Love on the Blockchain

Hey! You’re the interviewer streamer chick, aren’t you? It’s so good to see you, I’ve been preparing for this interview for like, three weeks. I’ve got a real show for you.

Oh, yeah, right. This is a newer thing to “the real world”, I forgot. I’ll do a quick rundown - of course, you know, but for your watchers. Oh, shit, this is kind of complicated to explain to a newbie. Okay, so you remember NFTs, right? Basic idea, you have a blockchain-verified token that signifies that you’re the specific owner of a file. Okay, so that’s what LoveTokens are, but there’s a bit of a difference - instead of a file, it’s a token that signifies you’re in a relationship. So let’s say I’m a content creator, right, and I want to sell someone the “boyfriend” relationship. I make a LoveToken and post it like, “Hey, if you get this, I’m your boyfriend”, and then people can bid on it. Get it?

Okay, cool, we’re nodding, we’re nodding. Haha. Yeah, it’s kind of a weird thing to wrap your head around at first, but that’s why I’m here, to pull back the curtain. Ooooo.

Right, right, how did I get into this. Standard stuff. I had gotten the first one when I was still young, just a teenager with a dream. She’d been someone I can… honestly, I can hardly remember her now, just a small-scale streamer, but her LoveToken had just dropped down into the realm of affordability. I hadn’t expected to get it, but when that notification popped up on my screen that she was mine - my girlfriend, exclusively, the breath stopped in my throat and, well, I was hooked.

As a relationship collector, the goal is always to get the rarest, most desirable relationships. Sure, some people see it as more of an investment than a direct relationship and buy and sell them like they’re no big deal, but there’s a difference, and the true collectors know that. For the true collector, a collection of relationships is the purest expression of love you can get. To have your relationship until the end of time, isn’t that the dream? Isn’t that what we always wanted?

So now, I’m the top collector in the world. Sure, it might not seem like I have a lot of relationships. Some collectors have relationships that run in the thousands, small-time influencers and streamers and content creators, but my collection is oriented around quality, not quantity. I have twenty total girls in my collection. You would think that that would be sufficient in and of itself, but I’ve collected beyond that. See, there’s more to relationships than just love relationships, right? There’s Friendships, Friendships+, Close and Distant Family. The bigger content creators will usually tokenize those relationships as well, since they get a commission on each transaction.

I used to live in a better apartment - you know the East Side? That little upper-level collection?

Oh shit, they tore that down? Christ. I haven’t - I haven’t been there in a while. When you’re collecting, you kind of lose track of the outside world. Anyways, I ended up here after I’d shifted my lifestyle to support spending as much as I could collecting the entire set for each of the top girls. Usually, it’s a small percentage of the girl’s cost for each member of their set, but it adds up, of course. I had to start trading down, checking back in with the local House-Mart to see what I could afford to rent. So now I’m on the lowest levels of the city and the smog outside’s thick enough that they recommend the Xtra-Saf-T masks with extra acid resistance, but it’s been worth it.

Do you want to see my collection? It’s here on this wall. Here, come on, bring the camera over. I’ve got a case for each one, polypyrex glass on each one and a vacuum seal. Some collectors don’t like to have anything physical and, I mean, you don’t need anything physical since it’s all digitally encoded, but I thought it would be neat to have something for each of them. I custom-designed these heart-shaped lockets - they’ve got chips inside of each one with the alphanumeric signifier for each of the relationships.

Yeah, yeah, come on and zoom in. I’ve got some high-quality images in each of these - the custom LCDs cost me like, a thousand dollars each but they’re super-high-def. That’s Psyissa. She’s - oh, look at her, she’s so cute. I love this part where she’s just not able to get over the cliff- there was some glitch I think. She’s one of the crown jewels here, you could say. She had a big family, too. She was from one of those countries that had like, a lot of refugees when the famines hit mid-2036ish. They didn’t get the whole, like, “Stop having kids!” thing, so now I’ve had to buy all of their relationships to her. See? Here they are - they don’t have any good videos so I had to like, rip stills from the streams she did where they were in the background.

So what makes me the best? Yeah, I can understand the confusion. See, the important thing to remember is that it’s a relationship, and relationships can change. You can get outbid by someone else and you could lose everything! It’s a huge problem, and there’s only one way.

See, if the content creator’s alive, their relationship status can change. There’s only one way to lock it in- if the creator dies. Then all that’s left is the relationship, and let me tell you, there’s no better relationship than one that you can’t lose.

That’s why I’m the best. See this girl? Sykken? She was really tricky to find. She streamed from a blank room and she didn’t really wear any identifying clothes or anything, but I finally figured it out. She’d forgotten to encrypt her data stream and I reverse-engineered the system in the MMO she was playing to find her IP address. From there it was a short jump to find out where she lived and, well, haha, she’s here now.

What? Why are you backing away?

It’s just how collecting works. Don’t run from me.

It’s just like pinning a goddam butterfly, that’s all. Don’t act like they’re people like you and me. They’re just collectibles.