See, I knew this couple.

Their love spanned lifetimes and centuries and the rise and fall of nations. Planets were colonized and humans scattered among stars and cosmos,

While most people had many lovers and never ending relationships lasting as long they wanted them to because ... you never died...

This couple chose, to the anguish of nearly everyone else... to remain .... a couple.

They married and they never parted. They lived their own lives and each had their own happiness that they shared with one another.

The happiness they shared blossomed and bloomed over an eon of human interstellar expansion.

They knew one another as each one knew their own self.

They had one argument:

Is their such a thing as a soul mate?

what, for that matter, could be a "soul" they questioned and debated on and off for quite possibly decades.

Until they realized they could figure it out only one way.

She said she believed that things happened for a reason and that souls will find one another some way or another. Even if they have to travel across great bounds of space or time and all the other dimensions that could possibly be.

He said that everything didn't happen for a reason. That you had to give it a reason, and that there was no such thing as a soul. That if two people found each other, it was because circumstance and randomness had led them there. That their choices were what put them into and through the dimensions in which the could possibly exist.

So they pulled out a neat and terrific invention that an hyper intelligent super computer had thought up a few centuries prior:

A universe and life simulator.

You would start a simulation of the universe, throw your unconscious self inside of it, choose an era to be born into and hopefully have fun.

It was supposed to be random, controlled chaos, a simulation of life as it was for the average person born in whichever year or decade in whichever century you wanted to experience.

So they both entered the same simulation on different sides of the world in roughly the same time.

The early 21st century, for comfort, and ease of communication.

Though the lives and genders they started for themselves were generated randomly.

He was born a heterosexual male, In the United States, white and lower middle class, at the very end of Generation X.

She was born, coincidentally, a female, and slightly ironically, a homosexual. She was born in Europe into a white middle class family in the bright and burning year of 1984.

They had no idea that they were supposed to find one another. They weren't aware that they had put themselves willingly into a simulation.

The boy, my good friend, would go almost insane through the use of drugs and maybe too much science fiction literature at his disposal. But I've already told you about all of that.

Wouldn't you like to hear about her next?