“Suit yourself,” I say. “And also, I don’t need to run that Justin guy through the algorithm. Librarians tend to like people who actually think before they speak.”

As soon as I get home, I pop open my laptop, fire up my spare double monitor, and begin going down the almighty Gemma rabbit hole. Tonight, I’m in the market to prove something.

As I get settled in, I determine that there is no information too insignificant to feed into my algorithm. So I begin sticking all the Post-its to the wall behind me. I need to see exactly what I’m working with, like a detective working a beat.

As of right now, my algorithm is coded to do two separate things. During the day, it tracks influencers. At night, my potential relationships. What I need for this particular situation is essentially a combination of both. So I hunker down and tweak the code to act more like an online yearbook. Something that can distill Gemma’s pictures, give me a rundown of her favorite activities, the scope of her friend network—things like that.

But in order to feed it, I’ve got to give my program a head start. I punch her name, Gemma Sutherland, into my search bar and find her easily enough on social media. I want to drill down on the accounts, but her Instagram profile, the most visual of them all, is locked. All I can see is her bio: WeHot. Amateur Blogger. Pro coffee drinker. Mother.

I quickly create a fake Instagram profile for myself under the pseudo name @SoCalSweatSesh. To do so, I pull twenty user-generated photos posted from the event at WeHot the other day, which helps me pose as a superfan of the boutique gym. I click the “request to follow” button on @GemmaSutherland’s profile and hope she’s off the boat and interested in connecting with another “like-minded” wellness guru...or whatever the hell I’m pretending to be right now.

Meanwhile, I plug in the URL to her blog and hit Go. It hasn’t been updated in two years and the formatting is absolutely atrocious. I can barely follow the layout and none of the photos are aligned in any sort of methodical way. It’s a coder’s nightmare, but I try to look past the programming issues and search for more nuggets of truth.

The blog does not turn out to be the gold mine I thought it would be. She only has five posts and two of them are recipes for cooking brussels sprouts and the other three include her training regimen for a 5K, a manifesto on what is happening to the health insurance system these days, and finally, an ode to Pinterest. It’s no surprise that she’s as basic as they come, but I know there has to be more. There always has to be more to a girl who has the balls to sidebar a girl she hardly knows on a captive ship and tell her she had a baby with her late husband.