Attraction
“You’ve got the most gorgeous eyes,” he says to me with what I assume he thinks is intensity. “Did you know that?” He stops and shakes his head to indicate that’s not what he meant to say. I debate whether he is going to get a nickname. “Obviously you know that. You’ve seen them.” He pauses. “I just meant that they’re fucking with my Attraction.”
He’s more attractive than someone pulling out this tired line has any right to be. Part of that is because someone else is dressing him. He doesn’t know how to wear the outfit he has been put into. It’s almost stylish enough not to matter. I wonder if his dresser knows him well enough to care that he’s not pulling it off.
If only they could convince him to do something about the mustache.
“Hmm?” I say noncommittally. Even someone pretending to be interesting can sometimes get there accidentally. Not that I had high hopes for this one.
“Attraction doesn’t change you, y’know? It just gets rid of your baggage,” he says with a straight face.
Sure, he wasn’t wrong. That’s the whole point of Attraction. Thirsty people remained thirsty — they just didn’t know what they wanted to drink anymore. My disappointment with him wasn’t factual. He’d started off unoriginal and seemed unlikely to rise to even my lowest expectations.
Obviously he has done this before and if I didn’t slow him down, next he’d be telling me that he wasn’t a regular user but he’d gotten up to some fun with it before and had never met someone like me. That is to say, someone who he still found genuinely and uniquely attractive, despite the drug’s influence.
“Are you going to buy me a drink?” I cut him off. Not rude, but to the point. He looks me straight in the eyes, trying to assess whether I was worth the effort when he couldn’t tell what I looked like. This is my favorite moment when talking with someone on Attraction.
People are basically mimetic animals. We mirror behaviors we see in others without necessarily deciding that we want to act that way. Attraction cuts through that in a way and so users tend to forget to pay attention to the social norms that they hadn’t personally cared for in the first place. In this case, my suitor was comfortable openly assessing how likely he was to get laid if he put in the effort.
“Ah, of course. I’ll be right back with two more of those.” He points down at the drink I was nearly finished with. He hasn’t bothered to to ask what it was and doesn’t even bother with a convincing show as he walked away from me. Also away from the bartender who wasn’t doing a very good job at hiding her amusement.
So, not worth the effort then.
Fair enough. It didn’t seem likely that he would have remained attractive for much longer anyway. Wanting to get laid isn’t a personality that very many people are good looking enough to pull off. Besides, I wasn’t in the mood for being interesting enough for both of us.
“I’ll get you another,” the bartender says with a laugh. I guessed from the look in her eyes that she saw that same scene play out a few times a week.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no prude. Had he cared to ask why I was playing hard to get, I’d have told him frankly. There just wasn’t anything curious about him.
People think the trick to long term use is to have someone keep an eye on you to help you avoid doing things you’ll regret after the Attraction wears off. There was a whole public awareness campaign about it, but it was clearly made by people who’d never tripped. A properly dosed Attraction high means that your regrets are a distant memory. It’s not that you’re suddenly horny and impulsive — unless, of course, you were horny and impulsive before.
You still feel like you the whole time. That’s one of the hardest points to get across to the skeptics. Attraction doesn’t make you a different person. Politicians keep getting themselves worked up into a lather with claims that the drugs are having a corrupting influence on young minds. As if young minds weren’t always already experimenting with their sexuality.
All Attraction does is redirect the flow, so to speak. If you’re meek or shy, Attraction isn’t going to change that. The reason that people seem different when they’re on it is because knowing, for a certainty, what you want sexually is a pretty crazy high. You could figure that out on your own, I suppose, but that seems like a lot of work and we’ve been using technology to overcome our limits since we first smashed two rocks together.
Besides, adrenaline is my antidrug. Seriously, that’s how it works. Attraction starts to wear off rapidly when your body floods with adrenaline. That’s why you’ve got to avoid doing exactly what my would-be suitor is doing: strenuous, active flirting. Doing that is a good way to have your high wear off long before anyone’s pants are on the floor. Or elsewhere.
Of course, there are ways around that, but they mostly involved more frequent or higher doses — which amps up the inhibition loss and makes for a vicious cycle. Get yourself too turned on too quickly and the Attraction starts wearing off and you find yourself looking for your usual kinks instead of letting the Attraction wash over you. That can be a particularly bad experience if you’re on the way to someone place. Or their car, whatever. Any port in a storm. Regardless of where you are, it’s one hell of an unnerving experience to be in the middle of fucking someone and realizing that you’re utterly repulsed by them. So, you amp up the dosage to avoid that, but you’re less careful with dosing at this point, because you’re already high — and probably not just on Attraction. Then your night is just peaks and valleys.
Different strokes for different folks, I suppose, but I’d prefer to avoid the adrenaline crash altogether. Let the Attraction naturally leave your system, so slowly that you don’t actually notice the ‘moment’ your sexual baggage comes back because you’re too invested in enjoying the experience that you’re having. Then you take someone back to your place. I don’t know why you’d use Attraction just to get laid. Sex that you regret in the morning is easier to pull off than you’d think.
When the box industry bubble burst, w. stood alone. There were minor players. There always are, but it was a long time before anyone paid attention to the pretenders. Even as w. has faded from the scene, Experience companies still usually talk about it as whimsy work. Compared to that, the artisanal drug industry has been better understood as a bloom.
There are more local, craft pharmacists than anyone can remember the names of, and, even if you did, half of them have either rebranded or gone out of business. Once you’ve got the right spores, the mushrooms are easy enough to grow just about anywhere. Attraction is one of the big corporate players and there are lots of off-brand knock-offs, but getting people to have sex isn’t remotely close to the most interesting pharmacy going on these days.
The electric car iteration was an improvement on the combustion engine, but as the fossil fuels dried up we started taking a closer look at energy costs of almost everything. The real origin of the pharmacy bloom was temperature control.
An enormous amount of energy is spent on making human beings comfortable. To be clear, there are hard limits on the body around exposure to the elements. Too hot and you’ll burn, too cold and you’ll freeze. We can’t break fundamental laws of thermodynamics, but it has proven considerably cheaper to trick the body into being more comfortable than it is to actually make the body comfortable. Our lives have become too dependent on electronics for many climates and so the unpredictability of weather means we need all kinds of protections, but the global thermal insulation requirements are massive. Even minor improvements can have dramatic energy implications, as long as they’re widespread among the population.
That was the sales pitch, anyway. The pill works well enough that serious people took it seriously. A couple of governments have even been working on restructuring around the premise and the numbers are promising, but you can imagine how democracies tend to think of daily government mandated highs.
Luxury convenience drugs, however, remain popular regardless of the government.
The BARNAME was as interesting a bar as its name pretended not to be, but it was a popular enough. Add some fine tailoring and my suitor’s aggressively boring approach stands a pretty good chance of working out for him. If only because enough people will be out and about using Attraction and its knockoffs to start something that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten started on its own. Any half-decent pharmacist makes something you can take if you have morning after regrets. They can’t make memories go away, but they’ll be fuzzy enough that you don’t mind and it’s no worse than a hangover. Yet another high to add to your supply.
People keep saying the next big jump will be when they revolutionize food, but I’m skeptical. Mood, sexuality, body temperature, concentration enhancers, and therapy are all one thing, but taste buds are too precious to let an amateur play around with.
The bar isn’t busy enough to drown out everyone’s conversations, so the couple next to me have been trying to have a whisper fight, but I catch enough fragments that they’ve caught my attention.
They’re one of those pairs whose style and look is starting to blend together. The kind of couple that makes you misremember what ‘kissing cousins’ are. It makes it hard to tell which of them is more attractive.
“I don’t care that you’re still taking it.” Angrily enough that it’s hard to believe. “It’s that you lied about it.”
“Oh get off it. I didn’t lie!” Almost dismissive.
“You didn’t tell the truth either.”
“You don’t get a say in what drugs I take.”
“I don’t want a say. You just let me believe that you’d stopped.”
It isn’t hard to piece together the fight. They had probably found themselves next to each other after an Attraction hookup and it was the first time they hadn’t been disappointed. Maybe one of them had said they do it again and the other had joked that they’d only do it with Attraction. Him for the former and her for the latter, if I had to guess, but that’s all it would be at this point.
“It isn’t about you.”
“Fuck off.”
It would be a moment of dramatic silence if there were silence to be found in the bar. I do my part though.
There were a thousand justifications that could be offered. None would be satisfactory to someone who didn’t already want to be convinced, but that was the way these conversations inevitably went. That’s not meant with any judgment. Recreational pharmacy isn’t for everyone and it certainly isn’t for every relationship, but most people don’t know that until after the fact.
I find myself drafting an update for my public feed about their conversation before I recognize that I’ve become too invested in the lives of strangers. I decide to tune them out, but I save the notes. Obviously.
With less subtlety than I intend, I look around the bar. I’m not looking for my dull friend from earlier, but I’m also not not looking for him. It’s been that kind of night.
But I can’t find him. I imagine he found his dance partner for the evening. Maybe they’ve already made their way to the dance floor.
I turn my attention back to the drink that I’ve been nursing long enough for the ice to have melted. A consequence of my snooping.
“Hey. It’s just about last call. Do you want one more for the drive home?” Just barely a hint of how tired the joke is.
I know I’ve been talking to him — her? — for a while now, but I can’t quite place the face I’m looking at. I try to shake the cobwebs out of my head and casually look across the room. Everyone’s face has that same sort of blankness to it. All the normal parts are there, but I can’t bring myself to care about the details enough to bring them into focus.
I try to imagine any of them going home together.
I’ve been sitting there silently for long enough that it was starting to feel weird. I try to make it look I was judging the drink before pushing it aside dramatically and give a quick nod. I look up and try not to get distracted before I can speak.
“You’ve got the most gorgeous eyes,” I say. “Did you know that?”