C.A.R.P. (Ch. 01 of 13)

"That's just it, Mr. Turner," she said with a wicked grin. "We're going to specialize in making our students maximize that radical potential they bring with them when they come to our campus. Once a week for the entirety of the summer, I or someone else from the staff is going to call you and we're going to discuss what your class load should look like, things you're interested in learning about and things that you aren't, and between all of us, we're going to devise a syllabus for all our students, with the intention of having about ten students per class, although that may go up or down a little bit for certain classes. We may even have one class in the fall which will have as many as twenty students at a time in it, but simply offer in five different time slots."

"What class would that be?"

"Now now, Mr. Turner, I've talked all about CARP for a while. I want to hear a bit more about you. Tell me about your hopes, your dreams, what you want to do with your life when you get out into the working world."

"Well, I guess I just really want to be a writer, although I don't really know what kind of writing I want to focus on yet," I said. "All I know is that I want to tell stories that have an impact on people, that change the way people think about things, that illuminate things they haven't considered, to put things in a new light for them. Whether that's in books or in television or movies or maybe even videogames, I don't really know. I'm a storyteller in search of an audience, I guess."

"'Audiences know what they expect and that is all they are prepared to believe in,'" she quoted at me, which made me laugh.

"I know my Stoppard just as much as you do, but The Player has a point. I want to do what they do."

"Which is?"

"What was his quote... 'We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as an entrance somewhere else.' That's what I want to do with my storytelling. I want to show all the bits most writers cut away from, warts and all. Violence, sex, love, death, the whole nine yards. I want to find a way to turn our traditional way of storytelling inside out, to find new truths by refusing to look in the old places."

She nodded with a sage smile, as if my answer had been what she'd wanted to hear. "Good. Good good. Are you in a relationship right now?"

I puffed up my cheeks and then blew out a harsh sharp jet of depressed air through my pursed lips. "Not as of, oh, like six hours ago? My girlfriend dumped me this morning. She's going to UCLA and didn't think a long distance relationship would work."

"And this would be..." she said, looking through the papers in front of her. "Miss Miranda Purdue? She's your ex?"

I remember my eyes going a little wide at that. "I'm not entirely sure how you'd know that, but yeah, that's right." We hadn't gone out of our way to hide that we were dating, but it wasn't exactly the sort of thing you expected a college recruiter to know.

"We very much do our homework, Mr. Turner, and if it makes you feel any better, you're capable of doing so much better than Miss Purdue. While yes, she is quite easy on the eyes, she's also rather ordinary in many ways, especially with her tendency to treat adversity as something to run from instead of something to overcome. If you were still with her, I would've had to tell you that a condition of you coming to CARP would be that you would need to break it off with Miss Purdue, but seeing as that's already done, we don't have a problem."

"Why would I need to have broken it off with her?"

"Because, Mr. Turner, you can and will do better, I assure you."

"That's... a little ominous."

"You needn't worry. Besides, it doesn't matter anyway. Let's get back to my handful of questions. What would you say the most important piece of art - be that visual, musical, literary or even cinematographic - would be for you personally?"

"Pink Floyd's 'Wish You Were Here' or Hunter S. Thompson's 'Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas,' for wildly different reasons, obviously."

"What's the most important part of any creative endeavor?" she asked.

"The execution," I replied immediately. "Anyone can have an idea. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Executing that idea into a way that reaches and evokes a feeling in the audience, that's the real hard part, and where all the work lies."

"There's the sort of insight that we want at CARP," the woman said to me. "Would you say you work well within restrictions, or are you the type of creative who always goes outside of the lines?"

"Restrictions breed creativity, so I'm all for having unexpected lines to work within, as long as they're reasonable and productive," I told her, seeing her nod even more.

"Excellent, excellent. Can you be a team player?"

"I've worked on the school newspaper the last two years, always in a supervisory role, but never in charge, so I'm used to both taking orders and giving them, whenever the situation calls for it. But the thing I've learned the most over the years is that you have to be adaptable, be able to improvise and evolve in any given situation, and that being static is the enemy."

"Good," she almost purred at me. "There is a greater purpose beyond CARP, but it will take quite some time for it to become obvious and relevant, so the level of commitment we ask may seem a little steep. There will be a non-disclosure agreement you will need to sign, and you will need to spend all four years at the Academy, otherwise you will need to repay the Academy for your time spent with us."

"Non-disclosure agreement? That's... unusual."

"Yes, well, we're going to be doing some... rather unorthodox things at the University, and taken out of context, they might seem somewhat strange," she told me with an odd smile. "In a decade's time, we'll go public, but doing so any earlier could compromise our initial studies."

"So we're students, but we're also lab rats."

"That's a rather harsh way of looking at things," she said with a laugh. "You're partners in a groundbreaking endeavor that won't just change your life, but change the lives of millions of people. If we're right, of course. We always need to allot for the possibility that we aren't. It's a small likelihood of that, but a true scientist always allows the experiment to proceed naturally and not interfere. Do those sound like conditions you can adhere to?"

"What would I tell my family and friends?"

"Oh, just the usual. Make it sound like any other college experience and don't focus on the less typical elements about it," she said, waving her hand. "You're a storyteller. I'm sure you can convince anyone who asks that it's just a slightly esoteric school start up on the West Coast. Other than your parents, who's going to ask? You want a fresh start, away from all of this, don't you?" she asked, gesturing around her. "That's what I'm offering. A fresh and remarkable start."

"Okay then... where do I sign?"

And like that, with a stroke of a pen, my life was on a completely different trajectory. At that moment in time, I didn't even realize quite how much. I told my parents that I'd been offered to go and attend a college on the West Coast, and they weren't exactly happy about it until I told them that it was entirely paid for at which point all the resistance in the world dropped away. It felt almost like they were just glad to be rid of me. It would be a great adventure, they told me, and since nobody else was offering, they were glad I'd just accepted.

But there's one other thing I should tell you about what happened between here and my first semester at C.A.R.P. I'm only telling you this because... because, well, you're you, and I trust you, so maybe we can figure all this out if we put all the pieces of the puzzle together. Because even though I lived through it all, I can't make it make sense to me.

About a month or so later, when I was hip deep into making my preparations to go out to California, I got called down to the counselor's offices again, this time without much in the way of explanation given. When I entered the room, this time there was a very different looking woman. Short, dark hair cut short, business suit although with pants and no skirt. She was good looking as well, but she also seemed stern and overworked.

"You're Mr. Turner, yes?" she said to me, her voice very much East Coast, maybe Boston or New York or Maine. Somewhere definitely upper northeast. She looked kinda like that actress, Carla Gugino. "I'm Special Agent Karen Costello from the FBI. Have a seat."

"You didn't bring your partner, Special Agent Abbott, with you?"

"Like I haven't heard that one a few thousand times," she sighed. "Look, I didn't bring you for you to talk, just for you to listen, so sit down and shut up."

The woman didn't seem to want me to say anything, so I sat down across from her, as she opened a vanilla folder before me, revealing a picture of Dr. Igarashi staring back at me.

"We're fairly certain this woman, Dr. Igarashi, came to visit you, to invite her to her new California Academy for Radical Potential. She promised a fully paid experience and education, but insisted you sign an NDA. Now, I want to tell you two things. First, that NDA does not apply to the federal government, no matter what they tell you. And second, I'm not here to discourage you from going to C.A.R.P.. In fact, I want you to go there. But I want you to be my eyes and ears into the place. Once a semester, I'm going to find you and I want a report on everything you can tell me about the place, and in exchange for that, I'll give you full immunity from whatever illegal and shady shit's going down there. Hell, I'll even sweeten the deal - you and any friends you happen to make over there will be shielded from any prosecution in regards to anything that's tied to the Academy. We've had our eyes on this Dr. Igarashi and her associates for some time, so I want you to think about it, and sometime around Christmas, we'll meet again, and you can tell me what you think, okay? That's it. You can leave."

"I wanna see a badge first," I said to her.

She smirked, reached into her pocket and pulled it out, sliding it across the table to me, as I opened it and considered her credentials. I'd never seen an FBI badge up close before, but it looked pretty realistic.

"Business card," I said, tossing her badge back to her. She pulled one out of her pocket and tossed it over the table to me, spinning it like a throwing star.

"We'll be in touch, Mr. Turner," she said, as I headed to the door. "And I expect you're going to have quite the story to tell me when next we meet."

Good lord, did she not know the half of it...