The phone rang not in the main house but in Karen’s semi-attached suite, though the call was clearly not for her.
“Karen Green? This is Sarah Rivers, an old friend of Don Walker’s. I’d like to speak with him, but it seems impossible to get through to him directly.”
“Not again. Another call for Don. How do you people get my number? So you’re an old friend. Right. Will he recognize your name if I disturb him with a message?”
“Actually, I used to be his baby-sitter. Many years ago. Would you mind very much telling him I called?”
“Yes, but I guess this once I can be his social secretary. I’m amused by the idea of Don having ever been a baby.”
“He was 7 at the time. His sister was the baby of the family.”
“Ah. And his sister’s name is?”
“Pamela.”
“Good enough, tell me how to contact you. He’ll probably call you right back, unless you were mean to him when he was a kid.”
Sarah gave Karen her less well-known cellphone number and most private e-mail address.
Karen went out into the covered alcove and knocked on the door of Don and Helen’s remarkable house.
“Hi, Helen. Is the boss home?”
“I am, yes. What can I do for you.”
“You can fetch your lover for me.”
“Which one?”, asked Helen, who would never be unfaithful to the husband she loved so desperately.
“Oh, any one, they are all the same.”
Helen invited her oldest friend into the house and found Don for her.
“Hey, Donny, got a call for you. Some old woman by the name of Sarah Rivers. Said she used to be your baby-sitter.”
“Sarah Rivers? Wow, that takes me back. I wonder what she wants. Not some old bat, Karen, she was young and very pretty, though I wasn’t quite old enough to appreciate the finer points of womanly beauty at the time.”
Helen glowered at him, especially when he showed so much eagerness to call the woman back.
“Sarah, is that you? This is Don. You called? What’s up?”
“Well, Mr. Walker, sir, I’d like to buy Project Match.”
“Impossible, not for sale. We have too many commitments, promises to lots of people. And we are not really an entity of any kind, anyway.”
“Don, that is terrible. You must incorporate right away, this second, non-profit, if you must, but get yourself protected, now.”
“Good advice, I see you are still a smart gal, time hasn’t changed you. But what do you want Project Match for?”
“My daughter wants it as a pet.”
“I see. You have a daughter. Wouldn’t she rather have a stuffed elephant instead.”
“No. She is too old for that, has been for years. Beth is one of your competitors, Don. A new one, you haven’t heard of her, I suppose, but she wants me to buy you out.”
A stepdaughter then. “Never”, Don said right away.
Not long after this event, Ann Kelly received a similar phone call. “Dr. Kelly, I’m Sarah Rivers, and I represent one of your newer competitors. We’d like to buy Technological Fantasies.”
“Sorry, that is impossible.”
“Why not. I was under the impression that you owned it? I could offer you a lot of money.”
“In a sense I do own it. I hold the vast majority of the stock in it. But we function as if we were a non-profit organization. We have commitments to our users and would never abandon them. Not a chance.”
“That’s roughly the response I got from Don Walker, when I contacted him about buying Project Match.”
“So it’s not all of Tech Fantasies that you want. Just our matching branch?”
“No, we’d take the whole works, but yes, it is matching we are interested in. That’s why we called Don.”
“Interesting. Don and I are both from North Vancouver, by the way. I remember being a shy girl who desperately wanted someone, but I don’t know about Don. Maybe just a coincidence we’re both from there. Or maybe our hometown really is the social nightmare he describes in his books.”
“Ah. You wouldn’t know. I’m from North Vancouver too. But I had good experiences there. No boyfriend before I met Ken, but I don’t think I was burning for one.”
“Think again, you sound human to me. But let me see now. Sarah Rivers. I don’t recognize the name at all.”
“Ask your colleague Sally Aston. We went to the same school. She was a grade behind me, but we all knew about her.”
“I’ll ask her. So, what would you do with Project Match and Technological Fantasies if you had them?”
“My daughter Beth would probably throw away everything but the data. My son Arthur, he’s a business man. He’d like to make them commercial, right away, not waiting for his sister’s system to get going.”
“Good for him. The more competition the better. We’ve been hoping for a commercial venture, some entrepreneur trying to make a buck from advanced social technology.”
“I’m glad to hear that. I thought for a moment there that you were some of those people who only believed in non-profits. Actually Arthur wants exactly that. He is planning a new venture called Advanced Social Technology.”
Both Don and Ann had figured out from what Sarah had said that she must be about 32, and wondered how she could have children with such plans. Independently they had arrived at the same conclusion, that they must be stepchildren.
After making her calls, Sarah came to report on her findings, speaking to Beth and her father first.
“Ken, neither of them will sell anything to us. They are committed non-profits themselves, though Ann Kelly at Tech Fantasies does like the idea of commercializing the services.”
“They are non-profits? Then we have to send them some money. Please Daddy”, said Ken and Sarah’s 13 year old daughter, Beth, author of the incredible combinatorial matching system called simply The System.
Everyone in the family called it that, because they knew it wouldn’t have such limited capabilities for long. Soon it would take over.
At Beth’s urging Ken sent each of the two non-profit organizations 10 million dollars, while Sarah gave each a million of her own. These donations gave Sarah a little more leverage, so she was able to arrange for a meeting to discuss database merging protocols and other things her daughter wanted. Sarah was not a technical person but trusted Beth and the girl’s father completely.
Don and Helen were the only people to offer to host the meeting at their home, though Ken had suggested putting them all up at a luxury hotel and having the meeting there.
“Has he got a lab, Daddy, lots of computers?” Sarah phoned back with that question and was assured that Don and Helen not only could accommodate them in relative luxury, but keep even the most technical person happy. That was good enough for Beth. The trio from Tech Fantasies also liked the idea, it being a shorter trip. Tech Fantasies was now based in New York, and while the three might have enjoyed a trip home, they were busy people. Don and Helen lived in the same time zone, if not exactly close to the big city.
Ann Kelly arrived first, with her two friends and colleagues, Drake Phillips and Sally Aston, having left from the east, and having a shorter flight.
Don looked good to Sally, who had a great appreciation for the male of the species, though thoroughly satisfied by her now jealous husband. Of middle height and with blonde hair, Sally and Drake looked quite alike, as did Ann Kelly and the tall dark haired husband she had left at home to mind the store.
Later in the day four other people arrived. Don immediately recognized his baby-sitter from so long ago, the still slim and even lovelier Sarah Rivers. With her was an older man, tall, fit, sophisticated looking. And two children.
Sarah had mentioned a son and daughter, but the others had assumed she meant stepchildren, because she have would been too young to have adult children.
“Hello, Don. Thank you for having us here. May I present Ken Green, and our two children, Beth and Arthur.”
“Well, this is a surprise. Sarah, this is my wife, Helen, and our friend Karen Green. I don’t imagine she is related in any way. Our other visitors are Drake Phillips, his wife, Sally Aston, and their good friend, Ann Kelly, the president of Technological Fantasies”, Don announced, indicating each of the others.
Sarah recognized Sally as the boisterous and rather slutty girl from her school in North Vancouver.
“I don’t think you ever told us the name of your organization, Sarah”, Ann noted.
“Oh, we are actually part of a larger corporation of Ken’s, but we usually just call ourselves the family. We refer to Beth’s system as The System, internally, though it has some other name, she says.
Beth, you never told us what its real name is.”
“It’s real name is The System, Mommy. I never use the one hidden away somewhere in our online documentation. See if you can find it!”
“That’s interesting. So, Beth, apparently your mother told Don that you wanted Project Match as a pet.”
“Well, I want your data, really. As for your software, uh, I don’t think I need it, but I guess I could hide it away in a corner of the system, just to maintain functionality if you ever needed it.”
“Oh, that’s a comfort”, Don Walker said, not at all sarcastically, though others might have used the words as a dry comment on Beth’s remarks. “But we have sworn to our participants that we shall preserve their privacy and have guaranteed them total security.”
“Oh, we would honour that.”
“Still, I don’t think we can let the data out of our hands. We promised them it would be kept so anonymous that even we can’t read it.”
“We give our users the same promise”, Drake Phillips of Tech Fantasies agreed.
“So do we”, Beth insisted. “We all make the same promises. That’s why we think you could sell out to us, or at least sell us your data.”
Ann looked at Don and Helen, nodding to show that they were all of the same opinion. “Sorry, but no”, she said.
“Well, then how about a database merging protocol, something which would give us limited access to your data, in exchange for limited access to ours.”
“We are worried about pool size, aren’t you concerned about it too?”, Ken Green said, speaking for the first time. “You have to have a large pool of candidates to have any hope of finding good matches for people.”
Again Ann looked at Don and Helen for confirmation, somehow seeing agreement in their faces. “Yes”.
“So?”, Beth prompted.
“What kind of a protocol did you have in mind Beth”, Drake asked. He couldn’t quite believe that a young teenager could know what she was talking about. She sure was cute, though. He wondered what she would look like when she was her mother’s age.
“Do you do principal components analysis to rotate the question and answer space into something better?”, Beth asked.
This time Helen Walker spoke up. “Yes, of course we do.”
“So do we”, Sally answered. She was the statistics and numerical methods person in the Tech Fantasies organization.
“Well, then let’s exchange conversion matrices, then send each other converted data which will therefore be two levels of abstraction and estimation away from the actual answers to questions, with encrypted tags on them. That’s how we guarantee privacy, by the way, multiple encryption”, Beth said.
“How does that work”, Don asked.
“Oh, we use trap-door encryption. We have an open-source encryption application. The paranoid can examine the code and recompile it, if they want.”
Ann and Helen nodded, agreeing that this was a good idea. Neither was doing it.
Beth went on. “We exchange keys after they post their public encryption key anonymously on a public web site. That key allows anyone to send them a message by posting it anonymously, but only they can read it. We post, officially, a message they can read, giving them keys to use in communication with us.”
“How do you send them suggestions, without knowing their e-mail addresses them?”
“Oh, all communication can be entirely public. Usually the user send us encrypted messages directly by e-mail, perhaps using public internet terminals, or using mail redirection services to keep us from knowing where the message originated. But they can just post their messages openly. That’s what we do with our suggestions to them, we just post them on a public board. Only they can read them, because of the encryption.”
Don was impressed. “That’s pretty clever, miss. Is it something you came up with?”
“Yup. Had to have something that would work. It’s all handled by the open-source software they download and use, but they can be assured that it is safe. It’s easy to use, too. Give it a try sometime.”
“How come we haven’t heard about this? Your service must be new.”
“Very new. And not popular, yet. It works, but it is slow because it is thorough. I think we actually have more data, on more people, though, because Daddy has bought out companies which didn’t have your reservations.”
Ken and Sarah were visibly proud of their daughter. Their son Arthur had not said a word until now. But it was his turn to speak. “Beth and Dad have been planning for non-profits. That’s their mistake. Even spending so much money, there will never be a large pool size, not until someone starts to make a buck doing it.”
“I think everyone in the room is non-profit oriented”, Ken said, then immediately realized that he’d forgotten his companion, Sarah, the mother of some of his many children. “Oh, except Sarah, of course. Sorry, my dear. You are pragmatic. You’ll do anything to push social technology, even grow rich doing it.” The others laughed.