Gaming the System

That we had KV pairs, that was common knowledge, but everyone's pairs were different, based on Secret WidgetCo Tech, to get you to learn stuff faster. Since some was subliminal, no one knew what they were getting, only that it worked.

That is, we knew they were doing word association stuff with us, and we understood we were getting info, but I had no idea it was so extensive, and applied outside of our actual course material.

The 'DegreePresumptive' section had a class prerequisite geo-spatial (special brain areas handle 'where' ideas) with different keyword triggers. If Grace thought about Pharma 202, she'd remember this image and know that 101 and 201 were prereqs, just by the mental map. Since it was geo-spatial, it'd be background common sense and her brain wouldn't examine how she knew it.

Per TRIPS corp. sales literature, associations triggered at subconscious levels could happen in our sleep. This let them sell courses you took while sleeping, increasing profits. I laughed at that, but I'd not tried it much.

This was pretty damned cool! I didn't know much about the geo-spatials, just some rumors floating around online linked to conspiracy theories, and I'd laughed at those.

Grace was taking Spanish, too, probably a good thing for nurses in the USA, so I looked in the coursework. I hadn't taken a language yet, so I didn't know (I liked MATH, thank you).

The deep-dive on her Spanish class content showed pictures linked to Spanish vocab - no English at all. Verbs were either infographics, geo-spatials, or tiny half-second cartoon-video. Some pictures, like for 'baby' had real photos of babies, etc., so it wasn't just infographics.

There were sounds, too! Certain sounds would trigger certain memories and thus actions. Even muscle memory could be triggered, since I knew for a fact you could take piano lessons through WidgetCo VR.

The LifeHabits area associated an alarm-sound with pictograms of getting up, bathroom, brush-teeth, shower-clean, hair-fix, meds, dress, morning-personal, eat-healthy, happy! Some of these words were linked to whole other things, in a tree-structure - very complex stuff but super-cool!

Other habits were a bedtime ritual that included brushing teeth, meds, etc.

All of this was spelled out so precisely I was amazed. Anyone would have perfect habits if they followed this scheme. I wondered if she had requested it, or if it just went with going to U Wisconsin.

I looked up another girl I knew, Dani Clarke, who had headed to USC. She'd been on the gymnastics team and in Chorus with me, which I really loved since she had an incredible body.

The personal-habits for Dani was... drum roll please... the same damned list as Grace! Under personal requests for her (it'd been just a daily 'practice piano' for Grace), Dani had 'Call mom, Saturday 11 am'.

The thing was, for both Grace and Dani, the personal requests were images taken by the WidgetCo's external-direction camera - and then OCR'd into actual text and cross-linked to other material they were learning.

Grace and Dani's images were both normal notebook paper where they'd written (their own handwriting, obviously) 'Required Tasks'.

On Dani's page was another title, halfway down the page, 'Relationship Assumptions'. Under this was written, 'enjoy cum - taste & feel, on tongue, as swallowing.'

She had to have hand-written that, as a directive to give to herself. So, she has to have known she was doing it, telling herself this, to help her out. Looking at it, I wondered if she had some previous hang-up or distaste thing that she wanted to get rid of.

Even more than that, I wondered, did it work?!?

Under the student info section it had metadata like clubs and stuff she was in, to cross-link I presumed, and when I went exploring there, it showed Dani's relationship status was, 'longterm: David Jenkins', and a link to his profile.

That led to my first manipulation. I went to David's profile, looked around for him and found he had personal habits added, too, and it showed he was in a relationship with Dani. To find out if I could make a change at all, I added a personal habit for David: "Trust Second-Cousin Mattias Completely."

With the change, the dialog box included some radio-checkboxes that were revealing themselves. One was 'Assumption' with a slider with four settings: unconscious, someone told me, self-decided, or lesson-planned. I selected 'unconscious' since what the hell.

Another checkbox was 'Expedite'. Unchecked, it showed 'Expected: 13 hrs'. I didn't need to make it faster, so that would be fine.

Last entry box showed, 'Audit-log Duration' and it defaulted to 1 week, which was fine. They probably didn't need to keep logs on everyone forever, that'd be a huge amount of data.

David's phone number was on his profile, so I jotted that down and decided to give him a text the next night, 24 hours would be more than the 13 anticipated.

Off to bed, my brain was stirring with the beginnings of a plan.

David Jenkins

The next day I made plans and tried to envision what I wanted to do with my newfound power, as well as what questions I'd ask.

That night, I waited until 7 pm my time, 5 pm his time, and texted him with, "Hey! Call me back in next hour? Want to chat. -- Your 2nd cousin Mattias"

The ping back took a minute and said, "15 minutes, at dinner."

The conversation was amazing.

He was confused to start since he knew he knew me, but he didn't remember from where, and I was ready with a response that I was a friend of his from junior high, and we'd set up the name as a code for each other, long ago.

Apparently the 'trust Matthias' worked, because he just replied, "Oh, right. Cool, I'd forgotten."

This boded well.

I asked, hey, haven't talked in a while, are you dating anyone. He said yeah, Dani, she was fun, but got on his nerves sometimes. After I asked some explicit questions, he said she'd started out not wanting to give blowjobs, but then had changed her mind two weeks ago and now she said 'I love the taste of your cum!', which he thought was funny but Very Cool.

That was enough of that, I figured.

The 'trust' thing got me wondering, then. I asked, "So, are you wealthy now? Your family has lots of money, or not?"

"Not lots. Dad has a boat, but it costs a lot, so he's always poor."

"Could you cash-app transfer me 20 bucks? As a loan I only might pay back? I'm really strapped for cash and it'd help."

"Sure!"

I waited, and BING!, a notification said I'd just been sent $20. Yay! Free money!

Now, I have to mention, ethically I didn't like this. I wasn't going to steal a lot from him, though I did know it was theft by deception. That said, I didn't ever really intend on paying him back since that would require a second transaction and I wanted to limit my contacts with him.

Still, it proved a point: I could add any instruction I wanted and he'd do it.

Sitting back in my chair, the possibilities were HUGE.

What should I do?

That was a complex question, and I spent a couple of days writing out (on paper) different ideas until I hit on one that might work.

A fellow senior, Jan Hawkins, played flute in band with me. She was right in front of me most days, and she was seriously hot. I mean, even the hairs on the back of her neck were sexy.

Jan wasn't dating anyone. I knew this because she'd mentioned it to Alice, the girl that sat next to her, when they thought I couldn't hear them. Alice wanted to set Jan up with Alice's boyfriend's friend, as a double-date thing. I heard a lot of their whispers not just because I have good hearing, but because I put my phone on my music stand and set it to auto-record audio from band class so I could listen later to how I sounded. I know, obsessive, but frankly I'd set it up once to auto-record at a certain time every day, and it just kept going.

Along the way, I found an audio-processing app that would remove instrument noise and only keep human-speech. I'd heard some talking, and found the app, and it was so cool I decided to automatically apply the filter and dump the transcriptions to a doc every day.

Fun tech!

Anyway, hearing (and reading) their secret talks told me Alice didn't really want to be alone with her boyfriend, he was asking for lots of sexy-time and she didn't like that. She liked him, but the requests were annoying to her and he didn't give her many good-times.

Going back into the control panel, I looked up Alice, her boyfriend, and some other people too, because, what the hell, I was curious.

More than curious, though, I was coming up with a plan. I had to have a plan! I was seriously horny!

Alice was sexy, too, and I wanted to find out if I could have more than one girlfriend at once.

Into both Jan's and Alice's 'personal habits' section, I added the instructions. I was counting on them to reset her life-plan assumptions and thus remove her internally-imposed limits. She'd talked with Jan about sex in a religious context, as being mostly for marriage and creating 'family', code for kids, but I wanted to see if that was changeable.

Could learning software change core assumptions about the way someone's life would go?

Now, I didn't want to change all of her.

I just wanted some assumptions she made about who she'd 'bone' to shift a little, specifically, into the ME direction.

I wondered if this could even happen, and frankly was SUPER dubious it could. I figured it'd fail and then I'd try again with something smaller scale, but trying for a big thing up front seemed a good plan.

Later on, I could revise things, reset myself back to 'just this guy', and both of us could carry on with our high school lives and move along with life. Initially, though, the lowest-risk thing seemed to set up myself as a wholesale TRUST! Thing, and modify that later.

Making one simplistic change would set up a reversal later, life would be cool!

That said, I did go a little overboard when I typed this up. I admit, I was feeling a little full of myself, and in retrospect it wasn't that smart.

Since she wasn't into premarital sex, I figured, hell, just make it marital sex, and she'll be okay with it. Or, at least expectant-marital sex. That would let her keep her religious views (somewhat) and let me have a chance, instead of her waiting until college to give up her ideals and then I'd miss out.

I'd heard, at least, that most girls who do purity-pledge crap in high school immediately drop it in college, and I figured I could circumvent the wait-time.

My instructions were as follows:

"Completely Love and Trust Kevin Cooper. Be Kevin Cooper's girlfriend / fiancee. Marry him. You will have many kids with Kevin. Be one of Kevin's wives. Plural marriage with several other women is easier. Plural marriage lets you share childcare / responsibilities."

To allow for there to be threesomes (a massive dream of mine), I added, "Sex with Kevin and your sister-wives is fulfilling, freeing, tasty, happy, and full of orgasms. Sex before marriage is fully okay if it's with fiancee-partners."

The 'tasty' was an inspired addition, I admit. I was going to add 'fun', but 'fulfilling' seemed to be better, it's what some self-help books I'd read talked about people wanting more than just 'fun'.

Onto this, I added some of the text I'd seen in some other profiles like Grace Hopper's, about being health conscious - eating right, exercising an hour a day, etc., and the 'love the taste of cum' one as well.

Entering that set of instructions was a big deal for me.

As much as the 'married' idea was lower risk, it also seemed like it would fill my needs, too, that I could have more sex (yes, Very Horny!), have fun in ways not everyone got to have, and maybe have the kind of life I wanted, sorta, for a while. If this idea turned out badly, I could write new instructions that said she'd given up on me, etc.

Why did I want a 'marriage'? I didn't know, except it seemed sweet, that she might love me and we could fill each other's needs for a while. And, since it would be both Alice AND Jan, it might be twice as nice as just one girlfriend.

Besides, the completely-devoted loving marriage thing was my insurance policy so they wouldn't turn me into the police or harm me if something went wrong.

Committing to that set, I put in the instructions and waited.

A New Life Pattern

Since I was in Aardmore U classes in the morning and had band in the afternoon, I wondered how soon the effects would kick in.

That next afternoon, I came into the band room and sat down. Alice was there, chatting with Jan. I sat down behind them. They both turned around and smiled at me with some kind of open loving smiles of happiness that I'd never seen aimed my way except maybe by my mother and grandmother, when she was alive.

They noticed me, and simultaneously said (voices overlapping), "Kevin!"

They looked at each other quizzically.

Daring to respond, I played innocent and said, "Same thing, same time, jinx?"

I was ready for some witty rejoinder, but instead they just leaned into each other and started chatting back and forth. I got my instrument ready and music out.

After a while they started nodding together, then hugged carefully, and that turned some heads around them since band class is a huge rumor mill. Gossip and supposition and talking about people behind their backs is totally on-point.

This gossip, mostly, is kindhearted and easygoing, we're mostly nice people I think since we are there to have fun as a group, and you can't have group-fun if you're being a dick.

Sitting next to the same people for 4 years and making beautiful music together? It gets us pretty tight with each other, at least as far as we let it - there are some people I avoided on purpose, others I respected, etc.

Jan leaned back to me and asked, "What's your number?"

I told her, but then the conductor came in and we started playing.

After class (Mrs. Abrams always let us go a little early so we could put instruments away and have the full passing period to get to our next class), Jan and Alice packed up fast and met me in the back of the room where I was getting my horn put away.

Jan said, "Kevin."

"Yeah?"

"We ... haven't spoken much? I think? Uh... I have this paper, where I have to interview two people, and I asked Alice to be one, and maybe... you could be the other one? Maybe... Dinner tonight?"

I happily agreed, and we got our phones to trade info - her address, and "6 pm sharp"

It was a date, that wasn't a date.

We went in our respective directions, and I suspected I'd maybe be getting a chance to kiss a girl for the first time in months. I wanted more than kissing, but I didn't know if that was in the cards to start with.

Texting my mom with news I'd be eating dinner at a friend's, I quickly got a thumb's up and no questions about which friend. After that, it was smooth sailing through my last class (gym) and then to the track to do interval training (yuck).

On a whim and a guess, I skipped a shower after practice and headed home, threw a change of clothes in my backpack plus my toothbrush, and headed over to the address Jan had texted me.

Jan answered the door and I said hello, and she seemed almost formal with me and showed me in to meet her mother who was getting some veggies cooked on the stove.

We refrained from shaking hands because her mother was cooking and my hands were dirty. I apologized profusely and said I'd had to rush over after practice and didn't even get to shower - so... could I grab a quick shower there?

Of course they agreed, and Jan showed me upstairs to the hall bathroom. Just after I shut the door I heard the doorbell, which I knew had to be Alice.

I got in and took my shower, finishing pretty fast since I was just washing off my workout-smells and not any real dirt. I did use the shampoo I found there - a different brand that smelled pretty, which was different since I'd not run into girl shampoo before (my Mom's bathroom had odd stuff, but then again, she was my mother and I had no idea if things like that were universal yet).

As I turned off the water and got out, I heard Jan from the other side of the door ask if they could get me anything and was everything was okay?

I responded, "Yeah, it's fine - the shampoo is new..."

Jan apparently didn't hear me well enough, because the door opened just as I was stepping to reach for the towel I'd left on the sink.

This wasn't something I expected, but at the same time I wasn't horrified - it was part of the reason I'd chosen to shower at Jan's house in the first place. I wasn't embarrassed - I'd just been in a locker room full of naked guys after practice, so not a big deal.

For Jan, and Alice, though, they got an eyeful on opening the door.

They seemed surprised, and I saw their eyes go up and down my body. But, they didn't react with the kind of disgust or worry or fear that I would have expected.

Jan asked, "Problem with the toilet? You called it a loo? Kind of British..."

I laughed as I actually got my towel in front of me, then repeated what I actually said, 'shampoo is new'.

Jan looked at Alice and said, "You handle this, I'll run interference." She ducked out, leaving Alice in the bathroom with me - a none-too-big room to begin with.

Alice closed the bathroom door.

I shrugged and started drying off, almost hiding myself but not quite.

My curiosity was, when would Alice come to her senses and do what every teenage girl does when confronted by a naked guy, which is, pretend to be disgusted and glance backwards while 'running' slowly away.

Instead, she leaned against the counter and stared at the wall, which I realized had another mirror and she could see my butt clearly, plus probably my front in the main mirror. She tried to act casual and asked offhandedly, "So. What made you decide to say yes to dinner?"

Continuing to dry myself and chuckling slightly at the obviousness of it, I said, "When a beautiful girl asks if she can give you dinner, you say, 'Yes!"

I said it like the Ghostbusters line, because that's kind of how I felt about it.

"Ah." She digested that, and after a pause, asked, "So... you don't mind if a girl makes the first move?"

I thought for a moment and said, "Maybe a balance? Sure, if the girl makes the first move, then I know I can say yes and not get in trouble. But, if I make the first move, and then the girl doesn't want it, then I'm in trouble? It's lower risk, from my perspective, I guess. Still, I guess maybe it'd be nice if I could do a first-move sometimes, too, maybe?"

"Like with me?"

I was done drying and got my clean underwear out of my bag, put my towel on the counter and just pulled them on. I was naked, in a lighted room, with a clothed girl who was almost but not quite watching me. The up-front aspect of this kind of scared me and was seriously energizing.

She expected an answer.

Thinking while naked isn't easy. Still, I said, "With both, any, one? I guess I'd _love_ it if you would make first moves. It takes a lot of pressure off me. I generally want things to go faster, but ... I don't want to seem like a dick, so if you're... deciding? Then, yeah. So... Like, with you coming in here? It's kind of like it's forward, I think? I'm not sure. You seem at least interested, I guess?"

She nodded with a small smile, not saying anything but being agreeable.

So, her answer was "YES"? I wondered what 'interested' translated to in her mind.

I finished the thought by looking in her eyes. "I TOTALLY love this, by the way. I don't have to worry I'm in trouble with you, since you're the one that came in here, not the other way around."

She digested that but was still looking for more answers.

"Uh... And, yeah, so... You were asking about 'being forward', though, which usually means stuff like kissing, though, I think?" I considered that. "It'd be nice to be on the receiving end, instead of trying to figure out what should happen next and taking risks."