Damage Control

“Give it back to me,” I say, punctuating my voice with as much threat as I can muster. My vision of Vidocq—wrapped in his black sweater, thick moustache and still-thicker rimmed glasses—swims slightly. Fuck the painkillers. Vidocq holds the Affection Multiplier now.

“Ah, so zis one’z important to you,” he says, waving the phone carelessly. He rubs his the goatee on his chin. “I clicked around eet earlier, you know? Very interesting—vhat does eet mean, I ‘ave -1000 points? You hate me that much?”

I lunge for my phone then, and the move catches Vidocq by surprise. My hands wrap around its smooth exterior and I tug, convinced for a fraction of a second that I’ve got it back. The phone slips out of his grip.

But then, Vidocq pivots forwards and chops my in the arm, my right arm, my bad arm, and even through the painkiller, I feel the dull blossom of pain; it’s enough that my hand stiffens and the phone slips toward the ground.

I drop down, throwing my body over it, but Vidocq kicks me in the side. I take the first kick with a grunt, and then sweep my own legs out as he gears up for a second. Vidocq staggers as I take out his leg, and he falls to the ground next to me. I knee him before scrambling backwards, phone now in hand.

He doesn’t chase me, instead finding his footing again. Vidocq shakes his head at me, letting out a sigh. Out comes the gun, off comes the safety, and I freeze again. When Vidocq speaks, it’s with a voice of casual contempt.

“Playtime’s over, you bastard. I’m going to keep your phone for the next little while.” He waits for a second, holding out a hand. I look down at the phone in mine. Am I willing to die for this? He clucks his tongue impatiently. Reluctantly, I slowly walk towards him, and drop my phone back into his waiting hand.

“Good boy. But now that I’ve got this, I won’t be able to track you. That’s a small problem. So here’s what we’ll do. You’ll flag down a cab, and we’ll take a ride home together. You get into your apartment nice and safe, and you stay in your little dingy shithole shack, until I return this phone back to you,” he says, his accent completely gone now. “Otherwise…” His eyes flick to the gun still in his other hand. He doesn’t need to say aloud what he’s thinking. I know to stay in my place.

The moment my apartment door swings shuts behind me, I rush over to my laptop. The Inspector’s got his hands on my phone, but there’s a chance that I can do something…

I open the lid of my laptop, and the white interface of the Affection Multiplier stares back at me. That’s strange. I definitely did not have it up when I left the apartment.

You fucked up, Markus

The text runs across the screen, and I swallow. Oh fuck.

But luckily, we have a little present for you.

I lean closer to the screen, waiting for the next line of text to appear, but nothing does. After a minute, I look around the room. Anything? No, nothing’s changed. The room, stuck in its dishevelled despair, looks just as it did when I left it this morning. The fleck of vomit that I missed during my feeble attempt to clean up earlier looks a little more brown, a little crustier. I look away from it, disgusted, and turn back to my computer; I can deal with that later.

I click into the Affection Multiplier. I want to know what my scores with Scarlet and Jessica are now, but what catches my eye when the interface slides in isn’t the table of scores. The sidebar, once containing only a single item labelled Scores, now has a second entry beneath it.

Perks

I quickly click into it, and lines of text unfurl across the screen.

Your continued use of the Affection Multiplier has unlocked the ‘Perks’ feature. Perks are small tweaks to reality that you can purchase with points. Points are earned by increasing your scores within the Affection Multiplier; each increase in score of 50 points earns you 50 points that you may use on perks (though you cannot re-earn points if your score declines).

Up until this point, you have earned 50 points total. To reward you for your loyalty, we have given you a starting allocation of 100 points, giving you a total of 150 points.

I blink a couple of times, staring at the screen. Okay, this is a little unexpected. But what even are perks? The text slowly fades away, replaced by a list of items:

Perk - Internal Defences I: Makes your immune system respond roughly twice as strongly to threats. Upgradeable. Cost: 50 points.

Perk - Fearlessness I: Gives you the ability to selectively disable your sense of fear. Upgradeable. Cost: 50 points.

Perk - Joy’s Deliverance I: Makes anyone you sexually couple with capable of orgasming from PIV sex. Upgradeable. Cost: 100 points.

Perk - Disappearing Act: Makes the Affection Multiplier invisible to all users but you. Cost: 100 points.

Perk - Quiet ****: Die painlessly. Cost: 1000 points.

More perks may be unlocked through further use of the app.

If this really is true, well… Ever since confirming that it worked, I haven’t given the Affection Multiplier much thought, chalking it up to some new advanced technology that probably violates my privacy in five dozen ways. But looking down the list of perks on offer, it’s becoming rapidly clear that I am dealing with something… something that I don’t think I’ve quite seen before. I don’t know if I want to call it supernatural just yet, but God knows I don’t have a good explanation for it.

But there’s no time to hesitate. Vidocq has my phone, and if he can purchase things with the points that I earned, this could go south real quick. I tap on the perk for Disappearing Act. A confirmation box pops up, asking me if I’d really like to spend the 100 points. I press yes.

I don’t feel any physical change, but when I look at the top of the screen, I see that I only have 50 points, as expected. If all went right, Vidocq can no longer see the Multiplier. Maybe that will be enough to contain the damage.

A second later, a new perk appears to replace the one that I’ve bought:

Perk - Swoon: Anyone meeting you for the first time gets butterflies in their stomach. Cost: 250 points.

I look at the remaining perks. The ones relating to romance intrigue me, but I can’t afford any of them. Then, there are the upgradeable perks—they don’t seem super great, at least not that I can tell, but maybe the higher levels of the perks will be better? And then there’s the Quiet **** one. I don’t know what to make of that.

I decide to save up my points, thinking that, should a situation arise where’d I’d need to make use of either a stronger immune system or selective fearlessness, I could just buy the perks then.

With that settled, I click back to the scores tab. It’s time to see how things have progressed. I scroll past most of family, the scores unchanged since my first time seeing them, until I come across Scarlet’s name.

Scarlet Najbreit, Score: 40 (+25)

Seeing the small upwards tick in score gives me the first sense of relief that I’ve felt in a while. After all the craziness that was today, from the brutal wake-up to the demands I made of Scarlet to Jessica and the surgery to the thrashing and phone-stealing that Vidocq delivered, things have been pretty shitty. This little piece of information, confirming that I’ve made some bit of progress? Good shit.

Then, I scroll a little further, and see:

Jessica Najbreit, Score: 0 (+50)

Okay, okay, real good shit, I can work with this. My mind drifts back to the last memory I recall before I drifted off into anaesthetically-induced sleep, words that Jessica had mentioned, words that I hadn’t quite let myself believe weren’t dreamed… but this reassures me. Jessica doesn’t like me, not yet, but this proves that I can turn the rest of my scores around, if I just play things right.

All it will take now is—

A knock sounds at the door, followed by a familiar voice calling my name.