THE GIRL THE ALGORITHM CHOSE

In August 2024, I arrived at Makerere University carrying the nascent confidence of a young man who believed he understood himself. The future looked luminous from the foot of the hill: an open horizon, a golden promise, a vast dreamscape waiting for my footprints.

I had been admitted to study Computer Science at the College of Computing and Information Sciences, COCIS, as everyone called it. To me, Makerere was not merely a university. It was the mighty Makerere: the hill where ambition climbed, where brilliant minds became a constellation, and where I intended to continue the serious academic life I had always known.

I had spent most of my education loyal to books. While other boys spoke of girlfriends and heartbreak, I privately considered myself immune. Romance belonged to songs and films, not to my carefully ordered life.

“No girl can distract me,” I used to say.

It was the kind of preposterous declaration life enjoys overhearing.

During orientation week, we gathered in Big Lab 2 on the second floor of COCIS. It was a liminal morning: we had left secondary school behind but had not yet become university students in anything except name. The room carried a convivial mixture of nervous laughter, whispered introductions and the furtive glances of freshers pretending to possess equanimity.

At the front of the room stood our orientation speaker, Hon. Mwegyesa Saul, speaking to us about university life, responsibility and the opportunities ahead.

I sat among them, ready to hear about timetables, course units and university regulations.

Then my eyes found her.

She had a warm brown complexion, calm eyes and a smile with the gentle radiance of dawn. A gossamer stillness seemed to surround her, as though the noise of the room had agreed not to disturb her. While the rest of us looked like bewildered freshers, she appeared almost seraphic, composed, graceful and strangely at home.

Someone introduced her as Juliana.

The name entered my mind like a melody and refused to leave. Before the speaker had finished, my imagination had begun its quixotic work. It placed her at the centre of an invented universe and arranged every other thought in orbit around her.

First crushes are poor judges of proportion. Within minutes, I had promoted a girl I had never spoken to into a princess. Before learning anything about her character, her dreams or even her full name, I had turned her into an enigma wrapped in starlight.

I told myself that God must have taken particular care while creating her. Had King Solomon seen her, I thought, perhaps the Song of Songs would have needed another chapter.

Yet for all the celestial poetry forming inside me, I could not produce one ordinary sentence.

Hello, my name is Anthony.

That was all I needed to say.

But reticence stood before my tongue like an obstinate guard. The words became tremulous whenever I imagined speaking them. I remained in my seat until orientation ended, watching my opportunity walk out of Big Lab 2.

That evening, I returned to Nkrumah Hall carrying an ineffable regret.

“Why didn’t you speak to her?” I asked myself.

No answer came.

“You only had to say hello.”

Still, no answer.

Night spread its velvet shadow across the campus, but sleep did not visit me. Moonlight rested on the window while I drifted into a reverie. Whenever I closed my eyes, Juliana appeared like an apparition. Her name moved through my thoughts as a whisper, then returned as an echo:

Juliana.

A firefly of hope would bloom whenever I imagined seeing her again, only for disquiet to extinguish it. She did not know me. She probably did not remember seeing me. Yet somewhere at Makerere, a fresher lay awake because of a smile she had given to the room without knowing one particular heart had received it.

By the weekend, my appetite had weakened. Food stood before me like an assignment I had no intention of completing. I kept waiting for Monday, believing that one glimpse of Juliana might restore both my appetite and my sagacity. Perhaps her smile would be a lantern in the strange tempest she had unknowingly created.

Monday arrived beneath a rain kissed sky. Makerere’s capricious morning weather delayed me, and I entered my Digital Innovation and Computational Thinking lecture late. The class was already underway in Room 4A. I slipped through the door with surreptitious care, hoping to find a seat without attracting attention.

Then I saw her.

There she was, the girl from Big Lab 2, seated in the same lecture room.

My heartbeat became thunder. The floor seemed to move like a tide beneath me, and every sensible thought scattered like a petal in the wind. Juliana’s presence possessed its own gravity.

I wish I could say I responded with maturity. I wish I had taken my seat, opened my notebook and concentrated.

Instead, the room tilted.

My memory of what followed dissolved into a silver cloud. When I opened my eyes, I was staring at the unfamiliar ceiling of Makerere University Hospital, thoroughly discombobulated. People told me that I had fainted in class.

Perhaps it was hunger. Perhaps it was exhaustion. Perhaps the hurried walk through the rain had caused some physical perturbation. The true explanation remained an enigma, but I offered no one my private and scientifically dubious diagnosis.

In my febrile imagination, Juliana had caused it.

I missed the rest of...