Love Is a System Error

In a near-future world, death has been solved.
One pill a day rewinds your body by twenty-four hours. No aging. No decay. Eternal youth on prescription.

There’s just one fatal side effect: if you fall in love, the pills stop working. Your blood produces the same antibodies as the drug, your reset button breaks… and your life starts counting down for real.

Chapter 1

“For God’s sake, I really have fallen in love with you,” the man said, sounding hopeless.

“Me too.”

The woman had gone dead pale. Fear flickered in her eyes as the words tumbled out, “What… what are we supposed to do now? Maybe it’s not real, this… how could we be this unlucky…”

Seeing how miserable she looked, he felt as if a blade had run straight through his heart.

But what a sweet blade it was, sweeter than anything on earth, sweeter than grinding every piece of candy in the world into sugar dust and forging a sword out of it.

He pulled her bare body into his arms and pressed his chest to hers. It was like they shared the same heart, both of them pierced by that sweet sword, both of them shuddering from the mix of pleasure and pain.

“We’ve probably caught the worst kind of love plague,” he said, “but we should still go see a doctor to be sure. Try not to panic. Most cases burn out on their own in about three months. Losing three months of life sucks, yeah, but those three months feel incredible.”

She still looked terrified, even paler than before.

“There are plenty of cases that last longer,” she said. “If it doesn’t clear in three months, it can drag on for a year or two. And there are stories of it going on for seven years. Some people never get better at all. They stay in it until they die.”

“A love that never fades for the rest of your life is extremely rare. Let’s not jump that far.”

He tried to steady her. “We should see a doctor first. Maybe we’re not actually infected. Maybe it’s just a really strong physical thing between us.”

She nodded.

“I hope so. But this isn’t like any desire I’ve ever felt. Right now, as long as you’re happy, my own pain doesn’t matter. Before this, even at my hungriest, I only ever cared about my own pleasure.”

He felt the same pull in his chest.

“Me too. When I was holding you just now, there was this crazy thought in my head that I wanted to die with you. That really is one of the classic symptoms of the love plague. Anyway, let’s get checked first. I’ve heard there are treatments.”

There weren’t many people at the clinic.

Love was never common to begin with, and in recent years everyone had gotten used to basic protection, so real cases were rare.

The doctor who saw them was a solemn, tight-lipped man. He drew blood from both of them and tested the concentration of immortality antibodies in it.

Each dose of the immortality drug could roll a person’s body back to where it had been twenty-four hours earlier. Taking it again within those same twenty-four hours did nothing, because the body would produce a special antibody that blocked the drug. That antibody faded after a day.

As long as someone took their dose on time every day, they simply stopped aging. They could, for all practical purposes, live forever. Unless they got infected with love.

Love made the human body produce the exact same antibodies, which meant the immortality drug stopped working. Once someone fell into love, their life started running forward like water in a river, never rewinding, never coming back.

When the doctor found out the man and woman had slept together with no protection at all, he was furious.

“How can you be this careless with your lives?” he snapped. “Silence, masks, darkness, those three basic precautions, and you skipped every single one. That’s basically suicide.”

Chapter 2

The man and the woman said nothing.

Most of the time they were careful and followed every rule. This had been one rare night of letting go, and by sheer bad luck they had run straight into the one person they fell for at first sight.

Seeing how miserable they looked, the doctor stopped yelling. He steadied his voice and said, “What is done is done, so try not to be too scared. In the first three months, there is an eighty seven percent chance the feeling fades on its own. If you follow my advice exactly, we can push that to ninety five percent.”

He pulled out a sheet of papers and went on, “These are the latest clinical guidelines. In the first three months, the two biggest reasons love dies are familiarity and boredom. I do not believe there are two people who are perfectly made for each other. So while the bond between you is still new and not too tight, the best treatment is to learn each other’s flaws as quickly as possible.

“Remember, first you have to show your real self. Do not sort things into strengths and weaknesses. Just be straightforward and honest, do not polish anything, and your flaws will come out on their own. Second, when you feel unhappy, do not hold it in. Complain, joke, shout, attack the other person if you have to.

“Last, when you are the one being attacked, you must fight back. You can use harsh words, you can lash out physically, or you can freeze the other person out and ignore them. Whatever you do, do not try to be understanding and answer with kindness.”

He paused, then added, “Besides getting to know each other, you need to create boredom on purpose. For these three months, the two of you should stay together every waking moment. I suggest you indulge yourselves as much as you like, but only in the one way you enjoy most. Keep using that same way until you are sick of it.

“It is the same with everything else. Do whatever you enjoy most, as often as you can, with no restraint at all. Restraint creates novelty. Boredom is what kills love.”

The doctor handed them the packet.

They took it and nodded blankly.

He stood up and said, “You have to follow these instructions. Do not let your feelings run the show. Good luck. I hope your love disappears as soon as possible.”

After that, the man and the woman spent the most beautiful three months of their lives together. They did not need to work at it. They just naturally stuck to each other.

Even when one of them went to the bathroom or took a shower, the other felt a small hollow disappointment. The first thing they did when they woke up was reach out and make sure the other person was still there.

On the seventh day, they had their first fight.

The man no longer remembered what they had argued about, but the sharp pain of it never left his memory. It felt as if someone had carved a piece straight out of his heart.

He asked himself, “When did that missing piece become part of me. It must have something to do with love. From the moment we met to the first time my heart hurt, only seven days went by. How could something grow so fast and blend so completely with my heart and my flesh that it hurts this much when it is pulled away.

“Is it something new, or has it been hiding in me all along. Is it because of her, or because of love itself.”

Wherever that extra piece had come from, after they went through that knife twisting in their chest, they were no longer so afraid of death.

They started to feel that a life without love was not worth living. If they had love and their life flowed away without coming back, it did not seem quite so hard to face.

Chapter 3

On the eighth day they made up.

They kissed and held each other and made love, their bodies and their souls soaked through with tears and pleasure.

From then on, they tried to follow the doctor’s orders in what they did, yet in their hearts there was a light nothing could cover. Under that light every flaw looked beautiful and every hint of boredom turned into passion.

Three months later, the man and the woman went back for a checkup.

When the doctor realized his treatment had done nothing at all, he let out a long, heavy sigh.

He thought it over again and again, then decided to try something harsher.

He suggested they try jealousy therapy.

A week later, the man and the woman checked into the hotel the doctor had booked and met another couple who also needed treatment.

Both of them had dyed blue hair. They were tall, good looking, the kind of people who turned heads. Standing next to them made the man and the woman feel plain and a little small, and their conversation came out stiff and dry, nothing felt natural.

The doctor had reserved a two-bedroom suite for them. The man and the blue-haired woman went into the bedroom on the left.

There was a king-size bed with crisp white sheets, and a black leather sofa by the window. Above the headboard hung a photo of a sunset over the ocean, grand and beautiful, the sort of view you could find on almost any coast in the world.

The blue-haired woman sat at the head of the bed and started to undress, then realized the man was still standing there.

She stopped and said, “We are already here, so let’s at least try. I do not want this either, but it might actually save our lives.”

The man blushed a little.

“It is not that I refuse to try,” he said. “I just keep thinking about her. I honestly do not feel anything.”

The blue-haired woman frowned, her tone sharpening.

“Why are you being so sentimental. You know exactly what she is doing in the next room, so do not pretend to be some tragic saint.”

The man felt a sting of shame. She was right that he was being a little fake.

He walked over and wrapped his arms around her. Even so, his mind was far away, stuck on the woman in the other room.

The blue-haired woman sighed and leaned in first. She brought her mouth to his.

Her warm, soft lips pressed against his. He closed his eyes and tried to picture the woman in his arms instead. Little by little, his body started to respond.

At that moment the door flew open.

The woman rushed in, tears streaming down her face, and the blue-haired man ran in behind her.

She threw her arms around the man. His eyes filled too, and he kissed her back without holding anything in, completely forgetting about the blue-haired couple.

The blue-haired man saw his partner with her clothes half off and his face darkened. He began to shout at her, and she snapped right back at him. In that moment something in their love twisted, and for the first time there was a real chance it might heal.

The man and the woman only fell deeper. Their sickness settled into the marrow.

After that, they never went back to the doctor. For them, losing each other was far more frightening than dying.

They stayed together, completely committed, for seven years, until the woman turned twenty-nine. Astrologers called twenty-nine the year of Saturn’s return.

At twenty-nine she discovered a new kind of fear.

Next year she would be thirty, and in this world that meant she would stay a thirty-year-old woman forever.

She thought of the blue-haired woman at the hotel. That woman had looked just past thirty. On that very day, the love between the blue-haired couple had suddenly vanished.

If their love was doomed to disappear one day, the woman would rather it happened now, before she turned thirty.

One night she finally gathered her courage and asked the man, “Are you not afraid of getting old. What if we only stop loving each other when we are already old, what then. Living forever as an old person without love would be truly terrifying.”

Chapter 4

The man did not think too hard before he answered.

Maybe he should have said, “No, I am not. I will love you until the day I die.”

Instead he said, “I am scared too, but if love refuses to disappear, there is nothing I can do about it.”

That was the last straw that broke the camel’s back.

There had been plenty of other warning signs before this, but he had spent so much effort trying to forget the past that he no longer remembered them clearly.

The next morning, when he woke up, the woman was gone.

He did not worry about it. He drifted back to sleep until sunlight slipped through the gap in the curtains and flashed across his face, dragging him out of his dreams.

He vaguely remembered having a sad dream, but the details were already gone.

He got up and walked into the kitchen.

On the stove a small pot of oatmeal was simmering on low heat. Next to it sat a plate of hot breakfast sandwiches she had made herself, still giving off steam.

He called her name.

No answer.

He figured she had probably gone to the grocery store.

He poured himself some oatmeal, took a sandwich, and sat down at the table. Only then did he notice the envelope lying there.

It was blue gray. Inside was a postcard. On the front, a little girl was waving goodbye to a little boy. The whole picture was in black and white, except for the girl’s shoes, which were red.

On the back of the postcard she had written one line.

“I am sorry, I do not love you anymore. Please do not love me either. Live your life, and forget about me.”

The year she left, the man was also twenty nine.

It was not until thirteen years later that he finally came out of that love. The antibodies disappeared from his blood, and he could start taking the immortality drug again.

His body froze at forty two.

After that he developed a quiet fear of women.

He cut his dates with them down to the bare minimum. When he really could not help himself, he only let his body touch another person in the dark, both of them wearing masks, and he tried his best not to say a word.

Another forty years passed like that.

He never caught the love plague again.

Sometimes he thought about cutting loose for once, but whenever he pictured the price he might have to pay, he pushed the thought back down.

The next time he heard from the woman was on an autumn morning.

That day was a Sunday. After more than ten straight days of rain, the sun finally came out.

The man looked at the light and felt an itch he could not ignore, so he went to the seaside by himself to wander and walk.

There were not many people on the beach. The few who were there wore masks or had scarves over their faces. The love plague had trained people to stay home and to hide themselves when they went out.

The man followed the path along the water, planning to walk all the way to the huge white rock in the distance and then turn back.

Chapter 5

When he was about fifty meters from the white rock, his phone vibrated in his pocket.

He was waiting for an important email, so he took it out at once.

The sender’s address looked unfamiliar.

He opened the message, saw the name, and only then remembered it was from the woman.

All these years he had hated her.

He felt she had cost him thirteen extra years of life, because she had been the one to walk away first, not him.

In her email she wrote that she was about to die and wanted to see him one last time.

She said that when she left back then, it was not because she had stopped loving him, but because she wanted them both to have a chance to go on living.

Unfortunately, the love in her heart was stronger than the love in his. It had never agreed to disappear.

She wrote that she knew he had recovered, so she had never dared disturb his life. Only now, at the end, she could not stop herself from asking to see him one last time.

He lit a cigarette, turned toward the sea, and sat down.

He smoked and thought, “So I was the lucky one. My love at least faded after thirteen years. She kept loving me until it burned through her life.

“All this time someone has cherished me like that, valued me more than her own life, and I had no idea at all. What does that even mean for me.”

He drifted off into his thoughts. Ash piled up at the end of the cigarette and he did not notice.

He asked himself, “If she had never told me and carried it to her grave, then her love would mean nothing to me. But now she has told me. Does that mean that for the one who is loved, love only matters when it is spoken out loud.”

He let out a slow breath of smoke and looked through the haze at the flashes of light on the distant water.

He thought, “Should I go to see her. This is her last wish. When she dies, this kind of love will vanish with her, and no one will ever love me like this again. I ought to go. I ought to feel the best and last love of my life.”

Then he shook his head slightly.

“No, I still cannot go,” he thought. “Seeing her is far too dangerous, even if she is a dying old woman with white hair and loose skin. Love is blind. It does not care about reason. It can make you fall in love with anyone, even someone who looks completely impossible to love.”

He made up his mind, put his phone away, and kept walking toward the white rock.

After a while, something seemed to occur to him. He stopped, took out his phone again, and added the woman’s address to his blocked list.

He believed he had made the safest choice.

Yet it was this very act of fear that dragged his memory back to the woman from half a century ago, the way she had looked when he loved her most.

The ashes of love will always be lit again by remembrance.

Perhaps this was the moment when he should have gone to see her, to stand at the bedside of an unfamiliar, dying old woman with white hair and sagging skin. In truth, that might have been safer.

Three weeks later, news of her death reached him, and he felt the torment of love all over again.

This time the love plague never healed.

It stayed with him until the day he died.