how to align friends and optimize people
Michael checked his phone. Joey would be arriving in three...two...
"Heya!" Precisely on expected schedule. Michael grinned at the app. Its icon was a grinning yellow emoji with an analog clock ticking superimposed on top. He downloaded it a few weeks prior and had been in love ever since. It predicted his friends' arrival times based on historic data, when his coworkers would be at their desks or in the break room, and even knew exactly the time his mother would call him down to the minute. His whole life had been optimized.
The following social gathering would last for 4 hours and 12 minutes, and he would be leaving when Joey was too drunk to stand. Their taxi would arrive six minutes after being called. The app even recommended a barf bag for the ride home, which Michael kept buried in his back pocket.
'Opti-Friend' did everything for him. Every minute of every day was planned for him. He tried to outsmart it at first, but he would wake up exactly when the app said or take the back roads home only to hit every green light on the way back. It was a little unnerving at first. To his friends, it was even more unnerving. He could find their location at any time. He knew when they would text and sometimes get the response back as soon as they hit Send.
Michael would say that he was busy when the app said he wasn't going to be there. Why bother if fate was already against him? So they slowly stopped inviting him. Over months, the app turned him into a recluse, relying on Opti-Friend to know exactly what he was going to do every waking minute of every day. He checked it obsessively as the notifications and events went down and down.
And before he knew it, there were no more events on his calendar, and no more friends to meet up with.