Command students to live better. Maybe some other people too?

"As I was saying," said Frank, cracking his neck, "we've been waiting a couple years to put this plan into practice. It was all theoretical until we identified you, though we'd been considering other options until you showed up on our radar and made us re-evaluate our options. Then we had to wait for you to become eighteen, then we figured why not wait until you got back to school?"

"The point?" I tilted my head and blinked once, slowly.

"Ah, right, the point! We're starting a class 3-F for students eighteen and up who have gone into debt to keep up their education, but are already so badly off academically that we can call their debt anytime and reference their poor performance as supporting reasoning for them becoming dropouts. We want you to be in class 3-F. You'll need to keep up somewhat on your studies, but the goal is for you to take charge of those dropouts and **** them to make their lives better. How you do that is up to you. You can take ownership of them, in fact we encourage it so you can get used to the idea, but we're curious if you can make them improve without applying directives on them using the Life Plan app. If you do we don't care, we want to study your methods and techniques, not **** you to make any decisions."

He leaned in across the table, half-standing. "Then we want to see what you can do to improve some other lives. Probably starting with the faculty, who already would be full dropouts if we hadn't offered them reprieves. They're ours to do with as we please. If you want we'll make them all dropouts tomorrow, and you can register them as yours whenever you want. We've set up something very special for you on your Life Plan app to make that easy, but it's rather beside the point so I think we can discuss it later. For now just know that we're offering you a job, and a full ride education here and wherever you want to go after Golden Dawn for the chance to study you. The actual progress you make on your property will be rewarded with a paycheck too, can't have our prime experimental subject wanting for the basic luxuries. Understand that the more of our dropouts you're helping, the more you get paid. And all of class 3-F will be dropouts, whether you want to take possession of them or not."

I had no doubt that was part of the test. Would I overextend myself by taking too many of them as property? Or would it be the only efficient way to make them all improve?

I pointedly looked at the camera in the corner of the room. No doubt the reason I'd received the app notification so quickly. "You'll be watching my progress." It wasn't a question.

"Every second we can," agreed Frank, excitement evident in his eyes and the feverish glint in his cheeks.

"No cameras in my mom's room. Or mine. You can watch the rest of the house if you throw in a stipend for my mom so she doesn't have to work if she doesn't want to, or I don't want her to. No audio unless I specifically have a student over to my house though. And I get access to the raw feeds so I can check that you're being honest — and so I can watch people in the school as easily as you can."

"Huh." Frank appeared actually surprised, his mouth opened halfway.

In the corner principal Sanada laughed lightly. I'd almost forgotten she was there. I looked over, and she winked at me with one large blue-grey eye. Come to think of it, faculty would include her, wouldn't it?

"Deal Andrew," said Frank after a moment, nodding sharply, "it'll be undeniably useful to monitor any of your dropouts in your home. But then I want something else, feeds in the homes of everyone who becomes your property. With audio, unless you deactivate it from your feed — we've got an app for that," he said, without an ounce of sarcasm, "I think you should be able to get some privacy when dealing with them if you really feel you need to. You can shut off the video temporarily too, how about that?"

"Home extension." I leaned back. "If I want any of my possessions," the word felt awkward in my mouth, "to live with me, your people foot the bill to expand the house. If I end up needing too much more space, the new house is on LaRose."

Frank started scribbling notes down on a piece of loose paper. "We'll have to set minimums for that. You can't have every possession you claim living with you, not yet at least. I'm sure that can be renegotiated if you were to work with us on a more permanent basis, but for now your contract is for 12 months. We actually want you to go to university if that's where your path takes you, and will want to negotiate some kind of analysis of you during that time, but later. Once we know if you're even going."

That did bring up something important. Made me think just a bit more. "How does this all work with the right of dropouts to pick their custodians? And are you just going to take them all away from me once the year's over?"

"Oh, no Andrew," Frank grabbed a hefty pile of papers from out of the briefcase and slid them to me, "it's all in the full contract. It's like a court-ordered custodian, the normal process. To get it changed they either need a priority custodian — like a direct family member not in debt, which for these folks is only possible if they have a younger sibling who'll come of age without going through our institutions — or you need to be considered abusive towards them. You get special consideration from us as their owner that will make other claims powerless against you though, we have personal stake in these dropouts and LaRose has a lot of pull in the Life Plan Correction as a whole. So unless you're a sick fuck and start causing real damage you should have anyone you want for life, and we'll still get to learn something if you go too far, so. . .," he looked up, "do that if you want, we want to know everything you can show us. As for us taking them away, we'll be transferring our legal right to control them to you when you take possession. That's a condition listed in the contracts. Speaking of."

Frank picked up his phone and dialed someone. Then he dropped it on the table and started talking, the faint hint of an earpiece showing that he was wired up with some very sleek communications gear.

"You heard the subject's conditions right? Good, get me the revised contract conditions ASAP. We never imagined he'd offer video in subject housing, it's worth everything he asked for. Yes. Yes! Good, I better have copies in five minutes."

He hung up. "Now we just wait Andrew, and you sign these papers, and I can welcome you to project Helpful Asset Researching Enduring Management. HAREM for short."