Vinge, Vernor - Rainbows End.pdf - Masterbatingphysics.com

He started some background checks. Like most kids, he kept lots of stuff saved on his
wearable. He could run a search like this very close to his vest. He didn't route to the outside
world except when he could use a site that Chumlig was talking about. She was real good at
nailing the mentally truant. But Juan was good at ensemble coding, driving his wearable with
little gesture cues and eye-pointer menus. As her gaze passed over him, he nodded brightly
and replayed the last few seconds of her talk.
As for the old students... competent retreads would never be here; they'd be rich and fam-
ous, the people who owned most of the real world. The ones in Adult Education were the has-
beens. These people trickled into Fairmont all through the semester. The oldfolks hospitals
refused to batch them up for the beginning of classes. They claimed that senior citizens were
"socially mature," able to handle the jumble of a midsemester entrance.
Juan went from face to face, matching against public records: Winston Blount. The guy
was a saggy mess. Retread medicine was such a crapshoot. Some things it could cure, oth-
ers it couldn't. And what worked was different from person to person. Winston Blount had not
been a total winner.
Just now the old guy was squinting intensely, trying to follow Chumlig's answerboard ex-
ample. He had been in several of Juan's classes. Juan couldn't see the guy's med records,
but he guessed that his mind was mostly okay; he was as sharp as some of the kids in class.
And once upon a time he had been an important player at UCSD. Once upon a time.
Okay, put him on the "of interest" list.
And then there was Xiu Xiang. PhD physics, PhD electrical engineering; 2010 Winner of
the President's Medal for Secure Computation. Overall the hotstuff index on her was almost
Nobel-quality. Dr. Xiang sat hunched over, looking at the table in front of her. She was trying
to keep up on a view-page! Poor lady. But for sure she would have connections.
Chumlig was still going on about how to morph results into new questions, oblivious of
Juan's truancy.
Who's next? Robert Gu. For a moment, Juan thought he had the wrong viewpoint. He
sneaked a glance to his right, toward where the Adult Education crocks hung out. Robert Gu,
PhD literature. A poet. He was sitting with the crocks, but he looked about seventeen years
old! Juan brought his apparent attention back to Ms. Chumlig and inspected the new arrival
close up. Gu was slender, almost scrawny, and tall. His skin was smooth and unblemished.
But he looked like he was sweating. Juan risked a peek at outside medical references. Aha!
Symptoms of the Venn-Kurasawa treatment. Dr. Robert Gu was a lucky man, the one in a
thousand who fully responded to that piece of retread magic. On the other hand, it looked to
Juan like the guy had run out of luck after that. He was fully unpingable. There was a
crumpled piece of view-page on his desk, but he wasn't using it. Years ago, this guy had been