Damn Greeks

Well, the brats are back and no mistake.  It used to be a quiet neighborhood, until it was invaded by the fratrats and sorwhores.  Two years ago there were a few college kids living on the street, three or four houses, quiet natured serious students for the most part.  Their parties were at most half a dozen friends, easy to live with, they were good neighbors.  No gripes with them at all. 

Then two years ago some rich frat daddy bought a house rather than pay rent, and the situation went south.  Of course the fratrat boy takes full advantage of having a huge old house built to house a large family to throw huge hundred head parties two or three times a semester, and well, of course someone from a competing house found out about the new neighborhood to abuse and had his rich daddy buy him a house at the other end of the street this year, and of course now for the permanent party folk just like for the serious students we're trapped in the middle while the revelers make sport out of seeing who can out shout the other in the middle of the night. 

It sucks.  There's no sense calling the cops, nothing ever happens, the rich fratdaddies have way to much clout for junior to get a ticket for disturbing the peace.  That's been well proven.  You just have to live with the noise and pick up their beer cans in the morning.  Well, ok, if that's how they want to play then I for one am ready to counterattack.

The problem kids don't live in the neighborhood, but everyone knows where they do live, they live in the big greek houses clustered tight in a relatively small region just southwest of the main campus.  The campus cops patrol that region like a prison camp, of course, and of course there's screamer emergency call boxes on every corner, and of course this is so because everyone who lives in the region has been fully indoctrinated with an immense dose of the compressed fears going on full phobias common to the middle going to upper class establishment sorts who send their kids to live greek in the first place.

Given the above set of facts I'm thinking it might be possible to utterly empty the greek section of town in a matter of only a couple of years, and do it without breaking any laws.  How?  An alliance between technology and psychology.  They'll want to leave, they'll be begging to go anywhere else, and if it's done correctly they won't even really know why.

I hit on this plan as a psych weapon to use against the superstitions of the Taliban in Afghanistan, but the same concept will work against the brats.  It involves crafting very small self contained audio systems engineered to present sounds to the world from a prerecorded library of sounds based on a logic grid of sounds heard.  In Afghanistan they'd have been deployed by air drop, and at random times in the night wail like banshees, but never from the same location, one would hear the other go silent and pick up the cry, a rolling wave of immortal agony making the canyons sound like the foot hills of hell itself. Now in Afghanistan they'd have been loud, and intermitent, reinforced by times the sky above lit up in arabic characters dripping blood red condemnations of the Taliban taken from the Koran, the illusion worked by high altitude deployment of aluminum particles imaged by ground and air based laser.  All stock technology stuff, and cheap by government standards, easily within reach of say Pink Floyd's or TSO's special effects crew.  But a bit of overkill to use on the brats. 

No, the ones I want to build and deploy will operate right at the threshold of perception, barely to be discerned on a quiet night, but ubiquitous, ever present, always active.  I want to deploy them by infiltrating the contract crews who do the yard maintenance for the greek houses, and build each unit to hide in plain sight within the environment everyone has seen so often they don't see it anymore.  It used to be a decorative chunk of river rock edging a flower bed, now it is one of my ghost units.  It used to be a solid steel cap on the fire hydrant hose port, but now it's just a bit thicker, still a fine steel cap for the hose port, and one of my ghost units as well.  With a bit of methodical audio engineering it shouldn't take that long to have enough units positioned through the region to saturate the area with essentially subliminal sound. 

Now what progam should the ghost units play for the brats?  The OSU fight song, of course, the voices of any OSU professor lecturing to any large class that can be caught with a decent microphone, any and every sound that might carry the association to OSU.  And of course, interwoven around and through and between the association triggers sound crafted or captured to tap all those fears and phobias the brats arrive with preloaded into their subconciouses.  Some actress' acadamy award winning beg and scream being raped, a real cry of pain captured in a hospital labor room, the wracking choke of death, the wail of the spirit doomed to haunt where it died untimely, the vocal tones of contempt and rejection heard in a thousand places by those whose heritage didn't position them as children of privilege. 

You get the picture.  They want to trash out my neighborhood, ruin the peace and quiet of those who actually live here with utter contempt thinking they're safe behind daddies' money?  Hey kid, two can play that game, and I don't need to make it loud to make it work.  You'll be wanting to go somewhere else in short order.  That or your shrink will be making a fortune off you trying to figure out where the nightmares are coming from.

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In post script, and in fairness:  they held it to a dull roar last night, not to bad all and all.  The street was choked with parked cars of course, but no screaming contest, doesn't appear to be to much litter left on the yards, no chunks of something in the gutter still floating on budweiser or baccardi's.  So... we'll see.  It's early in the semester now, and it did seem to get progressively worse as the semesters aged and the kid's arrived ever more overloaded with stress and anxiety.  If their end of semester parties are no worse than this one was maybe their actually becoming... nah.  That ain't likely to happen.  Just me trying to be optimistic.