Alice Ames had begun writing in the school paper about the available social technology systems to help her cohorts enjoy the kind of life she was now leading, which included a satisfying sexual relationship. The information she provided was often about how to get around the limitations imposed on the systems from outside. Having made an impact with these articles, Alice continued to write about using those systems in ways not intended by their authors.

These newspaper articles were available online, as were the newspapers themselves. That was the preferred delivery methods, actually, though for school use some were printed up on paper. Many people who used the Internet picked up on Alice’s articles, which were linked to over and over again. They became very popular.

It was in response to this that Alice was invited to an in-person meeting of the people who had created the big social software systems.

This time the meeting was held in New York, at the huge apartment of Sarah Rivers. Beth Green attended, as expected, but so was her father, Ken, who had received an invitation, but had not been expected to come.

Ann Kelly, Sally Aston and Drake Phillips were there. Don and Helen Walker from Project Match had flown in to attend.

Alice felt like she was being called on the carpet for her naughty behaviour, but this was not exactly the case.

“You’ve served us well, young lady”, Ken Green said, taking control of the meeting. “We could never act in a subversive way. Our software has always had a subversive potential, but we could never have drawn that to people’s attention the way you have. I appreciate it.”

Alice was surprised. “But won’t there be a reaction, pressure to change the software?”

“There has already been, as you probably know. But we are too firmly entrenched. What we offer is used in every country around the globe. No one government could get away with forbidding the use of capabilities available to people around the world.”

Don Walker added a comment. “For years we have had individual users who have made use of the systems without fully exploiting them. I suppose they are a bit intimidating. Now you have been teaching the world how to use them in new ways.  Even better, you have spurred imitators around the world to do the same.”

Proud of Alice, Sally Aston said, “I believe this girl of ours has become an expert on social technology. She understands the school software better than I do. She’s talked me into letting her make some changes to it.”

“Alice has been my friend since the school first linked us together”, Ann Kelly said. “I often consult with her on things. More and more I consult with her about our software and its use. We have a large staff, you know, many of whom work on our software, but I have learned more from my conversations with Alice than from talking to any of them.”

“In short”, Ken said, “I think you are one of us now. Does anyone disagree?” Nobody did.

“What does that mean?”, Alice asked.

“Somebody has to anchor things down”, Don Walker said. “We all have developers. But we cannot let things drift too far. Years ago we came together and discussed ways to merge our databases. Later we discussed ways to unify our software. We’ve divided the work between us. When problems arise, we work on them together. In the long run it is this group of people who set policy.”

“I get the feeling you might be trying to co-opt me. I have served as a critic and helped people get around the limitations of your systems. Now it seems that you want to bring me into your policy making group so that I will no longer be in a position to criticize.”

“But you are more than a newspaper reporter, Alice, much more”, Ann said. “I think what we are seeking is a two-way flow of information. We want to tell you the direction we are heading first, before anyone else gets it. You will be free to report and exploit what we tell you. In return, we’d like suggestions from you about how to improve the software. And when we get together to make decisions, we’d like you to be here with us.”

“As long as that is entirely unofficial and nobody even knows about it, then OK. I have to be free to write about what users can do with the system, even if none of you want that.”

“I think we do want it”, Ken said. “I think we want the subversive potential of the systems to be open knowledge. As I said, we cannot do it. Beth and I are Green family members, and her system is legally owned and operated by my corporation. The Tech Fantasies software is legally their property, though in fact theirs and ours are now based on much the same code.”

“I rewrote much of my system’s code using their software libraries”, Beth said. “And their software is now based on the result. But from a legal point of view they are distinct systems. Project Match is more concerned with human interaction, and especially in constructing the largest and best collection of questionnaire questions. Legally they services they offer are provided by their non-profit organization, though they use our software now.”

“So we are all one big project in one sense”, her father said. “Legal responsibility is another matter. We are each liable in different ways for the different services we supply.  We cannot tell people how to use them to get around the legal systems of any country. But you are an outsider. You own no service, offer nothing except user advice. That gives you complete independence. You are free to say what you want.”

“Including what you want me to say.”

“We could tell you what we want, but it would be up to you whether to write about it or not. You could help us implement social policies which none of us could do alone, because of our legal responsibilities as service providers. For example, suppose we felt that challenging the structure of US government and the legal system was important. Furthermore, suppose that the system included support for that. For example, suppose it could produce effective organizations of activists. Suppose it suddenly became easy to get proposals put forth as questions for a public referendum. I don’t think we could advertise these capabilities. You could.”

Sally went on to explain further. “By showing kids how to get around the limitations against underage sex, for example, you have taken the pressure off not only the school but our services as well. We cannot be held responsible for devious methods some people use to get around our safeguards. You can help use take get around other problems as well, in similar ways.”

“I don’t know, Dr. Aston. I just don’t know. You are not being specific enough, probably with a good reason. Let me put it this way. If any of you wants to communicate with me, I will listen. If you hold a meeting like this, I will attend. I not reveal my sources for anything I might write. If I do tell people about getting around the system, however, that might be something you don’t want. I won’t listen to attempts to shut me up. Not even from you, Dr. Aston.”

This satisfied everybody. The meeting dissolved. Alice went home, puzzled. What had that all been about, really?

Something did change, however. Usually it was Ann Kelly who hinted,  during one of their regular contacts. Here was a topic Alice might want to write about. Nothing more than that. Just a hint. Nothing about what to write, just a suggested topic. Useful, really, for someone who liked to put out interesting content on a regular basis.

There were always things that the providers of big social software systems apparently did not want you to do. For example, they apparently did not want their systems to be used for political purposes. The systems did not seem to support searches for ways to attack political figures. But they could.

So over time Alice reinvented herself. She was still a person who worked on projects developing software. Now she added the role of user adviser. Usually she decided what to write herself, figuring out something that a user might want to do, something the systems apparently didn’t support, then saying how to do it. But sometimes she did accept suggestions from Ann, suggestions probably originating with the informal group of project leaders.

This continued throughout the fall. Her articles were linked to by people all over the Internet and as they became popular, Alice became somewhat famous in some circles. It would not continue into the summer, when the school paper was replaced with whatever the summer school students chose to publish, but would resume in the fall.

This year passed even more quickly than usual, since Alice’s life was now full. She attended school full time, still did homework in the evenings, and now wrote a weekly newspaper column advising users how to use – and get around – the social software system. She still did volunteer work on weekends, physical work, a great relief from the intellectual activity of weekdays. And this year she also had a steady boyfriend.

Alice and Albert were only of Level Four on the logarithmic compatibility scale, because she had used so many constraints when finding him. But that was more than compatible enough for a good relationship.

They enjoyed each others company all the time, never fighting at all. Even when she dragged him along to do volunteer work on the weekends he did not complain. And the sex was great.

They were too close to separate before it was really necessary, so Albert did not leave for England until near the end of summer. He spent time at the summer school and did more volunteer work with her, having few activities of his own to take precedence.

As the end of summer neared, they made a clean break, not being too sentimental about it. They swore to be friends, but wisely said nothing about being more than friends in the future. One day she just drove him to the airport, stayed long enough to see him off, all very calm, then sat down and cried for an hour.

In the fall Alice Ames started Grade 12, her senior year. Next year she would be at university. One hour a week she went to the course designed for graduating students, to help them prepare for the years beyond high school. Alice was sure she didn’t need that course, but found herself enjoying it anyway. It was in the usual format of a discussion class, which gave her lots of chances to make suggestions to other people.

The school now had roughly 4,000 students, evenly distributed over the six grades. Almost seven hundred students were expected to graduate the following June. Almost all took the special course for future graduates. That meant there were almost a hundred different classes of eight students for the one hour a week classes. Dividing the graduating class of seven thousand into that many smaller classes was a non-trivial problem, but allowed for very compatible classes. The students in any one class had a lot of fun. Alice’s class was filled with students wanting a technical education. Yes, there was more for Alice to learn. Rumours to the contrary, she didn’t know it all. Not yet.

For the duration of this course discussion about university life in general would predominate, but students would also study such things as the syllabus for each technical subject in each of many possible future university. They would compare in detail the course offerings at schools like Princeton, Stanford and MIT, all of which had excellent reputations in the fields which interested Alice the most.

There was another issue this year. The boy problem. Alice had stayed celibate for almost a month after Albert left, but finally weakened and used the Tech Fantasies software to get herself another boyfriend. This time she had no hesitations or fears, so she put on few restrictions. She found herself a serious boyfriend, not just a temporary one, like last year.

Like her, he was interested in technical subjects, though mostly in mechanical and construction engineering. Like her, a senior, he would be going to university the following year. Unlike her previous relationship, this one was with a very compatible boy, a boy who would not just be leaving her behind when he graduated, as last years boyfriend had done. She missed Albert, who had gotten into Oxford and left her with more heartbreak than she had expected.

Alice had planned on him leaving, even wanted him to leave, but was shockingly overwhelmed by emotion when he actually left. Having someone new in her life helped. More than helped.

Actually being a senior was different than Alice had imagined. She did mostly individual study projects, but she was still in several classes with other seniors, for subjects other than her specialities. The students in those senior classes were somehow different from those in previous years. They knew graduation and college were on the horizon, so they applied themselves harder.

The school still sent out homework, to supplement the classes, which were still mostly discussions. The quality of this homework changed, being more of a preparation for standardized tests at the end of the year.

As always, homework was actually mostly in the form of tests, open-book tests, designed to guide the selection of further work. Usually homework was suggested by the school software, subject to revision by the teacher. Alice was used to this by now, though finding it a surprise in her Grade Seven year. She now knew exactly how it worked, being impressed with those who had thought up the system.

It had been Sally Aston herself who had realized that a steady flow information from the students, in the from of answers to such open-book homework tests would be so beneficial. It would help by suggesting careful swaps of students between classes, to better match them with their classmates. It would help the software suggest further homework assignments, and thereby guide the course, and it would reduce the load on teachers.

Since Sally had first put together this system, many teachers had added their suggestions, which had eventually been incorporated into the software. Even Alice had made suggestions, such as having math students write down steps in solving a problem on different lines and feeding the transformations to a symbolic math package. That way a student could not only indicate the answer to a problem, but indicate what steps had been taken to arrive at it. Alice had been in Grade Seven when she proposed this software change, now in use by all school math classes.

As well as the open-book tests which formed most of their homework, students in their senior year had more closed-book tests in class. This would get more information about their actual level of knowledge and help prepare them for standardized tests at the end of the year. After such in-class tests each student’s homework was often adjusted on an individual basis, more often than already done.

This senior year was more intense in many ways, including social functions, which were more common. Dances for the senior class with all external friends of the opposite sex invited were more common.

Alice brought Jason Talbot as her her date to those dances. Her new boyfriend was a senior at the Brooklyn Technical High School, which specialized in preparing students for college level science and engineering. He took the subway to meet her, spending most of their time together in Manhattan. As well as evenings out together, she often entertained him in intimate ways at her house.

Her indulgent mother ignored this activity though secretly envying her daughter’s happiness. Since her husband’s death, 15 years earlier, Sybil Ames had not been able to give herself to any other man.

Alice and Jason both talked about going to MIT after graduation. Preliminary estimates from the Tech Fantasies software indicated this as the most likely recommendation to be made later, when they graduated. This was true both of them, which was both a great relief and a worry to Alice. Selected carefully, Jason was nevertheless not the ideal man for her. She could do better. Loving him, she knew she would not marry him.

During the fall and into the spring, Alice’s famous social software user’s guide helped put the school on the map, but in truth it was already on the map, very much so. Applications for it still continued to pour in, from every part of the globe. It seemed that everybody wanted to study at the school, and those who had were welcome anywhere. Universities around the world sought out Social Tech High graduates.

Universities were now graduating people who had studied at Social Tech. Confident, wise, well educated when they had entered, they left university even more so. Those graduates would have a great influence on the world. They would always look back on their old high school with affection.

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.

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.

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.”

As the spring term wore on, students kept an eye on the increasing girth of their school principal, wondering how long she had. Sally wondered how long she could stand it. The solution was eventually found beneath the school.

When the building had been renovated the sub-basement level had accepted a few extra layers of concrete at one end, gotten changing rooms installed, then tiled all over. It had become the school’s pool.

Sally now took the advice of Beth Green’s mother. Sarah Rivers was remarkably slim and fit for a woman who had born eight children to Ken Green.

“Swim, Sally. Swim everyday. Get a lot of that near-perfect exercise. See how well it worked for me?”

“The pool is used by teachers and students, so it’s not exactly empty, but there is always room for another person, I guess. I have used it occasionally myself, but I get so busy.”

“Then just don’t get so busy. Better to take more work home so that you can swim when at school. The exercise will make everything easier, including the delivery.”

“Ouch, yes, that. I remember the birth of Kelly far too well, and I was there when Ann’s little Jimmy was born. Not much fun.”

“Easier, if your body is in good shape. Believe me, I know.”

Sally did as she was told, swimming for an hour, twice a day. Having a more flexible schedule than most teachers made that easy to arrange.

It seemed to bring her closer to her students as well. They enjoyed being in the pool with their principal, even if she mostly just did laps for exercise.

As Sally swelled, the end of the school year approached. Now the usual social changes were prepared for.

Many of the graduating class would stay on for summer school, some would not. Amarita Singh would graduate. She would stay at the school for the summer, then go out west. She had applied to the University of California at Berkeley and been accepted.

There Amarita could be with Beth. The long-distance friendship the school had established had been deep but exciting during the year. They would be able to continue it in person.

Beth would be entering her junior year at Berkeley in the fall. Amarita, the same age, would be a freshman, but that would not affect their relationship.

The girl from Northern India was still a virgin. Her other close friend at the school in New York was not, and would follow her lover to MIT in September. Amarita would miss her, but be happy at Berkeley with Beth.

Beth’s current boyfriend, a senior, would graduate from UCB and go on to grad school at Columbia, as planned. Once again Beth’s heart would be broken, but not so quickly this time. She had persuaded him to come to New York early. Beth would be at her mother’s again over the summer. The couple could share a room in Sarah’s huge apartment before Beth took Amarita back to Berkeley with her for the fall.

The shy international student would be a regular guest in the apartment this summer, though a little uncomfortable when her friend’s lover was around. Envious of her love life, Amarita was also aware of the emotional turmoil Beth would be in at the end of summer. Why didn’t her friend just move to New York herself, study at Columbia, and maybe marry the boy?

“We are not compatible enough, Amarita. He was only a temporary boyfriend, a barely Level Five one. However much I feel in love with him, I know I can do better. And I will, someday. Two years from now, when Essie and I graduate from UCB.”

Esmeralda was also staying with Sarah Rivers, and got to spend another summer creating brilliant works of art with her own long-distance friend, two years younger.

The summer school was just as busy as the previous year, with many students and parents participating, though a lot of the international students had only short visits from family members, or none at all. Sally’s attempt to speed up immigration for families of students had so far been largely unsuccessful.

Sally’s own family was enlarged just before the end of July. She gave birth to a girl, Catherine Ann Phillips. Kate. Sally was happy to have a healthy daughter, with only the slightest trace of regret that her attempt to propagate Drake’s remarkable abilities had failed. Drake himself was pleased. He did not get along with the male of the species, young or old, and had not looked forward to having a son.

It was the sight of wee Kate which made Ann Kelly want another baby. Mitch was glad to cooperate and couple announced their good news within the month.

Alice was concerned. “It is so soon. Your Jimmy is not even two.”

“I know, Alice. Mitch and I did want another child, someday — we never planned on having just the one. Not so close together, though. But sometimes it just seems like the right thing to do.”

Ann was worried about it herself, and had called Alice largely to soothe her own feelings. Talking to the young girl always seemed to help.

Unlike her deep understanding of computers, Alice’s knowledge of human reproduction was limited. Oh, she knew all the facts, of course. But knowing the facts was a long way from true understanding.

Still cheeky in class, sometimes mildly flirtatious with the boys visible to her across the room, Alice would have been scared to approach one in person. Boys at that age were not yet bold enough to approach girls yet, and had little interest in Alice anyway, because she had not much in the way of a figure. She was still young and slightly underdeveloped for her age.

Alice understood the futility of in-school relationships anyway. Except for much older students, whose connection to the school had been across gender lines, girls were not linked to boys.

Her class was an unusually close one, however. When it came to the school dances which had begun this year, the relatively compatible boys from the class were friendly and willing enough to dance with her. Such social behaviour was encouraged, even for younger children. It was a good preparation for adult relationships, and it was fun.

In the early fall, Alice turned 13. All of the other kids in her class were already that old. The class were so close that they had already established the tradition of giving birthday parties. Alice had one too, at which people posted such signs as “Welcome to the Terrible Teens”.

But in fact all of the kids at the school were well adapted adolescents, kept from the usual teenage angst by the close friendships the school provided.

Alice had started out at the school with only Level Three connections, then had found for herself the Chinese girl, Ming Ling Lo. The older girl was at the party with her lover, the Chinese-American boy, John Heng Wei. The other kids in Alice’s class knew Ming Ling, and knew what she and John did together. For not quite identical reasons, all of the younger kids envied these two older ones.

Alice knew more about this topic than her classmates. She knew that the median age for girls to lose their virginity was sixteen, but seven to nine percent of girls had sex as young as thirteen. She never imagined that her highly respected school principal had been such a girl.

Alice knew one other thing about the matter. The social software systems like Tech Fantasies did not suggest sexual relationships for young teenagers, but would not refuse to suggest friendships simply because of gender.

When Ann Kelly called to talk about other things, Alice asked her some questions. “Some kids my age have sex. Don’t they?”

“I hope you are not considering it.”

“Not really, though I am very curious and have a physical reaction to the idea.”

“That’s normal enough. Going further is not recommended.”

“Even today, when it should be easy to find a mate for life, even at my age?”

“Not as easy as you might think. Yes, the systems will find you a very close friend of the opposite gender. And if you met such a person, the shared curiosity and physical reactions would probably lead you to experiment. But just being compatible as friends does not mean being compatible as lovers.”

“Oh, I see. Yes, I should have thought of that. The criteria must be quite different.”

“The software is very good at what it does, Alice. For most people it will not recommend sexual relationships until the time is right. There are exceptions, when the kids are very mature, but in general you should wait.”

“What about boys? I understand that boys get desperate in a way girls usually do not. What if a boy seeks a girl as a friend, then encourages her to give in to her curiosity and urges. They probably wouldn’t be compatible, as you say, but won’t he get what he wants?”

“Well, we don’t tell the boys that.”

“Not telling the boys is probably not enough. You know how word spreads in our school. You should be warning the girls.”

“Good idea. I’ll talk to Sally about it.”

Ann did, but Sally was not optimistic. “We can tell the girls in our school, but they are not so much at risk anyway. The school is too tightly bound. No boy is going to get away with taking advantage of one of our girls. The problem will be the girls outside the school.”

“I see. You can’t warn all of them. I guess not. I suppose there could be some warnings displayed for girls about to be connected to possibly devious boys. The system should be able to predict the boys seeking only fun and the vulnerable girls.”

“Shouldn’t be such a big software change. You should contact Project Match and Beth Green, too, make it unanimous.”

“I agree. OK, leave it with me, Sally. I’ll do something about it.”

Ann reported this conversation to Alice. “I do approve”, the girl said, “don’t get me wrong. But I am an exceptionally curious girl, and even a short physical relationship has its appeal, especially if it would mean having a long term relationship with some boy.”

“Please, Alice. Don’t. Thirteen is much too young. And you are so precious, I mean someone I value so much, both as a friend and as one of our brightest students. I’d hate to see you get hurt.”

“I probably won’t. At least not for a while. Boys still scare me.”

“Good.”

Not everyone at the school would be this wise. And there would be one unintended consequence to the new software changes. Warnings given to girls who got queries from boys did not seem to be working. This fact quickly flashed through the network of boys in the school, who seemed to be taking advantage of it.

Sally was not aware of the problem until the parents of girls who did not go to the school called to complain about boys who did. Rather a lot of parents called, especially angry fathers, upset about what was happening to their darlings.

Once again there was one of the rare emergency meetings between the creators of the various social software systems.

Ken Green decided to bring along to the meeting his son David, who already enjoyed a reputation as the black sheep of the family. Actually he did enjoy this reputation, proud of his accomplishments.

“This is my son David. An author of published books, though not quite seventeen. I am proud of you David. There is just one little problem. You are also a prodigy in another area. May I mention it to these fine people?”

“Yes, Dad. You know I am proud of it. I am skilled in the seduction of young women. I may have learned that from you.”

“Nonsense. Well, almost nonsense. You know that I only want children, not sexual pleasure.”

“We all pretend to believe him, people. But rumours have it that my worthy father did not always seek children. How young did you first have sex, Dad?”

“That is a state secret, son. But I was always kind to the girls, never devious about seeking their favours.”

“Right. Not too devious, anyway.”

There was more “just kidding” talk between father and son, who were clearly affectionate, whether Ken approved of David or not. Then serious talk on the issue of underage sex began. “Oh, no”, Sally thought, with a groan. “Not again.”

“David, you seem to be able to use the system in ways I never intended”, Beth told him.

“Yes. I am not just devious but very skilled. But with good reason. The attractions of the flesh are just too strong.”

Though pressed hard, David would not reveal his secrets. That didn’t matter. It seemed that without being nearly that sneaky it was still easy enough for any young teenager to find sex out in the world beyond the school.

“Exactly”, David agreed. “And that is how it should be. Sexual frustration is bad for a boy.”

“But don’t you admit that innocent girls need some protection?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I am not sure how frustrated girls get or if it does them any harm. But as long as the boys are able to get what they want, I don’t care about the girls.”

“You are a scoundrel, David”, Beth said, failing to hide a trace of affection for her brother. They had once been close, before puberty crushed all morality out of him.

“David, I can appreciate your point of view”, Drake Phillips said. “I started having sex very young myself, and needed it badly. But there must be some way to preventing a few unscrupulous boys from exploiting every young virgin in New York.”

“A mouth-watering image, but I do understand. Really, there is no need for them to be tender virgins. As long as a boy can satisfy his needs regularly, that’s enough.”

“So, you’d recommend that the experienced girls in the city provide for the poor hungry males?”, Sally asked.

“Not a bad idea. There is always room at the top, you know. Unsatisfied older woman, happen to further a boy’s education.”

“That’s outrageous”, Ann said. Raised in a religious family and a virgin till graduating from university, she still had a streak of puritanism. Helen Walker nodded her agreement. A virgin on her wedding night, she had never been with anyone but Don and was sure she never would be.

“I am not so sure it is outrageous, Ann”, said the far more liberal Sally.  “David’s choice of words appeals to the educator in me. An older woman contributing to a young man’s education. Assuming that our software finds a truly compatible older woman, she will be not just a sex partner but a true friend, and since she is older and wiser, will help teach the younger person many things.”

“That’s true, Dr. Aston”, Beth said. “Knowing my own system as well as I do, I’m sure it could find the best possible woman to be with the young man or boy. Best in all respects, not just willingness to provide sexual pleasure.”

A consensus was soon reached. David’s insistence that teenage boys did not deserve the frustrations they usually felt was eventually accepted. So was his notion that older, experienced women were the solution. Sally and Beth had won the day by agreeing on the educational value of such arrangements.

“So what should we do, Beth?”

“We could increase the positive weighting applied to such affairs.  But I am not sure we need to do that. Our neural networks learn. They will learn that such relationships are beneficial if they truly are. I can check the stats, but I bet these changes are already taking place.”

Beth did check the statistics her system kept, reporting that the problem did seem to be resolving itself in they way they’d just agreed upon. What they had done was put into words a tendency already visible, if you looked carefully for it.

Sally raised the idea of a controlled leak. Maybe a hint should be dropped. It would spread through the network of boys at the school like wildfire through dry grass. David suggested the way a hint might be worded. They all thought it clever. He was a clever boy, alright. Too clever.

“Dr. Aston, it is entirely inappropriate for you to to consider such a thing”, Beth said. “If no one opposes it, let me handle it. I know a very influential woman in New York who will do what I say. She is linked to a teacher of our fine female variety. That will be enough to let the idea loose in the school.”

If there was anyone in the world that the strong-willed Sarah Rivers could be influenced by, it was her first and probably favourite daughter.

“It is the right thing to do, Mommy. Let your friend know. That should be enough to get the idea out there, but just to be on the safe side I will speak to Arthur too.”

Soon all the boys in the school had heard the word. “Don’t jeopardize the school by seeking sex from girls near your own age under the guise of friendship. If you are too young, the software won’t let you seek sex with older girls directly, but if you just seek friendship with them, you are much more likely to be fully satisfied.”

That seemed to work. Very quickly the number of parents complaining of exploited young girls from outside the school dropped dramatically. Sally was sure it would drop even more as success stories told by the boys reached other ears.

All of this was eventually recounted to Alice Ames by Ann Kelly, seeking reassurance from the young girl that they were doing the right thing.

“Whether for right or wrong, I don’t know, but I think it is for the best. Whether the boys in my class should be having sex with older girls is right or not, they are happier, less frustrated. I’m sure of it.”

“How old are these girls?”

“Not very old. I’m not sure. I don’t think there is really a legal problem.”

“I sure hope not. I thought we were getting a handle on the old underage sex problem, which I always thought was confined to girls. Now here it is, back again, this time with boys.”

“Read books, watch movies. The problem is not our invention. Parents have been worrying about it for centuries at least, and in the past 30 years or so has been almost their greatest concern. Things are better now. Don’t worry so much.”

Ann continued to worry. Sally recognized that an old problem had re-emerged, but was not nearly as upset about it. Her own experiences as a teenager had been in a time when parents worried only about teen sex, giving little thought about the terribly unpleasant feelings sexual matters brought about, both for teenagers who were having sex and those who were not. 

Now that kids could be matched for compatibility, most of that emotional pain could be taken away. The ones in her school understood this better than any others in the city, probably better than any others on the planet.

By mid-September it was clear that Tech Fantasies president Ann Kelly was pregnant, due just before the New Year. Her duties were considerable, but she had no fixed schedule. There was also much help available to her, so her pregnancy would cause no problems either to her organization or the school.

The addition of lower grades to Social Tech High had begun early in the fall and would continue throughout the year. Beginning to have some worries about the number of special classes like Alma Renwick’s, the organizational committee under Sally Aston was now linking these classes into the main body of the school with the intense Level Five connections which had characterized the school from the start.

Making these connections could only be done with the aid of short chains of individuals, at least one inserted between two people that should be linked up. All of these were voluntary, mere suggestions, but both students and teachers usually accepted them without question.

Alice Ames was not the kind of girl to accept things without question, however. “What does the space of possibilities look like? What kinds of choices do I have.”

“Well, Alice”, her teacher explained, “since these links are intended mostly for your benefit, you do have a lot of choice. The school software is set up to suggest the best configuration it can find. Others are possible.”

“How much better is the best than the next few?”

“Oh, not much better. The top ten are very nearly equal.”

“Then I want a choice.”

“That is your right. I’ll set it up.”

The same day Alice received some fairly detailed information about alternatives which could probably be implemented, since the people listed would probably cooperate. Blindly. Unlike Alice herself.

She took the results back to Mrs. Renwick. “The Chinese girl interested in computer langages. She would be linked to that Chinese-American boy interested in natural languages, the ones people use. He would probably be linked to one of the language teachers in the school.”

“Are you sure the software recommended a girl linked to a boy?”

“They are both seventeen. Her parents are back in China. The software predicts that she’d accept a link to a boy, not having to consult her parents.”

“You are some days short of being twelve, Alice. How likely is it that a seventeen year old girl would accept you as a friend?”

“Don’t you trust the software, Mrs. Renwick? My guess is that she will think of herself as my mentor, but appreciate having a guide to western culture, too.”

“Alright, let’s put in the request and see what happens.”

Almost immediately a girl in mainland China who was in a state-run school there got a notice saying that she would be admitted to the Social Technology High School of New York, with a full scholarship including room and board.

In San Francisco’s Chinatown a second-generation Chinese-American boy got a similar notification, without the offer a full-scholarship. That could be changed, but his family wealth seemed sufficient to cover the school fees. He could also take care of his own living arrangements, which would be through a cousin in the New York Chinatown.

Natural language enthusiast John Heng Wei would accept as close friend and mentor the school’s Greek and Latin teacher, Arnold Smithson. He would also accept the probably intimate friendship of a Ming Ling Lo from Nanking, China. Alice Ames would be close to Ming Ling.

As Alma Renwick had also pointed out, both of these students would almost certainly graduate in June, less than eight months away.

“That is good. They will remain as friends in some way, I think. The links will be too strong to just dissolve. Meanwhile, the school will help me find new friends. I’m not by nature a social person, Mrs. Renwick. The more people I have around to pull me out of my shell, the better.”

“An unusual point of view, Miss Ames.”

“Thank you, ma’am. As long as it is a reasonable one, an unusual point of view is valuable.”

“See what I mean?”

The character of Alice’s Grade Seven class did change slightly as everyone in it got extremely good connections though short chains leading back to the main school. They were still close, but no longer felt dependent on one another.

Alice’s connection with Ann Kelly continued to be a strong one, apparently growing stronger. Alice rarely mentioned her problems to Ann, but the latter was fond of calling the girl in the evening, to discuss her own problems. Rather often the young girl’s comments were helpful.

From being a rather lonely girl, whose best friend was her mother, Alice Ames was now popular, with one near perfect friend and several more than adequate ones. Her dry wit in class was much admired, though her ready answers and obvious status as teacher’s pet occasioned some mild jealousy.

Ann Kelly could not help doing a bit of meddling. Knowing how close Alice and her mother were, Ann arranged for Sybil Ames to get an invitation to join the Social Tech High board of directors. As a regular donor Sybil was acceptable. As a regular volunteer she was recognized and popular. It took only one board meeting to approve Sybil Ames as the newest member of the school’s board of directors, which included some well known educators as well as major donors.

With Sybil now clearly a more important figure in the Social Tech High organization, Ann did two things. First she called the school.

“Sybil Ames is important, Sally. More than you might think. I can sense it. I’ve gotten her on the school’s board of directors. That’s good. She deserves it and her strength of character will be good for us. My young friend Alice gets her abilities honestly.”

“Yes, I know about Alice. Alma Renwick says she’s the best student ever.”

“I can believe it. Alice is very close to her mother, who raised her alone after Alice’s father was killed just two years after the girl was born.  But how compatible can mother and daughter ever really be? Alice doesn’t really tie Sybil into the school. I think we need to do that.”

“It might mean several links, but they won’t be too hard to find. Will she want to be linked in?”

“That’s my next project.”

Sally agreed to invite the woman to join the school and if she accepted, to find a short chain of students or teachers linking the woman into the school. This was not something to be done lightly, because it would affect the lives of the people imported to create these links.

The other thing Ann did was speak to her young friend, who now had a video-wall in her bedroom. “About your mother, Alice.”

“A fine woman. Takes after her daughter.”

“Yes. Just so. And like her daughter, should be linked into the school.”

“Will Dr. Aston go for it?”

“I twisted her arm.”

“OK, I’ll twist my mother’s. That’s why you called, isn’t it?”

“Of course. So twist away.”

Alice reported to Sybil right away. “It worked, Mommy. You’re in.”

Sally Aston got the software to construct the new chain carefully, even agreeing to the unusual step of creating a link by hiring a teacher. Sybil’s new friend would join the school as a education teacher, to help teach future teachers.

That woman was linked into the school through two students, one in Grade Eleven and one in Grade Eight. All were from outside the United States. The teacher being British, the students from India.

As the school grew, less than two percent of those who joined the school were to build such short chains, not a very significant number. But the external people thus linked in were important. Invitations had also been sent out to several well known scholars and educators around the world.

A professor of education at Oxford university accepted an invitation which had included the offer video equipment for overseas communication. There was no room in his office for a video wall, but the man’s office computer was modified to include the special cameras and image integration hardware which Beth Green had invented. The man was linked into the school via a Grade Seven boy from an Australian private school, now in residence in New York.

When the winter holidays arrived, the absence of organized classes gave those working on the various conversion projects a chance to make more progress. The last of the rooms for students in the main building could now be converted without the noise interfering with classes in adjacent rooms.

The new rooms for lower grade students in the building devoted to them were being completed, somewhat ahead of schedule. There were a very few single-bed rooms. They were for those linked to teachers or local students who could not or should not be boarded out to the families of their friends.

Almost all rooms were two-bed rooms, for strongly linked students to share. Grade level did not matter too much, so some students from higher grades lived in these residences. A section of the building was for girls only, regardless of grade.

A small section of the residences for older students was mixed, intended for Grade 12 couples. The rule was that both students had to be of legal age in their country of origin.

If that condition was satisfied and the students were 17 or older, then parental permission to live in these rooms was not required.

Alice’s friend Ming Ling Lo was not in one of these couple’s rooms, though she and her boyfriend, John Heng Wei would meet the legal requirements. John lived in the city’s Chinatown so the school did not recognize the need he felt to live with his true love. That did seem to be a great pity.

Alice and the Chinese girl five years her senior got along very well. They were contemplating the possible creation of a new computer language someday. Though neither was directly connected to her, the two girls spent some time in video-wall conversations with Beth Green, who had created her own language, PreCode, when younger than Alice.

Early in October, moved by her friend’s evident condition, Sally had an idea. “Ann. You knew Drake quite well at one time.”

“We both did. Jointly and severally, as I recall.”

“Perhaps then you also recall Drake’s remarkable qualities.”

“I do. Mitch is a fine man, but Drake was exceptional. Is he still?”

“Regularly. Quite wears me out, I am happy to say.”

“So, we are girls after all, despite our mature respectability. We can giggle over men’s attributes.”

“Please. Am I giggling?”

“Yes.”

“Oops. Well, never mind. Mature respectability is over-rated anyway.  What I wanted to bring up was the propagation of excellence. It would be sad if Drake was never to pass his attributes on to a son.”

“A tragedy. What have you in mind?”

“Adding procreation to recreation.”

“They do say that adds fuel to the flames. It would also add a little baby to the household. Can you cope with that?”

“Yes. I look forward to it. Kelly was such a beautiful baby, made me so happy. I miss that.”

Sally and Drake went to work right away. Yes, doing it for real did add fuel to the flames. If Drake was anywhere near as fecund as he was vigorous, Sally should be pregnant well before the fall term ended.

Beth was in Vancouver for the winter holidays, home from Berkeley. With her was Amarita Singh, Beth’s long-distance link to Social Tech High.

By the time the New Year arrived, the lower grades were mostly filled. Classrooms in the main school were sufficient, but some residences needed to be created.

By that time, Ann Kelly had been delivered of a handsome baby boy, named James Mitchell Kirkwood, to be called Jimmy. And Sally was indeed pregnant. Due near the end of summer, her pregnancy would not interfere with her work.

Ann Kelly did still live in Princeton with her husband, but she came into New York sometimes, especially on weekends when Mitch had no teaching duties. As soon as she realized that Ann would be there occasionally, Alice insisted on serving as a babysitter to her friend’s little baby. It seemed to Ann rather a waste of such intelligence to have the girl looking after a young child, but Alice brought Ming Ling with her, and the two talked about computer languages non-stop. Little Jimmy stared at them, fascinated.

At the meeting of the whole faculty, which now included 177 teachers, Principal Sally Aston introduced Solomon Eisenstein and Ralph Stevens, explaining what the purpose of this discussion would be. “Resolved: That Social Tech High shall be extended to the two lower grades, grades seven and eight. Mr. Eisenstein for the proposition and Mr. Stevens opposing.”

“As principal and chairwoman I have decided to give each gentleman 20 minutes for a presentation of his views. After which I will open the floor to discussion, but I will limit the topic of underage sex to the first 20 minutes before asking for a vote on whether or not to continue discussing that topic. As decided by lot, Mr. Stevens will go first. Sir?”

Once their views had been given, much as predicted, the floor was opened for discussions of underage sex. The comments made largely duplicated those made by the two speakers, so after 20 minutes of them, the assembly voted not to continue discussion of that topic.

The rest of the planned agenda included three topics: Would adding those two grades to the school be good for the students in them? Would adding those students to the school be good for those in the current four grades? Would the addition of those grades be good for the school as a whole. From the nature of the ensuing discussion, Sally felt that all three questions had the same answer. Yes.

After these topics had been covered sufficiently, the floor was opened for additional questions. Already knowing the answer, Dr. Paul Grey, Vice-Principal, asked about financing. Rita Stevens asked about residences. She shared her husband’s opposition to the proposition and wanted to know about about the dangers inherent in housing younger students.

Finally the issue was put to a vote. Teachers interested in the younger grades tended to vote in favour. Fathers of girls in the affected ages voted mostly against it. Mothers seemed undecided. As a whole, the assembly voted for the proposition, defeating the affected fathers, who would be free to send their daughters elsewhere, as some of the others had probably recognized.

The meeting continued, as questions of staffing and implementation remained to be discussed.

Sally proposed that these matters be treated in just the way the school itself had been created and run. She suggested that within those guidelines, the implementation of the project should be left up to her and a small committee chosen with new software designed for this purpose.

Sally was referring to Beth Green’s backward text matcher. Applied to the written work of school faculty members, all of whom had profiles available, the new software produced committee recommendations. It even assigned possible roles to individual members.

With only one exception, the chosen committee members agreed to serve, even accepting their suggested roles. The role left unfilled was soon filled with the use of the same software. Then a list of the committee members was circulated to faculty and staff members. Two additional faculty and one office staff member wanted to be on the committee as well. Beth’s software suggested revised roles for everyone. There were no objections. Handy piece of software, that. Sally wondered how she’d ever lived without it.

An announcement went out through all known channels, which were mostly people who had used one of the social technology software systems and had profiles available. Millions of them.

In approximately these words, it said, “Social Tech High will be expanding to include grades seven and eight, intended for students aged twelve and thirteen. Applications for students and teachers will be accepted immediately. Full scholarships will be available for those who need them. The expansion of the school will be limited by how quickly classroom space can be made available. For international students requiring residences, their acceptance will depend on how quickly residential space can be made available. If you are a qualified candidate to be a teacher or student, please apply now. If you know of such a person, please have them contact us. Finders fees may be available under certain conditions to be specified on request.”

There now. They were committed. The school would be changed forever.

Ken Green quickly mobilized an army of workers to convert space in the main school building and nearby ones. Space in the main building which had already been converted to residences would be converted again, this time to classroom space.

New residential space would be provided elsewhere. The lower floors of a different building would be converted to residential space for the younger students, while the older ones would live separately. Students would also be boarded out with families, when appropriate.

Conversion of old office, sales and warehouse space into student residences had already been happening and the teams doing the work were a bit ahead of the game.  So some students in the lower grades could be housed immediately.

It would be a complicated process. The older students living in the main building would be moved into newly completed rooms elsewhere, making their old rooms available for the newcomers. Most of those rooms would be left for student use, while a small fraction would be converted into classroom space right away. When the new space for younger students was available, all of the residential space in the main building would become classrooms.

Various kinds of non-teaching staff would be required, especially people to support the students who were to get room and board directly from the school.

Beth Green referred Sally to her half-brothers Edward and Norman Green, who were not only twelve and thirteen, respectively, but were planning to become teachers themselves. Both boys went to the Green Private School, saying that they needed to be in an real educational environment in order to learn their subject.

That school had small classes and was as organized along compatibility lines as possible, given the condition which had a higher priority, its use for Green family members. It supplemented or replaced tutors for some of Ken Green’s various gifted children.

Ken had given them those gifts himself, partially through a discriminating selection of genetic material to complement his own, and partly by spending freely to hire dedicated full time tutors for the children who lived with him. Their mothers were free to take them away, but even then he supported their education handsomely.

Edward and Norman were both boys, however. A female point of view would help. There was no girl child of Ken Green’s within the key age range and planning to become a teacher. Beth recommended her half-sisters Donna and Dorothy to fill the gap.

These inseparable best friends were fifteen, outside the relevant age range, but like Edward and Norman did plan to become schoolteachers. For the same reason as the boys, they went to the Green Private School. All four children studied in the right grade for their age, on purpose, though bright enough to have advanced further.

Polled in turn, all of the kids offered the same opinion, unaware of what their half-siblings were advising. As Donna put it, “Make sure it is a school first, a community second. You will have an enormous number of applicants and can tie everyone together as you bring the students in.”

Sally asked for specifics.

“Put together a class, say a Grade Eight class. Make them a bit more compatible as a class than usual, Level Three, say. Then for each one, find the best student or teacher in the school to serve as friend or mentor. Those will also probably be Level Three connections, no more, since the school is more puddle than pool.”

“I see, Donna. The kids will still be well tied in, by more than adequate links, then the real Level Five or higher links can be added as the school expands.”

“Exactly.”

Sally decided to make an executive decision and build the class around the one true polymath in the school, the teacher who most wanted to teach younger kids.

“We want your input, Alma, but it will be mostly the software’s task. If you want the job, we will find you a class of eight kids, the best we can do for you and for the kids themselves. Probably Level Three for everybody, including you.” Sally recounted the very similar opinions she’d gotten by consulting the Greens.

“Let me at it!”

There were more than enough applicants to form a single class, which turned out to be a Grade Seven class. For now, Alma would teach them all subjects. She could do that easily.

Five of the eight spoke English as a first language, three of them being from English-speaking North America. One of the remaining three students was European, one from India, one from China. Five girls, three boys. Something in the way the software made up a compatible class had affected ages, so the boys were a few months older than the girls. And probably a few months less mature than the girls.

Only one of the students was from Manhatten. Neither of the other North American students lived anywhere within the tri-state region near New York and so seven of the new students would have to be boarded out to local families or to live in residence.

Exactly half the class had already been placed with local families for room and board. The other half would be in residence. Their rooms would be near their classrooms. An additional staff member would join the existing ones for older students, to help supervise and care for these four students. That level of extra staff would not be necessary in the future, but Sally thought it wise to start out the right way.

Alma Renwick thought it a fabulous class, the best ever. It was hard to bring the mutual compatibility of a whole class of students above Level One, since each time you add a student the requirement to be compatible with the teacher and all previous ones makes it harder. If the compatibilities of the students were independent, it would in theory take 100 million candidates to be sure of assembling a Level One class.

Since there were some predictable factors, the school managed to reach Level Two usually, but this class was almost of Level Three. Each was the best one out of a thousand for all the others, including Alma Renwick herself.

The local girl was Alice Ames. The youngest student in the class, not yet twelve, she seemed the smartest. Alice had never gone to school before. Her profile in detail had been in the computer since Alice was little, and was regularly updated, since both Sybil Ames and her daughter were Tech Fantasies volunteers. Raised with private tutors, Alice had also learned to use broom and dustpan, paint and paintbrush, working on various projects since the was barely five years old.

Alice was placed at the end of a quarter circle of students, seated beside another girl. The way seating arrangements worked, that girl would be the most likely friend for her within the class. Not nearly as close a friend as the school would eventually find for her, but someone to lean on a bit. Never having gone to school, Alice didn’t have many friends, only the few kids she had met on some Tech Fantasies volunteer work crews.

The residential students would not ever hear about it, but Alice had worked as a volunteer, helping to paint their rooms. Social Tech High was still a Tech Fantasies project and was still dependent on donors and volunteers, not investors. On weekends for some time to come Alice and her mother would work side by side on conversion projects related to the school.

Alma Renwick took at once to to the pretty girl with pale skin and slightly frizzy reddish-blonde hair. When nobody else had an answer to some question, Alice would always try to answer. She didn’t always know the correct answer, but would try, thinking out loud as necessary.

When going through the usual discussion of the number of different ways the students might be seated in a class this size, Alma always asked if simple mathematics could determine who should sit next to whom.

“So, we know about your compatibilities from your profiles. Does that mean we can calculate where to seat you?”

Nobody else had an answer, but when looked at, Alice tried to respond. “No. I mean yes, you can calculate it, I think, but only by ignoring most of the important stuff. Let me see. People are different, different in a class like this, I mean. Different from what their profiles might say. Different because of the way we react to the other kids. Um, I am the youngest one here, and shy. Imagine how insufferable I would be if I was the oldest.”

“Alice, you are not the least little bit shy.”

“Yes, Mrs. Renwick, but I might be. Try seating me between two boys. Then I’d be shy.”

“So context determines everything, Alice?”

“Pretty much, yeah, but compatibility calculations are a good starting point.”

That was Alice. Quickly the teacher’s pet.

All of the students in the class would soon be linked to much more compatible people, Level Five or above, but not as soon as had been done when the school had first been created. Then any student added had to have such strong connections. Now there were so many applications that the school was confident enough to create a few classes right away and tie them in properly later.

These classes were an experiment, an attempt to create highly compatible classes to start with, since it was so difficult to create them later. So Alice Ames began school for the first time with the people in that class as adequate friends.

To link the class even more closely to the school, each student was also advised to accept as an adequate friend someone already in the school. The population of the school was such that a Level Three connection could be certain, almost by definition. Level Three was the best choice out of 10 to the third power, the best out of 1,000 Each student in the class was now connected to the best person out of 1,487 individuals.

Alice Ames was unusually bright, even by the standards of this school, and her main interests were in computers and mathematics. So it is not just a coincidence that the person suggested to tie the young girl into the school as it had been was a brilliant mathematician who was also a brilliant computer programer.

This exceptional individual was not a student but an adult, and not someone who was at the school on a regular basis. Linked in only by a short chain of students, this woman lived in Princeton, New Jersey and was married to a linguistics professor there. Her name was Ann Kelly, Dr. Ann Kelly, with a PhD in higher mathematics from the august university in that city. She was was also the president of Technological Fantasies.

Nor was it a coincidence that young Alice actually knew the woman who would become her friend. Though living some distance away, Ann was often enough in the New York office of her organization. There she had met several of the local volunteers.

Of especial interest to Ann was the remarkable Sybil Ames, Alice’s mother, who not only worked beside her daughter, cleaning up, plastering and painting, but also donated money for Tech Fantasies projects that interested her.

Projects with a low priority to the organization as a whole might not happen for a long time unless a specific donor adopted them. Sybil had adopted several, such as rooms for some school clubs to use as their own.

Alice would indeed get closer links into the school, but for now she was very happy with her class and with the unusual video-wall link to the president of the organization the two Ames women were so dedicated to. Once the need for it was established, Sybil purchased one of these expensive communications devices for her beloved daughter to use at home.

Ann Kelly was fascinated to discover that she would have another video-wall connection to a student at Social Tech. Of course she did already have a Level Five connection to the school, but Ann sensed that the connection with Alice might be just as important.

Since the beginning, the school policy had been to readily accept transfer students, placing them in the right classes according to both their abilities and the classmates they would work with. This was done regardless of what the paperwork from the previous school might suggest. Sometimes these classes included students of different ages. It was made clear that nothing about the classes by themselves implied an educational level, but nevertheless, each student was nominally in one grade.

The school exams and the external exams at the end of the year were open to students at different levels, but there was still a Grade 12, the seniors who would almost certainly graduate in June. They would receive the most attention in the school yearbook which would come out in the spring. They would participate in the graduation events planned for the end of the year.

In this respect Social Tech High was much like any other high school. It was a much more socially active school than most, and what they did worked, but Sally Aston and the other teachers were not sure why.

Earlier, when the problem of underage sex first emerged, things did seem to work out, somehow, but with students of other cultures and nationalities, there might be more difficulties. This fall was the first time there was a significant number of international students. It seemed clear that events involving couples, like school dances, might now be a problem.

There were many people of both sexes in the school who were connected with strong bonds only to others of the same sex. Opposite sex couples had sometimes been formed with the aid of the school software, but since the days when the first 17 year olds were sometimes matched in that way, there were few who had been.

With about one thousand students, five hundred of each gender, almost Level Three matches between boys and girls were possible within the school. From the first, a delicate question had arisen. Should the school’s software help to make these matches happen? Or would they be left to chance?

What to do about Amarita Singh, for example, Beth Green’s long-distance friend? Her culture required her to remain a virgin until marriage. Should the school let her remain alone, without even a partner for school dances, should it let her fall under the spell of whatever boy might want her, or should it interfere, matching her with someone?

Because she was Beth’s friend, that girl was consulted. Though not exactly dragged out of her boyfriend’s bed when the call came through, Beth was still a passionate young girl with views of her own about sexuality.

“I say do nothing. If Amarita stays alone, let her. It is unlikely that the boys will bother her, since they can more easily get what they want outside the school using one of our software systems. If she decides she wants someone for dances, then she will soon learn that the school software lets her privately seek for someone inside or outside the school, for whatever she wants. If she wants a boy who will not pressure her for sex, I think such rare beasts do exist.”

“Do nothing?”

“It’s worked in the past, hasn’t it?”

“Somehow.”

“Teenage sex is not such a bad thing, you know, I’ve been doing it for years”, Beth exaggerated. “We evolved in a world where people needed to reproduce at a young age. That is in our genes. The prohibition against adolescent sex is a cultural thing.”

“Much of what is best about humanity is a cultural thing, Beth. Don’t knock it.”

“Well, we have changed things in a way that can improve our culture without keeping kids from having the kind of satisfaction which they want. We make it easy for them to find lasting relationships.”

“But many are too young for lasting relationships.”

“Why? Girls in Grade Nine at your school are about 14, and can legally marry. If they can find someone truly compatible, why not just marry? Nothing else about their lives need change. They can just become truly happy and settled.”

“What about Amarita?”

“One day she will use the system, find herself a nice young man acceptable to her parents, someone she can easily fall in love with. Then she will take him back to India for a colourful marriage. After which she will come back and keep on going to school. I bet her new husband would be an excellent addition to the school if he is within the age range, but would be good for her either way.”

“Alright. But keep an eye on your friend, please. Don’t interfere, but don’t let her screw up her life, either.”

“Oh, she is a real friend. I’ll look after her, of course I will. And I’ll try not to set an example for her. Best if she didn’t take up my decadent life style.”

 “It’s none of my business, Beth, but, uh … “.

“Why am I not happily married? Well, Essie and I decided to go for the best guys here at UC Berkeley, even though we knew they’d only be temporary. Time to go for the best in the world when we graduate.”

“How has that worked out?”

“Some heartbreak. OK, lots of heartbreak. But wonderful good times, too. About par for a kid my age in the medieval days of social technology, say ten years ago.”

“I’m surprised. I’d have thought that you, of all people, would have done better.”

“Oh, I did. Back then a teenager might have a series of Level Two or Level Three relationships, with frustrations and fights. I have had Level Five relationships. Just wonderful. I’m a little on the underage side myself, so I don’t want to you to pry, but they were seniors, who went on to grad school elsewhere, as they’d planned all along. We broke up when they left.”

“College seniors? And you were how old?”

“Oh, about fifteen. But a lot of the freshman class were dating seniors. I saw no harm in it. Had to do a bit of sneaking around to keep them out of jail, but that’s normal.”

“Beth, I see you are absolutely the very worst person I could have asked about this.”

“Don’t underestimate sneaking around. I bet most of the kids in your school are doing it. Sneaking around that is.”

“And therein lies the problem. I am so worried about the foreign students.”

“If necessary they can almost all marry their way out of their difficulties. Don’t worry about it.”

Sally could not stop worrying, but for now would do nothing. There was a delicious irony in this which was not lost on her. Sally had enjoyed an active sex life from just before she turned thirteen, and done years of sneaking around.

Some people, including Beth’s mother, who had gone to Sally’s school in North Vancouver, one grade ahead of her, had known about Sally, and thought her a slut. That was not actually true. She had never slept around, never had more than one boyfriend at a time, and only had a sequence of them because the boys dumped her.

They didn’t like being with someone so obviously smarter than they were. Once dumped, however, the lustful Sally never waited long before finding someone new. Now everything was so much better. She was not smarter than Drake, he stayed with her, satisfying her regularly. Her husband had remarkable qualities of endowment, strength, inventiveness and endurance.

Sally’s daughter, Kelly, was not Drake’s. Her conception had been partly responsible for the creation of Technological Fantasies, years earlier, which among other things, was supposed to find Sally a husband.

It would be ten years before Kelly would be ready for Social Tech High. She had just started kindergarten. But the time would come when Sally would want Kelly in the school. What would it be like at that time? Everything Sally did, every time she made a decision, she always wondered what effect it would have on the school her daughter would attend.

One thought came to mind as Sally dwelt on these topics. Did she really want Kelly to spend nine years in the public school system? No. Well, how about a good private school? Yes? No?

Sally tried to envision Kelly’s life at twelve and thirteen. She couldn’t. Not knowing what else to do, Sally called Alma Renwick and went to see her.

“You are probably the very worst person for me to ask about this, Alma, and I have already made that mistake once today. So I won’t think of you as impartial, more of an advocate for one point of view. I’ll try to dig up an advocate for the other.”

“Ah. Well, I am famous for my points of view. You will have to be a little more specific.”

“Your favourite grade is seven. You have argued for extending the school downwards, making it a full range high school, a junior-senior high school.”

“Oh, goody, you are going to consider it. About time.”

“We’ve always worried about the underage sex problem, Alma. I was just talking about it with Beth Green, who tells me that it isn’t really a problem, because girls in our school are old enough to marry.”

“With parental permission. I do see the point, though. Now you see me as wanting to remove even that solution, by opening up the school to kids too young to marry even with parental consent.”

“Except in Quebec, where it is legal for girls as young as twelve to marry, with consent.”

“I didn’t know that. Well, anyway, Sally, we do know a lot more about underage sex than we used to, and we’re able to deal with it, somehow. I think we could manage to keep the lid on even with younger kids.”

“So now you are going to tell me the advantages of having young kids here, Alma.”

“I am. First of all, junior high is hell, whether in public schools or private ones, same sex or mixed. How we survive those years, I don’t know. But in some way those are the key years. They are the years girls become obsessed with boys, become rebellious, drift away from their studies. They are the years boys start to take an interest in sex, about a year later than the girls, finally becoming obsessed with it, while the girls won’t give them the time of day. In single sex private schools, it is the same, with kids outside the school being the object of their desire. In a residential school, all kinds of things go on.”

“Wouldn’t all that happen here, too?”

“Not the same way. It would be a lot better. The younger kids would have older ones to look up to. That can be good or bad, depending on what the older kids are like. Here they are exceptionally good.”

“Here they sneak around. Would they learn that from their elder mentors?”

“Chances are they already sneak around for one reason or another. Didn’t you sneak around at that age, Sally.”

“Yes, but I don’t want little kids behaving like I did.”

“How soon we forget.”

“Very funny. OK, I’m guilty of growing up into a responsible adult, though I never wanted to be one. I just don’t want to be responsible for parents suing the school.”

“I think you already challenged one father to do just that, didn’t you? It’s not the school, anyway. They might sue Tech Fantasies or Project match. Suing the Greens would be good, they’ve got a bundle. But the school, no. We’re behaving ourselves, and will keep on doing so, even if we admit kindergarten kids.”

“Ouch. I’ve got one of those, Alma. If you have your way, then 7 or 8 years from now little Kelly will be in a school with 17 year old boys.”

“All rendered harmless by good relationships, mostly outside of school.”

“Do you really think my little girl would be better off here, in Grade Seven, with other twelve year old’s?”

“It is the best school in the world, Sally.”

“Won’t the influx of younger kids change everything, possibly for the worse?”

“Possibly for the better. Older kids will become mentors for younger ones, and in doing so will grow themselves.”

“You have almost persuaded me.”

“Good. Now go find your devil’s advocate, to undo all my efforts.”

Sally thought she had been a good enough devil’s advocate herself, but just to be on the safe side, looked around for someone to argue the contrary position. That seemed harder than it should have been.

“Beth”, Sally asked by video wall, “I wanted a person to argue a certain point of view. Why is it so hard to find one?”

“Ah, what you want is my half-brother David. He can persuade anyone of anything, especially if she is cute.”

“I am sure someone in your family is a prodigy at any human ability. Have you a brilliant musician in the family, like Mozart?”

“My half-sister Ashley.”

“Rocket Scientist?”

“My half-sister Caroline.”

“Sophist?”

“That’s David. Able to argue any side of any issue.”

“I thought so. But no, I don’t want some product of your father’s genius factory. Oops, sorry, you are more than that.”

“It’s alright, I am proud of it.”

“What I mean is, I want some technology. Given an argument, find me a person to argue it.”

“Ah. I think I have just thing. Indirectly a product of my father, via me. My little backwards text matcher. Produce about a page of text, asking a question, stating an opinion, giving a sample dialogue. Hand it to the backwards matcher. The writings of everyone with both some text and a profile in the system will be compared with your sample page, then you will be guided to the best individuals.”

“Fascinating. How do I get my hands on this piece of magic?”

“I just e-mailed it to you. Click on it and follow the instructions.”

“You are very kind. Too bright, but still kind. Like that father of yours.”

“High praise.”

Sally fetched the program and started it up. It requested a text file, in any format, preferably on one topic, and suggested something of page length, or at least a paragraph, giving a button to click for short examples.

That was easy enough to do. Briefly she wrote up both Alma’s views and what Sally guessed an opponent might say. Feeding both into the matcher, separately, Sally got one-line descriptions of several people, and was asked if she wanted them invited to contribute their expertise.

Eventually Sally got in touch with a Solomon Eisenstein, who would argue in favour of adding lower grades. To argue against them, she got the husband of one of her best teachers. Ralph Stevens was the husband of the Grade Nine music teacher, Rita Stevens. The couple had a fourteen year old son in the school and a twelve year old daughter in an all-girls private school.

The two argued their cases much as Alma and Sally had earlier, making their points more clearly and firmly. But there was one thing they almost agreed upon. In some ways the school would help the younger kids. Being thoroughly integrated into such a good school would help them mature and help them academically.

The part about helping them mature was one of Mr. Stevens’ reasons for disliking the idea. He wanted his little girl to remain a little girl for as long as possible. Sally wondered what young Eileen Stevens would think about that. No, she didn’t wonder at all. Of course the girl would be frustrated and angry over it. Kids want to grow up. Sally thought adults should let them.

On the other hand, did she really want little Kelly to grow up too soon? In her mind’s eye she suddenly saw a too mature twelve year old Kelly getting out of the car a block before reaching the school, wanting to walk there, hoping nobody would realize that Kelly Phillips was Principal Sally Aston’s daughter.

Her attention diverted, Sally hardly noticed the argument going on around her. It didn’t matter anyway. This was not the proper forum. She would have to invite the two gentlemen to present their views before the assembled teachers.

Before the new school software was ready to help, the second expansion wave was well underway. As soon as the always demanding Sarah Rivers had spoken out in favour of seeking much more compatible people by looking worldwide, the expansion stopped.

Only a few more people were added, the more easily found locals, for the specific goal of wiring in all the important individuals who had contributed to the school, such as Sarah herself.

Using the technically advanced video conferencing system loosely called video walls, but actually distinguished more by their cameras and signal integration abilities, Sarah spoke with the father of her children, Ken Green.

Devoted to her own goal of expanding the Green family, Sarah had demanded regular insemination from him, producing eight children, though he had similar services to perform for others. The advantages of being a billionaire are not to be underestimated, though Ken claimed he only wanted children, not pleasure.

Ken was always glad to receive a call from his favourite female friend, though she had eventually left him to seek higher education, settling in Manhattan.

“Ken, my dear, would you do me the smallest favour. It is something for the school.”

“Whenever you mention that damn school I feel a sharp pain in my wallet. How many billion is this going to cost me?”

“Well, we want to expand the size our pool of candidates to include the whole English-speaking world. Almost all students will require full scholarships at 30 thousand a year. Within four years we may have three thousand of them, which would be 90 million a year. Round up to 100 million annually.”

“I see.”

“That’s just one percent of the interest on your invested capital.”

“I already use most of that interest to support the silly projects dreamed up by my beloved children. Caroline’s space project alone costs seven percent of that income.”

“Naughty girl.”

“I keep telling her so, but your Ada demands almost as much for her own self-reproducing factories project, and is constantly defending her best friend’s project as the ultimate use for hers, in space ships.

“Another naughty girl. I should have tried harder to make her accept Beth as her role model.”

“Do you really want to know how much Beth spends? Her project to back up her system’s data in multiple locations deep in stable rock formations is ridiculously expensive. Not to mention the new chip fabrication facility she wants.”

“I notice that you haven’t said no, not yet.”

“When was the last time I said no to you, Sarah?”

“I think you said it quite regularly, whenever I objected to you acquiring a new vehicle for propagating the family.”

“OK, aside from that. Hardly ever. You always insist on the right thing to do, which saves me the trouble of thinking for myself.”

“Well, the right thing to do is spend 100 million dollars a year for scholarship students from around the world.”

“OK, OK. Go ahead. Send me the bill.”

In fact the entire English-speaking world was not available directly, since all of the social search and match systems together only covered a tiny percentage of the whole. Sarah proposed to use all of their existing contacts, for a start.

“Between us we have contacts with a cooperating few million people who have given us profiles. I suggest we invite all eligible students from within that population to apply for scholarships. That’s not nearly enough, though, but I am not sure of the next step. Somehow we have to use our contacts to make others.”

Beth Green responded to her mother’s suggestion with one of her own. “Bribery.”

“Expensive.”

“OK, so don’t mention this to Arthur, just do it. If one of our users recruits a scholarship student for us, hand out some money. Good stuff, money. I get a generous allowance, so I never feel the need, but it is supposed to be a great motivator.”

“Your father was just telling me about that chip-fabrication facility you wanted.”

“Oh, that. OK, I guess a good allowance isn’t always enough. Everyone can use an extra buck. So give them some. Everyone who brings us a scholarship student gets, oh, say 10 percent of what a year of the scholarship is worth.”

“That’s too much. Your father would probably spring for $1,000 apiece.”

“Oh, come on, that’s just a drop in the bucket. You probably wouldn’t even mention it to him.”

“Dear, if I even hinted to him about most of the things I spend his money on, he’d be furious. Well, mildly annoyed. It’s Arthur who’d be furious.”

After discussing this with some of the other members of the Social Tech High board of directors, Sarah offered formally on Ken’s behalf to spend a lot of his money on her idea. Not a new experience for her.

Improvising freely as she went along, Sarah announced “Ken Green has agreed to pay for scholarships to expand the school to ten times its present size. These generous scholarships will cover all fees, plus room and board.”

“I have heard something about this already, but would you please spell out why you want to do it?”, board member Ellen Smith asked.

“Increased pool size. A larger pool of candidates will mean much higher compatibility levels. We could go from Level 5, the best student out of 100,000 applicants, to Level 7, the best out of 10 million applicants.”

“Measured by both academic performance and compatibility with an existing school member”, Sally explained for the unenlightened. “Neither attribute by itself is good enough for admission.”

“How could we possibly get 10 million applicants?”, Paul Grey asked.

“The penetration of Tech Fantasies, Project Match and Beth’s system into the English-speaking world may be nearly one percent of the billion or so individuals in it. If we reach those people and offer them a suitable incentive for finding scholarship students, they will get us applicants.”

Ann Kelly said, “Actually the numbers may be higher than that. We do have a significant penetration into places not considered English-speaking. But their best students most often choose English as a second language.”

“Right. So by offering rewards for getting scholarship students into the school, we would have a lot to choose from.”

Sally had another idea. “We routinely find educational opportunities for the people we keep profiles on. It is part of our service. Yours too, I think. If we got a large influx of new users, people hoping to get one of our scholarships, we could recommend other educational opportunities for the ones we don’t accept. For example, we could help the academically gifted who are just not compatible with any of our students or teachers — we could find them scholarships at other institutions.”

“Good idea, Sally. I think we must do this”, Sarah responded. “Ken has offered, well, will offer, when I say so, to pay an incentive of $1,000 as a finder’s fee, for each scholarship student accepted.”

“We might do better if we spent a bit of that money to reward people for just bringing us a qualified applicant. Someone we could send to another school, if not right for ours”, Ann Kelly suggested. “But I am not any kind of expert in this area.”

Ellen Smith was more concerned with the legitimacy of applicants and the identification of the people who actually deserved the finders fee. “If we paid any kind of fee for for valid applicants, I think there would be a lot of fake ones. And even for the real ones, there is the problem of identifying the real person who did the finding. The unscrupulous might try to claim finder’s fees they don’t deserve.”

“Not a problem, according to Beth”, Sarah assured them. “Consistency checks in the questionnaire or generated questions can verify that the people who applied are really people who applied, not somebody’s fabrications. Asking suitable questions of the applicant and supposed finder can verify if the identification of both are correct.”

“If that’s true, we should go ahead.”

Sarah said with a smile, “I believe that Ken is going offer the $1,000 for each accepted applicant anyway, plus, oh, say, $10 for each qualified applicant. That will get us more applications than just offering the larger sum. A lot of people just won’t understand our selection criteria, but if they get some money for kids they don’t think stand a chance of selection, they might help us find them anyway.”

“Such a kind gentleman”, said Sally.

“Always kind to me. And to many others, the damn man.”

It was agreed. Then agreed to again, once modified by Beth.

“Do it in waves. The first wave will draw in a lot of kids, who will go out to recruit others, next time around, hoping for the finders fees. One more iteration, you should get full coverage.”

This would take a while, but the process was begun.

After much consideration, Sally restricted the acceptance rules to strictly guarantee that girls who were too young would never be matched to boys or male teachers, even when parents tolerated the resulting illicit activities. She also applied this rule to girls who according to the customs of their cultures must remain virgins until marriage.

It seemed at first glance that this would damage the structure of the school by creating long chains of girls radiating out from a central core. This worried Sally at first, until she realized that some cross-linking would occur naturally and more could be induced with a careful selection of students.

Expansion began again as students fitting the revised standards were added. It would be gradual until a lot of room was created by the departure of the school’s second graduating class, in June.

As that day approached, many standardized tests were taken, especially by the senior class.

Their performance on tests like the SATs reflected what everyone associated with the school knew. It was not just an intimately linked network of students who shared a wonderful social environment. Social Tech High was an academic success as well.