So I don’t know if it’s cool or not to go with code names at this school but I wanted a clean break with my old school, the Woodrow Bishop Help Center Training Academy.

When the Army of Kid Journalists released the documents, the writing was on the wall and we all knew the school would be shut down. So we took new identities and transferred to other schools. I applied to like 100 schools, because of my energy issues, includung Fusion Economics High School (evil conspiracy high school more like it) and Deeply Held Passionate Beliefs High School (posers) and Rumble Cat Prep (too rough) and Make-a-Scene High (too drama) but I just know Psyhigh is the right place for me and to blossom into the psychic I was always meant to be!

Join me, won’t you?

It really was a shame what happened at Woodrow Bishop Help Center Training Academy. I mean, obviously, because students like me and Chrysanthemum Jones and The Squeaker (also using a code name now) had to find whole new schools, but also because what was happening at Woodrow Bishop was very special. It was a trade school, but it was also a school of healing arts, which is what working in a help center is really all about.

Maybe if the school had promoted that fact more they could have stayed in honest business and not run into the trouble that they did.

Do you know I got to use my healing powers today?

There was a man with a big black goat on a leash. Naturally I like goats. But this man was being mean to his goat. He had it at the grocery store and nobody else could see it. He tugged it around on its leash like a mean guy and the goat didn't like it and all the people around him could tell. Plus, the smell. Unhappy goats have a special smell.

He tugged the goat down the aisle and it knocked over a Mountain Dew display. With its butt. This just made the man meaner. And the goat smellier. Everybody was frowning.

"Excuse me do you know where the corn meal is?" I asked him very sweetly.

"Hnnnn? No."

"I want to make cornbread."

He stared at me.

"To eat with honey."

He stared at me more.

"You know. Honey? Huuuuunneeeeee?" and I made a buzzing sound and moved my hands like a bee.

"Honey?"

"Yes! Honey! You know--in the bottle shaped like a bear?"

"Bear?"

"Yes! Bear! Shaped like this!"

And I made the shape of the bear bottle in the air with my hands.

He stared at me.

"MAKE THE SHAPE OF THE BEAR WITH YOUR HANDS!"

And right away with both of his hands he made the wavy two blob vase shape of the bear shaped bottle of honey in the air between us.

That's when I grabbed the leash of that black goat and got on out of there.

One thing I did not like about the Woodrow Bishop Help Center Training Academy was being put in the Time Box. It was their polite way of punishment. If you gave people too much help the shift manger would say “We’re going to have to Time Box that” and part of you would be trapped in a place outside of time and space, sort of like being in detention, but forever. After a few dozen Time Boxings you find the majority of your being cut off from reality and all you could do was read the script and not really offer the healing arts.

That’s a part of what went wrong at the Woodrow Bishop Help Center Training Academy.

Learning the healing arts at Woodrow Bishop Help Center Training Academy really gave me insights into people. In everyday life you’re taught to take people at face value, and ignore all the rich data that’s there in front of your third eye.

“OK class, open your books to page 138.”

The teacher has unresolved issues about their childhood, and now their parents are aging.

“Chrysanthemum Jones, please summarize the reading.”

The teacher uses Chrysanthemum as a proxy for himself as a student, trying to leverage Chrysanthemum‘s lack of confidence and borderline performance into a public failure that he can relive but as the outside god-like perspective, enjoying his own punishment as representative performance.

Chrysanthemum begins to falter. Of course she didn’t do the reading.

“Mr. Sadisme?”

“Please don’t interrupt, Energetica.”

“But Mr. Sadisme, there are worms growing out of my brain.”

I show him my hands full of tubeworms, projected through my imagicore.

“I, uh, well, go to the nurse’s office at once.”

The class erupts with uncomfortable laughter. Mr. Sadisme is forced to take another approach.

Creating a diversion is always an excellent first option to this kind of problem solving.

People say the Woodrow Bishop Help Center Training Academy couldn’t have made a difference, and that the AIs have already written the past, present, and future, and so there was never any choice but to go with the flow, free market capitalism, etc, etc.

I say that’s crap. If the resources had actually been focused on helping and healing, that would have built humans into the system by design. Instead, since the plan was specifically NOT to help anyone and just build up more and more noise in the system, and make more and more money by creating more work and recommending bigger and more elaborate systems to “fix” the problems they were helping to create, it sought only to hasten a malevolent AI dictatorship.

It’s all in the report from the Army of Kid Journalists. You can read it online for yourself.

One secret of the healing arts is about seeing the big picture. When you're in the zone, your perception expands beyond just focusing on what's in front of you, moment to moment. You begin to see the subject like a figure in a doll house, the rooms and floor plans opening up around them, expanding into the terraced landscaping of the surrounding world.

But it's not about modeling--you're not making a simulated copy. It's the real thing.

There are general dynamics in the system that play a role in any individual experience. Common failure points, both in the natural environment and the human-created environment inside of it. You get a vocabulary of kinks and pitfalls, and the ability to track the points between them.

Sometimes the scenery gets to look mighty familiar though. Like it was all made in the same place. The furniture, the trees, the three-eyed stags leaping over the edge of the rim...

Like it was all made in the same... factory?

I started paying more attention to the fine print in the big picture. It's the hyper-reality zone where a Help Center Healing Arts Technician does all their work--the burning reality of every true thing... the buildings, the streets, the rolling landscape filled with beatific sheep and puffy clouds and cyclopes .

The fine print is on the hyper-real trucks that go by, the billboards, occasional graffiti, the names of grocery stores, a manufacturer of the hyper-real foods...

Woodrow Bishop's name is on everything. The gum, the magazines, the soft drinks. If you look closely enough everything's all made up of little woodrowbishopwoodrowbishops everywhere.

I see now the true scope of the schemes committed by the academy. It wasn't merely manufacturing reality and selling it off in wait times, cashing in on creating boredom and despair. It was manufacturing occupants of that reality, to continue its vision, replicate its mission.

It made me what I am.


It's time to truly see over that ridge, where the giants ride air balloons and the kirin glide. There's only one way out of Woodrow Bishop town, and it's the same distance away in any direction.

I'm finding out what's over the edge.