Chapter 9

I got to homeroom early again, so I read messages.

Auntie:

>Ash, it takes three hours to bake the kind of birthday cake Gretchen and I know about. As long as you are not carousing, feasting or wenching that morning, there is time. She added ingredients to the next pantry run. Please give some thought to the design of the frosted cake. Your loving Auntie -SumiH

“The design of the frosted cake.” Another thing to which I’d paid scant attention. Just when I thought I was getting on with paying attention I get slapped with something like that. I’d have to search it later.

Beck:

>Hi, sweetie, do you have anything on tonight? <3 <3 <3 Beck-oo

At that point Mr. Mesrobian walked in. “Good morning, gentlefolk.

“Collective IT has designed a firmware upgrade to communication hardware - tablets, phones - which will be announced shortly. I am bound to remind you that a “version lag” of your hardware vs. the community has usually unfortunate results, namely that your use of Collective services might be curtailed or refused. Please ensure you keep up.

“The trees on School property belong to the School and its heritage board. Deliberately changing the tree in any way is considered vandalism. A student has been suspended for carving on a redwood with a folding knife, the possession of which on School property is itself a serious infraction.

“Any comments, questions...?”

None.

“Carpe diem, gentlefolk.”

At Mr. Moss’ class we talked about how Sterne used humor and that went into a descant about modern versus old ways of deploying it. There’s an underlying feel about Sterne’s - that it might take advantage of someone’s foibles, but it wasn’t ever mean-spirited.

Bang-ja and I met at Dr. Green’s classroom and she rolled her eyes at me. “This is such a waste, maybe we should have done the work last Litha and challenged.”

As predicted, Dr. Green had some less-than-charitable things to say about differentiating under the integral: they were noted on my returned homework that was down-graded. I requested a meeting after class.

“Evidence, please.” “Yes, Mr. Boakye.”

“Dr. Green, I object to your down-marking my reply to question #9 on the last homework.”

“I have not covered your path to the solution yet.” “Tell me, Dr. Green, do you wish to strictly limit your students to your timeline of instruction?” “I wish to limit my students to a pace they can sustain.” “My research shows that you have never taught differentiation under the integral. I deduce that my progress is therefore independent of your instruction, yet you seek to disavow a correct implementation of something I learned on my own that is applicable to an exercise? How does limiting me to a pace I can sustain enter the argument?”

“As I say, from your need as a member of the class to maintain a sustainable pace.”

“Then, Dr., where does your assessment of my ability to sustain pace come from?” “From my best judgment.”

“You assert, therefore, that you can ignore actual progress and use a model that has nothing to do with the student’s ability?”

Here he was between two fires. If he was ignoring ability then he was culpable, according to his contract, of restraining students’ progress; if he wasn’t, then he perforce hadn’t a problem with what I’d done.

“I don’t take kindly to your question.” “Nevertheless, I shall have an answer and it will go on the record.”

He declined. “Very well, let it be so. Achille David Boakye. Notarize, send, end.”

I sent the notarized record to Erik Fong, the school administration, a copy to Dr. Green.

I was late to lunch and apart from getting the fish “after it was turned” I hadn’t much further luck. In particular, I wasn’t used to eating alone but I hadn’t wanted to make Bang-ja wait for me, so ... sucked to be me. And...

Erik Fong:

>Hi, Ash,

You’re generating a fair amount of paperwork these days. I have some information in re. Anderson and now I have a School Board pleading to write.

Taking Anderson first: you have the initiative. I believe the case against him is a good one because a) multiple video streams showed the situation; b) multiple interviews conducted by the School District validate the accuracy of the video streams; c) formally the charge against Anderson would be assault and battery. The facts in the video and measurements I subpoenaed from Barnaard hospital are clear: Anderson is 195 cm and 100 kg; you are 155 cm and fifty-five or sixty kg. A reasonable person would draw the conclusion that Anderson’s attack was hostile and designed to make you fearful. That checks the boxes for proof. The family is offering inducements for you to not sustain the charges.

Second, Horatio Green: I believe this is straightforward, the man should have shut up and asked for a meeting with you, and counsel. (Have you considered law in your career plans?) Would you send me a copy of the homework in question and an explanation of a) why the solution you advanced works; b) how you learned it independently? Fond regards, -EFongEsq

‘The family is offering inducements... ‘. I’d have to check, but I imagined the idiot protesting to anyone who would listen that he did nothing wrong, and that annoyed me.

>Erik -

As to Anderson, I would like to head to the court and sustain the charge; when should I do it and is this something you should attend? There are people I do not want among us. That his family is offering inducements is revolting: a clear understanding of English would lead one to call that ‘bribery’, or witness tampering. By the way, no one has yet asked me for a statement. I believe one of my parents has to accompany me to such a proceeding and I haven’t heard from either on the matter.

Homework enclosed. Will Dr. Green have competent counsel who understands mathematics themself? I am by no means certain that Dr. Green bothered to understand what I did, and I must write for an audience whose level of mathematical competence I understand. My fond regards -Achille -Enclosure1

>Hi, Beck-oo,

Homework + legal case against the guy who assaulted me. I come up for air Friday sometime after the school day is over.

Do you know whether John, Iain and the Vikings are coming to your performance Saturday? <3 <3 <3 -Achille

Comp. geom. wasn’t my favorite class but it had its moments. Unfortunately the only moment it had today was Bang-ja coming up before it started. “What’s up tonight?” “Homework, followed by endless paperwork. That clown who grabbed me is admitting nothing and his ‘rents want to bribe me to not sustain charges - once I found that out all I could do was ask our lawyer if he wanted to be there when I do.” “But ... me so horny...” She giggled. “Bang-ja, do you know I have been gorging at the temple of fine, lovely flesh continuously for a week?” “And, so?” “Well ... I haven’t had any alone-time in a while, and since I’m used to it, I get nervous about having made such a change without check-ups.” “But...” and her eyes shone, “me. so. horny!” I had to laugh. “Hey, the only things happening from Friday night throughout the weekend - at least so far - is two Saturday morning classes, one picnic and one musical performance. I have this homework and bureaucratic thing tonight, a thing tomorrow before dinner, and a thing Friday after school whose time isn’t known yet.”

“I want cock, more specifically I want -your- cock. Dinner with my fam, Friday after your mysterious ‘thing’?” “I’d like that, Bang-ja. I am hopeful that the mysterious ‘thing’ will help the three of us but I don’t know for sure - it’s why I’m motivated to make sure it happens.”

She licked her lips, stared at my breasts for a second, then said “OK, but any further nonsense about ‘things’ and Beck-oo and I will be Not Pleased. We got the all-three-together sensing last night and we. Want. More.” “I committed, Bang-ja.”

She looked around furtively, then kissed me on the cheek with one of her hands on my ass. “Good, then. Friday. Right after your ‘thing’.” “Right after I go change out of school clothes...” “Transit. Make it happen.” She tossed her head. “Honestly, you overthink things when you can make them easy.” She smiled at me, then her eyes went wide. “I want you, Ash, deeply.” She thought about that a second, then giggled. “Very deeply.”

She gave my hand a squeeze. Mr. Simmons came in and droned on a while, mainly about clean versus maintainable code. The example he used was a wild algorithm someone in last year’s class developed and turned into a controller for active armor. The problem with the algorithm had been no one else could figure out how it worked - even though it did. “The student became a Contributor [added to the Collective’s revenue] with a NA Defense contract. To get that, she had to have the source vetted by auditors and they called it clean code that shouldn’t be able to do what it did, but it did. They asked why and she said “long’s the code meets requirements - and it does - you have all you need”. She locked up the explanation and there it sits. Although the reasoning is clear and in this case profitable, it’s a case study about how to write code that’s useful and correct but not maintainable - unless you can get in the safe.”

We went to lunch. Usually Bang-ja preceded me in the line, so I got to check out her butt and legs; this time she said “I get to look.” The lunch was chicken with a light pasta, courgettes, and a salad of rocket, cucumber, and tomatoes in a vinaigrette. I took a mugicha, she had plain water, and we found a spot not far from one of the corners.

“Yesterday I went to get measured for yoga clothes...”. “But you’ve just been to the measurers’...” I wondered how she knew that. “This person makes yoga clothes their way and the measurement system feels like a cross between a mechanical lab and a radio development outfit. And ... something happened. Glades for more deets.” She nodded silently: they’d got some lemon flavor in the pasta and it brought the meal into focus - anyway, we were both eating slowly but intently.

We went out to the glades. Bang-ja had to have a kiss (not PDA-safe) so we looked around guardedly and then began it, but abruptly we stopped. Too tempting to turn our sharing on. “This is so ... frustrating!” I said. She stared at my breasts. “Spirit”, she said, “I want!” “So do I.” Then she said “so ... what happened?”

“Remember when we stayed at your house last night, and we were looking for the off-switch and found it?” She nodded. “Then look, we didn’t have the off-switch before then, right, like at the first measurement?” “True.” “Well, at this measurement, data are taken off a wearable mechanical structure by radio, and something went wrong with the data.” “What?” “I don’t know, I’m hopeful I can tease it out of them, but tomorrow I get measured again. One measuring with the sensing on, resulting in mangled data or something. One measuring with the sensing off, resulting in we don’t know what yet. It’s a chance at learning something about -how- we’re doing this.”

She was looking through me, not seeing. “Yes ... ok ... it isn’t the answer but it’s a potential step, depending on how the data are - and it’s thin, but quite a bit better than nothing.”

We headed back, brief PDA-safe squeeze of hands.

Drama. We had to read from plays with very little preparation time. I and a few others had drawn George Ade’s “The Sultan of Sulu”. None of us had heard of it, it’s a satire on what used to be called gunboat diplomacy, and we stumbled through passages involving five or six characters at a time. It was surprisingly difficult, yet I enjoyed it and there was a lot of laughter as we fumbled lines, or didn’t understand the mood of the scene. No wonder people rehearse plays.

I got out of there and Beck was waiting, no doubt for a walk home. “Heya, what’s up?” “Another class, then homework, then dinner, then legal.” “Seems a pity.” “???” “We could play.”

“Beck, I know and I love it but you’ve been active, well, I’d imagine a couple years at least. For me this is the eighth -day- since I first kissed someone with, uh, intent.” “I hear it yet it is so hard to believe. Reminds me of Athena, popping out complete with knowledge and instinct.” “Maybe I’m just a fast learner.” She took my hand as we went through the gates. “It’s way more than that. You gave me ... us ... this beautiful... “ Her lips were quivering. “Beck...” She sniffed and went on. “If anyone had told me that would happen, then a) I would not have understood and b) the telling in words would have missed the mark anyway. Being in it, you, me, Bang-ja, has me feeling as though I am four and jumping in mud puddles again.” I nodded. “I’d no idea either, and now that you say it I am thinking in flashes about when I was a little.” “Nothing to worry about, no anxiety, no weltschmerz.” “Yeah...”.

I told Beck about the opportunity of getting measured and what it meant, and she pondered that herself. “No use wasting clock cycles until we have both data points.” I said “true, yet I don’t know where else to look right now.”

We got to my front walk. “Really, you have to do all that stuff?” “I do, Beck. The weekend is coming up.” She planted a fierce kiss on me and said “check out what you’re missing” as she sashayed back to Riemann.

With the hour or so before tang soo do I had some homework planned but as I entered Auntie pounced. “Here for a while?” “Homework, tang soo do, homework and the Anderson thing.” “Seriously. Sleeping alone?” I nodded. “Well, don’t make it a habit”, she giggled. “Your prototype uniforms came. Some time tonight please try them on.” “Uniforms? With a week and change to go before Litha?” “Look at it as an advertising expense that will, I am nearly certain, pay off nicely. You have an opportunity now to make more friends, so get on it!” “Yes, Auntie.”

I rolled the desk cupboard open and worked on o-chem for the hour. Enantiomers, well, the chirality fuss had to have been for something given Dr. Dalton’s logic, and here it was. I hadn’t known you can have two chiral molecules that were mirror images and that they’d do different things in reactions, but Nature is either too weird to anticipate or too diverse to not have odd results here and there.

For the first time in a week I’d done an hour’s uninterrupted homework, gotten plenty out of it, and not felt rushed. I made an appointment at the reweavers’ for after my measurements at Yong’s, then I stuck on my gi and headed for Master Ro’s. Danni was waiting at her door for me to pass. “Ash! A minute?”

I walked to Danni, she’d trimmed her hair and something else I couldn’t place. “Wow, you did something besides the hair and whatever it is, it’s, erm, pretty hot!” She folded me up in her arms and kissed me, quickly. Ah. Changes to her upper torso. “I know you have to go, but I wanted you thinking of me.” “All of me is, right this minute. We need to play soon.” She smirked. “You’re that easy, huh?” I looked at her C-cup breasts. “Remember when you called me ‘utter whore’?” She nodded. “It’s worse, now.” She laughed and smacked my arm. “Good. Your schedule is shifty and I’m having trouble figuring it out. Now you’re motivated.” And she beamed at me. “Oh, Danni, you don’t have to have new stuff for me to get motivated. My schedule is definitely shifty and I’m having the same problem.”

Danni’s shape change was going to dog my attention through some of the class, but when we began the sparring part I wound up with Master Ro himself as my partner. He threw some moves I’d never seen at me and it was all I could do to deflect or dodge properly - he was testing whether I would create weakness by over-committing to a single course of action. He tagged me a couple times, once with a round kick and once with a heavy punch to my solar plexus but I rolled with them. My gi was dripping and I observed he’d broken a sweat. We stopped after about twenty minutes and bowed to one another.

“Mr. Boakye, something is going on with you.” I nodded. “Last week that would have been too much for you.” “Yes, Master Ro.”

“If you can, then, please explain why you are now so fluid.” “I don’t know that I can. I have succumbed to the horrors of puberty and I’m more open to a lot I had been missing.” He cracked the first tiny smile I’d ever seen on his imperturbable face. “Belt test early in Litha 2. Work on your hyung, too.” “Yes, Master Ro.” We bowed and I got back into the rows we make for dismissal.

“Gentlefolk, please recall I go on vacation beginning Friday, for two weeks. Mx. Hundeford will announce sparring opportunities.” We did our leave-taking ritual and dispersed. On the short walk home I wondered what kind of exercise I could get ... oh.

Home at 1845 for a change, and here came Serge in his old car. He had to drive slowly across the lip of the driveway to protect the exhaust system but he had it down, and I watched him maneuver it across the dip and into the garage.

“Brakes and injection are fine, now.” “How much email traffic to Italy did it take to get the injection parts, all told?” “Three suppliers, maybe forty outgoing and twice that coming in.” “Happy with it, now?” “I’ve been happy with it ever since I got it.”

When he got it he was fourteen. It arrived in stages: a rolling chassis, an engine in a crate, a transmission in another, boxes full of miscellany, and he’d driven it his first klick not a year ago. There wasn’t much he hadn’t taken apart, cleaned, imaged, fixed, imaged again, and reinstalled. On the path to finishing it his way he’d met people in Europe, Scandinavia, and all over the Americas.

We went inside and by silent agreement out to the deck. I got us mugicha from the deck fridge. “It’s funny, here I am working on cars all the time, and you don’t have anything about that in your thinking.” “I don’t. Until recently I was just about math.” “And then?” “And then I was about math and sex play.” He stifled a snort. “Is it going well?” “Taking one thing with another, it’s going better than I had any right to hope.”

“Any questions?” I thought a minute. “When sex play becomes ... something else, call it intense closeness, and it keeps happening, how do you manage?” “Ash, count your blessings. I have been fucking. I’m looking for that closeness and not often finding it, though the sex is pretty good - but let me ask you something, then, when do you know that’s there?”

“Um. Remember, the partners I’ve played with I’ve known for a number of years, we’re friends, and the first concern for me was to not push them away with a body I thought not functional or not functioning well or otherwise too strange. That turned out to be, well, other than an issue, but my very first kiss was good and during the second one I realized I’d known them for years, for a reason, and this was it - a confirmation of why I was friends with them this whole time.”

“I don’t know that feeling.” I patted his hand. “If you feel it, ever, trust it. I’m of the mind these days that if you let your body feel and follow its wishes, rather than getting enmeshed with analysis, you will do better.”

He nodded slowly. “This is metaphysics to me, it sounds like a language I’ve never been taught.” “Oh, I haven’t been taught it either, I’m trying to convert feelings into English and sometimes they just won’t go.”

At that he laughed. “How do I get there?”

“Here I have a number of problems, Serge, mainly data and security. Shall we head to the gazebo?” We got up, traversing the early evening with the crepuscular creatures busy in the branches and bushes on our way, and sat in the old chairs. “Why the security issues?” “I can give you little. Think of this: if you had information that would bury the, uh, North American oil industry in lawsuits, and it got out that you had it, what would happen?” “I would disappear, along with the information.” I nodded and his eyes grew round. He stood. “What passed or passes between us here is sealed. Serge Manon Boakye.” I stood. “What passed or passes between us here is sealed. Achille David Boakye.”

We sat and mulled. “Serge, truly, this is another in the conundrums ... some of us ... are finding. I now have a new issue to solve, which is ‘how, and under what circumstances, can this knowledge be diffused’? It’s strange, it’s dangerous, and we have no idea how it works, but work it does and with spectacular results for three of us.”

“Ah ... then ... you are seeing implications.” “I am, and I don’t know how to not raise expectations, nor do I have a good feel for the ethics, but if we can ... navigate that, I think it’s a moral imperative that we do the diffusion.”

Interesting discussion. “Serge, I can’t go further. Please let us try to get through this, I promise none of us wishes to own this information; rather, life will get far better if we do not. It’s, for now, a matter of strategy.”

“How in the name of spirit and spark are you managing?” “A day at a time.”

We went in the house. 1930 and my comp.geom. just got shifted to the right. I could squawk and live with it, or just live with it.

I took my gi off, showered and dressed for a family dinner. Too little of that in my life lately, though I had no complaints about the alternative. Soft and un-challenging terry-cotton clothes. When Gretchen rang the bell Serge and I, coming from opposite directions, found we had guests - and oddly, one was four-legged. “Ash, Serge, please be introduced to Calvin and Callia Worthington.” “A pleasure, gentlefolk, Serge Boakye, he/him”. “Gentlefolk, I’m happy to know you. Ash Boakye, he/him.” We shook or took the hands. “Would you like to meet our dog Spot?” The caracal took one step forward and raised a paw. “Um - are they serious?” “She has a marvelous sense of humor.” I took the paw and she briefly nuzzled my hand. “You are a mannerly cat, Spot.” The “I know” look on her face made me laugh. “No disrespect, Spot. Perhaps you have ‘an unexpected vein of pawky humour’.” She looked at me and yawned.

Serge shook the big cat’s paw. Callia went into the kitchen and returned with three bowls and place mats. She placed two of them before Spot who sat, and whose eyes tracked Callia, as she placed the third bowl in a corner of the living room. “Now Spot is served”, said Callia. “Watch her. She is more intelligent than you might expect.”