Page 13 of Burn Bag

“We’ll head home tomorrow and get started on it.”

“But we’ve only been here a day,” IKE reminded me.

“Right, and I’m sure you won’t mind leaving all this shit behind to return to your pregnant woman,” I gritted out.

He held up his hands in acquiescence.

“We can start on the way home. Dash can build a program and we’ll start weeding out the women who are clearly too good for a system like this.”

“Right,” Red snorted. “You wouldn’t want any good women. Just the lonely and desperate.”

“And ugly,” Eli tacked on.

“There are going to be no ugly women. Trust me, somewhere out there, there’s a woman who is wishing she had this exact system in place so she can get it over with and find the perfect man. I’m going to harness that power and bring us together once and for all. You’ll see. This is going to be fucking magical.”

“Okay,so the system is pretty damn sophisticated, if I do say so myself,” Dash grinned, pulling up the mainframe on the screen in the conference room. “As you can see, I’ve sorted through dating websites and online profiles, pulling the most likely women to fit your needs. Now, there’s a degree of variation here that I can’t control. You’ll just have to weed through them.”

I nodded, studying the first woman he pulled up. “As you can see, I haven’t sorted them any more than the basic stipulations you gave. If you want to narrow it down further, we can do that.”

“Narrow down how?”

“Hair, eye color, build, IQ…pick your flaws.”

I snorted in amusement at that. “I think when my potential wife finds out that I chose her out of a lineup of women through a program designed to weed out bad candidates, she’ll wonder what my flaws are.”

“I’m just saying, you can literally design your woman with my program. Hell, you could even go to China if you wanted.”

“I don’t think I’m that desperate yet,” I huffed, but the look he shot me said he wasn’t so sure about that. I cleared my throat and went back to studying the charts he’d made. “So, what do I do? I just pick the ones I like and we send them a message?”

“Something like that. Although, I would narrow it down a little further. We have thousands of candidates to weed through.”

“Alright, so…let’s start with hair. I want a blonde.”

“Blonde it is,” he said, typing in the requirements. “What else?”

“Um…” I thought it over, wondering what the most important attributes, other than what I had already listed, were. “How about height. I don’t want a woman who’s too tall.”

“Right,” he snorted. “All those women walking around in high heels can be intimidating.”

I had the feeling he was mocking me, but I ignored it as I watched the pack decrease just a little. This was going to be harder than I thought. “How about a woman who likes nature. Goes hiking and likes the outdoors. That sort of thing.”

“Maybe sporty,” he suggested.

“Sure.”

He put in a few more filters, but the list was still humongous. It was going to be impossible to really find the woman of my dreams without a larger way to narrow the field.

“What about eye color?”

I shook my head. “That’s not something I care about.”

“Shoe size.”

“Don’t you think that’s a bit ridiculous? Eliminating a woman because of her shoe size?”

He leaned forward, narrowing his eyes at me. “You’re choosing a wife from a list of women who have their profiles already online. I’d say we’re far beyond ridiculous.”

I glared at him, but he was right. I’d already crossed the crazy line. “Fine, feet no larger than size eight.”

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