We'd agreed to meet in front of UKARI Hall—a fairly massive building—and a pretty decent crowd of couples had the exact same bright idea: "Let's meet by the entrance." In the end, the security guards just ended up herding us across the plaza so we wouldn't cluster together and block each other's space. Apparently, this was a daily routine for them, considering they hadn't just painted circles on the ground tiles—they'd actually engraved numbers into them. Mine was 35, which made it pretty easy for Christina Flute to spot me.
"What?" she asked, looking a little flustered under my gaze.
"You look great," I said, and I wasn't just being nice.
Earrings, subtle makeup, styled hair, a trendy jacket, stylish pants, cool boots—nothing like the version of her I was used to seeing at home. I felt a sudden pang of shame for dressing so aggressively average. But then again, maybe this was average for her? Asking felt awkward, which naturally led to an equally awkward silence.
Out of nowhere, she started whistling and shuffling her foot on the ground, doing the whole "innocent kid who definitely didn't just break a window" routine. I couldn't help but smile at her antics.
"Shall we?" Christina pulled out her phone. "Did you download your ticket?"
"Nope," I admitted, suddenly remembering the link I'd received last night and lazily pushed off until morning.
"There's fifty gigabytes of prep materials attached," she poked me in the stomach with her phone. "Here, I can share it with you."
"That's gonna take an hour to download. Can I just look off your—" I cut myself off as Christina's face melted into a smug, triumphant grin. "You little pain in the ass."
She gave me a full-on, unabashed smirk. I couldn't keep a straight face if my life depended on it.
“Oh, look,” Christina pointed at a tile near us. “A repeating number.”
“What do you mean?” I glanced down at the number 14 under the feet of a couple standing next to us.
“Right there, look, diagonally... No, not that way,” Christina nudged my arm in the right direction.
Sure enough, another tile with the number 14.
“Why the hell did they duplicate it?” Christina frowned. “It's not even a magic number.”
“What's a magic number?” I asked.
“Thirteen, for instance. Bakers' dozen.”
“Well, they probably got rid of it because of the superstitious folks,” I started looking around, scanning for a thirteenth tile. “They didn't make a 69, either.”
“That's so people wouldn't fight over it,” Christina grinned, wiggling her eyebrows.
“There's no 68, either,” I decided to ignore the dirty hint. “I'm guessing, to avoid any mix-ups, they just ditched anything that reads the same upside down.”
“Well, that doesn't explain why one person gets two 14s.”
“Maybe an AI designed the square layout. It’s often doubling things up.”
“Yeah, totally glitch out,” Christina snorted, marching over to the freshly vacated 14 tile. “Remind you of anyone?”
“No,” I didn't get it right away.
“Right here we've got one Christina and Alex, and over there another Christina and another Alex are supposed to stand,” Christina nodded toward the empty 14 tile. “Coincidence?”
“Nah, the matrix is just glitching,” I joked, heading toward the UKARI Hall entrance.
“Actually, there's a movie like that,” Christina fell into step beside me. “Where we're supposedly living in a glitched simulation, so all kinds of weird shit is possible.”
“And I thought that was just about conventional thinking. Like, escaping the matrix means stopping doing the exact same thing every time, and matrix glitching means you're repeating yourself.”
“Alright, if we don't get a déjàvu right now, we're out of the danger zone.”
Nothing else out of the ordinary happened. The guards scanned us in with a QR code. When we asked where to go, they just pointed toward a trail of arrows that read, "Yep, you're definitely in the right direction." Both Christina and I found that pretty funny—maybe this whole thing wasn't going to be as stiff and academic as we'd feared.
The auditorium wasn't huge so much as spacious. An amphitheater layout, but with generous spacing between the double desks—even wider than tables in a restaurant, clearly designed so nobody's personal space bled into anyone else's. I decided to claim desk number 35, partly because it was my lucky number from the plaza and partly because half the crowd was still trickling in.
Christina sat beside me, resting her chin on her laced fingers on top of the desk like a majority shareholder at a board meeting. I did the exact opposite—slumping back in my seat the way I used to during school breaks—and glued my eyes to my phone. I hate waiting. Not the "doing nothing" part, but the active kind—the feeling of being trapped on standby.
"Good morning, everyone," the lecturer's voice snapped me right out of my phone. "Allow me to introduce myself—"
"Hey," I nudged Christina, who had somehow already managed to fall asleep, face down on her arms against the desk.
"Five more minutes, Dad..." Christina made a smacking sound with her lips.
"Cut it out. It's starting."
"It's gonna take until lunch to actually start," Christina sat up straight and yawned.
"If anyone finds this uninteresting," the lecturer chimed in, almost as if on cue, "feel free to grab your test papers now and jump straight into the individual practical exercises."
Wait, test papers? An exam?!
"Just kidding," the lecturer grinned. "Today, the practical portion will be demonstrated for you by Mr. and Mrs. Mannequin."
A man and a woman walked onto the stage wearing skin-tight green bodysuits, looking like CGI chroma key actors.
"There won't be any pornography..."
A collective, disappointed "Aww" echoed through the room.
"...however, we will be showing you a few spicy scenes. If it gets a bit too explicit for anyone, you're welcome to be shy—" the lecturer covered his face with his hands, but spread his fingers wide to peek through. "—as long as you keep watching. If our observers notice too many covered faces, we'll take it as a sign that the topic really resonated with your hearts, and we'll spend even more time analyzing it. You can also raise your hands to ask questions, just like in school, or use your phones to join our anonymous chat. We'll be dropping links and extra materials in there so you don't have to just take our word for it—you can verify it yourselves. And trust me, we have a lot to verify today."
While the lecturer was setting up the intro, almost everyone whipped out their phones to register for the local chat room. I set my nickname to Mr. Capybara.
"Don't peek," I said, trying to block my screen from Christina.
She gave me a mischievous grin and promptly named herself: Mrs. Capybarella.
"Shoot, I should've gone with Capybaretti," she realized with a gasp. "Then I'd sound like an Italian architect."
"Or Capybapin, to sound like Chopin. You're the musician here, after all."
"Nah, that'd be way too Polish. Capybaraldi would be better... Ugh, stop, I can't!" Christina tried to stifle her snickers.
"To keep it brief for those who skipped biology class in school," the lecturer officially kicked off the topic. "Where do babies come from? As of right now, from a woman."
Mrs. Mannequin placed her hands over her stomach and began comically acting out the entire pregnancy cycle—morning sickness included—as the lecturer spoke, looking like a sign-language interpreter for a kindergarten class.
"And now for the most intriguing question," the lecturer built up the suspense. "How on earth does the baby end up inside the woman in the first place? The most ridiculous answer in our live chat will win a nice bonus—assuming, of course, the winner chooses not to stay anonymous."
For some reason, I was ninety-nine percent sure Christina wouldn't miss a chance to participate in this crap. While the lecturer droned on about primate reproduction, her mind was already hard at work.
"They emigrate from an overpopulated Europe to the Wild West," she typed—and then deleted it.
"According to the handbook, I'm required to tell you that people engage in sex because it's deeply pleasurable and a natural way of experiencing enjoyment granted to us by nature," the lecturer continued. "But you can read the handbook on your own time. What you won't find in there is that sex isn't an action—it's a language. Yes, indeed. A language of communication between human beings. Ah, I see the first hands covering faces already..."
Nobody in the audience even had time to glance around, because right at that moment, Mr. and Mrs. Mannequin locked eyes. They raised their hands toward each other's cheeks without making contact, leaning in close but stopping just short of a kiss.
"This is sex... and so is this... and this," the lecturer casually narrated as the Mannequins' actions grew progressively more intimate. "...and this."
The entire room let out an audible gasp when Mr. Mannequin placed his palm over Mrs. Mannequin's chest, pressing gently against her. It wasn't because it looked "steamy" or erotic, but because of the way Mrs. Mannequin looked back into his eyes right after.
"The most vital aspect of sex is understanding," the lecturer summed up the performance. "Just like in any language, it's essential to..."
Instead of turning to bow, Mr. and Mrs. Mannequin dissolved the tension between them in a subtle, quiet rhythm that belonged entirely to the two of them. You could actually watch them cool down, and the entire room cooled down right along with them.
"...it's essential that you not only understand your partner's desires, but also express your own without relying on words. So let's practice a bit. Turn to your partner and look into their eyes."
Christina and I exchanged a glance. Then another. For some reason, a sudden wave of panic set in. Christina instantly pulled a face, pressing her nose upward with a finger to turn it into a piggy snout. But I'm terrible at making faces.
All around us, the vibe had turned dead serious and romantic. Complete silence. Everyone looking intensely into each other's eyes. And us? Then again, we weren't here for sex—we were just here to listen to the theory. I tried to force a smile, but it felt completely fake. So I gave up and just monkeyed her, or, I should say, piglet-ed her, turning my own nose into a piggy snout too.
Out of nowhere, Christina let out an accidental, loud snort that instantly drew every pair of eyes in the silent auditorium right to us.
She slammed both hands over her bright red face and bent double to hide under the desk. But since my legs were taking up the space below, her forehead crashed straight into my knees. I knew for a fact she was wheezing with laughter, but because she was desperately trying not to make a sound, it looked like she was sobbing uncontrollably.
As for me, I had nowhere to run. I was sticking out like a cell tower in an empty field. I just covered my face with both hands, not even peeking through my fingers. The sheer embarrassment. We weren't even engaged. That made the shame ten times worse.
To make matters worse, the lecturer singled us out, claiming our couple had handled the exercise even better than Mr. and Mrs. Mannequin, because sex wasn't about logic—it was about emotion. You could have a formal chat about the weather, or you could grant each other life.
My ears were practically burning at this point. Thank God he means "vitality" life, not "creating a new life" life. The absolute top priority right now was to NOT start thinking about sex. Because with Christina's head currently resting right on my lap, she would definitely notice any... reaction.
Fortunately, the lecturer moved on to his next point, and everyone's attention finally shifted away from us. A few moments later, Christina's shoulders stopped shaking, and she sat back up.
"Sorry," she whispered. "I just... I saw a nose hair sticking out."
"A nose hair?"
I honestly didn't even know what I was supposed to feel right now. It was deeply humiliating and utterly absurd all at once. The lecturer had just praised us because of a nose hair—or rather, a single stray nose hair had carried our entire "intimate bond" on its back. Good to know which part of me qualifies as my primary sex appeal. A sudden burst of laughter nearly escaped my throat, but I managed to clap a hand over my mouth just in time.
"Well, yeah, there's this one hair poking out, and it was just so funny," Christina explained, entirely unbothered.
"I'm starting to get the feeling..." I was about to say that laughing uncontrollably was probably her equivalent of an orgasm, but I decided not to be too mean. "...that you've got a whole arsenal of these little surprises ready to go."
"Shh, quiet, let's watch!" Christina cut me off, suddenly captivated by the green mannequins, who had moved on to demonstrating various hugging positions.