Shine

by Jetse de Vries (ed)

  "Listen, man," I said, setting my hand on his shoulder. And then I felt it, right through the fine black Italian arachnosilk: Hunter was shivering, almost shaking. "What the fuck are you on?" I asked, snatching his peacocky mirrorspex from his face, and taking a good look at his surgically-Eurasianised eyes.

  Dilated pupils stared back wetly at me, the left one huge and the right still dilating. Hunter cringed from the sudden brightness. He ignored my question and exhaled slowly. Brain haemorrhage, it had to be. The pupils: textbook images flooded back from one of my pre-med bio courses, before I'd fled into a pharmacy program.

  Fuck! For what? A couple of fucking coral reefs that were doomed anyway, because Diaz and Abral and Rodriguez were playing let's-compare-dicks with ASEAN again? Always with the drama, Hunter was, and now he was probably gonna end up brain-damaged, if not dead on the spot. We had to get that shit out of his system fast. My WingerCC app had already alerted the other guys, thank fuck. He stared at me, grunted my name, and then, with a sudden jolt, he slapped himself in the face and started howling, nothing but vowels and slobber. Nobody had noticed, lucky for us.

  By then Homboyostasis and Biosfear had shown up on either side of Hunter and looped their arms through his. They hauled him out of the place with all the efficiency of professional bouncers, with me at their side.

  "Get him to a DTC, or he's fucked for sure," I hollered once we in the hallway, away from the pounding beat, wondering if there even was a detox centre close enough to save his ass. "Maybe too late already. If not, when he wakes up, tell him he did his best, and buy him some time in a vippy tank, okay? I'm gonna go back in and shake-close this treaty if it takes both of my front teeth and one of my balls."

  By then, they'd stuffed him into a cab and piled in after him. "Sure thing, Organic," Biosfear said to me with a nod, while Homeboyostasis shouted into his cell phone and fumbled with the taxi's emergency medikit. Before the cab had even pulled away, I was back in the hallway, making my way back into the noise. Strutting, already: if there was one thing that would get me through the next two hours, it was inner game.

  And thank fuck, my inner game was deep as the Mariana Trench, and solid as titanium steel, or the sight of Hunter losing his shit would have done me in.

  Fuck s-closing, I thought to myself. Fuck handshakes. I am gonna t-close, I told myself. I'm gonna fuckin' treaty-close this deal, I repeated, and took a deep breath as I reached the dancefloor.

  Finally, I caught sight of Gilberto over by the bar, laughing as he talked to a tall skinny black guy--I didn't quite recognize him but I was pretty sure he was on some human rights land mines homeless children immunization whatever-the-fuck committee we usually didn't have to game--and Sigrid Rasmussen, a slightly chunky middle-aged blonde--HB 6, if I were pressed to rank her sexually, because I don't like big girls and because of her age--who was the Assistant Secretary of the Taskforce for the Deacidification of the World's Oceans. Who was, everyone agreed, playing a little too friendly with the WTO-run oversight council, and needed to be reminded that whatever profit motive mattered now would mean nothing once the reefs were all toast.

  The world's reefs. Not the world, just the world's reefs, I told myself. We could always engineer something artificial if we had to, I reassured myself dubiously. You can do this.

  Then I kicked myself with the 3 Second Rule: never wait more than three seconds to approach a person, or else you'll overthink it. I thought of Mother Earth for a moment, and then waded into the pulsating crowd.

  Not for the first time, I wished these WTO/UN dickheads would start acting their age and hang out someplace besides night clubs.

  We started out as far from idealists, of course. As my teacher, Praxis, said when he met me: "Environmentalist? Ha, you know who gets laid less than a green radical?"

  "Nobody?" I said, wishing I'd mentioned my day job as a lab tech instead of how I spent my weekends.

  It was true, though. Women had seen fit to chain themselves to trees beside me, and join me in hijacking oil tankers on highways, and march arm in arm with me in the streets of a dozen countries by my side. But I'd gotten precisely one girl out of a bra in my life, and that had lasted just five weeks. 37 days, to be precise. And that had been four years before.

  "'xactly," Praxis said with a sneer. "Nobody. But we're gonna change all that. You're gonna," he said, on day one.

  That was back in the days when fellas like Praxis were called mPUAs. Guys like him made a living running "boot camps" for AFCs, the Average Frustrated Chumps. Guys who didn't know how to talk to women and were willing to spend a thousand bucks for a weekend of being coached on how talk to women.

  Guys like me.

  Mostly, they learned by being forced to go sarging--approaching thousands of women in a row, until they stopped pissing themselves with fear and grew a backbone. And Praxis was right: during that weekend, he changed my life... or, well, really, I did. He'd taken me and the other AFCs--a hardware engineer who called himself Axiomatic, a lonely high school teacher we dubbed Homework, a recently-divorced cop called Slammer, and some Japanese poet or something--and baptized us by fire. We went out sarging all weekend--chatting up hot women in bars and bookstores and coffeeshops, coming onto them and hassling them, teasing and rubbing shoulders and even scoring some phone numbers.

  That weekend was the first time I ever wore leather. Tight leather. Peacocky leather. Praxis taught us routines, taught us cocky-funny, taught us rules of thumb and dozens of techniques, and by the end of it, every one of us had learned the secret: there wasn't one. Getting a woman's phone number--or anything else, for that matter--didn't require magic, or an eleven-inch cock, or perfect white teeth. All it took was asking for it in the right way, once she was ready to give it... once you'd helped her become ready. Pretty soon, we were having the time of our lives with the kind of babes who'd terrified us just months before. I was no longer Andrew Dalton: I had become Organic, and now I was swimming in women. Tall women, short women, dark and pale, funny and serious, wild and schoolmarmish alike. I tasted every flavour there was. I'd learned techniques for getting them to come home with me in less than thirty minutes of first contact. For engineering a threesome. For getting them to give me a sponge bath dressed in nurse uniforms, while speaking in fake Polish. (Look, everyone has his kinks, and whoever claims otherwise is lying.) For the first time in my life, I was getting laid like a truckload of linoleum. And it was the part of me that was really, really enjoying all that sex that spoke first when Katana had laid out his plan.

  That was the part of me that had stopped caring about how many trees got cut down at Clayoquot sound, and didn't give a shit about the coral reefs and strip mining in the Northwest Territories. They say that a sense of impending death makes people have more sex--it's a mammalian instinct. Well, the first year the icecaps melted completely in summer? I made that work for me, and worked out my own mammalian panic all at once. From there, I hadn't looked back, not once, at the dying Earth.

  Not till that day. And it hurt to look again at what I'd once cared about--which I think is why I yelped, "That's fucking crazy, Katana! The tools we have... they're for pickup. For getting laid. Not for... saving the world."

  "Yeah, man," Biosfear said, nodding his head. "What d'ya wanna do, seduce the sun into shining less brightly? Sarge lumberjacks? Toss a few negs at metacorporations and hope that they go sweet on us?"

  Biosfear laughed at the absurdity of it. We all did.

  "You're not listening, bros," Katana said, his hands parallel in front of him like some kind of loony Japanese evangelical minister. His eyes shone with some kind of insane, holy-fire light. "You can't seduce the sun, but you don't need to. The environment? The ecology? It's people. I've been rereading Dawkins and Page..."

  We all groaned.

  "...and there's something to this extended phenotype thing," Katana went on. "The world is what we make it. What governments decide. How giant companies decide to behave. But governments and companies, what are
they?"

  "People," Biosfear said. "They're just people, and so they can be seduced..."

  "Wrong," said Katana, flicking at the wall with his keychain remote. The smartwall flickered, and images from satellites flooded it at high speed, corporate logos and national flags flashing superimposed onto creeping desertification, megastorms, and black-smoke flashes of brief, vicious water wars. "They're persons, legally and functionally. They're the ultimate amogs. And they can be amogged too."

  Someone who hadn't known us would have taken one look around the room at us in our freaky peacocky clothing--Homeboyostasis' purple fur vest, my depilated scalp, Biosfear's animated Magic Eight Ball T-shirt cycling through its advice--No Way!... Yes Way!... Maybe!... Go Fuck Yourself!--and declared Katana's attempt to sway us a complete, hopeless failure.

  Goes to show you what total strangers know about anything.

  At first, we figured that swaying the head of a WTO/UN Committee to see things your way might be a little bit different from scoring a phone number off the hottest chick in a bar.

  But in the end, sarging is sarging. It's all the same game, and all the skills are transferrable. Peacocking, for example. As I walked up to Gilberto--the secretary to the head of the committee for reduction reef fishery--I held my chest out, the way a quarterback stands when he walks past a street fight. I strutted slightly, comfortable in my skin, in this bar, comfortable around Gilberto. Clubs and clubbers didn't scare me anymore, despite all the years of nights that I spent wanking at home, alone, while Gilberto was dancing his ass off as he climbed the ranking ladder of the youngest WTO/UN hierarchy pyramid ever.

  None of that mattered. I was confident.

  My suit was Libyan, not that you'd ever know: most people can't tell it from the Italian stuff. (The difference, my friend, is price.) The slight untidiness of my hair was as carefully engineered as the piezoelectric bricking system under the floor that powered the lights and audio in that ecoclub. When I spoke, my voice was a half-octave lower than it'd been for most of my adult life. My smile was natural, of course--practice anything in the mirror enough and it becomes natural. And, yeah, I'll admit: there was a gentle cloud of pseudopheromones surrounding me, telegraphing virility by advertising much higher levels of testosterone than any real, healthy human male could possess.

  "Gilberto," I said with a serious, professional smile, and then I noticed Bagheera. Fucking Bagheera. She was headed straight for us, a look in her eye that was straight out of a nature documentary. A panther about to sink her teeth into an antelope's neck.

  A beginner ePUA would've looked around frantically, breaking the spell I'd begun--even by then--to cast over Gilberto. But my wingmen were well-trained, and I let them do their jobs.

  Bagheera was closing fast as I shook Gilberto's hand, ignoring his Who-the-Fuck-Are-You? look. My grip was firm, but not much firmer than his, and I shifted my posture slightly to match his own.

  "Good work today," I said. We'd all seen it on the WTO/UN netfeed: Gilberto slapping down a conservation measures offshoring initiative put forward by the G14. The standard crap--have someone else clean up their air, and trade their measures for the right to keep shitting into the sky and ocean. After verbally bitchslapping the American rep for twenty minutes straight, Gilberto had gotten a standing ovation.

  And dared to go out in public the same night.

  I let my smile drop ever so slightly, and then matched Gilberto's when he responded with a grin. My timing, of course, was perfect: I'd trained this particular skill for weeks. His response was immediate, a glow in his eyes and a sudden display of comfort. Next, I spoke just a little too quietly. When he leaned forward, I knew I had him. AMOGs don't lean forward: they say, "Pardon me?" or "Say what?" The other guy can repeat himself, louder, or reposition himself. But I stepped closer to him, setting my hand on his back in the way that buddies do, turning my back to Bagheera as she approached. That would buy a few seconds.

  "I wish we had more guys like you in the trenches," I said. Yeah, that's right, my eyes said. I'm from upstairs. Suddenly my easy magnanimity held a different meaning for him. It flashed in Gilberto's eyes. Maybe, just maybe, I was the real Alpha Male of Group.

  Gilberto nodded happily, thanked me, and picked up his drink. He glanced into the glass as he sipped it, his body screaming a single message: Whoa. Upstairs.

  That was when I caught sight of Antigen and his wing-babe Greenfire leading Bagheera across the room and away, cordial and professional as all get out. Not for the first time, I thanked God for Greenfire. She was an insider chick who'd ended up on our boards one night by chance after being seduced by Antigen. She'd decided she liked how we were working the WTO/UN--"The only rational approach to this bloody organization that I've ever heard of!" was how she put it, according to Antigen--and teamed up with us.

  I turned to the African, and his name flashed across my spex: Echewo.

  "Mr. Echewo!" I said, shaking his hand firmly, my smile exuding confidence and Have we met before? We hadn't--I've never had any reason to talk to someone in human rights--but there was a faint glimmer of do-I-know-you on his face, one confirmed by my MuggleCC software, and I wasn't about to help him out.

  The game was on, and I was well on my way to bro'ing these fuckers. Soon I'd be able to start working my real target.

  Everyone had to start somewhere, and I started with Hunter, in a club called Il Barra Spaziaratta, in Sydney. I'd paid 1500 canuckbucks to fly down there, and another $1500--in Canadian, because Aussie money was crashing then--to do a boot camp with the best, because back then that was what Hunter was: the best of the best of the mPUAs. He was an mPUA 2.0: a master of the older PickUp Arts, and a pioneer in the newer, technology-fuelled 2.0 subscene.

  I'll never forget the first time I went sarging for real, post-boot camp--the terminology roiling in my head, tumbling through my mind as I realized that all these words and concepts really referred to real-world things. To people.

  Sets, which meant groups of women--and mixed groups of women and men together--had to be opened. DHV: I had to Display High Value. AMOG the competitive males. Try (stupidly) the Jealous Girlfriend Opener. Dodge the inevitable slap--this was 2016, after all, and it was beyond obsolete. Peacocking. Negs.

  I walked over to a triple set: HB 9.0 in a red cocktail dress; HB 2 punky in a plaid skirt and leather vest over her blouse; HB 7.0 whitetrash with a nose ring and an animated tramp stamp dancing on the small of her back. I followed the 3 second rule, approaching the set immediately and engaging HB 7.0--who was so not my target--as I worked the social game a little.

  I ignored HB 9.0 persistently.

  They smiled at me like a little boy who had picked and bought 'em ditchflowers, and HB 2 punky ruffled my hair with a smirk.

  "Are you trying to pick one of us up?" they said, glancing meaningfully at HB 9.0. They knew what I was doing, understood that the girl I ignored was my target.

  They knew.

  I wasn't little. I was almost six feet tall, and if my body was a bit slim, I wasn't exactly skinny. I was dressed in a long black jacket, and fake gem-encrusted shades. Later, I realized that they looked like Elton John's, but that night, I'd thought I was peacocking. And I thought I'd looked cool, and had been on top of things.

  But they'd read me like a trashy sex blog.

  "Do you want me to?" I tried, with my winning smile. When caught, play it cocky-funny. Okay, I said to myself.

  And then it happened. I wondered, Am I showing too much tooth? High school yearbook pictures flooded my mind. Happy birthday videos. Teenaged rants on Youtube in 2008 that I made after my mother screwed up my hair, and all the nasty comments about my teeth. Hours of sitting in a chair when I was twenty-six, getting all that dental work done. Lasering 'em white.

  I wavered.

  It showed. My smile imploded, lips twisting together. Their eyes registered the change. I saw myself reflected in their bedroomy eyes, and between the long lashes and the lovely lids, what stared back at me was
Chump, Chump, Chump, Chump, Chump, Chump. (They had six eyes between them, after all.)

  HBPunky started laughing first, and then HB 9.0 spun on one stiletto heel, her arm around HB 7.0's shoulder.

  Hunter was right there beside me, and he said, "Duuuude. That's, like, nothing, dude. They have issues. You connected, at first. Totally. No big deal. Take it in stride. Just takes practice, bro."

  But all night long, I saw them glancing at me, grinning among themselves. When we took off for another club, one without them around, I noticed other girls looking at me the same way, before I even talked to them.

  Failure. It was just like life before boot camp. A series of failures, of women laughing at me. It sucked. I sucked.

  "Dude," I said to Hunter, at the front door of the second club. "I don't think there's much point, man... I just..."

  And then he slapped me. He just fucking slapped me right across my face, out of nowhere, and I fell on the ground, right there one the sidewalk. I fell down, not because he'd hit me so hard, but because I hadn't had any idea it was coming. I was just so shocked.

  "Surprised, huh?" Hunter shouted. "Didn't expect life to bitchslap you right in the face, huh?"

  I sat up, hand on my cheek. "Life didn't slap me, Hunter. You did." I could still feel the burning handprint on my face.

  "Shut up," he commanded me, "and listen." Then he reached down, grabbed my free hand, and helped me to my feet. "Life is like that. Life will smack you at any moment. No warning. No announcement. That's how life works. It bitchslaps you with everything that matters: a chance at pussy, random senseless danger, a job opportunity you never knew you wanted... and finally, it bitchslaps you with death."

  I stared at him with widened eyes, in his purple leather Aussie cowboy hat. He was turning unprovoked assault into a life lesson. A parable. And finally I was starting to get it.

  "When life bitchslaps you," he said, and I realized the muscles in his arm were tensing again, "You need to be paying fucking attention..."