C.a.r.p.

Part Ten - Summer Break (Junior → Senior Year)

The last free summer I was ever going to have. That was my line of thinking going into the summer break between junior and senior year. I wanted to relax. I needed to destress and not focus on what chaos I'd seen just a few short months ago. I wanted to have the season open, as open as I could get it. But the rules still applied. I could only be off campus for a week at a time, before coming back to the campus to check in.

(For what it's worth, yes, for a while I did suspect that we were being treated with chemicals via food, water or oxygen, but I spent a good part of the first month of my last summer break disproving that. We tested the air in our dorm rooms, we installed air purifiers, we avoided the cafeteria food for a month, and we only drank bottled water that we bought ourselves. And we tested our body's chemistry regularly. For anyone who asked, we passed it off as a training regimen that Julia was going through and told everyone that we were doing it with her as an act of solidarity. But we found nothing. That said, my current line of thinking is that whatever chemicals we were exposed to, it was during our freshman year, and had had years to settle into our systems.)

In early July, however, I was sent an email inviting me to go to Dr. Igarashi's office, and I can tell you, I was definitely nervous as all hell. I'd gotten very good at controlling my body's subtle tells and giveaways, but not even the most accomplished of us is perfect, and I knew that if the Doctor suspected that I was aware she'd been involved in the death of Will Bierko, and possibly several others, I would join them in their concrete pillar tombs.

All the girls offered to go with me, but I told them if they all showed up, we were only going to look even more suspicious, so I decided to take just Chelsea with me, since she was easily the best of the three at keeping my emotional side in check. So, on a Monday afternoon, the two of us went to visit the Doctor in her office.

I'd been to Dr. Igarashi's office several times over the years, and each time, it seemed like it got a little bigger, a little more ostentatious, a little more preening, as if her success was being translated into comfort and wealth around her for display. I found it a little telling, but of course I kept that insight to myself. I figured pointing out that the young and hungry Doctor who had recruited me to her college had gotten a touch lax and self-indulgent to her face would've only gotten me in the very trouble I was working to avoid.

The furniture, the views, the artwork - each time I came to see her, it all got a little bit more pretentious, public focused rather than for the simple joys of things. It was less and less of her on display and more and more of the image she wanted to portray. Still, I couldn't tell how much of herself she was losing to the false front she was wearing for the edification of those she brought here.

"Hello, Doctor," I said to her with a smile. "I'm sure you remember my emotional partner, Chelsea."

"Of course I do," Doctor Igarashi said, taking Chelsea's hand and shaking it. "I recruited her myself specifically for you, Josh, so I'm glad to hear you two are working out so well. I heard you and Abigail had a bit of a rocky start, but it sounds like you two are on the same page these days."

"Abi's got quite the head of steam on her about what she wants to do with her life, and sometimes it takes all three of us to bring her back down a bit to earth, to make sure she isn't making plans beyond her reach."

"I thought I taught you nothing was beyond your reaches, Josh," the older woman said to me with a little grin that made the pit want to fall out of my stomach, but I held my ground.

"No, you taught us that

nearly

nothing was beyond our reaches, and how to tell the difference between the impossible and the highly unlikely, Doctor," I said, trying to use my patient smile, as if to imply that I could tell she was testing me, because of course she was.

Everything was a test.

"Very good, Josh," she said approvingly. "You always have been one of the brightest students here. That's particularly why I invited you here today, to discuss an opportunity that's become available to you, well, to

us

, per se,

through

you."

"I'm afraid I don't understand, Doctor."

"I'm sure it's no secret to you that they're filming an adaptation of your novel, 'Last of the Luddites,' right now, yes?"

I remember laughing a little bit, simply because it felt for once in my life that Dr. Igarashi

didn't

know everything about me before I told her. "Well, I was aware they purchased the film rights, and that an adaptation was in the works, but not that it had gotten so far as to already be in the filming stages," I said to her. "When I sold the rights to the book, I figured it would be best if I simply took a maximally hands-off approach, so that I could concentrate on my schoolwork, and, more importantly, so I didn't become disillusioned with what they were doing to my story. I didn't want script review, I didn't want actor approval - in fact, I told my literary agent specifically

not

to tell me anything about it until it was approaching premiere, or, at the absolute earliest, when they had a first cut of the movie, something I could see and offer feedback on. Beyond that, I'm afraid I don't really know anything about it."

"I, by contrast, know quite a

lot

about it, Josh, and that's why I've invited you here. I want to make you a... rather unique offer. A chance for you and your whole pod to spend three or four consecutive weeks off campus, no returning to campus at any time during the middle of it."

"That's... can I ask why?"

"I'd like to deploy you to their film set, Josh," she said with a slight sigh. "One of the producers on the film is an old friend of mine, and he's worried that they've screwed something up, and they aren't sure if it's in the script or in the actor's performances or... they don't want to mess it up, and I don't want them to either. They reached out to me to ask if they could have you come down and stick around for the entirety of what remains of their shooting schedule. They'll rent out a house for you, provide daily transportation to and from the set, all your meals, completely comped."

"Hmmm," I said, even though in my head I was already thinking of how I was going to tell Abi and Julia that we were going to spend a month in Hollywood. "Let me ask one key question, because if it's cast wrong, there isn't a whole lot I can do with it - who're the main actors involved?"

"Tom Skerritt, Matt Damon, Natasha Henstridge, Rene Russo and Angela Bedlam as the reporter investigating the story," Doctor Igarashi said. "And Chow Yun-Fat is playing Bedlam's editor at the paper, which is surprising, since I thought he only did Hong Kong films."

"Who's directing? Don't tell me they got Tony Scott or another of those crazy shaky-cam directors to film it."

"No no... a guy who's known for making smaller, more intense pictures, although he usually directs his own writing. David Mamet."

That certainly caught my attention, because regardless of what

you

think, I consider Mamet one of the greatest writers of dialogue in the business, and if he had adapted my book and was having trouble with it, I definitely wanted to see what he and I could get when we put our heads together. "House of Games" is a criminally underrated movie, and he'd just a few years back done another film called "The Spanish Prisoner" that I adored. Based on that, I assessed that there was enough potential for them to make a good adaptation of the book, if they could nail the tone right, and hone on the rather fine tightrope I'd walked between black comedy and drama.

"Forgive me for asking what might be a rather rude question, but this seems more like a request from an old friend," I said to her. "What's your

actual

motivation behind wanting to dispatch me to the set?"

She laughed at me, nodding her head as if she'd been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. "I need to remember you're not the young high school senior I first met years ago. You've gotten extremely perceptive as you've gotten older. Much more insightful than many of your fellow classmates, at least when it comes to human nature."

"I'm a writer, Doctor Igarashi," I told her. "It's an essential part of my job to be able to find insight in those I see around me, so I can convert that into meaningful motivations in my stories."

"C.A.R.P. is one of the major investors in the adaptation of "Last of the Luddites," Josh, and if it does well, the Academy stands to profit quite significantly from it," she said. "It was a gamble I felt comfortable taking, once we saw that cast list, and now that they're a little nervous, I want to do everything we can to allay those fears and right the ship once more, as it were."

"I've never been on a film set before, nor was I writing the book with a screen translation in mind, so I don't know how much I can help, but I can try and do a crash course on the way there and see if I can offer any insight that will help them get it back on track."

"It's

your

book, Joshua," Dr. Igarashi told me. "You more than anyone would know how to salvage it. As long as you feel comfortable with that, I can arrange a car to take you and your pod to SFO today, and you won't be expected back until filming has wrapped up."

"They will, of course, be paying me for my time?"

"Naturally, Josh. You'll be fully taken care of."

I remember nodding. "Give me an hour to gather everyone up, let them get packed and then send a limo over to pick us up."

"Why a limo and not simply a cab?"

"I'm fairly certain my partners will not pack lightly if we're going to be there a month or two," I said with a grin as Chelsea and I stood up and headed out of the office.

True to her word, within an hour Dr. Igarashi had a large limo waiting to drive us to SFO. We flew first class down to Los Angeles, and when we arrived, there was a limo driver waiting to pick us up and take us from the airport over to the studio lot, saying that the director wanted to meet with me immediately, so I could watch the dailies of what they'd already filmed and get started thinking about what was wrong.

I'd read a book on screenwriting on the plane ride down, and had spent the drive from the airport to the studio thinking about how to fix the film, and once I started watching the dailies, it was completely obvious - so much of what I'd done in the book had been voiced internally through the narration of three protagonists - the young upstart raider, the old corporate loyalist and the eager young reporter trying to cover both sides fairly. Without those three narrative voices guiding the project, so much of the biting humor was lost and it didn't feel like a comedy anymore.

My recommendation, my first recommendation anyway, was to add three voice-over narrations, and also to consider using color palettes to help differentiate whose perspective any individual scene was being presented from. That meant using lens filters, which could be added in post for the scenes they'd already shot. I told them that for the next few days, I would begin extracting what needed to be converted into voice over, and that we could take a day off from their shooting schedule to record some test voice over work that they could drop in over the dailies and get a sense of whether or not it helped.

If you've seen the movie, and I assume you have, you know that both of those decisions turned out to be key parts of the final movie and were cited by many critics as 'an element that shouldn't work, but somehow fits perfectly.' Morgan Freeman had done it in 'The Shawshank Redemption,' but that film hadn't quite elevated to classic status yet, and it only had one voiceover while we were using three, something that's still considered a rather daring move by us.

The first few days on set were... rather strange. The first day or so, it almost felt like nobody even noticed I was around, as I was paying attention to the actor's performances, making notes on how my dialogue had been adapted, and I noticed that some of the things that characters thought in the book needed to be voiced in the dialogue, and not in narration for just the audience. So I started giving the director notes. After a few days of that, the director told me that if I had further dialogue changes, I should just start revising the scripts beforehand, so I got to work on that.

By week two, we had gone from white pages to blue pages to green pages to pink pages as I essentially took the script the studio had and reworked it by half, never once adding anything that I hadn't put on the page in the book already, just repackaging it in new and interesting ways.

At first, the actors did a

lot

of grumbling, calling me a prima donna, saying I was too precious with my work, but day by day, I could feel them coming around, as the revisions helped scenes make more sense and land better. I could feel them starting to trust me, starting to respect that I was doing what I could help

them

look better, to make the project better.

By the third week, I'd finished all my major revisions to the script, we'd tried out the triple narrator voice-over idea (along with the accompanying visual stylings) and found that it worked, and I was suddenly stuck with very little to do, mostly just watching scenes, and helping actors adjust lines of dialogue if they had trouble saying them.

Looking back, that might have been the first point when I realized that Dr. Igarashi might have done something to our minds early on at C.A.R.P., given us abilities that we never quite realized we were tapping into.

When I'd first arrived on set, I'd literally been able to

feel

the tension floating around me, not in

my

mind, but in the minds of all the others I encountered. I remember feeling like I was willing them to relax, to desensitize to the stress, to see me as someone there to fix the problem for them, and each day I went home from set, I passed out like a lightbulb, like I'd run a goddamn marathon, when really I'd just been sitting around a set all day. But each day that followed, I could feel like that tension had been lessened marginally, and I remember wondering if I had had any impact on that, consciously or unconsciously.

One of the things I'd noticed in the spring semester was that those of us who had been at C.A.R.P. since the beginning had a sort of

presence

around us, when we tried. I had begun referring to it with the girls as

The Influence

.

At first, I'd wanted to attribute it to charisma, just natural charm and the mental insight and acuity of those of us who'd studied human nature for the past three years, but somewhere along the way it became clear to me that it definitely went past that, that it was a skill all of us C.A.R.P. originals possessed, and that we had it to varying degrees.

On set, I could literally

feel

my mind starting to rip away the stress from the actors and crew, replacing it with confidence. After the three weeks of working on building that confidence up for them, and fixing their script for them, I could finally show up to work and relax.

Yes, Agent Shetterly, I realize how fantastical it sounds, the idea of just using one's mind to alter brain chemistry, to implant thoughts inside of someone's head, but that's something that we, the alphas of C.A.R.P., at least the first class, can do, just that precisely. I've gotten pretty good at it, too. I can dig an idea in the back of someone's subconscious and they'll think they thought of it themselves. I'm certainly not first in my class at that ability, but I've gotten pretty good at using it when I need to.

You do that, Agent Shetterly. We'll see you in just a few minutes then.

...

Now that he's out of the room, I just implanted an idea for him to go and get us soft drinks from the vending machine, and I let him consciously know I planted that idea there, but what he doesn't know that I

also

implanted is he's going to bring me the wrong drink first, putting up a Coke Zero on the table before revealing he

also

brought an actual Coke to the table, to prove to himself that he still has some sense of willpower. Don't worry, you'll see it all for yourself in just a couple of minutes.

He'll be very proud of himself for resisting at first, until the snickers and giggles of you agents will give it away, and then he'll be both very cross and very frightened, but he'll be nervous that I'll do it to him again, so he'll sit down quietly and not bring it up further.

No, I can't see the future, but I've done this party trick a few times before and it inevitably ends the same way, and what I've told you again and again I'm

excellent

at is pattern recognition.

Alright, ask your questions, Assistant Director Caulfield, and I'll answer them.

Right, sounds like you've got a handful there, so let me take them one at a time - first and perhaps most importantly, I can't

make

anyone commit acts of violence against themselves or others, in explicit or even implicit detail. That's not necessarily true for all the C.A.R.P. grads, as I'm sure you may have noticed, but it certainly is true for

most

of us.

Dr. Igarashi would tell the graduating class some eight months later about The Influence, how each of us in the graduating class had it, and there were three scales on which it was graded - Power, Duration and Reach. My abilities, it turns out, are a 6 out of 10 on the power scale, a 9 out of 10 on the duration scale and a 2 out of 10 on the reach scale. As it turned out, most of us scored between 4 and 7 on the power scale, with the number of students above that being very few. Those students who did score above that, however, scored incredibly

low

on the other two scales. So yes, if you're asking me, are there people from C.A.R.P. who could make someone commit an act of violence, I must reluctantly confirm those people do exist, but they would need to be basically standing right next to someone, and the compulsion would pass within less than a minute.

The most powerful in The Influence can only do things in short bursts. For the career paths those people have chosen, those skills suit them well. After all, once you have gotten a password from someone's brain, what further use do you have for them, if you were going to kill them anyway?

I'm exceptional in the category of duration, meaning that anything I have people do can last for long periods of time, because I can't make them really do anything they wouldn't normally do with a little bit of coaxing. I also have to be right next to them when I plant the suggestion. But I can make it last, and I can set up things that won't trigger for days, weeks, months... maybe even years, although I've never tested anything that far out.

Ah, look, Agent Shetterly is back. A Coke Zero? Ha ha. Yes yes, very funny. Ah, I see, you brought me a real Coke as well. No no, pay them all no mind. They're just intrigued by your actions.

To get back to my story, after the first three weeks, I had mostly completed the task as it had been assigned, with just minor tweaks being made during day-to-day filming, I could spend the time observing what people were up to, and how they interacted.

It's also how I ended up having a summer romance with Angela Bedlam. I'd realized that I had the ability to induce a sense of calmness on the set, and so Abi challenged me to see if I could induce other emotions in people. Since the ability felt new and raw, I wanted to be very careful about how I deployed it, so I let the idea roll around in my head for an entire week before I did anything with it.