely free" part, but he faintly remembered hearing about this system on the news a few weeks back. It intrigued him and so after watching his movie, he opened the commercial.
The first thing that hit him was just how official everything looked, there were no "horny women in your area" or "Wanna Fuck?" just a PowerPoint presentation introducing the system. It explained that they basically took an AI and fed it all the statistics gained from surveys conducted on happily married couples in the last 50 years.
Jaime was captivated and so he finished the presentation which then led him to a registration page. Now normally this is where he would close the page and forget about it, yet there was once again something interesting to keep him going.
Instead of asking for his name, address or credit card number as one would expect from a scam web site, the account creation required only an email and a password to proceed. This surprised Jaime and so he checked the institute website for any mention of such software and sure enough, there it was a link to the same site.
"What do you know..." He mumbled to himself and returned to the experimental site and there he stayed for a good while just staring on the screen before him contemplating.
It wouldn't hurt to try...would it? He thought as he created a throwaway email and registered.
The survey was absolutely ginormous, there were 20 biometric questions and 4 separate psychological surveys. It took Jaime nearly an hour to fill all them up. What followed was a sexuality test which made Jaime very uncomfortable and nearly forced him to close the entire thing down. He was always secretly a bit afraid that he gave off this weird gay vibe due to his feminine body and sometimes he even caught himself having homoerotic fantasies, but miss Graham told him that it was absolutely normal for people his age.
After another nervous half an hour, the young man finished his registration process and got a notification on his email, which explained that an alert would come if the system found him a match. He suddenly felt very tired and after he checked the time and found out that it was already half past eleven, he went to bed, not very optimistic about his chances.
What Jaime didn't know, was that two states away from him a phone pinged alerting its owner that a match has been found.
(A week later)
The boyish man was standing in front of the door to a big modern mansion in a good part of the city wearing the fanciest shirt he owned and sweating bullets.
