✅ Potty Genius [NaNoWriMo 2022]

Zero

Author's note/question: I thought about using the questions as chapter headers; but some of them will be quite short sections, so I might run into the chapter limit before the story ends. So should I keep with the chapter titles "Zero", "One", etc; or do you think it would make more sense to have a title like "Chapters 1-2", "Chapters 3-5", and so on?

¿How did you get into this?

It's kind of a long story, I guess. Not the kind you can easily summarise in a couple of pithy lines. And it's hard to pin down when it started, as well. I mean, I've always loved finding things that nobody else knows about. When I was a little kid, there was a cave in the Meldham Woods, and I was convinced I was the only person who ever found it. I mean, I don't know if it was a real cave, more a bit of earth scooped out of the hillside by a storm, where the roots of a yew tree held the roof together. But I would go and sit in there every day, watching people walk past through the foliage, and thinking like I was so smart because they didn't even know I was there.

Okay, that's not really relevant to the story. But I was always an inquisitive child. And as I got through high school, I would always have been the first to tell you that I wasn't that child anymore. I was an inquisitive adult, and that was a whole different thing. It mattered to me, saying that I wasn't a child. Why it was such a big deal, I never really considered. But I knew that it was an important thing to me.

Something changed when Ste Lewis showed me a game on my phone. We were supposed to be paying attention to a French class, but I'd never really cared that much about languages. The way ancient people had made grammar work made no sense, it was just learning a list of stupid things that other people had done, and I had no desire to learn more than one. So I wasn't paying attention, and it wasn't uncommon for one of my friends to be sharing the latest game or fad in the back of the class. The teacher didn't even try to make us pay attention now; she knew that we knew we could fail one class without jeopardising our college admissions.

But this one time, Ste wasn't giving me a link so I could install the game. Instead, he told me to open the CrossCal app, which was supposed to be a calendar app for businessmen, but the school made us install it to track if we were present in class or not. I wondered what he was talking about then. And he lifted out his keyboard. Ste was a bit weird, sometimes, he carried a full size keyboard around, and in the classes that we were supposed to have a laptop for, he'd balance his phone on the back of the keyboard. Some of the teachers had argued that it wasn't a laptop, and he'd said that he could put it on his lap just fine. Or on the desk, but that didn't make it a desktop computer. Somehow they never managed to give him any real trouble.

"Here, watch this," he said, and quickly went through a couple of screens to pair his keyboard with my phone. Then he slowly and carefully pressed the keys, whispering the letters as he did so: "L-E-O-N-I-D-A-S, OK, OK, backspace, backspace, left, right, left, right, OK. See, you get stuff like that in a lot of serious apps. The programmers want a chance to show off, something that doesn't have to be approved by a corporate committee. And they think of a phone as a thing in your hand, so they never think about keyboard input outside of text fields. Nobody expects pressing a key to do anything, unless you're typing something in. I mean, you can't even get the onscreen keyboard to appear unless the app's expecting you to type something in."

"Yeah, but..." Stacie mumbled.

"No, it's cool. Because nobody expects it to do anything, the programmers hide stuff there, and don't have to check it with their management. I mean, look at that; you can't say that's accidental. Look what happens if you disconnect the keyboard now."

What happened, as it turned out, was a rather disappointing platform game, with levels that were designed by some code based on the stuff on your calendar. So I was controlling a tiny pixelated duck, running across the top of blocks with the names of my classes and teachers printed on them. It was kind of fun, but no way interesting enough to justify the effort that somebody must have put into finding that secret code. Still, it was new enough to keep me entertained for the rest of the lesson, especially when I realised that by adding new appointments, I could try to make the level easier. That was when getting the best time out of all my friends really became fun.

It wasn't something I would even think about a year later. That duck was pretty neat, but it wasn't a world changer. It just happened to be the first time I'd seen a game like that. But there were other apps that had much more interesting hidden features.

¿What apps?

That's kind of the point, isn't it? There are so many of these little hidden things. Like a slideshow, or even a hidden game. They call them 'easter eggs', like the hidden details in movies, and I guess for the same reason. But the one that really turned out to be different was on an app I would certainly never have bought. It was called Potty Genius. Well, I can tell what you'd assume about somebody who has an app like that. Must be a baby, right? A toddler, potty training. And you'd be right. The app lets you tap a button when your little terror manages to use the potty, and another one if he has an accident. It's like those charts that some parents used to put up next to the potty, with magnets or stickers to say if it's been a rainy day in your pants.

I never installed that app, of course not. But after I'd found out about these easter eggs, I had to search for more. And I heard that a lot of them could only be found if you had a keyboard connected to your phone. So that was my Christmas present from Mam and Dad that year. Not a new phone, not the tablet I'd been thinking about until I dipped a toe into the world of easter egg hunting. I guess it saved them some money, which was always a positive in our family.

Uncle Stefan wanted to get me a present. He said that his own time at university, which had led to a successful life he would otherwise never have dreamed of, would have been a lot different if he hadn't been able to afford a computer. He said that he wanted to get me something so that I wouldn't be stuck going to the library every time I needed a PC, or trying to compose essays on my phone with its stylish ergonomic keyboard. But then he couldn't be as generous as he might have liked after his little bundle of joy turned out to be triplets. He named them Joy, Voice, and Honour, which nobody else in the family quite seemed to approve of, but I thought they were pretty cool names and I didn't mind telling him that whenever we came to visit.

The triplets had a tablet. They were too young to use a phone, of course. But they could see the bright colours on a tablet screen, and get an early introduction to new technology. And they could use a helpful app like Potty Genius, of course. Their parents could tap the buttons for them, and show them the chart, so that they would already be used to seeing a grid filled with cheery rain cloud icons before they were old enough to learn what it really meant. "Immersion" was the most important word to Uncle Stefan; he wanted every little technological gimmick to be second nature to his kids, so that they would never imagine being without it.

He got them a new tablet for their first birthday. One tablet between three babies; he might be more successful than my parents, but he wasn't made of money and living in Abraham's Wood wasn't cheap. And they could all stare at the same screen in mute incomprehension. They wouldn't need their own yet. I didn't think about what would happen to their old one, until I opened an untidily-wrapped box when Grandpa took us all out for dinner to celebrate my getting accepted to Moistville University.

"I thought you could use one," he said. "Kitty agreed."

I might have hugged him in thanks; but that would be too embarrassing for me to admit or remember. A tablet was a big deal for me, even if it was second hand. I knew that it had belonged to the triplets before, but that wasn't such a big deal. They had probably barely touched it. It might have been used for watching supposedly-stimulating kids' videos on loop, but I didn't think any of them was mature enough yet to understand what was going on in a game. So to my mind it was just a barely-used tablet. I would erase all their data from it, of course, and then set it up with the same apps that I had on my phone, or the tablet versions of some of the things I was used to doing on the school computers.

After, of course, I played around a little to see if the apps already installed on that tablet had any easter eggs or secret games. And that was how I first found that Potty Genius was so much more than it advertised.