Jack Dann - Dangerous Games

“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.

“Yeah!” She gave him a strange look. “But you got the stability in less than an hour. It would have taken me days to set up the simulations.”

“It’s easy with the right tools.”

She looked disbelieving.

“Hey, I’m near failing at bonehead math. Look Dr. Xu, if you learn to search and use the right packages, you could do all this.” He was beginning to sound like Chumlig. And this fits with the affiliance! “I-I could show you. There are all sorts of joint projects we could do!” Maybe she would always be one of those deep resource people, but if she found her place, that would be more than he could ever be.

He wasn’t sure if Dr. Xu really understood what he was talking about. But she was smiling. “Okay.”

MIKE was late walking home, but that was okay. Ralston Blount had signed onto the affiliance. He was working with Doris Nguyen on her project. Xiaowen Xu had also signed on. She was living at Rainbow’s End rest home, but she had plenty of money. She could buy the best beginner’s wearable that Epiphany made.

Big Lizard would be pleased, and maybe some money would come Mike’s way.

And maybe that didn’t matter so much. He suddenly realized he was whistling as he walked. What did matter… was a wonderful surprise. He had coordinated something today. He had been the person who helped other people. It was nothing like being a real top agent-but it was something.

The Radner twins were almost home, but they showed up to chat.

“You’ve been scarce, Mike.” They were both grinning. “Hey, we got an A from Williams!”

“For the Vancouver project?”

“Yup. He didn’t even check where we got it,” said Jerry.

“He didn’t even ask us to explain it. That would have been a problem!” said Fred.

They walked a bit in companionable silence.

“The hole we put in the Pyramid Hill fence is already repaired.”

“No surprise. I don’t think we should try that again anytime soon.”