Whatever other role Social Tech High might play, it was still a school. There were teachers, students and classrooms. But most education occurred outside of the classrooms, between people tied so closely together that they shared everything.
That it was genuinely education, not just social activity was partly because of the strong bonds between teachers and students. By now most teachers had links to at least one student. The creation of the school by linking people to compatible others had often linked teachers to one another, but also linked many students to teachers. A teacher’s passion for a subject tended to flow outwards, generating sympathetic passions in their students, who in turn generated them in to their friends.
The school worked not just because of the high bandwidth, the strength of the communications channels, supporting a great flow of information, it also worked because of this flow of academic passion. The urges to satisfy the friends who had urges to satisfy their teachers drew everyone together, making the whole school gain interests in what might otherwise be passed off as just schoolwork.
Graduates who had gone on to university had the same effect. John, Grace, Clarity and their friends at Columbia were still connected to the school. As graduates and university students they had a high prestige amongst those still in school. A college student’s natural interests in academic subjects also generated passions for learning in the students they influenced.
Without being quite conscious of what she was doing, going just on intuition, Sally had set a precedent by giving John Calder one of the prototype social tech hardware devices. Now they were routinely given to all graduates of the school, treating them as if they still belonged to the community. Indeed, they did.
But there were desirable links which just didn’t exist. Sally Aston, principal of the school and mathematics teacher not only shared a link with sociology teacher Ellen Smith, but with two extremely compatible students, who inherited Sally’s passion for a certain kind of mathematics and influenced their friends with it. The other members of the Tech Fantasies Trio were not quite so well linked, to each other or to the school. The three were close, but not nearly as close as the individual links within the school.
The three had worked together when employed by a software company in Vancouver, learning from work that they were compatible, then becoming friends. More than friends. Drake had been intimate with each of the women, sometimes with both of the women, who remained friends, with no apparent jealousy.
Very close, yes, but if measured on the standard logarithmic scale, their friendships might have registered at about Level Four, each being the best friendship candidate out of ten to the fourth power others.
In linking together the school, friendships closer than Level Five were found for each new student or teacher, each person linked to someone else who was as close as the best out of ten to the fifth power.
So both Ann Kelly and Drake Phillips should have tighter ties to the school. They may have felt that their link with Sally was a sufficient one, however, because neither pushed the issue. Nor did various other people important to the school.
It was Sarah Rivers, now a member of the school board of directors, who first decided that this must not continue.
“Link me in. There has to be a way. Find or create links between me and someone in the school”, she told Sally, imperiously.
Sally wasn’t sure she could, but said she would try. Using a supercomputer with terabytes of RAM memory, she constructed a huge graph, what we might call a network, with the probability of a link being formed based on mutual compatibility. To a graph theory person it might sound like a simple enough problem, to be solved with a Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm. But questions of context made it much harder. Two people will typically be more compatible if linked between specific others.
Finally, working with Ann and using some elaborate relaxation algorithms, Sally was eventually to find a few possible paths or chains, people acting as stepping stones, to join Sarah Rivers to a student already in the schools population. Sarah was satisfied. But no, she was not, she wanted her daughter Beth linked in, too.
Sally groaned. Linking in Sarah had been easy enough, though almost impossible, because she had looked only at local links, teachers or students who could be added to the school, one of whom could spend time with Sarah outside of school hours.
“Video walls”, Sarah said, when Sally explained the problem to her. “Teleconferencing writ large. Beth has been working on them for a while. I have one here. I don’t know who’s available, but someone will be.”
It turned out that the only person she could reach easily was her son Arthur, the other business-oriented member of her family.
Like his sister Beth, he was a young teenager attending the University of California at Berkeley. Arthur shared an apartment with another young boy, a less admirable member of the Green family, but unlike his half-brother, Arthur was usually at home in that part of the apartment which served him as an office. There he had a video wall.
“These are more than just large video screens, Sally”, Sarah explained. “What makes them unique is arrangement of multiple cameras around the edges of the screen and the powerful computer which processes the outputs of the various cameras. This avoids the exaggerated perspective you get with a single lens. Arthur please walk towards us, right up to the screen, to show Dr. Aston.”
Arthur did so. Sally saw how perfectly in proportion his image remained, even when he was almost touching the screen. “That’s amazing.”
“You have to experience it in action, Sally. It is a 2-d screen, of course, but it works in a way no ordinary video conferencing system does.”
“So we could use this to link up Beth to the school, through some number of links.”
“I’d appreciate it if you could do the same for me, Mom”, Arthur said, surprising them both. Neither thought him the kind of person who would value social links into the school. But of course. They were more than social links. Arthur did need to be included.
Providing video walls was easy and quickly done, though they were costly. The computers which combined the various signals were powerful units with lots of analog and digital processing ability. Not cheap.
Sally begged for more and more of the wonderful walls, wanting them in all the classrooms. Every one she got made her argue her case more strongly. Sarah passed the request on to Ken Green, who had almost limitless resources.
Yes, it could be done. Every classroom already had a large video screen behind the teacher’s desk. Each of these was removed and the whole back wall turned into one of the special video walls. Some small rooms were also equipped with walls intended for the use of the single students who would link important outsiders into the school.
Identical units were in several remote locations already, but more were installed. Project Match leaders had several, Green family members had several, and a few were allocated to special friends or business associates.
That was actually the easy part. Now Sally, vice-principal Dr. Paul Grey and a few other teachers had the difficult task of finding short chains of students to link in the outsiders.
A student named Mara Tableton was the link to Beth Green. Mara regularly used one of the schools special video conferencing rooms to communicate with Beth. Mara was 17, and her link into the school was her boyfriend George. George was linked into the school through his best friend, Silvio. Silvio in turn was linked to a girl, Janice, who not only had a best friend of her own gender but a fully compatible link to a teacher.
Would this long chain of links degrade the effects of the school’s magic? Nobody knew for sure, but Mara, George, Silvio and Janice went to the school every day, fully experiencing its advantages.
They participated in the remarkable classes where every student was significantly compatible with every single other one and with the teacher. They also read books chosen specifically for each class and individually for themselves. Each did have one strong link, Level Five or above.
Mara was in every way a student of the school, thoroughly tied in. Her teleconferencing-friendship with Beth would be that strong as well, tying the younger girl tightly to the school.
There was only one problem. Mara and all other students, up to and including Janice would graduate the following spring. They would remain part of the greater school community, perhaps for the rest of their lives, but would no longer be in the intense school environment. Indeed, Mara herself planned to leave the city altogether, going to MIT.
Various members of the Green family were soon linked to the school, but were not in general close to one another, compatibility between family members being not much more than between random individuals.
Various people within the Project Match leadership were linked in, but that project was devoted to matching individuals to their social environments, not creating a completely connected structure like the school.
All of these external connections were like trailing arms or antennae leading off from the school, which remained the only tightly linked structure known to the three coordinated software matching services. Probably the only one in the world.
With each technological innovation added, it became even more so. Powerful social matching software. Personal social tech devices. Video walls.
The school was not just becoming closer, it was becoming larger, with more cross-linking happening as well. A buzz of passionate discussion was heard everywhere. Apparently satisfied, nobody complained.
Except Sarah Rivers. The aggressive woman wanted to push things to a new level, literally.
“It’s a wonder, Sally, an ongoing miracle. But in a world with a billion English speaking people in it, most of them young, probably 10 million suitable candidates for our school, Level Five is not good enough. Not anymore.”
“Not anymore?”
“It was different when we were talking about there being many schools. It was Arthur who insisted on that and was sure we needed to charge fees, make the school self-supporting, so there could be many of them.”
“Smart kid, your Arthur, but now we are thinking in terms of just the one. We could bring in students from around the world, subsidize them. Is that what you mean? Spend money to try to ensure there is only one? I liked the idea better when it was just a theoretical prospect. We might be the nexus, the only one, at least so far. Now to force the issue? I don’t know, Sarah.”
“We can discuss it, we must discuss it, sure. I didn’t mean it the way you are thinking, though. Not to do anything to actively discourage competion, no, that wasn’t at all what I had in mind. Just to ensure stronger connections.”
“Using Ken Green’s money.”
“He has a lot, you know, billions, but even then, if a whole country decided to spend a significant amount of their resources, what we have would be nothing.”
“I can’t help but think you might have a secret agenda here, Sarah, if I can say so without offending you. By bringing in the most compatible students from around the world, you might be trying to defuse that possibility.”
“So no amount of government money could duplicate what we have, so we could remain unique? The thought had crossed my mind. Would that be so bad?”