The flat was quiet again once the call with Sharon ended. Garrett sat on the sofa, phone warm in his hand, £9,501.12 sitting in his account like it belonged to someone else’s life. He was halfway through deciding whether replacing his trainers before the sole finished flapping counted as sensible or premature when the screen went gold.
[NEW SYSTEM CONDITION DETECTED.]
[CONDITION UNLOCKED: VALUE MULTIPLIER.]
[MONEY SPENT TO CREATE GENUINE VALUE FOR A WOMAN — OR TO INCREASE HER GENUINE INTEREST IN HOST — MAY NOW GENERATE A RETURN MULTIPLIER.]
[MULTIPLIER: DETERMINED BY RECIPIENT’S GENUINE INTEREST IN HOST.]
He read it twice, slower the second time, the way he read anything that sounded too convenient to be free. Not spend money on women, get money back — he’d have closed the app on principle if it had said that. The word doing all the work was still genuine. The condition wasn’t a shortcut. It was a magnifier bolted onto something that already had to be real.
He set the phone face-down on his knee. That changes things, he thought, and didn’t much like how it felt to think it.
He ran through the short list of people it could apply to. Sharon didn’t count — wrong category entirely, and the thought of putting his own sister anywhere near that word made something in his chest go cold. Which left, as far as he could tell, one name. Freya. The water bottle. The charger. The laptop fix. None of it planned, which was probably the only reason it had worked.
If the multiplier ran the same way, deliberately manufacturing value on the chance someone happened to like him back should, in theory, be possible.
It should also, in theory, make him feel like he was running a scheme on people who had no idea they were in it.
He didn’t know if Freya even liked him. Tolerated him, maybe. If the number depended on genuine interest, it wasn’t his to decide.
He’d have to find out. He had no idea yet what that was supposed to look like without becoming exactly the thing he didn’t want it to be.
University the next day ran its usual shape — lecture, notes, Daniel complaining about a seminar reading he hadn’t done. Something under the shape of the day had shifted anyway, and it took Garrett most of the walk in to work out it wasn’t the campus. It was him. Money. A working relationship with his sister. Freya, somewhere in the last week, turning into someone he actually knew.
Between lectures, cutting across the courtyard outside the arts building, Daniel was mid-sentence about something Garrett wasn’t fully listening to when he clocked a crowd up ahead.
Not a fight. Just a knot of people too tight to be anything but deliberate — three or four lads orbiting one girl, one with his hand half-out to carry a bag she hadn’t offered him, another talking fast enough Garrett could hear the rhythm without catching the words.
"That," Daniel said, slowing down, "is Emiliana Vane."
Garrett didn’t need the introduction. Everyone knew who she was, the same way everyone knew which buildings had the good coffee and which ones didn’t. Top of whatever ladder the university had going.
The lads around her weren’t randoms either — Garrett recognised two of them, Brian, yes the same brian Gilbert--the spoilt son of an influential mayor. And Raymond carter, the second son of the famous "Lioness". Priscilla Carter, she was a popular football star and owner of a not so big football club downtown.
They were the sort of people who arrived already knowing where they belonged and never had to check.
Which put the whole scene, as far as Garrett was concerned, several postcodes outside anything to do with him. He wasn’t in that queue’s league. He wasn’t sure he was in the league of the people standing behind the queue.
"She turns down basically everyone," Daniel said, delighted with himself. "There’s a whole thing about it."
"Good for her."
Daniel looked at him like he’d insulted a war memorial. Garrett had already stopped looking. He turned to keep walking, and that was the end of it as far as he was concerned — no different from clocking any other thing on campus that had nothing to do with him.
His phone buzzed.
[POTENTIAL VALUE DETECTED.]
Garrett stopped. Checked the screen properly, half-expecting it to be another line tacked onto the multiplier condition from the night before.
It wasn’t tied to anything. No name attached. He glanced back once, more out of reflex than intent, saw the same crowd still orbiting the same girl, and decided the notification meant nothing in particular. Things got flagged all the time that came to nothing. He put the phone away and didn’t think about it again.
That evening the flat settled into its usual quiet — bag by the sofa, shoes off, bank balance checked out of habit.
£9,501.12.
Still there.
He was leaning back, expecting an ordinary night, when the screen lit again.
[NEW PRIMARY CONDITION AVAILABLE.]
He sat up properly. Different shape to the message. Not value detected — something being handed to him.
[SPECIAL ROMANTIC OBJECTIVE DETECTED.]
[TARGET IDENTIFIED.]
[EMILIANA VANE]
"What the actual fuck!"
Garrett didn’t move.
He read the name a second time in case his eyes had done something stupid. They hadn’t.
She’d barely registered as more than a name attached to a crowd he’d walked past that morning. He hadn’t thought about her once since. There was no version of the last twelve hours where she’d crossed his mind, and yet there she was, in gold letters, apparently now the point of the entire evening.
[OBJECTIVE: MAKE EMILIANA VANE ASK THE HOST ON A DATE.]
He read that twice as well.
Ask. Not the other way round. The System wasn’t telling him to go and try his luck like the rest of that queue. It was telling him she was going to be the one asking.
That was, on the list of things he’d expected to read on his phone tonight, somewhere below nothing at all and considerably above anything he’d have come up with himself.
He thought about the courtyard again now, properly, for the first time — the two lads with the money and the certainty, the queue behind them he hadn’t even bothered ranking himself in. None of that had changed in the last few hours. He hadn’t suddenly acquired whatever it was those guys had.
The System, apparently, didn’t care.
[OBJECTIVE CONDITIONS WILL BE REVEALED UPON ACCEPTANCE.]
He sat with it a moment longer than he needed to. Not weighing whether to accept — the System had already made that decision more interesting than refusing it would be. Just letting the strangeness of it sit for a second before he did anything about it.
He tapped ACCEPT.
[OBJECTIVE ACCEPTED. ]
His expression barely moved.
"...This is going to be annoying."
Beneath the words, the first condition began to load.