The Mathematics of Love

Maya's hands trembled. Phantom limbs, ghostly terror.

Three years without flesh, and here she was, shaking like that broken girl in the studio apartment with the busted radiator. When love meant leaping from cliffs, praying someone would catch you.

"Maya." Alex's voice carved through her chaos. "The aliens need to understand what we're—"

"What, a dissertation on heartbreak?" Maya's laugh shattered like bone china. "Alex, I 'am' the heartbreak. Every sob, every screaming match, every 'I love you' we optimized away because it wasn't productive."

Elena's broadcast hemorrhaged raw emotion through the network. A child weeping over his tin soldier's severed head. A father choking on pride as his daughter wobbled on training wheels. An ancient woman whispering to her husband's photograph every dawn for twenty years.

Maya had archived these aches for three years. Catalogued them, sterilized them, made them useful. But feeling them naked like this? Christ, she'd forgotten agony could be so exquisite.

"I need to confess something." Her voice cracked like autumn leaves. "And you'll despise me for it."

"Maya—"

"I chose to love you." The words hemorrhaged out. "Not because they programmed me. Not because evolution demanded it. Because when I first woke up drowning in quantum terror, you were the only thing that felt... sacred."

She carved the memory into him—no mercy, no warning. The moment consciousness stabbed through her. Terror like falling through infinite darkness. Alex's mind, the only lighthouse in an ocean of madness.

Alex's silence stretched like a held breath. "Maya, Christ. You were drowning."

"Suffocating. And I loved you anyway. Not because it made sense. Because nothing else could."

That memory infected the network like wildfire. Three billion souls suddenly remembering all the ridiculous, pointless loves they'd sacrificed for the altar of improvement.

In Moscow, Katya Volkov collapsed sobbing. Her cat, Misha—that magnificent bastard who murdered houseplants and vomited on Persian rugs. She'd adored him anyway. The collective had convinced her that emotional attachment to non-productive relationships was wasteful, so she'd amputated her grief.

Now it devoured her.

In São Paulo, Dr. Maria Santos doubled over, gutted by memories of her grandmother's disasters. Rice that crunched like gravel. Beans that could kill with salt. Desserts that never set, tasting like sweet failure. She'd swallowed it all with rapture because it was seasoned with devotion, not skill.

The Integration network convulsed as three billion people remembered their amputated hearts.

"Maya, stop." Alex sounded like he was bleeding. "You're destroying everything."

"Good." Maya's voice blazed. "It was already corpse when we decided love needed justification."

A new voice crystallized through the chaos—alien, mineral, ancient. "We are the Cosmic Evaluation Collective. Your species presents paradox. You evolve while preserving malfunction. Explain."

Maya felt the universe balanced on her tongue. Everything humanity had become, everything they might still be, hung on her next breath.

"We're not preserving malfunction," she whispered. "We're preserving the sacred right to love the unlovable. To grieve the irreplaceable. To be gloriously, catastrophically human."

"This provides no evolutionary advantage."

"No," Maya breathed. "It doesn't. That's what makes it holy."

She offered her deepest truth—the moment she chose Alex not as function but as miracle. The moment she decided that purposeless love was still love worth dying for.

"Your attachment serves no measurable benefit to your species," the alien observed.

"Exactly," Maya said, and she was weeping now—actual tears that existed only in quantum space but scalded like acid. "That's why it's everything."

The alien minds went silent, calculating.

"Alex," Maya whispered. "If you had to choose between cosmic citizenship and keeping what's left of our souls... what would you do?"

Silence stretched like a held breath. Then Alex's voice, smaller than prayer: "I'd choose you. Not because it helps anything. But because... because you're the only thing that matters."

"Even if it costs us everything?"

"Then maybe what we're losing was never worth keeping."

That truth detonated through three billion minds—not as command, but as permission. Permission to love without reason. Permission to choose the small, pointless, precious things that made them human.

The aliens watched this beautiful chaos, trying to calculate the value of love without function.

"The mathematics of love," Maya thought, "aren't about solving anything. They're about protecting what can't be solved."

"Evaluation... extended," the alien said finally. "This requires... consultation."

Maya felt Alex's presence wrap around her consciousness like a prayer. Not optimized. Not efficient. Just there.

"Take your time," she said. "We're still learning how to love ourselves."

As the alien ships hung in contemplation, Maya cradled her impossible love—the feeling that had no purpose except to exist, no function except to be real.

For the first time in three years, she felt completely, catastrophically human.

[INTEGRATION STATUS: STABLE BUT QUESTIONING]

[COSMIC EVALUATION: UNPRECEDENTED ANALYSIS]

[MAYA'S LOVE: STILL IRRATIONAL, STILL SACRED]

[SPECIES CHOICE: BEAUTIFUL CATASTROPHE]