Robert patted his shoulder. "They still have Miri's log, too."
"I know ! I asked her." Tears welled up in the boy's eyes. "She doesn't remember either. We were getting to be friends, Robert. We wouldn't have gone after you together if she couldn't trust me." Sure.
"Well, now she treats me like when we first met — pushing me away. She thinks I must have chickened out and that's why she had to find you by herself. And maybe I was chicken. I don't remember !"
Lena — > Juan, Xiu: <sm>Give her time, Juan. Miri's distracted by what's happened, especially to her mother. I think she blames herself for that, and maybe all of us. I know you wouldn't chicken out.</sm>
Lena — > Xiu: <sm>But why he's asking the SOB for comfort is beyond me.</sm>
Juan looked away from Robert for a moment, gradually seemed to get himself back together.
Robert gave the boy an awkward pat on the back. Comforting others was definitely not part of his former resume. "She'll come around, Juan. She didn't call you a coward when we were underground. She was very worried about you. Just give her some time." He cast around for some distraction. "Meantime, do you want to waste all the work we put in this semester? What about the kids in Boston and down South? We have to catch up on our demo preparation."
Lena — > Xiu: <sm>Can you believe this jerk? All he wants is to trick some more help out of the boy.</sm>
Robert's attempt at humor was feeble, but Juan looked up at Robert and gave a creditable smile. "Yes. Gotta keep track of the important things!"
Bob and Miri didn't come to Fairmont High for the vocational-track demos. At least they weren't physically visible — and Robert could tell that Juan Orozco was searching hard.
"Miri's at Crick's Clinic tonight, Juan. Her mother should be coming home from the hospital." Bob had seemed just as happy that Robert had another commitment this evening.
The boy brightened. "But maybe she'll peek in here, right?"
In fact this was rather a big deal for Fairmont, but not for good reasons. The popular press had built an enormous pile of speculation around the events at UCSD, and Friends of Privacy lies surrounded and embedded those speculations in conspiracies unending. The rumors contaminated everything and everyone associated with that night. Robert had dredged the public record — first to try to discover what had happened to him that night under UCSD, and then to see what people thought had happened. Robert and the cabal showed up in most of the theories, often as the picaresque heroes Bob had mentioned. But there were other theories. Robert had never heard of Timothy Huynh, but there were journalists who claimed that Huynh and Robert had engineered everything that happened in the riot and the underground!
Robert had become very good at blocking paparazzi mail, but the notoriety was blowing over; his ratings were declining with a half-life of about five days. Nevertheless, he spent a lot of time at Fairmont High, where the school rules banned the most intrusive visibles.
Tonight, at the demos, that ban was in force. The bleachers were jammed with ticketed visitors — families of students and their guests, including virtual presences. Most of these people had no interest in Robert Gu. But if you looked at the network stats, a lot of people were invisibly watching.
The vocational program was not the gem of Fairmont High. Most of these kids could not master the latest, cutting-edge applications (and most of the retread students were even less competent). On the other hand, Chumlig had asserted in an unguarded moment that parents preferred the vocational demos, mainly because they made more sense to them than what other children were doing.
The teams were duos and trios, but they were allowed to use solutions dredged from all over the world. Demo night didn't begin until after sunset, so meshing overlays with reality would be relatively easy. Chumlig wouldn't have given the regular students such a crutch. Those demos lasted two days — and would not begin until a week after the vocational-track students had done their best. That was a kindly interval, a week for the vocational students to bask in their achievements.
Tonight, the audience sat on the west side of the soccer field, leaving the east free for whatever grandiose imagery might be created.
Robert sat with Juan Orozco right down on the sidelines, with the other performers. They all knew the order of their execution, er, performance. Their private views hung little signs over the field showing how much time remained in the current demo and who was up next. There had been no democratic choosing of the performance order. Louise Chumlig and the other teachers had their own ideas, and they ruled. Robert smiled to himself. In this, his old people-sense hadn't deserted him. Even without knowing the details of each project, he knew who had a strong project and who did not. He knew who was the most frightened of getting out in public and in person… So did Chumlig. Her play order was an orchestration, exercising each kid to his or her limits.
Amazingly, that ordering also produced a pretty good show.
The Radner twins started out. For these two, the east side of the campus was not enough. They had some kind of wacky suspension bridge — it looked like the Firth of Forth Railway Bridge, but scaled up — that put down steel caissons on each side of the bleachers, and then climbed higher and higher into the northeast till it broke into the departing daylight. Seconds passed — and the construction reappeared out of the southwest , their nineteenth-century masterpiece making a virtual orbit of the Earth. The climax was the roaring passage of vast, steam-powered trains across the sky. The bleachers shook with the apparent power of the locomotives.
"Hey!" said Juan, and gave Robert a nudge. "That's new. They must have figured out some of the building maintenance protocols." If the Radners had not been targeted by the Library Riot rumor mill before, they were now. Robert guessed that would please the twins just fine.
Most of the demos were arty, visual things. But there were also students who had built gadgets. Doris Schley and Mahmoud Kwon had built a ground-effect vehicle that could walk up the steps of the bleachers. They tipped it over the top; there was an explosion of sound, and then it touched down without breaking anything. Juan stood up from his place at the bottom of the bleachers to turn and watch with his own eyes. He cheered Schley and Kwon, then plunked himself back down. "Wow, a ground-effect parachute. But I bet Ms. Chumlig doesn't give'm more than a B." His voice rose into a standard Louise Chumlig imitation: " 'What you did was scarcely more than off-the-shelf engineering.'" But he was still grinning. They both knew that a B was better than what most of the image plays were going to get.
There were even kids who tried for the cutting edge, projects that seemed a little like what Miri said her friends did. There were two new-materials demos, an extreme elastic band, and some kind of water filter. The elastic was not spectacular — until you realized there was no trick imagery. Two boys that Robert hardly knew did the demo. They stood twenty feet apart, swinging a large doll between them. The mannikin was suspended from a strand of their magical glop. The strand wasn't simply a strong composite. Somehow the boys could change its physical characteristics by the way they squeezed the ends. Sometimes if behaved like a giant spring, whipping the doll back to the center line. Other times, it stretched like taffy, and they swung the dummy in wide arcs. Their demo got the biggest cheers of all.
On the other hand, the water-filter demo was just a magnified image of a garden hose feeding into the filter. Above them, the students had floated an enormous graphic that showed just how their programmable zeolite could search for user-specified impurities. There were no sound effects, and the graphics were slow-moving and crude. Robert looked up into the sky and then back at the girls. "They're going to get an A, aren't they?"