Bruce Sterling, Green days in Brunei, mi favourite short cyberpunk story:

Their romance had grown through the Net; (…) Day by day it became more intense, for it was all kept in a private section of memory, and nothing could be taken back. There were over a hundred messages on their secret disks, starting colly and teasingly, and working slowly up through real passion to a kind of mutual panic.

The hadn’t planned it to happen like this. It was part of the dynamic of the Net. For Seria, it has been a rare chance to escape her role and talk to an interesting stranger. The net had tricked them. Because the couldn’t see each other, Turner realized now that no woman had ever known and understood him as Seria did. (…)

Over the weeks, it had all come pouring out between them: his family, her family, their resentment, his loniless, her petty constraints, all those irritants that ulcerate a single person, but are soothed by two. Bizarrely, they had more in common than he could have ever expected. Real things, things that mattered.

The painfully simple local Net filtered human relations down to a single channel of printed words, leaving only a high-flown Platonic essence. Their relationship had grown into a classic, bloodless, spiritual romance in its most intense and dangerous sense. Human beings weren’t meant to live such roles. It was the stuff of high drama because it could very easily drive you crazy