My name is Mica. I live in West Yorkshire in the Kingdom of England in the British Isles. I am twenty-three and blond-haired, and my bust is a D cup. I had all the hair below my ears lasered off for my eighteenth birthday, beautifully smooth skin everywhere from my neck down. I love the feel when I have just powdered with pseudo talc. You can’t get real talc these days; apparently it causes cancer. Who cares? I tried some real talc once, so soft compared to pseudo, but pseudo is okay, I suppose.

I am assigned work three mornings per week, and that pays my living costs and an allowance for food, which I select online and is delivered by drone on Wednesdays at 1300. My work is straightforward; I combine deep star images ready for the AI BOÖTES to analyse. I do my work on my Personal, an AI-enhanced computer linked to an embedded chip in my arm. We all get the chips on our first birthday, and then we are part of the great human web.

My Personal pinged in my head, an incoming. Someone had expressed an interest in hooking up. I am, like most people, registered, or rather not excluding myself from, from a site for meeting people. My criteria were simple: live within free pod distance. I am not fussy on gender, race is never an issue, and since embedded chips became mandatory, crime has virtually vanished, the state always knows where you are, and so they always know who is in the vicinity of a crime.

His name is Vassily, my suitor, and he proposes meeting at the coffee hub. I have never had real coffee, only syntho. I believe that you can get real coffee on the black market, but who knows what it actually is? I accepted and went to get dressed. What to wear? The age-old question, but really, there was only one answer: my outdoor clothes. We all wore the same these days.

I remember my mum telling me when I was a little girl that her mum used to have different clothes. Different colours and that she could wear whatever she wanted, but nowadays we all wear the same. Every few years the style changes a little, or the colour, and we all go and get the new clothes and hand the old clothes to the Bots who dispose of them.

I put my outfit on; I am a girl, so it is a dress, and the colour is cornflower blue. It is cut above the chest so as to show no cleavage, and not a low cut at the back either. The sleeves go to the wrists, and the hem is at knee level. Knickers are knickers, and my bra is just a bra; everything is the same colour of cornflower blue. Last year everything was a pale green, seafoam green, they called it. The dresses were the same style; they haven’t changed for a few years now. The men wear shirts and trousers in the same colour. I suppose someone knows why we all became the same, but I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter, to be honest.

I used my Personal to call a pod; it knew where I lived from my Personal. All I had to do was tell it where I wanted to go. When it arrived, I opened my door and stepped outside. It was a balmy day, no rain. Rain tended to fall only at night these days. I think that somehow we must control the weather, but I don’t really know.

I got into the pod and sat down; a restraining belt appeared, and I wrapped it around myself, and it clicked too. I have no idea why we have belts in pods to hold us in our seats, but we do. I sat back and watched the streaming commercials on the pod walls, no windows to see out of, just commercials. I had long ago learnt to switch off from them.

I felt the pod come to a stop, and the belt unlocked itself, and the door opened. I got out and went into the coffee hub; there were quite a number of people there, all drinking synth. A hand went up; his Personal must have told him I was there. I walked across to him. “Hi,” I said, “I am Mica.”

“Hello, Mica, gosh, you look so much better in real life. I am Vassily.”

I guess charming girls have happened since the dawn of time. We were taught at school that DNA, the building blocks of our lives, has men chasing women and women accepting, sort of, there are a few grey areas. Girls don’t usually ask boys to meet them. They can; there is no law against it, it just almost never happens. We girls allow our profiles on meeting sites, and men and boys trawl them, and then they make the first move.

“I got you a synth,” Vassily said.

“Thank you, Vassily; that is very thoughtful of you,” I said as I sat in the chair next to him. It was quite noisy in the Hub, lots of people all talking. I sometimes wondered what people managed to talk about; I really had no idea.

“Okay Vassily, tell me, what was it about my profile that made you want to meet me?” I asked.

“Oh, that is easy, Mica. As I was scrolling through, I couldn’t get past your page. At first, I thought that there must be a glitch. But no, it was my eyes; they saw something, and my Personal kept you in front of me. Now that tells me something.”

“Goodness, perhaps you need your Personal updating?”

“I don’t think so, Mica, and now that I have seen you in the flesh, so to speak, I can tell this is no glitch; we were meant to meet.”

“Oh, crumbs, well, I can say that you are the most good-looking I have ever met from the Meeting Site.”

“Have you met many?”

“A few.” Well, we do; it is a bit rude to turn someone down, even more so after you have met. I took a sip of my synth. To me the taste is coffee, but only because that is what I have grown up with. If I had been told all my life that it was seawater, I would have accepted it.

“Nice synth, thanks,” I said.

“My dad prefers synth tea; there is a tea hub too,” Vassily said.

“Yes, I went with my mum a few times; I found it too astringent. I prefer the smoothness of coffee, or rather synth coffee. I have never had the real thing.”

“I have some.”

“What?”

“Real coffee, I have some.”

“Oh wow, how did you manage that, or perhaps I shouldn’t ask.”

He waved his wrist where his implant was. “Nothing illegal, obviously,” he said, “right place, right time.”

“Wow, I would love to try it.”

“Well, if we get on and we go back to mine, then perhaps you can try some after.”

I wondered if that was just his pickup line and if he did actually have some, and even if he did, after I had gone with him, would he still offer me some coffee? Who knew? I wasn’t ready to commit to going back with him, not yet, although turning him down without a valid reason was deemed rude and got your profile downgraded on the Meeting Site.

I gave him a closer look. No facial hair except for his eyebrows. I wondered if it was the same all over, like me. I don’t think I had met anyone with body hair; I wondered sometimes what it would be like. I suspected that if I hooked up with someone and discovered that they were hairy, down there, I would be an instant yes, let’s go back, mine is nearby.

“Like what you see?” He asked; he had seen that I was checking him out. “Or is it just my coffee?”

“I have never tasted real coffee, so I don’t know what I am missing, but if I did go with you and you didn’t give me a real coffee, then I would give you such a massive demerit.”

“I don’t think you answered my question. Like what you see?”

I did actually; his hair was dark, almost jet black, and his complexion was beautiful and clear, with lovely lips; his skin was an olive colour, making my paler skin feel almost white. His eyes were dark in colour, a real contrast to my blue ones. “Yes, Vassily, I do like what I see. Do you like what you see?”

“Oh yes, Mica and I have to be honest, I would like to see more, a lot more.”

“This is hardly the place though, is it?” I said as I finished my synth coffee.

“Would you like to come back to my place? I will get you a pod to take you home later, after we have had real coffee.”

I knew what he was asking. Would I like to go back, get naked and have sex? Now I had no objection to any of that; I had no idea if he was future mate material, but finding out if he was proficient in that regard was a precursor to mating and then having an offspring. I had no idea how I felt about getting pregnant. I know that it is my duty, but still, I wasn’t feeling like that yet.

“Yes,” I said, “let’s do that. Thank you for inviting me.”

He called a pod on his personal, and then after a moment it signalled, and we went out. The pod was just like any other pod, just like every other pod that I had seen. I had no idea if there were different styles of pod; I had only ever seen the one style. We got in, sat down and wrapped the belts around ourselves. It wasn’t long before we came to a stop and got out.