Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End

Xiu wasn't entirely crazy; normally she didn't show up when Robert Gu was teaching Juan. Robert had never taught children, and he didn't like incompetents. For all Juan's good intentions, he was both. And now Robert was pretending to teach him to write.

"It's easy, Juan," Robert heard himself say. Lies on top of pretense ! Well, maybe not: writing crap was easy. Twenty years of teaching graduate poetry seminars had shown him that. Writing well was a different thing. Writing beauty that sings was something that no amount of schooling could teach. The geniuses must take care of themselves. Juan Orozco was distinctly less able than the students of Robert's experience. By twentieth-century standards he was subliterate… except where he needed words to access data or understand results. Okay, perhaps he was not subliterate. Maybe there was some other word for these crippled children. Paraliterate? And I bet I can teach him to write crap, too .

So they sat high in the bleachers, pounding words across the sky, Juan Orozco oblivious of the runners below and the games far away. There came a time when he didn't play with his fonts anymore.

There came a day when he wrote something that had affect and image. It was not utter crap. It was almost up to the standards of muddled cliche. The boy stared into the sky for half a minute, his jaw slack. "That is so… bitchin'. The words, they make me see things." His gaze flickered sideways, to Robert. A smile spread across his face. "You with wearing, me with writing. We're getting really good!"

"Perhaps equally so." But Robert couldn't help smiling back.

A week passed. Most evenings, Robert had interviews with Zulfi Sharif. After school and sometimes on weekends, he and Juan worked together. Much of that was remote now. They were still flailing around for a semester project. More and more, Robert was intrigued with the problem of far coordination. Games, music, sports, it all got jittery beyond a few thousand miles and a couple dozen routers. The boy had bizarre plans for how they might put everything together. "We could do something with music, manual music. That's lots easier than game synchronization." Robert went for hours at a time without thinking about his demented, maimed condition.

These school projects were more interesting to the new Robert Gu than Sharif's admiring interviews — and far more interesting than his occasional visits to UCSD. The library shredding had been temporarily suspended, apparently due to the demonstration and his own unintendedly dramatic appearance there. But without the demonstrators, the library was a dead place. Modern students didn't have much use for it. There was just Winnie's "Elder Cabal" up on the sixth floor, rebels whose cause was suddenly on hold.

Robert and Xiu Xiang had mastered most of the Epiphany defaults. Now when he looked at a real object in "just that way," explanations would pop up. With the proper squint or stare at attendant icons, he got the added detail he wanted. Look at the object a different way, and he often could see through and beyond it! Xiu wasn't as good as Robert with the visuals. On the other hand, if she didn't get flustered, she was better at audio searches: when you heard a word you didn't know, if you could tag it, then search results would appear automatically. That explained the marvelous vocabulary — and equally marvelous screwups — he noticed in the children's language.

Miri — > Juan: You should tell him that the nondefaults are a lot harder.

Juan — > Miri: Okay.

"You know, Dr. Gu, you and Xiu are, um, really good with the defaults. But we should work on the nondefaults, too."

Xiang nodded. She was remote today, too, though not as realistically as Juan Orozco. Her image was perfectly solid, but her feet were melted into the bleacher bench in front of her, and occasionally he got glimpses of — background? Her apartment? He kidded her about that, but as usual when he made a joke, it just made her even more quiet.

Lena –> Juan, Miri, Xiu: What! What did he see?

Miri — > Juan, Lena, Xiu: Not to worry. Xiu has a good background filter. Besides, you're in the kitchen and she's sitting in the living room.

Robert turned back to Juan. "So what are the most useful nondefaults?"

"Well, there's silent messaging. The bit rate is so low, it works when nothing else does."

"Yes! I've read about sming. It's like the old instant messaging, except no one can see you're communicating."

Juan nodded. "That's how most people format it."

Lena — > Juan, Miri, Xiu: No! Let the SOB learn sming on his own!

Miri — > Juan, Lena, Xiu: Please, Lena!

Juan –> Lena, Miri, Xiu: It's something everyone uses, ma'am.

Lena — > Juan, Miri, Xiu: I said no! He's already sneaky enough.

The boy hesitated."… but it takes a lot of practice to do it smoothly. It can be more trouble than it's worth when you get caught." Maybe he was remembering run-ins with his teachers?

Xiang sat forward on the bench. She was leaning on some invisible piece of furniture. "Well, what are some other things?"

"Ah! Lots of stuff. If you override the defaults you can see in any direction you want. You can qualify default requests — like to make a query about something in an overlay. You can blend video from multiple viewpoints so you can 'be' where there is no physical viewpoint. That's called ghosting. If you're really slick, you can run simulations in real time and use the results as physical advice. That's how the Radners do so well in baseball. And then there's the problem of faking results if you hit a network soft spot, or if you want a sender to look more realistic — " The boy rattled on, but now Robert was able enough to record the words; he would have to come back to this.

Lena — > Juan, Miri, Xiu: The monster's eyes are glazing over. I think you've distracted him, Juan.

Xiu said, "Okay, let's start with the easiest, Juan."

"That would be moving attention from face front." The boy talked them through some simple exercises. Robert had no idea how this looked to Xiu Xiang. After all, she was already remote. For himself, looking directly backwards was easy, especially if he took the view off his own shirt. But Juan didn't want him to use mirror orientation; he said that would just be confusing once he moved on to other angles.

Without the defaults, things got very tedious. "I'll spend my whole life just tapping in commands, Juan."

"Maybe if we use the eye menus," Xiang said. Robert gave her an irritated look. "I am, I am!"

Lena — > Xiu: Never criticize him. He'll get back at you when it hurts the most.

Xiang's gaze dropped from his. He looked at Juan. "I never see you tapping your fingers."

"I'm a kid; I grew up with ensemble coding. Hey, even my mom mostly uses phantom typing."

"Well, Xiu and I are retreads, Juan. We have learning plasticity and all that. Teach us the command gestures or eyeblinks or whatever."

"Okay! But this is not like the standard gestures you've already learned. For the good stuff, everything is custom between you and your wearable. The skin sensors pick muscle twinges that other people can't even see. You teach your Epiphany and it teaches you."

Robert had read about this. It turned out to be just as weird as it sounded, a cross between learning to juggle and teaching some dumb animal to help you juggle! He and Xiu Xiang had about twenty minutes to make fools of themselves before the soccer teams came out to play. But that was long enough that now Robert could look all around himself with just a subtle shrug.

Juan was smiling. "You guys are really good, for — "

" — for oldfolks?" said Xiu.

Juan's smile broadened. "Yeah." He looked at Robert. "If you can do this maybe I can learn to put words together… Look, I gotta go help my ma. She's running a tour this afternoon. See you all tomorrow, okay?"