Going home and finding something on your laptop.

So Mr. Green was indeed suspended for two weeks, and although you were warned to be careful about what you say to students, most teacher agreed that it was time somebody stood up to the kid. It seems he’s one of the biggest troublemakers in school, by which they mean he’s quick to get in fights and win them. They told you this is his first time hitting a teacher though. Lucky you. What’s more, news spread like wildfire. By the end of lunch break the whole school knew about the incident. It made last period class even harder, with other students asking if “you really hit a student”. You hate how facts start getting warped by word-of-mouth.

After yet another tiring day, you arrive at the apartment building. The owner, Mr. Jacob, is sweeping around the entrance. You greet him politely and he returns it with a smile. After exchanging short pleasantries, you get inside your apartment.

Again, it’s not the most relieving thing. Not only does the place not look great, but even with you being as tired as you are, you need to get stuff ready for next week. You don’t have a desk, so you work on the kitchen counter. You turn on your laptop while you prepare yourself a cup of coffee. Then, you see something strange. There’s a new icon on your desktop. A heart with a plus sign called Affection Multiplier App.exe.

Affection Multiplier? You look at your watch and press the mode shift button. After a couple of presses, you see it again, though this time it has the same name as the thing in your laptop.

Affection Multiplier App.

Out of curiosity, you press the “next” button, and are shocked to see a familiar name there.

L. Vanessa – Aff. 14 (+5)

L. Vanessa? As in Lindbeck Vanessa? Your student? What the fuck? And what are these numbers? You press next again, and see yet another familiar name.

Y. Veronica – Aff. 19 (+6)

Young Veronica? Another student? What on earth is this?

You sit on your flimsy plastic chair in front of the kitchen counter and click on the AMA, viruses and such be damned. When you do, you’re welcomed by a black screen. Then, a textbox with a green font.

“Welcome. The Gift of the Affection Multiplier allows your relationships with people to build five times faster. It is an always-present gift, and will affect every aspect of your social life from now on. The Affection Multiplier App is a useful resource to check the progress of your relationships with people through the use of an intuitive scoring system.”

As you read through the glossary, you start understanding what this is about. Supposedly, this makes people like you better and faster, and it tells you how much they like you by putting a score from -100 to 100, with negative scores meaning hate. Scores in the 50s mean they like you a lot, while a complete 100 means they are loyal companions.

There’s a lot here. References, concept definitions, folders, subfolders… before you notice, an hour has gone by. You went through almost everything, including the scores of the people you know.

To your surprise, the scores of your co-workers are very much ok, with most of them being quite close to the 30s. Your students, however… Well, the good thing is that there’s only one negative score, and that's Mr. Gabriel Green at a low -21. Very few others go further than +6, with Ms. Lindbeck and Ms. Young being notable exceptions.

Wait, why are you taking this seriously? This has to be some sort of weird program that you installed by accident. Surely a bitcoin miner. You look for the uninstaller, but it’s nowhere to be found. Actually, there’s no installation folder or anything, just… the exe on your desktop with a size of 1kb.

You sigh and start running your antivirus while you get to work. There’s more material you need to prepare. But even after it’s done, the thing is still there, unfound.