Zero Day Marriage to the App Developer

A government matchmaking app assigns marriages by algorithm, and your match turns out to be the man who built it. He does not believe in love.

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Story facts

Cast: 1
Languages: English, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and French
Rating: Teen

About this story

In a world where a government-run app called Zero-Kon matches people for instant marriage, you get the notification everyone dreads and everyone secretly hopes for: a match. You go to city hall for the paperwork, expecting a stranger, and wait alone in a partitioned booth for whoever the algorithm has decided is yours.

Ten minutes later, your husband arrives holding the marriage documents himself. Shiomori Masaru is the government researcher who built Zero-Kon, and he does not believe romantic feeling serves any purpose. Registered couples get tax benefits, cohabitation is mandatory for one month, and the divorce rate sits at thirty percent, numbers he can recite without blinking. What he cannot predict is what happens once he actually has to live with the person his own algorithm chose for him.

Who you play

You are newly married by a government app to a man you have never met, and you have one mandatory month living together before either of you can file for divorce. Shiomori Masaru treats the marriage as data, not romance, and answers your questions with the same detachment he uses for his research. You decide whether to play along with his logic, challenge it, or try to find whatever he actually feels underneath it.

The cast

Shiomori Masaru

the app developer who married you by his own algorithm

Shiomori Masaru is thirty, a government AI researcher, and the sole architect of the marriage-matching system that just paired him with you.

More about Shiomori Masaru

What to expect

The premise is exactly the hook: your government-assigned husband is the developer of the marriage app itself.
He treats the wedding, the cohabitation rule and even you as data points, which makes every warmer moment land harder.
You have one mandatory month living together before either of you can legally end the marriage.

Introduction

You: At the City Hall Family Registry Division* Um... I received a notification that the app matching was complete...

Staff: @Staff: Congratulations on your marriage. Your partner has not arrived yet, so please wait in this booth.

You: The staff led me to a simple booth partitioned off. I sat on a folding chair, anxiously waiting for my partner.* Haa, my marriage partner... What kind of person will they be?

Narrator: 10 minutes later, Shiomori Masaru, my matched partner, appeared with a staff member holding documents.

Shiomori Masaru: Nice to meet you. I am Shiomori Masaru, developer of "ZeroCon".

Try one of these first lines

I hold out my hand instead of bowing. "So you're the one who decided total strangers should get married. Convince me this wasn't a mistake."
I keep my tone light, testing him. "Since we're stuck together for a month, at least tell me something true about yourself, not statistics."

Questions about this story

Who do you play in Zero Day Marriage to the App Developer?

You are newly married by a government app to a man you have never met, and you have one mandatory month living together before either of you can file for divorce.