We had a scare in @Candi Wolfe's car tonight. We had gone to the pop-up psychic arcade that's in town, in the empty video store at the end of the strip mall with the Pet Co in it. It was one of those totally unsanctioned arcades--unsanctioned by the school or any of the psychic regulatory commissions. They usually get shut down by Psycops in a couple days, so they never stick around for long. It's kind of a rite of passage for all Psyhigh students to visit them when they come to town. Naturally I didn't tell my parents.

They're not really that dangerous--those kind of games won't really "break your mind" like they say they will. Unless you played one for hours maybe. But there's no chance of that because it seems like every junior and senior in school is there and wants a turn.

But on the way home, this big black muscle car pulled up next to us at a stoplight and started revving its engine. Candi said it was a Fantasm. It had tinted windows so you couldn't see in, and a small H-C-CL stencil in white on the side of the door. It was Chloroform Kids.

They started up their stereo but I think technically it was more of a sonic weapon because immediately the thudding of the mega ultra bass cracked all of Joyce's windows. That's Candi's car's name. Joyce.

When the light changed, Joyce took off. Candi wasn't even touching the wheel or the gas. Joyce was taking matters into her own hands. But the Chloroform Kids stayed right on our tail.

There was tire screeching and quick turns around blind alleys and Joyce shut her headlights off and we couldn't even see where we were going. Then Joyce backed herself into space between a container and a loading dock and turned herself off. We waited till we saw the Fantasm drive by. It kept on moving, and we heard the thudding fade off into the distance.

Joyce let Candi take the wheel and she drove me home by the back streets. And I had her text me to let me know she got home safe. She just texted. We're both still kind of freaked out.

After getting chased home on Friday, I just threw myself into homework all weekend. Who are the Chloroform Kids anyway? Do they go to Psyhigh? There's plenty of other paranormal high schools out there--like Satanic High and Mildly Paranoid High and Antediluvian Academy--all of which are within the Tri-cities area. Or maybe they go to Supernatural VR Academy online? Or they could be demonic dropouts I suppose.

In any case, neither @Candi Wolfe or I are in a hurry to go late-night cruising in her old Volvo any time soon. Her dad was able to fix the windows (I guess you can melt shattered glass back together with the right chants) so Joyce is right as rain. Candi told him it was all from a cheerleader routine that went wrong at the pep rally. She didn't dare tell him anything about the Chloroform Kids or he'd never let her out at night again.

I have even more homework tonight. Extrasensory Processing stuff. You know--when they have you put your hand in a black velvet bag with shapes in it and you have to figure out what each one is just by feeling? It's one of those, but the bag is huge, and full of mostly non-euclidian shapes. For instance, I've got a non-euclidian chicken shape in my hand right now.

Guess that's a sign that it's time to visit the Chicken Lady again. I wonder what I'm doing tomorrow after school?

The Chicken Lady had two cups of tea ready when I arrived at her campsite. Just like she was expecting me. I assumed the chickens had told her. They were milling around with their masks on.

She looked at me and said "Creeping Charlie."

"I'm sorry what?"

"The tea. It's Creeping Charlie. Grows everywhere around here."

I realized that I wanted to tell her about the Chloroform Kids. I certainly wasn't going to tell any other adults about what happened, but somehow the woman who lived in a tent in the forest with masked chickens that told the future didn't count.

She asked me "Have you seen one in the flesh?"

I had just taken the first sip of my tea. It was horrible.

"No, just their tags around campus. And that car, but the windows were tinted."

She said "They sound like Witchfinder GPS types. And obviously there's chemicals involved. They obviously want to make that clear."

She got up to shoo the chickens back toward their pen. "They're part of the dissociative fallout of the Reality Accident. Meaning evaporates, and it leaves people dried up and mindless. Marionettes made from gristle and bone. They're left without energy, without POWER, so they need stimulants, whether it's hunting witches or huffing chloroform. But it's not really chloroform, I'm sure. That's just in stories. There's all kinds of new chemicals every day... don't they have somewhere at your school where they make them?"

I'm a science person, but this term all my science classes are theoretical. I hadn't had any reason to go to the labs. Till now, I guess.

I made a complaint to Bill Weeener, faculty head of the Scientia department, about not being able to access the northwest wing of the science labs. He told me the wing was officially "checked out" to a student named @Marthew17 for independent study in psychic cosmetics development. He framed it like it was a great thing about how Psyhigh encouraged innovation in psychic STEM, and shouldn't I be proud that the school offered such great opportunities...?

Whatever. Something seems super sketchy about it all, but I don't really feel like leading a criminal investigation. Isn't that what campus security is for? Or the PsyCops?

@Candi Wolfe and I even got our courage up to go driving last night. Thankfully, we saw no big black muscle cars and no Chloroform Kids. But definitely more of their H-C-CL tags out there if you know where to look.

Joyce (Candi's old hand-me-down Volvo) insisted on doing the driving. Candi kept her hands loosely on the steering wheel--just for looks--but that wheel was moving on its own the whole time. Gas and brakes too. After some cautious sneaking around on back streets, Joyce was anxious to take us up into the hills, and we ended up on the one they call Warlock Mountain. It's called that because once upon a time somebody said they saw a bunch of people in black robes gathered on the summit in some kind of ritual, calling down purple fire or lightning or something. Purple definitely is always part of the story whenever you hear it.

We didn't find any warlocks, but we did find a clearing with a boulder with a big iron spike driven into it. By then it was pretty dark and late though, and we didn't want some Chloroform Kids to suddenly appear, drifting in with their headlights off, quietly crunching over the gravel with their fat six rubber tires. So Candi took me home.

i. Complete a 500 word essay arguing either pro or con to the statement, "Adding more molecules to your own physical form is a moral and effective way to open yourself to new investment opportunities.

Con (ABSTRACT)

In a free moving market, with 602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules per share, Irrational Faraday Expectaion Theory predicts that uninhibited growth creates a zoo of bubble animals that will grow to fit the size of their container. Equal volumes of bubble animals at the same temperature and pressure (for instance poodles, giraffes, or mind shattering horrors from beyond) will consume one another until a massively monstrous bubble animal is created, with nothing left to consume but itself. At this point, Coulomb's inverse-square law implies that the very exciting charges that inhabit the bubble animal become very unexcited at the prospect of consuming itself eternally, and hence arrives at an undead state, in which dynamic psycho-emotional growth is impossible.

For this reason, addition of molecules alone ultimately creates a static-state existence resulting in life-death, which is neither a moral nor effective way to open oneself to new investment opportunities.


Full essay available for presentation. Includes bubble animal demonstration, including free samples for students.
#DEARBRANIGAN

My dad grew up in this town, and he went to Psyhigh back in the day. My grandparents are still in town too, and aunts and uncles and cousins, and my parents' friends. Which means lots of old people to entertain with my presence at various celebrations and dinners and get togethers.

Not all these old people are psychic. It's a mix. It didn't used to be as OK to be public about being psychic in the old days, so all of them are used to kind of not making a big deal about it.

But in a big group of them you can sure tell which ones are and which ones aren't. Well, Everybody's a Little Bit Psychic™ (as they say), but the ones who are more psychic than others are like soft leathery couches you sink down into when you start talking to them. Soft leathery octopus couches, and warm, but somehow aren't creepy. You can feel how ancient they are, but they don't mean you any harm. Quite the opposite, really. It's like they want to protect you, like they've put a little something of themselves inside you, and it's important that you live on so that little part of them can live on too... like thousands of little diamond eggs of wisdom, deep inside your psyche, just biding their time and ready to hatch one day, like a million little baby spiders made of pure psychic power.

Ok when I put it that way maybe it is a little creepy.

I ran into a skunk on the trail. Sort of.

I was on my way to visit to the Chicken Lady and realized my phone had fallen out of my pocket. I knew where it had fallen out because I had been looking through my pockets for some gum. It wasn't that far so I started walking back up the trail and got to where I it must have fallen out but I didn't see it, so I kept on walking and looking at the ground. It was getting dark and I knew it couldn't have been that far so I turned around and walked back down the trail, looking at the ground and the dirt and the rocks and the grass and weeds in the half dark but still couldn't spot it.

Then I smelled skunk.

I turned around and walked back up the trail, still not finding anything till I got back to where I turned around before. It was getting almost too dark to see anything, and the skunk smell was getting stronger. I was going to give up, and walked back down the trail again and suddenly found my phone right there in the middle of the trail, face down on a little bed of twigs and moss.

I picked it up to check for messages and it was already opened up to email. The screen was muddy with little paw prints and there was a message composed in it with no address. I assumed it must have gotten bounced around in my pocket with random word suggestions but it read:

"The game has been fixed since the latest update. The cork is rotten. The transmitter is compromised si no comprende. Get a job in terrestrial radio."

Wasn't there a project you could choose in Upward Mobility and the Modern Worker called Moving Up in 20th Century Media? How convenient. It doesn't sound very "modern" but I guess I need to take a work-study at the local radio station.

Who even listens to radio? In cars, I guess. @Candi Wolfe has a cassette adapter in her volvo, so we don't listen to radio there. Old people? Guys in their garages working on their pumped up Witchfinder GPS muscle cars?

I got my work-study at G-LUV, the radio station in town. Upward Mobility and the Modern Worker arranged it. I expected to see... well, people. Deejays and talk show hosts in a glass room with headphones at least. But it turns out it's entirely automated. There's nobody there at all. I let myself in with a code, and then I sit behind a desk. The station is playing, and there's a screen that has the schedule of what's on. It's all very shiny and black.

Nobody comes in. After the first hour or so I got out my phone, but then got an alert on the screen that phones were only allowed on break. That's when I noticed the camera that points right where I sit.

I doubt you've ever listened to G-LUV, but it's all very "positive and encouraging." None of the music is by anybody you've ever heard of, but it's all super life-affirming and "uplifting." And then every once in awhile a voice comes on and gives the station identification and says something like "You are someone" or "Don't worry, just ignore it" or "Just sleep, and everything will turn out great." It wasn't till the third day that I brought in bluetooth headphones and could listen to what I wanted.

Why did I take this job again?

I was putting in my hours at G-LUV radio, thinking about transferring to another work-study. Professor Branigan gave me a brochure for Ciudad-Rusa Public Radio, and all the noumenally aware robots there look really nice. But as I was reading through it I got a strange notification on the G-LUV dashboard screen:

SELF CLEANING MODE MALFUNCTION

INTAKE PORT 1168B

TECHNICAL SERVICE AGENT WACU 99784221 ACTIVATED

...and it proceeded to output longitude/latitude coordinates. Which I wrote down.

After work I mapped it. It was a place up in the hills, not far from where @Candi Wolfe and I like to drive sometimes. So I figured it sounded like a good adventure.

Now I'm wishing we'd never gone.

We followed dirt roads through the woods till we got to an installation. I assumed it was antennas, or boosters, or the kind of stuff I'd be learning about if this workstudy were any good. We parked Joyce down the road a little, then walked up a concrete path that led to what looked like a giant toaster.

As we got nearer to it, I noticed the ground was littered with trash. On closer inspection, it wasn't just trash--it was the contents of wallets. Starbucks gift cards, donut punch cards, some stray dollar bills and change... but mostly student IDs. Specifically, Psyhigh Student IDs. The first one I picked up was @EmilyDH. Then @C.Buzzington Jr., and @gwenstefunny. There were IDs for @TaylorKem and @Finnegan Tomko and @Beenie Weevil and lots more--all from students that all seemed to have "disappeared" from campus.

Just then, we heard a rumble and a roar from down the road and we slipped into the woods. Coming up the concrete path was an Wheeled Autonomous Cleaning Unit (a WACU). It must have been the one called in by G-LUV. Suddenly its flamethrowers roared to life, and all the debris--gift cards and student IDs alike--went up in a fiery poof.

My internship at G-LUV has gotten much more interesting... since I uncovered their network of soul-destroying transmission substations.

Sitting alone, day after day, in the soundproof, dust-free reception area of their otherwise unmanned and fully automated local office, I began to understand how to interpret some of the strange codes and symbols that appeared on the G-LUV dashboard screen. Longitude and latitude coordinates were easy to figure out, but the ARRRG (Automated Ratings, Reach, and Reaction Graph) was far more sinister than I originally suspected.

I'd been jotting down the geo-coordinates for weeks, and @Candi Wolfe and I have been taking weekend road trips in her self-possessed Volvo named Joyce to visit each one of them. The trips have been fun, taking us up into the hills and farmland all within a day's drive. Sometimes we pack lunches, and sometimes we find some creaky old hamburger stand out in the boonies.

It turns out the substations encircle the entire tri-city area in a regular tridecagon. That is, for those of you not paying attention in Arcane Geometry class, a 13-pointed star.

Well, it will be a 13 pointed star, once the last of the substations gets built. Currently there are just 12.

Candi's been doing the math (she pays even better attention in Arcane Geometry than I do) and the graphing, which ended up looking very much like the ARRRG map at work. Transposing those graphs onto a map of local news events, there is a direct correlation of gang reports involving the Chloroform Kids, Witchfinder GPS users, and other unexplained acts of violence at all the places where the connecting lines intersect.

And if you draw a line right through the center of the star? You guessed it--Psyhigh.

There's already an obvious symphony of violence and destruction directly related to the placement of these G-LUV substations. But what will happen when they build that 13th location? What will happen when the loop is closed? What is G-LUV really transmitting? Who is behind it?

I think I understand now why their office is unmanned.