Rainbows End (8 page)

creature lumbered to its feet, and now its voice came from high above. “Just as well we don’t meet again on Pyramid Hill.”

 

“Suits me.” Juan stood up. He made a point of slapping the creature’s mighty tail as he walked off downhill.

The twins were way ahead of him, standing by the soccer field on the other side of campus. As Juan came up the driveway, he grabbed a viewpoint in the bleachers and gave them a ping. Fred waved back, but his shirt was still too gooey for comm. Jerry was looking upward at the UP/Ex shipment falling toward his outstretched hands. Just in time, for sure. The twins were popping the mailer open even as they walked into the shop tent.

Unfortunately, Juan’s first class was at the end of the far wing. He ran across the lawn, keeping his vision tied to unimproved reality: The buildings were mostly three stories today. Their gray walls were like playing cards stacked in a rickety array.

Inside, the choice of view was not entirely his own. Mornings, the school administration required that the Fairmont News show all over the interior walls. Three kids at Hoover High had won IBM career fellowships. Applause, applause, even if Hoover was Fairmont’s unfairly advantaged rival, a charter school run by the Math Ed Department at SDSU. The three young geniuses would have their college education paid for, right through grad school, even if they never worked a day at IBM.
Big deal
, Juan thought, trying to comfort himself. Someday those kids might be very rich, but a percentage of their professional fortunes would always go back to IBM.

He followed the little green nav arrows with half his attention… and abruptly realized he had climbed two flights of stairs. School admin had re-arranged everything since yesterday. Of course, they had updated his nav arrows, too. It was a good thing he hadn’t been paying attention. He slipped into his classroom and sat down.

Ms. Chumlig had already started.

Search and Analysis was Chumlig’s main thing. She used to teach a fast-track version of this at Hoover High, but well-documented rumor held that she just couldn’t keep up. So the Department of Education had moved her to the same-named course here at Fairmont. Actually, Juan kind of liked her. She was a failure, too.

“There are many different skills,” she was saying. “Sometimes it’s best to coordinate with lots of other people who together can make the answers.” The students nodded. Be a coordinator. That’s where the biggest and most famous money was. But they also knew where Chumlig was going with this. She looked around the classroom, nodding that she knew they knew. “Alas, you all intend to be top agents, don’t you?”

“It’s what some of us will be.” That was one of the Adult Ed students. Winston Blount was old enough to be Juan’s great-grandfather. When Blount had a bad day he liked to liven things up by harassing Ms. Chumlig.

The Search and Analysis instructor smiled back. “It’s about as likely as being a major league baseball star. The pure ‘coordinating agent’ is a rare type, Dean Blount.”

 

“Some of us must be the administrators.”

 

“Oh.” Chumlig looked kind of sad for a moment, like she was figuring out how to pass on bad news. “Administration has changed a lot, Dean Blount.”

 

Winston Blount sat back in his chair. “Okay. So we have to learn some new tricks.”

“Yes.” Ms. Chumlig looked out over the class. “That’s an important point. This class is about search and analysis, the heart of the economy. We obviously need search and analysis as consumers. In almost all modern jobs, search and analysis are how we make our living. But, in the end, we must also know something about something.”

“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 preanalysis 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: You have all day to play games, Juan! If you won’t pay attention here, you can darn well take this course over.
Orozco — > Chumlig: Sorry. Sorry! He suspended his question queue and dropped the external session. At the same time, he played back the last few minutes of her talk, desperately trying to summarize. Most times, Chumlig just asked embarrassing questions; this was the first she’d sminged him with a threat.

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 especially 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.

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 progess 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.”