C.A.R.P. Ch. 11

Part Eleven - Senior Year, Fall Semester

It's easy to think of what happened over our senior year and get distracted by the terrorist attack that occurred in March of 2001, but we'll get to that in time, because the fall of that semester had a lot going on to keep us distracted. It was the last autumn I would be coming onto a campus as a student, although I would eventually return to other campuses a few times as a guest lecturer and one time even as a visiting professor, although I don't have any real accreditations in education. I think Oxford decided my writing spoke for itself.

We were all certainly nervous about our last year, because at that end of that year, we all knew we had to go out and make our marks on the world. People would have to go out and get actual jobs, take on real responsibilities and be actual adults.

Of course, the only reason we were worried about any of that was because we were holding ourselves to our already high (bordering on ridiculous) standards and wouldn't accept anything less than what we knew we were capable of, which was changing the world, improving it, leaving it a better place than how we found it.

I know what you think of me by this point, Agent Shetterly, but you have got to believe me when I tell you, myself and the rest of the CARP students, we only had the world's best interests at heart. You once described me in your reports as "rather bloodless, more reptile than human, able to weigh the cost of human lives without remorse" and that's true, although perhaps not as true for me as it is for many of my fellow graduates. You know, the ones I asked you to protect? The ones who keep mysteriously turning up dead? There's a reason I didn't trust you with my family, and why the last few years we've been particularly difficult to keep track of - because I'd like my entire family to remain breathing, thanks, and you lot seem to be miserable at that.

Yes yes, I've heard your apologies several times, Assistant Director Caulfield, and they mean as much to me now as they did the first time. I've got a yearbook full of enough dead friends to fill up a cemetery by myself, and you seem to somehow still think a handful of regretful words somehow absolves you of the amount of blood on your hands from your years of inaction.

I assure you, it does not.

You and your fellow FBI agents did not take me seriously when I came to you suspecting something regarding the death of Special Agent Costello. You did not take me seriously when I came to you with my suspicions about Will Bierko's death. I have been trying to get you people ahead of curve with all of this, and instead, I have been met with derision, mockery and even suspicion that I was the cause of all of this, when, in fact, I brought all of it to you after Costello's death. So don't tell me to calm the fuck down, lady, because I'm as cold as ice.

When we came back for our senior year, the first thing we got was a letter in the mail reminding us that each Alpha was responsible for their own 'senior project,' an actionable plan on something in our world that we could fix, within our lifetimes, with a reasonable amount of effort. Among the remaining 36 members of the Senior class of Alphas, we would come up with enough influential projects that we would change the face of the world in just fifty years' time.

That was the plan anyway.

It's worth noting that a lot of the senior projects that were put together that year did not rely on the survival of the architect to see them through to completion. In fact, it almost felt like we were a bunch of fatalists, expecting ourselves to die long before our work would come to fruition. I suppose there's something to be said about Dr. Igarashi raising an entire graduating class prepared to martyr themselves for what they believe in.

My plan wasn't so doom-and-gloom; it required me surviving to at least year twenty-five of its implementation.

We'll get to that.

I know what you're most curious about, the prudes that you are, and so I'll indulge your compulsive need to know about my sexual history first. The student rally for returning seniors was an unusual one, simply because we were told that just the Alphas were to be there - not to bring any of our partners with us. That came as something of a surprise, because in all the previous years, we'd been encouraged to bring our partners with us. They wanted them to find out when we found out, normally, so the fact that they wanted to do this one differently was more than a bit surprising to all of us. It felt a lot less like a rally and more like a large lecture, especially since this one was being held indoors, unlike all the previous ones, which had been held in the outdoors auditorium.

"Greetings my senior class of Alphas!" Dr. Igarashi said from her confident place on the stage to us. "I've brought you here today to inform you about your final partners, your mental equals. I'm sure you've been giving it some thought over the last few years, and maybe even a few of you have guessed at what I am about to say next, but your final partners... are right here in this room already. For the last few years, we as a faculty have been guiding you towards one another, and now, two different Alphas will join together, intermingling partners, forming one large Squad.

"We've been developing these pairings over the years together, and right now, I'm sure it's coming as no great surprise to you to learn that the Alpha whose suite is across the hall from yours in the dormitories is your new partner. Them and the rest of their team. You've had projects with them for years and because of the nearness of their suite to yours, I'm sure your team and theirs already know each other quite well, on a friendly basis. Well, now it's time for them to become friendlier than that. As always, it is up to you on how you want to intermingle your two teams, but our research has established that variety is the spice of life, and that by offering your existing partners a bit of 'new,' it will help prolong their connection with you as an individual and make the bond between your two teams form even faster.

"Now, one thing we do want to make sure of is that all your partners get the same amount of time to adjust to this, so no one is allowed to leave this room until everyone has come up and signed their name on the call sheet, stating that they're ready. In fact, in case you need verification about what the pairings are, they're all listed up here. And again, as it was with all previous pairings, they are merely our strong recommendations - if you feel a pairing doesn't work for you, all you need to do is come up to the podium and explain to me why, and I'll set about trying to find another pairing for you in the junior class, but I'm hoping I've done my job well enough that that won't be necessary."

It wasn't.

I was partnered up with Brianna Greene.

Yes, I've mentioned Brianna before, obviously, because she and I would often hang out and discuss Alpha problems, the kind of things that would've been impolite to complain about to our existing partners. It wasn't as though I had serious problems with Julia, Chelsea or Abi, but when I was struggling to make myself fit into the social identity Abi needed me to have to blend into her existing social stratosphere, I found myself struggling to reconcile the two identities within myself.

To be the sort of ladder-climbing chameleon Abi needed me to be, I had to be able to present a false front of whatever the situation called for. That meant, at any given moment, I might need to be anything from a high-class silver spoon egocentric one percenter to a scrappy, pulled-myself-up-by-my-boots, built-my-fortune-from-nothing self-financed ideocrat. Abi knew her world well and knew how to get me to fit within it, if I was anyone but who I really was. Oh, I never gave out any false names, but you ask anyone in Abi's social circles what I'm really like, and you'll get a completely different story for each person you ask. Sometimes even multiple stories from the same person.

Brianna had been forced to learn a similar skill when she picked up her social beta, Tom Kennedy. Yes, of those Kennedys. I know, I know, I've also been a little surprised that Brianna didn't take Tom's last name when they got married, but she was adamant she wanted to retain her own full name and not make that last compromise. The last year had been especially challenging for her, since she wanted to establish herself as a power player in the political arena on her own accord. She's often told me that using Tom to get her there felt like a shortcut in, but also a handicap once she got in there. She had to work three times as hard to get taken seriously by those in the political sphere, many of whom just wanted to consider her arm candy for Tom, whom she is at least a dozen times smarter than. She said with the Kennedy name, it would've been 'far too easy,' and one of the things I like most about Brianna is that she isn't one to shy away from a challenge.

Along with Brianna would come all three of her betas, Tom, who I just told you about, as well as Kelly and Casey, whom I mentioned earlier. Kelly and Julia were already close friends, each of them having Olympian level physiques, with Kelly making it to the Olympics for a variety of swimming activities. You've probably seen him and his nine gold medals on television at some point, where as Julia's had to relegate herself with her fourth-place finish at Wimbledon as her peak, although I keep telling her that her career has plenty of time left in it. I get that the average retirement age of tennis players is in their late 20s, but as I keep reminding her, we as a cohort are going to defy every convention and expectation set before us, so why not that one also?

I remember looking over at Brianna when Dr. Igarashi announced the Alpha pairings and seeing a huge grin on her face. "I'm down for this if you are," I told her, once the Doctor had allowed the group to break down into individual discussions.

"I've had a recurring dream about you and Kelly spit roasting me for years now, and you're telling me I get to make that happen anytime I want it?" Brianna giggled. "Yeah, I'm fucking down for that. In spades."

"Julia and Kelly'll probably want to fuck," I told her, as we kept talking through the permutations that we knew we needed to prepare for. "Shit, I imagine both Chelsea and Abi will want a crack at Kelly too." I couldn't help but laugh at the situation. "I mean, I'm not into guys, but he's probably in better shape than almost any guy on this campus."

"Oh, he's my lovely slab of Boston beefcake, although thank Christ he's slowly letting go of that goddamn accent," she giggled, shaking her head. "'BAHstun! I'm from BAHstun, sweetHAHrt!' Oh god, it was so fucking horrible when we first met!"

"What was it that Julia said to me when she first met him? 'I don't need him for his conversational skills, Josh,'" I said with a hearty laugh. "You think Casey will be okay with it?"

"She once described you as 'the kind of man I want to ravage my loins until my knees give out,' so yeah, I don't think you have much to worry about there, Josh," Brianna said to me, reaching out to take my hand in hers. It felt nice. Natural. "How are we going to do this long term? Because I don't know that you and I have similar career trajectories, and that might be the one real conflict we've got going against us."

"I wouldn't be too worried about it, Bri," I replied. "Early on, you'll be in a major city here in the States, and after that, you'll be in a major city somewhere else in the world. I'm going to be a writer. I don't have to be in any one place to do that. You can just have my and my team as part of your entourage whenever you need to live abroad, or we can simply keep two residences and not worry about it."

"I guess we'll figure that out when the time comes," she said to me, squeezing my fingers affectionately. "But I'm good with this as a pairing if you are."

"Sure," I said. "Abi'll bitch and moan a little--"

"Isn't that her normal SOP at this point?"

"Pretty much," I agreed, rolling my eyes. "Abi likes to complain so she feels like she's contributing something to any given conversation. But when she gets a chance to take Kelly out for a spin, I imagine that'll shut her up quick enough."

"Well, yeah," Bri giggled. "It'll be pretty tricky for her to talk with Kelly's cock lodged in her throat, and I'm sure he'll keep it down there until she's rolling her eyes back into her skull."

"Sounds like you're speaking from personal experience."

"Oh, you're gonna do much worse to me, I'm sure of it."

"There is no way I have the endurance of that guy."

"Endurance? No. Creativity? A hundred times over," she said, giving me a saucy little wink. "Besides, I already told you where we're gonna start. Unless you have objections to that."

"None whatsoever," I said. "Shall we head back to the dorms?"

"Well, we can at least sign in our lack of objections with the call sheet up front, so that when everyone's agreed, we can go."

By the time we made it to the front of the room, most of our fellow Alphas had signed the sheet agreeing to the pairings, which wasn't really a surprise to anyone, and in the end, only one pairing asked to be paired with other people, and those two Alphas had always been two of the most difficult to deal with. We'd be told they were paired down with juniors who were of similar mindsets, and that seemed to settle that.

Introducing the two teams together wasn't anywhere near as complicated as I was afraid it was going to be. As it turned out, Julia and Kelly, the two 'jocks' of the bunch, had guessed we were heading towards this years ago, and they'd discussed the possibility with not only each other, but also with each of our other partners, without my or Brianna's knowledge.

"Let's get down to it!" the normally reserved Tom said, once we'd gathered everyone into a room. And so, we did.

I can skip the lurid descriptions of debauchery and sexual depravity if you like, Assistant Director Caulfield, or I can include them, so that your report is comprehensive and conclusive.

Very well, as you wish.

We began, as Brianna had requested, with her on all fours, my cock thrust deep into her mouth while Kelly savaged her pussy from behind. It certainly wasn't something I'd ever done before - all my sexual encounters had purely been with women, and while I was (and remain) a heterosexual male, I was perhaps a little surprised that I didn't get 'performance anxiety' with another man in the room. As it turned out, Brianna was quite hellbent on showing off her skills as an oral technician, taking the length of my cock into her throat for long periods of time, even while her face bumped against my pelvis each time Kelly rammed his cock deep into Brianna's snatch. I might have thought she was in trouble, except each time she pulled off my dick to gasp in for a lungful of air, she had the most excited, borderline demented grin upon her face, her spit and my precum slathered over her face, bubbled and foamy, almost to make her look like a rabid dog.

We decided the first night would be Brianna's night, because after that, she wanted to get, and these are her words, Director, not mine, 'airtight.'

After a short break, we swapped places and added Tom into the mix, with my girls sitting out, cheering me on from the sideline, although I did see Brianna's partner Casey and Julia fooling around with one another on and off during the proceedings.

I don't know if you're familiar with the term 'airtight,' Director, but it's when... Good, so you understand. Tom was being blown, Kelly was beneath Briana with his cock inside of her pussy, and I was lodged up inside of her asshole. It was... quite the sensation for me, so I can only imagine how overwhelming it must have been for her. Brianna did her best to insist that all three of us cum at close to the same time, but Tom, well, Tom's a light touch, and he went off far earlier than Kelly or I did, but that just let Brianna talk both of us up, and we left Brianna exhausted and glazed like a donut assaulted by overeager bakers.

The next day was mine, and I enjoyed waking up to an assault of cocksuckers, no less than five women trying to vie for a turn at bobbing their heads up and down on my shaft, although I finished my wake up call putting a load inside of the one hole of Brianna's I hadn't filled my cum in the last twenty-four hours, her pussy, at her request mind you.

After that, I banged Casey in the shower, while Julia and Chelsea egged me on. Going to my first class of that day was definitely much more of a challenge than I had anticipated it would be, and when I returned back to the dorm room in the evening, I found Chelsea and Brianna had donned identical girl's school uniforms, and done up their hair in the exact same fashion, offering themselves up to me as 'twin sisters,' and I have to admit, the genetic makeup of both women is close enough that if you give a little room for leeway, it's easy enough to pretend the two were sisters, even though they are clearly not. That was certainly an exciting evening.

The next night, Brianna and I watched as our partners put on an erotic sex show for our amusement, allowing us to dictate what each of them did and who with. I made sure that Julia got the brutal fucking she'd so desperately wanted from Kelly, and for a grand finale, we let Abi have a turn at the 'airtight' experience.

Alright, I suppose I've made my point, and I can move on, but I want it down in your report, Director, that despite what you think of me, I am, in fact, quite capable, sexually, and want that down in the historical record, if only for my own amusement.

We ended up duplicating our suite keys, and for the next few months it was basically as though we simply had one large apartment separated by a little hall, my partners and Bri's partners intermingling, all the while making sure to tend to our needs first and foremost.

Both Bri and I had started work on our individual senior projects - mine focusing on cultural evolution beyond the need of mythological religions, hers on how to slowly push towards a one-world government structure - and while each seemed like a massively unscalable idea, both of us had core conceits that weren't difficult to grasp or execute, if you weren't expecting immediate results. The key was making them durable enough that they could withstand the tampering of people who didn't know any better.

Nothing is ever foolproof, but we tried our best.

Never underestimate the power of a truly legendary fool.

I also didn't wait long to tell Bri about my suspicions about CARP itself, relaying to her in great detail what I'd seen with Dr. Igarashi and Dr. Lebedev disposing of a body by embedding it within the concrete foundational supports of one of the buildings, and how they had been talking about having done so before. It was... well, it was one of the most terrifying conversations I've ever had with anyone in my life, because before I told her, I knew there was a very real and distinct possibility that she could be in on it, that she already knew about Will's death, and the deaths of the others, and that she'd been part of whatever inner circle Dr. Igarashi had.

Thankfully, it turned out that Bri was just as horrified as I was.

But, more interestingly, she wasn't surprised.

As it turned out, my newest partner had been suspicious of the good Doctor for as long as I had, and she'd also been doing her own investigations, but from the other end. Bri hadn't been looking into where our missing colleagues had gone, but more of where Doctor Igarashi had got the money to start up the college. And despite having spent more than a few years trying to track down where Doctor Igarashi's seed money had come from, Bri had only increased the number of questions she had, not decreased them.

She'd followed several of the money trails back to wealthy investment firms, except that despite the firms' assets on paper, they were physical phantoms. No domestic addresses anyone could go to, no phone lines that anyone would answer. And it wasn't just one or two countries either. Bri had been able to document nearly two dozen investment firms that had donated money from Russia, Brazil, South Korea, Spain, France, China, India, Egypt, South Africa, Japan... and yet, not one real person anywhere along the chain. She'd even hired local private investigators in those countries to look into the supposed offices of these companies, only to find they were generally just empty offices.

Bri had thought, well, if she couldn't get to the investment firms, then she could get to the people behind the investment firms. But that turned out to be a circular loop, an Ouroboros constructed out of paper and deception. The investment firms were set up by fictional law firms that had, in turn, been funded by more fictional investment firms.

She told me that after two years of trying to make sense of it, she felt like she'd been chasing her own tail for so long, she was losing her mind, and wasn't sure how to handle it. In some cases, the loops literally doubled back in an impossible circuit, with four companies forming a chain that had no start point nor any end point, and everything established at the exact same moment in time.

At least, according to records.

That didn't sit well with any of us, but we knew that digging and getting caught could end up with us taking the same sort of concrete power nap that Will Bierko was. None of us wanted that.

We had to keep moving forward and not let anyone know about our investigations, so for the most part, we went about our education, focusing on our final classes, our senior projects and the major integration of our two social structures.

That took a lot more work than either Bri or I had anticipated. You see, the Rockefellers, Abi's family, were, at their roots, robber barons. They'd built their fortune on the backs of finding a market they could exploit and absolutely strangling it within an inch of its life until either the market broke or the government stopped them. Usually the latter. But the last fifty years of government monopoly busting had knocked the Rockefellers onto their heels a bit. No longer were they being looked upon as the wise and reliable stalwarts of capitalism.

The Kennedys, by contrast, considered themselves a populistic, people's movement, pushing for the government to do the right thing by its people, at the cost of all else, or at least they used to be, but the death of JFK and RFK had shaken the family up a great deal, and many of the remaining family members were starting to have serious doubts about the way forward for their legacy to continue. They were crumbling, fracturing, fragmenting from one unified front into half a dozen different squabbling subgroups.

Both groups were in danger of time passing them by.

That meant the two factions were at loggerheads from the very start, and we had to navigate ways to find middle ground and common points of agreement without letting either side feel like they were losing. It was a tricky, tenuous balance at best, one that we achieved by letting each side think they had the upper hand and that we were simply humoring the other side.

When the holidays came around, we had to make the decision not to stay with either family, but to visit both of them. Even there, the two families were sort of in direct conflict with one another, judging the other for their actions or inactions.

Old rivalries run deep.

There was a lot of pressure on us during the fall semester, making sure that we were working on our projects, developing plans that would benefit humanity on the whole, even after we were gone, but we also had other typical senior things to do, like get our senior pictures taken, plan homecoming and start to think about what life was going to look like when we graduated.

Between me and Bri, we had decided that since my career wasn't tied to any singular location, if she needed to go someplace particular, we would do that. And if she didn't, well, we would remain the Bay Area for the foreseeable future. Our opinions on that would change in the spring, but we didn't know that at the time. Some things are simply unknowable, impossible for even the smartest and wisest among us to see coming. We'd decided that living in San Francisco proper was too ostentatious for us, so we had found a nice house in Woodside Glens, south of Redwood City, that would let us be close to everything without our comings and goings being scrutinized too closely by nosy neighbors, a tricky thing to acquire in the Bay area. I'd already gone about putting a bid on the house at 30% over asking price, just to ensure some realtor wouldn't dick me around in terms of price or availability. Both Bri and I wanted the house, and we didn't want to risk the chance of losing it.

We were also tasked heavily with training and tutoring the incoming freshman, as well as guiding the sophomores and juniors who were feeling strained at some of the more unique and complex challenges at CARP. Sometimes students didn't know how to adapt to polyamory. Sometimes it was something as simple as missing home, or their friends back where they'd come from. Another fascinating thing I'd discovered over the years at CARP was that none of the Alpha students were ever Bay Area locals.

There were also surprisingly more transfer students in the sophomore class than there had been in previous years, and I noticed that a significant number of freshmen Alphas from the previous year had not returned for their second year. Being down five or ten would've made sense, but Dr. Igarashi had brought in fifteen students to replace the ones who had left, and it meant the sophomore class needed a lot more of our time to help get adjusted to 'The CARP Way' instead of 'the traditional way.'

That specific number, fifteen missing students, I'd think about that a lot come spring.

It's always like that, though, if you're ever even tangentially involved in something truly horrific, Director Caulfield, as I'm sure you know from your experience down in Waco, that whole Koresh experience. I'm sure you're a little shocked that none of us CARP students went on to think we were the second coming of Jesus or anything, but none of us were that grandiose in our delusions. No no, we were simply people who wanted to change the world using our ideas.

We didn't even really want credit for it.

Look where that got us.

85% of CARP students from 1997 to 2003 classes, dead.

Murdered.

Some by our own government.

Just because a handful of them went rogue.

Hey! If Agent Shetterly had done his fucking job in the first place, and started investigating when I reported the murder of Will Bierko to him, maybe you people wouldn't still be picking up the wreckage nearly a decade fucking later, alright?! Don't you come at me with this 'you should have done more!' bullshit! I had an FBI handler who told me to report to him and only to him, and it's my fault he didn't take me fucking seriously?

I reported a murder, and he thought I was blowing smoke up his ass!

Now you're telling me you can protect me, that you can keep me safe?

Forgive me, Director Caulfield, but that is the biggest load of shit you've tried to shovel me since I turned myself in, and I turned myself in voluntarily when I saw the news about the raid in Jakarta, where you and the local authorities raided the compound where Dr. Igarashi was holed up, after she released her manifesto a few months ago.

I agree, the seeds of her manifesto, and that of the World Acceleration Radical Project, both obviously spring from work not only pioneered by the faculty, but also the students of CARP, but you and I both know, I wouldn't ever be involved in that sort of level of civilian casualties. We were having theoretical discussions about it among the students, but I've never taken a life with my own hands. None of the members of my team or of Brianna's team have either.

Shit, Agent Shetterly still hasn't stopped teasing me about how badly my hands were shaking the one time he saw me draw my gun on him because he surprised me.

We're not the terrorists you're looking for, Director Caulfield. You already showed me the photo of the late Doctor's body, riddled with bullets. You got your mastermind! Take your win, figure out who's hunting us down or leave us the fuck alone!

...

Yes, you're right, you're entirely correct. I am stalling.

I don't want to talk about Spring of 2001, because... well, you know why.

Fine. Let's get into it.

Let's talk about the day the United States fell to its knees for almost half a year.

Bridgepocalypse.

March 15, 2001.

God help all of us.