The Girl Who Wasn't There

by G Scott Huggins

  “No, sir,” the class chorused.

  Mr. Hybels pulled out his convirscer and consulted it. “Ah, he was even enrolled. I must have missed the notification. I thought he might have been a friend come to audit the course, and I figured on letting him stay. Never hurts to give a potential subscriber a lesson for free. I wonder if he’ll be back.”

  “You would let him back in?” asked Kseniya in disbelief.

  “Of course I would, Ms. Okaforova,” said Mr. Hybels. “I don’t blame children for acting like children.”

  Jeremy frowned, “Uh, no disrespect, sir, but you had him thrown out with a broken arm.”

  Mr. H looked up sharply. “I did no such thing. I asked you all to solve the problem. I then picked a volunteer. You had him thrown out of the classroom with a broken collarbone when you assented to my choice of Jael as your representative. Which reminds me, Jael Wardhey receives full participation points for today’s session.” He spoke these last words into his convirscer and then put it away. “But in any case, Mr. Miller, what would that have to do with whether I blamed him?”

  “Well, uh,” stuttered Jeremy. “If you didn’t blame him, why punish him?”

  “I’m afraid you misunderstand the nature of punishment, Mr. Miller, and I expect better of you. Adults punish behavior after the fact to reinforce the social rules of their society, so that all the members in that society will not only wish to avoid such punishment themselves but will also experience the satisfaction of being a faithful member of the community whose standards the offender has broken. Now, who can tell me why what Denariis experienced was not punishment according to that definition?”

  “It wasn’t given by an adult,” said Jeremy, obviously hoping to counterbalance his earlier, wrong answer.

  “True, but only on the shallowest level relevant,” said Mr. Hybels dryly. “Paul?”

  “It wasn’t a penalty prescribed by laws or the regulations,” he said.

  “Better,” said Mr. Hybels, “And partly correct. But you’re thinking too much like a deputy. The answer is perhaps too obvious.”

  “It didn’t happen after the behavior,” said Jael.

  “Exactly. For there to be punishment, the behavior first had to be stopped. And Jael executed the will of the classroom.”

  “But what else could we have done?” asked Kseniya.

  Mr. H frowned at her. “Most obviously, you could have let me leave and done nothing.”

  “But then all our money—our parents’ money—would have been wasted!” said Jeremy.

  “Exactly. That would have been the consequence, and none of you wanted to face it. So instead, I selected a representative who would and did physically throw him out, with recourse to mild violence.”

  “Then why should we let him back in?” asked Kseniya.

  “A better question,” said Mr. Hybels. “But one you should know the answer to: because you have all agreed, by being in this classroom, that I am the authority here. Of course, I can delegate that authority back to you at any time, Q.E.D. But it is still my classroom, and I am the one who decides which persons may enter, and which will be expelled. So the question is why I will let him return.

  “And I answer: it’s in the nature of children to test boundaries, and adults should give them a chance to demonstrate that they have learned from their mistakes. I asked where he came from, but I would be willing to guess.” Mr. Hybels looked at the ceiling as he thought. “Richmond, Chicago, or Phoenix. Which is it?”

  “Chicago,” said Yilong.

  “That makes sense.”

  After a pause, Paul smiled and raised his hand. “Why does that make sense, sir?”

  “Well,” he said, sitting down, “Because Chicago is a fairly conservative area on Old Earth, and has been for a long time. To understand why, we have to go back about 150 years and consider the way sociological pendulums swing. Review question: what do I mean by a sociological pendulum?”

  Yilong raised his hand. “You mean that in a society, people’s opinions tend to swing between extremes. After a bad experience caused by one extreme, people tend to swing toward another extreme.”

  “Correct,” said Mr. Hybels. “I might have expected a citizen of China to give me that one. Can anyone give me an example?”

  Kseniya raised her hand. “Germany after Great Patriotic…I mean, Second World War. They were extreme militarists. Became extreme pacifists.”

  “Very good, Kseniya. The Germans had learned that a military could make them strong and embraced the use of their army to force other nations to give them concessions. But when Hitler and his generals pressed that too hard, they reaped the devastation of being defeated by an alliance of most of the world. So they concluded that militarism had destroyed them and turned away from it. Japan is an even better example.

  “Now, the Second World War followed the Great Depression, which meant that everyone in the world had lived through a very hard time. But after the War, the United States immediately went through a very easy time. They were the only major industrial power whose factories hadn’t been bombed to rubble, and they immediately became the supplier of the world’s industrial needs. This led to a huge wave of prosperity that the American people quickly thought of as normal. What do we call this? Jael?”

  “The…The Law of Rising Expectations?” she said. Paul thought she was still a little shaken up by her victory. Or maybe because she obviously hadn’t meant to hurt Denariis quite that badly.

  “Yes. But as the prosperity grew and then waned, the inequalities of American society, which was still not recovered fully from its own Civil War and the slavery which caused it, became more obvious. And without an active war or a threat to drive the people closer together…Yes, Kseniya?”

  “Excuse me, sir? But what about Cold War with Soviet Union?”

  “Good question. But the Cold War was very different from an actual war, and the Soviet Union very adroitly used propaganda to convince the American people that their own society was just as repressive as Soviet society. They correctly deduced that the racial divides in American society were its weakest point.

  “So the prosperity of the United States had two major effects, one coming from the other: firstly, it convinced people that the United States ought to be able to do anything it wanted to do. Its successes in landing on the Moon and in defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War only reinforced this idea. As a result, people’s expectations rose ever higher. The better things got, the more intolerable any remaining problems became. The United States was not the first nation to suffer this problem, of course.

  “Now, with all the racial and cultural divides, the only thing Americans could agree on was that violence was bad, and so they monomaniacally focused on the problem of violence. The use of violence against Civil Rights advocates and the United States’ military’s involvement in a series of unpopular wars played a large role in convincing people that all violence was bad, especially if it was directed against those perceived to lack power. And in every society, there is one group that lacks—one group that must lack—power. Children.

  “During the early twenty-first century, the belief arose that this was unjust. It started with an assertion that was, at least on the surface, reasonable: that children should not be the targets of physical violence. And the abuse of children was a problem, of course. But then, according to the Law of Rising Expectations again, it began to expand. By about 2030, it became generally accepted among the elites in the United States and Western Europe that treating children in any way differently than adults was ‘violence,’ and thus not permissible.”

  “Wait, so…children were forced to get jobs and pay for their own housing and things?” asked Jeremy.

  “Hah!” said Mr. Hybels. “You caught me there. No, of course not. That would be neglect, which was also unacceptable. So children had to be treated in all ways better than adults. Which meant that they grew up with almost a complete lack of discipline because you could not forcibly compel a ch
ild’s behavior.”

  “Is insane,” said Kseniya. “Americans thought this made children safer?”

  “Yes, they did,” said Mr. Hybels. “Of course, such a delusion could only happen in a society that was already one of the safest in history. In a dangerous place—like a lunar colony—it’s impossible to think that disciplining children, even by corporal punishment, is more dangerous than allowing them to freely exercise their ignorance and selfishness. And you just saw a tiny portion of where it led: far from eliminating violence, it encouraged it. It created violent children, unafraid to attack other children, and especially unafraid to attack adults, who would be punished for defending themselves. That and other issues came close to starting another civil war in the United States.”

  “I don’t understand how all this let you know where Denariis was from,” said Yilong.

  “Well, all this did come to an end, not because of an American civil war, but because of the AI War. You see, the nuclear weapons that destroyed the largest American cities caused great poverty and hardship. America, and to a lesser extent, China and the old Russian Federation, became more like the Moon. There was no more time or resources for coddling children. Discipline meant—as it always does—survival. But now America wasn’t soft enough to pretend otherwise. Also, the destruction of the AI networks meant that many more people could, and had to, go to work.

  “But those who lived in the big cities that did not suffer nuclear strikes took in a lot of the refugees from those who did. Those cities became the most conservative places in America, although they called themselves progressive then. There, it is still popular to believe that children are inherently more innocent, and in some ways wiser, than adults. Which is a contradiction in terms, as it always has been. Adults are, by definition, disciplined. Children are not.

  “So, when I came in here and saw how Denariis was behaving, I simply picked the largest American cities that both survived the war without suffering a nuclear strike and attracted the most refugees from the coasts.”

  “Sir,” said Paul, a horrifying thought beginning to arise in his mind. “Are you saying that all schoolchildren acted like Denariis…all the time?”

  Mr. Hybels chuckled. “Oh, no, son. Much worse. It was bad enough here when there was just one of him. Can you imagine what would have happened if the whole class was made up of him? Or even half of it? No teaching happened. A teacher couldn’t be heard above the shouting and had no way to quiet the class.”

  “Why didn’t they just leave?” asked Jeremy. “Like you threatened to.”

  “All teachers were paid by the government. If you left, you’d be fired, and have no way to be rehired. That’s assuming you weren’t arrested for child abandonment, which carried a five-year prison term. No, teachers were glorified baby-sitters, except we weren’t glorified: we were despised as the lowest of unskilled laborers. The only thing we could do was watch, and pray we called the police at the right time if some child decided to really hurt another one.”

  “They needed police in the schools?” said Yilong.

  “Constantly,” said Mr. Hybels.

  “We still have police in the schools,” said Jeremy, looking hard at Paul.

  “Shut up,” said Paul, annoyed.

  “In any case,” said Mr. Hybels, “I urge you to forgive Denariis his rudeness. He does not know any better and deserves a chance to learn. He has been a valuable lesson to us all, and we would be ungrateful not to give him a second chance, should he be wise enough to desire it. But that lesson needs to come to an end so that we have time for the presentations, which I suspect some of you may be trying to delay.”

  There was a subsonic moan.

  “Let’s begin,” said Mr. Hybels. “First up, we have Jeremy. Chosen topic: The Origins of the Holy Chinese Empire.”

  Wincing slightly, Jeremy got up and moved to the center of the classroom. With a gesture from Mr. H, the lights went down, and Jeremy set up his project, a blank disc about the size of a large pizza, on the classroom’s center table. At his touch, the SmartBloc began unfolding its thin graphene sheets according to Jeremy’s presentation. The SmartBloc’s magnetic fields began to change its colors, and within a few seconds, it had unfolded into a precise miniature rendering of Hong Kong’s Grand Assembly Building, the seat of the Chinese Imperial legislature.

  Jeremy began, haltingly, with a summary of the AI War and the downfall of the People’s Republic of China. Paul found it difficult to keep his mind on his classmate’s wandering style. Making the required notes on it for the peer critique portion of Jeremy’s grade helped only a little. What’s your thesis? he input through his convirscer. He winced as he realized that Jeremy’s SmartBloc had done all it was ever going to do, being nothing more than a static model, probably one he’d grabbed straight from the LunarLibLog.

  If it was intended to provide visual interest, it was failing. Paul stifled a yawn and wondered again about the man Jael had claimed she’d seen. Maybe another new family was on the way? Even other students? But no, that was stupid; the man couldn’t have arrived before the ship he came in on. Paul hoped that there might be other kids coming who would be more pleasant to hang around than Denariis.

  Jeremy’s presentation stuttered to a halt. Paul hastily began punching in notes. He didn’t want to lose points for doing a superficial job.

  “Thank you, Mr. Miller. Your presentation was correct in all relevant points,” said Mr. Hybels in a flat voice. Jeremy beamed. Paul closed his eyes. Jeremy didn’t see it coming, but Paul heard the hanging note that meant Jeremy was about to be, well…hanged.

  “But there’s one thing I don’t understand,” he said. “You explained the long and bitter history between North Korea and the United States. But you never really explained why China was so heavily targeted by Kim Jong Un’s AIs. Wasn’t the People’s Republic of China the closest thing that North Korea had to an ally?”

  Jeremy looked confused. “Well, yes, sir. But the Norks were crazy, everyone knows that. And that made their AIs crazy, too.”

  “Mr. Miller,” sighed Mr. Hybels, “‘They were crazy’ is the excuse for every piece of bad behavior in history, put forward by people who don’t care to put forth the time and effort to understand. Let us see if anyone can perfect our understanding. Mr. Wardhey. Do you have an alternate explanation?”

  Paul rose. He wished that Mr. H might have chosen a different student to give his answer. Jeremy already resented him. But what else was he going to do? Mr. H had notoriously little patience for slack answers or playing dumb and Paul was not about to explain a low daily grade to his mother on top of everything else today.

  “Yes, sir. While the North Korean dictator was undoubtedly less than sane by our standards,” and hopefully Jeremy would take that as an attempt not to humiliate him, “the fact is that China had already shown increasing reluctance to support his regime, and the growing Christian population that Jeremy cites as forming the eventual core of the Holy Chinese Empire had already made its wishes felt in the old People’s Republic. They hated Kim Jong Un and his brutal repression of North Korean Christians. The Chinese Communist Party was beginning to realize that they couldn’t just repress such a large part of their population anymore. So when Kim Jong Un decided to give the Go Code to his AI-controlled nukes, China was already a target for his revenge.”

  “Well said.” Mr. Hybels rose. “We cannot afford to see people as stupid, evil, or crazy, just because they threaten us. In fact, we cannot afford to see them that way, especially when they threaten us. Such were the errors that led to what we now call The Great Realignment.

  “The People’s Republic believed that the North Koreans were stupid and desperate. They simply did not foresee that the North Koreans could easily do the same basic strategic calculations that the People’s Army had and conclude that China was a much more immediate danger to them than the United States. They thought they were safe.

  “The United States, for its part, believed that North Kore
a was crazy. It never occurred to them that North Korea would simply be able to bribe a small set of first-rate AI engineers—many of them disaffected Americans—to work there.

  “Meanwhile, Russia and Western Europe simply ignored the problem, allowing China and the United States to handle it, and never dreamed that the consequences of not doing so would rebound upon them. The consequence, of course, was the destruction of eight major U.S. Cities, and shortly thereafter, its two political parties. With the destruction of Beijing, Guangzhou, and Chongqing, the People’s Republic of China died and was replaced by the Holy Chinese Empire. The Russian Empire lost Vladivostok and St. Petersburg, and any remaining pretensions to controlling Eastern Europe. All that would have been bad enough without the aftermath that became known as the AI War and the Big Crash. Speaking of which, Mr. Wardhey, it is your turn.”

  Paul swallowed and rose. Through his convirscer, he activated his presentation. Fortunately, his was much more elaborate than a simple SmartBloc model.

  The problem was that Paul hated public speaking. He took a deep breath.

  “After the AI War, the governments of the world faced the twin challenges of populations that were both poor and deeply suspicious of anything that smacked of artificial intelligence,” he began. He tried to ignore the faces of his classmates and focused on the words he’d practiced over and over again during the long hours of patrol duty. If there was an advantage to serving as Mother’s deputy, it was this: it gave you a lot of time to prepare.

  “And so while the AI War did cost countless lives and set humanity backward in many areas of technology,” he concluded, “it is quite possible that without it, the Moon would be as lifeless as it ever was, and that none of us would work or study upon its surface.”

  He braced himself for Mr. Hybels’ probing questions but instead heard nothing. The silence was broken by a dry, rhythmic, slap. Focusing his eyes, Paul suddenly realized that Mr. Hybels was clapping, harder and harder. His classmates joined in, half-heartedly. There was only so much enthusiasm you could work up for a history report, after all, but he couldn’t believe it. Mr. H’s applause wasn’t often given.