C.A.R.P. Ch. 06 - Sex Stories

C.A.R.P. Ch. 06

Part Six - Sophomore Year, Spring Semester

By the time the spring rolled around, things were already feeling both on total lockdown and completely spiraling out of control. I was blazing through my classes and felt like I was being challenged but also rewarded. The classwork wasn't so much that it was out of control, but I was learning so much, and, most fascinatingly, I was learning what Iwanted to learn, not what might've been typically shovel fed down my throat at another college.

I'd never really known much about adaptive learning, but over the fourth semester, I figured out that each of us had a syllabus completely tailored to our interests and our own learning, and whatever we were showing particular interest in, they were leaning into. But there were also making sure to layer in some wild fundamentals, things I wouldn't have gotten into on my own, like philosophy and macro economics and political systems, and theoretical applications.

The thing I was most impressed by was how they were teaching me to think systemically - how I needed to stop thinking about things on a small scale and start thinking about how they worked in large approaches. I looked into the sort of societal changes that started happening during technological advances throughout human history, how there are always friction points, and always alwaysalways people trying to exploit the new systems before the masses can spot the writing on the wall that the world has changed. The technological ...

... advances happened in what we called opportunity gates.

Kings and robber barons, all the systems were built upon the backs of people not realizing who was taking advantage of them until it was too late for them to do anything about it, shy of full-blown revolution, and when exploitation was pushed to the revolution point, it always ended in blood. Blood in the streets, blood on the hands of the oppressors, blood on the hands of the revolutionaries, blood running in rivers, drowning anyone who didn't learn how to swim on that unholy flow.

What was even scarier were our theoretical models. By this point, I think most of the second years had figured out we were operating as some sort of high-level brain trust. We were being raised and trained to work collectively, collaboratively, each of us holding just a single piece of the puzzle, trying to fit them together to see a bigger picture, one I'm pretty sure even our handlers weren't entirely anticipating us finding so early on.

We've always been overachievers.

It was a Tuesday in April when we realized how close the next opportunity gate was.

Typically, opportunity gates happened every couple of hundred years, but the rate at which the human species was encountering them was accelerating. You could track backwards and watch all of humanity clawing its way upward. Flight. Automation. Electricity. Step. By. Step.

"Look," Caleb said to the seven of us gathered around the table. "I'm telling you, the computer revolution ...