Somehow June arrived, yet again. The year had passed quickly, as students almost dazed by the intellectual life of the school had few boring moments to make the time drag on. Most of the anticipated problems had quietly gone away, the others were much diminished.
The graduation ceremonies in June were the school’s fourth. The graduation class now included many students who had spent all four of their senior high school years at the school. Though not many of them were intimately linked to other students within the school, most had such external links, so there had been several marriages during recent months and would be more before the end of June.
Strange to say, a few boys just barely old enough to marry had chosen to do so, often with brides a few years older. Charming couples, they seemed happy.
There were some pregnancies amongst recent graduates, all of whom swore that they would send their children to Social Tech High when the time came. Meanwhile, the pregnancy of Ann Kelly came to term and she produced a girl, Judith Sally Kirkwood. Judy. Sally’s Kate was about a year old, learning to walk and talk. Making both Drake and Sally proud.
Ming Ling Lo and John Heng Wei had both graduated in June, then gotten married. That left Alice without a close friend at the school. She again requested the unusual step of finding her own new friend. Once again it would take two people to make the connection. Hmm. This was going to be a bit trickier. Could she persuade the powers that be to actually hire a teacher for the sake of making her such potentially wonderful connections?
Alice had long ago begun referring to her friend, the president of Tech Fantasies, by her first name, at least in private. “Ann, what are the chances of me getting the school to hire a new teacher?”
“Why?”
“I need a friend to replace Ming Ling, who graduated in June. Best on the shortlist is a senior, linked to another student, who is linked to a teacher. The software gave this a high recommendation, apparently because of the teacher.”
“You want to have Sally hire a teacher, just to forge a short chain for you, a chain which will break when your new friend, the senior, graduates next June?”
“Yup.”
“And she should go for this why?”
“The teacher is about the most qualified one I have ever heard of. He could be teaching electronics at the university level, but is interested in our school.”
“You could find out that much about him? That is almost too much. We are supposed to be preserving privacy, dammit.”
“Oh, he has a flag on his profile. Open CV to any enquiries from this school.”
“Huh. Really interested, eh? Sally might go for it. Want me to ask for you?”
“Does she bite?”
“Rarely, and her teeth have grown dull.”
“OK, I’ll give it a try on my own, first.”
She did. “Dr. Aston, ma’am.”
“Why, Alice. Good to see you. What can I do for you?”
“It is what I can do for you, Dr. Aston. I think I have found you a most remarkable teacher. He is so interested in teaching here that he waives anonymity for enquiries from this school. Here is his CV.”
Sally squinted at the girl, sure she was up to something, but did look at the man’s resumé. He’d published several papers in peer-reviewed journals while still in grad school. “OK, I admit it, I am impressed. And wanting to teach here is a plus. Now what are you up to, Miss Ames? How do you intend to make use of this man?”
“Oh, well, that’s easy. See. Just like last year. He links to a senior boy, the boy and girl have applied for a couple’s residence room. I link to the girl. Well, uh, neither of them have actually been admitted to the school yet, but I’m sure they’d jump at the chance, especially if they get a couple’s room.”
“You want me to admit two new students, hire a teacher and use up one of my precious couple’s rooms, just to get you a nice chain to tie you into us for another year?”
“Yes, ma’am. Excellent students, I promise.”
“From where?”
“California. They are Hispanic, you see, and although of legal age to be together, their parents don’t exactly approve. Her parent’s know she’s not a virgin anymore, but don’t like it rubbed in their faces. Oh, not a good metaphor. But you know what I mean. They don’t like the kids being overt about it. Three thousand miles buys a lot of tolerance, I think.”
“Seniors. So your finely crafted link will break at the end of the year.”
“I convinced Mrs. Renwick that variety is good. A succession of good links is better than a single lasting one. Besides, only a senior could be at my level.”
“You scare me, Alice.”
“Little me? Who could be more harmless.”
“Alright. I’ll call the electronics teacher. Sounds like a great guy. You put the other links in the computer. We’ll try to set it up for you.”
Alice thanked her and skipped off to her next class. Sally sighed and went through the back and forth procedure until she had the man on the phone.
“You are with Social Tech High?”
“I am the principal. Sally Aston. I’ll hire you right now, if you want the job.”
“Well, I just got an offer of a post-doc at CalTech, but I’d rather teach with you.”
“CalTech’s a great school. I got my doctorate there. If they want you for a post-doc, all the more reason to have you here. Your profile says you should be able to teach.”
“Worked with kids for years as a volunteer community worker. I’ve taught electronics to hundreds of them. Computer hardware, too.”
“Good enough. We want you. For September.”
“How do I get wired in?”
“We are not sure of the details yet, but we’ll do it.”
Sally doubted it would be a direct link. She’d have to find one more student, perhaps two. That would put Alice at the end of a pretty long chain, but a chance to cross-link would probably come up.
It was not too difficult to arrange for the two seniors the little nuisance had specified. Yes, they were admitted, yes, they could have a couple’s room. Now Sally had to find links for this new teacher. Alice had only found the chain leading from him to her. He needed to be tied into the existing body of the school. No current student was a good enough link. The addition of another should have been enough, but Sally could not find the right one. Adding two students would do it.
When she realized that she would need two, Sally tweaked the requirements a bit in favour of finding juniors, so the chain would not break right away. The stable end point of the chain was a teacher with two existing links into the school. Five new people to be added to the school. Five between Alice and the teacher already part of the school. Damn kid.
Dr. James Hanson arrived the next day from Pasadena. Like Sally, he’d done his doctorate at CalTech, after doing his undergraduate work at UCLA. He arrived at the school in the afternoon and went straight to Sally’s office, as instructed.
After they had introduced themselves, Sally sat and looked at the man. The software had giving him an unusually high recommendation. She’d read his CV, but academic excellence and teaching experience would not have been enough. What made him so special?
“Have you succeeded in wiring me into the school?”
“Yes. I think so. The students arriving have agreed to our usual open-mindedness requirement for admission. By that they agree to meet with their suggested links a few times before objecting. In admitting them we are making them some promises too, but we ask them to try. These students will be juniors. Two boys, one from Indonesia, one from Madagascar. They link you to another teacher, who has been here a while and plans to stay.”
“Excellent. So I will be directly linked to one of these boys. Is that the only link planned for me, or is there something else in the works?”
“Ah, no. I’m afraid there is. You were invited at the suggestion of a girl who is going into Grade Nine this year. Assuming all the connections she suggested work out, she will be linked to you through two intermediates.”
“This must be an exceptional girl.”
“Yes. If she wasn’t, we’d never let her get away with all this nonsense. Imagine, asking me to hire a teacher just to keep herself nicely linked into the school. She was connected to a senior, who graduated in June, so the little witch somehow persuaded me to admit four more students and hire a new teacher. Of course, when I looked at your CV it was obvious that I’d want to hire you anyway. How come you never applied?”
“Oh, I did. I presume there were no suitable connections.”
“I think we’d have made some. But anyway, you are here now, and that’s what matters. I’m still not sure why you’d rather teach high school than college. Turning down a post-doc at CalTech in our favour, that is something. Why do you want to be here so badly?”
“Oh, it is the electronics analogy, you see. When I speak of being wired in, I mean something familiar to those who work with electronic components. You are connecting people in important ways. More than you may realize. Your Grade Nine girl, for example. I expects she needs input from me, even if it is not direct, even if I never meet her. I think your elaborate network of social connections made by considering compatibility has other consequences, the creation of important communications channels, even between incompatible people. I might not be able to connect with your Grade Nine girl, but what I have to say may be important for her to hear. Or maybe what she has to say might be important for me to hear.”
“We have some safety rules and don’t connect girls with male teachers. Our connections are so strong that the temptation to misbehave would be hard to resist. You can meet her, though, because there will be no magnetic attraction between you. Her name is Alice. She will be friends with an older girl, who will share one of our couple’s rooms with the student we have found for you. He’s a physics student who is also good at math, according to his previous high school, which is not too far from Los Angeles. “
“Sounds ideal for me. And his, uh, intimate friend?”
“She is interested in social technology, which is one reason the couple wanted to come here. You can study physics anywhere, but this is the place for social technology.”
“May I ask about Alice herself?”
“She hoped you would. Good at everything, perhaps the smartest student in the school, most interested in computers, but also in social technology. She dreamed up the chain between you two, then left me to find the other side of the chain.”
“She persuaded you to hire a teacher and admit, how many, four new students, to link her to the rest of the school, via that other teacher you mentioned?”
“I’m afraid so. I must be an idiot.”
“Not at all. Forging communications channels in society must be very hard. I’m sure you’re the expert. Anyway, as a result I will have connections with two male students. I know how good the students are in this school. To have two of them, very compatible with me, that’s wonderful. Do you know, I haven’t even asked what you want me to teach.”
“We have an electronics and computer hardware program with one existing teacher. We’d like you to be the other. You two are moderately compatible, Level Two. That’s good enough, since you won’t even share the same labs.”
“Fine. Perhaps you would let me run some network analysis on the students I’ll be teaching. You probably have software for that.”
“Yes, of course. I’ll get someone to run over it with you. I am sure Alice would volunteer. She knows all our software pretty well. Sometimes I think she knows it better than I do.”
Sally fetched Alice and introduced her to him. “Dr. Hanson, this is the meddlesome individual who was responsible for bringing you to us, Miss Alice Ames. Alice, Dr. Hanson, our new electronics and computer hardware teacher. Dr. Hanson would like to do some network diagnosis on the classes he will teach. I told him you know the software and I volunteered your services.”
“Oh, Dr. Aston, you got him!”
“Yes, and the others you wanted. Everything you told me to do. So if it doesn’t work out, don’t blame me.”
Alice took James Hanson to a central computer room, which had a lot of monitoring and some surveillance equipment in it. “OK, so right now we are in summer-school mode, which will end in a few days. In this mode the students are unscheduled and we have only a few teachers and a few staff members to keep the kids from burning down the school. But there are parents of local kids. Some brothers and sisters, too. By local I mean in and around the city. Not very many of those. Anyway, the computer is still busy in the summer, even if not actually scheduling things, because it accepts input and makes suggestions. The students all know that they can organize their own activities better if they supply the computer with good data, so they do.”
“What can it tell us, right now?”
“Not so much. It depends. The kids can control their level of privacy. Most let the software handle that, too, releasing more data for the students whose profiles describe them as open, outgoing, not secretive. We can get some information, anyway. Find out your probable classes, see if they are here, what they are doing, whom they are doing it with, and so on. Whatever information is available.”
It turned out that several of Dr. Hanson’s future students were in one or the other of the electronics labs, working on some project or other. “Can I go over and see what they are up to?”
“Sure. Watch, suggest, explain, help, whatever. Go ahead. We can go over this software another time. Best to do it when the fall term starts, really.”
As James Hanson found out after he started teaching in September, the programs were mostly for net flow analysis. One could get an overview of the whole school as a network, with estimates of the probable flows of information between students. Or he could focus on specific areas.
The more general views told him about what kinds of information were flowing, but the local views preserved more student privacy, again depending on what the students had told the software to do or what it had estimated itself.
For his classes, Dr. Hanson could monitor the flow of data along connected chains of students with more or less detail, but surprisingly well. The classes tended to run at about Level Two, because it was so hard to arrange for more within the confines of a single class. A few people were not even that compatible with the other members of their class, but there were no actual incompatibilities.
Most people in his classes were not at the ends of chains, but some were, having only a single connection to one other student. In only two of the classes he taught did Dr. Hanson find those single connections being to another one of his students.
Since he taught as several different levels, this teacher had one Grade Nine class, the youngest of the ones he taught. In it, there she was, Alice Ames herself. Unable to see in any more detail, he was nevertheless able to see the large data flows involving Alice. Not only connected to the one senior who formed her nominal link to the school, Alice exchanged information with many other people, including two marked as external. Apparently that meant members of the school who did not actually attend the school. He’d been told that there were many such links, often to important people.
Alice got her friend Maria Hernandez and Maria’s lover, Jorge Garcia to invite Dr. Hanson to dinner. “Alright, Jorge, I’d be delighted. Where do you want to go? You probably don’t have much to offer in the residence, but if you want I could provide the dinner myself, at my apartment.”
“No, Dr. Hanson. I invited you, we couldn’t impose on your hospitality. Actually the source of the invitation is Maria’s friend Alice Ames. Alice would like you to eat at her mother’s house.”
This seemed a bit strange, but James Hanson was interested. Soon he found himself sitting down to dinner in the attractive home of Sybil Ames. Sibyl and Alice had cooked Mexican food, very authentic.
“Now”, said Alice. “The five of us are quite compatible with one another. I set it up this way. Sorry for being so meddlesome. I can’t help it. Mommy, my teacher and friends are all at least Level Three with each other and with the both of us. We can all be friends.”
“I am sorry, Dr. Hanson. Alice is used to having her own way. I did everything I could not to spoil her, but obviously I failed.”
“You certainly did something right. She’s the best student I’ve ever had, Mrs. Ames. I think you should be proud of her.”
“Oh, I can’t help being proud of her, I’m just annoyed that she’s more manipulative than I am.”
“My means may be mechanical, Mommy, but my heart is pure. Isn’t it nice to have these guests? And look, four of us from the chain, right here. Dr. Hanson, Jorge, Maria and me. Three Level Five links, at least Level Three amongst us all. Nice party.”
It was. The participants felt comfortable with one another right away. Much was said, many good jokes and stories told, but a lot of deep conversation, too, which went on until nearly midnight.
“This group of people is unusual, but the school is closer together now”, Alice commented at one point in the discussion. “At one point there were more long chains, but Dr. Aston and the others have tried hard to improve transitivity and cross-linking. Now little groups of compatible people are easier to form. It just happens, most of the time. People get to know one another and get very social.”
“Mostly with others from the school?”
“No, many from elsewhere in the city. Locals get involved. People from the city often link up two people from the school who might not otherwise get together, or the other way around. The school pulls on the city, the city pulls back. What I mean is, the school is bound by such strong links that it is a very elastic structure. It does not dissolve into the city, absorbed by it, instead it draws people towards it.”
Dr. Hanson was fascinated. Alice pointed out with pride that her mother was on the school’s board of directors as well as being tied into it herself. Then she prompted her mother to carry on the discussion.
Sybil Ames explained. “The school is open late into the night, long after classes end. Students can bring people outsiders in to use the facilities. The school is generous in providing materials and equipment for projects sponsored by students. Not everyone has all the friends they want within the school. So they find friends outside and get them involved. Almost every students and most teachers have used the big social software packages to find at least one friend in the city. Often two. Extremely close friendships, usually. They supplement the ones the school supplies, almost perfectly.”
“What’s best”, Alice continued, “everyone in the school is taught social technology. So they don’t just blindly make friends from the rest of the city. They assemble groups of people. If they have two friends from outside the school, the kids make sure those two are compatible. They assemble larger groups if they can, all more or less mutually compatible. They do use the school’s facilities, but they also go out together. It works out, too. All of our kids know how to collect friends who will stay out of trouble, have fun together safely. It is part of what we learn here. We learn to use the social technology to do what every kid wants, to have a really good social life, in school and out of school. Look at me now. I’m not at all like I used to be. I never had friends, never went anywhere, never did anything but the volunteer work my mother and I like to do.”
“Do you still do that?”
“Oh, yes, of course. And that’s one way I can see it working. Instead of the same old crew of volunteers, we now have lots from the school and lots that they have dragged in to help.”
Sybil Ames looked proud, not only of her daughter and her school, but also of the people who had worked so hard to keep it going. “We have gotten more money from our major donors, and will be expanding the school again. Almost all of the work is being done by student volunteers and their friends. We haven’t announced it yet, but by next September the school will have doubled in size again, to almost four thousand students and five hundred teachers. Soon they will be drawing in people from the surrounding city, creating a network of over ten thousand young people with the school at the centre.”