Camillo's alarm goes off at seven. He fumbles for his phone and shuts it up.

On the bus, he catches up on his webcomics, texts his bestie, makes a little cookie run and jump across the screen. By the time he makes it to the chemistry auditorium, his cookie is out of energy and he's flipping through apps for something else to distract him from stoichiometry.

The app starts up with a flourish of animated background details, mosaic tiles fading in and their colors painted by invisible brushes. There would probably be a little intro tune, if his phone weren’t always on silent.

In the center of the screen, there’s text:

Welcome to Sultana!

Tap to learn how to play.

Sure. Tap tap. He's seated in the back row for this exact purpose.

It directs him to the menu bar at the bottom of the screen —

Tap to open your Stable.

And then to a plus in the  top right corner—

Tap to add someone new.

—and then opens up the camera, currently pointed at his desk.

Point and tap to add someone new.

Okay he thought this was a game but maybe it's some kind of address book, or possibly a slightly weird bug ID app?

Camillo takes an experimental shot of the desk surface. This is fine. Just take him through the intro.

Please target a person in the room!

So they actually bothered to put in some kind of face ID.

All right, this professor is a pretentious jerk and Camillo doesn't care if Chinese spyware steals his identity. He tries his best to be surreptitious about snapping a picture of the front of the room.

The picture loads, and every head in the audience has some tiny text hovering above it.

If he zooms in, he can see a name above each student (and above the professor), and what looks like a star rating. Most people in the class have one star — the professor, and a few people he’s worked with on group projects or studied with, have two.

Tap a name to select.

Okay so this is some kind of social-media-enabled thing and it's apparently really popular? Weird. 

Better to tap on a random classmate, in case it's going to send them a friend request or something. Professor might be awkward. There's probably an academic policy about friending your students.

Ethan Moore, one star, shows up on his screen.

It’s a startlingly detailed likeness, in the clothes he’s currently wearing, with his name and age and a few statistics listed next to him.

It doesn’t give him that much time to linger.

Tap to enter the Shop.

There are only three things listed in the Shop — one BodyTool, listed as FREE, and one Measles Cure, listed for 10 [Pearl]s.

Okay so this is ... some kind of Tamagotchi thing? With other players as pets? Wild.

He'll claim the free tutorial BodyTool.

It sends him back to the Stable, already on Ethan’s page, and has more instructions for him.

Tap to open your Tools.

Tap to use the BodyTool.

It returns to the view of Ethan, centered on the screen now (with a List View and Advanced button he’s not allowed to click yet).

Tap the hands to zoom in.

The hands zoom in. There’s a set of sliders you can scroll through at the bottom of the screen — the first one is highlighted.

Move the slider to the right to increase PALM SENSITIVITY.

What? What???

Sure. Fine. Palm sensitivity, up.

Ethan drops his pencil.

Your change is affecting Ethan’s life!

Ethan will now produce Pearls for you, even when Sultana is not open.

The app zooms out. It highlights a counter beside his feet in the app, and one in the top left corner that shows 10 pearls.

Let’s head back to the Shop.

Uh.

Okay. Weird ... coincidence.

Back to the Shop it is.

Click to buy “Measles Cure”.

It costs him his current 10 pearls.

There’s a brief loading icon, and then it disappears from the screen.

We’ll send you a notification when your reward is complete!

Tap the DRAW tab.

This is a dizzying page of…

Gachas. It’s definitely gachas.

It directs him to the second item on the screen,  a holographic deck of cards icon with the label PREMIUM TOOLS.

Pull the lever to draw!

He will accept his free premium tool.

The swiping motion to pull the lever is a nice touch.

There’s a flurry of sparkling rainbow animation before the machine onscreen prints out a card. The item in the window that pops up is an icon of electrodes on someone’s forehead, captioned BrainTool.

You have a new premium tool! The BrainTool is extremely versatile and adaptable. You’ll be upgrading it with many different subtools as you play.

Let’s try this out!

It directs him back to his Stable, back onto Ethan’s page, into the tools menu. BrainTool. Basics tab.

Slide left slightly to decrease Ethan’s IMPULSE CONTROL.

It even has a convenient little marker for where to stop.

Why are all the graphics so charming? Why are there so few ads? Why are those the two most confusing things about this app?

...well, fine. He slides the little slider.

The app highlights the little pearls per minute counter, which has increased to 0.3.

The more you change, the more pearls your Stable will produce!

Ethan’s hands, which had been set firmly on his thighs, have begun to slide back and forth just barely enough to see from two rows back.

That's -- normal. That's a normal fidget which is normal to do. Normal people do that.

Can he slide the little arrow further.

Yes he can. He can slide it all the way to the left, actually.

At which point Ethan starts unbuttoning his pants.

What!!!!!!

He slides the arrow right back where it came from.

Ethan goes completely still.

(The little pearl counter goes back to 0.1/m.)

What the hell.

He gives it a carefully-considered sixty seconds.

And then he slides the little arrow left again.

This time, he gets up, leaving all his stuff in his seat.

He starts unbuttoning his pants again before he’s gotten fully out the door.

Camillo puts the arrow back where it belongs, while he rethinks the nature of the universe.

Ethan stops in his tracks, and then nearly sprints the rest of the way out of the classroom.

(A little +10 pops up on the screen before fading slowly into the background. It’s unclear for exactly what, but he is 10 pearls richer now.)

So he has ... a magic ... phone ... app.

With gachas.

Camillo does the only reasonable thing and checks out the store. Maybe there are more options now that the tutorial has freed him from its clutches.

There are many, many more options.

There’s two tabs within the store, now. One of them has a countdown timer, and evidently refreshes at midnight. It has items like $1000 (10/10 available) and Subtool Draw Ticket (3/3 available) and Favorable Vote (1/1 available).

The others would take a long time to finish reading.

If he scrolls and skims, he’ll see items like Novel Leukemia Treatment and Manned Moon Landing and Voting Age Bill and Improved Saltwater Filtration and Flawless Transcript and Russian Coup.

Oh.

Oh, wow. Oh. Oh.

Those are ... available. For pearls. For numbers of pearls that are ... large ... but not ... unachievable. Not if it keeps giving him ten pears here and ten pearls there and -- this had better not be one of those apps where it's super generous with the currency at the beginning and then gets all stingy.

Even just the money -- a thousand dollars is a lot of money. He could get a new phone. ... he probably shouldn't get a new phone. He could get a new laptop. He could get a queen-sized bed.

He could cure leukemia. All of those cute sad pictures of kids on coin boxes at McDonald's -- gone.

Can he still add people to his, uh, stable.

Yes, he can.

He has, apparently, 9/10 slots remaining.

Oh. Shit.

Well, important question: can he kick Ethan out?? He doesn't want to waste a slot on Ethan. He has no interest in following Ethan around all the time trying to make virtual currency off him.

He can! It asks him if he’s sure, then—

Would you like to reset Ethan before removing him from the Stable?

YES        NO

What did he even -- oh, right, the hands. Ethan can have normal hands back.

He returns to 10/10 slots remaining.

Oh shit is this a situation where it's free the first time and then it costs pearls to add people to the Stable after that. How many pearls. Did he just accidentally softlock himself out of the magic app.

There is a pearl cost next to every name in his second picture. Luckily, it’s 0 this time.

Thank fucking god.

...does he have to use his live camera to add someone to the Stable, or can he upload a photo from his library. Inquiring minds want to know.

There’s no way to add a picture from his camera roll. It’s live or nothing.

Camillo will (resentfully) wait for the end of chem class to go find Z.

Towards the end of class, Ethan returns, looking moderately harrowed. There’s a little whispering about it.

Z is hanging out on a bench just outside the building with a rapidly depleting takeout box of chow mein.

He waves lazily as Camillo approaches.

Camillo waves back, pulling up the app camera with his other hand.

There are 5 iridescent stars next to Z’s name.

Adding him apparently costs 1500 0 pearls.

Camillo is literally the smartest person on Earth.

He adds Z immediately.

"Hey you!" 

“Hey! I saved you the fortune cookies!”

Z appears, lovingly rendered and spinnable, on his screen.

(There’s a button labeled TRAITS, a button labeled LOG, a little checkbox labeled Show Clothing…

"Is that because I'm your favorite?"

Camillo joins Z on the bench and shows him the phone screen.

“—I’m, uh, on your phone?”

(Z’s pearls per minute drop instantly from 1/m to 0/m, and his name is greyed out in the interface.)

"--oh, hey, rude, it's locked you out for some reason..."

He taps the spinning Z irritably.

After the fourth tap, this is apparently an expected user behavior. A popup appears.

Z has become informed, and

- cannot be edited.

- will not produce pearls.

Roll back memory? (There will be a ten second grace period.)

YES (50 0)       NO

Z looks at the phone, and then at him, and then back at the phone.

“Uh?”

What friendly UI design, Camillo reflects, and that's the main thought in his mind as he hits YES.

Z’s face goes blank, for a moment, eyes staring past the phone and through it into nothing.

Then he blinks, a few times, looking slightly disoriented.

He stares blearily at the phone screen, trying to make it resolve into an image.

Camillo switches apps and shows him a meme he's saved instead.

Ten seconds on the dot after Camillo hit the button, Z’s eyes refocus, and he snorts.

“I’m always saying this.”

"It's what you're always saying," Camillo agrees. "Gimme those fortune cookies."

Z forks them over. 

“This one’s got an extra half a cookie in it.”

"My life is literally perfect."

Even if he has magic (?) powers (???) but can't tell his best friend about them.

Z complains to him about his homework, and shows him a picture of a fat lizard, and throws a noodle at him. Normal stuff.

Camillo eats cookies and admires fat lizards and makes plans to study together.

As soon as he can decorously immerse himself in his phone, he does. 

Z has already made him a few pearls.

All the options from earlier are looking clickable again. The tutorial isn’t showing him anything new, yet.

Well. Z doesn't need his impulse control adjusted -- actually, belay that, what if he adjusted Z's impulse control up?

No obvious changes here, at least not right away.

A little green up arrow flashes briefly next to Z’s pearl counter, but apparently it’s not enough change to show up.

He's done his good deed for the day. Assuming any of this is real and isn't some kind of absurdly involved high-budget prank with his entire class and best friend complicit. Which frankly seems less plausible than magic.

Anyway. Body tool time. He taps on Z's hand and investigates those sliders.

The options here are extensive.

On Z’s hand alone, he can adjust the sensitivity of the palms and fingers up and down, tweak the vascularity and the roughness of the skin, change the length of his fingers and the width of his palms and the shape of his nails.

Camillo likes Z's hands just the way they are.

Back to full-body view. What's under that Advanced button?

The “Advanced” button is currently greyed out. It vibrates its offense when he pokes it.

Well that's no fun at all. He'll have to level up.

Fine. What else can the BrainTool do for him?

The BrainTool’s “Basics” have a decent spread, albeit with a specific bent. Libido, impulse control, aggression, IQ (Z, despite his own protests, is up there), masochism (Z is also up there — although only about halfway up the slider), sadism, volition…

Well, okay. Adjusting IQ seems ... kind of weird and fraught ... so he's going to leave that alone for now, even if probably a good friend would just turn it all the way up. Volition seems good? Volition can go higher. Goodbye executive dysfunction. Libido can go just a touch higher, that doesn't hurt anything, right?

...that's not as many pearls as he was hoping for.

Libido can go moderately higher. Z can have pointy nails -- fingers and toes -- because he'd like that. And ... well, the sensitive hands were some good points last time.

He starts noticing when the point of his thumbnail clips the screen of his phone.

That wasn’t…like that…a minute ago. He’s pretty sure. Almost positive.

And then the other physical change hits, halfway through his one last automatic scroll.

Z drops his phone in his lap.

Wait. When it says sensitivity -- it's not, like, painful, is it? He didn't mean to hurt Z.

"You okay?"

“I, uh. Yep. Yeah.”

He stares at his hand.

Carefully, he runs the pad of the other finger’s hand over  his palm — or, he starts to, before going even wider-eyed and stuffing both hands into his hoodie pockets like they might develop minds of their own.

"You're sure? Do you need a hand?"

Why did he say that.

“I, uh—”

Wait, was that a pun?

Nooooo.

His eyes dart back and forth.

“…I’m gonna…go back to my room…like, now. Do you wanna come with.”

He should be saving the world with his app -- because he could save the world, with this, could cure diseases and overthrow tyrants and make a hundred years of scientific progress spring into being at the tap of a button --

-- and he should be thinking about the morality of his choices, because he just altered two people's minds and it probably wasn't harmful, not really, at least not beyond mortifying that one guy, and it was probably the right thing to do, wasn't it, he's going to make such good use of it --

-- but that sounds really stressful and complicated and, honestly, like it can wait for later.

"Yeah. Let's do that."

He very carefully slips his backpack on, gingerly drops his phone in his pocket, and gets as close to sprinting as he can get without leaving Camillo behind.

Once they’re both behind closed doors, he takes his hands out again.

“…this — is gonna sound really weird.”

Oh. He thought they were just going to play with the new toys (Z's hands).

"--yeah? Okay."

He holds out his hand to Camillo for inspection.

“Was this, uh…pointy? Like ten minutes ago?”

Camillo takes the hand in both of his, as if to examine it.

His fingers twitch, and he halfway moans before he cuts himself off.

“Fuck. Uh.”

How the fuck does he explain this.

“That feels really good right now.”