Is the next chapter actually going to be about cleaning a bathroom?

A little bit at the beginning, yes.

You think about a lot of things while cleaning Tammy’s bathroom.

You think about that fantasy Penelope had of you fucking her – and telling her you love her – in Meeting Room C.

You think about the soap scum built up on the walls of the shower.

You think about the Multiplier having an instruction manual.

You think about the fact that you and Molly and Tammy all masturbated in this very shower, this very morning (actually, based on the updates log, it looks like Tammy masturbated twice).

You think about the lime buildup on the shower head.

You think about the fact that Belinda has amazing tits and apparently likes the idea of you looking down her top.

You think about the fact that there are five open shampoo bottles and three of them are nearly empty.

You think about the fact that apparently Sigrid likes the idea of watching you fuck Eleanor.

You think about the grout at the base of the toilet… or is it caulk? Actually, what is the difference between grout and caulk? You could look it up, but you’d probably get distracted by a Wikipedia rabbithole – or, much more likely, by the Multiplier. Anyway, you left your phone on the sofa.

You think about the fact that apparently Eleanor likes the idea of watching you fuck Sigrid.

You think about whether you need to wait exactly fifteen minutes after applying the toilet cleanser before scrubbing, or if you can just half-ass it.

You think about what it implies that the Multiplier has an instruction manual.

You think about how much of a hassle it’ll be to find a new apartment, even though Tammy told you could stay as long as you needed, and the fact that any place as cheap as the apartment on Anglesey Street will probably be mediocre at best.

You think about going back to the insurance office to talk to Maggie again, and the fact that she and Belinda are both Top Prospects.

You think about the caked-on bits of dried toothpaste and other gunk in the sink basin.

You think about the fact that Molly’s sexual history log said that “she and her best friend have experimented with each other”, and what it implies that apparently Sonia got a little jealous of you after Molly told her she wanted to suck your cock.

You think about how much of a hassle it’ll be to replace all your stuff.

You think about the projects you’ll be missing at work, and the ones you missed today.

You think about the fact that Penelope will probably be willing to recommend that you get a raise now.

You think about the fact that her mom, your boss, Mrs. Hansen… Helen… is also a Top Prospect. And, really, for 45, she’s not too bad-looking.

You think about how much you don’t like scrubbing toilets.

You think about that insane forest of settings and options in the Multiplier.

You think about actually understanding what the Multiplier is doing.

You think about the fact that Helen and Penelope are not the only women at the company, and you’re going to be interacting with all of them.

You think about the fact that there is now apparently an eight-hundred-and-ninety-three-terabyte file on your laptop, even though that’s several hundred times larger than your laptop’s entire memory. That is absolutely fucking ridiculous.

You think about the profile pics, and the attributes, and the update logs, and the personal histories, and the probability of success slider, and the fact that apparently there’s a difference between ‘opening and closing the app three times in sixty seconds’ and ‘opening and closing the app three times in sixty seconds while looking for documentation’.

You decide that, no, an 893-terabyte PDF on your 600-gigabyte laptop is still absolutely fucking ridiculous.

You think about the fact that the updates log said the manual had been downloaded to your “largest owned device”, and are suddenly worried that you might have to go back to Anglesey Street and extract the remnants of your desktop machine from the ruins of your apartment.

Finally, you look around the bathroom and are pretty confident that you’ve gotten everything. Molly’s waiting outside in the hall. She’s wearing jeans now, although you can tell she’s still braless under that t-shirt.

“ ’scuse me,” she says, “just gotta go undo all your hard work!”

She steps into the bathroom as you step past her into the hall. As she reaches for the toilet lid, she pauses and looks at you.

“Uh… do you wanna watch?” she asks.

You hold up a hand, palm out. “No, but thanks for offering.”

She grins, then shuts the door behind her, and you make your way to the sofa. You grab your phone and your laptop both.

On your laptop screen, there is indeed an icon marked Affection-Multiplier-instruction-manual.pdf. You exhale.

Although… does that mean your desktop machine is completely unrecoverable? … meh, you’ll find out tomorrow.

You double-click the icon, then switch your focus to your phone, because something that size will probably take a few minutes to open.

First, the easiest thing – you open Wikipedia and check the difference between ‘grout’ and ‘caulk’, otherwise it’ll bug you (‘grout’ is the one between the tiles, ‘caulk’ is the one that seals edges). Then you take a quick peek at your messages.

There’s a reply from Eleanor -

From: Eleanor R

Hi, Jacob! It was so good seeing you today too, despite the circumstances! I’ve always felt lucky to know you.
Thank you for introducing me to Sigrid!
Also, Vincent says “rawr” back.

– and one from Sigrid.

From: Sigrid P
Hey! That was a hell of a meet-cute, wasn’t it? Also, Eleanor’s really sweet, thanks so much for introducing us!
I’m not going to send you any photos of my ankles, don’t worry. I know you’re not actually into that!

There’s also a message from an unknown number, which has no text, but two low-res dimly-lit photos attached. The first one is of a woman wearing a police uniform, seen from the neck down; her badge is covered.

In the second photo, her uniform is mostly unbuttoned and you can see the cups of her bra.

You grin. Then you glance at the laptop screen, where there should be a progress bar and a little spinny glyph.

Instead, the file is already open.

Really, you don’t know why you expected anything different. In fact…

… you experimentally click the little ‘x’ in the corner, and the Manual closes instantly. Then you click the icon again, and the Manual opens instantly again.

Of course.

You want to check Molly’s updates first, though. Across the apartment, you hear the toilet flush and the bathroom door open; it feels like it’d be a little rude to look at Molly’s updates log while she’s in the living room with you, so you wait until she’s gone back into her bedroom before you continue.

Based on how long it took you to clean the bathroom, and on when Tammy said she’d be home, you still have about fifteen minutes to explore, and the updates shouldn’t take too much time to read.

Molly Carter

Molly Carter: You forgave her big stupid mouth. 0/+2/0 (92/62/81)
Molly Carter: “Wonderful, caring women who’re helping me.” 0/+1/0 (92/63/81)
Molly Carter: Explicitly told you that you make her horny. 0/0/+3 (92/63/84)
Molly Carter: You admitted that you’re flirting with her! 0/0/+3 (92/63/87)
Molly Carter: You suggested a threesome with her and Tammy! 0/+5/+8 (92/68/95)
Molly Carter: You asked if she wanted to watch you pee. Ha ha, but also ew. +1/0/-1 (93/68/94)
Molly Carter: Likes the chance to talk about where her idea came from. +1/0/0 (94/68/94)
Molly Carter: You like that she remembers weird details. +1/+1/0 (95/69/94)
Molly Carter: Appreciates that you were honest about the line being stupid. -1/+2/0 (94/71/94)
Molly Carter: “You’re one of my favorite people.” 0/+3/0 (94/74/94)
Molly Carter: Appreciates that you described Eleanor as a person first, without talking about her body. 0/+2/0 (94/76/94)
Molly Carter: Has a very clear image in her head of you jacking off onto the face and bare breasts of an adorable nerdy Latina with a blue streak in her hair. 0/0/+2 (94/76/96)

... and now you do too. And an erection to match. You’re not sure you would have described Eleanor as “nerdy”, but it absolutely fits.

Molly Carter: WHAT THE FUCK?!? HOW CAN YOU LIKE THAT FUCKING BITCH!
-6/+4/0 (88/80/96)

That’s still a bit upsetting, but it’s also interesting that Molly’s Love score went up at the same time her Affection went down. That reaction to “I wasn’t happy when you criticized my joke, but you were honest”, you can understand, but what happened here?

… although didn’t Sigrid and Eleanor both get increases to Love as a result of feeling protective of you? That could be what happened here – feeling a need to protect you from Penelope?

Anyway, what’s next...

Molly Carter: You took her feelings seriously, and you took responsibility for having misinformed her about what sort of person Penelope is. +5/+2/0 (93/82/96)

And then that appears to be it. You fully expect there to be updates from Sigrid and Eleanor, at the very least, but you’ve only got twelve minutes before Tammy gets home, and you want to look at the Instruction Manual.

You hear a fragment of music that you recognize as the opening trill from George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. It repeats itself – ah, Molly’s phone.

“Hey, mom,” you hear her say. Then “Oh, great! See you soon!”

Molly emerges from her room. “Mom’s just at the last traffic light,” she says. “Should be here in five.”

Shit, that’s right – Tammy didn’t say “an hour”, she said “about an hour”.

Okay, quickly then:

First page – Multiplier logo.

Second page – “Registered user: Jacob Robertson Carter”, along with your date and time of birth, your preferred email address, your address back on Anglesey Street, your blood type, your eye color, and several other strings of numbers and letters that you assume identify you in some way.

Third page – ah, here’s something interesting.

Things the Affection Multiplier is:

A phone app
Magic
Only yours
Incapable of doing harm to anyone

Well, #1 was obvious. #2, you’d already guessed. #3 and #4 are… good to know.

Fourth page.

Things the Affection Multiplier is not:

A phone app
Magic
Only yours
Incapable of doing harm to anyone

Uh. Well.

Those are the sort of deep weird zen statements that are probably very meaningful once you think about them in greater detail, which you don’t have time for just now because Tammy’s almost home. Next page?

More pragmatically, the Affection Multiplier is:

a way for you to have consensual sex with any adult human you meet.

The Affection Multiplier is not:

a way for you to rule the world.

Okay, that’s useful to know too, although you didn’t have any particularly megalomaniacal intentions. “Any adult human you meet” sounds very intriguing, but is every page going to be this… short?

Next page: ah, a table of contents.

Actually, no, wait… it’s a table of contents for a table of contents, for another table of contents.

Because it looks like the actual table of contents is over 5600 pages long, holy shit.

There’s a button in the upper right corner that says Random page (wait, do PDFs even have that functionality? … well, clearly this one does), so you click it.

You find yourself on a page explaining a Personal Attribute called Scurvy Dog (850 points), which you have no recollection of having seen in the Attributes store earlier. There’s a short description – “enables you to metabolically synthesize your own Vitamin C”. There’s also a much longer description, and – no, you can come back to this later. Random page again.

You find yourself on a page explaining the difference between turning a woman into a French Maid and turning her into a French Maid Archetype, starting with “actual French maids may not speak English, and may panic at suddenly finding themselves to no longer be in France”, which would be funnier if you didn’t suspect that it was literally true. Random page again.

You find yourself on a page with a chart explaining the advantages and disadvantages of changing the taste of a given woman’s pussy, versus changing how you, personally, perceive the taste of that woman’s pussy. Random page again.

You find yourself on a page addressing the issue of why you don’t always notice the update notification buzzes. That’s actually something you had wondered about a bit. You skim… Ah, it looks like it’s just how the normal human attention span works, which is boring but has a lot of explanatory power. Banner blindness, habituation, that sort of thing… although the sentence “this can be altered in your settings” is intriguing, along with “the Affection Multiplier application is installed on this device; click here to access the relevant setting”, which will make navigating the app a lot easier.

You click the link, and a control panel with a checkbox pops up.

Consciously notice all update notifications for on-site increments and decrements?

You hesitate a moment – modifying your own consciousness feels like it could be a very bad idea, the sort of thing that could get out of control much too easily, and you wouldn’t realize it because ‘you’ would have changed. But this is something tiny, so you click the checkbox, and then Save changes.

The control panel closes. You click Random page a bunch more times – there’s an attribute that will make you an intuitive genius at building things out of… well, it doesn’t say “Lego”, it says “plastic interlocking construction toy bricks”, and one that’ll let you see in the dark, and one that’ll make you taller, and one that’ll make your cum rainbow-colored, and one that’ll suppress seafood allergies, and something about the smell of your armpits that you don’t read, and something about gum health, and then…

Top Prospects™ FAQ

Your eyes widen. This could be very important.

Question: Am I supposed to fuck all of my Top Prospects™?
Answer: Properly used, the Affection Multiplier will make it possible for you to have consensual sex with any adult human you meet. What you actually do is your own choice!
Question: Is (Person X) really a Top Prospect™? I never would have expected that their personality is compatible with mine!
Answer: Yes. The Affection Multiplier will help them be open to you, but their compatibility is pre-existing. Romance is fun! Get to know them!
Question: Can I have consensual sex with people who aren’t Top Prospects™?
Answer: Top Prospects™ are people with whom you have a high probability of a successful romantic and sexual relationship. You can still have a successful romantic and sexual relationship with someone who has a low probability, it’s just less likely and may take more effort.
Question: (Person X) is a Top Prospect™, but they prefer a gender that I’m not. How is this possible?
Answer: One reason they’re a Top Prospect™ is that they’re more flexible than you, or they, may have initially realized.
Question: (Person X) isn’t a Top Prospect™, and they prefer a gender that I’m not, but I want to have consensual sex with them anyway. Is this possible?
Answer: Yes, although it may take more time and effort than you’d like.
Question: I’m not finding any Top Prospects™. Are you sure they exist?
Answer: Yes. You would not have been given the Affection Multiplier if there were no Top Prospects™ for you. Finding them will be half the fun! Go out there and meet people!