Meanwhile...

Laura Jones simply could not believe her luck. The first man seen outside a farm in years, and she managed to catch him!

Of course, then her boss took all the credit (and the man!), leaving Laura to sort through his meager possessions. It wasn't much, thankfully, just his clothes and the contents of his pockets.

The clothes weren't much to look at: a shirt that was too wide of should to really fit most girls she knew, and a pair of jeans with more space in the crotch than was really necessary. It was the stuff in his pockets that puzzled her. A wallet with some credit cards for a "Josh West" (Who would give credit cards to a man? Laura wondered) and what looked like money, but the faces were all wrong. A week-old ticket stub to a movie she'd never heard of. A small pile of lint. But there was one thing she absolutely didn't want to tell anyone about yet:

A smartphone.

Laura didn't have one of her own yet, so she decided to take the man's -- it wasn't like he'd be using it. Unfortunately, she didn't get a chance to examine it more thoroughly at work, as Madame Fletcher could pop in at any moment, and she would immediately confiscate it if she found out, so Laura had to wait until she got home to play with her new toy.

Now, in the early evening, Laura was relaxing in her one-bedroom apartment, laying on her bed in nothing but an oversized white t-shirt, fiddling with her new phone. When she first activated it, there was no password of any kind (Wow, thought Laura when she discovered that. Even when they're smart, men are really stupid.). That was the first thing she changed. Then she spent ten minutes playing around with an app that let her jiggle boobs in any photo just by moving her fingers. She felt mildly disgusted with herself after that, and deleted that app.

And then she saw it.

Rules of the World.

She clicked it open, expecting some kind of game. Instead, she saw rules. Lots and lots of rules. Scrolling through them, one immediately caught her eye:

"The only thing adult women can eat is men's cum."

Laura had always thought that was kind of unfair. She hadn't had ice cream in years, and sorely missed the taste of strawberries. Oh sure, there was flavored stuff, but it never tasted quite right.

Laura clicked on the rule, maybe she could get more information or something, and saw that glorious little button, with just four little letters, that made her feel on top of the world:

“Edit”

Then she noticed it was greyed out and unclickable, and hung her head in defeat. But Laura would not give up so easily. No, she would not be beaten by such a mild setback. She would eat strawberries and ice cream again, damnit!

Some further exploring of the app revealed a few important rules, which were part of the app and couldn’t be changed without access to its source code.

• A rule cannot refer to a specific person or object.
• Any changes to rules or new rules are applied retroactively.
• Adding or changing a rule may change or delete other rules to remove contradictory rules.
• A user cannot edit or delete rules that were added or edited by that user.

That last one confused her a bit, because she knew she hadn’t changed any rules, and especially not that one, but she quickly deduced that the “user” was in some way tied to the phone itself.

Which means, Laura thought, that this “Josh West” asshole is responsible for me not being able to eat strawberries anymore! She wondered if she was maybe getting a bit fixated on strawberries, but dismissed the thought in favor of solving the problem at hand.

That problem being, how to get around the limitation of only changing a rule once. The most pressing question, in Laura’s mind, was whether the app’s user data was associated with the actual phone or the SIM card. If the former, she couldn’t do much about it, but if the latter, she could swap the smartphone’s card with hers and change whatever stupidity “Josh West” got up to.

Although, Laura thought, if it is tied to the SIM card, I can change whatever rule I want on this one, and then switch to mine and change back any I don’t like. That was certainly a tempting thought.