Ever since the school had expanded downward to include grades seven and eight, further expansions had been discussed. The conclusion always reached that a horizontal expansion was the right one. Keep the existing age range, add more students, teach a few more subjects.
Nobody wanted to extend the school any further down. It would remain a high school. The only other kind of expansion ever mentioned was adding a Grade Thirteen, for students who would otherwise get no college education at all. This tended to be an intramural argument, occurring within the walls of Drake and Sally’s apartment. Drake was in favour of the extension to Grade Thirteen. Sally opposed it. She did not want to give students the slightest excuse to avoid going to a real university. Sally always won these arguments. But finally Drake did have a suggestion which got her attention.
“Suppose we use all the applications for Grade Twelve submitted to the school as a basis for the creation of a very small two-year college, with some very different name and location, not affiliated with the school.”
“I guess that is possible. Let’s see what Ann thinks.”
Ann Kelly was sceptical, not seeing the purpose.
“What would you really accomplish, Drake. It might do no more than take some of our donor’s money, providing nothing in return.”
“I want to perpetuate our policies beyond the high school level, that is all.”
“We have this discussion over and over, Ann, concerning a Grade Thirteen. I always oppose that, because would make it too simple for students to stay in school, when they should be at university.”
“Then we should make it much easier to find places in universities, Sally”, Ann said. “I’d support having classes for graduates, aimed at helping them find universities to go to, along with software support all along the way. But perhaps what Drake proposes would be right for a small percentage of them.”
Sally agreed. “I like that, Ann. Give them a push out the door. Every possible help. We’d help them with preparations for admission tests, help them send out applications, help them get scholarships, everything. I’d like every single student to go to a good university, somewhere. But yes, I imagine that Drake could put together something based on our school principles, which just might be the right choice for some.”
“As long as you give me that much of a chance, I’d be content”, her husband agreed.
Drake put together plans to grow himself a two year college, but that was far from the most significant result of this meeting. Social Tech would now concentrate on getting its graduates into universities by all possible means.
Once again it was Sarah Rivers who sought funding for their most ambitious undertaking. “Ken.”
“Sarah. I’m delighted to hear from you. Purely a social call, I hope.”
“Next time. This time it is about the school.”
“Oh, no, not again. I may have to give my poor old wallet hospital care. Have you any idea how much that school is costing me?”
“Yes, I could give you a complete cost breakdown within the hour, if you want.”
“No thanks, I’d rather not know. What is it this time?”
“Well, you and a few other major donors are very generous when it comes to providing full scholarships for our needy students.”
“Yes, I am such a kindly old man. Slowly going bankrupt, but generous.”
“You old coot. I know you have more money now than ever before.”
“I have been lucky. Almost lucky. I chose some very good staff and let them run with it.”
“I know. I ran your business empire for a while, until I had skimmed off enough of it to set me up for life.”
“Oh, good. Now you donate some of that back to the school, please. I’ll match you, a hundred to one.”
“Sorry, need more than that. The school wants to offer full scholarships to good universities for the best of those students who would otherwise not be able to go.”
“OK, but persuade them to try to get their own source of funds, please. I am not made of money.”
“True. Nor is it your most redeeming feature. But your willingness to be exploited in a good cause counts in your favour.”
Sarah reported back to Sally. “I think we can offer scholarships ourselves, for our best and most needy students. But we should still have those courses you three thought up.”
“Sure. Recommended for all students, software tweaked to push them into it whenever possible, say one hour a week, higher education and career planning.”
“Right. That should do it, Sally. I’d suggest that anyone good enough to get into a first rate school, one of the top ten, maybe, be given a full scholarship if truly needed. One year, renewable on academic success. Other than that, we offer enough incentives to make them try hard, while teaching them everything they need to know about getting into a decent school. At the end, we help them pick schools.”
“That sounds about right. I’d not like to put limits on it, though. Somehow we should get post-secondary education for almost all students.”
“What about your husband’s little college?”
“We leave it up to software, I guess. I think it will end up getting students who are dependent upon compatibility to do well. We have some students who are highly successful in this environment but just wouldn’t make it at an ordinary university where compatibility is not considered at all.”
“That may be quite a few.”
“I have no idea, Sarah. We’ll see. Drake is getting setting up now, and will be ready to take some of our graduates next September.”
“What’s he calling it?”
“Connected College.”
“That has a nice ring to it. Maybe it will be a success.”
“I hope so. I am beginning to think the damn man has a brain in his head after all.”
Over the summer, the school hummed with the pleasant noises of happy students making the most of the unstructured environment. There were a few more locals this year because of families who had relocated to the New York area instead of just sending their students. The addition of these families to the city meant more parents and siblings who came with the students to enjoy the summer activities. As well as families who had actually relocated, the families of students beginning school in the fall often took summer vacations in the city. They came to the summer school as visitors, stayed as participants.
Sally’s lovely daughter, Kelly Phillips, came to the summer school again with her mother, though only nine, and once again helped an older student look after her half-sister, little Katie. But Kelly also went with her adoptive father, Drake Phillips, to do volunteer work at his Connected College. The college also fell under the Tech Fantasies umbrella and readily got volunteers. Kelly was thrilled to be one of them. She was not the only child her age doing work at the site, which made it all more fun.
Though Drake had not planned to open the college for another year, it seemed important to help the students who most needed, so at the end of summer a couple of dozen students from the schools’ June graduating class went off to become the core of Drake’s college. The software had estimated that their academic successes at school would not translate to success at a real university. They were too dependent on the presence of compatible students.
It had been very difficult to match together the candidates for the college, and most had to be left behind. The school had tried hard to find other post-secondary opportunities for the remainder.
Now a Grade Eleven student, Alice had completed all the senior courses in computer science and would have to work on supervised projects instead. She was happy with that arrangement, having lots of interesting projects planned. One of those projects, however, had very little to do with computer science. She would be sixteen for most of this school year, officially turning that age at the end of September. Regardless of what the law said, most girls started having sex at this age.
Alice was surprised at herself. A prodigy in so many other ways, she had so far done nothing to satisfy her curiosity or the physical needs she did feel. Now was the time to so something about it. But she was too young for any permanent relationship. And the available software was not set up to find her exactly what she wanted anyway.
These were not problems for the resourceful Alice Ames. She been listening to gossip on the school grapevine for some time, and knew about Beth Green, who’d had a succession of temporary men before she was ready for someone permanent. Whether truly intentional or not, the famous Beth had dated college seniors, who graduated and went off to grad school at the end of each year.
This was what Alice wanted. A senior boy from some other high school, due to graduate and leave for university at the end of the year. Alice had enjoyed the friendship of senior girls for several years now, and gotten to know their lovers fairly well. She’d be happy to have a boy like that. If he did stay around, she guessed it would be OK, but she’d prefer a relationship with a definite end in sight.
This was foolish of her. Alice could view that future heartbreak without fear, since it was not yet real to her. Having a boy who would evaporate at the end of the year helped her calm the very real fears she felt about having one at all. Having made up her mind to find herself a high school senior from another school, Alice set about to tweak the software.
The key was actually to clone her profile, adjust it in various ways, then feed it back in, as if it came from a real person. Using ST, she persuaded the school’s software to backup her profile, which she then used her own access keys to decode. Publicly available statistics showed how all of the various parameters varied with age. She ran a program to add the changes an extra year of age should make to all of them. The result was a consistent profile for an older person.
Alice then invented a fictional person, a user of the main Tech Fantasies system and uploaded the altered profile as a profile recovery from a previously saved backup file. This fictional girl, age 17, was now able to enquire about a sex partner, not just a friend. Alice set the Tech Fantasies software to collect and forward suitable candidates. Then she just watched her e-mail.
What arrived in the mail were very brief descriptions and contact information. Contacts were mediated by the software, to preserve user anonymity. She examined both the descriptions and the ratings. At first these included only short verbal descriptions of the other person’s appearance, but once some personal information had been exchanged, it was possible to add photographic information.
Alice let the software auction her off, as Beth had. The chosen boy was named Albert Greenfield. He lived in Manhattan and went to an exclusive boys private school. A senior, he had indicated his intention to study abroad, perhaps in England. It was possible that his grades could get him into Oxford or Cambridge. If not, perhaps Edinburgh. His French would be good enough to study in Paris, another choice he had indicated. He definitely did not want to stay in the US.
All of this appealed to an Alice Ames who thought more about getting rid of him than getting him in the first place. Out of the most compatible candidates, she had chosen him because he was likely to go away. But she was compatible with him. Compatible enough. She’d had to go through e-mail, then online chat, then, nervously, to video chat. He looked pretty good to her. She felt something when she looked at him. That scared her.
Albert saw a very pretty girl, reddish blonde hair, slightly frizzy looking, but attractive, pale skin, blue eyes, a well formed face. He hoped she was well formed in other ways. In that he would not be disappointed. The once underdeveloped twelve year old had blossomed. They agreed to meet in a public place, for coffee. Having coffee in public seemed mandatory in such occasions, so meeting at the Mandatory Coffee House in the Village was appropriate.
Albert arrived first, so that when Alice arrived, there he was. Tall, fairly slim, more handsome in person, just what she had hoped for. She almost turned and ran out of the room. But not Alice. Alice was not shy, she reminded herself. “Mr. Greenfield.”
“Miss Ames. May I say how lovely you look?”
“You may. I think you did. Look, let’s get down to business. I am not a senior at all, I am a junior. We are compatible, and not just as friends. I checked.”
“I see. I thought the software had ways of keeping us from finding one another if you were under seventeen.”
“Yes. I had to trick it. You don’t want to know the details.”
“Maybe I do want to know the details, I am computer person, like yourself. But I am more interested in the results. What will be the results?”
“You have won a chance to be my first lover. You will have to sweep me off my feet first, which will not be easy, but you have a chance.”
“If I fail?”
“I will move on.”
In order to succeed, Albert had, among other things, to endure the inspection of Sybil Ames.
“Oh, goodness, Alice. Have you really brought home a boy? Not just a friend, I assume. How did you trick the software into getting you one?”
“Oh, I have my ways.”
After passing the “take you home to mother” test, Albert then had to display his own parents, whom Sybil wanted a full report on.
Sybil Ames had a very nice home, but the Greenfield house was bigger, more attractive in many ways, and clearly the home of people with money. Alice was not quite sure how much money her mother actually had, but these people had more. Handsome, from a rich family, why did Albert not already have a girlfriend? It seemed that any girl he went out with would have to be brought home to meet the family, and none had survived that.
Alice was different. First, she sparkled, not the least bit intimidated by the formidable Greenfields. Nor were her remarks at all empty-headed. She made sense. And it seemed that Alice actually was somebody. It took them a while, but eventually her mother’s name was recognized as that of the former Sybil Barron. A good Old Money family. That was enough for the Greenfields, she passed. Albert could keep her.
That was not sufficient for Alice, but she did respond in the usual ways to the usual physical provocations, so eventually they both got what they both wanted.
Alice’s software trickery had indeed accomplished what she had hoped for, it got her a good sexual relationship. But it also made her conscious of what so many other girls must be doing, using the software to get friends, expecting them to be boyfriends, expecting sex. She knew they would probably be disappointed. In general friendship and sexual compatibility were just not the same thing.
There was something seriously wrong with a society which enforced a kind of morality so much at odds with nature. That the big social software systems would go along with this seemed wrong. That the school software also did seemed even more wrong. The adults who ran the school were still concerned about underage sex. Alice developed the opposite concern, about how the school’s efforts to protect themselves from outdated moral concepts were preventing students from getting what they wanted the right way. Instead, so many of them, driven by biological pressures, would be sneaky about it and waste themselves on the wrong people.
Alice was sure that the big social software systems should find people the best possible relationships, even if those people were young and the relationships sexual. The school could then stand away from this, letting the kids seek what they wanted, as long as they didn’t do it with school’s own software. At first, the most she could do was to clearly state her opinions in the best available forum. The school had a newspaper. It could be read online or downloaded as a printable file, but there were also paper copies made available for those who wanted to read them that way.
The school never applied any form of censorship to the newspaper, so Alice was able to write about sexual issues without constraint. In one issue she wrote a very strongly worded article expressing her views. Alice would not stop there. She did a lot of research and testing. Then in another article she wrote about how students using the Tech Fantasies software at some off-school location could enter carefully expressed queries which would in effect add a sexual compatibility constraint to the legitimate request for compatible friends of the opposite sex.
That was something new, a way of getting around built in limitations. There was some danger that the big social matching systems would be forced to make changes to eliminate this loophole, but the efforts to do so met with objections from people who liked those systems just the way they were.
Sally Aston was now faced with another threat to the school, the same old underage sex problem. She had to arrange for someone to sue the school, so that their lawyers could establish both the right of the school paper to publish such material and the right of students to use publicly available software. The school won. It would not be liable for any problems which might arise from now on.
This was not the first time Sally had been forced to provoke a lawsuit to get the school a legal right to carry out its policies. The rights of this private school to hire the teachers of its choice and to have them teach material often seen as inappropriate for children were challenged several times. These challenges often centred around the controversial topics: sex, religion and politics.
The school insisted that in signing their children up for the school the parents had given explicit consent for the school to suggest courses or classes in any appropriate topic. The kids themselves made the choice whether to accept one of the suggestions. The school reserved the right to respond only to a parent’s explicit request for information about this and to the parent’s explicit request for the child to be removed from one specific course.
No parent could ask for details about what a class could discuss or what point of view the teacher might take. Nor could a parent issue a blanket request to bar their child from any course which might discuss some sensitive topic, such as evolution. The courts supported these school rules. Any parent who wanted more control would have to remove their child from the school.
Again and again the school won legal challenges, often brought to court on purpose by friendly parents seeking to help legitimize the school’s policies. Social Tech High could continue as it had.