Chapter Preview: Jailbreak!
Eustace Beauregard thinks he has a solution to all of the 22nd century's ills. He just needs people willing to imprison themselves to prove it.
We break now from the over-sexed world of power-broker pawns milling about the central business district, to the world of academia, which holds few similarities to what we’ve viewed thus far, save for the vigorous masturbation and occasional over-wiping.
Across town, there are two institutions of higher education, the Milwax College, ‘the’ being a light moniker tossed around by those who attend/attended classes there, and X State University, which despite its origin as a land-grant college in a sleepy agrarian township 125 years ago, was rechartered and moved to the subnation’s largest city and not its capital 118 years ago.
The proximity of the two schools might have led to rivalries seeded and/or intensified through athletic competition, but the students of the Milwax had little use for sport, much like the playthings of X State had little use for study.
So it was on an advertisement sliding across the counter glass inside Mulberry Street’s second-most-successful pancakery, which straddled the 36-meter shared boundary between the two institutions that these worlds would collide in ways that would forever alter a future comprising people like Deidre and Glover (not the law firm).
WANTED: TEST SUBJECTS FOR PRISON EXPERIMENT WHERE YOU MOST DEFINITELY WON’T GO CRAZY AND ABUSE PEOPLE
PRE-RACIALS NEED NOT APPLY[1]
The pancakery was the obvious place for the research project’s designer, Eustace Beauregard, who knew the difficulties such prerequisites present toward ‘casting the widest net possible.’
He had already learned that pre-racialized people were already more likely to volunteer for a prison-type experiment, where they might wield unlimited theoretical power over others they perceive as lesser (or better) through an inhumane racial lens—evidenced by the fact only three people across Eustace’s entire research club within the Milwax College passed said racialization screening. [2]
Upon the suggestion of his academic extracurricular adviser, Dr. P.I. Swillowing, Eustace would need to include members of the much larger, sexually profligate X State population if he wanted the best result possible. Any.
Competent local conglomerates had poured a lot of money into this experiment. A poor result would mean the end of his career prospects, assuredly.
The first three hours of the promotional campaign occur without incident, sadly. Only three people bothered to watch the flyers beneath their meal—or at least so far as Eustace could tell—he had to go to the bathroom a few times because he wasn’t used to drinking so much coffee and he may have missed someone interacting with the ads during those seven minutes out of one hundred eighty total he spent at the pancakery. Had he seen them interact with the advertisement scrolling by their flapjacks, he could have approached them and encouraged submission of a survey response.
By 11am, the pancakery’s closing time, Eustace realizes that such an establishment may not be the best place to find students who would’ve stayed up the entire prior evening night drinking, sexing, and drugging with members of various ethnographies before skipping class for more of the same.
The X State quad and student union are also equally bereft of coeds and interracials, interlopers and interlocuters.
‘Excuse me, but could you tell me where the college students are?’ Eustace says to the cashier at the Memorial Union’s Taco Bell Express.
The cashier’s warbled reply requires a request for clarification, but upon receiving an equally unintelligible second answer, Eustace nods and then walks away. He cannot stand seeing a Cheesy Gordita Crunch for twenty-five shekels without the possibility of a Baja Blast to wash it down.
A lot of good things died in the Coca-Pepsi merger.
Eustace walks across the street to a large administrative building with bigger windows and art displays in the foyer than any other building he’d entered that day, X State or otherwise. He takes the elevator up to the sixth floor, which stands about two floors above the fifth floor of nearby, comparable buildings.
The directory mentioned this being the office of the Dean of Student Life, so this appeared to be as good of place as any to a) adjudicate what stores (if any) X State students frequent in sufficient numbers to respond to his advertisement, and b) find out where X State students were, in general, today.
‘Is the dean in?’
‘What is this regarding?’ says a secretary with a sleek brow-piece with an expandable microphone branching out like an old-timey orthodontic headset.
‘Student Life.’
‘Hold, please.’
Eustace freezes, then three minutes later the secretary ushers him toward a sliding glass door. Odd, for the interior.
‘Come in, come in, young learner. Thank you for braving the cold to come speak to me today.’
The Dean is polishing a protein shake while Eustace can hear the toilet bowl filling from a recent flush in the adjacent private restroom.
‘Thank you for having me, Dean.’
‘How can I help you?’ she says, eyes wide and expectant.
‘There are no students out today; the school is bare.’
‘You didn’t get the email that it is Staff Appreciation Day?’ she says, her voice lowering.
Eustace gulps. ‘No, no email.’
A section of lip, just at the corner of the Dean’s mouth, wobbles. Then it stops. ‘I can resend it. Just tell me your EdSync username.’
‘I don’t—I don’t have an X State username, exactly.’
‘I am the Dean of Student Life. I cannot send an email if you aren’t a student. Why have you wasted my time?’
‘I didn’t mean to; I just told your secretary I had a question about Student Life.’
The Dean stops her stalking towards the door, and snaps erect, beaming. ‘Then why didn’t you say so?’
‘I’m trying to enlist the help of X State students in my research experiment… I go to Milwax College. My name is Eustace Beauregard.’
‘Well, in that case, Eustace, let me explain one of my favorite X State traditions… Staff Appreciation Day!’
‘What’s that?’
‘It all started from an idea I got years ago when I worked a thankless job in the university mailroom. I was four months pregnant with my third child, and my husband hadn’t yet told me about his mistress. I was very hurt when I kept imagining what all the students who said nothing to me when I delivered the mail were really thinking. “What a cow—that stupid woman who delivers the mail!” Or maybe, “If campus police weren’t around, I would beat her and her unborn baby!” Terrible, right?’
‘Sure is.’
‘I vowed that when I became Dean of Student Life, once a year, I would have the students assigned to a campus job for a day!’
‘So, the person taking my order at the Taco Bell Express was a student held back from class? What do the professors do all day?’
‘Why they stay at home, with their faithful spouses, of course!’ says the Dean, wiping away a tear, indiscernible in causation.
‘Wow, that’s…different. I didn’t know that.’
‘Of course, there are opt-outs. Most post-racialized students didn’t want to acknowledge the power structure needed to invert the client-server model inherent in this institution to begin with. They’d rather stay at home on a day like today too, which is fine by me! As long as I can afford the staff this gesture that may or may not be interpreted as kind, depending on their viewpoint!’
‘So if it’s Staff Appreciation Day, why aren’t you at home?’
‘I am at home!’
And this is when Eustace notices the woman is too young and taught to have had her third live-birthed child years ago.
‘You said post-racialized students typically refrain from participating in Staff Appreciation Day?’
‘Uh-huh,’ the Dean says, checking her watch.
‘Would you give me the chance to email those students? I need post-racials to assist in a research experiment I’m conducting.’
‘What kind of experiment?’
‘It’s a prison experiment. I think I know why prior ones have failed—it has something to do with ideology.’
‘Prison, you say? Do you have a counter ad?’ the Dean says as she sits back hunting her desktop for the flyer to pass.
[1] ‘APPLY’ button links to the Milwax College’s Amateur Research Club Racialization Survey (Fall 2106 edition): a prerequisite for participating in Eustaces’s research experiment A Foray into the Epistemological Roots of Inequity and the Establishment of Corrective Ethics in Systemic Rehabilitation.
[2] Himself not included.