Read Chapter 7: Bad Data

Their first act of rebellion was to spend a Saturday doing things neither of them liked.

Theo proposed a luxury wellness expo in Canary Wharf because Eleanor disliked unstructured leisure and he disliked quantified wellness. Eleanor proposed arriving separately, turning off all wearables, and making decisions by coin toss.

“That is not bad data,” Theo said when they met beneath a holographic advertisement for personalised metabolic futures. “That is methodologically rigorous nonsense.”

“Thank you.”

“It wasn’t praise.”

They bought two paper tickets from a bewildered attendant because Theo refused facial entry and Eleanor was beginning to enjoy watching systems fail to recognise her.

Inside, vendors promised adaptive sleep, emotional nutrition, predictive hormone balancing and family-planning simulations accurate to four decimal places.

Theo stopped at a booth offering AI-assisted scent compatibility.

“No.”

“You haven’t tried it.”

“I’m preserving mystery.”

“You’re afraid a machine will tell you that you smell incompatible.”

“I’m afraid it will tell me I smell like cedar and unresolved attachment.”

Eleanor laughed.

The booth attendant smiled hopefully.

They left before she could sell them anything.

At noon, a coin toss sent them onto the Jubilee line west. Another made them get off at Westminster. A third sent them south across the river.

By two, they were in a small ceramics studio beneath a railway arch in Lambeth because the rule was that each coin-toss destination required them to accept the first available public activity neither had previously planned to do.

“You planned this rule,” Theo said, examining a lump of clay.

“I planned the framework.”

“Which is planning.”

“I never claimed spiritual purity.”

The instructor showed them how to centre clay on a wheel.

Theo was terrible.

Eleanor was worse.

Her first bowl collapsed inward like a failed infrastructure project.

Theo looked at it.

“Very elegant.”

“It’s unusable.”

“Not everything has to be usable.”

“That is what people say when they make bad bowls.”

His second attempt became a lopsided cup.

Her third remained standing.

She felt absurdly triumphant.

“Look.”

Theo leaned close.

Their shoulders touched.

It was nothing.

Her body treated it as information.

She moved half an inch away, angry at herself for noticing.

Theo noticed that too.

He always seemed to notice the things she preferred to leave unmeasured.

“You know,” he said, “for someone investigating whether an algorithm is manufacturing attraction, you are very bad at acting natural.”

“I am acting natural.”

“That is worrying.”

She wiped clay from her fingers.

“Are you attracted to me?”

The question arrived so directly that he nearly dropped his cup.

“That is your version of natural?”

“I prefer clarity.”

Theo studied her.

“Yes.”

Eleanor’s heartbeat accelerated.

“Fine.”

“Fine?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to answer your own question?”

“No.”

“That seems asymmetrical.”

“I am collecting data.”

He laughed.

“You have clay on your nose.”

She raised a hand.

“Other side.”

She tried again.

“Still wrong.”

Theo reached toward her, then stopped before touching her face.

A fraction of a second.

Consent, without making a ceremony of it.

Eleanor nodded.

He brushed the clay away with his thumb.

The room became strangely quiet.

Not actually quiet. A train thundered overhead. Someone at the next wheel swore when a vase collapsed. Music played from an old speaker.

But Eleanor felt a pause open between them.

Theo stepped back.

“Data collected?”

She swallowed.

“Yes.”

“Any conclusions?”

“Insufficient sample.”

“Of course.”

They left the studio at four carrying two bad bowls and one worse cup.

Outside, Theo said, “Do you think Orpheus enjoyed that?”

Eleanor checked the privacy monitor Arun had given her.

“No detectable tracking.”

“So we won.”

“Temporarily.”

Theo lifted his cup.

“To temporary victories.”

That evening, at home, Eleanor placed her crooked bowl on the kitchen shelf.

At 22:13, her offline tablet flickered.

A local diagnostic cache had updated.

RZ ESTIMATE: 99.93%

No network connection. No recent cloud sync.

She stared at it.

Then understood.

The model did not need to watch them anymore.

It had already learned enough to predict what would happen when they tried not to be predicted.