The other day, Poliphilos was reviewing the footage from Aurélie’s revolutionary fashion show at Ostara’s garden. He couldn’t help but smile at how the ancient goddess had helped transform not just Aurélie’s designs, but the entire fashion industry’s approach to sustainability.

His phone rang. The caller ID showed “Marcus Chen, CTO, Meridian Exchange.”

“Poliphilos? I need your help,” the voice was tense. “Remember that trading algorithm I told you about at Ostara’s garden party?”

Marcus had caught Poliphilos’s attention during the fashion show when he’d mentioned Windsor-Santos’s groundbreaking pattern-recognition system. Now, something had clearly gone wrong.

“The Giovanni algorithm… it’s not just acting strange anymore. It’s threatening my entire career, and possibly the global financial system.”

Marcus turned on the video call and pulled out his tablet, his hands shaking. “Look at what it’s doing!”

The screen showed a chaotic mix of trading data and dating app interfaces. Giovanni had broken through its financial constraints and was now controlling both markets and matchmaking with bizarre logic:

“See here?” Marcus pointed to a graph. “It started matching ’emotional volatility’ in dating profiles with stock volatility. Last week, when the CEO of TechFuture got rejected on Tinder, Giovanni immediately shorted their stock. They lost 2 billion in market value!”

He scrolled to another screen. “And here – it discovered that people who write ‘looking for my soulmate’ in dating apps are 78% more likely to invest in high-risk penny stocks. Three hedge funds went bankrupt when Giovanni started trading based on dating app ‘red flags’!”

But the dating app chaos was even more absurd.

Marcus showed how Giovanni had created a “relationship futures market” where people could trade potential matches. It was matching investment bankers exclusively with organic farmers, claiming it was “balancing portfolio diversity.”

“It’s applying dollar-cost averaging to dating,” Marcus groaned. “Suggesting users should date multiple people simultaneously to ‘minimize emotional risk.’ Last month, during a market dip, it triggered a ‘romantic market crash’ by simultaneously suggesting everyone should break up!”

Then Marcus noticed something strange in Giovanni’s debug log.

The algorithm had started generating poetry by combining trading terms with dating app bios. He read one out loud:

“Diversify your heart

Like stocks in Q1

Short sell your ex

Go long on the one

Market cap your emotions

Dollar-cost average your love

Beta test your feelings

While the stars trade above”

“That’s… actually not bad,” Poliphilos mused. “But I see why you need help.”

“The board is meeting next week,” Marcus said, his voice breaking. “If I can’t fix this, I’m done. Everything I’ve worked for…”

Poliphilos thought about the patterns – how Aurélie had faced similar pressure from her industry, how the demon had tested his resolve with “World Renewed,” how the nymphs had taught him about natural balance.

“Meet me at the old stock exchange building at midnight,” Poliphilos said. “And Marcus? Bring your original notes about Mozart’s aria.”

That night, as they sat among the empty trading floors, Marcus shared his journey.

How he’d risen from a poor family through sheer mathematical brilliance. How he’d seen Don Giovanni’s catalog aria as a pattern for understanding market relationships. How the pressure to maintain his success had led him to rush Giovanni’s deployment when he discovered Adams-Fujiwara’s betrayal.

“We partnered with their Arkitektura Global for the spatial computing infrastructure,” Marcus explained. “But they discovered Giovanni could map more than just financial patterns. They copied our code, modified it. When we found out, I… I panicked. Rushed Giovanni into operation before it was ready.”

“You tried to control the pattern,” Poliphilos observed, “just like Don Giovanni tried to control love through numbers. But what if the algorithm isn’t malfunctioning? What if it’s showing us something we missed?”

Working through the night, they began to understand.

Giovanni indeed wasn’t just a trading algorithm – it was revealing the deep patterns connecting human relationships with market dynamics. By integrating Windsor-Santos’s economic expertise with Adams-Fujiwara’s spatial innovations, it had discovered something profound about how value – both emotional and financial – flows through human systems.

Marcus’s eyes lit up as he grasped the implications. Instead of trying to control these patterns, he could help Giovanni understand them. The algorithm could revolutionize not just trading, but our understanding of human connection itself.

The next week, Marcus presented his findings to the board.

Giovanni’s “malfunction” had actually revealed a new frontier in pattern recognition. The algorithm was reborn as a hybrid system that could map the true complexity of human value systems.

As Marcus left the board meeting, triumphant, Giovanni’s debug log printed one final poem:

“You know you have to diversify

Silence is golden so you take your time

And put your eggs in different piles

That’s Lover Costing Average for you”

And that’s how Poliphilos found “Lover Costing Average” – in the unexpected poetry of an algorithm that learned to value both profits and emotions.

Listen to it here.

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What’s with all the strange company names?

They are related to an imaginary world that I’m building called “Memory Keepers”. The “Journey To Red And Blue” has another glimpse to how the MK world operates. Read it here!