“Do you remember when you were a child and you would spin around in place as fast as you could and when you stopped the world kept spinning?”

She did this every time, with every person the site told her would make a good match for her. It was both her introduction to them and her own additional screening step.

More than a few people never answered her, either ignoring the message completely or replying to it with a lot of personal details she had already gleaned from her profile or questions about what she was into. She ignored these. The questions and details were uninteresting, and the person behind them probably more or less so.

One of her matches replied to her with a detailed explanation of how this effect was caused via something called “persistence of memory”… she had no idea if this was true, and suspected that her correspondent didn’t, either. It had the ring of something that one says because it sounds good, because one cannot bear to appear ignorant.

She deleted that reply and ignored all further messages from the person.

Another person replied with “My mother always told me to stop because I was making her dizzy to watch. Honestly now I’m getting dizzy just thinking about it.” She felt a little sorry for that one and did not delete the message immediately.

The possible suitor after that asked her, “What do you mean when you say the world keeps spinning?”

A request for clarification always seemed like a fair question, so she answered, “The world keeps rushing past you while you’re spinning around, and when you stop the world seems to still be moving in your view.”

The reply came: “Do you mean your head or eyes keep spinning from momentum? That doesn’t seem likely.”

She responded: “No. It’s purely a sensory effect. You are still, the world is still, but the world seems to be moving.”

“Like a scrollbar in your head? Impossible. Your eyes must have been moving and you didn’t realize.”

She didn’t care for the tone she perceived in that text, but knowing how treacherous such things may be, she persisted.

“No,” she wrote. “It’s a physical sensation. The same objects, the same stretch of the world, the same everything is in your sight as before… but you swear that they’re moving sideways.”

“So you become delusional when you spin? Thanks for the warning.”

That was the end of her attempt to explain herself to that person, and it also damped her enthusiasm for making such explanations to anyone else in the future. She had almost decided to give up and try a different opening gambit for future matches when she got a reply from one last person she’d sent the question to.

“Yes,” it said. “Wasn’t that awesome?”

He didn’t know or care who had hired him to kill so many young men. He didn’t know what they had done to deserve death at his hands… he didn’t know if they even did deserve it. That was not a matter for him to decide. He was neither a philosopher nor a judge.

But there was one question that plagued him, that dogged him nightly. Many of his targets seemed to be insomniacs, being awake at their computers or reading in their beds when he came upon them. And when they saw their doom was upon them, more than one of them had chosen to say as their last words, “You can’t kill me! I’m a virgin!”

And so Ichiro, though he did not like to ask questions, wondered still: why did so many teenage males confuse ninjas and unicorns?

“Got you!” the boy cried, leaping from his hiding place in the bushes. The little man yelped and jumped, but the boy’s hands closed around him. “I caught you!”

“Alright, alright!” the little man cried. “You did. You got me.”

“Now you have to tell me where your gold is,” the boy said.

“Oh, no, that’s leprechauns,” the little man said. “I’m a gnome. I don’t have gold and I don’t grant wishes. But you can ask me one question and I have to answer it truthfully.”

“How can I get rich?” the boy asked.

“That’s not the question,” the gnome said.

“What?”

“I told you, you can ask one question and I have to answer it truthfully,” the gnome said. “That is not the one question you can ask.”

“Oh,” the boy said. “Um, what is the name of my one true love?”

“That’s not it, either.”

“How will I die?”

“Neither is that,” the gnome said.

“Meaning of life?”

“Nope.”

“Secret of life?”

“Sorry.”

“Grand unified field theory?”

“Never heard of it,” the gnome said.

“Well… what is the question, then?” the boy asked.

“That one,” the gnome said smugly, and vanished.