Eighteen
Haversham wasn't impressed. It was shoddy work, a terrible report. He'd seen higher quality material from elementary school students, and he said so to Merry, straight out.
"Nonsense," he told them as they sat in his office, demurely seated with an expression of penitence, she hoped, on her face.
"Ridiculous," he added, as he re-read the barely two pages of it. It was even written in large print, like a fourth grader would do to fill up a page. The handwriting he recognized as Bysshe's, and the verbiage clearly was Merry's, so he didn't doubt they'd done it together.
"You know this entire report is counter to the school's very mission," he scolded them. "The whole reason you're here is to learn to get past the superficialities of who is constructed of what. Whether an individual's made up of bones and blubber, or silicon and petroleum-byproduct, or optical fiber and shadow, none of that matters. You are each unique constructions, put here on Earth by processes extant in nature. Every one is man-made, in the sense that each has its origin in some sort of human activity. That might take the form of reproduction, whether cooperatively organic or laboratory-assisted, or it might take the form of code and compilation, or it might take the form of factory fabrication. The point is, none of it matters. We've been trying and trying to drill this simple lesson through all of your brains, but it just doesn't stick, does it? What is so hard to understand? You keep focusing all your attention on matters of secondary importance. How in the world are we going to survive as humanoid representatives in this galaxy if we can't even get beyond the basics? In the past it's been skin color, language, religion or customs. Today it's a different artificial divide. Girls, listen to me, please, for once in your life."
They listened, but weren't really paying attention. All they wanted to do was get out of there. Haversham didn't feel like wasting more breath, so he dismissed them with a final injunction to get past this juvenile obsession with internal identity. What was really important, he told them in the end, was an individual's actions, not his or her physical components.
After they left, he spent some time in quiet thought. He had a serious dilemma to consider. Although it wasn't in the report they'd submitted, he'd noticed the erasure marks, and was certain the girls were responsible for the Vonny Ramone incident earlier that day. He'd accompanied Ruth Landers back to her office after she'd come to see him on the pretext of some fake appointment. There together they'd found the limp body on the floor. It was a simple matter of re-engaging the projection. Haversham had written authority from all of the parents to restore their deactivated holograms in case of any emergency.
That was no problem. The issue was whether he needed to inform anyone. Landers wouldn't say anything. Haversham and all of the teachers were employees of the school, after all, and the existence of the school depended on the success of the project. If it were to be known that two of the students had somehow succeeded in discovering that they were all, in fact, holograms, then the project would have to be shut down, the students turned off, and then Haversham and company would become unemployed. Aside from that selfish concern, he was also acutely aware that the success of the project was dearly important to powerful people like the Freyjahs, and he had no interest in disappointing them. Not to mention the fact, which was continually pounded into him at every Leadership Council meeting, that the future of the entire world depended on just these very students.
Haversham had been a project manager before, so he knew all about shipping product. Sure, the schedule was aggressive. They'd only started programming these kids about a year earlier and had been rushing their development through every stage of their brief, invented lives. Most start-ups would consider the kids to be alpha quality at best, but these folks were intent on pushing out to a general release within a couple of years, without any serious testing or beta phase at all. They thought they had the best programmers and the top manufacturers too. They had done an okay job of it, he thought, but was that good enough? Did it really have a chance, or were they all merely fooling themselves? Haversham wasn't certain of anything.
Did the girls even know what they'd done? He couldn't be sure, but it didn't seem likely. He'd taken pains to be sure that all of the children had been in class when he'd restored and reactivated Vonny. Vonny himself had no memory of what had occurred. His program had erased that particular segment of time, so when he'd told Mister Mumford that he'd lost track of time he was literally speaking the truth. The girls could only guess. They had no proof of anything.
He decided a cover-up was the best course of action. No one really wanted to hear about this. They all had enough problems as it was, what with all the global strife and struggles. If these kids really were the last best hope for humankind then, oh well. Haversham stuffed the report in a desk drawer and decided that what he really wanted was another cup of coffee.
THE END
Humanoid Central Page 5
