Wow. What happens next?

Yes, I’m doing this again

Eventually, you open your eyes.

There’s someone else in the living room with you. But it’s not Tammy or Molly, it’s… a guy. You can move your eyes, a little, but the rest of you is paralyzed. This doesn’t worry you as much as it maybe should.

The guy is wearing glasses, and he has a laptop, and you can’t really describe his appearance more than that except to say that he doesn’t look as much like you as you would have expected, which doesn’t really make sense because you didn’t know there was anything to expect.

He looks up from the laptop. “Oh, hey, Jacob,” he says. “You’re not supposed to be awake!”

Sorry, you think, because you can’t say it. He hears you anyway.

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” he says. “My fault, really. I didn’t have to do this in the form of an extra chunk of Jacob-POV narrative, I could have just talked directly to the readers like last time.”

What? I don’t understand?

“I’m terminally up my own ass about my writing, and I like explaining how clever and detailed I’ve been.”

I like explaining things too.

“Yes, Jacob. I based that on myself,” he says. “A little bit.”

What?

“Don’t worry, Jacob. Just go back to sleep, and over the next 24 hours you’ll have more sex. You’ll also learn more about the Multiplier, and meet new people, and make some progress in apartment-hunting. These four items may – or may not – be connected! In the meantime, I’ll explain various details about the previous fourteen chapters, at least some of which should be either interesting or funny. As before, things like ‘Sphynx’ and ‘Babelfish’ I won’t bother explaining, because they’re on Wikipedia. I’ll also provide some extra content – one entire scene which is canon but doesn’t fit in the story because it’s about what other people did when you weren’t present, and also alternate versions of some passages, and details I changed my mind about including. All that stuff is marked as ‘Extra Content’ for the benefit of people who’d rather just ctrl-F to it instead of reading my ramblings.”

Oh. …will I remember this?

“Of course not.”

And then there’s nothing.

Chapter 25, “Key Lime Pie”.

“I was thinking of getting a rotisserie chicken, because I don’t want to spend any time actually making dinner tonight, but then I remembered we still have the leftover pizza.”
When I pick up on someone else’s abandoned branch, I try to stay as close to the details of the original text as possible. A friend described this as “a talent for coloring inside the lines”.
I started writing the scene as them having a rotisserie chicken, but then I went back and checked and DFang had described Molly getting three pizzas on Monday evening (remember, chapters 14 through 35 all take place on Tuesday) and Tammy consolidating leftovers of two pizzas into one box. I wanted Tammy to have done a little shopping before coming home anyway, though (so she could get the Plan B).

“Jacob, you still love key lime pie, right?”
I got a key lime pie the week before I wrote this chapter, for the first time in a few years.

“Beautiful, sexy women of my acquaintance,” you say
He doesn’t want to mention Penelope because it would involve telling them that he knew Penelope was naked, which wouldn’t really be fair to her.

“Is she a beautiful, sexy woman of your acquaintance?”
There are three reasons he didn’t think about Eleanor while masturbating in the shower. First: he was thinking about Tammy and Molly and Penelope.
Second: Either I wrote that scene before Eleanor existed, or I wrote it before I came up with the notion of Top Prospects. I don’t recall which. (Yes, currently the introduction of Eleanor makes it evident that she and Jacob already have feelings for each other, but that’s because I went back and made some adjustments. I try not to do that, but it was necessary there.)
Third: There was no point in having her be part of Jacob’s fantasies before she’s introduced in the story.

Tammy’s phone starts playing a fragment of Aram Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance.
If you’ve ever heard Sabre Dance, you’ll understand why Tammy uses that as her ringtone for “my job”. Here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUQHGpxrz-8. Also, as with Rhapsody in Blue, it’s a nice bit of characterization that Jacob includes the composer’s name when thinking of the song.

“This had better be important,” Tammy tells her caller.
Sometimes things happen just to distract people so that Jacob will have a chance to check the Multiplier. Also, I decided I wanted no actual sexual activity until after all the disclosures had been made.

“I was having a – what? Literally? But… okay, yes, but why do you need me for that? … Okay, yeah, but… really? Shit. You don’t need me to come back in for this, do you? Okay, thank god.
Several years ago, I heard a piece on the radio about how the reason it can be so annoying to overhear people talking on their phones in public is that our brains try to fill in the other half of the conversation, which is usually not possible and thus frustrating. It’s why characters in older TV shows and movies would repeat so much of what the person on the other end of the line was saying. Given what Tammy reveals about this call in the next chapter, it is possible to pretty much reconstruct the other half of the conversation.

Chapter 26: “That’s Exactly What I Did, Yes”

once you have a chance to actually read the instructions and experiment with the settings a bit instead of rushing through things, there will be a very simple answer to why sometimes the Multiplier shows you everyone’s update log at once, and sometimes only one person at a time
At this point in the story, I hadn’t figured that out yet. The first depiction of an update log (back in DFang’s original source material) had Tammy and Molly entries intermixed, but that would make it much more difficult to learn about one specific person. And the point of the Multiplier is to improve Jacob’s life, so obviously that option would have to exist.

Through the Stomach will increase people’s scores faster and get you more points faster if you make food for them
I suppose it’s possible that you haven’t heard the idiom “the way to someone’s heart is through their stomach”

Fascinating Etymology will get you more points faster from people who see your dick
The ancient Romans were obsessed with penises. One common artifact was the “fascinus”, a penis-shaped amulet which was alleged to have magic powers. To fascinate someone was to, essentially, put a mind-control spell on them using a fascinus. “She’s as fascinated as if she’s staring at a great big penis.” Yes, really.

I Never Sausage A Thing
Sometimes people miss puns that I think are really obvious, so: “sausage” (big penis) / “saw such”

Manicure will keep your fingernails at the perfect length for fingering women and scratching itches
On the Dropout streaming service, there’s a show called Breaking News, where improv comedians portray newscasters reading off a teleprompter whose content is intended to make them crack up. In one episode, Erika Ishii had to act out instructions that included scratching her fingernails down a small blackboard, to which she said “I don’t have fingernails, because I actually know how to finger a woman!”
That’s what inspired the ‘Manicure’ attribute.

Not Afraid will make it so knots you tie only come undone when someone is actually untying them
There is a joke whose punchline is “aren’t you the rope I threw out of here an hour ago?” “No, I’m a Frayed Knot.”

for a second you wonder if you maybe have an Attribute you don’t know about
I seriously considered whether to give Jacob some Attributes that he didn’t know about – maybe as a result of some time fuckery and he would have to buy them retroactively or risk destroying the universe? From my notes: “Another plot driver is that he eventually discovers that there are a few perks that apparently apply retroactively – stuff like ‘skilled conversationalist’ – he has to buy them because time travel bullshit?”

But then I decided, no, they’re just attributes, not Attributes. Putting Attributes on him without his knowledge would make him a weaker and less active protagonist. It would feel like cheating you, the reader. It’s easy for him to have deep conversations with his Top Prospects because they’re excellent matches for him.

I suppose it’s not impossible to write a good story where the protagonist has Attributes unbeknownst to himself and he has to retrocausally make up for that, but it’d require a lot more advance planning than I’m doing here. Also, I don’t think it would work as serialized fiction, because I’d have to make so many changes to earlier chapters once I figured out how they should be affected by the later chapters.

Woman came in with an open coffee
I am fussy enough about the details that I went to the trouble of figuring out what scenario would mean that a) the assistant manager at Fashionissima had to call Tammy at home, and b) Tammy didn’t have to go back to the mall to solve it, and c) she’d have to leave Jacob and Molly alone for several minutes.
And once I’d figured that out, there was no way I was going to just discard it without ever showing it to anyone.

She puts the coffee down somewhere, Dinah bumps into something, and somehow this leads to coffee spilling
I spent longer than I should have trying to figure out exactly how the coffee got spilled, and then realized I could handwave that away with “somewhere / something / somehow”.

I told her I wouldn’t fire her for that, and she said she believed me.
as with Eleanor and Sigrid’s approach to the question of whether Larry survived the fire, Tammy’s mindset here is part of why she’s such a good match for Jacob. The Multiplier’s compatibility scores are based on a lot of factors.

You’re 100% sure you’ll get points for fucking each of them
Everything Jacob speculates in this paragraph is correct.

harder even than speaking at the funeral
First indication that Jacob’s parents are dead – although if you think about it, it was obvious from the very beginning of DFang’s content. After the fire, why wouldn’t he ask to stay with his parents instead of his sister? Either his parents are dead, or he lives in a different city from them – and that he and Tammy would have independently moved to the same city isn’t plausible. So he and Tammy live in the city where they grew up. We could posit that his parents are away on vacation, or have themselves moved away, but in the first case he would at least ask to stay in their unoccupied home, and even in the second case he would at least notify them that he’d lost his apartment to a fire but was unharmed.

Chapter 27: “Disclosure”

You know that look. You’ve seen it in the mirror.
I did not plan this line. It just flowed out of my fingers, and I realized it was perfect. That said, it wasn’t until I was writing Chapter 37, “Sometimes it genuinely hurts”, that I figured out exactly what it meant.

“‘Magic’ is just a word for something we think we can’t understand. If it’s real… then it’s not magic.” “Sufficiently advanced technology, right?”
At the very beginning of the story, DFang describes Jacob as a genius. I decided that this means that Tammy and Molly are as well (it runs in the family), and thus they’re aware of things like that.

And before that, maybe eighteen hours total throughout your whole life?” “It’s got to have been more than that,” Tammy says quietly.
Another hint about how the Multiplier works, and one of many, many examples of Tammy not being as quiet as she thinks she is.

“How did you know that!” You throw up your hands. “It’s in your profile in the app.”
This – Jacob using the information from Molly’s profile to prove that the app is real – was one of the earliest details that occurred to me.

“It feels weird to hear you say ‘vagina’ even though we were about to have a threesome,” Molly comments. You shrug.

EXTRA CONTENT: UNUSED SCENE FRAGMENT

You hesitate. It does feel weird to say ‘vagina’ and ‘anus’ to them. Tammy [sighs / chuckles?]. “‘Pussy’ and ‘ass’, Jacob. You can just say ‘pussy’ and ‘ass’.”

he was a construction worker in his thirties
This was another detail I thought of very early on. DFang’s original description of Tammy as “when she was 16 she was basically seduced by an older guy and got pregnant” sort of felt like it was implying that maybe he was as old as 20 or even 22. I decided that this had more narrative possibilities (including that it shows that the Multiplier knows more about people than they know themselves). It also helps explains more about why Darren’s not a part of Tammy and Molly’s life in any way (as evidenced by Jacob not knowing his name). Maybe at some point I’ll explain how they met.

“I eat pussy,” you volunteer. “Or, well, I have. Once.”
At the moment I wrote this, I knew that I had established that Jacob’s college girlfriend Arlene didn’t let him try cunnilingus. And yet, the words came out of my fingertips anyway. Which meant I had to figure out when that other sexual experience had been, and who with.

Molly interrupts. “No. Fuck no. That’s bullshit,” she says.
Early on in DFang’s original text, Tammy chides Molly for using the word “bitch” in front of Jacob. By this point, Molly has decided that if they’re going to be fucking Jacob (and each other), she can fucking well swear in front of him.

“Does that mean that without it, we would have waited until the weekend before asking you to fuck us?” “I have no idea,” you admit. “It’s not like there’s a standard linear progression – day one, couch-surfing, day five, threesome!”

EXTRA CONTENT: ALTERNATE VERSION

“No, I see your logic,” you say, “but I have no idea. It’s not like I can compare the Multiplier to a placebo.”
“The real power was inside you all along?” Molly says.
“And the real treasure was the girlfriends I made along the way,” you reply.

“We were going in this direction anyway. (…)” You frown. That argument feels too simple, somehow.

EXTRA CONTENT: ALTERNATE VERSION, FROM VERY EARLY ON

“But… it can’t make something out of nothing, right? We had feelings for you before or else it couldn’t have magnified them, right?”
“Well, yeah, but – Penelope! Look what it did to her!”
You take the phone from Molly and call up Penelope’s profile, and then her history.
“Look. She was at minus twenty-four when I left work yesterday. And now she’s at plus fifty-two for Affection! She’s got a Love score! She’s got a Lust score!”
Molly examines the history. “These are all real things you did?”
“I mean… yeah?”
“You were nice to her, you listened to her, you forgave her… that’s all stuff that could definitely help a girl like you more.”

“Don’t know if I would have made you wait quite that long, actually,” Tammy mutters quietly – although obviously it wasn’t as quiet as she thought.
Another example of Tammy not being quiet enough.

Chapter 28: “Have you tried turning it off and then on again?”

“Chelsea Swainton, by the way
Tammy’s girlfriends’ first names are very late-80s-early-90s, as befits someone who was 34 in approximately 2020 (when DFang started the story). For “Swainton”, I looked at one of the bookshelves near me, picked a random author’s name, deleted a few letters, and then verified that the new version of the name actually existed.

EXTRA CONTENT: UNUSED SCENE FRAGMENT

“Wait, Ms. Swainton ?!?” Molly says, startled.
“Oh, uh, yes, she was Molly’s fifth-grade teacher. Startled the hell out of both of us.”

a friend’s brother, who told her he wanted a blowjob from a visibly pregnant girl, and she agreed because she was afraid that she would never be sexually desirable again
I wanted that to be as sleazy and sordid and depressing as possible without having it feel like there was any extortion or ****.

“It’s not wild today!” she says. “Or, well, if it is, I’m being left out!”
As with Tammy assessing Dinah’s reaction, Molly’s approach to the question of whether people on the track team hold orgies is part of why she’s a good match for Jacob.

“I’m a virgin in terms of, have I had a penis in there,” she emphasizes (…) “But Sonia’s fingers, her tongue, her dildo…”

EXTRA CONTENT: UNUSED DETAIL

“I don’t think Sonia’s tongue is as big as Jacob’s dick,” Tammy points out.
“A lot more flexible, though!” Molly says, then she sticks her tongue out and wiggles it from side to side.

“Also, how many times have you eaten Sonia out? I’m betting it’s less than nine.” “Oh, because of the levels?” “Clearly what we need to do is, every time you cum in my mouth, we check my profile, and we see how many times it takes for me to go from Experimental to Neophyte!”

EXTRA CONTENT: ALTERNATE VERSION

Molly blinks a few times. “Oh, because it says we were ‘experimenting’, you mean? I’ve eaten her out four times. Hypothesis confirmed, I love eating pussy.” She bats her eyelashes. “Unless you think I need a larger sample size? Mom, can I lick Jacob’s cum out of your pussy?”

Chapter 29: “It’s a legitimate question”

This chapter took over three weeks to write, because there were a ton of pre-existing scene fragments that I wanted to incorporate and they didn’t all fit together. That’s one of the reasons I made that big mistake with Sonia – the one that led to me asking MrWhysper to delete the original version of chapter 29 (which was called “She genuinely wants to know”). It took me almost a week to figure out how to fix it.

“Turns out it’s got a real low threshold for what counts as interaction. ‘Hi, can I have pad see ew with beef?’ ‘That’ll be eleven ninety-five.’ ‘Here’s fifteen, keep the change.’ That was enough for the Multiplier. Her name is Sanouk.

EXTRA CONTENT: ALTERNATE VERSION

“‘Every woman’ means ‘every woman’. When I had lunch with Penelope, I got pad see ew from Thai Game. Hi, I’d like pad see ew with beef, please. That’ll be $11.95. Here's $15, keep the change. That was enough for the Multiplier. Her name is Sanouk, she recognized me as the tall polite guy who always tips, and I have a 65% chance with her. When I was on McAuley Boulevard, some idiot who was texting while he walked bumped into me, and I knocked over an old lady, so I helped her up and she said thank you. Her name is Anita, she’s in her 70s, and I have less than 1% chance with her but she likes my ass.”
“Is she pretty?” Molly asks, then hastily clarifies. “Sanouk, I mean.”
You shrug. “Pretty enough, I guess.”
“Still,” Tammy says. “Sixty-five percent odds of success? That's pretty good.”
“You’re both Top Prospects, which is ‘more than 92%’, so I think I can live without getting into Sanouk’s panties.”

“Oh my god!” she says. “That’s Callie Attenborough!”
I had this scene in mind ever since I created Shondra back in chapter 21 (“RTFM”) – although originally, Molly was pointing to “Callie Attenborough’s mom”, who I considered having be someone who drew a lot of attention to herself. I briefly toyed with the notion of her offering sexual favors to the track coach on Callie’s behalf, but that said things about the character that I didn’t like (regardless of whether the coach accepted). My notes were: “is that excessive? Tone it down some? [yes, it absolutely is excessive.] [is shondra fucking the track team coach also?]
… No. Or, at least, if she is, it’s not in the summary.
…yes, but not while Callie was on the track team. Shondra has never had sex transactionally.”
Will I go through with that? Wait and see.

Callie Gabrielle Attenborough
As I mentioned last time, “Callie” is a reference to ’90s sitcom star Calista Flockhart, from Ally McBeal. The middle name “Gabrielle” is a reference to Renee O’Connor’s character “Gabrielle” from ’90s action show Xena: Princess Warrior.
(I have not ever actually watched either Ally McBeal or Xena, but Shondra did. A lot.)
(Jenna’s middle name, ‘Rosemary’, is not a TV reference; rather, it’s the name of an author from one of my shelves.)

Level: Aficionada. Shondra loves sucking cock.
This section of Shondra’s sexual history is a lot tamer than it originally was. I considered taming it down even further, but decided that the readers – you perverts – would love it like this. (Also, ‘Aficionada’ is not a typo.)

before she turned 30 and left Texas
Regardless of where this story actually takes place… we know it’s not Texas.

unaware that one of them was her half-brother
As before, the Multiplier knows more about people than they know themselves. This is a better demonstration than Darren’s real age, because at least Darren knew it even though he was lying to Tammy about it. Neither Javier and Shondra knew they had the same dad. (Shondra knows she has one half-sister from her mom, and is unaware of the three other half-sisters, and two half-brothers, from her dad. He got around.)

As you expected, the video shows Sonia completely nude
The original version, which I took down, had Jacob surprised by Sonia masturbating, and he immediately closed the video and then everything else went much faster. But I decided that “I promise I didn’t know she was doing that right now” makes Jacob sound really naive. Also, this way we get to learn more about who Jacob is as a person, and Tammy gets to approve of his morality.

at some point you’ll have to figure out what the Manual meant when it said that the Multiplier both is, and isn’t, only yours
One thing I specifically had in mind for this is that there are other Multiplier stories. Is that the only thing it means, well…

Sonia Maghrebi: Is imagining you making out with her while she sits on Tammy’s face

EXTRA CONTENT: UNUSED DETAIL

“From what I can tell,” you say, “sometimes women have really wild sex fantasies about me even when I’m not doing anything.”
“Totally normal,” Tammy says. “Don’t need the Multiplier for that!”

Tammy snorts. “Your magic phone app has microtransactions and DLC?!?”
Up until the last minute, Tammy was horrified by this revelation. I decided this reaction works better.

Tammy rolls her eyes. “Jacob,” she says very gently, “you realize that I masturbated thinking about you before I went to sleep last night, right?” (…) “Can you get rid of it?” Tammy asks. “If I’m going to have sex dreams about you, I’d rather they be because we’re having sex.”
Again, these are details that I had in mind from the very beginning.

“I’m glad you’re thinking about this before buying them,” Tammy says, and you’re pretty sure that’s criticism.
It’s an interesting question – does the “I Think I Did Okay” attribute mean that Tammy is incapable of criticizing Jacob? I went back and forth on whether to italicize “before”, which would have changed the meaning of the sentence considerably; eventually I chose the version that makes Jacob uncertain as to whether he’s overthinking it.

I didn’t buy that one for you.” “Why not?” You blink. “Well, for one thing, I didn’t have enough points.”
It’s only now, when compiling these annotations, that I thought to check DFang’s original text, and Jacob actually did have enough points. The most important reason he didn’t buy it for Molly is that, at that point, her scores were too low and “Personal Attributes” was not yet an option for her, which is something I actually did mention, back in chapter 26. Hmm. Well, the simplest solution is to say that Jacob just misremembered (like me, d’oh!) and leave it at that, but that doesn’t feel satisfying. And I’m sure that none of you care about that little detail (“Why didn’t you do XYZ?” “It was impossible, for reason A” – but that should have been “for reason B”!)… but I care about it. And therefore, so should Jacob.

Eh, I’ll think of something.

“Yeah, like there’s one that says it’ll make you perfect –”

EXTRA CONTENT: ALTERNATE VERSION

“There’s one that says it’ll make you perfect, but it costs fifty thousand points. I’d have to… I dunno, get 2500 people to think about me while masturbating, or something.”

“Stepford Wives is a horror movie,” she says. “About women being murdered and replaced by robots. Literally murdered. With knives.
I hate the Stepfordization trope. And yes, it really is a movie about murdering women. Again, one of the details I had in mind from the very beginning. (Yes, I know it was a novel first.)

this magic thing that says it’ll make me perfect

EXTRA CONTENT: UNUSED SCENE FRAGMENT:

“So you accept that it’s magic now?”
Tammy hesitates. “I accept that it’s real. Is it magic, I’m not making a decision on just yet.”

She pats your hand. “So take the win, okay?” You roll your eyes, but nod again.
I wanted to make it very clear that, even with all her scores maxed and “I Did Okay” in effect, Tammy can still contradict and (gently) ridicule Jacob.

“You’re sure Penelope will be okay with it?” she adds. “Yeah, the no-jealousy is for everyone whose Affection is high enough.” “No, I mean, you’re sure she’ll be okay with us fucking her?

About three days after I’d posted the corrected version of this chapter, I realized that there was an important detail about Penelope missing: namely, it ended with Jacob’s comment about Affection scores, but just assumed that Penelope would be okay with Tammy and Molly getting involved, which would have clashed with the scene a few chapters later where Penelope calls and they try to conceal “Jacob has fucked Tammy and Molly” from her.

Fortunately, instead of deleting the chapter again, it only took me 5 minutes to figure out how to fix it and write this passage. Most of you will probably have already seen it, but about a hundred of you might not!

EXTRA CONTENT: SCENE FRAGMENT WHICH ISN’T ACTUALLY EXTRA

“No, I mean, you’re sure she’ll be okay with us fucking her? Or, y’know, with you fucking your sister and your niece?”

Um.

“Mayyyyybe not. I’ll… figure out a way to raise the subject discreetly. Would you be okay with just me fucking her, and you not joining in?”

Tammy shrugs. “I’d be disappointed, yeah… I’d really love to eat her pussy while you fuck me –”

“Same here,” Molly puts in.

“ – but I’m serious: it won’t hurt my feelings. Not like it would have this morning, anyway!”

“That’s the only reason I didn’t suck his cock while you were in the shower this morning,” Molly points out. “Didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

“Awww!” Tammy says, and they kiss again.

You feel yourself running out of words.
I had no idea how to give that part a satisfactory ending.

Chapter 30: “Not everything is about you”

You make a mental note to find out more about how blushing works.
I did in fact have to look up how blushing works for this. Because I don’t have easy access to a blonde woman with a low sensitivity threshold for her blush response.

That’s all out in the open! Why am I blushing!”
Because I liked the part about how the first time Jacob can remember seeing Tammy blush was when she had to admit that she was pregnant.

clearly it’s nothing the Multiplier counts as sex. A lot of making out… sometimes we watch porn and masturbate together

EXTRA CONTENT: ALTERNATE VERSION

“I…” Tammy says very slowly, “I may have… thought about… Molly… sexually… a few times.”

EXTRA CONTENT: ANOTHER ALTERNATE VERSION

“Jacob,” Tammy says, “Molly and I have been… well, messing around, I guess… for the past several months. And talking about it since... oh, well before that. I guess the sexual experience tracker doesn’t care about tongue-kissing?”

“Or masturbating together,” Molly adds. “I mean, while we’re in the same room and watching the same porn. We hadn’t gotten to the point of, you know, masturbating each other. It might count that?”

Your eyes are wide.

“That’s a good point,” Tammy says. “Jacob, does it say anything about me and Mom getting each other off?
It was just, you know, kissing and hand stuff. And we watched each other use dildos.”

From my notes: “tammy’s been very open with molly about sex, because she wanted to make sure molly didn’t get exploited – or, worse, pregnant at 15 – the way she did.”

A few years back, I realized I was starting to have feelings for you.
DFang’s original text says that, at the beginning of the story – as in, before the Multiplier ever affected her – Tammy’s Love for Jacob was already 40, and her Lust for him was already 19.

EXTRA CONTENT: UNUSED DETAIL

“Hey, don’t look at me,” Molly says, and holds up her hands, palms facing you. “You and me, we barely spent any time together before this all started. I had no strong opinions on you one way or the other.”

Normally I masturbate about… every other day
I considered having this be daily, but then that would make the fact that Tammy masturbated on Monday evening (chapter 12, “Let’s check the ol’ rectangular anxiety generator”) and twice on Tuesday morning (chapter 13, “Who am I to disagree”) less remarkable.

“I changed clothes three times before you got here
DFang went to the trouble of emphasizing that Tammy changed clothes before Jacob reached the apartment (chapter 4, “Explore the app more”).

“Um. How did you know, actually?” you ask. “I put them back where I found them?”
That genuinely bugged me. Well, fortunately DFang established that Tammy works in clothing retail, so it’s plausible that she’d notice little details like “these panties have been turned inside out”.

you retrieve your phone from where you dropped it earlier.
Remember last chapter, when Tammy grabbed Jacob’s wrist and squeezed so hard he dropped the phone?

“Haven’t done anything sexual with a guy in nine years,” Tammy says
Remember how Tammy’s profile said that the 15th blowjob she gave was “a coworker at her first retail job, who had been very nice to her” ?

Then Molly frowns. “Hold on,” she says. “Kneepad.”
Remember how I said I didn’t want any sexual activity until all the disclosures had been made?

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she says. “The second I heard the words come out of my mouth, I realized you’d want to hear about this.”
For the longest time, this was “Oh! I, uh, I guess you do want to hear about it?”, which makes Tammy seem dim.

a few months after I turned nineteen
In a lot of stories, this sort of thing would begin at eighteen. Carol Carter had a specific reason for waiting an extra year and a bit, but I don’t know what it was. (Also, it annoys me that I can’t italicize only part of a word here.)

“I don’t know if she was planning to bring you in once you were old enough too, or if it was supposed to be a girls-only thing,”
I have deliberately not decided the answer to this question.

did that mean he didn’t know? Or was he waiting for something?”
As above: I’ve left this question unanswered even to myself.

Chapter 31: “Fucking finally (and vice versa)”

She stops. “Actually, no,” she says.
By this point, the ‘last-second interruption’ felt like a running gag.

Molly arranges herself on the sofa so you’ll have access to her pussy from where you’re standing.
I spent too long trying to visualize her exact position so I could describe it.

I never would’ve lasted this long without the stamina [booster]
You might say that’s not very long to last, but he’s basically been edging for several hours.

“And one time, at a party, I got to watch.
as per the end of chapter 28, track team was wild.

Chapter 32: “Everything’s made up but the points still matter”

Reference to the theater sports TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway, described as “the show where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter”.

lying antiparallel on Molly’s bed, clutching each other.
In the previous chapter, Molly said she’s not ready for face-sitting, so this is side by side.

“Do you have…”
After ten seconds, you realize she’s not going to finish her sentence.
Sigrid was going to ask Jacob if he had an erection, but that way lies phone sex, and one detail I’d had in mind from very early on was that he’d never done that before Penelope offered.

“Early ’70s movie called Deliverance,” Tammy says.
It wasn’t until a few weeks after I’d had Tammy know about both The Stepford Wives and Deliverance that I decided she’s taking a course in film studies. (Why? Because it interests her, and because all characters should be more than just what they’re used for in a given scene.)

Who’s On First? You’re On Second
You can look up stuff like “sphynx” and “babelfish” on Wikipedia yourself, but “baseball metaphors for sex” isn’t necessarily the most intuitive article name.

The Universal Language
In some languages, the word for ‘tongue’ and ‘language’ are the same. Even in English, we have several idioms that do this.

“Why didn’t you get points for her orgasms?” Molly asks. “My guess – and I’ll look this up in the manual later, but it makes sense – is that I’ll only get those once her Affection passes 50.”

EXTRA CONTENT: UNUSED DETAIL

Tammy looks thoughtful. “Huh. I wonder if that means you won’t get any points for fucking her.”
“Only one way to find out!” Molly says cheerfully.
“You mean, read the manual?” you say. Molly sticks out her tongue at you.

your sister and your niece, her daughter
The Multiplier gets this specific because “your niece” isn’t necessarily “your sister’s daughter” (and even if she is, she’s not necessarily that sister’s daughter).

Chacun À Son Goût
French for “To each their own”, or “to each according to their tastes”. This is sort of a pun because if we delete the accent over the ‘a’, the phrase means “each has their own taste”. It’s not a great pun, I admit, but I did think of it while writing the chapter, so…

That’s a Lot: Fucked your host’s daughter
I am truly proud of this pun (check Wikipedia for “Lot’s daughters”).

Vast Difference sets your sperm count to zero
This is a pun on the anatomical feature known as the vas deferens, which is what gets dealt with in a vasectomy. It significantly pre-dates me, though.

Sonia has replied “Okay! Fuck and suck him real good for me!” “I’m fifty-fifty on whether I should answer her with ‘already done’!” Molly chuckles.
In my original version of this scene (written well in advance), Sonia’s reply was “Okay! Suck his cock for me!”, but as the story reached this point, I realized that Molly had not yet sucked Jacob’s cock, and therefore she couldn’t joke about saying “already done”.

her period started fifteen minutes ago and these past few months she’s been getting really bad –”
The word Molly was about to use was not “cramps”. It would have been an even worse violation of Sonia’s privacy.

I already told you I won’t have time to meet with her until the weekend anyway.”
I wrote this scene well in advance, and then by the time the story reached this point, Jacob had already explained that he wouldn’t have time to meet Sonia until the weekend. But the notion of Molly insisting that she can keep a secret, and then immediately demonstrating that she can’t, was too much fun to omit.

Also, the Sonia scene serves as a reminder to the reader of why it’s important for Molly to keep her mouth shut when Penelope calls. And I liked the chance to have a character in the story forget a detail.

I already took the Plan B
This is the point at which it occurred to me to check whether Plan B actually works that way.

They’ve just started getting into position when your phone rings.
I figured, why not one more use of the last-minute interruption gag?

Chapter 33: “Caller ID services were first formally defined in 1993”

You know very well what she’s expecting you to say, but you’ll never get this straight line again. “I don’t remember how big your fingers are, but… probably!”
I originally had him say this seriously, which would make him sound dim.

Someone asked me if I’m deliberately writing him as if he had “high functioning ASD – what they used to call Asperger’s”, to which my answer is: I’m deliberately writing him this way, but I’m not aiming specifically for “high-functioning ASD / neurospicy / neurodiverse / whichever”. Jacob is very aware of what’s true and what’s not, and he notices weird details, and he thinks all the time. That said, Jacob has a sense of humor and is able to not only appreciate silliness, but to say silly shit for the sake of being silly.

Chapter 34: “She can and she did”

Originally, I had planned that Jacob would only ask Penelope for the car-related favor after the phone sex.

She has this amazing grin that you’ve only ever seen from across the room when she didn’t realize you were looking in her direction, but you’ve definitely heard her sheer delight in figuring things out.
I decided months ago that this scene would begin with Jacob and Tammy terrified by Penelope asking about them fucking. By the time I got here, it was no longer completely obvious why that would be the case. For quite a while, I was actually considering “what if she pretends to sound angry, as a prank?”

she’s not as quiet as she thinks she is.
The payoff to all those moments of Jacob overhearing something Tammy muttered.

“He’s bigger than my ex-boyfriend, but he’s not, like, a Pringles can or something.”
I want you to know I actually looked up the measurements for a Pringles can.

(Jacob is almost as long as a Pringles can, but not anywhere near as thick.)

you lay back with two pretty naked women who love you, and close your eyes.
Notice it doesn’t say “and fall asleep”.

Chapter 35: “If I phrase a question like that, the answer is probably “no””

Because you did some basic reading on mechanisms and modes of action on a whole portfolio of **** a few years back, when you were part of a team doing recommendations on takeover plans for a pharma manufacturer
Here’s a secret: I don’t know what Jacob’s company actually does. I sent a PM to DFang, but he never answered; I realize that he might never have bothered to decide, but it was worth asking. “Recommendations on takeover plans for a pharma manufacturer” sounds meaningful, but it’s actually very ambiguous. Was Jacob assigned to read up on the portfolio of ****, or was that something he decided independently? Answer: <shrug emoji>.

Barking Biter has invited you to the shared folder: “HER NAME’S NOT HYACINTH, YOU ASS – ferret pics!”
This happened just to disrupt Jacob’s conversational rhythm (because otherwise I couldn’t really see a good transition from “is this just about me having lots of sex with lots of women” to “Is there any way you could help me”).

You can make my cum rainbow-colored!
Jacob is never going to buy this Attribute, so this is my only chance to tell you that it’s named after a D&D spell: Prismatic Spray.

Because now you do remember what else points are for. There was an option to buy an upgrade to the profile-watching feature so it would have audio.
It amuses me to imagine someone reading the story, and reaching that line at the bottom of the screen, and being completely baffled as to how “add audio to the profile-watching feature” could possibly be a solution to Jacob’s problem.

Chapter 36: “Beep Boop Beedly Boop”

the Quantum Sperm Probability Eraser is not, in fact, a tool. It’s a game.
Back when Jacob discovered the Manual, one of the first things it told him was that the Multiplier is magic, and also that the Multiplier is not magic.
One thing that means is that the Multiplier won’t do absolutely anything with no effort. The magic doesn’t just “work like magic”. Jacob can’t just press a button and have all the sperm inside Tammy instantly vanish, and then go back to bed: that would be boring.

There are a lot of different ideas about how magic in fiction should work – should there be rules? Should it be inherently rule-less? Whatever you do, it’s important that the magic be narratively satisfying, that there be some sort of logic – or at least, causality – that the reader can follow. This often involves paying a price of some sort… and, here, the price is that Jacob has to play the game. Not only play, but win.

Three options – Molly, Tammy, Tutorial
He came in Molly too, so if he’d chosen “Molly”, the Eraser would have offered him the chance to erase all the sperm that could potentially fertilize her. She’s on the Pill, so the three levels (he spurted three times) would have all been empty.

“multiple” means you won’t have to take out 500 million sperm individually, thank god.
For reference: one million seconds is eleven and a half days, and 500 million seconds is over 15 years.

Cartoon Molly UNHINGES HER JAW LIKE AN ANGLERFISH
Somehow this feels more horrifying to me than “like a snake”.

And she wrote back – she said she’d made it home just fine, and don’t worry about her.
The only reason Genevieve did even that much before deleting the account is that Jacob told her that his parents had died in a car accident (that is, while traveling), and she didn’t want him to be scared that she had died while traveling too.

Why didn’t she just give him a fake address – she had a reason, but I don’t know what it was.

It occurs to you that it’s bad UI/UX design to not have “OUT OF TIME” and “HERE’S HOW TO CONTINUE” in the same message box

This only occurred to me afterward. I could have fixed it, but I really wanted that moment of Jacob being terrified that not only has he failed but also his phone is dead. Also, this way we get to see that Jacob is someone who has opinions about UI/UX design.

Chapter 37: “Sometimes it genuinely hurts”

I put a lot of effort into this story. Occasionally I’ll time myself reading passages of dialogue aloud at a reasonable speed, interspersed with brief descriptions of action, so that I can tell if a scene is taking too long (or not long enough) in-story. Reading Jacob’s secret aloud doesn’t make me cry, but sometimes it makes my eyes wet.

Hyperempathy is when you make up imaginary people, and then get sad because you’re doing terrible things to them.

I hope the secret startled and horrified you.

“I’ve jacked off to fantasies about strangers!” / Klaxon. / “… about characters from TV and movies and comics! / people who lived near me! / people I know from work! I’ve …”
What Jacob was about to say was “people I knew from school”.

I thought a lot about what the secret could be. I’d already decided that he held himself responsible for his parents’ deaths in some way… and then he needed a sexual secret to feed to the Eraser. His parents died when they were going somewhere because of him, I was sure, but where? And why?

I almost made it “he saw two teachers who were married to other people, having sex on school property”, but that wouldn’t have the same emotional charge as “a teacher he had a crush on”. And having it be the school librarian instead of a teacher neatly resolved logistical questions about where it happened and how Jacob was able to see it.

so uncle Roger had to come over from England to help out
Details I’ll provide about Roger at this time: he was their father’s brother, not their mother’s; he’s the one who got Jacob through adolescence and into adulthood; he has since gone back to England. Other details will gradually find their way into the text.

when I got back to school, the principal was really nice to me, but Ms. McGrath and Ms. Liang and Ms. DiStefano were gone and I never found out what happened to them.
I wrote that line, and suddenly I knew exactly what had happened, so I wrote it too – but it doesn’t fit in the story, because the story is from Jacob’s POV. (Do you think the principal was right?)

EXTRA CONTENT: UNUSED SCENE WHICH IS CANON

“I don’t care that you’re gay,” the principal said. “I don’t care that you’re poly, or whatever the word is. I don’t even care if you do PDAs, as long as you keep them to the same level as the straight teachers. What I do care about is that you were having sex on school property, where students could see and hear you.”

Jennifer blanched. “What –” she began; Trish grabbed her hand and squeezed, and Jennifer stopped talking.

“And now the worst possible thing has happened, as a result of you three being sloppy and careless and having sex where a student could see and hear you.”

“Someone made a video?” Cynthia guessed.

“No, Cynthia. If only. No, what happened is that, as a consequence of a student seeing and hearing you three fucking, his parents are dead.”

“WHAT?!?” Cynthia shrieked. Trish and Jennifer just stared.

“Jacob Carter. Trish, I assume you realized he had a crush on you?”

Trish nodded nervously.

“You left the door to your office ajar while you three were fucking. And you didn’t check to see if any students were still in the library. And Jacob heard and saw you. And he did what most thirteen-year-old boys would do if they saw the woman they had a crush on, engaged in a lesbian threeway.”

All three women cringed.

“And then Ernie caught him in the act, and brought him to my office, and we called his parents to come to the school and talk about what to do with him, and while they were en route a semi-trailer spun out of control on the highway and they were killed.”

“Oh my god,” Trish said in a horrified voice. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.” Jennifer just hyperventilated.

“You can’t – you – we didn’t – it’s not –” Cynthia sputtered, but trailed off.

“You’re not legally culpable for what happened,” the principal said. “I don’t think I’d even say that you’re morally culpable. And I’m not going to fire you, because then the union would get involved and it would become a matter of public record and that would destroy any chance that poor boy has of ever putting his life back together.”

None of the women said anything.

“I’m not firing you,” the principal repeated. “You can consider yourselves on paid leave until you find positions elsewhere. I will write you letters of recommendation that are as glowing as you want. You were very good at your jobs, and we will miss you. But you cannot work in this school ever again.”

You can’t get Tammy pregnant. You can’t. You just can’t. Oh god, oh god, oh god. This could be the end of everything.
At this point, I feel it would be intellectually dishonest for me to not at least mention abortion. There are a few reasons Jacob doesn’t consider that as an option, one of which is that it doesn’t belong in a story like this. Plus, I’m aware that it might upset some of you readers. Even a method that prevents the implantation of a zygote might upset some readers, which is why Jacob’s going to all this trouble to prevent the egg from even being fertilized.

Tammy is pro-choice, and she chose to go through with her first unplanned pregnancy. Would she choose to do that again even if Jacob was the one who fertilized her?

I’ve never even admitted that to myself.
I really like the ramping up. First secret is something that’s very personal but if you were in a circumstance to be asking him about his sexual history, he’d willingly share it with you. Second is the one that’s so awful he used to have nightmares about people finding out. And then there’s this one.

every hot girl I’ve ever met
To be clear, Jacob has met more than 14 hot girls throughout his life. Also, notice: he didn’t mention either Arlene or Genevieve.

Chapter 38: “Shift work has its advantages”

My original idea for what happens after Jacob finishes Quantum Sperm Probability Eraser was “he uses the profile image function to look in on his Top Prospects, and then his non-Top Prospects. Everyone is asleep. Tessa is sharing a bed with someone. Shondra is sharing a bed with someone. Sanouk gets out of bed, and he realizes she’s going to the bathroom. He closes the app. He is very tired, and the last thing he thinks before he passes out is ‘it feels like I’m forgetting something’.” And that would be the end of chapter 37, and then chapter 38 would begin with him waking up in the morning.
I think this is a lot better.

last night I trimmed it down to a tiny little landing strip, just for you,” she says, which is actually a detail the ‘camera’ didn’t tell you
Just in case: the detail is “she did it last night”.

you and Sigrid are talking over each other
Did you ever notice that characters in fiction don’t talk over each other the way people in real life do?

Suddenly you can’t see anything, and then you realize your eyes are closed. You sort of try to open them, but it doesn’t really feel like it’s worth the effort.
Remember, Steel-Driving Man gives greatly increased stamina, not infinite stamina.