The end of the school year was marked by changes in the lives of important people tied into the school by carefully constructed chains of students. These chains would break and be reformed as the lives of those people changed, but the school had a firm commitment to keeping them involved.
This year in June the long-distance school members Beth and Esmeralda Green graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. Free to go almost anywhere, for any reason, both expected to be in grad school, but even that would be left open until Beth’s system had made its recommendations.
Beth’s brother, Arthur, also graduated. He would be in New York, however, not pursuing further education but doing business in this, the world’s financial capital. Here he would be close to his mother, Sarah Rivers, who shared his business interests, and indeed had cultivated them in him. The school was committed to creating links which would provide him with close friends, so Arthur would continue have a tie to the high school. But henceforth it no longer be a long-distance one.
Beth was 18 in June, and could have claimed to be almost 19, but no longer felt such an urgency to appear older. Her link to the school had been through a senior girl almost the same age. That friend hoped to go for her undergraduate studies wherever Beth would be going for grad school. As of mid-June, Beth could still not say where that would be. Her friend had made an unusually large number of applications to various universities, and just hoped it would work out.
This year’s graduating class at Social Tech High had the composition expected, about one third from English-speaking North America, half with English as a first language, and about half of visible minorities, whether American, native English-speakers or not. Only a tiny number would not go on to college. Beth’s friend was not the only one who might choose where to go based on links which had been forged by the school.
The Social Tech High graduation ceremony had been a few days after the University of California one. As soon as theirs was over, Beth and Esmeralda had each sought the permanent relationships they both wanted.
“No more temporary men!”, Esmeralda announced.
“No more temporary men”, Beth agreed.
The field was wide open. Ultimately the future course of their lives would be affected more by the people chosen to share them with than anything else.They had decided to seek the best men in the world, trusting the system to give suitable weights to their preferences. They would prefer to live near one another, for example, but that was just a preference, not a constraint.
They both wanted further education, Beth seeking grad school, Esmeralda being less specific, but these would not be strict constraints, either. They had made applications to a large number of institutions, just in case, but had no commitments. What they sought were permanent relationships, husbands. From the resulting lists, they would be free to reject those who might prevent them from getting the further education they sought, but Beth did not want to place any constraints on her search. She did not want to keep any potential candidates out of the pool with upfront limitations.
There must surely have been many good candidates because the young women had much to offer. They had pleasing personalities, a wide range of interests, brains and talent, some fame within their fields of expertise and lots of money. They had no prejudices and would accept men of any racial or cultural background. As a result of early training with tutors, they had some linguistic abilities and could get by in few of the major European languages. There was also the matter of what nature had given them. The girls were lovely. Beth quite beautiful, Esmeralda more than pretty.
Nor did they want to be limited to the men who might be available at the moment they asked. So Beth set up open enquiries. These were not unlike auctions. The highest-bidders, that is to say the most compatible men, would be notified that someone meeting their criteria might be available, if they would wait and see. As time passed, the impatient might choose someone else, or the system itself might decide that so many more compatible men were collected above them to make their chances low. They would be notified when that happened. Some would choose to withdraw at that point. Some would not.
This was a good time of year to be seeking someone, since many others would be changing their circumstances at this time, as for example, graduating from university. Beth and Esmeralda would not be the only new graduates wanting changes in their lives.
As the days went by, descriptions of more and more compatible men arrived. The girls examined these carefully. Nervously, giggling, knowing that this time it would be for life, they took their time. When highly compatible men came on the lists, they sometimes made contact. None of these contacts were good enough at first, but before the end of June they were each able to stretch out initial contacts with high level candidates into real conversations.
None of the men had video walls, but the quality of their best video communications were sufficient. Beth recommended meeting their suitors in person. Perhaps she did not realize how much of a magnetic pull a personal contact would exert, but for whatever reason, neither girl needed more than a single airplane trip to make her choice.
It was not long before the Tech Fantasies Trio and Project Match founders were invited to Vancouver to witness the wedding of Esmeralda Green to John Hamilton, engineer, followed by the wedding of Beth Green to Harold Grey, architecture grad student. Beth’s husband and sister would both study architecture at Harvard, Beth herself would study various technical things at MIT. The four would all make Cambridge, Massachusetts their home for a few years.
Sally could not believe that the cute young teenager she’d met five years earlier was now a married woman. This was the first year in several during which Beth and her half-sister would not be at the Social Tech summer school. They’d be missed.
This year Sally’s daughter Kelly wass especially interested in going to the summer school. She is eight. Younger children are allowed if supervised, but Sally is going to be busy with Kate, who will turn two before the summer is out and is already a real handful. Sally got a twelve year old who would be starting Grade Seven in September to babysit both kids while Sally hung around school trying to be useful. Not quite truthfully, she told Kelly that Delia was only there to help.
“You are responsible for Kate, Kelly.”
“Then why is Delia here, Mommy?”
“She’s going to be in the school and wants to get started early. I said she could be if she made sure you didn’t murder Katie when the little monster drives you crazy.”
“OK. Mommy. I’ll take care of Katie. Don’t worry.”
Sally of course would worry, and would keep an eye on all three girls, but was going to be busy with the arrival of new teachers and students.
Well before the end of summer, Alice came to see Sally in her office. Sally groaned. “Now what?”
“Dr. Hanson’s chain to the school, the two boys, are to be seniors now. No changes needed there. I still want Dr. Hanson linked to me in some way. It seems to be the usual complicated indirect way, since I am a girl and Dr. Hanson is a guy. I’ve found a girl I can connect to, already married to a boy Dr. Hanson can connect to. They are both from Southern India, and speak a strange language, but they speak English well enough.”
“Couple’s room?”
“Sorry, yes.”
“Seniors again?”
“Sorry, yes.”
“Alright, alright, leave it with me, I’ll see what I can do. At least you’re not asking me to hire a teacher.”
“Sorry, maybe next year.”
“Get out of here, kid.”
When fall arrived, Dr. James Hanson found that Alice Ames was in his Grade Ten electronics and computer hardware class.
“What else are you taking, Alice?”
“Oh, senior computer software courses, you know, analysis, design, programming, one hour a week in each one, plus an hour’s supervised work on a big project. I’m writing a compiler for the ST language some of us invented a while back. Then senior math. Grade Eleven chemistry. Most of the other stuff is just what ordinary Grade Tens study.”
“So that will leave no computer programming for your next two years?”
“Oh, big projects are always made room for. I’ll manage.”
“We’re going to have big projects in my area, too. If you sign up for them.”
“I know. I’m really a software person, but hardware’s fun. I’ll definitely do something.”
“What is your computer language like?”
“Oh, it is designed around a very simple graphical user interface. You don’t have to use that, but the language has billions of callable functions, which you’d never remember without the interface. Actually the interface is built around the user and programmer help system. The first step in doing anything is to write about what you want to do, how it should work, anything else that documents it. If you don’t write user help, you can’t write anything. It’s designed to be taught to Grade Seven kids with no programming background, while also being powerful enough to do anything a big language can.”
“Sounds good. ST stands for Social Technology, after the high school?”
“Yes, but also because we are building social software right into it. Stolen from the school’s software.”
“How does that work?”
“Well, say a student wants to write a program to do some social stuff that has the usual very limited access to the big databases. Our team had students from every grades. It was a project that we put together during the school’s totally unstructured Friday afternoons. After the interpreter got running, I caught one Grade Eight boy trying to probe the limits of data access with respect to girls, trying to bypass the constraints and hook him up with someone. Very enterprising. I showed him how to get as far as he could.”
“How far was that?”
“Oh, he found the backdoor into the full Tech Fantasies system from the school’s system, and found out how easy it would be to make friends with a girl from outside the school who would probably be talked into more than friendship.”
“Oh. Should you have done that? Helped the little devil?”
“He would have figured it out anyway. I had to give him the talk, you know, the talk. But it was fun. Then he wanted to write a program which would do this exploration automatically, reporting results every time he signed on. We had fun with that. I needed to give him the talk again. I think he got the message, but I also think he got what he wanted, probably from some older girl outside the school. He was kinda cute.”
“Alice, you’re impossible. Tell me you made that story up.”
“Well, you have to understand, he could walk into any public library, use one of the big social software systems and find a close friend of the female variety. This would be better, because our backdoor into the Tech Fantasies system flagged the user as coming from our school and would not give him access to girls in the school community. We can’t protect the outside world, but we can protect our own.”
“Does it work both ways? What if a girl had used it?”
“More or less the same thing. Again, we don’t let them do anything more than a public computer would. Less, actually, because we do protect our own.”
“Well, I don’t know if I approve, but I can see that this computer language must be pretty high level if it allows that kind of functionality.”
“It has lower-level access functions built into it too. Potentially very powerful. We just built in a few restrictions at Dr. Aston’s insistence. It’s not finished yet, of course, and so far has just an interpreter. I’m working on a compiler.”
“Alice, you are in Grade Ten.”
“I know. Sad. Don’t worry, I’ll get over it.”
Alice found herself getting over it rather quickly. Days passed by as they had in past years. When she had started in September she’d had three years in the school. It would be four soon enough, but there was a conspicuous break over the winter holidays, a true break from ordinary schoolwork. From early morning until late in the evening, Alice worked hard along with her mother, this year’s best friend and that friend’s husband, all doing volunteer work at the school.
The building had one extra floor, which had been used for storage by the company which owned the building before Ken Green bought it for the school. Ken had actually bought the company, too, a rather marginal one, squeezed the assets out of it, and shut it down. That left the top floor of the building full of probably worthless stuff.
The gang of Tech Fantasies volunteers had slowly been working through that stack of miscellaneous material, saving some of it, throwing a lot of it away, selling some at auction. That was not finished, but about half of the open area was available for classroom use. But there were no interior partitions, no rooms, hallways, bathrooms, nothing.
All fall a small team of volunteers had worked on this, while trying not to make too much noise. They didn’t want to disturb classes on the floor below. Now with classes suspended for the holidays, a lot of noisy work could take place. Alice and her mother did a lot of heavy carpentry over the holidays. They also taught other volunteers how to do various kinds of work. The mother and daughter pair had been doing this for so long that they were experts at many things.
This was a nice break from the intellectual life of the school, but Alice would glad to get back to that.
Sally Aston often came up to view the work and talk to the volunteers. She sometimes brought along eight and a half year old Kelly, who found it all fascinating. Sally realized that by Kelly’s age, Alice had been doing Tech Fantasies volunteer work for three years. That must have had a role in shaping Alice’s character. The girl was a strong person, not just a smart one.
Would it be a good idea to get Kelly involved in something like this? Sally asked Sybil Ames about it.
“I highly recommend it, Sally. It is a matter of when and where. I’d recommend starting her out on weekends, working in places where there is nothing heavy going on. She could help cleaning up, at least. Oh, there is always something for people to do, even kids. I often see parents and kids working together on the weekends. Maybe you or Drake could spend a few hours sometimes on weekends, just a few hours, to give her a feel for manual work.”
“We will. One of us, maybe both. I am sure she will like it.”
Kelly had listened to this conversation with growing enthusiasm. “Yes, Mommy, Mommy, I want to help. Let’s do it. On the weekends. You and me. Or Daddy and me. Kate is too little. Someone has to stay with her, but I could come.”
“Before Alice was old enough to work with me”, Sybil told Sally, “I usually paid a nanny to look after her. Get a good babysitter, you could both come.”
“You paid a nanny to stay with Alice so you could do volunteer work for us? Sybil, you never cease to amaze me.”
“Doing it for years myself gave me some idea of what was going on, so that when Alice was old enough I could bring her along and find things for both of us to do.”
Sally was always the busy one, especially when the school was expanding, so it usually fell to Drake to bring Kelly to the school or its residences for the volunteer work she was going to do on weekends. Not the kind of man who had a workshop and used powertools, Drake found it an awakening experience himself.
Kelly was in school during the week, Grade Three, which she seemed to enjoy. On weekends Drake took her up to the top floor of the building. The heavy carpentry had been finished, now it was a matter of putting up wallboard, taping, painting, and so on. Kelly was too small for that, so she worked on other things with the man who had knowingly married a woman pregnant with another man’s child, the man she only knew as Daddy. They assembled desks and installed them in some of the rooms which were more or less finished. Kelly was thrilled. It was so much fun.
This floor was almost the only space left in this building, but there were some changes which could be made in the rest of the school, which had perhaps been converted into classrooms a little too hastily. There were also changes to be made in the basement and the ground floor, which were poorly used. As the school had expanded, they had learned to make better use of the available space. Those would be projects for the future.
Sally was glad that the physical creation of the school and its residences provided volunteer work, especially when done by students. She thought it would contribute a lot to their character and provide a kind of education not otherwise available.
The school’s basement was used for laboratories and industrial workshops. Their were so many teachers that a lot of different subjects could be offered. As the school expanded, it started to offer subjects once common in high schools but more recently taken out of many of them. Woodworking, metalworking and even auto-mechanics were now being taught. These now occupied space in the basement.
The ground floor of the building and the floor above it of the building had been partly merged, extra support columns being added to allow the construction of a gymnasium extending upward into space once occupied by part of the second floor.
The rest of that space was not good for classrooms because of the noise from the gymnasium, so a row of offices had been placed between hallways separating the gym from a few classrooms. In general the original part of the school had too many long hallways. A lot of changes could be made. Good. More opportunities for kids to learn. Sally certainly did not think her students were going to end up in the building trades, but a knowledge of them was desirable.
Because of the small classes, the school had a lot of teachers, but even more teaching went on. Students were encouraged to do some teaching themselves, under the watchful eyes of the professionals. Education courses were offered, for students intending to become teachers after their university education. These were available as options for grades eight through twelve. Students taught classes they had taken themselves.
As well, students not taking education courses were still asked to occasionally teach a lower-level class. Having them muster their thoughts for presentation to younger students was felt to be good for them. In each case, the students be matched up with classes as well as possible, so they could teach people compatible with them.
Alice Ames was now in Grade Ten, and could teach classes from grades seven through nine. She enjoyed teaching, and though she took no education courses, she did take every opportunity to teach something in her fields of interest. She had often gotten a chance to teach computer programming. Whenever possible she persuaded the teacher to let her use the ST language, because it led students to do more high level thinking than most languages. Normally Python was taught, so Alice showed the kids how the ST interface would lead to programs comparable with Python ones.
ST was only one of many student projects which had produced something genuinely useful to the school. A lot of teaching materials had been produced. Students often chose to make videos for classroom use, based on something they would have liked to see when taking those classes. There were now thousands of students, and most of them had participated in some worthwhile project, so the educational resources available to the school continued to grow. The most important educational resource was still the students themselves, who taught each other more than all the many teachers combined.