Every attempt was made to keep the school community from undergoing drastic upheavals, but the breakup and remaking of families did occur. There were also a significant number of new families about to be formed. Throughout late spring, with June on the horizon, an unusual number of engagements occurred between members of the senior class.
The school was so linked up by now that gossip flew around it like magic, nothing could be kept a secret. The first couple to get engaged prompted a wave of others to follow their example. John Calder and Grace Ling were not the first but certainly among the first few.
All it took was a look. They had each heard the news of the first couple while in their separate classes. When they met during the break, he looked at her. She blushed, looked down for a moment, then back up and into his eyes.
“Grace.”
“John.”
“Nothing would make me happier. You are my life, Grace.”
“Are you sure?”
“Grace, I could not live without you, I love you. Please become my wife. Grace Ling, will you marry me.”
“I love you too, John. I’ve wanted to be your wife since the day I met you. Yes, John, yes.”
It was not quite so easy to persuade their parents. John was 18 now, Grace a couple of weeks older. Her parents were very conscious of what might happen, that the two might tie themselves together. Speaking to John’s mother earlier they had discussed what seemed inevitable, hoping for at least a delay.
But Grace had been picked out of many possible candidates as a match for John. They’d been unusually compatible, almost a one in 100,000 match, a Level 5 match on the school’s logarithmic scale. Once together they at first began to drift apart a bit, but then this trend had reverse, bringing them together. Perhaps because of their successful joint project and the social glue provided by Abby James, they were now closer than ever.
Not the first to get engaged, John and Grace were the first to marry, not waiting for a traditional June wedding. Nor did they pick the traditional Saturday morning. Their ceremony was not in a church, either. It was held in school, right after classes ended, in a large main hallway. That was where they wanted to be, amongst the many teachers and students of the school they loved.
Being married in the school became something of a tradition, though there were exceptions. It just seemed the right place.
It felt very odd to be away from school for the week the happy couple took as a short honeymoon. Others in their classes missed them.
Leaving Friday, after a dinner reception, also at the school, the two had a weekend to themselves in the Hampshires, plus the following week and weekend, returning to class Monday morning. Long enough. They had missed their classmates too. Married or not, they wanted to be at school.
During late spring, when many seniors did get engaged to be married, they also sought out places for their college education. Some just had to be at MIT, some chose Princeton or Yale, not too far from New York by train, but most chose somewhere in the city. Columbia and NYU were favourites. Few would be too far away from the high school which had so changed their lives.
John and Grace had been at Social Tech High a full calendar year, but many seniors had not even been there for the academic year. Regardless of how much time they’d actually spent at the school, they felt it their own.
It was Clarity Bond who explained this at the graduation ceremony in June. “The school has linked every one of us with an astonishingly compatible person, forming a lifetime friendship. Almost all of us have two such connections. They are worth more than gold to us. We are not united because we go to the same school, we are united because the school united us, selected us individually. Under the inspired leadership of Dr. Sally Aston, the school has also reached out to our families, changing a whole community of people. We cannot be too grateful to Dr. Aston and the other teachers, those fine people who have done so much for ourselves, our families, and our friends.”
The school would go on, continuing in September, but for the senior class it was over. Or was it?
In the summer, the school stayed open, going into the same kind of unscheduled and unorganized state it had over the winter holidays. It would be more accurate to say that it went into an entirely self-organizing state, because to the eyes of visitors it seemed to function in an orderly way, without evidence of discord.
In fact some students were incompatible with others. That was inevitable. But everyone had compatible links to offset the other kind. There were no cliques, either, because the school was a connected structure. No group of a few people was ever isolated from the others.
Still present in the school were most of the graduates, maintaining their connections with younger students and helping out in various ways. The school was already expanding, so there was much work to be done. Come September, the senior class would finally disperse, though Alma Renwick bet Sally a dollar they’d show up again on some weekends, no matter how intense their college work got.
During the summer the school was open to parents, family members and friends, filled to capacity. Though it remained unscheduled and not officially organized except by casual and common consent, the school software was busily churning out suggestions for social contacts. These suggestions were made only to those who agreed to put their names forward, but most did.
Here was not just the school in action, but a significant part of the community as well.
There were two unexpected temporary additions to the school this summer. Sarah Rivers had obtained a position on the Tech Fantasies board of directors and decided to spend time in New York getting to know the organization better. She brought with her a 14 year old girl, claiming to be “almost 15”, the prodigious Beth Green. With Beth had come her inseparable half-sister, Esmeralda.
Beth did not know it, but both girls would start university in California soon. This would be their last chance to spend time in the school environment, even though it would be the unusual summer one.
Beth had arrived with a piece of social hardware, full of special software of course, but obtaining its power from the large synthetic neural network on an experimental chip set.
“What is it for, Beth?”, Ann Kelly asked. She was participating in the summer school, taking advantage her close relationship with Sally.
“It interfaces with a lot of different computers, Dr. Kelly, yours, ours and some belonging to Project Match, but mostly to the school’s computers. It also has voice recognition and some video abilities, though it won’t record either unless I give it special permission to, in the presence of someone who has given me special permission to. It has GPS and a detailed map of the school – the city, too, actually.”
“And why?”
“It’s inductive, picking up information wherever it can, without actually spying on people. It keeps an eye on what is happening in the school, in the city and with me. It gives me hints about things.”
“OK, it gives you hints. Go on. What kinds of hints?”
“Hints about being more human. Hints about where to go, what to see, what to do. How to fit in better. I am not very good at being social, Dr. Kelly.”
“What is it saying right now? Talk to Dr. Ann Kelly and tell her how your toy works?”
“No. It says I should hang around some event, not trying to analyze it. It’s pointing me in the direction of a play to be performed by a few students, in about 5 minutes or so.”
“Is it almost intelligent, Beth, an AI?”
“No, it is an extremely efficient and powerful data collection device, a first-rate data miner, with a built in model of what it can learn of my environment, plus a snazzy model of my humble self.”
“I see. Maybe.”
“Mommy has one too. They communicate, more than I really want them to, but that’s parents for you. Hers tries to influence mine to keep me out of trouble. I’ve programmed mine to tell hers that I am keeping out of trouble.”
“What about your sister?”
“Oh, she has one too. Thinks it’s turned off.”
“Beth! Your best friend!”
“I know. But I have to make sure she keeps out of trouble. Or at least doesn’t get into more than I do.”
“You mean boys.”
“Boys. I want one. Essie wants one. Daddy can never know.”
Summer did end at last. Beth and Esmeralda went home with Beth’s mother. They had not gotten what they wanted, though they’d met some boys who seemed to like them in that way.
John and Grace went to Columbia along with Clarity and over a dozen others. They would try to maintain their connections there. And yes, they did plan to revisit Social Tech High again and again.
Despite all their planning, despite the careful invitations given out to new students to fill up the lowest grade, it was still a shock when the seniors were finally gone.
Not far away at Columbia, John Calder still spent sometime with his former math teacher, Sally Aston, but he was just not there, no longer at the school, day after day. He and Grace had joined Tech Fantasies, providing additional reasons for contact, but it never seemed enough.
Near the end of September a large box from Vancouver arrived for Ann Kelly. She got her husband to open it, not sure what to expect. Mitch handed her a carefully wrapped package and a note.
“Here’s a hundred of them, a test batch. Beta. If you can find some people to test them, I’d appreciate it. — Beth.” One hundred of those nice toys.
Ann called Sally. It shouldn’t be hard to find some willing volunteers.