Corrupting Power
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C.A.R.P. - Part 7
🕑 Added 2023-10-28 06:49:47 +0000 UTCPart Seven – Summer Break (Sophomore → Junior Year)
The summer between sophomore and junior year represented the midway point in my education, assuming I was going to be having a standard four-year length for my education. The length was standard; the education, anything but.
Again, I still had a light load of classes, but it only meant I needed to be in a classroom twice a week, mostly to ensure I didn’t leave campus for too long, I think, in looking back at it. Being taught to think at scale isn’t a traditional way of teaching, and it meant our brains were wired differently than most of the people we grew up with. People are taught what thinking at scale means, but they generally aren’t taught to make it their default. We were especially strange in that we almost always thought that way, except when it came to ourselves, which I’ve long suspected led to C.A.R.P.’s inevitable failure, although I don’t know that I could prove that.
Then again, I’m also not entirely sure that C.A.R.P. failed in what it set out to do.
Long-term survival may have never been in the cards for Dr. Igarashi, as weird as that sounds. She had to be smart enough to see some of the writing on the wall regarding the school’s eventual downfall, which wasn’t anywhere as far in the future as many of us would have suspected. I do wonder what became of her, at spare moments when my brain isn’t focusing on a bigger problem. Even with all the news coverage of the last couple of years, nobody’s said anything about her at all, which is more than a little disturbing. They all refer to her as ‘missing,’ which is creepy enough all on its own.
Mainly summers were meant for us to develop ourselves as individuals, but I spent a decent part of the second summer cultivating the relationships between me, Julia and Chelsea. They didn’t mesh together as immediately as I would’ve liked, but it also wasn’t like they were at each other’s teeth either. In fact, it was more like each of them was trying to figure out how to make the other person fit into their worldview, and that was slightly more challenging than I think either of them had expected it to be, based on their first impressions and limited research they’d done on each other.
Chelsea was the kind of person who paid attention to every little detail, almost obsessively. It meant she needed our apartment to be clear and orderly. That rubbed against Julia the wrong way at first, because she felt like there was too much structure being inflicted on us, that we were being walled into a restrictive, predictable cage of a home. After a bit, though, it became clear that finding a middle ground wasn’t really going to be all that hard – Chelsea didn’t mind that Julia just tossed her clothes on the floor before hopping in the shower, as long as she put them in the hamper after she got out of the shower. Chelsea didn’t mind short-term messes; she just didn’t want long-term chaos. Julia liked to do things without too much planning; Chelsea was all about the plan. That left me smack dab in the middle, although the two sides weren’t the miles apart they were when I’d first considered them.
I found the way to make it work was to play to each woman’s strength and not push her against her weaknesses. Julia preferred sport and outdoor activity; Chelsea hated the great outdoors and would opine so at the drop of a hat. And yet, despite all the differences, the two actually became good friends. Both loved movies, music and live entertainment, and as long as I made sure I wasn’t neglecting one in favor of the other too often, and working to schedule stuff that had us going as a group regularly, it just meant I had to consider what was going on.
Unlike Julia, who just seemed to think of C.A.R.P. as some sort of egghead breeding ground, Chelsea was fascinated by the sorts of things me and the other alphas were constantly discussing. The constant refrain for us was cost versus benefit, and believe you me, we’d got brutal and efficient about calculating it. We even had this imaginary constant we’d made up, which we called an Igarashi Dot. The Igarashi Dot was what the equivalent of one human life was, in terms of resources spent to get it to that point versus the amount of resources that would be reclaimed by ending it. We would use the Dot to start thinking about the really horrific shit that none of us wanted to admit we were thinking about. How many lives were worth changing the economic structure of a country? One Dot per one thousand people? Per ten thousand people?
Chelsea had taken a wild interest in our speculations and was doing everything she could to convert those into actionable gambles with our savings, nothing that would break the bank if it went astray, but enough that if a few of them paid off, we’d eventually get to the point where we were very comfortable in terms of funds to live off.
We made our first million before the end of the summer between our sophomore and junior years, on the back of a couple of smart gambles early into the development and deployment of fiber across the country. I’d expected the rollout to be a lot slower, but it turned out there were more people rushing towards the future than I’d expected there to be, and the tempo was set to high, rather than low.
The three of us went out to celebrate, and ended up getting a hotel room down on the Santa Cruz beaches where we fucked like rabbits, because we were young and suddenly rich. It was nice to fall asleep to the sound of ocean waves literally within walking distance of our room, but because of the CARP rules, we couldn’t stay long, and headed back the next day. I’m still not entirely sure what the rules regarding spending almost all our time on campus were, but I almost wonder if there was some kind of experimental tech in the walls or the water, working to reduce our reliance on long-established norms, and to consider any sort of societal taboo as a ‘guideline’ that we should only work within if we saw a benefit to using them.
Summer classes were long-thought studies, designed to focus on systems that were highly entrenched, so we couldn’t pull them apart as easily, and we couldn’t just tear into them like we normally would during fall or spring classes. Each summer, we generally focused on one or two very complex problems. The previous year, we’d been focusing on the international currency exchange market, and all the ways we could put our thumbs on the scales without anyone catching on. This year, we were looking into the property market and how it was being used to exploit people with low income in ways that they hadn’t even begun to realize. Land ownership was a pretty elaborate scheme to drain people and funnel the money in very specific ways. Not only was it a system we saw easy ways to disrupt, we could see that some people were already starting to break the home ownership system, with mortgages that were clearly bad under the most cursory of glances.
So, yeah, predicted the housing crash that’s hitting right now almost a decade ago.
Go me.
You’re probably wondering what sort of solutions we reached, and one of the ones I’m still the most in favor of is giving every single American a home that’s theirs. We’d start with stackable large condensed units – a hundred or so apartments layered on top of a floor or two of commercial businesses, to centralize the work force. We could get past the labor shortage by requiring everyone who would get one of these homes to help build, say, twenty or thirty of them. Once you had everyone with permanent housing that they owned, you could start working towards bigger and better things, the sort of public works that the country used to be renowned for – the Hoover Dam, Interstate-80… If you even redirected, say, a third of the military for just five to ten years, you could turn the United States into the kind country that had medicine for all, housing for all and work for anyone who wanted a job. Sure, there would be those that would call it ‘socialism,’ but the real complaint of those people would be that they couldn’t make a buck off how it was being done, or that it would be encroaching into the seemingly endless profit/growth cycle they expected their business to eternally live by.
You know what kind of life form lives with endless growth?
A parasitic virus.
It’s not a good business model.
Stop building your businesses that way.
Once you are both profitable and stable, you have a good business model. Until, say, you have twenty or thirty of years of experience with that, stop aiming higher.
(Also, if your business model requires you to burn a seemingly endless amount of money in order to ‘eventually’ reach profitability, you’re also doing it wrong. Stop that, too. You’re fucking things up for the rest of us.)
I also spent a good amount of the summer coaching Freja, Chelsea’s sister, teaching her some of the hardest lessons that I wished I’d have learned earlier. The hardest one for her to wrap her head around was the one that tripped up a lot of students – because we coulddo something generally meant we should be doing it, because if not us, then who?
“What happens if—” Freya would often ask me before I would inevitably cut her off.
“Don’t overgame yourself, Freya,” I would tell her. “The further you get from now, the harder it is to see clearly in the future. Predicting what’s going to happen next week? That’s easy. Predicting what’s going to happen next year? Certainly a lot harder. Predicting something a decade or two from now? You can probably get some of the larger strokes right, but the details are always going to be fuzzy at best. So don’t aim for precision points – just concentrate on how you can move the target to be in the right field.”
I also learned that Freya was convinced that within 25 years, she was going to have a replacement arm with such fine precision control in the hand that it could pet (and fool) a cat, and that the person with the prosthetic would be able to actually feel how soft the cat’s fur was. I remember telling her while I wouldn’t be surprised to see her get the first half, the second half was going to be extremely complicated, because neural-electric interfaces were going to prove far more difficult than people were anticipating. She’s still hoping to prove me wrong, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to come out on top on this one. Putting signals into a brain is way more complicated than you think it is. I’ll get into how I know that later.
Another thing that kept me busy during the summer break was trying to get as much information as possible about William Bierko, because the idea that he’d gone from being a normal CARP student to some kind of guerrilla warfare teacher in just a year seemed absolutely impossible. That said, Dr. Igarashi had discouraged me from looking into it, which meant I was also spending a good part of the summer learning how to circumvent the good doctor and her supervision. This training – how to investigate things without people being aware of it – it would save my life multiple times over the next few years, so while I didn’t know that, it was good that I built up that particular skillset early on in my life.
What I’d heard from Agent Costello about Bierko was that he was teaching insurgents advanced combat tactics and special weapons training, but that sort of thing wasn’t exactly easy to corroborate. You can’t exactly call up the CIA and ask for classified information on a possible enemy combatant. They tend to frown on that kind of thing, weirdly. Dunno why. (Kidding.) I ended up having to bribe a reporter from the Chronicle into keeping an eye out for pictures of him, and I’m still not sure if that was money wasted or well-spent, because it certainly didn’t pay off at first, and by the time it did, well, it only asked a lot more questions than it answered.
See, getting around the good doctor was a lot harder than it looked. Dr. Igarashi knew basically everyone in the Bay, so finding someone not in her good graces was already a difficult starting point. That’s how it was for most things, as well. She knew people in law enforcement, the media, politics, business, entertainment, technology, you name it…
I did my best to make sure the doctor didn’t have any idea I was looking into Bierko, but that was complicated even more when I started poking around about him on campus. I didn’t talk to teachers – that would’ve been an obvious way to get caught with my hand in the cookie jar – but I started seeing what I could do to glean information about him from other students, those who’d known him better.
Right.
Paige.
“You’re fucking with me, Josh,” Paige said to me and Chelsea as the three of us sat in a nice little taqueria down in Half Moon Bay, a good distance away from the doctor’s prying ears. “Will training contras and militants? That’s so unlike him I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“I saw a picture of it, Paige,” I said to her. “And his mom claims he never came home after he left CARP.”
“Well, that doesn’t make any fucking sense,” Paige sighed. “The main reason he left CARP was so that he could go and spend more time with his mother. Being away from her was slowly driving him crazy. And he didn’t know anything about firearms or explosives or any shit like that.”
“Nothing?” Chelsea asked.
“He hated guns,” Paige said, and she would know. She spent most of a year as William’s partner, and when he left C.A.R.P., she’d had to find a new partner. We’d tried her, but she and Julia were just too similar for them to work as a pair long term. “Said they were a tool of the uncivil, that the people who resorted to using them were inevitably doomed to lose their argument because they couldn’t support it by any path other than violence. That’s a direct quote, Josh. You’re sure it was him?”
“I am, Paige.”
“That’s a complete 180 from the guy I knew,” she said. “Josh, Will was a sweetheart and in my report to Dr. Igarashi, I told her that he was maybe too soft-hearted for this place, unable to keep up with how cutthroat you were all going to eventually get.”
“We’re not that bad,” I said with a frown.
“Not yet,” she replied. “But you’ll get there.” Paige sipped from her horchata, shaking her head once more. “Will’s a good guy, Josh. I don’t know what it would take to turn him into the person you’re describing, but I certainly didn’t do it.”
“I didn’t say I thought you did, Paige.”
“Have you talked to Dr. Igarashi about this?”
I sighed. “She thinks I should leave it alone, and I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t talk to her about it.”
“I won’t, but she’s usually right when it comes to these kinds of things, isn’t she?”
“She’s not infallible, Paige.”
Paige chuckled. “She’s pretty close.”
I’m not sure why I so desperately wanted Paige to be wrong. Maybe because it would’ve stripped a little bit of the mystery away from Dr. Igarashi. Maybe because it was good to see other people making mistakes here and there and knowing that even the head of our illustrious college had made the occasional misstep would’ve been reassuring.
And, just a month before the fall semester was going to resume, I got news that shook me to the very core. One of the pieces of cutting-edge technology I’d learned to set up in the spring was something called ‘an alert.’ Basically, this could allow me to keep track of certain names and terms in newspapers across the country, without having to do the work myself. A computer program would scan and sift through all the various news articles posted every day, and if anything was relevant to my key search terms, it would elevate that article to me for my review.
I didn’t expect ‘Agent Costello’ to be the first alert to bear fruit.
But in July of 1999 I got an update that a news story had appeared in the Washington Post that there had been a car accident, and that Special Agent Karen Costello had been killed when a drunk driver had plowed into her car on a Thursday night and had knocked her car into the Potomac. The drunk driver had also been killed in the accident, and Agent Costello left behind no living relatives.
It was completely unexpected and came out of nowhere, and I can’t tell you how utterly suspicious it made me. A drunk driver. On a Thursday night. Hits an FBI agent and kills her. The agent who just happens to be investigating CARP. When it seems like CARP might be getting some attention because of one of its former students, who may or may not be training revolutionaries.
I couldn’t find anything else about the accident.
That frightened me more.
Comments
Ian B
And that Psycho piano tune
JC
bookmark
Ronan
Cue Jaws theme. And Friday 13th theme.
