by Vernor Vinge
“Meaning those courses we got C’s in, right?” That was a voice from the peanut gallery, probably someone who was physically truant.
Chumlig sighed. “Yes. Don’t let those skills die. You’ve been exposed to them. Use them. Improve on them. You can do it with a special form of pre-analysis that I call ‘study.’”
One of the students actually held up a hand. She was that old.
“Yes, Dr. Xiang?”
“I know you are correct. But—” The woman glanced around the room. She looked about Chumlig’s age, not nearly as old as Winston Blount. But there was kind of a frightened look in her eyes. “But some people are better than others. I’m not as sharp as I once was. Or maybe others are just sharper…What happens if we try our hardest, and it just isn’t good enough?”
Chumlig hesitated. How will she answer this! thought Juan. It was the real question. “That’s a problem that affects everyone, Dr. Xiang. Providence gives each of us our hand to play. In your case, you’ve got a new deal and a new start on life.” Her look took in the rest of the class. “Some of you think your hand in life is all deuces and treys.” At the front of the room were some really dedicated students, not much older than Juan. They were wearing, but they had no clothes sense and had never learned ensemble coding. As Chumlig spoke, you could see their fingers tapping away, searching on “deuces” and “treys.”
“But I have a theory of life,” said Chumlig, “and it is straight out of gaming: There is always an angle. You, each of you, have some special wild cards. Play with them. Find out what makes you different and better. Because it is there, if only you can find it. And once you do, you’ll be able to contribute answers to others and others will be willing to contribute back to you. In short, synthetic serendipity doesn’t just happen. By golly, you must create it.”
She hesitated, staring at invisible class notes, and her voice dropped down from oratory. “So much for the big picture. Today, we’re going to talk about morphing answerboard solutions. As usual, we’re looking to ask the right questions.”
JUAN LIKED TO sit by the outer wall, especially when the classroom was on the third floor. You could feel the wall sway gently back and forth as the building kept its balance. That sort of thing made his ma real nervous. “One second of system failure and everything will fall apart!” she had complained at a PTA meeting. On the other hand, house-of-cards construction was cheap—and it could handle a big earthquake almost as easily as it did the morning breeze.
He leaned away from the wall and listened to Chumlig. That was why the school made you show up in person for most classes; you had to pay a little bit of attention just because you were trapped in a real room with a real instructor. Chumlig’s lecture graphics floated in the air above them. She had the class’s attention; there was a minimum of insolent graffiti nibbling at the edges of her imagery.
And for a while, Juan paid attention, too. He really did. Answerboards could generate solid results, usually for zero cost. There was no affiliation, just kindred minds batting problems around. But what if you weren’t a kindred mind? Say you were on a genetics board. If you thought transcription was a type of translation, it could take you months to get anywhere.
So Juan tuned her out and wandered from viewpoint to viewpoint around the room. Some were from students who’d set their viewpoints public. Most were just random cams. He browsed Big Lizard’s task document as he paused between hops. In fact, the Lizard was interested in more than just the old farts. Some ordinary students made the list, too. This affiliance must be as wide as the California Lottery.
He started some background checks. Like most kids, he kept lots of stuff saved on his wearable. He could run a search like this very close to his vest. He didn’t route to the outside world except when he could use a site that Chumlig was talking about. She was real good at nailing the mentally truant. But Juan was good at ensemble coding, driving his wearable with little gesture cues and eye-pointer menus. As her gaze passed over him, he nodded brightly and replayed the last few seconds of her talk.
As for the old students…competent retreads would never be here; they’d be rich and famous, the people who owned most of the real world. The ones in Adult Education were the has-beens. These people trickled into Fairmont all through the semester. The oldfolks hospitals refused to batch them up for the beginning of classes. They claimed that senior citizens were “socially mature,” able to handle the jumble of a midsemester entrance.
Juan went from face to face, matching against public records: Winston Blount. The guy was a saggy mess. Retread medicine was such a crapshoot. Some things it could cure, others it couldn’t. And what worked was different from person to person. Winston Blount had not been a total winner.
Just now the old guy was squinting intensely, trying to follow Chumlig’s answerboard example. He had been in several of Juan’s classes. Juan couldn’t see the guy’s med records, but he guessed that his mind was mostly okay; he was as sharp as some of the kids in class. And once upon a time he had been an important player at UCSD. Once upon a time.
Okay, put him on the “of interest” list.
And then there was Xiu Xiang. PhD physics, PhD electrical engineering; 2010 Winner of the President’s Medal for Secure Computation. Overall the hotstuff index on her was almost Nobel-quality. Dr. Xiang sat hunched over, looking at the table in front of her. She was trying to keep up on a view-page! Poor lady. But for sure she would have connections.
Chumlig was still going on about how to morph results into new questions, oblivious of Juan’s truancy.
Who’s next? Robert Gu. For a moment, Juan thought he had the wrong viewpoint. He sneaked a glance to his right, toward where the Adult Education crocks hung out. Robert Gu, PhD literature. A poet. He was sitting with the crocks, but he looked about seventeen years old! Juan brought his apparent attention back to Ms. Chumlig and inspected the new arrival close up. Gu was slender, almost scrawny, and tall. His skin was smooth and unblemished. But he looked like he was sweating. Juan risked a peek at outside medical references. Aha! Symptoms of the Venn-Kurasawa treatment. Dr. Robert Gu was a lucky man, the one in a thousand who fully responded to that piece of retread magic. On the other hand, it looked to Juan like the guy had run out of luck after that. He was fully unpingable. There was a crumpled piece of view-page on his desk, but he wasn’t using it. Years ago, this guy had been more famous than Xiu Xiang, but he was an even bigger loser now…What was “Deconstructive Revisionism” anyway? Oh. Definitely not something on the Big Lizard’s list. Juan slid the name into the trashcan. But wait, he hadn’t checked out Gu’s family connections. He queried—and suddenly there was silent messaging hanging in letters of silent flame all across his vision:
Chumlig --> Orozco:
Orozco --> Chumlig:
And the amazing thing was, she’d done it in a short pause, when everyone else thought she was just looking at her notes. Juan eyed her with new respect.
“YOU WERE A little hard on the boy, don’t you think?” Rabbit was trying out new imagery today, this based on classic Alice in Wonderland illustrations, complete with engraving lines. The effect was fully silly on a three-dimensional body.
Big Lizard did not seem impressed. “You don’t belong down here. Juan is my direct affiliate, not yours.”
“A bit overly sensitive, aren’t you? I’m simply spot-checking the depths of my affiliance.”
“Well, stay out. Juan needs this class.”
“Of course I share your charitable motives.” The rabbit gave the lizard his most dishonest leer. “But you cut him off just when he was looking at someone especia
lly interesting to me. I have provided you with a most excellent affiliance. If you want my continued support, you must cooperate.”
“Listen you! I want the boy to reach out for himself, but I don’t want him to be hurt.” Lizard’s voice trailed off, and Rabbit wondered if Chumlig was finally having second thoughts. Not that it mattered. Rabbit was having fun, spreading out across the Southern California social scene. Sooner or later, he would figure out what this job was all about.
05
DR. XIANG’S SHE
Shop class. It was by far Juan Orozco’s favorite class. Shop was like a premium game; there were real gadgets to touch and connect. That was the sort of thing you paid money for up on Pyramid Hill. And Mr. Williams was no Louise Chumlig. He let you follow your own inclinations, but he never came around afterward and complained because you hadn’t accomplished anything. It was almost impossible not to get an A in Ron Williams’s classes; he was wonderfully old-fashioned.
Shop class was also Juan’s best opportunity to make progress on Big Lizard’s project, at least with the old farts and the do-not-call privacy freaks. He wandered around the big gadget tent looking like an utter idiot. Juan had never been any good at diplomacy games. And now he was schmoozing oldsters. Well, trying to.
Xiu Xiang was really a nice lady, but she just sat at the equipment bench and read from her view-page. She had the parts list formatted like some kind of hardcopy catalog. “Once I knew these things,” she said. “See that.” She pointed at a section in the museum pages: Xiang’s Secure Hardware Environment. “I designed that system.”
Juan came up with “You’re world class, Dr. Xiang.”
“But…I don’t understand even the principles of these new components. They look more like pond scum than self-respecting optical semiconductors.” She read one of the product descriptions, stopped at the third line. “What’s redundant entanglement?”
“Ah.” He looked it up, saw pointers into jungles of background concepts. “You don’t need to know about ‘redundant entanglement,’ ma’am. Not for this class.” He waved at the product descriptions on Xiang’s view-page. The image sat like carven stone, not responding to his gesture. “Go forward a few pages, you’ll find the stuff we have available here in class. Look under”—jeez this was a pain, spelling out navigation in words—“look under ‘fun functional compositions,’ and go from there.” He showed her how to use her view-page to id local parts. “You don’t need to understand everything.”
“Oh.” In a few moments she was playing with the possibilities, had downloaded half a dozen component gadgets. “This is like being a child. Doing, without understanding.” But then she started putting BuildIt parts together, doing pretty well after Juan showed her how to find the interface specs. She laughed at some of the descriptions. “Sorters and shifters. Solid-state robots. I bet I could make a cutter out of this.”
“I don’t see it.” Cutter? “Don’t worry, you can’t hurt anything.” That wasn’t quite true, but close enough. He sat and watched, made a few suggestions, even though he wasn’t really sure what she was up to. Enough of establishing rapport; he marked that box in his diplomacy checklist and moved on to the next stage. “So, Dr. Xiang, do you keep in touch with your friends at Intel?”
“That was a long time ago. I retired in 2010. And during the war, I couldn’t even get consulting jobs. I could just feel my skills rusting out.”
“Alzheimer’s?” He knew she was much older than she looked, even older than Winston Blount.
Xiang hesitated, and for a moment Juan was afraid he had made the lady really angry. But then she gave a sad little laugh. “No Alzheimer’s, no dementia. You—people nowadays don’t know what it was like to be old.”
“I do so! All my grandparents are still alive. And I have a great-grandpa in Puebla. He plays a lot of golf. Great-grandma, she does have dementia—you know, a kind they still can’t fix.” In fact, Great-Grandma had looked as young as Dr. Xiang. Everyone thought she had really lucked out. But in the end that only meant she lived long enough to run into something they couldn’t cure.
Dr. Xiang just shook her head. “Even in my day, not everyone went senile, not the way you mean. I just got behind in my skills. My girlfriend died. After a while I just didn’t care too much. I didn’t have the energy to care.” She looked at the gadget she was building. “Now, I have at least the energy I had when I was sixty. Maybe I even have the same native intelligence.” She slapped the table. “And all I’m good for is playing with jacked-up Lego blocks!”
It almost looked like she was going to start crying, right in the middle of shop class. Juan scanned around; no one seemed to be watching. He reached out to touch Xiang’s hand. He didn’t have the answer. Ms. Chumlig would say he didn’t have the right question.
THERE WERE STILL a few others to check out: Winston Blount, for instance. Not a jackpot case, but he ought to be worth something to the Lizard. In shop class, Blount just sat in the shade of the tent, staring off into space. The guy was wearing, but he didn’t respond to messages. Juan waited until Williams went off for one of his coffee breaks. Then he sidled over and sat beside Blount. Jeez, the guy really looked old. Juan couldn’t tell exactly where he was surfing, but it had nothing to do with shop class. Juan had noticed that when Blount wasn’t interested in a class, he just blew it off. After a few minutes’ silence, Juan realized that he wasn’t interested in socializing either.
So talk to him! It’s just another kind of monster whacking. Juan morphed a buffoon image onto the guy, and suddenly it wasn’t so hard to cold-start the encounter. “So, Dean Blount, what do you think of shop class?”
Ancient eyes turned to look at him. “I couldn’t care less, Mr. Orozco.”
O-kay! Hmm. There was lots about Winston Blount that was public record, even some legacy newsgroup correspondence. That was always good for getting a grown-up’s, um, attention.
Fortunately, Blount continued talking on his own. “I’m not like some of the people here. I’ve never been senile. By rights, I shouldn’t be here.”
“By rights?” Maybe he could score points just by imitating an old-time shrink program.
“Yes. I was Dean of Arts and Letters through 2012. I was on track to be UCSD Chancellor. Instead I was pushed into academic retirement.”
Juan knew all that. “But you…you never learned to wear.”
Blount’s eyes narrowed. “I made it a point never to wear. I thought wearing was a demeaning fad.” He shrugged. “I was wrong. I paid a heavy price for that. But things have changed.” His eyes glittered with deliberate iridescence. “I’ve taken four semesters of this ‘Adult Education.’ Now my résumé is out there in the ether.”
“You must know a lot of important people.”
“Indeed. Success is just a matter of time.”
“Y-you know, Dean, I may be able to help. No wait—I don’t mean by myself. I have an affiliance you might be interested in.”
“Oh?”
He seemed to know what affiliance was. Juan explained Big Lizard’s deal. “So there could be some real money in this.” He showed him the payoff certificates, and wondered how much his recruit would see there.
Blount squinted his eyes, no doubt trying to parse the certificates into a form that Bank of America could validate. After a moment he nodded, without granting Juan numerical enlightenment. “But money isn’t everything, especially in my situation.”
“Well, um, I bet whoever’s behind these certs would have a lot of angles. Maybe you could get a conversion to help-in-kind. I mean, to something you need.”
“True.” They talked a few minutes, till the place got busy. Some of the shop projects were finally showing results. At least two teams had made mobile nodes, swarm devices. Tiny paper wings fluttered all around. The other swarmer crawled in the grass and up the legs of the furniture and chairs. It stayed out of clothes, but it was awfully close to being intrusive. Juan zapped a few of them, but the others kept coming.
Orozco --> Blount:
“Of course I can,” replied the old man.
So despite Blount’s claims of withittude, he couldn’t manage silent messaging, not even the finger tapping most grown-ups used.
The class period was almost over anyway. Juan looked up at the billowing tent fabric. He was a little discouraged. He had covered almost everyone on the list, and Winston Blount was the best he’d found: someone who couldn’t even sming. “Okay. Well, keep my offer in mind, Dean Blount. And remember, there are only a limited number of people I’m allowed to take in.” Blount rewarded this sales jabber with a thin smile. “Meantime, I-I have other possibilities.” Juan nodded in the direction of the weird new guy, Robert Gu.
Winston Blount didn’t follow Juan’s gaze, but you could tell he was sneaking a peek sideways. For a moment the skin on his face seemed to tighten. Then the smile returned. “May God have mercy on your soul, Mr. Orozco.”
JUAN DIDN’T GET his chance at Robert Gu till Friday, right after Ms. Chumlig’s other class. Creative Composition was almost always the low point of Juan’s school week. Chumlig was flexible as to media, but students had to stand up and perform their own work. That was bad enough when you had to watch some other kid mess up, but unbearable when you were the performer. Order of appearance was decided at Ms. Chumlig’s whim. Normally worrying about that would have occupied most of Juan’s attention. Today, he had other concerns that mercifully blotted out the usual panic.
Juan skulked to the back of the class and slumped down, covertly watching the others. Winston Blount was here, which was a surprise. He blew off this class almost as often as he did shop. But he took me up on my offer. The Lizard’s account showed that the old man had taken his first step toward signing on.
