"She put you on drone combat?" Mei Ling looked outraged, "That Thornton woman sounds like a piece of work. You should report the bitch..."

"I wasn't supposed to do anything, but then shit hit the fan," Sean replied moodily, "It was horrible, Mei. There was this little girl who was forced to commit a warcrime. Then she nuked a building and I... I had to stop her by nuking the hospital building she was in."

"What the..." Mei Ling stared aghast, "Dude, that's just messed up. Do you want to talk about it... hey are you OK?"

"A hospital full of kids like her," Sean sniffled, wiping away tears that were starting to trickle down. He assured himself that Mrs. Wang was busy in the kitchen and couldn't see him crying, "I threw away their lives, because I wanted to protect... this analyst who worked for Julia."

Mei's laptop lay open between them on the living room couch. The monitor was cycling through high resolution video clips of soccer practice downloaded from Seymour High's girls varsity webpage. It was the training set Randal had used when attempting to implement Mei Ling's prototype model of the human frontal cortex. Facial expression and motion analysis overlays rubber-banded around the atheletes' images as machine learning libraries abstracted the feed into input for the next higher layer.

"We are not utility maximizers weighing human lives on a scale," Mei Ling said quietly after a while, putting a hand on his shoulder, "Your family and friends, even acquaintances, will always be more valuable to you than complete strangers. Only comic book superheroes pretend otherwise."

"The only reason I valued Dawn's life more is because she's hot," Sean dropped his face into his hands as he blurted his shameful secret festering within, "What's wrong with me, Mei? Am I going to lose my mind whenever I run across a pretty girl?"

"I don't believe that," Mei Ling surreptitiously lowered her voice, her eyes flickering wistfully to an atheletic senior taking a penalty kick in slow motion on the laptop screen, "I know what it's like to be attracted to women and I wouldn't ..."

"That doesn't count," Sean interrupted morosely, "you are a girl."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Mei Ling froze.

You know what I mean," Sean frowned, "men want women a lot more than women want men... or women want women. It's a lot harder for me than for you."

"Dude, what are you talking about?" Mei Ling hissed loudly.

"Isn't it obvious, Mei?" Sean looked surprised as he registered her anger, "Men pursue women, not the other way round. It's been that way for all of human history. Supply can't meet demand."

"That doesn't mean anything, dumbass," Mei Ling nearly yelled in his face, "You realize that most cultures have severely suppressed women from expressing what they want, right? Or, perhaps women simply have better impulse control than men, not lower desire. Have you thought of that, huh? Perhaps men aren't the poor frustrated martyr's you are making them to be."

"But... but," Sean protested, "even if I was some alien who didn't know anything of human history, I'd expect male sex drive to be a lot stronger than the female's. Based on reproductive asymmetry in parental investment alone."

"Asymmetry?" Mei Ling glared at him. She looked fighting mad. Crap, what did I say to set her off? Sean frowned.

"Since gestation takes nine months, there's an upper limit to the number of kids a woman can birth in her lifetime," Sean pointed out, "A woman can't maximize her offspring by being promiscous. It's downright risky for her. But there's no theoritical limit to the number of kids a man can father. Assuming evolution has optimized each gender to maximize their genes..."

"You are making too many assumptions," Mei Ling simmered, "First, you are assuming that the genetic switch that controls desire is located on the sex chromosome. Second, just because a behavior may be adaptive doesn't guarantee a path to that..."

"Let's look at some data," Sean suggested, "Mmm... what about the ratio of female to male sex workers?"

"Fine," Mei Ling typed a query into her phone browser and frowned, "According to Fondation Scelles 80% of sex workers are female..."

"Pretty conclusive evidence, I think," Sean nodded grimly, "Women have always been exploited, you said that yourself."

"Aren't you forgotting about sampling bias?" Mei Ling answered tartly, "This only shows that most women aren't willing to pay for..."

"Do you feel deep frustration and self loathing when you see a hot girl?" Sean demanded.

"Well, no..." Mei Ling looked surprised.

"I rest my case," Sean declared triumphantly, then gave a muffled yell when Mei Ling's pillow hit him in the face. They glared at each other for a second, then burst out laughing, Mei's anger vanishing as quickly as it had appeared. She could never stay angry for long, Sean thought fondly, unlike his own bad moods which festered for weeks.

"If girls make you so angsty," Mei challenged, "why the heck are we wasting time and effort to help the girls soccer team?"

"I... don't know," Sean looked uncomfortable.

"You don't know?" Mei growled, "Dude, I spent a whole week sketching the flowchart for the decision model. Which according to Randall, doesn't work anyway. Good thing I got the AP Bio and Comp Science teachers to buy into it as my cross-domain research project, or my grades would be toast. Some of us actually have to study for good grades, you know."

Sean winced at Mei's barbed reference to his power, "At first it was to pay back Kaitlyn for allegedly saving my hide at the Fuller plant. Then I thought I could, maybe, get some of the girls on the team to like me... if I actually manage to make a difference to the match outcomes, that is."

Mei stared at him disbelievingly, "The same way you like Kaitlyn out of gratitude?"

"No," Sean sputtered, "I don't like Kaitlyn, not like that... oh."

"You really are a dumbass when it comes to girls," Mei Ling scoffed.

"So the cognitive model correlation was pretty poor, huh?" Sean frowned at the glossy centerfold in Mei's biology text sprawled on the coffee table, a cross section of the human brain labeled in impressive detail.

"This is what Randall sent back," Mei Ling typed on the laptop, bringing up array after array of pixelated still images from the soccer practice videos, "the machine learning library itself has no problem mapping the soccer players' facial expressions and body language into which quadrant of the soccer net they sent the penalty kick into seconds later."

"Really?" Sean perked up, "He's sure there's no overfitting of the data?"

"That's what he says," Mei Ling shrugged, bringing up a scatter plot of dots clustered in a large blob, "Fat lot of good that does though. Getting the cognitive model to deconstruct that mapping into plain English that our goalie could use... forget about it. You might as well flip a coin."

Sean stood up to stretch and tried to push down rising disappointment, chiding himself for expecting anything more from what had been a long shot. His eyes were drawn again to the biology text on the coffee table. The book's illustration was a taunting puzzle. The layers of cortical tissue added to the brain over geological ages like an onion waiting to be peeled...

"I'm an idiot," Sean slapped his forehead.

"Tell me something I don't know," Mei smirked.

"We've been modeling the wrong region," Sean muttered as he paced around Mei's living room, "MRI experiments have shown that we usually act a split second before our conscious mind - the frontal cortex - is aware of it. Sure, it feels like we are the ones in charge, but that's just a story our conscious mind tells itself. That's even more true for us teenagers, our frontal cortex is not fully developed."

"So..." Mei Ling frowned, "when a highschool soccer player takes a penalty kick..."

"...her limbic system is making the choice," Sean finished. The limbic system, commonly referred to as the mammalian brain, had evolved in a simpler more deadlier world with sole purpose of surviving long enough to reproduce. It had kept humanity's forebears alive from the monsters that had stalked them in the African night, using the twin prods of fear and pleasure. And it didn't come with an OFF switch. The conscious and more rational frontal cortex was an afterthought that simply went along for the ride, a thin layer of neural tissue thrown over the limbic system that actually pulled the puppet strings.

"I am not modeling the limbic system," Mei Ling declared firmly, "Won't do much good anyway. There's no way to condense all the realtime cues the mesolimbic dophamine circuit uses into simple rules for our goalie. She'd need as much portable computing power as the human brain..."

"Mei... that's it," Sean exclaimed, "The goalie already carries a portable computer... her own brain."

"But... training her brain like a machine learning algorithm," Mei Ling protested, "that's impossible."

"Is it?" Sean mused, "Most people can instinctively pick up social cues that are hardwired. But we can also learn stuff through practice. What we need is a realtime tool that can train the goalie quickly on the field. A gizmo that shows her where the penalty kick is going just before the kick."

"I don't know, dude," Mei Ling shook her head, "sounds like cheating..."

"Oh no," Sean waved his hand, "the gizmo is just like bicycle training wheels. Once the goalie gets comfortable using the gizmo, she's going to start picking up subconscious cues from the kicker and won't need the gizmo anymore. At least that's the theory."

"But we don't have a gizmo like that," Mei Ling frowned, "A game VR headset won't work..."

"Actually I have just the thing," Sean smiled, "It's these advanced contact lenses, called SculptSight, that can edit what we are seeing in realtime. A gift from Julia Thornton."

"Randall did mention something of the sort," Mei Ling said slowly, "He said you wanted him to program it so pretty girls don't look pretty to you anymore."

"That's what I want to use it for, eventually," Sean looked determined, "but there's no reason we can't use it to help the soccer team."

"Dude, why are you doing this to yourself," Mei Ling seemed disturbed, "it can't be healthy to distort reality that way. Just stay away from girls you think are hot, if it bothers you that much."

"I... can't," Sean looked embarrased, "I'm meeting with Tiffany on a semi-regular basis. That pig Jason has been abusing her. She wants my help in figuring out how to... deal with Jason safely."

"Tiffany Brooks?" Mei Ling stared at him open mouthed, "Dude, she's just using you for whatever drama she has going with Jason."

"I know that," Sean rolled his eyes, "And I want to use that drama to... get closer to her. I can't do that if I turn into a gibbering idiot everytime I see her."

END OF CHAPTER