My Milf Conqueror System

Ethan threw a ping-pong ball at my head at seven in the morning.

We were in the villa's game room, a room none of us had used until week three, when Ethan discovered it during one of his wanderings and immediately declared it "the most important room in the house." It had a ping-pong table, a dartboard, a pool table that was slightly crooked, and a TV bolted to the wall at an angle that suggested the previous owner had been either very short or very drunk. Ethan had claimed it as his domain, the one space in a twelve-bedroom villa where the Queens wouldn't follow.

"This is a no-Queen zone," he'd announced on day one, taping a handwritten sign to the door. "Queens not allowed. Friends only. Darius counts as a friend even though he's technically security. Nia is allowed because she's my girlfriend. Claire is allowed because Claire is Claire."

The rules didn't apply to Ethan. They never had. He existed outside the system of rules that governed everyone else, not because he was special but because he was so completely, irreducibly himself that rules slid off him like water off a duck. He'd been that way since before the System, since before any of it. He was the first person who'd looked at Jake Hart, invisible, broke, nobody, and decided he was worth knowing. Not because of what I'd become. Because of what I was. He was my only real friend. The only guy who'd talked to me when I was still invisible. That was Ethan. That had always been Ethan.

"You're not even trying," Ethan said, serving again. The ball bounced off my paddle and into the corner. "You're standing there like a man who's thinking about something. This is ping-pong, Jake. Ping-pong doesn't require thinking. It requires reflexes and a willingness to lose, which you don't have, which is why you're losing."

"I'm not losing. I'm strategizing."

"You're down nine to three. That's not a strategy. That's a massacre."

Nia sat on the couch with her laptop, not watching the game, watching the game. Nia did this. She'd appear not to be paying attention while cataloging every detail with the precision of a woman who'd built her career on noticing what other people missed. She'd been that way since the day Ethan pointed me to her. "You want Nia," Ethan had said. "Nia Patel. Junior. CS major. She hacked the registrar's office to change her schedule because she hates 8 AMs." He'd told me to look for the girl in noise-canceling headphones. That was how I found Nia. Not through the System. Through Ethan.

"You're both terrible at ping-pong," Nia said without looking up. "The average rally length is 2.3 hits. Professional players average 4.7. You're at barely two."

"Statistics don't apply to my game," Ethan said. "My game is intuitive."

"Your game is losing."

"My game is creative losing. There's a difference."

Claire was on the other couch, reading. She didn't play games she couldn't win, and she couldn't win ping-pong against Ethan because Ethan didn't play by rules, and Claire lived by rules. Claire Montgomery. Same class. Same year. I'd had a crush on her for years before the System. I used to deliver her coffee. Hold the door for her. Watch her from across the quad and think a smile from her was a blessing. She didn't know my name. Then the System came, and I stopped being invisible, and Claire started seeing me, and somewhere between the tutoring sessions and the all-night whiteboard sessions about Marcus Thorne, she became part of the group. Not because the System recruited her. Because she was smart and she was there and she cared.

Darius stood in the doorway. He didn't play ping-pong. He didn't play anything. He existed in the game room the way he existed everywhere: a presence, a sentinel. I still remembered the first time I'd seen him in the university weight room, deadlifting with a bar bending under the weight, six-four with shoulders that could tackle a truck. The System had flagged him as "The Muscle." A junior. Quarterback. Scholarship student. Outsider. I'd offered him respect and a paycheck. He'd said "What time do we start?" That was Darius. Three words.

But today Darius did something unusual. He sat down.

He sat on the couch beside Nia, which was notable because Darius didn't sit on couches. Darius stood, or Darius leaned, or Darius positioned himself in a doorway with his weight distributed for maximum response time. Sitting was a luxury Darius didn't allow himself, because sitting meant relaxing and relaxing meant vulnerability. Except today he sat, and the sitting was so unexpected that Ethan stopped mid serve and stared.

"Are you sitting?" Ethan said.

"I'm sitting."

"On a couch."

"On a couch."

"Are you okay? Do you need a doctor? Are you dying?"

"I'm sitting, Ethan. People sit. It's not a medical event."

Ethan looked at me. I looked at Ethan. We both knew what the sitting meant. Darius sat when he felt safe. Darius felt safe when the perimeter was secure and the threats were minimal and the people he was protecting were in a place where nothing could reach them. Darius sitting was Darius saying: This is good. I can rest here.

[Ding!]

[Host Stress Level: 40%.]

[Notice: Friend Darius is sitting on a couch. The System has not observed this behavior before. The System classifies this as "relaxation," a state the System previously believed Friend Darius was incapable of.]

"Remember how this started?" Ethan said, resuming his serve. "Not the Queens. Not the empire. This. You and me in a dorm room with a whiteboard and 'BRAD' written at the top in red marker. That was the whole thing. Two guys who were nobody, drawing a pyramid about a lacrosse captain who wanted to spill a keg on you at Greek Week."

"I remember."

"Then you found Darius in the weight room and I pointed you to Nia in the server tunnels and Claire was already there, in class, pretending she didn't notice you were changing. And suddenly two guys became four and the whiteboard became a war room. But it started with two. Just two. You and me and a red marker."

I missed the ball. It bounced past me and rolled under the pool table. Ethan stood on his side of the ping-pong table with the paddle in his hand and looked at me with an expression I'd seen maybe three times in the years I'd known him. The expression that wasn't the joke, that wasn't the banter, that was the real thing underneath all of it, the friendship that had started in a dorm room when we were both nobody.

"You're thinking about the restaurant," Ethan said. Not a question.

"I'm always thinking."

"You're always thinking about the restaurant. The woman. Mila. Whatever she is. You've been going there every day and you've been quiet about it and when you're quiet about something it means it's big and when it's big you try to handle it alone and when you handle it alone you forget that you have people."

"I have nine Queens and a villa full of analysts."

"You have four people who were there before the Queens. Four people who knew you when you were invisible and who didn't care. That's different. The Queens are your empire. We're your whiteboard."

Claire looked up from her book. The look was enough. The look said: He's right, and you know he's right, and knowing it and doing something about it are different things, and you've always been good at the first and bad at the second.

Nia closed her laptop. Darius sat on the couch. The game room was quiet in a way that wasn't silence but attention. Four people who'd been there before the System gave me anything worth having. Ethan, who was there when I was invisible. Darius, who I found in the weight room and who became the wall between me and everything that wanted to hurt me. Nia, who Ethan found in the server tunnels and who became the eyes that saw what I couldn't. Claire, who was in my class and who I'd loved from a distance for years. All four of them, here, in a game room in Miami, because they'd stayed. Not because of the System. Not because of a mission. Because they'd chosen to.

"We're here, Jake," Ethan said. "Whatever Mila is. Whatever's coming. We're here."

"I know."

"Do you? Because knowing it and feeling it are different, and you're good at knowing and bad at feeling, and that's been true since the whiteboard."

I looked at him. I looked at Nia. I looked at Darius, sitting on a couch for the first time in the years I'd known him. I looked at Claire, who'd closed her book and was watching me with the steady gaze of a woman who'd been watching me for years.

"I know," I said. And this time I meant it the way he meant it. Not as knowledge but as feeling, which was harder, and which was what the System had been trying to teach me without finding the right words.

[Ding!]

[Host Stress Level: 38%. Tied for record low.]