And what’s that?

RTFM

When in doubt, read the instructions, you say to yourself. Let’s see if this thing has any documentation.

You remember that there was a Glossary when you first opened the app. Where is it…

… you can’t find the Glossary. You quit the app – or, well, you close it. Didn’t it say something about being always present, always on? You re-open it… still no Glossary. Although... something flickered for a second? Close again, re-open… nope.

One more time, just to clear the cache… still nope.

Hm. Maybe if you look through the settings?

There are a lot of options. In fact… there might be more options than there were yesterday?

You dig, and dig, and dig, and after fifteen minutes of checking every single possibility, you find an option for “Success Probability Profile Display Threshold”, which sounds like it could be relevant. You tap it, and a window pops up.

To save you time and effort, and reduce unnecessary heartbreak, by default the Affection Multiplier will only show you profiles and status updates for Top Prospects™ — that is, people with whom you have a >92.3471%? chance of a successful romantic and sexual relationship. This threshold can be altered in your settings. You can also alter the threshold for what interactions will trigger relationship tracking (WARNING: NOT RECOMMENDED).

Hm.

You’re suspicious of anything with that many significant digits. On the other hand, though… well… what with the profile images and the jealousy elimination and the increased stamina and everything else… this is magic.

Your eyes widen. That’s the first time you’ve let yourself think the M-word.

You tap the question mark. A smaller window pops up. It says “As calculated by a synergistic fusion of agentic compatibility tests, intelligent forecasting systems, and deep learning engines”, which is not anywhere near as informative as you would like, and quite possibly meaningless bullshit.

You wonder what it says about you that Tammy and Molly are in there, then realize that you know very well what it says about you. And you’ve already decided that you don’t mind.

You open the Professionals tab and begin dragging the slider to the right. To your surprise, a new profile pops up as the probability of success drops below sixty-five percent: Sanouk Ratana Weiss.

You have no idea who that is. You tap the name and a window pops up with her image. She’s Asian, with short hair, and pretty, and she’s bustier than Tessa, although that’s not saying a lot. She’s reading a tablet and laughing, and after a moment you recognize her as the woman who always takes your lunch order at Thai Game. You check her log of status updates, just to see…

Sanouk Weiss: Recognizes you as the tall polite guy who always tips. +1 (1)
Sanouk Weiss: That’s a bigger tip than you usually give! +2 (3)

Hm. You haven’t gone to Thai Game that many times, have you? But… minimal score changes, resulting from minimal interactions. That’s a useful data point.

You drag the slider some more. Tessa Hye-Bin Gyeong’s profile doesn’t appear until thirty percent. Her profile image shows her talking with another Leopard’s Spot employee.

Tessa Gyeong: Likes that you’re polite. A lot of customers aren’t. +1 (1)
Tessa Gyeong: You made her feel dumb. -1 (0)

What?! … Oh, that must be from when she admitted that she couldn’t give you directions.

Tessa Gyeong: Feels sorry for you about the fire. +5 (5)
Tessa Gyeong: You gave her a perfect score on the survey!!! +10 (15)
Tessa Gyeong: You made her feel dumb again. -1 (14)

And that’s probably from where she didn’t realize how you knew her name. Maybe you should have made it more obvious that you were reading off her name tag?

Oh wait, there’s more.

Tessa Gyeong: Thinks you’re not bad-looking, actually. +1 Lust (14/0/1)
Tessa Gyeong: Thinks that someone as tall as you probably has a big dick. +4 Lust (14/0/5)
Tessa Gyeong: Remembers the rumors she’s heard about people fucking in the changing rooms, and wonders if she should have gone in there while you were trying on pants and offered to suck your cock. 0/0/+10 (14/0/15)
Tessa Gyeong: Wonders if you eat pussy. 0/0/+4 (14/0/19)
Tessa Gyeong: Is thinking about having a threesome with you and Zoe in the stockroom, with your cock filling her naughty little cunt so good and Zoe sitting on her face and your hands squeezing Zoe’s big fat tits. 0/0/+10 (14/0/29)

Holy shit.

You have an erection again. Thank god you’ve got your shopping bags on your lap.

And you have less chance with Tessa than with Sanouk? How does that work? If you got Sanouk (and why does a woman with a Thai first name have a German last name?) into a long personal conversation like the ones you had with Sigrid and Penelope, would her scores go up faster than Tessa’s? What would ‘faster’ mean, anyway – over a shorter time? By greater increments?

Does it matter that most of what gave Tessa that Lust score was entirely inside her head, without you doing anything? Is that something the Multiplier affects?

Another update comes through:

Tessa Gyeong: Has realized that the odds of her and Zoe both being on shift when you next come in, and also of it being a quiet time when they can sneak off to fuck in the stockroom, are actually pretty low. 0/0/-9 (14/0/20)

Still no Janine, though. At twenty-six percent, you find a profile for Shondra Mae Attenborough, whose profile image shows her to be black and busty (although neither as dark nor as big-titted as Belinda), and not bad-looking, really, and in her early 40s, and also she’s the driver of this very bus.

You can just barely see yourself in the background of the profile image, which is weird.

And, actually, she was driving the 78 bus this morning too, when you were headed to your old building to take pictures for the insurance – you remember saying “hi again” when you got on a half-hour ago. Which means you probably said “hi” to her this morning, and she... probably nodded or something, acknowledged you in some way. You don’t remember, so it was probably something very very brief. Less than five seconds of conversation, most likely. That can’t be enough to trigger relationship tracking, can it?

Shondra Attenborough: You were polite getting on. +1 (1)
Shondra Attenborough: You were polite getting off. +1 (2)
Shondra Attenborough: Thinks you have a nice ass for a white guy. +1 Lust (2/0/1)
Shondra Attenborough: You remembered her! +3/0/0 (5/0/1)

Apparently it can. Wow. You wonder if that’s the smallest interaction that can trigger the tracking, because it’s hard to think what could be smaller. Smiling at someone? Waving at them from so far away they can’t see your face? Sending them an email? And what would be at the other end of the scale – you’d have to be formally introduced first?

And there’s more in Shondra’s log:

Shondra Attenborough: Is 75% sure that you have an erection, based on a two-second glimpse in the rearview mirror. 0/0/+5 (5/0/6)
Shondra Attenborough: Is 100% sure that you putting your bags on your lap means you have an erection. 0/0/+6 (5/0/12)
Shondra Attenborough: You put your bags on your lap to conceal your erection, which is considerate to the other passengers. +3/0/0 (8/0/12)
Shondra Attenborough: Is relieved you’re not masturbating. +1/0/0 (9/0/12)
Shondra Attenborough: Surprised herself by being a little disappointed that you’re not masturbating. 0/0/+2 (9/0/14)
Shondra Attenborough: Has decided you probably have a big dick. 0/0/+4 (9/0/18)
Shondra Attenborough: Wonders if you like black MILFs. 0/0/+2 (9/0/20)
Shondra Attenborough: Wonders if you eat pussy. 0/0/+4 (9/0/24)
Shondra Attenborough: Wonders what your cum tastes like. 0/0/+5 (9/0/29)
Shondra Attenborough: Wonders if you’d want to fuck her and Callie and Jenna all together, using them in all their holes. 0/0/+29 (9/0/58)

Holy shit! Your erection had faded while you were thinking about the fine details of interaction tracking, but now it’s definitely back. You adjust the bag of shirts on your lap, and the old lady across from you looks at you curiously.

Your phone buzzes, and another update appears:

Shondra Attenborough: Has reminded herself that she’s driving a crowded bus and needs to focus on the road instead of getting all horny over a random passenger just because he’s polite, cute, and probably has a big dick, and thank god she only had that fantasy when she was stopped at a traffic light. -1/0/-48 (8/0/10)

In all honesty, that’s probably for the best.

Again - BUZZ, update:

Shondra Attenborough: Wonders if you’d let her be on top. 0/0/+2 (8/0/12)

This might make riding the 78 bus a little more complicated.

For some reason, it feels like that’s not the only complication with riding the 78 bus, but you aren’t quite sure what else there might be. Well, it’ll probably come to you sooner or later, once you’ve stopped thinking about it consciously.

You have to drag the slider all the way to the right, and less than one percent chance of success, before a profile pops up for Janine Melanie Hendrick. Her profile image shows her talking on her phone. She does not look happy.

Out of morbid curiosity, you tap the link for her affection score. It’s -9. That’s actually a little upsetting – you could have sworn she liked you.

If you ever need to go back to Hendrick Locksmith (and there are other locksmiths in town, thank god), you’ll check the app first to see what you did that pissed Janine off. For now, though, it feels like it’d be unnecessarily masochistic, especially since even if you were somehow able to get her scores into the positive double digits, she’d still be at less than one percent chance of success.

Something occurs to you – there was another interaction you had today, and if a “Hi” to the bus driver was enough to trigger relationship tracking, this should have been also. You definitely wouldn’t put her in Professionals, Superiors, Co-workers, or Family, so the app probably has her categorized in Friends.

There’s Eleanor’s profile on the far left, and – exactly as you predicted – the other profile, for “Anita Grace McFarlane”, doesn’t pop up until you drag the slider all the way to the right.

You touch it and… yep, it’s the old lady you knocked over earlier today. You suppose you didn’t really need the Multiplier to tell you that your chances of a successful romantic and sexual relationship with someone seventy-howevermany years old are < 1%, but it’s nice to see that she has an affection score of +10. You would guess that it’s because you helped her up, and helped her retrieve the contents of her shopping bags, and apologized to her even though it was actually the fault of the guy who knocked you over. No harm in checking, right?

Anita McFarlane: HEY! WATCH IT, YOU DUMBFUCK! -5 (-5)
Anita McFarlane: Oh! It wasn’t your fault! +5 (0)
Anita McFarlane: You helped her up and asked if she was okay. +4 (4)
Anita McFarlane: You helped her recover her groceries. +4 (8)
Anita McFarlane: Saw you put your phone in your pocket as you walked away, instead of texting or whatever like the other idiot was doing, and likes that you’re smart enough to learn from example. +2 (10)
Anita McFarlane: Thinks you have a nice bum. +1 Lust (10/0/1)

Uh. Well.

You drag the slider slowly to the left, and watch as Anita and Janine and Shondra and Tessa and Sanouk gradually blink out. You’re a little worried about whether you’ll be able to stop at exactly ‘92.3471’, so you dig a little more and find that the Success Probability Profile Display Threshold slider has a ‘restore default value’ option.

Well. These are some… very, very interesting results. And you’re getting a much better idea of what your options are from here.

You put your phone in your pocket and look out the window, and instantly realize you’ve made two serious mistakes:

you’ve gone nine stops past where you normally get off the 78 bus, and
much more importantly, and the detail you were trying to think of earlier, the 78 bus is the one you take to go to your apartment. There isn’t a bus that goes to Tammy’s place.

You yank the pullcord and get to your feet – thank god your erection has subsided – but it’s another block and a half before the bus stops.

As you get off the bus – you would’ve gone out the back door, but you were a lot closer to the front, and there are too many people in the way for you to make it to the back – you say “thank you” to Shondra, mostly out of habit. You don’t make eye contact, but you see that she smiles and nods.

You don’t hear a buzz, though. You wonder if that’s because thanking her didn’t make a difference to her scores, or if it’s just because she’s below the display threshold.

As you cross the street to reach the stop for the 78 bus heading in the other direction, you can’t help but wonder who Callie and Jenna are.

You check the bus route app. Nineteen minutes to wait, and then nine stops on a crowded bus back to where you normally get – got – off, and then you can basically retrace your steps from this morning: call a taxi and wait however long it’ll take to arrive, and then ride it back to Tammy’s place. Tammy did say she’d pay you back, and you are trying to be mindful of her finances…

You look at the map app, and estimate how far that’d be, and how much you’d save Tammy…

Fuck, it’d only be an extra twelve bucks, and it’d get you home a lot sooner. Fine.

You call a taxi company; a cab shows up in five minutes. Mostly to your relief – but also, if you’re being honest with yourself, a little bit to your disappointment – the driver’s a guy, and you get in. Twenty minutes later, he drops you off at Tammy’s building. He gives you a receipt, which you tuck into your wallet, just in case Maggie says this is reimbursable too.

In the lobby, you press 4 0 1 7 on the keypad to get into the building, go up the stairs, and let yourself into Tammy and Molly’s apartment with your brand new key.