Chapter 406: Working on My SCS Project

Late-September to Mid-November 2007 (Continued)

We started having frequent, innocuous meetings with groups of SCS girls. They were simple, ordinary social events, much like any other group of teenagers would have. They were in the open and in public, so clearly innocent. The stated purpose for these dates was so my girls and I could get to know the SCS girls. We did a long nature walk with some girls, spent an evening bowling and eating pizza with some others. It was different than my previous bowling date in that I didn't bowl - "Because I don't want to show off," and also because of the risk from the Surveillers - and there was no hot tub party afterward. There was lots of pizza though, so that was good. With another group we had a horse-riding afternoon then a casual restaurant dinner. There was no sex, and we didn't even allow conversations about it. My girls did, however, make sure to subtly show their approval for any girl that dressed particularly attractively, which quite a few of them did, and more started doing so.

One unrelated incident worth mentioning is that the Universe's five-merge Marks had decided to be proactive about our abilities, and to send 1-in-6^12 of us forward. On November 1 I rolled a "5". At first glance its visual similarity to a "6" gave me a momentary panic, but I laughed at my silliness for having even a momentary fear of rolling twelve 6s in a row.

The following weekend we had a big picnic in one of Corvallis's parks for all seventy five of the SCS girls. By the end of the picnic it was reasonable for them to believe that we'd spent enough time over this and the previous social events for us to have gotten a feel for who we got along well with. I'd also had the first couple of useful messages from the déjà vu grapevine about how the Risk-Taking Marks' solutions to the Surveillance Problem were working out. The way the mathematics of that worked, after only three or four more déjà vu's the chance of my getting more information should be significant, and after only a few more of them nearly all the Marks should have news, usually of multiple results. Soon after that I would have enough information to act. [Correct, it only took another a week from now, and that long only because I preferred to accumulate a great deal of information]. With those considerations, it was time to ramp up the SCS competition and make the process more efficient.

I got all the girls' attentions, then said, "As fun as it is to date so many of you at once," which it wasn't really, but that's the sort of thing you say in these circumstances, "I'm looking for only one or two more girlfriends. I don't think we could practically move all seventy five of you into our home, so we have to reduce the number. We know you well enough by now to be able to make the first cut down to twenty five, and it wouldn't be moral to continue to give false hope or waste the time of any of you that we don't think would fit in well.

^-- "I'll explain the process. My girls - Nevaeh, Julia, Ava and Carol - and I will have twenty five votes each. Because anyone we finally choose will be living with us, my girls and I get equal says. You'll form a circle shoulder to shoulder facing inward with one hand extended and open. Because Joy and Gail couldn't make it today we'll use plates to represent them in the circle. The five of us will be in the middle. We'll go around and give one vote to the twenty five of you that we each think most suitable for our home. We're using Monopoly money to indicate our votes because there are lots of pieces of it. The denominations don't matter; each piece equals one vote." We have different denominations each to let us easily keep track of who we voted for, to make it easier to spot if any of the girls try some monkey business. I had the $1 denomination just to make me look more self-effacing and moral.

^-- "Once the five of us have handed out all our votes the twenty five of you that got the most votes will still be in the running and we'll continue to meet you socially so we can get to know you even better. As we've said before, there's no guarantee that we'll end up choosing any of you, or maybe we'll choose more than one. We will only pick someone if we think she'll fit in with all five of us and we don't know you well enough to know how many of you that might apply to. It's still too early to know how many of you have got personalities that suit us as much as Nevaeh's does.

^-- "It's mathematically possible that there could be a tie on the cutoff point. For example, twenty girls could easily get in, and then there are eight of you who have the same number of next highest votes. We'd only want to choose five of those eight so there'd be a small problem. My girls have put their collective foot down and insisted that I will decide any tie-breaks. In that case, I'd just name the five girls I think most suitable for our lifestyle.

^-- "To those of you who don't get enough votes to carry on: 'I'm sorry.' There's simply nothing I can do about that. We can't have all of you living with us so some of you have to be eliminated. It's kinder to do that sooner rather than later. Your lives will just carry on as normal so you won't have lost anything. If it's any consolation, what is happening here is so unusual that it's unlikely that it has any relevance to the rest of your lives. My girls and I have a very unusual mixture of things we're looking for, so even I can't guess how many votes each of you will be getting. For example, one of my criteria is a slight preference for athletic girls because Ava is the only one of my girls who is athletic and I would like her to have some company that has similar interests. Most guys prefer girls who aren't good at running away, so you can tell I'm unusual, haha." Our voting would be in favor of girls that were athletic because they had better than average bodies. I was preemptively giving an acceptable reason for our bias so they wouldn't think we'd picked girls based on their figures. They shouldn't because most of the votes that the beautiful girls were about to get will come from my girls rather than me.

I passed out the bundles of twenty five pieces of Monopoly money to each of the five voters, Ava got two different colored plates to represent Joy and Gail, and Julia got the girls to form a large circle, while answering their questions: "Why didn't you warn us?", etc., none of which mattered.

^

[The previous evening I'd sat my girls down to allocate our votes. After explaining the procedure I'd use for the voting, the first step had been to ask Nevaeh to decide on who her votes would be, based on how she personally wanted to vote, with as much regard to her friendships as she wanted. I'd explained that I didn't want any of her friends to be angry with her for not voting for them, and that her votes didn't matter because the rest of us would easily outvote her to get the final results I wanted. Nevaeh got the idea and picked her votes. She had fewer than twenty five classmates whose opinions of her votes mattered, so she allocated the rest of her votes on her honest opinion of the girls who would best suit me.

The next task had been to determine who the winners of the vote would be. The goal for my SCS project is to sleep with the top 10% by beauty, which with 85 girls (not counting Nevaeh) means 9 of them. So the 25 winners have to include the 9 most beautiful girls. Unsurprisingly, my girls and I had different opinions of who the beauties were. I'll have to decide on who the exact target 9 are before I started sleeping with any of them, but that wasn't necessary now. Our individual opinions of which girls were in the top 10% resulted in a combined list of 13 girls, so they'd all be winners of the voting. We picked 12 more girls to make up the 25, choosing those that were the nicest and most popular because those were believable picks. They'd also make the subsequent dates more enjoyable, which would be a nice side benefit. I was amused by how shallow it was to choose girls for being good company secondary to their sexual attractiveness. According to the challenge I'd set myself it was actually logical to sort them that way, which just meant that my challenge was shallow, but I knew that already.

We'd next worked out who to give my votes to. I'd ignored the girls' beauty and breast sizes (I'll continue to prove my shallowness by stating that I'm aware that there's a considerable correlation between those two groupings), choosing those I thought would fit in well with my household.

Then we'd allocated Julia's, Ava's and Carol's votes to generate the 25 winners we wanted. It was an easy exercise. A few of the beautiful girls weren't nice on the inside, but any girl that Julia, Ava and Carol voted for was guaranteed to be a winner. We'd favored the first-contact nine (actually eight because Nevaeh wasn't included in this) because they were better trained and could be more useful, so five of them survived the cutoff. We'd even arranged for a few ties at the cutoff point because that was more believable.

Because most of the votes were obvious - we knew who the nicest and most beautiful girls were - it'd been easy for the girls to memorize the few extra names each of them needed to vote for. It had been trivially easy for me to memorize my votes, as each of my minds had to remember at most one name. I'd also memorized who my girls would be voting for in case they got confused on the day.]

^

I kept a sight blob on my girls as we did our voting, but none of them had any trouble placing their votes in the way we'd agreed, including a couple under Joy's plate (it was a little windy so the votes had to go under the plate). The time my girls spent thinking about their list looked like they were thinking about who to vote for, which they were, so that was fine.

The SCS girls had naturally been keeping very worried counts of their own votes, so when the voting was over it was easy to announce, "Please hold your votes up if you've got four or more of them."

The beautiful nice girls did.

"Thanks. How many of you are there? Ten. Great. Please move out of the circle and stand over there.

^-- "Please hold up your hands if you've got three votes."

The beautiful or nice girls did.

"How many? Thirteen. Please join the other ten, so that makes twenty three of you. Two more to pick, but I bet there's more than two of you with two votes. Put your hand up if you've got two."

Julia added, "Joy had two votes after I put my vote under her plate." Ava checked under the plate and confirmed that Julia was right.

I said, "Okay, so that makes six of you with two votes. I know I voted for Jan and Gaye so those are the two I pick now. Will you two join the other winners please." The six girls with two votes were all ordinary, so I'd voted for the two of them who didn't look good to make me look good.

Not that it mattered much, but we'd allocated the votes so thirty four girls had got one vote each, and only twelve girls had got no votes. There'd been ten girls that we'd not invited to participate in any of these meetings because they were very unacceptable, so we were in effect clearly rejecting only twenty two out of eighty five girls, which was a proportion that was probably being too kind because the bottom quarter of girls were clearly unsuitable girlfriend material for a famous multimillionaire guy like me. Importantly, because the rejects so obviously should have been rejected, very few people would blame or consider us unfair for rejecting them, hopefully including the rejects themselves. With two votes being the cut off, we also hoped that the girls who'd missed out by only one vote wouldn't feel too bad.

We had to give some condolences, say some things to try to cheer up the losers, and then arrange future meetings with the winners. One important piece of news for them was: "We'll have to eliminate half of you after another few dates, depending on how fast we can get to know you well enough." And also on how quickly the Surveillance Problem could be dispensed with.

We carried on having casual, social outings, the stated purpose being a continuation of our getting to know each other. There was an important change: one of my girls would occasionally approach one of the girls they'd voted for - nearly always one of the beautiful ones who were in my target pool - and quietly give her a little bit of advice for how to improve her chance of surviving the next elimination. For example, Nevaeh told one of her beautiful friends, "I voted for you because I like you and I think you'd be a great girlfriend for Mark, but I'm worried that you're not trying hard enough. I know Mark loves pizza and values girls who are thoughtful and generous, so why don't you make some homemade pizza and quietly give it to me at school to pass on to Mark. I'll tell him you made it for him." Chloe Moon had done one thing right: inspire me to suggest this to Nevaeh.

Carol, Julia and Ava knew the SCS girls well enough for it to be believable that they'd offer similar advice to the girls they'd been seen to vote for. For example, Ava could advise a girl, "I know Mark wants to please me by choosing a girlfriend who is athletic. I voted for you because you are, but you're not doing enough to make Mark aware of that. When we have our next date, apologize in advance that you'll be arriving fifteen minutes late because you're in training. Then you run to wherever we are. Make sure you're wearing clothes that make you look sleek and athletic. Don't worry about being sweaty because that'll be an advantage in his eyes."

Nearly every girl that I wanted to make the next cut - the beautiful girls - was given a specific, distinct and confidential piece of advice from one of my girls. I suggested the pizza idea to Nevaeh, but my girls had no trouble thinking up their own ways in which the SCS girls could please me, even with the restraint that the ideas shouldn't be sexual. Several of the SCS girls were able to think of that ploy without any prompting, but I sadly had to turn down their various degrees of subtle or blatant invitation as I didn't want my plan to go off half cocked. My girls' work was reduced because a few of the SCS girls did something noteworthy on their own initiative. That was good because it made it less likely for the beautiful girls to compare notes and realize they'd all been steered. To help disguise that, a few of the non-beautiful girls were similarly advised; we just wouldn't use their good actions as justifications for our subsequent picks.