✅ Potty Genius [NaNoWriMo 2022]

Thirty-Nine

¿Did Britney's plan to escape the challenges work?

I think it was about as good as I could have expected. On the train back to Ellisberg, we pretty much had a carriage to ourselves. It wasn't usually crowded outside of rush hour, so we were the only ones willing to walk down to the far end of the platform before the train arrived, and we would up a good distance from any of the regular shoppers.

"It's quiet today," Theo said once we were all sitting down, looking around the deserted carriage with apparent surprise. That got a little chuckle out of me, which I worried might offend her until I saw that Britney was responding exactly the same way. Of course, we hadn't discussed anything as we walked down the platform, but I had assumed that our intention was obvious. It was Britney, always the practical one, who had thought of it.

"Yes. That's why we went right to the back of the train," she explained to her friend. "The next six stations are small, rural towns, and we'll actually be off the end of the platform. The signs all said to board forward of carriage E if you're getting off anywhere but a major interchange."

"Then we should have–"

"We can have the privacy of an empty car for a while, and then start walking down the train five minutes before it's time to get off. I figured that gives us time to start the appointment on the way, if Adrica's comfortable with that."

"Yeah," I said. "That sounds like a good idea. Will there be time before we arrive?"

"I looked up the timetable," Britney said, showing us her phone screen for a moment. "This is one of the slowest trains, and it's delayed at almost every station so that people who are continuing their journey from another train can get on. We should have a little over an hour on this one."

"We can do that, then," Theo said. "I expect the induction on the badge change is around twenty minutes, and it's likely to take me about the same to tone down the effects of the badge, and reinforce the suggestions that will prevent you following the app's triggers in a situation that could be problematic. There might even be time for you to uninstall the app from your main profile before we get back to Ellisberg. It's just deciding which badge you want to have on before you uninstall the app."

¿Did you change your badge?

Eventually. I fished the tablet out of my bag, opened the app to change it, and there was a notification on my screen saying that I'd failed a challenge.

==> 𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚎𝚗𝚐𝚎 𝚏𝚊𝚒𝚕𝚎𝚍 𝚙𝚎𝚗𝚊𝚕𝚝𝚢 (𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚛𝚍 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎):

----> 𝙿𝚘𝚝𝚝𝚢 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎𝚛 💧 𝚜𝚎𝚝 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝟾0-𝟷𝟸0 𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚞𝚝𝚎𝚜

----> 𝙿𝚘𝚝𝚝𝚢 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎𝚛 💧 𝚜𝚎𝚝 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝟽𝟸0-𝟿00 𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚞𝚝𝚎𝚜

----> 𝙿𝚘𝚝𝚝𝚢 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎𝚛 💩 𝚜𝚎𝚝 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝟿𝟺0-𝟷000 𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚞𝚝𝚎𝚜

"I'd best get this uninstalled before any of those go off," I said with a groan, and dismissed the alerts. I scrolled past the next daily challenge without reading that, as well. "I'll change to the teddy now, and then you can hypnotise me. Right?"

Theo nodded, and said that she would get a drink out of her bag while I changed the badge. She didn't want to have a dry mouth while she was talking to me. I was going to change the badge right away, but once Theo bent down to fish around in her bag, I saw Britney put a finger to her lips. While I watched, she reached out for where Theo's phone was sitting on the table, and turned it on. There was a potty genius icon on the desktop, and Britney launched it right away. And then in just a couple of taps, she had set a potty timer for a little over an hour. It would probably go off somewhere between the station and getting back to Theo's office, and I didn't understand why a friend would do something like that.

Theo sat up again, and Britney just about had time to turn the phone off again before she noticed. I wondered if I should say something, but Britney had always seemed to be the practical one of those two. She must be doing it for a reason, and I didn't want to cause tension.

"Ready to put your badge on?" Theo prompted, and that ende my indecision. I quickly dragged the badge over Baby Adrica, and a box filled with spirals immediately appeared. I read the first of the instructions, but I already knew that I would get about five words in before I wasn't paying attention to what they said. I was just agreeing and accepting, and I knew that these words were all right, so I could accept them and do everything that they said.

When the words eventually ended in a countdown, I imagined myself becoming more and more aware of the train around me as I heard the voice count each number. And it was only then that I realised the words that had started on the screen had ended up being Theo's voice. I couldn't pin down when they had changed, but that was only natural because I couldn't remember what the words had said at all.

"Refreshed and awake?" Theo asked.

"Yeah..." I said, and then giggled. I was wearing the teddy badge now, I knew that. And even if I couldn't actually see it, I knew that I was wearing it, and it made me feel happy. I could feel like a little kid again, and I was looking forward to finding out what that meant. "Did you change it?"

"Yeah. You'll act like a kid when you feel safe to do so. But rather than being forced to, it will be an easy state to slip into when you want to, and there won't be any inhibitions to stop you doing what you really want, if it's really not problematic."

"All according to plan, then," I said with a smile. "So now I remove this app. Assuming it will let me."

¿Did it let you?

There was no problem at all removing the app. There was, Britney assured me, nothing the app designers could technologically do to prevent you doing that. So the next step was to start using the app on my new profile, and make sure that it would still let me set potty timers so that I could use the bathroom.

I tapped on the app and it popped up right away, asking for a referral code. I stared at that, a little confused. I was sure I hadn't seen that before. But it would let me choose Britney from a dropdown list, so it wasn't a hard question to answer. I just didn't understand why it was being asked.

"I think it only does that the very first time you open it," Britney said. "As far as I can gather from researching that app, it's been made by a community of adult babies. They enjoy those kind of challenges, and wanted an app to help them. So they distributed it with the same name and icon as a dozen real apps that do the same. It's a kind of camouflage, in case someone else sees the app on their phone. There's a kind of referral system, it picks the person who sent you the link unless you enter another username."

"Yeah," Theo confirmed. "When I installed it, it had Adrica already filled in."

"It's just to keep the app only available to like-minded people. Unless you get invited by somebody else who uses it, you have to join the forum first, and prove you deserve an invite. Then they'll give you a link, and instructions to access the hidden features."

"Wow," I said. "Almost makes you wonder how I got it. I mean, I sure didn't get any kind of instructions. I thought it was just a regular potty training app, because..."

I might have finished speaking mid-sentence. The next word was on the tip of my tongue, just waiting to be said. But I was too busy right now, thinking about the questions on the app in front of me as it started to quiz me on it's terms and conditions. Some of them were really interesting questions, practically a game in itself. But I couldn't remember afterwards what any of them actually were. In fact, I couldn't remember while I was answering them, after a while. I just needed to answer more and go deeper, so that I could go even deeper and be a real baby girl. The train, the other people, and everything else just faded into the background as I let myself read, and accept.