Chapter 3

Two weeks passed, and we still weren't convinced we were ready. Mrs. Houhlihan came into our lives right about then, a slightly chubby but well-endowed brunette with a thorough understanding of what she called the Change Process. She'd studied ITIL, which was a 'best practices' library for the IT world, and walked us through what we were doing.

It helped that we had the clone in place, and had been running it in parallel for all tthat time It was a bit disconcerting to see myself walking hand-in-hand with Jared, but I soon got over it. I zipped in and out a few times, sampling life in the clone. It was like the other schools I'd been in, and quite frankly, I preferred Claiborne. The girls formed cliques, the boys flexed and strutted, and all of the angst a teenager had was obvious to us all.

The boys soon had really sappy grins on their faces, especially because Irene, Shannon and I, when Shannon did appear, relieved our sexual tensions after visiting the clone. I think even Jared liked that part. Shannon was up to her eyeballs in something, I knew but had promised her I wouldn't say, but she did make time to go over everything with us.

"Even the most skeptical parent will like this," she said after the last walk-through. "Of course they won't like that the history class isn't filled with the latest leftist cant."

"They try to be apolitical around here," Alex said.

"I know several prominent people who would be aghast that you absolved the English from the evils of slavery," she said. "And they should be. The Royal Navy destroyed the slave trade nearly single-handed, something conveniently forgotten by a lot of people."

I'd heard her go off on that subject in History, and couldn't help but add, "The people who are blaming the English are just after something to strike at."

"It makes them feel more moral than anyone else," Shannon said. "They do it even if they have to lie to themselves. They don't want to think that they're supporting evil. No person is evil in their own minds."

"Even Pol Pot and Mao?" Jared asked.

"Especially not them," Shannon shot back. "They were getting rid of bad people. That's a noble cause. Why they've even tried it in this country: certain speech is hateful, and only bad people do it. Of course since they make it a matter of legislation instead of commonly held and derived moral concepts, they can rule anything to be hate speech. The Canadians tried that a few years ago and it failed spectacularly in a court case. These people can even stand it on its head and arrest someone for being bad, and then justify it by labeling their speech as hateful."

"Is everything politics with you?" Jared asked.

"Mostly. It's the way I was brought up. That's the beauty of the dialectic. If you give it the right twist, you can justify anything. I've read my Lenin, I know how that works."

"Let's get back to our list of people," Alex said. "We can argue the politics of what we're doing at some other date."

"Mrs. Houhlihan did want to review it before we ran the execution program," I said.

"Actually, there were a lot of things she wanted to review before we went ahead," Jared said. "Let's go find her and talk it out."

We found Mrs. Houhlihan in the atrium. She and a male member of the school staff were going at it like bunnies. As we were out of the lab, that resonated with us. The roof was open, and warm air, sunshine, and the smell of the outside world sharpened out desires. I could feel the dampness on my thighs, and Jared was getting mighty stiff. We went off to one side and took each other to the moon. Alex and Shannon did the same, while Irene sat on the face of the man Mrs. Houhlihan was riding. It didn't get any work done, but it put everyone in a much better frame of mind.

After a second round, and a breather, we all retired to the lab to go over our work. Mrs. Houhlihan still had flushed cheeks from her romp, but she focused on the essentials of our plan.

"I think this will do," she said at last. "You could probably refine these for several more weeks, but I don't think you'd get much improvement. Let's move the first students this weekend."

"That fast?" Irene asked.

"We'll just move a small group," Mrs. Houhlihan said. "I'll check some records you're not privy to, and make a final list. It'll probably be no more than 20, all from what you've already given me."

"How do we select them?" Shannon asked. "No matter what criteria I use, we end up moving at least half of the students." She looked at Alex and Jared. "What's peculiar is that most of the ones on the lists I've prepared are boys."

"Boys are often a lot more puritanical than girls," Mrs. Houhlihan said. "I know that sounds counter intuitive, but if you consider most of the customs about sex, it makes sense."

"I don't follow your logic," Jared said.

"She means that a lot of the customs have grown up the way they have so the boy knows which baby is his," Irene said in an irritated tone. "I thought you knew that."

"It wasn't in anything I ever read," Jared said.

"A lot of people think women are the monogamous ones," Mrs. Houhlihan said. "We're taught that way. If you remove the restrictions we grew up with, a girl can cut loose and have sex just for the fun of it. Oh, sure, she'll have feelings toward one guy or another, but when you let her do it in a safe environment, and I mean socially as well as physically, when you encourage her to do it just for her own pleasure, the average girl will cut loose. She might limit herself to one guy socially, but she'll have sex with a lot of partners."

"Do you think that's true?" Jared asked.

Shannon, Irene and I looked at each other, and shrugged. What Mrs. Houhlihan said made sense in a way. I certainly didn't just have sex with Jared. There was a whole school full of boys, and a girl who didn't do her best to try them all was considered somewhat odd. In a way it was funny. In the clone, a girl who had sex was looked down on. Here she was considered a social odd ball if she didn't.

"Why don't we just let the snoops watch the clone?" Irene asked.

"Their parents will ask them about things that happened at school," Mrs. Houhlihan said. "And when it doesn't match what they saw there'll be a problem."

"So we have to do this for our own protection," Irene said, "and yet in doing it, we'll ruin what we have." She shook her head. "I don't like it."

"Nobody said it's a perfect world."

"What does that mean? It's just like always: a few are going to spoil it for the many."

"So what do you suggest?"

"That we find a way to only move kids who are being watched, and then only for that time."

"But what about the discrepancies in their stories?"

"Find a way to explain it to the kids," Alex said. "We'll have to reinforce things so they can't say anything, but that shouldn't be too hard."

"That's running a big risk."

Alex shrugged. "Of course it is. But somebody has to draw a line somewhere. If the parents are so concerned about what their kid does in school every day, then they shouldn't be here. They should be home-schooled so their controlling parent can rest assured that their little darling isn't getting taught something they object to."

"That takes in about half the kids in school," Shannon said. "Of course if they'd spent some time a few years ago paying attention to the course material things would never have gotten this far."

"Instead of complaining about it, Shannon, why don't you have some concrete solutions."

"Sound," Shannon said at once, shooting me a dark look. "Don't let them have a video."

"But they'd raise a fuss," Mrs. Houhlihan said.

"Tough. There are laws on the books preventing anyone from viewing a classroom and the teacher. That was passed when the teachers unions didn't want the parents to know the pap they were shoving down the kids' throats. But nothing was ever said about an audio pick-up. You can't have a kid carrying a wire, but other than that you're all right."

"If you say so."

"Have your lawyers look it up," Shannon said.

We all looked at each other again. "Let's do it," I finally said. "I like what we have."

"I was always afraid this project would put an end to Claiborne," Mrs. Houhlihan said. "This was my high school, and I don't want to see it closed."

The boys nodded, and so it was decided. We went back to work, focusing on the controls that kept a student from talking about what happened at school. We wanted to modify it so they could talk, just not about the nudity and sex.

While we worked we discussed the idea. I gradually realized that Mrs. Houhlihan was right. The controls on a girl were a lot more elaborate than those on a guy, and they were all social. It made me reflect on what I learned growing up. There were a lot of things that a girl just 'didn't do'. Take clothes. You had to find the right balance between revealing and covering up. If you went too far, something was said. The same with make-up. Too much was bad; too little was unheard of. It reminded me of an aunt who was deathly afraid of going out of her house without some make-up.

This took the next week or so.

Mrs. Houhlihan was right, there was a fuss. But Shannon was right, too. One parent with more money than brains, filed a lawsuit. It was thrown out in the preliminary hearing. And somebody filed a countersuit alleging that the first parent wanted to spy on the kids, and had some secret fetish. It quickly turned into a real can of worms, and we got lost in the confusion.

Mrs. Houhlihan was right in another way. The day we got word of the countersuit I decided to do a little testing on my own. I left the lab with the others, but when I got to the main floor I kept walking. It wasn't that I didn't want to have some fun with Alex and Jared, but I was in the mood for a little wildness.

I walked quickly, slowing when I got to the other side of the building. There was a collection of kids in an alcove. I walked up to the first unattended guy I saw and looked him square in the eye. "Want to?"

The next few seconds were a little confusing, but in the end I was on my side, sucking a boy, while another put it to me from behind. I had hands grasping my boobs, and I had my hand around a third boy, fondling and jacking him. It wasn't romantic, it was hardcore sex just for the sake of it.

The boys must not have gotten any in the last couple of hours. They ravaged me repeatedly. Two of them came in my mouth, the first flooding me with enough that it spilled down my chin. At least three came in me, maybe more. Things got a bit hazy there; I was in the middle of a nearly continuous climax so I wasn't taking notes. By the time we finished I had come in my hair and all over my face. More was dripping from my chin and boobs. I had it on my hips, my ass, and running down my legs. My jaw was tired from being stretched, and I was sore enough to worry if I could pee.

I felt marvelous.

In any other school there would have been a ring of people watching and all sorts of nasty comments. At Claiborne I got some looks, and a few comments about how messy I looked, but nothing else.

The way I figure it, there are really three parts to our brains. There's the part that tends to the body, and does all of the coordinating with muscle memory and stuff like that. There's the subconscious, and there's the conscious. I needed to figure some things out, and to do that I had to get the subconscious busy while the conscious part of my brain checked out. In the outside world you do that by entering a Zen like trance. In Claiborne you let your animal instincts governing sex and stuff like that take over.

I went back to the lab and just sat there for a bit, mess and all. I needed to get my equilibrium back before my next class, and I needed the time-compression to do that. By the time I emerged, I'd experienced 20-30 minutes of recovery, but only a handful of minutes had passed in Claiborne time. Then I found a shower.