This confession was sent anonymously to the Scroll.
It was me.
Remember that time when you were alone with your bestie/bro/sibling/scheme and you lean in for a warm embrace just to hear the ice-cold utterance of that cruel word in your vulnerable ears…
“Gotcha.”
It was me.
You are like “What the hell? You had me? What are the odds?”
There were no odds. Everything was predetermined, rigged, by me.
I still remember that fateful Friday of April 14th, 2023 when I was approached in the Koch Cafe by two suspicious seniors who introduced me to the leaders of this year’s Gotcha. For my personal safety, I’ll refer to them as Mr. Gamma and Mr. Omicron. They asked me if I could create the target list for this year’s Gotcha. I accepted it without hesitation. They were thinking of using an existing website, but I convinced them to let me write a program for it. Too great was the temptation to use this power to… help other people of course.
Since the moment I took the job, I knew Gotcha was going to be rigged. After all, by definition, if we don’t use our power, what power would we have? It is common knowledge that our clubs and alliances run on connections and eat breakfast with a side of corruption. So when I was making the list, I left a back door that would allow me to manipulate certain pairings before it got converted to the final list. Not for my personal use of course. I would never do something like that. However, I did expect Mr. Omicron or Mr. Gamma to, so I made the back door to save time later on.
Sure enough, the morning after I submitted the list, I saw in Google Sheets’ version history that at 3:31am, Mr. Omicron had secretly edited the document and changed four names, giving two of his senior friends underclassmen girls as targets. First of all, that’s SUS, Mr. Omicron. It is also annoying for me technically, because switching names blindly would mess up the entire thing and create separate loops when it should all be one huge loop. It’s not that I have a problem with Gotcha being rigged but you gotta do it through me; I even prepared for it. The comp-sci must be respected!
So I talked to Mr. Gamma about it, but he was just confused. Sussy Mr. Omicron had hid his operations from him as well. However, ultimately I was able to get him to admit to his schemes and I executed them my way, preserving the consistency of the loop, but not before some students had already received their targets. So if you gotcha’d somebody in the first week but later learned that you didn’t really have them, that’s because your target got changed as a result of the rigging I performed for Mr. Omicron.
The next week, seeing my capabilities, Mr. Gamma sent me a list of exactly 61 people out of the remaining 261 to “rig.” I had successfully made myself indispensable. I looked over the list, seeing friends, siblings, exes, and partners. It was JUICY. I even took personal revenge on a person who forced me to tell him his target by making him my target and getting him out when he tried to coerce me again. You should have seen the look on his face when I uttered the words “Gotcha” while sipping frozen lemonade. It was priceless. As he started pleading desperately for my forgiveness, I felt… powerful. It was fun to be powerful.
Power corrupts people, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that it had already corrupted me. I realized that I had to end this, so I took myself out of the list and sent this confession to the Scroll. God save Deerfield.