Partly Cloudy, 64°
Every school has a few urban myths, superstitions, and secret societies that everyone knows about but no one has the guts to speak about openly. Yale has Skull and Bones, Harvard has their infamously sinister debate/world domination team, and Brown has the EMS. What appears to outsiders and na've freshmen to be a straightforward emergency response team for the Brown community is, in reality, a local cell for an illicit international organization known only as The Conglomerate.
The Conglomerate is and has been for centuries involved in all manner of activities with only the goal of gaining more money and power. It was The Conglomerate that engineered the presidency of Gerald Ford, who was never legally elected to any national post. Although this was The Conglomerate's greatest achievement to date (with Ford in power they virtually controlled the world's most powerful nation), history has often born their mark.
The Neolithic Revolution? A Conglomerate plot to speed the evolution of virulent pathogens in urban environments. Jethro Tull's seed-drill? Another plot, this time to supply a name for Ian Anderson's progressive rock band (of whom The Conglomerate are die-hard fans, even owning the codpiece worn by Anderson throughout much of the 1970's) 350 years in the future. Even Roberto Begnini's 1997 move Life is Beautiful was engineered by The Conglomerate, although their goals here are less clear.
At Brown, The Conglomerate's goal is slightly less ambitious but just as nefarious as any of their other ventures. Through the EMS, The Conglomerate has been harvesting students' organs for sale on a booming international market. They chose Brown as their center of operations because, as we all can attest to, we have the tastiest organs, even when compared to our fellow Ivy Leaguers, who are also known for their deliciously supple innards. That's right: these organs aren't for sale for transplant, but as food products valued by the demi-human, vampirical members of the conglomeratory bureaucracy.
Many students have woken up after a night of heavy drinking to realize that they had been so sick as to need medical care and, as a result, were now soaking in a tub of ice, short an organ or two. This, too, was no accident. Up until The Conglomerate saw the benefit of harvesting from inebriated students, alcohol was seen as uncool and shunned unanimously by college students in favor of rousing games of bridge and Parcheesi. The Conglomerate popularized the recreational use of alcohol for the sole purpose of expanding the role of the campus EMS to make the job of stealing our organs easier and more efficient.
The most common removal is the kidney, of course, but there are a significant number of students who have woken up sans liver, stomach, kneecaps, or even brain. This practice has acted as a constant drain on our school as a community of learners and, if we hope to survive, we must stand together behind Dean Katherine Bergeron in her fight against the evil organ harvesters among us. She has been waging this war in secret up until now, but we must now support her in the open if we have any hope of surviving
this.
