It is not Aqqord!  That would be classless, okay?  Inserting yourself as a woman's top match is the act of a person without any class.  Aqqord has at least some sense of classiness.

Anyways!  The top match is some guy who goes by Doomnoper.  Judging by his photo, he is one of the few souls besides Aqqord himself to wear reasonable-looking glasses instead of machine goggles, as well as a trilby so dark that it fades into the dark background he was photographed against.

Doomnoper is apparently some sorta minor Spark who tried to stop some sorta staggeringly catastrophic opponent from taking over all of Europa and maybe destroying the world!  He, like, totally lost, and now resides as a refugee in Doctor Disaster's domain.  His profile says that he is probably something of a rare taste, bedroom-wise, but very tasty if you are the right sort of woman to be into what he has to offer.  Dominant, sadist, and a huge goofball (especially in the bedroom) despite his generally grim aura and backstory.

You can buy action figures of him, for a price.

Nah. The action figure is just too much. Who does this guy think he is. He didn't even win.

(She does wonder about the rare taste, but reminds herself that she can always come back to this one later.)

Next!

Mister Bloomlord isn't a tight match to Opalyn specifically.  But one of the first things you learn in machine learning: priors matter.  The fact is, the machine didn't really have that much specific info on Opalyn.  So the #2 match is just that one guy in town who you would guess, on priors, any woman might end up dating.

The machine did compromise on one part of Opalyn's request, namely, for the man to be available.  But Mister Bloomlord does still have some room left in his romantic schedule, despite the other 37 women he's dating.  In fact, given how many other women it's worked out for, the odds are if anything strongly in Opalyn's favor!

(Possibly there is at least one time machine involved here.)

Thirty-seven! His milkshake certainly brings all the girls to the yard! Opalyn wants to know what the special ingredient is. He can go in the maybe pile for further study.

It does not sound like Mister Bloomlord will have a lot of room for Opalyn, though, so she should probably keep looking.

#3:  He-Who-Soars.

A perfect match?  No.  But if He-Who-Soars is into you, he will damn well make it work.  He's a hardgoing perfectionist that way.  So, really, it's only necessary that he be attracted to you, not that you be attracted to him.  Statistically speaking, that's quite a boost to the probability of a successful match.

Unacceptable! Opalyn is the main character in this story and if someone is going to work hard to pull something off, it'll be her.

Next!

#4:  Some guy who renamed himself to "Mornelithe Falconsbane".

Who's not into rogueish catboys?  Another minor Spark, who transformed himself feline, and also got chased out of his previous domain after a bunch of, er, well, heroes, actually, brought down his reign of, er, terrifying villainy.  With a distinct sexual component.  Also he turned his own daughter into an unwilling catgirl as the prototype for his own transformation.  He's in Doctor Disaster's territory under probation, under supervision, and under condition that he makes himself useful and restricts himself to willing victims.

Some women are into that sort of thing!  The machine doesn't know otherwise!  Opalyn didn't tell Aqqord to restrict to Lawful Good alignments!

Opalyn tells herself sternly that this one is not at all interesting and tosses it emphatically in the no pile.

Why are the top five mostly worse than the next five? Can match #5 save the day?

(Worse, hm?  If that's what she wants to tell herself.)

(...Okay but actually if you take the perspective that Aqqord's engine is going to behave like a not-very-debugged machine learning system, it's perfectly natural for the top results to be weird.  Consider Opalyn's real value function in mates to be V, and view Aqqord's machine as computing a proxy U of V, with an error term [U - V].  Indeed, view U as being composed of V plus the error term [U - V].  Then selecting the topmost results from U = V + [U - V] is not just selecting on high V (insofar as U correlates with V at all), but is also potentially selecting for places where the error term [U - V] is positive and high.  This is the generalized form of Goodhart's Law that we might combine with the Optimizer's Curse to yield a concept of Goodhart's Curse; to select high values from an imperfect proxy is to select for upward error in that proxy, even if on average U is a statistically unbiased estimator of V.)

(Or put less technically:  Just like search engines in Opalyn's world from time to time start to cough up spam or other weird things in their top results, it shouldn't be surprising if the top results from Aqqord's engine are a collection of weird cases that sideways maxed out Aqqord's imperfect attempt at a search algorithm.  Like result #2 being that one guy in town who everyone dates, or result #3 being some overly-determined fellow with the capacity to make any relationship work if he tries it at all, or result #1 being the all-around objectively best person.  It shouldn't be that surprising if you have to go down to #5 to start finding interesting people who might actually match Opalyn.)

(#4.)

("the all-around objectively best person" SERIOUSLY who does this guy think he is)

(Hey, he tried to create better people.)

Anyways!  #5 is Kelsam, a man slightly older chronologically than he appears biologically, owing to some lesser optimizations.

Kelsam is not a Spark.  Kelsam is determined to show the world that it is possible to contribute useful science and technology to society without being a fucking Spark.  Kelsam thinks that technology which anyone can maintain, build, and extend is potentially more valuable than technology that can only be maintained by Sparks, even if this would require a reconceptualization of what is possible to non-Sparks and some amount of educational reform.  Possibly even trying to find men and women who are good at science and engineering without being Sparks, and encouraging them to have a lot of kids together.  Whatever it takes, Europan society needs to get that done, or it will forever be blocked on the limits of whatever inspiration Sparks tap.

This world has stagnated too long by trying to make Sparks solely responsible for carrying the torch of technology.  It's the path of least resistance, but it has meant that technology goes backward whenever a key Spark dies.  It won't be easy to resist the cheapest and easiest way of getting supertechnology, to build another entire path, but it must be done; things won't really change in this world until that happens; and whatever someone can contribute to making that happen, is the most good they can probably do in this world.

Kelsam is a sadist and not particularly monogamous, but has a reserved place for a primary partner that no woman has yet filled.

Oh, now this. This requires a closer look. Is that's everything that's in the profile? Does it say anything about his dating history or what his past partners had to say about him? What has he actually done so far on his reconceptualization and educational reform program?

Opalyn is really wishing she could webstalk him a little bit but apparently she only has this one packet of papers. She'll scrutinize every word she's got, though.

Some time earlier there was a period of youthful indiscretion wherein -- convinced that he could not know his limits, until he had tested them -- Kelsam tried simultaneously dating the thirteen most interesting girls he could find, mostly his own (young) age.  This does mean there's a number of different perspectives available on Kelsam -- though many of those are based on experience of a younger version of him.  Comments archived into Aqqord's machine include:

"He's absolutely going to get himself killed.  I bet 2:1 within the next five years."
  -- Mione Ranger (16 years earlier)

"The only really polite man I've ever dated.  This may say more about me than about him."
  -- Aisa Astilla

"Try actually asking Kelsam things.  He will actually tell them to you, or say straight out that he won't."
  -- A. S. Modia

"In retrospect that entire relationship was a mistake.  It caused more physical collateral damage than any other relationship I've ever been in.  This was more or less 50/50 the fault of both of us.  I'd say we've both learned a few valuable lessons in the process, and are unlikely to repeat either of those exact mistakes again."
  -- Rissase Var

"Do not tell this part to guys -- you're not going to show it to guys? good, because they won't understand -- Kelsam can be equally into sex where you're not having an orgasm, because he thinks that's hot if you're doing it for subby reasons.  If you're giving it to him as a gift, or allowing it to him as a freedom.  I personally just find it an overwhelming relief not to need to have an orgasm every time on pain of injuring some guy's ego, and I somewhat gingerly told Kelsam that straight out, and he said he was fine trying that out to see how it worked for both of us."
  -- several different girls, apparently independently

"He thinks he's cruel, but he's not.  I'd hit him up sometimes when hollow cruelty was better than no cruelty."
  -- Pi Larpin, E.D.A.

"Likes variety in bed.  Turns out, so do I."
  -- Mary Itxel

"A selfish man pursuing a good cause.  The selfish part didn't work for me, liked the cause though.  Adequate in bed, but too much about the bedding."
  -- Peran Za

"Will possibly be interesting when he grows up and if he turns evil."
  -- Gail Throon

Opalyn approves of Kelsam gathering empirical data about his limits! But she wonders why there's nothing more recent in the file. Did he wildly swing from 13 girlfriends to 0? Exactly how wounded was he by the experiment all those years ago? Well, she's never seen a dating profile that answered that question, no way to find out but to step into the minefield and see what explodes.

She flags some of the notes for further investigation: selfishness, tendency to get killed, physical damage. She won't rely too much on any one of these reports but they do sort of paint a picture, together, don't they?

She likes the reports that Kelsam is not actually cruel, that he's candid, and the sex stuff.

That dating history was all on the first piece of paper. What's on page two? Anything about actual work products?

It's probably going to sound a bit odd from an Earth perspective, and like Kelsam is trying some things that an Earthling would consider a naive, overly-obvious, hopeful approach, that isn't likely to work in real life.  As for whether it flies in Europa, who knows.

Kelsam did not go straight out and invent the saner parts of Earth scientific infrastructure; he has no way of knowing what sorta-worked on another planet.

He is taking what Europans would consider a more natural approach to this sort of thing.

As Kelsam analyzes the issue, the fundamental problem with non-Spark science and engineering is that it will take a lot of time and cost a lot of money to build it up to the point where it can compete with just having powerful Sparks run out and do crazy shit immediately.

If a sufficiently large or powerful group of people were motivated to construct Sparkless Science, they could (as Kelsam sees it) offer large monetary prizes for the sort of science or inventions that are learnable and duplicable by non-Sparks and push the frontier of that particular subvariety of human knowledge, over time.  Continue this prize-offering process for a while, and eventually civilization as a whole would have accumulated science and engineering to a level where it could compete with some Sparks.  But the expenses would be immediate, and the benefits much delayed -- perhaps for centuries.

From Kelsam's perspective, then, the problem reduces to, "How do I give a sufficiently net-wealthy group of people today, an incentive to care about what level of science and engineering exists a couple of centuries later, such that they pay prize money for it now?"

Having thus reduced the problem, the drawing-a-straight-line solution is... immortality!  If people were immortal, they'd have more incentive to care about what happens centuries later!  Also this is a long-term project and Kelsam might need to steer it for a while, because he doesn't trust anyone else to see it from exactly the right angle.

This obvious first approach is why Kelsam is a bit older than he looks -- his first act was to go out to investigate rumors and legends about immortality methods, like any Europan would consider the straightforward course of action in his situation.  Albeit the results he got are due too much to Adventures and Things Happening that do not properly scale.

He's not NOT a mad scientist. He knows this, right?

There are non-mad scientists?  Isn't that just the sort of attitude that goes along with any variety of Science, Spark-born or otherwise?

Europa makes Opalyn a little bit tired. She'll probably get used to it?

Making immortality safe and reliable in a way that scales is, evidently, somewhat hard.  A few of the greatest Sparks in the world are ancient, but most are not.  Perhaps Sparkless Science could solve that problem in a couple of dozen decades, but that does not give current people an incentive to invest.

Kelsam is rather smart for a non-Spark, though.  He has gone past what Europa would consider the first obvious thought on the subject, instead of throwing himself madly harder at replicable immortality.

Kelsam doesn't need large groups of wealthy-enough people to stay alive into the future.

He needs them to expect to be in the future, and in a way that depends on future science and engineering getting far enough.

So what if, when somebody got old today, they could somehow travel to a few centuries later, after post-Spark science and engineering had advanced to the point of doing replicable safe immortality?

There are several known historical cases of stasis pods, time-suspenders, etcetera.  They were all built by specialized or overpowered Sparks, of course, because that's just how Europa rolls.  But that can maybe be improved-on!  Whereas safe and reliable immortality is evidently hard, building cheaper stasis-pods doesn't have that sort of known hardness.  This is especially true if you're willing to tolerate the sort of incidental damage in the stasis procedure that a post-Spark, replicable-science Future Civilization could probably also cure; thus the problem Kelsam needs to scale is, in a way, easier than the standard problem of stasis pods.

So what Kelsam is currently working on is getting the sort of stasis-pod design that is allowed to cause some side effects, can be reliably reproduced by more than one Spark, doesn't take significant work or expense to maintain, and isn't that costly to have a minor Spark build a hundred copies of.

Then, he will build a generation-spanning conspiracy of high-net-worth individuals to sponsor the long-term development of Post-Spark Science under conditions where they can expect to personally see and benefit from the results of their labor!

Kind of a sideways way of approaching it, but sounds basically sensible?

What kind of side effects, Opalyn wonders?

But maybe that's the sort of thing she can just ask about on a first date.