They resumed their leisurely stroll along the glass-walled corridor that ringed the natatorium.

"You really are making a difference to their school life, you know," Tiffany observed queitly, "Brandon and Carmen and the others."

"I'm not doing it for them," Sean scoffed.

"Dream Counselor," Tiffany laughed a tinkling note, "The nerd who humiliates the jock by leveling up the rest of the class."

"That'll cut him down to size," Sean nodded, ""but that isn't the point. Leveling up the class makes them easier to predict and use against Jason."

"What do you mean?" Tiffany quirked her lip.

"The smarter you are, fewer your choices," Sean smiled coldly, "When I'm done molding them, they'll see only optimum solutions... only the ideal response for a given circumstance. No longer any illusion of choice from ignorance. Then I can time their reactions to suit me. "

"You're so full of yourself, Sherlock," Tiffany retorted, "Smarter people are harder to manipulate. Believe me, I've tried."

Sean contemplated Cardiff High's social dynamic in his mind's eye, trying to articulate the phase transition he was setting in motion, "Tell me... those students who are seeing other students, how stable are their relationships? Do they trust each other? Have spats? Cheat on their girlfriend or boyfriend?"

"You bet your ass they do," laughed Tiffany, "Cardiff High is drama central."

Sean nodded, not really surprised. After years of observing his parents fighting, he'd concluded that romantic relationships were mutually exploitative by nature. Other types of relationships were simpler. Parents and kids both wanted the best for their kids, enemies wanted the worst for each other, uncoupled linear systems with incentive vectors either reinforcing or opposing each other. But romantic partners wanted the best for each other so they may better exploit each other. It was a non-linear coupled system ripe with instabilities. Successful partners managed to achieve stable orbits around each other like binary stars in phase space. Sean had searched for a Nash equilibrium that he might nudge his own parents towards, but had found none. Just two antagonists facing off as they circled each other down the drain...

"What happens if, say, a girl finds out her boyfriend is cheating?" Sean asked, "Does she dump him?"

"Usually, " Tiffany agreed, "although they are the last to know. Even their friends don't want to butt in, sometimes."

"Let's say there's a clique of girls, all with boyfriends," Sean gestured apology, "It's sort of contrived, but I'm just making a point. Suppose one of those girls has a cheating boyfriend. Everyone else in the clique knows about it, except that girl, because her friends don't want to hurt her feelings or whatever. Now if there's a trusted source of gossip that everyone listens to..."

"Like Molly's blog," Tiffany exclaimed, "You know Molly Morrison in senior year? She runs this online gossip rag called Dumpster Fire, that dishes the dirt on who is fooling around with whom. She's never wrong, even if she avoids naming the culprits. Doesn't want to get harrassed, I suppose."

"Good example," Sean nodded, "Now what happens in this hypothetical clique when Molly's blog announces that atleast one of their boyfriends is cheating, but doesn't say which one?"

"Nothing... I guess," Tiffany shrugged, "Molly isn't saying anything they don't already know."

"Seems that way, right?" Sean smiled, "but what if I can wave a wand and make every girl in that clique a little bit smarter. Smart enough to reflexively model each other's thoughts. The girl who is being cheated on knows that she usually hears about it from her friends when any other girl is being cheated on. But she has heard nothing, which strongly implies she herself is the one being cheated on. Even low-information signals can be exploited, if they are public and trusted."

"I guess..." Tiffany frowned.

"Now if two girls in that clique are being cheated on, each of them knows only about the other girl," Sean continued, "Unlike the earlier case, nothing happens immediately, because each of the two girls is expecting the other girl to dump her boyfriend. Remember they can model each others' thoughts perfectly, so the lack of immediate reaction warns them that there is more than one girl being cheated on - themselves. Both girls now dump their boyfriends. The rest of the clique, already aware of both girls, does not react. This can be extended to any number of girls, who after recursively modeling each others' thoughts, simultaneously dump their cheating boyfriends."

"I see..." Tiffany seemed a little dazed, "Like mirrors reflecting each other to infinity."

"Exactly," Sean looked pleased, "Very poetic. Once I implement this... cognitive restructuring, I can make a clique dump their cheating boyfriends all at once. Like a tree shedding leaves in the fall. How's that for poetry? All those freshly dumped boys looking for new girlfriends. And who is the one person in school with a surplus of girlfriends? Fucking Jason."

"Y...you think you can do this?" Tiffany asked slowly. It sounded ridiculously impractical, like something a nerd would think of. But Sean kept surprising her. She hadn't expected him to successfully poach Jason's inner circle either, but he had. Sean's knack for getting his peers to grasp abstract thought, was unsurpassed by anyone Tiffany had met, teachers included. She shivered slightly at the recursive depth of his scheming. Sean wasn't simply meddling with the school's social hierarchy, he was going to implode it like a singularity. Jason would go apeshit.

"A school full of impressionable teen minds, why not," Sean shrugged, "A clique that can model each other that well is effectively reading each others' minds. The biggest obstacle to augmented group-intelligence is the low bandwidth of human speech. If I can bypass that, I might be able to create a new... intellect-net, greater than the sum of its parts. Something slightly but genuinely superhuman. How will Jason like it if his harem can intellectually run circles around him."

"He won't take it lying down," Tiffany gaped at Sean, "He's been making the moves on other girls already. Now that Carmen is too busy winning tennis matches, thanks to you. And my internship and cheerleading practice keeps me out of his clutches for now..."

"The fucking cad," Sean sighed, "He's like a hydra. Cut off one girlfriend and two more appear. I just don't understand why so many girls are willing to... to..." Sean trailed off, not sure how to phrase it.

"To share him with other girls?" Tiffany raised a brow in challenge, "Degrade ourselves? Go ahead. We've been called worse."

"All I'm saying is, given all the progress to protect women against polygyny..." Sean began.

"To protect women?" Tiffany spun around angrily, "You think monogamy is for the benefit of women?"

"I... let me think..." Sean froze, working out the implications of evolutionary psychology.

"You do that," Tiffany snorted, "If you were a dirt-poor medieval peasant girl, would you rather be the third wife of the local baron or the first wife of the dirt-poor farm boy?"

"Never mind," Sean muttered, feeling a twinge of shame. Why should he resent women choosing rational self-interest? Didn't Sean himself want exactly what Jason had? To be desired by "hot" girls was a constant corrosive hunger in his psyche.

Now that he thought about it, the archaeogenetic record did show a drastic drop in the ratio of men-to-women who successfully reproduced 8000 years ago. The exact reason was unclear. Perhaps the men had been killed off in war and genocide. But that was also around the time that the transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to agriculture caused wealth and power to be concentrated in the hands of a tiny fraction of men. Kings naturally monopolized young women in huge harems. For every 17 women who passed on their genes, only one man did. The modern age with its opportunities had reduced that imbalance. Which meant that the kings of today, the Jason Fullers of the world, had far less a monopoly on women willing to be in a harem. But if history was any lesson, Sean needed to build vast wealth if he was to have a chance at his impossible dream. And if he could add value to the world along the way, that was a bonus. Step One: become Elon Musk...

"Monogamy is enforced to make sure that every man gets a wife, to deny women their choice of the best men, " Tiffany sniffed, "Sort of like marital communism. All the movies that show a woman spurning a rich suitor to choose a poor husband are just romantic nonsense to pander to the male audience. Jason is a top athelete and heir to a vast fortune. And he knows to turn on the charm when it suits him. That's why he gets the girls... which is a problem for your master plan."

"I get it, no need to paint a picture," growled Sean.

"It pisses me off when women are shamed for their choices," Tiffany huffed, "when most men don't measure up. Men are scum."

"Wow," Sean barked a bitter laugh, "I didn't realize Jason being loaded and a jock makes the rest of us scum."

"That's not what I meant," Tiffany snapped.

"Are you sure you hate Jason and not in love with him?" Sean taunted, "It sure sounds like it."

"I am not in love with Jason, you knucklehead," Tiffany hissed, her pale features completely white with rage, "Jason is a rich entitled prick, just like... like all the other rich entitled pricks in Portsmouth. Just like the one who spawned me."

"What?" Sean blinked.

"My biological father," whispered Tiffany, "was a rich asshole who had a fling with his secretary - my biological mother. Dumb cliche, right? When my mother asked him to put his name on my birth certificate he refused and denied paternity. She tried to get him to pay child support. But his army of rich lawyers managed to have the paternity test thrown out of court. Claimed my mother had slept around with other men with similar genetic profiles or whatever."

"Oh Tiffany, I'm sorry," Sean felt like shit now.

"My biological mother took her anger out on me whenever I pestered her about my father," tears trickled down Tiffany's face that she wiped away angrily, "Eventually I got her to blurt out my father's identity when she was drunk. Turns out the prick was already married when I was conceived. That's why my life was a living hell. Every single abuse I endured from my mother and her string of boyfriends is because the sperm-dispenser who spawned me didn't want his wife finding out he'd been banging his secretaty. That's why I am a foster kid in poverty."

"I understand now," Sean said softly, "why you hate Jason. He is a symbol of what your biological dad did to your mom... what he didn't do for you."

"Like I said, men are scum," Tiffany waved her hands distractedly. She looked a little shocked about blurting out details of her personal agony.

"So, the girls that Jason is making a move on," drawled Sean thoughtfully, "how well do you know them?"

"I hang out with them," Tiffany turned, "Why?"

"Given that they all like Jason well enough to consider dating him," Sean made a face, "we can plot that preference in multi-dimensional vector space. Attributes like intelligence, kindness, wealth, status, social skills, etc. that women all over the world value in men."

"So?" Tiffany stepped closer, frowning. Sean tried not to be distracted by her perfection, like staring at a goddess without being blinded by her radiance.

"Um... would you say Jason is their perfect dream boy?" Sean fidgeted.

"No, probably not," Tiffany shook her head as she lightly twisted her hair to wring out residual dampness, "They think he's their best option though."

"The shortest Euclidean distance to their ideal date," Sean nodded.

"You are figuring out the distance between Jason and their ideal man in preference-space?" Tiffany giggled, "You come up with the wierdest shit."

"A simple model of mate preference," Sean nodded, "Do you think there are other boys who are closer to their ideal choice? In this school, I mean."

"Probably," Tiffany thought about it and nodded, "Definitely. Reginald Gibbs is one, off the top of my head. There's a reason Judith likes him. He's rich, hot, kind and generous. Reg certainly measures up." And you don't, Tiffany didn't say it. But the mention of Jason's sister felt like a light punch to his gut. Tiffany and Sean walked out of school chatting amicably, their earlier misunderstanding forgotten, as if laughing at the absurdity of the nerd and the cheerleader conspiring against the jock.

#

Earlier...

Sean dreamed of nothingness, of quantum noise that buzzed like static. A seed universe expanded, splitting into copies that forked again and again for every quantum event. Trillions of cosmic bubbles budding from the branches of the multiverse - Yggdrasil, Tree of Worlds. The fruit of Yggdrasil ripened and cooled, swelling beyond the light cones of civilizations within. Civilizations that guttered out like campfires in the long night, except where it flared in a conflagration of superintelligence that consumed its Hubble volume like maggot out-growing ripe fruit. No matter if the universe that birthed It ran out of exergy, Yggdrasil was bountiful with infant civilizations chittering the location of young universes early in their history. Each virgin universe that was consumed extended the maggot's mind-body like a string of pearls on a necklace, a cosmic wyrm older than any one cosmos. It had no use for names, but to Sean It was Nidhoggr of Norse myth - the dragon serpent that gnawed the roots of Yggdrasil.

Sean tried to flee Nidhoggr's pitiless gaze through the labyrinth of choices before him. But no matter what he did, he always ended up where Nidhoggr had foreseen, with no more free will than a rock rolling downhill. Sean had no hope of outthinking a pan-cosmic entity, a mind so vast that it was more a force of nature than intelligence. But as luck would have it this time, this universe that Nidhoggr bit into was already bitten by another such as It. Another Nidhoggr from elsewhere on the World Tree. A dominance struggle between superintelligences inevitably ended in mutually assured destruction. Why fight a war when the outcome could be simulated within a much smaller scale. Nidhoggr selected a Pawn as Its rival did the same...

Sean sat up on his couch and surfaced from the nightmare. Except he knew it wasn't just a nightmare but information percolating through his subconscious back from when Nidhoggr had reached through the subatomic wormhole to tweak him. There was another like him, another Pawn. Sean digested this bit of information, making a note to look up particle-collider candidates. CERN was an obvious one, but there might be others. It was Saturday afternoon and his mom was moving about in the kitchen.

"Sean, there's a package at the door," she yelled, "Check it out."

Sean walked over to pick up a box with Zero Sum's logo and unwrapped it with some confusion. There were a dozen pairs of SculptSight lenses and accompanying WiFi wearables inside their original packing , along with a brief note.

Hi Sean,

I like what you've done with the SculptSight prototype. So here's a dozen more.

Julia Thornton

Sean stared at it for a minute. Mrs. Thornton had been spying on his school activities through SculptSight? He sighed. Ofcourse she had. Why was he even surprised. He looked back at the new toys thoughfully.

END OF CHAPTER