Chumlig — > Orozco: <sm>You have all day to play games, Juan! If you won't pay attention here, you can darn well take this course over.</sm>
Orozco — > Chumlig: <sm>Sorry. Sorry!</sm> He suspended his question queue and dropped the external session. At the same time, he played back the last few minutes of her talk, desperately trying to summarize. Most times, Chumlig just asked embarrassing questions; this was the first she'd sminged him with a threat.
And the amazing thing was, she'd done it in a short pause, when everyone else thought she was just looking at her notes. Juan eyed her with new respect.
"You were A little hard on the boy, don't you think?" Rabbit was trying out new imagery today, this based on classic Alice in Wonderland illustrations, complete with engraving lines. The effect was fully silly on a three-dimensional body.
Big Lizard did not seem impressed. "You don't belong down here. Juan is my direct affiliate, not yours."
"A bit overly sensitive, aren't you? I'm simply spot-checking the depths of my affiliance."
"Well, stay out. Juan needs this class."
"Of course I share your charitable motives." The rabbit gave the lizard his most dishonest leer. "But you cut him off just when he was looking at someone especially interesting to me. I have provided you with a most excellent affiliance. If you want my continued support, you must cooperate."
"Listen you! I want the boy to reach out for himself, but I don't want him to be hurt." Lizard's voice trailed off, and Rabbit wondered if Chumlig was finally having second thoughts. Not that it mattered. Rabbit was having fun, spreading out across the Southern California social scene. Sooner or later, he would figure out what this job was all about.
05
Dr. Xiang's SHE
Shop class. It was by far Juan Orozco's favorite class. Shop was like a premium game; there were real gadgets to touch and connect. That was the sort of thing you paid money for up on Pyramid Hill. And Mr. Williams was no Louise Chumlig. He let you follow your own inclinations, but he never came around afterward and complained because you hadn't accomplished anything. It was almost impossible not to get an A in Ron Williams's classes; he was wonderfully old-fashioned.
Shop class was also Juan's best opportunity to make progess on Big Lizard's project, at least with the old farts and the do-not-call privacy freaks. He wandered around the big gadget tent looking like an utter idiot. Juan had never been any good at diplomacy games. And now he was schmoozing oldsters. Well, trying to.
Xiu Xiang was really a nice lady, but she just sat at the equipment bench and read from her view-page. She had the parts list formatted like some kind of hardcopy catalog. "Once I knew these things," she said. "See that." She pointed at a section in the museum pages: Xiang's Secure Hardware Environment . "I designed that system."
Juan came up with "You're world-class, Dr. Xiang."
"But… I don't understand even the principles of these new components. They look more like pond scum than self-respecting optical semiconductors." She read one of the product descriptions, stopped at the third line. "What's redundant entanglement?"
"Ah." He looked it up, saw pointers into jungles of background concepts. "You don't need to know about 'redundant entanglement,' ma'am. Not for this class." He waved at the product descriptions on Xiang's view-page. The image sat like carven stone, not responding to his gesture. "Go forward a few pages, you'll find the stuff we have available here in class. Look under" — jeez this was a pain, spelling out navigation in words — "look under 'fun functional compositions,' and go from there." He showed her how to use her view-page to ID local parts. "You don't need to understand everything."
"Oh." In a few moments she was playing with the possibilities, had downloaded half a dozen component gadgets. "This is like being a child. Doing, without understanding." But then she started putting Buildlt parts together, doing pretty well after Juan showed her how to find the interface specs. She laughed at some of the descriptions. "Sorters and shifters. Solid-state robots. I bet I could make a cutter out of this."
"I don't see it." Cutter? "Don't worry, you can't hurt anything." That wasn't quite true, but close enough. He sat and watched, made a few suggestions, even though he wasn't really sure what she was up to. Enough of establishing rapport; he marked that box in his diplomacy checklist and moved on to the next stage. "So, Dr. Xiang, do you keep in touch with your friends at Intel?"
"That was a long time ago. I retired in 2010. And during the war, I couldn't even get consulting jobs. I could just feel my skills rusting out."
"Alzheimer's?" He knew she was much older than she looked, even older than Winston Blount.
Xiang hesitated, and for a moment Juan was afraid he had made the lady really angry. But then she gave a sad little laugh. "No Alzheimer's, no dementia. You — people nowadays don't know what it was like to be old."
"I do so! All my grandparents are still alive. And I have a great-grandpa in Puebla. He plays a lot of golf. Great-Grandma, she does have dementia — you know, a kind they still can't fix." In fact, Great-Grandma had looked as young as Dr. Xiang. Everyone thought she had really lucked out. But in the end that only meant she lived long enough to run into something they couldn't cure.
Dr. Xiang just shook her head. "Even in my day, not everyone went senile, not the way you mean. I just got behind in my skills. My girlfriend died. After a while I just didn't care too much. I didn't have the energy to care." She looked at the gadget she was building. "Now, I have at least the energy I had when I was sixty. Maybe I even have the same native intelligence." She slapped the table. "And all I'm good for is playing with jacked-up Lego blocks!"
It almost looked like she was going to start crying, right in the middle of shop class. Juan scanned around; no one seemed to be watching. He reached out to touch Xiang's hand. He didn't have the answer. Ms. Chumlig would say he didn't have the right question.
There were still a few others to check out: Winston Blount, for instance. Not a jackpot case, but he ought to be worth something to the Lizard. In shop class, Blount just sat in the shade of the tent, staring off into space. The guy was wearing, but he didn't respond to messages. Juan waited until Williams went off for one of his coffee breaks. Then he sidled over and sat beside Blount. Jeez, the guy really looked old. Juan couldn't tell exactly where he was surfing, but it had nothing to do with shop class. Juan had noticed that when Blount wasn't interested in a class, he just blew it off. After a few minutes' silence, Juan realized that he wasn't interested in socializing either.
So talk to him! It's just another kind of monster whacking . Juan mor-phed a buffoon image onto the guy, and suddenly it wasn't so hard to cold-start the encounter. "So, Dean Blount, what do you think of shop class?"