And now he was schmoozing the oldsters. Trying to.
Ralston Blount just sat staring off into the space above his table. The guy was wearing, but he didn’t respond to messages. Mike waited until Williams went off for one of his coffee breaks. Then he sidled over and sat beside Blount. Jeez, the guy might be healthy but he really looked old. Mike spent a few moments trying to tune in on the man’s perceptions. Mike had noticed that when Blount didn’t like a class, he just blew it off. He didn’t care about grades. After a few moments, Mike realized that he didn’t care about socializing either.
So talk to him! It’s just another kind of monster whacking.
Mike morphed a buffoon image onto the guy, and suddenly it wasn’t so hard to cold start the encounter. “So, Professor Blount, how do you like shop class?”
Ancient eyes turned to look at him. “I couldn’t care less, Mr. Villas.”
O-kay! Hmm. There was lots about Ralston Blount that was public record, even some legacy newsgroup correspondence. That was always good for shaking up your parents and other grownups…
But the old man continued talking on his own. “I’m not like some people here. I’ve never been senile. By rights, my career should be on track with the best of my generation.”
“By rights?”
“I was Provost of Eighth College in 2006. I should have been UCSD Chancellor in the years following. Instead I was pushed into academic retirement.”
Mike knew all that. “But you never learned to wear.”
Blount’s eyes narrowed. “I made it a point never to wear. I thought wearing was demeaning, like an executive doing his own typing.” He shrugged. “I was wrong. I paid a heavy price for that. But things have changed.” His eyes glittered with deliberate iridescence.
“I’ve taken four semesters of this ‘Adult Education.’ Now my resumé is out there in the ether.”
“You must know a lot of important people.”
“Indeed. It’s just a matter of time.”
“Y-you know, Professor, I may be able to help. No wait-I don’t mean by myself. I have an affiliance.”
“… Oh?”
At least he knew what affiliance was. Mike explained Big Lizard’s deal. “So there could be some real money in this.”
Blount squinted his eyes, trying to parse the certificates. “Money isn’t everything, especially in my situation.”
“But anybody with these certs is important. Maybe you could get help-in-kind.”
“True.”
The old man wasn’t ready to bite, but he said he’d talk to some of the others on Mike’s list. Helping them with their projects counted as a small plus in the affiliance. Maybe the Lizard thought that would flush out more connections.
Meantime, it was getting noisy. Marie Dorsey’s team had designed some kind of crawler. Their prototypes were flopping around everywhere.
They got so close you couldn’t really talk out loud.
Villas → Blount: Can you read me?
“Of course I can,” replied the old man.
So despite Blount’s claims of withittude, maybe he couldn’t manage silent messaging, not even the finger-tapping most grownups used.
XIAOWEN Xu just sat at the equipment bench and read from her laptop. It took even more courage to talk to her than Ralston Blount.
She seemed so sad and still. She had the parts list formatted like a hardcopy catalog. “Once I knew about these things,” she said. “See that.” She pointed at a picture in the museum section. “I designed that chip.”
“You’re world class, Dr. Xu.”
She didn’t look up. “That was a long time ago. I retired from Intel in 2005. And during the war, I couldn’t even get consulting jobs. My skills have just rusted away.”
“Alzheimer’s?” He knew she was much older than she looked, even older than Ralston Blount.
Xu hesitated, and for a moment Mike was afraid she was really angry. But then she gave a sad little laugh. “No Alzheimer’s. You-people nowadays don’t know what it was like to be old.”
“I do so! I have a great grandpa in Phoenix. G’granma, she does have dementia-you know, a kind they still can’t fix. And the others are all dead.” Which was about as old as you can get.
Dr. Xu shook her head. “Even in my day, not everyone over eighty was senile. I just got behind in my skills. My girlfriend died. After a while I just didn’t care very much. I didn’t have the energy to care.” She looked at her laptop. “Now, I have the energy I had when I was sixty. Maybe I have the same native intelligence.” She slapped the table softly. “But I can’t even understand a current tech paper.” It looked like she was going to start crying, right in the middle of shop class. Mike scanned around; no one seemed to be watching. He reached out to touch Xu’s hand. He didn’t have the answer. Ms. Chumlig would say he didn’t have the right question.
He thought a moment. “What’s your shop project going to be?”
“I don’t know.” She hesitated. “I don’t even understand this parts catalog.”
Mike waved at her laptop, but the images sat still as carved stone. “Can I show you what I see?”
“Please.”
He saved her display to his vision of the parts list. The view weaved and dived, a bad approximation to what Mike could see when he looked around with his headup view. Nevertheless, Xu leaned forward and nodded as Mike tried to explain the list.
“Wait. Those look like little wings.”
“Yeah, there are lots of small fliers. They can be fun.”
She gave a wan smile. “They don’t look very stable.”
Mike had noticed that, but not in the view she could see. How did she know? “That’s true, but hardly anything is passively stable. I could take care of that, if you want to match a power supply.”
She studied the stupid display. “Ah, I see.” The power supplies were visible there, along with obvious pointers to interface manuals.
“You really could manage the stability?” Another smile, broader this time. “Okay, let’s try.”
The wings were just tissue flappers. Mike slid a few dozen onto the table top, and started some simulations using the usual stuff from ReynoldsNumbers-R-Us. Xiaowen Xu alternated between querying her laptop and poking her small fingers into the still tinier wings.
Somehow, with virtually no help from anywhere, she had a power train figured out. In a few more minutes, they had five design possibilities. Mike showed her how to program the fab board so that they could try a couple dozen variations all at once.
They tossed handsful of the tiny contraptions into the air. They swirled around the room-and in seconds, all were on the floor, failing in one way or another.
From the far end of the table, Marie Dorsey and her friends were not impressed. “We’re making fliers, too, only ours won’t be brain damaged!” Huh? And he’d thought she was making crawlers!
Dr. Xu looked at the Dorsey team’s floppers. “I don’t think you’ve got enough power, Miss.”
Marie blushed. “I-yeah.” Her group was silent, but there was heavy messaging. “Can we use your solution?” She rushed on: “With official credit, of course.”
“Sure.”
Marie’s gadgets were making small hops by the time the class bell rang.
End of class, end of school day. But Xiaowen Xu didn’t seem to notice. She and Mike collected their midges and merged improvements.
Three generations later, all their tiny flappers were flying. Xu was smiling from ear to ear.
“So now we put mini-nodes on them,” said Mike. “You did pretty well with the power configuration.” Without any online computation at all.