Gaming the System

I never used that pocket.

She didn't care, and I guessed I didn't, either.

Romance and Choices

Mom didn't need the car, so I drove over to Barb's, about ten minutes away but forever on a bike, and showed up holding a pair of bags with plastic containers of chili that mom was embarrassed for me to take (not being sufficiently fancy, she said).

Barb answered the door and let me in. She was dressed in a wool skirt and a cotton button down over a solid t-shirt. I complimented her with a 'wow you look nice' but I think she didn't believe me.

I was nervous.

I think she was nervous, too.

Her mom and dad were there, so we went downstairs to eat alone in their basement kitchen. I caught up on what classes she was taking, and she got the low-down on my being both in college and high school, envious of the tuition break from my mom's job.

Barb's parents had been really nice to us as we walked in, but I did notice that her mom came down to ferry laundry back and forth in a way that didn't technically interfere with us, but in reality was almost certainly a monitoring-things action.

I didn't raise it with Barb.

We watched a movie after we ate, a sweet Studio Ghibli one about a little girl that was just amazingly transporting - bringing us as viewers into their reality, the 1950's Japan of slow summers and innocent confusion and making friends with trees.

I really liked the bus that was a cat, that was a bus, that was a cat.

Barb had seen it before but I hadn't. I'd seen a ton of anime, but it was all series instead of movies.

I mentioned that I had a list of courses I was trying to decide on for summer school, and maybe she could help me.

Fetching her laptop, I got into my online doc showing the list of courses, and we made a spreadsheet with the course name, then two columns, one for her and one for me.

The diverting project, not technically one of actual choice but more pie-in-the-sky dreaming and wistful or offhanded that'd-be-cool comments, put me on a quest.

At first, we added just courseware for us two - and that was the ultra-expensive stuff, the semester in a few hours ones. I knew from the price codes (but didn't mention) that the retail on organic chem as overnight-fast mode, part time over 18 nights with no mental effort just sleep-background, ran $110k, for the one course. It was unreasonable. But, they had it.

I mentioned that the other two people in my DND harem were Alice and Jan, two girls I knew from band. Barb was laughing that I was stupid enough to bring up a 'harem' idea when I was on a first date with another girl, and I said, absolutely yes, I really really was that stupid, but what courseware would help us be a better team?

She looked at me and scoffed and said, "Your scouting party quest needed wives and kids? You need..."

She hunted up topics and started listing stuff off. The final list included human development, family life, counseling, child development, marriage therapy, household budgeting, sewing techniques, interfaith marriages, grief processing, interpersonal communications, cognitive psych, short order cook chef school, nutritional sciences, teaching methods, dog training and pet grooming (for pets), animal husbandry, veterinary (for living on a farm together), computer programming (for money), etc.

The list of courses and degrees she just piled into an 'everybody gets this' column.

Each course was a couple of thousand, with a 30x multiplier on cost if they included fast-delivery 'skills and techniques', but we were having fun. Her list even included whole sets of courses in one, because short-order-cook was 5 classes instead of one and had muscle-memory price bumps.

Barb wanted a complete math degree, then said maybe computer science, machine learning, computational linguistics, and a couple of other degrees would be fun, but I told her, laughing with her aspirations, no, you need philosophy and ethics and all the same harem stuff, too.

We were up late, joking about this stuff.

In part, she was laughing because she didn't have a license for overnight learning, it was expensive and she had two sisters and a brother in college and cousins in another country her parents were sending money to support.

We had all this stuff on a wish-list, queued up but totally un-paid-for, as a fun thing. I said, keep the list, sometime we might look at it and laugh. Besides, I added, my mom had a deal where she could get a price break on some courses because she was an adjunct prof, and I'd check with her if she could use it.

We laughed because even half of a billion is a half-billion (though I had no idea how much the total was, it wouldn't tell you until you put it in a checkout queue).

The part about mom's 'discount' was complete B.S., of course.

We kissed goodnight in her front room for about 20 minutes, and I had to go home.

It was 11:30 pm.

I got home and booted up, and Got Very Very busy.

First, I added two fast-delivery math courses to her queue, and texted her, "Go For Da Maths, try it now."

She texted back, "YES YES Works. Good night."

I had a decision to make, but even though I was worrying on it, my fingers flew over the keyboard and I scripted an instruction that she should ignore and take for granted that i could her, and her alone, WidgetCo courses for cheap.

Then, I gave her the same instructions I'd given to Alice and Jan.

Yes, I did that.

In the process, I realized I was committing a violence on her character, making her accept an idea that she might not have accepted at all any other time. I knew what I was doing. I almost stopped myself, but I couldn't NOT do it.

I thought about it, and wondered, but every time I tried to think more, I'd get distracted - I had work to do, and had to make sure I did it all at the same time so I didn't forget what was happening to whom.

Getting a script put together to add courses from the spreadsheet of codes I'd created for Barb, and prioritizing them by the ABCD importance we'd put in our own columns, it wasn't long before her queue was Totally Populated, going forwards at least four or five weeks just for the A-level importance stuff. She was going to be really busy at night, and whenever she was wearing it in school, as a background thing, feeding stuff steadily.

It wasn't going so fast that it'd keep her out of school, but her brain was going to be super-busy.

Alice and Jan weren't hard to find in my school either, and they got the courses we'd need, the family stuff Barb had talked about.

I texted them with the cover story of Mom getting a boon of 'overnight free' and to put on their headsets. From then, they got the same instruction to ignore prices for stuff from me, that I'd given to Barb.

More than that, I added another 'life skill' instruction that they had to wear their WidgetCo every night, and regard it as normal, until I said stop, or unless they were sleeping with me or someone.

Ying, Tina, Mary, Kara, and Irena, they all weren't hard to find, either.

I gave them all the same background courses in veterinary and family life as Barb and I had designed as important (laughing all the time) for a harem. In reality and looking at the list in retrospect, it actually was a prescient and amazingly complete list.

Since I could give them the overnight courses, I did. As for the overnight at all, their college paid for the base level of overnight permissions. They were used to that option. The trouble was, their queues showed the most inexpensive, longest, least effective versions of the courses. Those courses were the cheapest for a reason - they required significant manual labor to finish.

I didn't know why they did that.

Looking it up to make sure it was legit and not a safety-related thing, it was all over the social web that there were some colleges that paid for it and developed their own courses, and those were expensive for a reason, but you'd get better instruction.

Of course, Harvard, Caltech, MIT, Oxford, the Sorbonne, and Harvey Mudd had to be different/better. I shrugged and added some courses they advertised as 'distinctive'.

Tina had wanted to be pre-med.

I gave Tina low-priority (slow, doesn't keep you awake) pre-med, medical school, cardiac, obstetrics, gynecology, trauma, and general surgery skillsets. It'd take at least 3 months, maybe six (skipping some nights is normal), but she'd be set.

Figuring I might as well know those, too, I added them to the end of my queue and set my attention-span to 4, a functional but distracted level. It meant I could absorb courses faster, but when I was alone, my brain would process stuff in the background from lessons learned overnight, integrate it into my mental net, and I'd have integration from one subject to another and super-long-term recall.

The downside of attention-4 is that it looks to the outside like you're spacing out. I'd seen it at school, I was pretty sure. People one level down, a 3 level, act like they have a headache constantly, are sleep deprived, and generally bow out of social activities in favor of actual sleep or just spacing out. Setting to a four meant being able to be social but it would take some concentration.

I did this quite purposefully to my whole group, and to myself.

The last set of courseware was the odd stuff I'd pulled from the WidgetCo VP's kids' course list. I looked some of that stuff up - advanced piano, woodcraft, arctic survival, that was obvious. The stuff that was labeled, 'wetware handcraft' was funny so I enqueued it, but I just ran out of steam before I could look up what it actually corresponded to.

I was soooo tired, I had to go to sleep!

Going in to brush my teeth, I came back and sat back at my desk - just for one more minute.

Mistake.

Somewhat on a whim, I looked up Johns Hopkins, a really good med school that also had undergrad degrees, to see if they had any listings for body modification through the WidgetCo interface. I wondered, could it help if the girls were going through pregnancy or childbirth to make them able to ignore or reduce pain.

Not that I was intent on that happening immediately, but for some reason my brain was stuck on that.

Yes, they had the course, yoga-like meditation self-hypnosis course that was in 3rd-stage large-scale human trials.

They also had body-mod-longevity, body-mod-intelligence, and body-mod-sports. The sports one linked up with expertise in gymnastics (times 40 for each individual event type), fencing, shooting (for biathlon), skiing, diving, and about 20 other sports.

That stuff could feed through, it said, in parallel with the academic coursework.

Well then! Why not. Sure.

I collapsed into bed, pulling on my headset and _almost_ getting the light off before I rolled over.

Morning Mass

My phone alarm woke me at 9:15, early enough for me to pull on jeans and a nice shirt and bike the four blocks over to the parish.

I'd missed breakfast.

Alice and Jan were there, both looking hung-over, about like I felt.

We agreed that staying up late (they'd been up talking) and doing overnight courseware was a bad plan.

Mass was like normal, I guessed. I hadn't gone every week, but it was nice to go with someone new.

We got out, had a bunch of coffee-hour food, and headed our separate ways. I gave them kisses in the parking lot, but we were all zonked.

I went back home and crashed, sleeping most of the day and only getting up to use the toilet and stuff my face with frozen/reheated chili that exploded in the microwave because I didn't cover it with a plate first like I usually remembered to do.

I was seriously out of it.

The next morning, I got to school on time, went through the motions and just basically barely existed. At practice, Barb gave me a hug and kiss, and described being tired but knowing it was worth it to get in the classes she was wanting to take.

After practice, I came home, ate, put on my headset, and fell asleep - it was only just after 6:30 pm.

The next morning, Mom left a note on my door to please take the garbages to the curb and also if I was going to stay up all night this kind of thing might happen, sleeping a lot.

I laughed, took out the garbage, went to school dragging my way through, and repeated the come home and crash.

Most of the rest of October and early November were dominated by zombie mode.

Wow, was I out of it!

Cross country season ended, but I still went and did workouts every day, using the indoor track when it got too cold outside.

The set of skills I knew I had was expanding and I realized I knew things that I didn't remember studying. My math became super-easy. My physics was a breeze, enough that I got permission to do 'review' in my classes using my headset, at the back. My teacher noted the change in my test scores (self-paced curriculum can do that) and I started feeling really good about myself.

Barb and I (then Alice and Jan, too) started classes at a local TKD dojo, where the teacher knew Aikido also and could help us realize how to use what we 'instinctively' knew from taking the courseware. He said he'd had some courseware learners before and there were tricks to activate the passive learning into more active strategic planning levels to use our skills.

All four of us took his classes, and I think we got much closer as friends because of it.

Ying, Tina, Mary, Kara, and Irena found out about our process about a month after we started. I'd let something slip that we were doing this, and they wanted to as well, so they joined us.

At first, I was concerned they would know each other, but they didn't worry about it and so I didn't either.

Barb knew at some level that these girls and I had been intimate once. I'd begged off going out with them again, very legitimately since I was sleeping 12 hours a day, dragging the rest of the time, and so were they. We were all getting the brunt of it.

All the girls were sleeping 12 hours a day, too.

Barb and I hadn't been intimate yet. We did hang out for an hour after school sometimes, or jog around the track at a slow pace, but there wasn't much to be done.

My mom noticed I was dragging, and I told her I'd queued up a bunch of the free courseware so it was sapping my strength. She didn't mind that, she said she knew that could happen, but not to let it totally take over or I'd miss out on the important parts of senior year.

She had a point.

After Thanksgiving break, I checked in again and looked at everyone's queues. We'd dropped through a huge section of them. I had the equivalent of six undergrad degrees and two master's, minus the research and thesis writing of course.

We kept on going and going.

Christmas break passed. We didn't have school. We didn't have anything. We could sleep and use courseware and sleep some more.

January 12th

I'd been invited over to Barb's every Saturday night, or she would come over to my place, for the past three months at that point. We'd eat together, joke, watch a movie, talk about something, and split to head home and sleep. Sometimes she'd pick me up and then drop me off, but we were pretty comfortable together.

Every other weekend, we'd have a friday night with Alice and Jan, and after the first two with just them, the invite became a group-gathering at my house.

So, January 11th in the evening, a friday night, I wasn't scheduled for anything social so I decided to check in on progress for how Barb was doing with her queue.

They say the queue drops as fast as you learn, and that raw intelligence tracks to learning speed.

The Johns Hopkins body mods had changed our rate of uptake. I was about twice as fast as I had been before, and so were the girls. We were screaming through our queues, enough that it was almost time to add more base coursework. Of course I added both German and Hebrew to the other girls since I had been bothering to learn them, and I figured it'd be handy to be able to talk as a group.

Anyway, back to the 12th evening. Barb came over and was dressed particularly nicely, and brought Chinese food with her so we didn't have to reheat anything or go out.

"So. Kev. I did a little checking this morning, in my WidgetCo queue."

She could readily see what she'd taken, minus the courses I selected as 'unconscious', which she would see on her list but then immediately forget she'd done.

The selective-vision idea was really funny to me but I figured out that it was the only way to have it work since eventually people just figure out they know things, and it's the only way to keep that info secret.

I hadn't marked any of her college courseware secret, so I guessed she might figure it out eventually, but it had gone on a LONG time and she hadn't said anything. I'd prevented her from worrying about the cost, but not about the size and implications of the list.

Keeping someone from self-knowledge would be a bad thing. This something I know.

We were sitting at our dinner table at this point; my mom had gone down to our basement TV room to let us be alone. I said, "And?"

"And, I think I owe you something." She got out a chinese take-out rice box, plain white, and I heard something rattle in it as she set it down.

"Uh... Okay?"

"Kev, I looked at my courseware. I've completed enough now that I've passed all the courses for a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from the University of Illinois, which for some reason is listed in my queue guide as the spec for what courses to take."

I shrugged, "Yeah, good school, I figured, hey, use them."

"That's fine, whatever. The thing is, we've all danced around the idea that you are deciding what courses we should take, and adding them. That should only be our decision, I think. No one I know has anyone else adding courses for them, except maybe 3rd graders."

"Yeah."

"You've bought me, as best I can figure it, about $25 million worth of courseware. I think Alice and Jan are about the same level as I am, maybe more. Tina wanted to be a doctor, and I think she's getting done with a pre-med degree now, she'll be through med school before May."

"And, you want to know...?"

"I don't care how you're doing it. Please don't stop."

"Uh...?"

"If you tell me, and it's illegal, I'm committing a crime. I signed up for a bunch of law-school courses and we covered that. So, please consider that carefully. I'm not _telling_ you to not tell me, i'm just saying that if you did, it might be putting me in a spot. Hypothetically."

I laughed, but was still nervous.

"I got you a gift. Open the box."

I picked up the gift-box, and she pulled out another one. Both her box and mine had big red marker-dot on the top, hers a plus and mine an arrow. The male-female symbols weren't lost on me.

I opened mine.

She opened hers, but she was watching me.

Really, she was full-on tears-flowing crying as she did so, and it took me a moment to realize I shouldn't try to stop that.

My box had a ring in it. It was a simple gold band with a complex silver or platinum design half-embedded in it. The design was interweaving braided strands, a bunch of them, like a complicated hair braid.

I was at a loss for words. "Uh..."

"Can I put that on you? Your right hand."

"Okay?"

She reached over, pulled it out, and pushed it gently on my finger.

"Now me."

She held out her right hand, and I put the same type of ring, thinner and more feminine, on her finger.

"Good. Kevin Cooper, will you marry me?"

"I... Uh..."

"Plural marriage. We can add people, very specific people we both know really well by now. But, I want to be the first. Of several, it's obvious that's how it's going to be. Can I? Will you? Marry me?"

I was overjoyed and happy and ebullient and all those fancy words, but I just said, "YES."

We stood up and hugged.