RE: Vox Mentis
04-15-2015, 03:44 PM
Spoiler
(04-15-2015, 01:35 PM)AgentBlue Wrote: »Hm.
Telling the truth might be dangerous, but it would be nice to have an honest relationship for once. And to be fair, what he's told you isn't exactly the most detailed biography in the world either. Let's try to play it safe and give him about as much as he gives you. Make your life story a reward he has to work for.
(04-15-2015, 02:39 PM)Schazer Wrote: »Tell him about the easiest hundred bucks you ever made; how proud you were of yourself back then, how the you right now could've snagged quadruple that and how little it matters in retrospect.
You decide to play it safe. You tell him your family is Canadian and you were raised on hockey. You describe how when you were six, your father took you to a game and you were terrified because the crowd was so angry. There was an incident, a splash of players on the ice, and you turned to your father for protection but his face was monstrous. On the way home, he asked if you'd had fun, and you said yes, but it was a lie.
You discovered your father gambled on the games. You were able to decipher patterns in the ways the games played, and could usually pick out which team was going to win just by seeing the lineups. You were your daddy's good luck charm. He gave you a cut of every win he had, and it just seemed so simple to you to read the patterns. It was the easiest hundred dollars you ever made. It was power.
It wasn't perfect, though. Sometimes you were wrong. And daddy hated it when you were wrong. You'd go to bed on game days with bruises sometimes. Eventually you couldn't take it anymore. One night you packed up what little belongings you had in a backpack and left, never looking back. You honed your craft on the street. Not only seeing patterns, but getting other people to see them where they didn't exist. Tricking fools into parting with their money. You could easily snag four times that first hundred dollars in a few minutes now.
But it all just seems so silly now, doesn't it? None of that even matters here. You're a new person and the past is the past.
Jeremy's hand touches yours.
Most of what you just said was lies, of course. You can't tell a student anything true about yourself. You couldn't help but let a little truth sneak in, though. There's something to be said for the real, you think. It'd be nice to let someone in, just a little. You've been closed off for so long.
It'snot a rule, exactly, this lying about yourself thing. It's just healthy paranoia. You're in you're second year and learning how people can be categorized into distinct psychographic groups based on how their brain works. Set 107, for example, is an intuition- and fear-motivated introvert personality: those people make decisions based on avoiding the worst outcomes, find primary colors reassuring, and, when asked to pick a random number, will choose something small, which feels less vulnerable. If you know someone is a 107, you know how to persuade them - or, at least, which persuasion techniques are more likely to work. This isn't much different from what you've always done, without thinking about it too much: you'd developed a sense of what a mark desired or feared and used that to compel them. It's the same, only with more theory. So that's why you shouldn't talk about yourself, and why the other students are so aloof and inscrutable: to avoid being identified. To guard against persuasion, you have to hide who you are. But you suspect you're not very good at this. You guess there's probably a whole bunch of clues you're inadvertently dropping to someone like Jeremy Lantern every time you open your mouth, or cut your hair, or choose a sweater. You figure the reason the school has a no practicing rule is that sometimes people do it.
~
"Tell me what they teach you," you say. "Give me a sneak preview."
You and Jeremy are making slushies. You've progressed beyond milkshakes. The advantage of the slushie is you have to leave school grounds. Tuesdays and Fridays, if the weather is clear, you and Jeremy Lantern walk the three-quarters of a mile to the nearest 7-Eleven. You like walking beside him, because cars would zoom by and the drivers would probably assume you're his girlfriend.
"You use very direct language," he says. "You don't ask. You command. That's a useful instinct."
"So tell me why I'm learning Latin."
"I can't."
"Do you always follow the rules?"
"Yes."
"Bah," you say, defeated.
"The rules are important. What they teach us is dangerous."
"What they teach you is dangerous. What they teach me is Latin. Dude, I'm not asking for state secrets. Just give me something. One thing."
He attaches the slushie lid and pokes the straw through the plastic.
"Bah," you say again. You both walk to the front of the store and stand in line behind a kid paying for gas. The man behind the counter is balding, in his fifties, Pakistani or something like it. You nudge Jeremy. "Which set is this guy?" He doesn't answer. "I'm thinking one eighteen. Am I right? Come on, I'm doing setting; you can answer the question."
"Maybe one seventy."
You hadn't considered that one, but see instantly how it makes sense. "See, that wasn't so bad. Now what? What do we do once we know he's a one seventy?"
"We pay for our slushies," Jeremy says.
~
You hang with Jeremy in his room sometimes. One time you stick chewing gum into the lock before you leave and come back when you know he has a class. You go to his bookshelf and pull down three titles you've been eyeing for a while. You're sitting on his bed, deep in Sociographic Methods, when the door opens. Jeremy stands there, one hand on the knob. You've never seen him mad before. "Give me that."
"No." You sit on it.
"Do you know what they'll do-" He tries to grab it and you resist and he lands on top of you. This you slightly engineered. His breath brushes your face. You let the textbook slide out and clunk to the floor. He raises a hand and hold it tentatively over your breast. You inhale. He moves his hand away.
"Keep going," you say.
"I can't."
"Yes you can."
He rolls off. "It's not allowed."
"Come on," you say.
"We're not allowed to be together." That's a rule. Fraternization. "It's not safe."
"For who?"
"Either of us."
You stare at him.
"I'm sorry," he says.
You shuffle closer. You touch his white shirt. You've spent a lot of time imagining taking off his shirt. "I won't tell anyone." You stroke his chest through the fabric. Then his hand close on yours.
"I'm sorry," he says.
~
"What's with the fraternization rule?" you ask Eliot. You wander around his office, fingering books, being casual. Eliot looks up from his papers. Originally, you were going to ask, Why can't we have sex. Because, just once, you'd like to see Eliot surprised or offended. Or anything, really. Just to prove that he's human. But then you lost your nerve.
"Students aren't permitted to enter relationships with each other."
"I know what it is. I'm asking why."
"You know why."
You sigh. "Because if you let someone know you well, they can persuade you. But that's incredibly cold, Eliot." You go to the window. Outside, you watch a sparrow hop across the slate roof. "That's no way to live." He doesn't reply. "Are you saying, for the rest of my life, I can't have a relationship with an organization person?"
"Yes."
"Do you appreciate how dull that is?" Eliot doesn't react. "And what about... you know, purely physical relationships?"
"It's no different."
"It's completely different. Relationships, okay, I get it. But not for just sex."
"There is no 'just sex.' It's called intimacy for a reason."
"That's one word," you protest. "Coincidence."
"'And the man knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain.' Note the use of the word knew in this context."
"That's from three thousand years ago. You're talking about the Bible."
"Exactly. The concept is not new."
You shake your head, frustrated. "Have you ever done it?"
"Done what?"
"Broken the rule," you say. "Fraternized."
"No."
"I don't believe you." You do. You're just pushing. "You must have thought about it. What about with Jane? There's something going on with you guys. Your feet always point toward her. And she goes very still around you. It's like when we're acting up in class and she's trying not to get pissed. She goes still when she's trying to control her emotions."
"I need to get some work done, if you don't mind." He sounds completely unruffled.
"I think Jane wants to fraternize with you," you say. "Badly."
"Out."
"I'm going!" You leave. You're more frustrated than ever.
~
You turn eighteen. You lie in bed awhile, thinking about what that means. Anything? You get up and go to class and of course nobody knows. At lunch, you walk to the 7-Eleven with Jeremy and debate telling him the whole way. Finally, while filling your slushie, you say, "I'm eighteen today."
He looks surprised. This is the kind of information you're not supposed to share. "I didn't get you anything."
"I know. I just wanted to tell you."
He's silent. You walk to the front of the store. You smile at the man behind the counter. "It's my birthday today."
"Oh my goodness."
"Finally free." You lean across the counter, grinning. "Free to give a long and happy life.
"I tell you what," he says. "I give you the slushie for free."
"Oh, no," you say.
"Happy birthday." He pushes it across to you. "You are a good girl."
As you leave the store, Jeremy seizes your arm. "Give a happy life? Finally free?"
You smile, but he's serious. He steers you to a bench beside the road and sits you on it and stands there, glowering. You feel a tickle in your stomach, simultaneously sickening and thrilling. "You can't do that."
"I got a slushie. One free slushie."
"It's a serious breach of the rules."
"Come on. Like word suggestion is even a real technique. I bet it's nothing compared to what you can do."
"That's not the point."
"Is this because he gave me a present and you didn't?"
"You think the rules don't apply to you? They do. You can't practice. Not outside the school. Not on that guy. Not on me."
"You? When have I ever practiced on you?" You poke him with your shoe. "As if I could compromise you. You're going to graduate next year and I don't know anything. Come on. Sit. Drink slushie. It's my birthday."
"Promise me you'll never do that again."
"Okay. Okay, Jeremy. I was just playing."
After a while, he sits. You lean your head on his shoulder. You feel very close to him. "I promise not to turn you into my thought slave," you say, and feel him smile a little.
But you've thought about it.
~
The next Tuesday, you hang around the school gates but Jeremy doesn't show up for your slushie run. You trudge back to the school. Something must have come up. Some class. He's getting busier. But you pass the front lawn and there he is, lounging with his friends, his pant legs rolled up in the sun. They're talking in the way of older students, no one laughing or even moving much, every sentence dripping with irony and layers of meaning, or so you guess. You stop. Heads turn. Jeremy glances at you, then away. You walk on.
You understand that you can't be seen together too often. You can't be attached. You know this. You reach your room and sit at your desk and open a book. If you turn your head, you could look down to the lawn and see Jeremy and his little group of conceited friends. But you don't. Occasionally you lean back and stretch your arms, or fiddle with your hair, because you know he can see you too.
~
From time to time you see students with ribbons tied around their wrists. The ribbon is red or white; if it's red, it means a senior taking his final exam. The rule is not to talk to them, or even look to closely, although of course you do, because one day you'll be wearing that red ribbon, and you want to know what that means. One time, you see a red-ribboned boy building a house of cards in the front hall. He's there for two days, making the house taller and taller while he grows thinner and more haunted-looking and it gets so people avoid the hall, in case of drafts. Then one morning the cards are gone and so is the boy. You never find out what happened, whether he passed or failed. Another night, you wake to an odd bell, and go to the window to see a girl leading a cow up the driveway. An actual, live cow. You can't deduce anything useful from this.
At the end of your second year, you find a slip of paper beneath your door, notifying you of a room change for Higher-Level Machine Languages. But when you turn up, you're the only student there. The teacher, a short, balding man named Brecht, hands you a white ribbon. "Congratulations. You're ready for your junior exam." You tie the ribbon around your left wrist, feeling excited.
Brecht tells you to make a computer print the word hello on its screen. THis sounds like something you can do in about two minutes, with a command like PRINT or ECHO. But Brecht says not to leave the room until it's done. You sit on a cardboard box, because this isn't a classroom so much as a crypt for the corpses of prehistoric computers, and flip open a laptop.
The laptop doesn't work. What do you do?
You discovered your father gambled on the games. You were able to decipher patterns in the ways the games played, and could usually pick out which team was going to win just by seeing the lineups. You were your daddy's good luck charm. He gave you a cut of every win he had, and it just seemed so simple to you to read the patterns. It was the easiest hundred dollars you ever made. It was power.
It wasn't perfect, though. Sometimes you were wrong. And daddy hated it when you were wrong. You'd go to bed on game days with bruises sometimes. Eventually you couldn't take it anymore. One night you packed up what little belongings you had in a backpack and left, never looking back. You honed your craft on the street. Not only seeing patterns, but getting other people to see them where they didn't exist. Tricking fools into parting with their money. You could easily snag four times that first hundred dollars in a few minutes now.
But it all just seems so silly now, doesn't it? None of that even matters here. You're a new person and the past is the past.
Jeremy's hand touches yours.
Most of what you just said was lies, of course. You can't tell a student anything true about yourself. You couldn't help but let a little truth sneak in, though. There's something to be said for the real, you think. It'd be nice to let someone in, just a little. You've been closed off for so long.
It'snot a rule, exactly, this lying about yourself thing. It's just healthy paranoia. You're in you're second year and learning how people can be categorized into distinct psychographic groups based on how their brain works. Set 107, for example, is an intuition- and fear-motivated introvert personality: those people make decisions based on avoiding the worst outcomes, find primary colors reassuring, and, when asked to pick a random number, will choose something small, which feels less vulnerable. If you know someone is a 107, you know how to persuade them - or, at least, which persuasion techniques are more likely to work. This isn't much different from what you've always done, without thinking about it too much: you'd developed a sense of what a mark desired or feared and used that to compel them. It's the same, only with more theory. So that's why you shouldn't talk about yourself, and why the other students are so aloof and inscrutable: to avoid being identified. To guard against persuasion, you have to hide who you are. But you suspect you're not very good at this. You guess there's probably a whole bunch of clues you're inadvertently dropping to someone like Jeremy Lantern every time you open your mouth, or cut your hair, or choose a sweater. You figure the reason the school has a no practicing rule is that sometimes people do it.
~
"Tell me what they teach you," you say. "Give me a sneak preview."
You and Jeremy are making slushies. You've progressed beyond milkshakes. The advantage of the slushie is you have to leave school grounds. Tuesdays and Fridays, if the weather is clear, you and Jeremy Lantern walk the three-quarters of a mile to the nearest 7-Eleven. You like walking beside him, because cars would zoom by and the drivers would probably assume you're his girlfriend.
"You use very direct language," he says. "You don't ask. You command. That's a useful instinct."
"So tell me why I'm learning Latin."
"I can't."
"Do you always follow the rules?"
"Yes."
"Bah," you say, defeated.
"The rules are important. What they teach us is dangerous."
"What they teach you is dangerous. What they teach me is Latin. Dude, I'm not asking for state secrets. Just give me something. One thing."
He attaches the slushie lid and pokes the straw through the plastic.
"Bah," you say again. You both walk to the front of the store and stand in line behind a kid paying for gas. The man behind the counter is balding, in his fifties, Pakistani or something like it. You nudge Jeremy. "Which set is this guy?" He doesn't answer. "I'm thinking one eighteen. Am I right? Come on, I'm doing setting; you can answer the question."
"Maybe one seventy."
You hadn't considered that one, but see instantly how it makes sense. "See, that wasn't so bad. Now what? What do we do once we know he's a one seventy?"
"We pay for our slushies," Jeremy says.
~
You hang with Jeremy in his room sometimes. One time you stick chewing gum into the lock before you leave and come back when you know he has a class. You go to his bookshelf and pull down three titles you've been eyeing for a while. You're sitting on his bed, deep in Sociographic Methods, when the door opens. Jeremy stands there, one hand on the knob. You've never seen him mad before. "Give me that."
"No." You sit on it.
"Do you know what they'll do-" He tries to grab it and you resist and he lands on top of you. This you slightly engineered. His breath brushes your face. You let the textbook slide out and clunk to the floor. He raises a hand and hold it tentatively over your breast. You inhale. He moves his hand away.
"Keep going," you say.
"I can't."
"Yes you can."
He rolls off. "It's not allowed."
"Come on," you say.
"We're not allowed to be together." That's a rule. Fraternization. "It's not safe."
"For who?"
"Either of us."
You stare at him.
"I'm sorry," he says.
You shuffle closer. You touch his white shirt. You've spent a lot of time imagining taking off his shirt. "I won't tell anyone." You stroke his chest through the fabric. Then his hand close on yours.
"I'm sorry," he says.
~
"What's with the fraternization rule?" you ask Eliot. You wander around his office, fingering books, being casual. Eliot looks up from his papers. Originally, you were going to ask, Why can't we have sex. Because, just once, you'd like to see Eliot surprised or offended. Or anything, really. Just to prove that he's human. But then you lost your nerve.
"Students aren't permitted to enter relationships with each other."
"I know what it is. I'm asking why."
"You know why."
You sigh. "Because if you let someone know you well, they can persuade you. But that's incredibly cold, Eliot." You go to the window. Outside, you watch a sparrow hop across the slate roof. "That's no way to live." He doesn't reply. "Are you saying, for the rest of my life, I can't have a relationship with an organization person?"
"Yes."
"Do you appreciate how dull that is?" Eliot doesn't react. "And what about... you know, purely physical relationships?"
"It's no different."
"It's completely different. Relationships, okay, I get it. But not for just sex."
"There is no 'just sex.' It's called intimacy for a reason."
"That's one word," you protest. "Coincidence."
"'And the man knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain.' Note the use of the word knew in this context."
"That's from three thousand years ago. You're talking about the Bible."
"Exactly. The concept is not new."
You shake your head, frustrated. "Have you ever done it?"
"Done what?"
"Broken the rule," you say. "Fraternized."
"No."
"I don't believe you." You do. You're just pushing. "You must have thought about it. What about with Jane? There's something going on with you guys. Your feet always point toward her. And she goes very still around you. It's like when we're acting up in class and she's trying not to get pissed. She goes still when she's trying to control her emotions."
"I need to get some work done, if you don't mind." He sounds completely unruffled.
"I think Jane wants to fraternize with you," you say. "Badly."
"Out."
"I'm going!" You leave. You're more frustrated than ever.
~
You turn eighteen. You lie in bed awhile, thinking about what that means. Anything? You get up and go to class and of course nobody knows. At lunch, you walk to the 7-Eleven with Jeremy and debate telling him the whole way. Finally, while filling your slushie, you say, "I'm eighteen today."
He looks surprised. This is the kind of information you're not supposed to share. "I didn't get you anything."
"I know. I just wanted to tell you."
He's silent. You walk to the front of the store. You smile at the man behind the counter. "It's my birthday today."
"Oh my goodness."
"Finally free." You lean across the counter, grinning. "Free to give a long and happy life.
"I tell you what," he says. "I give you the slushie for free."
"Oh, no," you say.
"Happy birthday." He pushes it across to you. "You are a good girl."
As you leave the store, Jeremy seizes your arm. "Give a happy life? Finally free?"
You smile, but he's serious. He steers you to a bench beside the road and sits you on it and stands there, glowering. You feel a tickle in your stomach, simultaneously sickening and thrilling. "You can't do that."
"I got a slushie. One free slushie."
"It's a serious breach of the rules."
"Come on. Like word suggestion is even a real technique. I bet it's nothing compared to what you can do."
"That's not the point."
"Is this because he gave me a present and you didn't?"
"You think the rules don't apply to you? They do. You can't practice. Not outside the school. Not on that guy. Not on me."
"You? When have I ever practiced on you?" You poke him with your shoe. "As if I could compromise you. You're going to graduate next year and I don't know anything. Come on. Sit. Drink slushie. It's my birthday."
"Promise me you'll never do that again."
"Okay. Okay, Jeremy. I was just playing."
After a while, he sits. You lean your head on his shoulder. You feel very close to him. "I promise not to turn you into my thought slave," you say, and feel him smile a little.
But you've thought about it.
~
The next Tuesday, you hang around the school gates but Jeremy doesn't show up for your slushie run. You trudge back to the school. Something must have come up. Some class. He's getting busier. But you pass the front lawn and there he is, lounging with his friends, his pant legs rolled up in the sun. They're talking in the way of older students, no one laughing or even moving much, every sentence dripping with irony and layers of meaning, or so you guess. You stop. Heads turn. Jeremy glances at you, then away. You walk on.
You understand that you can't be seen together too often. You can't be attached. You know this. You reach your room and sit at your desk and open a book. If you turn your head, you could look down to the lawn and see Jeremy and his little group of conceited friends. But you don't. Occasionally you lean back and stretch your arms, or fiddle with your hair, because you know he can see you too.
~
From time to time you see students with ribbons tied around their wrists. The ribbon is red or white; if it's red, it means a senior taking his final exam. The rule is not to talk to them, or even look to closely, although of course you do, because one day you'll be wearing that red ribbon, and you want to know what that means. One time, you see a red-ribboned boy building a house of cards in the front hall. He's there for two days, making the house taller and taller while he grows thinner and more haunted-looking and it gets so people avoid the hall, in case of drafts. Then one morning the cards are gone and so is the boy. You never find out what happened, whether he passed or failed. Another night, you wake to an odd bell, and go to the window to see a girl leading a cow up the driveway. An actual, live cow. You can't deduce anything useful from this.
At the end of your second year, you find a slip of paper beneath your door, notifying you of a room change for Higher-Level Machine Languages. But when you turn up, you're the only student there. The teacher, a short, balding man named Brecht, hands you a white ribbon. "Congratulations. You're ready for your junior exam." You tie the ribbon around your left wrist, feeling excited.
Brecht tells you to make a computer print the word hello on its screen. THis sounds like something you can do in about two minutes, with a command like PRINT or ECHO. But Brecht says not to leave the room until it's done. You sit on a cardboard box, because this isn't a classroom so much as a crypt for the corpses of prehistoric computers, and flip open a laptop.
The laptop doesn't work. What do you do?