Shine

by Jetse de Vries

  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...”

  And then he threw his fist at me.

  My hand had come up without my thinking about it, but it was only when I looked that I realized I’d blocked his punch. My fingers were closed around his fist, and he was smiling like a maniac.

  “Organic,” he said, using the pseudonym I’d written on my “Hello! My name is...” sticker back at Boot Camp orientation, and which had become my handle online at the PUA wikiboards. “Buddy, you learn quick. You’re one of us, just... in larval form. You’ll be rockin’ in no time, bro.”

  It was a routine, straight outta some boot camp trainer guidebook, the routine that was designed for the most promising recruit when his courage failed. Funny thing was, it turned out to be true. I was one of them, and a few months later, I’d become a real PUA. I’d gotten more numbers in three months than I had in all the years before then; I’d slept with five different girls, two of them together. The techniques that the mPUAs had refined were stunningly powerful. They turned me from a Geek Ignominous to a Geek Adonis, or at least that’s what I saw reflected in women’s eyes.

  Now, every PUA loses his powers occasionally. There was a night in Barcelona when every chick in the bar looked straight through me; routines and moves that had worked in a thousand other bars all around the world, failed me inexplicably that night. There was a night at Loco in Amsterdam when I found myself suddenly in my old rut, begging for approval from a trio of HB 9.5-10s. Suddenly I was back to being that gawky, balding geek that everyone else had forgotten, and I got shot down so hard I felt I’d never sarge again.

  But mostly, I was like wine or whiskey: I just got better and better with time. As I mastered the Game, I diversified. I picked up chicks at political protests and municipal libraries. I got laid in the bathroom of a Starbucks in Cairo with an HB 9 that I’d just met minutes before in line, with just a few words of xNLP whispered into her ear. Blonde. I still remember the scent of her vegan backpacker shampoo.

  It was like I’d woken from a long, deep sleep, into a world absolutely crammed with opportunities. Ice cream shops. Public parks. Blues concerts. Pet stores. Divorce lawyer’s office waiting rooms. At a frigging dental clinic, my face still numb from the nerve block.

  It changed me. Well, of course it did. Power always changes people. It transformed my awareness of what human beings are—because once you start sarging, you never lose sight of that: we’re mammals. No matter how much fancy, clever neocortex you slather onto our brains, we’re animals. Sure, we talk, we dance, we sing, and we build rockets and satellites and the internet. But we’re still animals, with animal instincts. Man, reading Darwin after you learn pickup is a totally different thing than reading it when you’re an Average Frustrated Chump. AFCs see evolution and sexual reproduction as a system they’re excluded from, hopelessly. But PUAs, they’re hackers, working the system, kludging the code. DHV. Manage expectations. Isolate your target.

  It’s the dance of evolution. It’s not just a game; it’s THE game, the machinery of evolution and life. It’s the reason we have these fancy neocortices that let us talk and engineer airplanes and perform brain surgery. It’s a minimalistic obstacle race with time, death, and destiny as moving goalposts. Smart people had been using game theory to discuss tons of stuff, including sexual reproduction itself—but they’d never dared to say what those first mPUAs discovered: that we humans, too, were locked in a game that few of us understood... a game that could be learned. That could be mastered and gamed. Not that sleeping with all those women ever filled the hole inside most of us, of course.

  And we found ourselves wondering what in the world could fill that hole.

  It turned out that Katana’s breakdown was the cold front that set in motion the perfect storm. Guys who had learned to social engineer the way we had, who could sell ice to an Eskimo village, who could talk a nun out of all her habits—what could we do, when we finally found ourselves an overriding purpose?

  We knew we could change the world. That, if we decided to, we could do more than rock on the fiddle and screw ourselves silly as Mother Earth burned to cinders all around us. We could use pickup to save the Earth.

  And Bagheera and the other ecofems knew it too. And they weren’t about to let it happen without a fight.

  BROING (BRO-ING) IS one of those concepts that never existed in Game 1.0, since that was all about picking up women. Things didn’t change till it became just as important to be able to finesse relationships with men.

  There are seven steps to the algorithm that underlies the Broing process, and they spell out a neat little acronym you can use as a mnemonic: BASTARD. As I broed Gilberto and Echewo, I worked through all seven steps.

  Be broable. That was easy, since I was already peacocked for the environment in my suit, with killer posture and my now-perfect teeth; and on top of that, my head was temporarily rewired by the dose of PeacockCC, my favorite PUA-designed deinhibitant wundapharm pulsing through my veins. I was, for the moment, the kind of man that men wanted to have as a bro. I was broable.

  Next was Assess networks, and infiltrate. This was the thing I’d struggled with hardest, for some reason. I’ve never figured out if I have some vaguely sub-autism-spectrum disorder, or just an extra-thick skull, but I’d always struggled to figure out group hierarchies. I was raised to consider people as equals, but the truth is, humans aren’t. They never are. Someone’s
always a little bit cooler, or sexier, or funnier than you are. And someone’s always less than you, too. There’s always disparity.

  And once I’d realized that, and started looking, there it was, everywhere. Sometimes it wasn’t obvious, but you could always figure it out. In the group at the bar, Gilberto was the AMOG, Echewo second, and Rasmussen was the bottom. Even though Rasmussen was, technically speaking, more important than both of them put together. That didn’t matter at the bar: back in the jungle, this is the typical way 2M-1F sets shape up.

  I’d already sussed out the triangle, and docked with the AMOG—Gilberto—so I moved on to step 3.

  Which is: Status is for sharing. Turning a fellow human being into an ally is a subtly different process from rendering a woman receptive to sexual advances. When you’re sarging women, you have to Display High Value in order to make her see you as worth pursuing, but also to dispel the feeling that you’re pursuing them. That’s even more the case with MM (or desexualized MF) interactions: in those cases, only total losers pursue. If you’re DHVing to a pol and he or she starts reacting like a chiquita in a tubeskirt, you’re almost always talking to the wrong person.

  With my 3-set, DHVing was easy: besides all the status I was exuding—thanks to the dose of PeacockCC I’d just taken—I knew Gilberto and Rasmussen’s work and track record inside-out.

  My “more guys like you in the trenches,” line first set off that faint sense among them that I was someone. Someone important enough that they had better not ask my name, in case they were supposed to know already. Four out of five times, that hesitation keeps the set guessing till the close, and this time, it worked. Rasmussen was too busy trying to figure out why I was ignoring her, and Echewo wasn’t in his element—he took me for some kind of eco-pol—so Gilberto was my only risk factor... and he’d already warmed to me the second I’d touched his shoulder.

  “So why d’you think Chen and Silver are so against the Reef Treaty?” I asked, forcing myself not to smile as Gilberto’s eyes widened.

  “Silver? What do you mean? He promised us a vote...”

  I smiled, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Publicly.”

  Rasmussen leaned forward, about to ask me who the hell I was, but Gilberto was hooked, and it’s a rare woman who’ll cut off the current AMOG when he has that look in his eye. Gilberto leaned closer to me and shouted, above the music, “Is there something I should know?”

  The others in the group leaned forward too, but I kept my back straight. Never lean in to be heard: the AMOG always speaks louder instead.

  “Recent meetings. Chen and Silver, talking. Late at night.”

  Gilberto’s eyes widened, and he pulled me aside as Rasmussen was distracted enough to forget the question of who I was working for, and whip out her MacBerry to mobtext her staffers.

  I watched her and Echewo out of the corner of my eye. The African just sipped his drink, watching them respond to the sudden crisis as Gilberto asked me, “Are you sure they’re talking a pullout? We’ve been working on this reef treaty for over a year now, and...”

  “Well, you know Silver,” I said, moving from step four—Talk shop, then stop—to step five: Activate instincts. Gilberto and me, we weren’t standing in a club, drowning in lights, shouting to be heard over the music. Not anymore. Suddenly, we were standing on the savannah, stone tools in our hands, and I was pointing over the next hill at the place where the enemy lived.

  Pointing at them—someone else, whom I was framing as an enemy. Which made us an us, in a very caveman sense. Grunt, grunt.

  Usually, it wasn’t quite that simple, of course, but Gilberto was an idealist. An uncommon disease, in the eco-pol biz, especially among the WTO/UN crowd. (The guys who weren’t scared of getting rich while saving the world—those free of the suspicion that wealth quietly corrupted their successes somehow—went into internal corporate reform and green research. And they didn’t hang out in places like this. I know, I’ve bro’ed some of them too. Think cigars, and cognac, and strippers, and conversations about design and alt-fuel so long you can feel your hair turning grey.)

  I saw it happening in Gilberto’s head: gears turning, teeth locking and unlocking, and clank, suddenly, I’m the bearer of bad news. I was the nettle that got under his jockstrap, the messenger he wants to kill. (Though he won’t, because what if I am from upstairs?) It’s only natural, this negative reaction. His mental frame of reference was that he’d been working for a year on this fucking deal when, suddenly, I told him it’s got the life expectancy of a beluga whale washed ten miles inland by a tsunami. His expression harshened and he gripped my arm, a little burst of aggression bubbling over.

  “What am I supposed to do now?” he growled. “It’s too late, isn’t it? Why are you only telling me this now?”

  This is why step six (Reframe the interaction) follows on the heels of step five: because step five can so easily go wrong. Human instincts are like monkeys that have grown up trapped in little cages. When you wake ’em up, and let them out, they turn highly unpredictable. Sometimes they slip on a tux and do a dance routine, and sometimes they fling their shit in your face.

  The cognitive dissonance was clear on Gilberto’s face. My comptact lens IPBR confirmed it: pulse 93 bpm, body temp slightly elevated, respiration shallow. Not surprising—Alphas don’t like surprises, or being out of the loop. And he was used to being an Alpha. When Gilberto got mad, he flung his shit and bashed heads in with verbal rocks. He was the type to get his pick of mates and sleeping spots. But I was, maybe, from upstairs, so this was potentially dangerous. So he mapped PER (Prior Experiential References) onto me. Distant daddy issues, I guessed.

  So many of us ecofreak types—pol and otherwise—have daddy issues.

  Now the stage was set for me to steal the frame. I had to make him important, turn his feelings inside-out and let him feel like it was me depending on him, and me being hurt by his failure, instead of the other way around.

  Rasmussen came in just in time. She’d finished texting and making her phone calls, and suddenly hurried back over to us at exactly the moment when Gilberto was about to run AMOG on me—of course, her presence was probably part of what drove him to it. She came on tiptoes, straining to hear our voices.

  Perfect.

  Stealing a frame requires a shock to the system, just like when Hunter slapped me across the face. Nobody lets his or her frame get stolen without a sudden shock that destabilizes all those underlying assumptions. Of course, I couldn’t slap Gilberto or Rasmussen: if I did that, I’d be fucked.

  “It’s okay,” I told them, “But you need to know that we’re counting on you. We can’t recover unless you pull through for us,” I added, looking away from Gilberto and toward Rasmussen. She was going to save the day. She was the one we needed. Sigrid Rasmussen, you’re my only hope.

  Gilberto registered, at least on some level, that he’d been amogged, but he was too stunned to process it quickly enough to properly challenge me. His own hesitation tripped him up, and I talked fast so that it would last. As long as he was listening, he’d be off-balance, and if he was off-balance for more than three seconds, he’d start thinking.

  And thinking is the bane of the would-be AMOG.

  I was ready for step seven, Deal with the target, when I noticed them. Two young white women in business attire, one with her hair in a blunt cut, like millionaire soccer mom, and the other looking like a business exec with her hair in classy beads, neo-African-style. They were only a few feet away, and heading for us.

  I recognized them, of course: the blunt-cut was Estraven, and her friend was Bamboo Grove. I felt a whiskey shot’s worth of adrenaline dump into my bloodstream. Of course Bagheera wasn’t alone, but if I’d known there’s be a full-on ecofem incursion, I’d have come better-armed.

  ESTRAVEN WAS ALMOST my girl, back when her name had been Monica Dietz. Coulda, woulda. Shoulda? Probably not, but I used to wonder how things would have gone if we had hooked up back then.

  The
scene: a hippie apartment, stinking of patchouli and burnt sandalwood. One wall absolutely covered in books, and the floor was littered with dirty old beanbag chairs stuffed with hay, instead of the usual comfy styro pods. A faint scent of unmasked body odour hung in the air, the unmistakable sign of true believers.

  And then there was Monica, radiant before the pack in her birkenstocks and Indian lahenga skirt, her hair hanging in narrow dreadlocks and an earnest-sloganed tee stretched across her chest. Despite the nose rings, the sketchy teeth and hair, and all that windy rhetoric she was spouting, she was hot. The hottest girl in the place. Sitting on a beanbag chair in the back in my jeans and t-shirt—I’d dressed down for the occasion—I saw her through the eyes of the other guys in the room.

  Not that there were many guys there. 80% of the world’s environmental activists are women, which was one of those little facts that had led Katana to his genius insight, even though we’d soon realize that sarging activists was a dummy’s Game. In this particular room, there were only two other men, both too awkward and uptight to hook up with any serious woman, let alone an ecofem.

  Guys like I had once been.

  “They don’t want us to think about the environment. They’d rather catch a profit for now, and float off into space on the almighty dollar,” she growled. Then she read us a poem she’d written, which I guess was supposed to be about what we should be thinking about. I’m pretty sure she thought it was a nature poem. About fish, and birds, and elm trees going extinct on the day she got her first period.

  But as she read it, I looked around and realised that I was probably the only guy in the room—maybe the only person there—who understood the poem was really about. She was dying for a man to come and lay her. To not be some namby-pamby friend, to not woo her with his sensitivity and dedication to Gaia. She wanted a guy who would sniffle at her eco-feminist rhetoric, and instead of mumbling along, would kiss her on the mouth and fuck her up against the wall. She had itches that nobody had ever scratched. It was clear in her voice.