My job is making incels. 

The agency I work for uses the incels to accomplish its mission, and so they send me into the germination grounds. There, I nurture them into the men I need them to be. 

To case the scene and do the deed, I go where the likely candidates are. My most recent placement was at a gallery in lower Manhattan, pushing the ascetic art boys over the line they love to toe. My tenure there resulted in 5 direct germinations, 36 level two indirect; 172 level three indirect. Those numbers have since exploded past what we’re required or able to track. Before that, I had a six month stint wageslaving (I’ve learned their terminology, though I never use it with them. They don’t like it coming out of a pretty girl’s mouth.) at a call center in Atlanta, embedding with IT. 12 direct, 97 L2 indirect, 326 L3. Shortly after, one of my direct boys shot up a food court. The agency used the media blitz to obscure their arms deal with an unfriendly European government. I got a bonus and went to Montauk for a month. 

Those two locations were my picks. The middle-aged war pigs who are my bosses don’t get it at all, but they trust me now. Last year, my handler put me behind the checkout counter at a VR arcade in Michigan. I told her, and the whole steering committee, that it wouldn’t work. When I dream, if I dream, I see the way the youngest of the bunch—roughly 45, wrinkles paved over by injectables—rolled his eyes at me. He learned his lesson inside a month: there were no seedlings there at all. They sent a second in to check my work and he came to the same conclusion. Arcades, even those dedicated to escaping reality, are social; the young men had too many friends. Some were brave enough to ask me out and there was no hatred on their faces when I turned them down. None at all. It was a complete waste. After that, the committee let me suggest my own placements. 

🩸 

The young men in this classroom are refusing to make eye contact. This is good—I like the shy ones. They’re easy to crack. All they want is to feel like the smartest and most handsome boy I’ve ever met, and to blame me when my attention doesn’t make them love themselves. Easy. The normie boys who are making tentative conversation with each other I can ignore. But there are plenty of potentials, all staring down at their phones. On the screen at the front of the classroom, in plain white letters against a navy backdrop, is the title of the lecture: CS 114—Formal Models of Language Generation. There are three other females in this room that seats thirty. Two of them are mousy Beckys; one is so beautiful that she may not pose a threat to me at all. Her cheekbones are exceptional and she’s already ignoring everyone. A true Stacy. For my seedlings, she’ll be another addition to the rage spank bank. On my first real day of college, I was more like her: afraid of being noticed by the boys and the professor for my beauty, more afraid of being ugly. She won’t pose a problem. My seedlings will write her off as an ice queen without my intervention. Some may wind up believing that she is too beautiful to be human. If I do my job right, she might die. 

If the Beckys are getting any attention, they won’t hold it for long. The boys I’m looking for will hate females who are too beautiful and call the plain ones subhuman, expect sex from them, and feel cheated when they don’t get it. With my looks as carefully curated as they are, I slip right between these two categories. So really, I’m alone with these men. My sticky, lonely boys. 

🩸 

For the next six months, I’ll be a computer science major, just transferred in. If it goes well, this will be my last stint in the field before moving into management. After I “graduate,” I’ll be too old to be a convincing college student; another year after that and I’ll be too old for the whole project. I don’t know what happens to the females in my role who age out of field work but don’t make it into management. It feels prudent not to find out. Age is a crucial recruitment element: I have to get to the seedlings while they’re still young. These ones are juniors and seniors, just the right age to be afraid of the future and disappointed by their performances in their own lives so far. Whatever other path they could take, I will divert them like a tributary, pouring them into the river of men just like them. 

My agency needs them to be soldiers on the front lines of a war they think they understand. To recruit them, I must make them all hate me. 

🩸 

The professor—a man in his fifties wearing a wedding band—starts his lecture. I pay him a third of my attention. One of the unexpected perks of this job is learning new skills. In Manhattan, I learned how to hang heavy, expensive art on the fragile gallery walls. In Atlanta, I learned how to uninstall malware from corporate computers. At the arcade, I became proficient at Dig Dug, though I had to be sure I was never better than any of the boys. And now, I’ll learn about AI advancements. 

It is to the boys in this classroom that I give the lion’s share of my focus. Immediately, I see an easy win: a white guy who would be perfectly nice looking if he wore different pants and shoes, cut his hair, lifted heavier weights, and used a salicylic acid cleanser. He alternates between smirking down at his phone and rolling his eyes whenever the professor says something obvious. Right now he—the professor—is talking about ethics. He—the young man—is in my sight line, but I’m not in his, so I’ll have to gauge his instinctive reaction to me after class. He stared at the Stacy when she first walked in, and for one layered second, pitiless rage crumpled his face. It happened so quickly I wonder if he was even aware of it. She certainly wasn’t. She didn’t look at him, or any of the boys, as she sat down in front of me. 

In this classroom alone, there are three other less obvious seedlings. One sits at the back of the room, scribbling on his tablet (a manifesto?). Another is glancing up at the prettier of the two Beckys, trying and failing to get her attention. I’d bet that he’ll decide he’s too good for her inside the next 48 hours. The other is the grad student TA, who gave me a heavy duty up-down look when I walked in early. His position of power over the other three, and over me to the best of his knowledge, may prove useful. Four seedlings in this room alone. In the two other courses I’m enrolled in, there will surely be more. 

The beautiful female has asked an intelligent, belligerent question. 

“Ingrid.” At the beginning of the lecture, the professor asked us to start each question by saying our names, so he could learn them. Most of the time I don’t bother learning the names of my seedlings or the females and normies around them. “How do these principles apply to small language models, or are they only useful for LLMs?” The program is mostly focused on large language models. SLMs are out of vogue here. 

She types out the professor’s answer into her crowded notes document, nodding along when he says salient things. His reaction to her is uninteresting. It’s the rest of the room that really gets going. The TA’s eyebrows raise. The seedling in the back stops scribbling. One of the normie boys starts nodding along with her. The most obvious seedling puts his phone down when she speaks. His whole body goes as still as a frozen lake. This is another unexpected perk: watching their arousal compete with insecurity until the two collapse into masturbatory self-righteousness. He’s broadcasting his thoughts into the room like he’s on a megaphone: who does that bitch (slut, maybe? Yes. Slut.) think she is? She’s smart, no, stupid. She’ll fuck anyone; she’ll never fuck me; I don’t even want to fuck her. I want to take something from her so she has to look at me. His small frame is practically vibrating with hatred. Slim fingers, narrow shoulders. A classic manlet. God, he’s going to be so easy. He barely even needs my intervention. But hatred and an active online presence do not a murderer make. 

I raise my hand and give my active alias. 

“Um, could you explain more about the hardware required for this?” This is a dunce question compared to Ingrid’s, but asked sweetly. The professor smiles at me; the TA relaxes; and Manlet turns around to look at me. Now his expressive face has a veil of surprise over it. He hadn’t noticed me. Ingrid was too blinding. She’s at least a nine. I am a seven point five, right in the sweet spot between upper-Becky and lesser-Stacy. He clocks all the elements I’ve cultivated to draw him to me: the soft cheeks and slender arms, the alluring anemic cast to my very clear skin, the clothes that tell him I’m exactly what he thinks he wants. He thinks he wants a female who is smart enough to ask questions he likes answering, and who will trade submission for protection. There’s a gun in my backpack and I am trained in both muay thai and lethwei, but he would never guess that. If he wants to hurt me, I’ll let him. I start to make eye contact, intending to look away blushing when Ingrid turns around. 

“Are you in EE?” she whispers. She means electrical engineering. I nod, but I’m annoyed. She disrupted the early stages of my process. Manlet has stopped looking at me. And now I’ll have to work hard to make sure he knows I’m not like Ingrid. In truth, I’m much less adept at handling females than I am at handling men. For one thing, there are fewer of them in my field. Much of my work is precedented on being a rare jewel. I seldom have to navigate the complexities of competition and friendships between females. 

“Cool,” says Ingrid. “I was thinking of adding it on as a second minor.” 

“Oh,” I say. Then, to not draw attention to the fact that I need her to shut the fuck up, I raise my voice. “What are you majoring in?” 

“Double in comp sci and comp lit.” So she’s intending to go into generative AI. Or one of the savior-complex snowflake non-profits, hence the SLM question. 

“Ladies,” says the professor, almost making me smile. I’d forgotten that old-school misogynists call females “ladies”. The class has gone quiet. 

“I’m sorry,” I say, finally breaking out the blush. Ingrid says nothing. The room moves on. But the disruption wasn’t in vain: Manlet is looking back at us. When he looks at Ingrid he frowns. But when he turns to me, his whole face softens. Incredible. He already has a crush. So, so easy. I’m still blushing, but now it’s because of the pleasure flooding my innards, starting as a fine point below my belly button and widening until I feel as moist and open as a new flower. 

This is the next phase: let him think he might actually get to sleep with me. When he’s certain, I’ll sleep with someone else. Maybe the TA. I can kill two birds with one stone there. Get the TA in trouble with admin and get the others to hate us both, but mostly me. Manlet clearly thinks he rejects authority, when really he’s desperate for it. The double betrayal will crush him deep into the ground, where his violence can develop a taproot. 

Some days, I think I love my job more than I’ve loved anything else. 

🩸 

Ingrid keeps messing with my flow. After class, she finds me in the library with the best Wi-Fi. With half of myself, I’m working on the homework. With the other half, I’m scouting. This is a rich terrain: 11 potential direct germinations in my line of sight. That line is cut off when Ingrid sits down in front of me. 

“Hey,” she whispers. 

I smile. I want her to leave but if word gets back to the boys that I’m chilly, they won’t be as interested. At all times, I must seem available while remaining aspirational. In Catholic school, they told us this aesthetic philosophy was called “hiding but inviting.” In these early germination stages, I need to lead them on with such a short leash that they start to doubt themselves without ever doubting me. 

Being a bitch, even if it’s to someone they hate, will not help. In some ways, this is good for my professional development. The line I have to walk is so thin, and my skills could always use further refining. It’ll make me a better handler in the future. 

Ingrid takes out an enormous tablet upon which she starts to scribble furiously. Every so often, she leans in and squints at the screen. The scrunched-up facial expression makes her already absurd cheeks even more alien. After three hours, I have finished the homework and asked two seedlings for help getting something from a tall shelf in the stacks. When I left to do the latter, Ingrid offered to watch my stuff. When I returned with the books, she made comments about each of them. For the first time since I started this job, I have met someone who might be smarter than me. But not more cunning. There is no reason for her to suspect me, and so she won’t. There’s no reason for anyone to suspect me. My division doesn’t exist, legally speaking. I don’t exist. But Ingrid does, and so do my seedlings. 

At the second iteration of the weekly lecture series, I show up only a few minutes before we get started. The TA watches me walk in. I went to his office hours to “get a head start” two days ago. I was shy, flirtatious, and displayed a fabulous combination of natural aptitude for general comp sci and spunky curiosity about his particular topic of study. We talked for over two hours. By the end, he felt special and I felt my next steps fall into place. 

🩸 

Upper management has forgotten the dance we lowly industry gardeners do. Before each placement, I research rigorously, delving deep into Discord servers using a spate of aliases—Adam, Jake.ER, vargfreak2004, etc.—and scrolling endlessly until my intuition kicks in. Intuition is just research plus experience plus time, honed to a hollow point. They don’t remember what it was like to be in the field, planting and harvesting, testing the air, the vibe, and the language. They have all forgotten how to read a room. Such is the curse of the powerful. I’m not powerful, except out here. The power is why I took this job.

An older gardener recruited me right after I graduated. I was finishing an in-house software engineering internship at a large international asset management firm and had been offered a transition into a full-time role. They slid my offer to me, complete with an updated job description, across the glass table. I looked at it and, having learned about negotiation as a part of my business minor, said I would consider it. Then I went back to my desk and tried not to cry. If I can get them to come up 10k, the pivot to clerical work will be worth it, I said to myself. But I never went back to the negotiating table, because she walked out of a conference room. 

She was so easy to look at, pretty and glowing. To this day, I don’t know her real name—I never saw her again after that day. The name she gave to me, after she had eaten up the floor between us on her long legs, was Celeste. Everyone in the office was staring at her. She watched me look around when the tone in the open-plan cubicles changed. She watched me take in the wide range of reactions among the staff and note which men I should avoid for the rest of the day, because her mere presence put them in a bad mood. Of course, I didn’t know that’s what I was doing yet. I thought I was just thinking that Chase looked pissed and would likely make another comment about the full-fat creamer I sometimes used in my coffee. It was her, Celeste, who pointed out my observational skill, and told me that I was a natural. 

She held her hand out for the piece of paper with my offer on it. 

“Let’s see it,” she said. 

Without knowing why, I handed it to her. Her full, pink mouth turned down as she read it. Shame filled me. The offer was embarrassing. Not even low six figures. When she looked up, I noticed that her eyes were the color of freshly-poured concrete. 

“Come have lunch with me,” she said. 

As we ate nicoise salads, she had me narrate the flow of the cafe around us: which men were happy with their wives and work days, who had just had an argument with their manager, who would be snappish with the serving staff. 

“You’ll be bored if you take that offer,” Celeste said. “It’s insulting to you.” And it had been. It had been unbearably insulting. The tears that I had chosen to keep to myself were borne of humiliation and anger. I was worth more than clerical work. 

She left and I haven’t seen her since, but the next day, my correspondence with the person who would become my handler began. I knew it was Celeste’s doing, this remarkable opportunity. A week later, Chase got fired for some comments he made on a public internet forum, and I rejected the firm’s offer to accept the agency’s. 

🩸

The TA is trying to make eye contact with me, but I’m ignoring him in favor of glancing at Manlet. He’s pretending not to notice, looking down at his phone. When I first came in, I tapped my hip against his desk. My apology had us both blushing. So much blushing in this job. The younger seedlings typically prefer demure females, while the older ones like the TA prefer those who appear precocious, but are actually submissive and adoring. The TA will read my shyness with Manlet as dislike, while Manlet will read it as a crush. 

I know what they’re going to do before they do. Because he’s noticed me and wants to be sure that I notice him, Manlet will dial up his assertive responses to questions during lecture. The TA will also notice this and condescend to him. He will want to laugh with me about it the next time we’re alone in office hours. 

Today, I’m bored with my job. I feel like a stay-at-home mom: I am half-delighted by my children, half-bored to death by our same song and dance. The lecture goes exactly as I think it will, with the exception of Ingrid. I had assumed that she would maintain her tough, not-just-a-pretty-face persona, doing the hard questions thing each class session, but I was wrong. Ingrid is sullen, a swarm of negativity buzzing around her like gnats on a sultry day. Even her clothes are shrouds of black and charcoal. She doesn’t ask a single question and doesn’t take notes on today’s topic (Interdependence in AI Supply Chains). Just because I’m noticing her energy doesn’t mean everyone else is necessarily, but that is the issue with being a Stacy. People tend to notice everything you do and say, and everything they think you feel. 

I believe it is more than likely that Ingrid’s mood is having an outsized effect on the room. The emotional temperature is chilly, the conversation dour despite the pep the doctoral researcher is trying to bring to their talking points. I find myself incurious about everything except Ingrid and the room’s response to her. The TA is glancing between me and her, just behind me. He’s not pretending to pay attention to his colleague at the front of the room. The other seedlings I’ve assessed are both absent today. Manlet, one row in front of me and one seat over, is staring at his phone. I drop my stylus and let out a feathery gasp, which he notices. But as he goes for it, elegant Ingrid dips like a heron hunting in a pond and reemerges with the stylus in hand, slapping it back on my desk without looking at me. Manlet and I only lock eyes for a brief moment before he turns his attention to the front. For once, I can’t read his mood. But I know my lines. 

“Thanks,” I whisper over my shoulder, to Tropical Storm Ingrid. 

When she doesn’t respond, Manlet rolls his eyes and mouths, Bitch.

I can’t have an ego in this job. It’s not about me, not ever. No matter what these boys think, I am not a person to them. I don’t count. Ingrid, however, counts more than she is aware of. Clearly, the germination in this room all comes down to her. The magnetic poles of affection and disgust are orienting to her. All at once, I don’t feel so bored anymore. 

🩸 

The war they’re fighting is one for culture, which is to say morals, which is to say money. Even though it’s a culture war, and is largely waged by terraforming the populated landscapes of nightclubs, medical clinics, and spiritual movements via the dual hammers of rhetoric and policy, it does sometimes require the use of actual guns. Earlier this year, a nineteen year old shot three of his classmates mere days after our government’s oil investments in a country we just invaded were uncovered. Needless to say, the oil didn’t stay in the news for long. One of my agency’s primary objectives is to make people afraid. Fearful populations are suggestable, and tend to not notice what is being taken from them if they get to keep their lives. 

I don’t think I’m a bad person for taking this job because I was never very political in the first place. Is working at this so much worse than working for a large international asset management firm? I saw their numbers. I could extrapolate how many died in the name of managing those assets. Their deaths were just further afield. The schools, malls, and office buildings to which my seedlings lay waste are right here, in plain view of the public. And more than the attacks themselves, it is the threat of them, which crystallizes in the way they speak, online and at the dinner table, that gets the job done. Blackpill, femoid, stormcel, roping, Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger rebellion. Their language is the rain in my garden of domestic terror.

Since this is sure to be my last stint in the field, I try to mix it up a bit and find a way to get some of my direct plants’ diatribes in front of a few seedlings here, just to see how they react. It’s easy enough to circumnavigate the campus firewalls and pull up some chat rooms on a laptop that I leave open when I know the group of boys who are struggling with the coursework use the library study rooms. One of the seedlings in my symposium caught a glimpse of a forum dedicated to atheists who have been rejected by women at work. So specific. My handler informed me that he read it for four hours straight. Still, she texted me. Lurking ≠ mindset shift. Only results are results. Remember that. 

As if I could forget. 

🩸 

“Hey, sorry if I was weird in class last week,” Ingrid says as she plops in front of me in the library, where I am deep into a seedling’s online activity. I shut my laptop. “I got dumped.” 

I don’t have time for this. The TA has started to flower: he asked me out for a drink this week and he’s giving feedback on a programming assignment that was due yesterday. Like he doesn’t even give a shit about the conflict of interest. So too have things progressed with Manlet. We will be studying together in his off-campus cave tomorrow, so I need to close out this conversation with Ingrid and get back to my deep dive. Really, I do. 

“What happened?” I ask. 

“She said we just wanted different things.” She waves her hand in front of her face like she’s shooing away a fly. We’re halfway through the semester, and up until her moody interlude last week, she’s been chatty with me at every opportunity. My superiors are getting antsy because the germinations are taking longer than they predicted. Find the ones that are flailing, they say. As if I haven’t already. They wonder if I’m distracted. I tell them no. I tell them I think we might have a full harvest of wins. To assuage them, I pull some tried and true tricks to get one of the silent, morose boys who keeps flunking quizzes to post some heinous conspiracy theories about who is really running universities on a popular message board. Word around the library is that the school called his parents. Humiliating for him, good for me. 

But the truth is, I am a bit taken with Ingrid. She’s got something special, and could go much further than just some PhD in machine learning doing nothing work for a green corp pretending to stem the apocalyptic tide of data centers, all while running its own in Chile. Yes, I feel certain that I know her dreams now. She has a do-gooder streak to her, and seems invested in making change. 

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “It sucks when they say that. Like, what does it even mean?” 

“It means she wants to fuck her roommate.” Instead of sounding bitter, Ingrid just sounds resigned. “This always happens to me. I’m always the second pick.” I would find this hard to believe if I hadn’t felt the same for so many years. Confidence comes from finding one’s true purpose, not from beauty. The incels know that without knowing it. Few are handsome, but all have purpose. Ingrid runs her hands over her perfect face and says, “Whatever. Thanks for listening.” 

“Want a distraction?” I ask, feeling my own purpose dawn upon me. I could go further, too.

Ingrid smiles and it’s like a winter sunrise. 

“Definitely.” 

We wind up at the dive bar next to the engineering building. At the next table over, a few females in ugly shoes are scribbling on a napkin and gesticulating. Even though it’s only mid-afternoon, the rest of the bar is full of boys. Sloshing my vodka soda, I gesture to a table across the room. “What’s their deal?” I probe. 

Ingrid looks for a while, taking her time. She’s already got the instinct to observe them in a way that doesn’t draw attention to her observation: looking out of the corner of her eye, one elbow on the table, leaning towards me. 

“The blonde sad sack also just got dumped for sure.” She chuckles. “Maybe I should try my luck with him. We can pity party together.”

“Really?” I ask. With his rounded jaw and craggy hairline, he’s definitely not good looking enough for her.

“Well,” Ingrid considers. “You know what they say about dudes in CS.” 

“What?” 

“The odds are good,” she intones. “But the goods are odd.” 

It’s true. Everyone else in here is a five or below and struggling to make eye contact. “What else do you notice?” I ask. 

“What, is this anthropology class?” She asks, slugging back half of her shitty negroni. 

“Yeah,” I say. “Homo sapien sadsackicus requires further study.” 

The other observations she makes (“He’s beefing with him.” “He obviously doesn’t want to be here, but has a crush on her.”) are the same ones I made as soon as I entered the room. As I imagine she is at many things, Ingrid is a natural. My new purpose comes into clearer view. 

On my way back from the bathroom, I spy the blonde boy’s phone. The wall of blue texts to someone named Kathrin brings a smile to my face. Ingrid was right about that too. 

🩸 

The study session with Manlet came so close to being a disaster. Maybe he thinks he has a crush on me, but he doesn’t. He didn’t try to touch me, and kept bringing up Ingrid. Over and over again, Ingrid Ingrid Ingrid. About halfway through, I realized that I was not even a fantasy to him, just a mirror, so I changed tactics. I insinuated that Ingrid had made some comments about him, that she, and by extension, every female (I was not included in that category, apparently, now an extension of him) finds him repulsive, but also that he doesn’t deserve it. By the end of it, he was back to looking at me like I had a halo. But no matter how he feels about me, Ingrid is the sun he grows towards. It will still insult him when it comes out that the TA is sleeping with undergrads. He will assume that Ingrid is one of them, maybe even the one who turned him in because she is outspoken and once wore a t-shirt with a pink balaclava printed on it. He will feel wounded that she didn’t sleep with him and angry at the TA for getting the prize he wants; he will also be certain that this imaginary Ingrid was lying and is ruining a man’s reputation for nothing. The opposing forces of these ideas will ramp up a tension in him that was, at the start of this semester, only in its budding stages. Like the best of my seedlings, he’s in the right forums and chat rooms, but the fresh pain of imagined rejection will drive him into the real world. I’m almost certain of it. 

Of course, it is me the TA actually sleeps with, two weeks later. I knew he would, just like I know that he was getting off on the fantasy of students long before I made his dreams come true. Clearly, the facade of my age is paying off. I believe I may be older than him, but he kept talking with obvious glee about how he was ruining me. And really, he did it to himself, because directly following my text asking about this week’s quiz is his response, ignoring my question and instead asking if I feel as dirty as he does after what he did to me. I show that to the Title IX officer and the ball starts to roll like Sisyphus’s boulder. The sex wasn’t even bad. Poor guy. 

🩸 

The first time I was assigned to a university setting to ruin a renowned psychology professor’s career, I felt uncertain about the possibility of taking up the time and resources of the office that followed through on actual sexual misconduct cases. But then, as it turned out, I didn’t need to do anything at all. The professor had already been manipulating his students into sleeping with him and four of them came forward when they saw his attention turn to me. Never again, they said. He was gone within two weeks. Before the year ended, he had amassed a follower count of 45,000 under the name @professorbraincel. That’s when I stopped feeling guilty. The men and boys I cultivate put themselves in this position. That’s why I’m called a gardener: I only need to nurture the seeds that already exist. 

🩸 

In lecture, Ingrid demolishes an argument Manlet makes about AI and crypto. It’s basic stuff and she looks bored doing it. The TA isn’t there. My handler has let me know that he’s on probation while the school investigates, and that he has visited a website called “returnofemperors.net” three times and has spent two hours on a subreddit called r/falseallegations. He just decided to post. Someone responds: AWALT. All women are like that. He doesn’t know just how few women are like me. No matter. My work is pretty much done there. 

Another text from my handler. 

Faster, she says. End of semester soon. Need better numbers. Work smarter. If I don’t prove my skill, that I’m better than all the others, I won’t be promoted. Last field placement, she texts me. I can’t tell if it’s a threat.

Pursuant to my handler’s advice, I coax Ingrid to do her thing faster, the thing she doesn’t know she’s doing but that I encourage by lightly talking shit about Manlet to her. It’s easy because he has an off-putting personality, and now that I know personal things about him, I can titrate ideas into her responses that will feel like a personal attack on him. My dislike of him makes her bolder in class, doing all the heavy lifting for me. She’s such a natural; it’s amazing to watch. If she wasn’t so striking to look at, it probably wouldn’t work. They would be able to pass her off as subhuman. As it is, she has that room handled. I get a few more seedlings in my other classes into a turf war with each other over me. It’ll end when they realize they have a common enemy. Another I found at the gym is easy enough to divert to looksmaxxing. That’ll get him where I need him to go. 

As for Manlet, he misses the next lecture. I’m worried that I/Ingrid pushed his insecurities too hard and made him depressed enough to rope himself. That won’t do. I don’t need him to die; I need him to kill, or at least to want to. For days, I turn to other targets, disappointed in myself. I think I’ve lost him. 

And then he makes this spectacular post: smart mouth stacys watch your backs before we find you / femoids should be barred from higher education or forcibly removed / see them run see them fall, brothERs 

A perfect three line poem, punctuated with an Elliot Rodger reference, compressing his blackpill bullshit into a diamond. What a relief. I shouldn’t worry, and I shouldn’t doubt myself. My handler is always saying that. My instinct for these boys is what makes me elite. Whatever he’s going to do, he’s going to do it soon. 

For the first time in a long time, however, I trip myself over uneven thoughts of the potential casualties. Ingrid Ingrid Ingrid. 

🩸 

The morning after his post, Manlet once again doesn’t come to class. Neither does Ingrid. I have held back from checking the news up until now, because I’m superstitious about this one thing. If I check it, I jinx it. Someone else has to tell me. 

Like I’ve summoned her, my handler sends me a text. 

Nicely done. 

I hold my breath, waiting for the stats. 

11 direct. 122 L2. 402 L3 and counting. 1 attempt nonfatal. Fastest yet. National news. 

The breath leaves me in a hearty woosh, and I leave the classroom without looking back. The numbers are the best of my career. And Ingrid is not dead. 

🩸 

As I walk across campus, the story comes out: he corners her and takes out a gun that he 3D printed in one of the campus labs. He tells her she is evil, an evil slut who ruins good men’s lives. When he tries to shoot her, the gun jams. Ultimately, he isn’t very good at 3D modeling. One of the components printed incorrectly. She takes the opportunity to tackle him and remove one of his teeth with her bare knuckles. She breaks his nose, and one of his slender, feminine fingers. All that with no formal martial arts training. By the time Manlet is carted off to a no-bail jail cell to await trial, his manifesto is online and accruing hits. Without a doubt, it is one of the ugliest pieces of writing I’ve ever seen. Some of the ideas I gave him are right there in the seven-page introduction, planted neatly in the rigid rows of his psyche. The steering committee will recognize my phrases. There will be no denying my finesse.

 It is a spectacular win for me, though it happened so smoothly that I hardly feel I can claim it. But I will anyway, because my handler has asked me to write this year’s best practices guide. I already know what one bullet point will say: Don’t ignore the Stacys; use them. Every person asked to write the guide has become a handler themselves inside a quarter. I will not be let go; I’m safe. The distance between the rung of the ladder I’m on and the one I want grows shorter each day. Each night, when I dream (and I do, each night), it’s Ingrid I see. I imagine what Ingrid could become if the right person cultivates her. If Ingrid was mine, we could ascend together to the highest rungs of power. She’s the right age, maybe a little bit too beautiful, but if she grows her hair out, it will dull her enough to get the job done. 

As I walk, I look over my shoulders back and forth. Someone is always watching. Somehow, I am feeling what I know Ingrid is feeling: terrified, exhilarated, paranoid, more sure of myself than ever, confident, disgraced, and on the precipice of incredible change. 

I have no idea how the agency is using this glut of media attention, and I find that I don’t care. Ingrid is thrashing on her line, and I need to reel her in. 

🩸 

She’s at the same bar we drank at after she was dumped a few weeks before. All the boys are avoiding her like the plague, but the bartender places a full shot in front of her, next to two empty glasses. When Ingrid tries to hand her a credit card, she waves it away. 

“On the house, hon,” she says. 

Ingrid nods but doesn’t respond otherwise. The fingers of her left hand are wrapped together. A mottled plum bruise peeks out from beneath the bandages. Proof of her skill, and proof that she’s a southpaw. 

“Hi,” I say. My heart is pounding. I’ve never been in love, but this feeling, I imagine, must come close. Like she is the answer to all my fears, insecurities, and questions. With Ingrid, the future is not terrifying, but as perfect as a white orchid.

“It’s you,” she says. 

Yes! I want to say. It is me. It’s you and me, Ingrid. Let me throw you the ladder that was thrown to me. But I don’t want to scare her, so I sit down next to her instead. 

“How are you feeling?” I ask. 

In that impressive way of hers, Ingrid chuckles. When she turns her face to me, it has an expression that tells me I’m a little bit simple for asking her that. But she’s alone at this bar, so maybe no one has. Anyway, she answers. 

“I just can’t believe—” Her voice is raised and wavy. The drinks have kicked in. “I can’t believe this is the major I chose. I spent four years surrounded by those fucking wingnuts. On purpose.” On that line, her voice drops. The next are delivered in sotto voce. “No one forced me to choose comp sci. It was me. I can’t believe I have to go back to it to graduate. Like, I know he’s not the only one who thinks like that. And you saw him! I bet you weren’t surprised. Not even I was surprised, to be honest. I could tell he hated me for no reason, but there’s a line, you know? No one else I know saw him. For every little incel asshole you can see, there’s two more you can’t. This is my life.” With that, the fight goes out of her entirely and she slumps over her own elbows, forehead approaching the bar top. 

She looks completely empty: defeated, alone, and defenseless. Now is my moment. 

“Ingrid,” I say, going for the angle that got me. I can offer her a way out of what she’s feeling. “You deserve more than to be some grunt with a PhD in machine learning, avoiding all the shitty guys you have to work with. I really think you should be somewhere that recognizes your talents. Anything else would be insulting to you.” I recognize her talents. And I’m the only one who can offer her a path that isn’t insulting to her perfection. 

She looks at me with blank confusion that turns into upset. 

“I’m not going into machine learning,” she says. “I have a job lined up at a fashion house in Copenhagen. A bunch of my family is there. I just took the symposium to fulfill a requirement. I can’t believe you think I’m into that.” She appears to be genuinely hurt by the accusation. 

I try to recalibrate. Looking back into my memories of Ingrid, of her mouth moving as she tells me things, I realize that she never did say that she was going into AI. I just assumed because of smart questions, because she was in the class at all. Another reality, one I ignored, blossoms in my mind’s eye: she is getting the comp sci degree to learn about 3D modeling and the comp lit to polish her Danish or French. I had forgotten that she might be more than what she showed to me. She’s not mine. She was never mine. The river of her full life is coursing past me. She’s standing up, putting a twenty on the counter as a tip. 

“Wait, Ingrid,” I try. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.” 

But she’s too tender right now. Someone tried to kill her and the new friend she thought she had just insulted her and made her feel misunderstood. It’s a huge misstep, even if she doesn’t want to admit it to me or to herself. I can fix it if she’ll let me. 

She turns back. 

“It’s not a big deal,” she says. Then sighs, and smiles like she’s throwing me a bone. “My mom’s coming to get me soon. I have to go. See you.” And then, with an elegant turn, she’s out the door, out forever. 

🩸 

I return to my studio apartment alone. It’s already packed up. My time here is over and I must go back to Virginia to receive my hero’s welcome. 

By the time I finish taking off my shoes, my phone has dinged three times. My seedling, my Manlet, has amassed an online following of sticky, lonely boys who call him Messiah. It happened so fast. My handler can’t stop telling me that. It was all so fast. I want to tell her that it didn’t feel fast, and to remind her that they kept impressing that upon me: speed up, more, keep it going. The threat beneath all those prompts. Do it now; do it or find out what happens. Under her message are two more: one from a steering committee member congratulating me on a job well done, the other an invitation to a new handler training scheduled the week after I return from leave. 

I don’t bother telling them what I tried to do with Ingrid. They don’t care about my failures right now, only my wins. And there are so many. A full harvest. Of course, I have no idea what the stats of the others in my position are, but I have a feeling that I am one of the best. It’s a hollow thought. In my world, no one else exists except for me and, briefly, Ingrid. She is my failure, and she will echo off the walls of my competence for a long time. What good is a handler without someone exceptional to handle? It was all so fast. I’m going to live. But without her, I am returning to my life with nothing of value at all.