Six weeks pass...

You receive a text from "Studware Commercial Partnership"

It's seven o'clock on a Friday evening, and only now are you finally finished with your backlog, and ready for the weekend. You really should have left a couple of hours ago, but it's been an unusually frustrating week at the office, full of unexplained technical outages in your department causing setback after setback. With all the unsaved or corrupted documents that you ended up having to start over from scratch (most of which your manager insisted could not possibly wait until Monday), by the time five o'clock rolled around, you had little choice but to remain at your desk to catch up on lost progress while everyone else headed home.

God damn, do you hate the work that you do.

After finally shutting down your workstation, you navigate the silent and dimly-lit sea of cubicles, shutting off the remaining lights as you make your departure. Although isn't the first time you've been the last one to leave the office, you still find it eerie being here on your own, in a building normally crowded with familiar faces.

As you descend the stairwell to the main entrance, your pocket vibrates, and you pause to take a look at your phone. You don't recognise the number, but it's signed-off with the company name "Studware Commercial Partnership", which rings a few bells. The message includes a link to follow, but no further details. You have a feeling you know what this is regarding.

For a moment, you wonder whether you should wait until you're home, but your curiosity gets the better of you. You follow the link and, as you suspected, it leads to an app on your phone's application store.

MalO ver2.O.O
[PRIVATE - CLOSED TESTING]
FREE TO INSTALL!

Reviews:
(O)

Description:

Never settle for those awkward feelings of being alone ever again. MalO 2.0 is an exciting and interactive experience that will keep you engaged and intrigued.
The anxiety of online dating to find a sexual partner can be nerve-racking, but after just a few hours of MalO, you will soon forget all about those painful feelings of dissatisfaction.

MalO is a cross-platform application that can be experienced across multiple devices. Through sustained engagement, MalO will be able to learn more about you, and will adapt to your personal tastes and interests. Interacting with MalO will also earn you SCPoints, that may then be spent to further enhance and customise the MalO experience.
To avoid performance and balancing issues, only one SCPoint purchase will be permitted in each 24 Hour period.

Remember, the more you participate, the more MalO will engage with you. Your experience is completely up to you.

Absolutely NO ADS. Enjoy!

INCLUDES MICRO-TRANSACTIONS

As you read the through the details of MalO 2.0.0 on the application store, the hairs begin bristling on the back of your neck, and your heartbeat quickens ever so slightly. You do raise an eyebrow at the "Includes Micro-Transactions" notice, but you suppose it makes sense.

You paid far less up-front than you were expecting on your Stud 'R' Us order, so you guess they're hoping to squeeze a little extra revenue from you through the app itself. You have no doubt that there will actually be at least two ways to earn yourself SCPoints (but also, "SCPoints"? Really?), and you bet one of those winds up on your phone bill.

Seeing no point in waiting any longer, you tap the 'Buy?' button with your thumb, and begin your installation of the MalO 2.0 application. Despite it only being a 9.8MB download, you know from experience that the signal from your phone network at work is spotty at best (and you never bothered to memorise the company wi-fi password), so you slip your phone back into your pocket and begin your walk home, locking the front doors of the office with a swipe from your keycard before you go.

You're about fifteen minutes into your walk when you feel your phone buzzing again... And again... And again?

Taking a look, you find that the installation has now finished, and a new application icon is visible on your home screen. Simply labeled "MalO", the icon itself seems to depict a fuzzy black heart, with ears and a tail, on a crimson background. The buzzing, it seems, was from a string of notifications from the application requesting authorisation for access;

"MalO would like access to your Location. Allow?"

Yeah, of course, that's fine. You already have a good idea of why it's asking, so you tap "Allow", without much hesitation.

"MalO would like access to your Settings. Allow?"

That one sounds... Way more ambiguous. Not to mention pretty damn broad. Along with every aspect of your phone's system configuration and notification settings, you believe that also would encompass your privacy settings, the account settings for every other device you've integrated with your phone (which is more-or-less all of them), and probably a bunch of stuff you're not even considering. "Allow".

"MalO would like access to your Shopping and Banking details. Allow?"

Ironically, this is the first one that actually gives you pause. You're pretty damn sure you're not about to be scammed, and you expect that this step is a requirement for you to make purchases within the MalO app in the future, so... Ah, fuck it. "Allow".

Having now granted MalO 2.0 access to pretty much everything it could have asked for, you take a seat on a nearby park bench, eager to open the MalO application and get your first look at the interface itself.

You're a bit surprised to find that it kind-of resembles a dating app (albeit a dating app which looks like it will only support exchanges between you and one single 'contact'). When you launch the app for the first time, a dialogue box appears, with two options at the bottom for you to pick between. Looks like there's just one more stage to the set-up before you can actually get started.

Thank you for installing MalO 2.0.0!

Before beginning your MalO experience, please read the two dating profiles below carefully, and select your preferred match.
There are two branches available for this version of the MalO software. These are MalO 2.0.0a and MalO 2.0.0b (MalO 'Alpha' and MalO 'Beta', respectively).

'Alpha' and 'Beta' are the two physical and psychological templates that MalO may embody from the outset of your online dating experience.
No traits within these profiles are necessarily set in stone- all aspects of MalO's personality and physicality may be customised by spending SCPoints in the MalOptions Menu, and MalO's attitude is also moulded organically through long-term interaction with MalO.