Fast Times at Fairmont High Read online

  Fast Times at Fairmont High

  Vernor Vinge

  Vernor Vinge

  Fast Times at Fairmont High

  Juan kept the little blue pills in an unseen corner of his bedroom. They really were tiny, the custom creation of a lab that saw no need for inert fillers, or handsome packaging. And Juan was pretty sure they were blue, except that as a matter of principle he tried not to look at them, even when he was off-line. Just one pill a week gave him the edge he needed....

  * * *

  Final exam week was always chaos at Fairmont Junior High. The school's motto was "Trying hard not to become obsolete"—and the kids figured that applied to the faculty more than anyone else. This semester they got through the first morning—Ms. Wilson's math exam—without a hitch, but already in the afternoon the staff was tweaking things around: Principal Alcalde scheduled a physical assembly during what should have been student prep time.

  Almost all the eighth grade was piled into the creaky wooden meeting hall. Once this place had been used for horse shows. Juan thought he could still smell something of that. Tiny windows looked out on the hills surrounding the campus. Sunlight spiked down through vents and skylights. In some ways, the room was weird even without enhancement.

  Principal Alcalde marched in, looking as dire and driven as ever. He gestured to his audience, requesting visual consensus. In Juan's eyes, the room lighting mellowed and the deepest shadows disappeared.

  "Betcha the Alcalde is gonna call off the nakedness exam." Bertie Todd was grinning the way he did when someone else had a problem. "I hear there are parents with Big Objections."

  "You got a bet," said Juan. "You know how Mr. Alcalde is about nakedness."

  "Heh. True." Bertie's image slouched back in the chair next to Juan.

  Principal Alcalde was into a long speech, about the fast-changing world and the need for Fairmont to revolutionize itself from semester to semester. At the same time they must never forget the central role of modern education which was to teach the kids how to learn, how to pose questions, how to be adaptable—all without losing their moral compass.

  It was very old stuff. Juan listened with a small part of his attention; mostly, he was looking around the audience. This was a physical assembly, so almost everybody except Bertie Todd was really here. Bertie was remote from Chicago, one of the few commuter students. His parents paid a lot more for virtual enrollment, but Fairmont Schools did have a good reputation. Of the truly present—well, the fresh thirteen-year-old faces were mostly real. Mr. Alcalde's consensus imagery didn't allow cosmetics or faked clothes. And yet ... such rules could not be perfectly enforced. Juan widened his vision, allowed deviations and defacements in the view. There couldn't be too much of that or the Alcalde would have thrown a fit, but there were ghosts and graffiti floating around the room. The scaredy-cat ones flickered on-and-off in a fraction of a second, or were super-subtle perversions. But some of them—the two-headed phantom that danced behind the Principal's podium—lasted gloating seconds. Mr. Alcalde could probably see some of the japery, but his rule seemed to be that as long as the students didn't appear to see the disrespect, then he wouldn't either.

  Okay, platitudes taken care of, Mr. Alcalde got down to business: "This morning, you did the math exam. Most of you have already received your grades. Ms. Wilson tells me that she's pleased with your work; the results will make only small changes in the rest of this week's schedule. Tomorrow morning will be the vocational exam." Oh yeah. Be ready to learn something dull, but learn it very, very fast. Most kids hated that, but with the little blue pills, Juan knew he could whack it. "Soon you'll begin the two concurrent exams. You'll have the rest of finals week to work on them. I'll make the details public later in this assembly. In general terms: There will be an unlimited exam, where you may use any legally available resources—"

  "All right!" Bertie's voice came softly in Juan's ear. All across the hall similar sentiments were expressed, a kind of communal sigh.

  Mr. Alcalde's dark features creased in a rare smile. "That just means we expect something extraordinarily good from you." To pass the exam, a team had to bring in three times tuition per team member. So even though they could use any help they could recruit, most students didn't have the money to buy their way to a passing grade.

  "The two concurrent exams will overlap the usual testing in visual communication, language, and unaided skills. Some of your parents have asked for more concurrency, but all the teachers feel that when you're thirteen years old, it's better to concentrate on doing a few things well. You'll have plenty of time for jumble lore in the future. Your other concurrent exam will be—Miss Washington?"

  Patsy Washington came to her feet, and Juan realized that she—like Bertie—was only present as imagery. Patsy was a San Diego student so she had no business being virtual at a physical assembly. Hmm. "Look," she said. "Before you go on about these concurrent exams, I want to ask you about the naked skills test."

  Bertie gave Juan a grin. "This should be interesting."

  The Alcalde's gaze was impassive. "The ‘unaided skills' test, Miss Washington. There is nothing whatsoever naked about it."

  "It might as well be, Mister." Patsy was speaking in English now, and with none of the light mocking tone that made her a minor queen in her clique. It was her image and voice, but the words and body language were very un-Patsy. Juan probed the external network traffic. There was lots of it, but mostly simple query/response stuff, like you'd expect. A few sessions had been around for dozens of seconds; Bertie's remote was one of the two oldest. The other belonged Patsy Washington—at least it was tagged with her personal certificate. Identity hijacking was a major no-no at Fairmont, but if a parent was behind it there wasn't much the school could do. And Juan had met Patsy's father. Maybe it was just as well the Alcalde didn't have to talk to him in person. Patsy's image leaned clumsily through the chair in front of her. "In fact," she continued, "it's worse than naked. All their lives, these—we—have had civilization around us. We're damned good at using that civilization. Now you theory-minded intellectuals figure it would be nice to jerk it all away and put us at risk."

  "We are putting no one at risk ... Miss Washington." Mr. Alcalde was still speaking in Spanish. In fact, Spanish was the only language their principal had ever been heard to speak; the Alcalde was kind of a bizarre guy. "We at Fairmont consider unaided skills to be the ultimate fallback protection. We're not Amish here, but we believe that every human being should be able to survive in reasonable environments—without networks, even without computers."

  "Next you'll be teaching rock-chipping!" said Patsy.

  The Alcalde ignored the interruption. "Our graduates must be capable of doing well in outages, even in disasters. If they can't, we have not properly educated them!" He paused, glared all around the room. "But this is no survivalist school. We're not dropping you into a jungle. Your unaided skills test will be at a safe location our faculty have chosen—perhaps an Amish town, perhaps an obsolete suburb. Either way, you'll be doing good, in a safe environment. You may be surprised at the insights you get with such complete, old-fashioned simplicity."

  Patsy had crossed her arms and was glaring back at the Alcalde. "That's nonsense, but okay. There's still the question. Your school brochure brags modern skills, and these concurrent exams are supposed to demonstrate that you've delivered. So how can you call an exam concurrent, if part of the time your students are stripped of all technology? Huh?"

  Mr. Alcalde stared at Patsy for a moment, his fingers tapping on the podium. Juan had the feeling that some intense discussion was going on between them. Patsy's Pa—assuming that's who it was—had gone considerably beyond the limits of acceptable behavio
r. Finally, the principal shook his head. "You miss-take our use of the word ‘concurrent'. We don't mean that all team members work at the same time all the time, but simply that they multitask the exam in the midst of their other activities—just as people do with most real-world work nowadays." He shrugged. "In any case, you are free to skip the final examinations, and take your transcript elsewhere."

  Patsy's image gave a little nod and abruptly sat down, looking very embarrassed; evidently her Pa had passed control back to her—now that he had used her image and made a fool of her. Geez.

  Bertie looked faintly miffed, though Juan doubted this had anything to do with sympathy for Patsy.

  After a moment, Mr. Alcalde continued, "Perhaps this is a good time to bring up the subject of body piercings and drugs." He gave a long look all around. It seemed to Juan that his gaze hung an instant in his direction. Caray, he suspects about the pills! "As you know, all forms of body piercings are forbidden at Fairmont Schools. When you're grown, you can decide for yourself—but while you are here, no piercings, not even ear- or eye-rings, are allowed. And internal piercings are grounds for immediate dismissal. Even if you are very frightened of the unaided skills test, do not try to fool us with implants or drugs."

  No one raised a question about this, but Juan could see the flicker of communications lasers glinting off dust in the air, muttered conversation and private imagery being exchanged. The Alcalde ignored it all. "Let me describe the second of the concurrent exams, and then you'll be free to go. We call this exam a ‘local' project: You may use your own computing resources and even a local network. However, your team members must work physically together. Remote presence is not allowed. External support—contact with the global net—is not permitted."

  "Damn," said Bertie, totally dipped. "Of all the artificial, unworkable, idiotic—"

  "So we can't collaborate, Bertie."

  "We'll see about that!" Bertie bounced to his feet and waved for recognition.

  "Ah, Mr. Todd?"

  "Yes, sir." Bertie's public voice was meek and agreeable. "As you know, I'm a commuter student. I have lots of friends here, people I know as well as anyone. But of course, almost none of that is face to face since I live in Chicago. How can we handle my situation? I'd really hate to be excused from this important part of the finals just because I lack a physical presence here in San Diego. I'd be happy to accept a limited link, and do my best even with that handicap."

  Mr. Alcalde nodded. "There will be no need, Mr. Todd. You are at a disadvantage, and we'll take that into account. We've negotiated a collaboration with the Andersen Academy at Saint Charles. They will "—

  Andersen Academy at Saint Charles? Oh, in Illinois, a short automobile drive for Bertie. The Andersen people had long experience with team projects ... back into prehistory in fact, the twentieth century. In principle they were far superior to Fairmont, but their academy was really more like a senior high school. Their students were seventeen, eighteen years old. Poor Bertie.

  Juan picked up the thread of Mr. Alcalde's speech:—"They will be happy to accomodate you." Glimmer of a smile. "In fact, I think they are very interested in learning what our better students can do."

  Bertie's face twisted into a taut smile, and his image dropped back onto the chair beside Juan. He made no additional comment, not even privately to Juan....

  The rest of the assembly was mostly about changes in exam content, mainly caused by the current state of outside resources—experts and technologies—that the school was importing for the nonconcurrent exams. All of it could have been done without this assembly; the Alcalde just had this thing about face-to-face meetings. Juan filed away all the announcements and changes, and concentrated on the unhappy possibility that now loomed over his week: Bertie Todd had been his best friend for almost two semesters now. Mostly he was super fun and an amazing team partner. But sometimes he'd go into a tight-lipped rage, often about things that Juan had no control over. Like now. If this were one of Bertie's Great Freeze Outs, he might not talk to Juan at all—for days.

  * * *

  The eighth-grade mob broke out of the assembly just before 4:00pm, way past the end of the normal class day. The kids milled about on the lawn outside the meeting hall. It was so near the end of the semester. There was warm sunlight. Summer and the new movie-game season were just a few days off. But caray, there were still finals to get through and everyone knew that, too. So while they joked and gossiped and goofed around, they were also reading the exam changes and doing some heavy planning.

  Juan tagged along behind Bertie Todd's image as the other moved through the crowd. Bertie was dropping hints all around about the unlimited project he was planning. The communication link from Bertie to Juan was filled with cold silence, but he was being all charming toward kids who'd never helped him a tenth as much as Juan Orozco. Juan could hear part of what was going on; the other boys weren't freezing him out. They thought Juan was part of the party. And most of them were more than pleased by Bertie's interest. For no-holds-barred collaboration, Bertram Todd was the best there was at Fairmont Junior High. Bertie was claiming high-level contacts, maybe with Intel's idea farm, maybe with software co-ops in China. He had something for everyone, and a hint that they might score far more than a good grade.

  Some of them even asked Juan for details. They just assumed that he was already part of Bertie's scheme for the unlimited. Juan smiled weakly, and tried to seem knowing and secretive.

  Bertie stopped at the corner of the lawn, where the junior high abutted the driveway and the elementary school. The eighth graders carefully kept off the little kids' territory; you don't mess with fifth graders.

  Along the driveway, cars were pulling up for students. Down by the bikestand, others were departing on bikes and unicycles. Everyone seemed to be laughing and talking and planning.

  At the corner of the lawn, Juan and Bertie were all alone for a moment. In fact, it was Juan all alone. For an instant, he considered turning off the consensus that made Bertie seem so visibly here. Caray, why not turn it all off: There. The sun was still bright and warm, the day still full of springtime. Bertie was gone, but there was still the other kids, mainly down by the bikestand. Of course, now the fancy towers of Fairmont School were the ordinary wood buildings of the old horse yard and the plascrete of the new school, all brown and gray against the tans and greens of the hills around.

  But he hadn't bothered to down the audio link, and out of the thin air, there was Bertie's voice, finally acknowledging Juan's existence. "So, have you decided who you're gonna team with for the local project?"

  The question shocked Juan into bringing back full imagery. Bertie had turned back to face him, and was grinning with good humor—a gaze that might have fooled anyone who didn't really know him. "Look, Bertie, I'm really sorry you can't be on a local team out here. Mr. Alcalde is a mutha for sticking you with the Andersen crowd. But—" Inspiration struck. "You could fly out here for the exam! See, you could stay at my house. We'd whack that local exam dead!" Suddenly a big problem was a great opportunity. If I can just sell Ma on this.

  But Bertie dismissed the idea with an offhand wave. "Hey, don't worry about it. I can put up with those Andersen guys. And in the meantime, I bet I can help you with the local exam." His face took on a sly look. "You know what I got on Wilson's math exam."

  "Y-yeah, an A. That's great. You got all ten questions."

  Ten questions, most of them harder than the old Putnam exam problems had ever been. And in Ms. Wilson's exam, you weren't allowed to collaborate, or search beyond the classroom. Juan had gotten a C+, knocking down four of the questions. The little blue pills didn't help much with pure math, but it was kind of neat how all Ms. Wilson's talk about heuristics and symbol software finally paid off. Those problems would have stumped some of the smartest twentieth-century students, but with the right kind of practice and good software even an ordinary kid like Juan Orozco had a good chance of solving them. Two Fairmont students had cracked a
ll ten problems.

  Bertie's grin broadened, a morph that stretched his face into a cartoonish leer. Juan knew that Bertie Todd was a dud at abstract problem solving. It was in getting the right answers out of other people that he was a star. "... Oh. You slipped out of isolation." That wouldn't be hard to do, considering that Bertie was already coming in from outside.

  "I would never say that, Juan my boy. But if I did, and I didn't get caught ... wouldn't that just prove that all this ‘isolated skills' stuff is academic crap?"

  "I-I guess," said Juan. In some ways, Bertie had unusual notions about right and wrong. "But it would be more fun if you could just come out here to San Diego."

  Bertie's smile faded a fraction; the Great Freeze Out could be reinstated in an instant.

  Juan shrugged, and tried to pretend that his invitation had never been made. "Okay, but can I still be on your unlimited team?"

  "Ah, let's see how things work out. We've got at least twelve hours before the unlimited team selections have to be final, right? I think it's more important that ... you get yourself a good start on the local team exercise."

  Juan should have seen it coming. Bertie was Mister Quid Pro Quo, only sometimes it took a while to figure out what he was demanding. "So who you do you think I should be matching up with?" Hopefully, someone dumb enough that they wouldn't guess Juan's special edge. "The Rackhams are good, and we have complementary skills."

  Bertie looked judicious. "Don and Brad are okay, but you've read the grading spec. Part of your score in the local test depends on face-to-face cooperation with someone really different." He made as though he was looking across the campus lawn.

  Juan turned to follow his gaze. There was some kind of soccer variant being played beyond the assembly hall—senior high students who wouldn't have finals for another two weeks. There were still a few clumps of junior high kids, probably planning for the locals. None of them were people Juan knew well. "Look over by the main entrance," said Bertie. "I'm thinking you should break out of narrow thinking. I'm thinking you should ask Miriam Gu."