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

C.A.R.P. Ch. 06

... they're getting something for nothing, or that the problems they're currently steeped in can't possibly be of theirown making, so they must be the fault of thoseother people over there. Convincing people something is real when you're also telling them they're not to blame is remarkably easy.

Eventually the bad faith systems we'd designed would collapse, because ofcourse they would. They weredesigned to. They were conceived and created to inoculate people against things that would be far worse than the sort of ratfucking we were designing, although at this point, I'm still wondering if we did our jobs too well. Our great plan for safeguarding information flow is scheduled to turn the corner around 2027, which is almost twenty years away still, and I knew it was going to get a lot worse before it got better, but we aren't even in the worst of it yet. Believe me when I tell you, shit's going to go haywire between here and then, and you will find yourself arguing until you're blue in the face that water is wet and that nobody should be above the law. You're going to hear about nonsense like "opinion-biased facts," or "loyalty above all," when in fact things should be going the other way.

I'd love to tell you this was the only system we were having to put together work on how to break and de-escalate, but this was only one of about two dozen large scale institutional problems we're been working on, basically as one giant school project. Others included environmental ...

... concerns, the consolidating powers of a small number of corporations over an increasingly large influence, the state of establishing debt as the status quo, the fact that the life expectancy for Americans was starting to trend downward instead of upwards, the mass influence of chemical intakes in the forms of pharmaceuticals and processed foods... look, it was a very, very long list of things we were working to solve, and while I'd love to tell you that we had answers for everything, at the end of the day, we were developing contingencies, things that could beattempted at scale, but we weren't fully certain if any of them would work.

Westill aren't.

But we built them anyway.

Chelsea integrated herself remarkably with both me and Julia, and I was very pleased to see the girls becoming friends even when I was otherwise distracted. I'm not the sociologist of CARP, but even he told me that he found it pretty remarkable that all the individual groups seemed to be so well integrated and tight knit. Lou, who works for one of the big thinktanks out of Washington these days, even theorized that maybe our partners had been exposed to some kind of pheromone or neurochemical designed to cause a bonding experience, but Olivia, the biochemist of the school, said there wasn't anything she knew of that acted like we were describing.

This also isn't to say there weren't arguments among pods. Caleb and his original partner, Sally, had chosen to reject their original second year partner, ...