Chapter 2: Displacement
As Felix drove towards the college, he glanced over at me and then back at the road. “Ash, could you open the glove box and grab the tape in there?”
“Uh, sure,” I said, opening the compartment and handing Felix the single cassette he had. He put it into the car's tape deck and an Ink Spots song started. Felix quietly hummed along to it as he pulled into the college parking lot and into the “Reserved for College Faculty” spot near the door. He paused the tape, ejected it, and as we headed into the college doors, he manually rewound the tape with a small screwdriver. “Hi, ma'am, we're looking for the office of admissions?” he asked the front desk person.
“Let me see, eh, 4th floor, room 405.”
“Thank you!”
After exiting the elevator, room 405 was just in front of us. Felix showed a badge of some kind to the person at that desk and asked to speak with the head of the department, who he was told was in room 405D. I had to say, the place was nice, just a shame that for whatever reason I was denied. I was really hoping Felix wouldn't force me into the class through some hacking or whatever, that this was just a misunderstanding. We finally got to sit down with the head of the office of admissions, a tall man with black hair and a blue suit with a white undershirt. “So how can I help you two?”
“Yes, I'm Felix, I don't think I need introduction around here, but one of my hopeful students got rejected from the school after a rather exemplary application, we were just wonderin' what was going on.”
“Well, Felix, we're deciding to step away from you and how you've been running the school and the town as a whole, we think we can do better as a school not just confined to a town, as a campus available to the world, and we have enough of your students.”
“What?!” Felix suddenly straightened out, a look of equal parts bewilderment and frustration on his face. He cleared his throat before stammering, “I mean-- er, what do you mean?”
“Well, Felix, it comes down to the logistics. When you're a town of, say, a few thousand people, and most college campuses have, say, 20,000 students, we're greatly limited in our outreach. We can only serve this one community, and to become a student they have to move into town. What about students in Portland? Eugene? Diamond? What about them, Felix?”
I was starting to lose interest in the logistics and started messing with the Modifier under the desk. I pulled the trigger and the entire room, the admissions head included, highlighted blue for an instant. I glanced down at the screen to see the last change was last night. I nudged Felix and showed him this information from under the desk, and as he finished an interjection about benefiting his community for a more hopeful future, I rolled the room back. Suddenly, the wallpaper had changed, the desk we were at was different, and the head of admissions was nowhere to be seen. “Wh-- Wait, was he--”
“Not the head of admissions, I guess,” I said, finishing Felix's statement.
“Then where is the actual person?”
“I dunno, I guess we could just ask.”
We headed back to the person at the desk in front of the doors and asked to see the head of admissions, and they pointed us to a completely different office, 405F. As we passed by room 405B, the door now read “Storage”. This person (who was surely the office head) greeted Felix warmly, understood his situation, and personally welcomed me to the college. I even got to sign up for classes for the fall quarter. As we left, Felix was trying to figure out why the change in the room changed so much. “The only thing I can think is that by setting that room as the office of admissions and having some guy fill that role and be pre-determined to deny you and other students, it changed the entire business structure of the college. I guess the easiest way to explain it would be like if you decided to order a soup at a restaurant and you get served it in a deep bowl with a spoon, if you suddenly went back and changed that order to a salad, you'd need a shallower dish and a fork instead. There's a few shortcuts like that in the town, sure, and while I don't know why someone would do this, I think you know who it already is.”
“Yeah,” I replied.
“But the bigger question is then what would Francisco and Twitch want with the town? This college is pretty clearly not for profit, free education just makes sense to me, so why mess with the college, with the students?”
“Do you think they're targeting me for always getting in their way? Francisco pretty clearly doesn't like me.”
Felix sighed. “I guess that's a possibility, but I sure hope that's not the case. Well, I guess it's time to drop you off back at home. Hope you enjoy your first quarter of college, Ash.”
“Alright, thanks for helping sort this one out Felix.”
The drive back home was very much like the drive to the college, with Felix inserting the freshly rewound tape into the deck and starting it. This time, a different song played, “New Way Out” from the Lemon Demon album Felix gave me a while back. “You put this on your tape?”
“Yeah, I recorded over side B the other day, and I couldn't get this song out of my head after that incident a few days ago. Sill sorry I broke the case that night.”
“It just snapped back together,” I replied.
“Oh, good! I haven't worked with CDs much. Actually, that reminds me, I actually am looking to get New Infinity backed up onto a newer format. A few thousand floppy disks made sense at the time, I could copy bits to them and sneak them out a few at a time, but now if everything were to go down, it would just be a pain to get everything back up.”
“Oh, neat. Were you thinking a flash drive, perhaps some magnetic tape backup thing?”
“Not sure yet. Well, here we are. Stay safe, Ash.”
Alright, Felix,” I said. As I headed back up the steps, I made absolutely sure I had the house key in hand, and sighed a bit when it worked on the first try.
ns 15.158.61.6da2
