Avelina's arrival was going to affect many other students in the school, but she did not know that when her first day started. As the day progressed she found Kelly in only one of her classes, the last one. That was too bad, since they were already close, but it was the best class she'd ever been in.
It did seem familiar in some ways. Back home in Tiana, her poor São Paulo favela, there had been classes with very few students. Like this class at the end of the school day, those kids had been of different ages. But school had not been attractive and the students were dirty, with little drive or previous education.
This was entirely different. Avelina's day had been spent in clean classrooms with comfortable seats. Attached to each seat was a small desk. They formed attractive units which could be moved but were in a quarter circle around a teacher desk, facing the teacher and the front wall of the room, which was all one giant video screen, like the one in Kelly's dining room.
In every class that screen had lit up to show a seating plan for the classroom, with the names of all the students listed. The teacher had usually said something like “Our composition is a little different today. That's because of a new student, Avelina Azevado, from Brazil. Welcome Avelina.” But sometimes the teacher had added that there other changes too. It didn't take the girl long to realize that the changes were because of her.
Just before lunch, Avelina got an explanation. She was in a social technology class, right here at Social Tech High! That must mean something. After introducing her to the class, the teacher, a Miss Ramsey said that there were other changes too. By this time Avelina was familiar with how freely the kids spoke in class and knew she'd have to contribute as well, so she started out with a question herself. Right away.
“Miss Ramsey. Why are there other changes? They are because of me, are they not?”
“Catherine, how about you start?”
“Alright. Avelina, I think there are about, uh, 600 Grade Seven students in the school. Is that right?” Miss Ramsey nodded. Catherine continued. “Well, at this school every single Grade Seven student takes Social Technology. In higher grades it is optional, but in this grade everybody takes it. We have eight kids in the class, so that means, about, maybe 75 different social tech classes. Well, there are lots of ways of dividing 600 kids into classes of eight. Some huge number, I don't remember. Uh, Georgio, you know?”
“Roughly four times ten to the 17th power. Do I have to explain that, Avelina?”
“No, I studied mathematics from a book in my school in Tiana. You are doing permutations and combinations. I don't remember the formulas, but I do know the numbers are very big.”
“These are the combinations, which is what Cathy asked for”, Georgio said, “but we do put the students in a special seating order, so the number is even bigger. If we did strict permutations, it would be over ten to the power of 22. That's big.”
“Right”, Catherine Rostrovich went on. “thanks Georgio. So to really pick classes of eight from 600 students is too hard to do, and to put us all in order might as well be impossible. So the school software fakes it. I think they have dedicated hardware now, too. Still fakes it. Comes up with something good enough.”
“Oh, I see, I see. Do you know how it makes this approximation?”, Avelina asked.
“Well, first they use all the interpersonal compatibility data they get from us, and form a big 600 by 600 matrix. You know, a table, this student in this row is compatible with that student in that column. Then this is used as an input to a Travelling Salesman Problem solver. The result is something like a big circle, each of use with a person on our left and one on our right. Then we just grab 75 eight-kid long segments of the circle.”
“Yes, yes, I do understand! I do. I read about matrices and about that kind of problem. Oh! I have a question. What does the diagonal of the matrix look like? Is every student compatible with himself or herself?”
“No”, a student named Ram Manita said. “That is a matter for psychology. We have well-adjusted kids and troubled kids, even here, though being with those who are compatible with you always makes your own inner self more at ease.”
“Oh, I see. Yes. That would be true. Thank you, Ram. I am happy now, very happy, but it must be because of you, all you people. But you don't put me at ease. You set fire to my imagination.”
Avelina's imagination was just about burned out by the time she reached that last class of the day. That one did it to her. She mentioned what she had learned in social tech class that day and how it had affected her.
“But now, Avelina”, Kelly said. Be ready for this. Every day, the last hour of the day, and all Friday afternoon, too, we make up a class like this, in which ages and subjects don't matter. Here we don't just divide 600 Grade Seven students into classes of eight, we divide 4200 students into classes of eight. Since we do use the TSP to get seating arrangements, that means picking the best from ten to the 28th possibilities. Really, really impossible. But we do good guessing. It seems to work. You watch.”
Yes, it worked. The sparkling, deep, enthralling conversation excited Avelina beyond what she had thought possible. Only twelve, living in a single room with her family, schooled by nuns, Avelina had never had an orgasm, by her own hand or any other means, but this was like an orgasm, an hour long orgasm, which left her worn out, drained, destroyed.
They were quiet in the car when Sally drove the girls home. Kelly just led Avelina to their room, pushed her in the direction of her bed, then lay down herself on the other bed. Within minutes they were both asleep.
Kelly napped only a little while, since this was just an ordinary day, not one of those blistering Friday afternoons.
“Well”, her mother said, when Kelly emerged. “I bet that did her in. She'll be a new girl by tomorrow, won't she?”
“If not by tomorrow, then by the end of the week. A Friday afternoon might prove lethal!”
“I hope not. Guess we should hold off on that Friday extension, for her sake. Don't want to kill off too many students.”
“Ouch. That. Oh, Mommy, I'd forgotten. Don't tell me your are actually going through with it?”
“It was your idea, Kel. I talked it over with Paul, Ellen and Alma. We all liked it. I am not sure exactly when Paul will announce it, but soon.”
Kelly groaned, looking in the direction of her bedroom. “Poor Avelina!”
Early in the school year, not long before Avelina arrived and at the very end of one Friday afternoon, Kelly had asked about extending those long afternoon sessions backwards into the mornings, so that the full day each Friday would be full of the kind of scheduled, optimized but unorganized classes which now characterized the afternoons.
“I dunno, Kel”, Suzy had said in response. “I don't know if I could stand being with guys all day. Enough is enough.”
“Hey, hey, wait! What if we get the machine to anticipate that, adapt to it. There are zillions of ways to divide up and order the kids. Billions just as good as one another.
More than that. Put us in one class in the morning … “
“ … and another in the afternoon”, Suzy finished.
“Better”, Coriola insisted. “Let each hour of the day be different. Right now this class fills up a whole afternoon. Long afternoon, kills us quick. Not so bad if we mix and match the kids, maybe. Do the same all day, some of us might survive it.”
“Worth a try, I guess”, another girl said, “as long as we have medical help standing by.”
By the time school principal Dr. Paul Grey heard about it, the plan was fully developed. Computer science and social technology students from various grades had worked together on the weekend to come up with algorithms and write some simple programs in ST to do the work.
“Basically we've added a relaxation factor, Dr. Grey”, a senior boy explained. “That's the technical term for the mathematical operation being applied, but also seems to fit what we're going to do. We are going to relax the constraints on the solution space as the day goes by. Give the kids a chance to relax a bit too.”
“I see. We are, are we? Well, that's nice to know. Proceed.”
“Oh, uh, sorry, Dr. Grey. I mean, if you want to do this. I hope you will. Here's the plan. We are going to constrain the solution space for the first hour of the day by forming the compatibility matrix with a mixture of academic topic data and interpersonal compatibility data. As the day goes by we'll relax the academic component down to nothing, so that the last class of the day is just interpersonal stuff.”
“Quite an idea.”
“Oh, more than that, sir. We've got the ST code to do it. Give it a whirl anytime you want.”
“I'll think about it. Have to consult with Ellen, at least. Sally, too. I'll get back to you. Where did this idea come from, anyway?”
“Class Eleven, sir, that's the one with Kelly Phillips in it. She seems to be the one who got the ball rolling.”
“Oh. That might make it easier to get her mother onside.”
Social Tech High ran for seven hours a day, three classes before lunch, an hour for lunch, then three classes after lunch. The longer than usual afternoon was to accommodate the special class at the end of the day. The first hour of the day was made up using a 675 by 675 matrix for each grade. That was 600 students plus 75 teachers. The matrix was tweaked by introducing an artificial incompatibility between teachers, to spread them at distant points on the circle-like network that resulted from applying the TSP approximation algorithm. Then eight-kid-sized segments of the circle were snipped out to form classes, each one based on a single teacher.
Some fudging of the data needed to be done, but ST had a well-written fudge library to be called at will. Homeroom classes were just plain vanilla. Other classes had a different flavour because they addressed specific topics, like Avelina's social technology class.
For the big special classes at the end of the day, no special sweetening was required. Every student in the school participated, classes were segmented by simply rotating a cookie-cutter around in 4200 steps until the best was found. Teachers were assigned classes on a simple best match basis. Relatively simple.
The first new Friday would be that of the following month, which would be in early November. By then Avelina would have had been in New York for three weeks, and participated in two ordinary Friday afternoons. From being stressed almost to the breaking point the first week, Avelina was now copying well enough. Kelly hoped the longer Friday would not be too much for the girl.
“The important thing, Lina, is not to overdo it. Skip a class if you have to. Each a longer lunch, sit down in a comfortable chair to rest for a while. Lie down if you have to. Survive it.”
“How hard will it be?”
“Hard. I am sorry. It's only six weeks at the school for me, you know, I've had that many Fridays. But I was here for summer school every year since I was five. Its not the same, not really intense, but it got me ready for the tough stuff.
That and six Fridays behind me, I'll be OK. I think we'll both make it.”
Several students burned out each hour during the day. As each hour ended, a few more kids were sent home or to a more leisurely part of the school, an intellectual clinic, being expanded as the number of casualties increased.
The first hour of the day was most like one in an ordinary day, since classes that hour were mostly on one topic. The main difference was that students of different ages made up those classes. Interpersonal compatibilities were important, so was subject matter, but age or grade level was not. As the day wore on topic mattered less and less. By the end of the day it didn't matter at all. The last class of the day was just like the last class of any other day. But following so many other remarkable classes, it was somehow different. Each student in it had different experiences to report. Good experiences, but like nothing ever felt before. It was a more relaxed class than usual, but still stimulating. The best class anyone of them had ever experienced.
For Kelly and Avelina, every weekend had been divided into sightseeing and work. Not school work, but physical work, volunteer work on some project. Avelina was shown the city, or as much as possible of it. Nobody could ever see all of New York City, not even in a lifetime. Sightseeing was tiring, mentally tiring. Physical work was the solution. Every weekend afternoon Kelly took Avelina to the site of some project the kids and some adults were working on. This became a routine. Eventually Avelina would want to go out on her own, but for now the girl was happy to be with her friend.
In the evenings Avelina usually spent some time with Future Green, via video wall. Sometimes Kelly sat in, sometimes she did not. When she did the conversations were different, hinging even more on Avelina, who was compatible both with Chure and Kelly. They talked about many things. Being twelve year old girls, they talked about boys, of course. Sometimes their discussions went into the intellectual stratosphere, sometimes they were like girls their own age in every way.
At first Avelina's Catholic upbringing made the more down to earth material shocking. Subjects Avelina had only the vaguest of ideas about were explained in detail, almost scaring her. People did that!? And sometimes that!? No, impossible. How horrible. It was horrible, wasn't it? The North American girls had heard about girls who did things and liked them. All three girls were virgins, though Kelly had no deep commitment to preserving this status. Future could imagine sex all too well, but was surprisingly timid for one so apparently wise.
Kelly was not the timid type. Fourteen, for sure”, she said. “Two years from now. Maybe earlier, maybe on my fourteenth birthday. I could get a guy just like that, snap, and he'd be a guy, right, he'd go for it, bang.”
Future found that plausible, and rather envied Kelly her determination. Avelina could not imagine doing it so young. Or at all. Unlike many other girls her age she'd had little knowledge of what sex was like when living at home in Brazil. Many children grew up in one room shanty houses where they could hear their parents breathing hotly, groaning, moving about with passion in the dark some nights.
But Avelina's father was dead. Her mother had just the three daughters, which she raised in utter poverty with no man or boy to help. Unlike some mothers and daughters in the slums, they did not sell sex for money nor trade it for food. So the girl had no experience at all, nothing except for the lewd remarks the boys around her made. They only served to reinforce her puritan attitudes, if you can call any Catholic girl puritan.
The North American girls would change Avelina, influencing the way she thought about sex, but not enough for her to contribute to the persistent underage sex problem. That did not stop her from getting a crush on a boy in her behavioural sciences class, but it put her beyond his reach. Just as well.
School social events might have been a problem for Avelina, but here she just took the computer's advice. She would do that until she recovered from the effects of being plunged into a new environment. Kelly helped her choose from among the top few choices given by the computer, which were usually almost as good as one another.
These choices would be noted and would affect the way the system made suggestions in the future. At first Kelly's influence would be felt, but the system could account for that. Later Avelina's choices would be her own.
There were many school dances. Everybody liked them. By now the school had adopted a variant of the old dance card scheme. Each student was given a card with a few partners and several pieces of well known dance music listed. They were expected to meet with their scheduled partners and pick dances together, but each person had some blank spaces on their cards for special dances with special people. Since the school provided multiple suggestions it seemed less like pushing people together – less like promoting sexual relationships.
Avelina found herself paired with seven different boys and had to meet with each one in turn to pick a dance. As she did this, her card filled up, until she came to the three spaces for optional dances. She was too shy to find anyone to fill in them, but a boy she knew did approach her, and she got an eighth dance. Eight different dances with eight different boys, then another with the boy who'd approached her. She liked him. A boy from her homeroom class, she liked him a lot. But he would never get more than a kiss from her, and not right away.
By the winter holidays, Avelina was feeling at home in New York with Kelly and her family, though she missed her own mother and sisters back in Brazil. Her scholarship included a small entertainment allowance which Avelina had saved up, so she was able to send her family presents. She wanted to send them thin mattresses and pillows, some simple clothing, along with a bit of canned food. All so practical, nothing fun. Seeing this broke Kelly's heart. She added some gifts of her own, toys for the younger, prettier clothes for Avelina's mother and both sisters.
Kelly and her parents sternly insisted that Avelina buy them no presents. “You have little money. Keep what you have.” Avelina promised, but bought little Katie something anyway. Many people bought gifts for Avelina and her family, embarrassing the girl but pleasing her. Sally did more than give presents to the family. She sent two computers with all the trimmings and some modern textbooks to the little school where Avelina had studied.
Sally was very pregnant. She'd had amniocentesis back in July, when she became aware of her much desired condition. It had detected Y-chromosomes. Sally had been happy. Almost exactly four months after Christmas she would be able to give Drake a son.
Avelina had a crush on Drake. She couldn't help it. Kelly's father was such an impressive man. Not tall, he was everything else a man should be, everything a woman might want, except the stereotypical “dark” to go with with the most outstanding property he did have. Handsome. Wow. Avelina could hardly keep her eyes off him. Sally noticed, but knew the girl was no threat to her.
During the winter holidays there was major work to be undertaken at the college, where a new lease had expired, giving them a whole new floor of their main building. Ken Green had bought the whole building and was turning over space to the college when leases expired.
Connected College was growing rapidly now, having gotten over the difficult initial stages and gotten a reputation which made it easy to attract international students. They were following the lead of Social Tech High, though differing in the details. Kelly, Avelina and friends happily worked at the college building for much of the winter break, doing physical labour which they had come to enjoy. They were developing skills, too. Drake made them be careful and arranged for adult supervision of anything remotely dangerous, but got the girls a chance to learn many new things.
This time it was both Kelly and Avelina who developed a crush on the same college boy, a boldly handsome volunteer who worked hard, played the guitar, and could keep up with anyone in conversation. Kelly told Avelina she'd give herself to the boy if he asked, compatible or not.
“Oh, no, you would not!”
“Would too! I want him! I can't help it.”
Happily this did not turn into a real problem. The girls were cute, but obviously too young, and he had a girlfriend, a nurse who couldn't come to work on the building, but kept him satisfied in bed. When Kelly eventually found this out she was upset, jealous, envious, hurt — and greatly relieved.
Girls of age twelve can be difficult. Kelly and Avelina were not, ever. They had each other at home and they had the unique STH environment at school. Avelina also had Future Green as a friend. Kelly also had Suzy and Coriola as friends. The close friends knew each other too well for jealousy to be an issue. Suzy and Coriola were sufficiently compatible with each other and with Avelina that they could could share those amazing afternoon classes.
Kelly's social life was rich. The school had ensured that. Not without some manipulation on her mother's part, but it was the school which made it work. Her situation seemed almost too good to be true, but it was almost typical. Most of the students at Social Tech High were just as well connected and therefore well-adjusted, feeling very little of the “teen angst” which afflicted so many other kids at other schools.