Sean leaned against the viewing glass and watched the swimmers slice through water, each one determined to outrace all others in the 50-yard freestyle sprint. On the other side of the glass, bleachers sloped down to the pool. Loitering outside the pool during girls varsity swim practice was not his normal pastime after school. His eyes tracked one girl in particular.
"Checking out the swim team?" a familiar voice giggled behind him, "Can't fault your taste, I guess."
Sean turned as Carmen walked up to the glass, smiling slightly.
"My interest is strictly scientific," Sean answered loftily, his hand reaching up instinctively to brush his hair. His breathing subconsciously quickened a notch in the presence of a pretty girl.
"Sure dude, whatever," Carmen rolled her eyes, and then more seriously, "Thanks for seeing me again. Your advice really boosted my A-game on court. I'm ready to move to the next..."
Wouldn't miss a chance to see you, Sean thought as he held up his hand, "Let's wait a minute for the others."
"What others?" Carmen frowned, just as Brandon rounded the corner along the long curving corridor that terminated at locker rooms at either end, "Hey Sean, thanks for... wait what's she doing here? I knew the girls' locker room was a bad spot to meet..."
"Nice to see you too, Brandon," Sean nodded, "Relax, Jason has gone home. There's no football practice tonight."
"That's not the point, dude," Brandon hissed, "This was supposed to be a private..."
"Hold up... what's going on?" Kyle showed up then, his eyes narrowing," Are these two giving you grief, Sean? Knock it off, Brandon. You too Carmen." His tone brooked no argument as he strolled up to the glass.
"We aren't giving him grief," Carmen huffed making air quotes around the last three words, "Sean turned a private session into a public one without telling me... us. That's a dick move. I didn't even know he was tutoring anyone else."
"Wait," Kyle said thoughtfully, "You've been helping others... other friends of Jason."
"That's what I wanted to talk about," Kyle caught on fast, noted Sean as he nodded, "I'm happy to help you all out with strategic advice when you need it. But I need a favor in return."
"Time to pay the piper, I knew it," Carmen nodded knowingly, "Well... what do you want? It better not be a date to the homecoming dance or something."
"I want you to be my friends," Sean smiled. The three stared at him incredulously.
"What," spluttered Carmen.
"I just need you to publicly acknowledge me as a friend," Sean clarified, "Hang out with me at the cafeteria once in a while, that sort of thing."
"Sorry, not gonna happen, dude," Brandon shook his head, "Jason will kill us."
"I see what you are doing," there was sadness in Kyle's tone, "If you are trying to turn us against Jason, it's not going to work."
"I'm not asking you to choose between me and Jason," Sean protested, Not yet.
"No can do, bruh," Carmen scoffed, "And I don't need your help anymore. I can take it from here."
"I'm not so sure you can," Sean countered, "if you really want to play pro-tennis someday. You see, there's a pattern to the type of friends Jason usually takes on. You are all very gifted losers."
"You take that back, punk," growled Brandon stepping forward, then paused confused, "wait... what kind of lame insult is that?"
"Let me explain," Sean rummaged in his backpack till he found a marker, "Take someone like... Mei-Ling for instance..."
Your girlfriend?" Brandon looked puzzled, "what about her?"
"She's my bestie, not my girlfriend," Sean sighed wearily, "Where do you think she'll be in ten... twenty years?"
"Miss goody two shoes?" Carmen gave a snort, "Straight A's', teachers' pet, on track to be valedictorian. She'll do fine."
"Sounds about right," Sean nodded, "Now what do you think her chances are of being the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates?"
"Um... how would I know," Carmen shrugged testily, "Is there a point to this rambling riddle?"
"The point is that valedictorians do well because they follow the rules," Sean turned and started sketching a Gaussian bell curve on the viewing glass, "Obedience and self-discipline are their key traits. School is designed to reward such students, as well as filter out failures." He crossed out an area under the tailend of the curve on the left. "But there's also another type of student that school filters out... the obsessive genius who excels in one field but has no interest in other subjects. People who might go on to revolutionize their field but get labeled as failures because they flunked history." Sean crossed out a corresponding area on the right end of the bell curve, "What do your grades look like, Carmen?"
Carmen scowled. Brandon broke the startled silence, "You're saying that... we..."
"You are the type whose passion is entirely one dimensional. Tennis, football, coding, music, mathematics, whatever," Sean nodded, "There's no guarantee you will be stars in your field. The odds are against you. But you'll never find out without me to fill in what you lack. School is a multi-dimensional filter in the vector space of human endeavour, which makes it an excellent mechanism to throttle progress."
They left after agreeing to think it over. They'll come around, thought Sean as he watched them leave. Flattery and self-interest were stronger than loyalty, after all. He just had to convince them that the only possible path to their dreams was through Sean and not Jason. Carmen paused and looked back pensively at Sean, "So what are your bestie's chances of becoming the next Bill Gates?"
"Generalists like Mei Ling... and myself usually don't become super stars," A spasm of pain passed over Sean, "We get nice stable boring jobs."
Sean left to his own thoughts, gazed at the pool through the viewing glass. The swimmers had finished their practice and were headed towards the girls' locker room. He waited patiently, contemplating the age old question of why he wasn't rich if he was so smart. The Phreak Club was trying, with no sucess yet, to make contact with the artificial intelligence that powered Susan Fuller's hedge fund. He had nothing to show for breaking into the Fuller household except a recently healed fracture. Accepting Julia Thornton's internship to protect himself from Richard Fuller had been a mistake. Sean could still taste the ashes of that debacle in the South Caucasus. Gloomily he wondered if it was wise to devote so much effort into destroying Jason. Surely there were other projects he should be pursuing towards financial freedom. But he couldn't let it go. Someone had contracted the Collection Agency to trash the chemistry lab and frame Sean. There was no hard proof, but Sean had no doubt it was Jason. Who else could it be? Thoughts about the Fullers invariably led to Jason's sister. Sean hoped Judith was doing well in her new school. He missed her already, as ludicrous as that was. But Judith's cheerful altruism made it hard to forget her. His thoughts were interrupted when the locker room door opened to discharge the girls from the swim team. They were chatting animatedly despite looking exhausted.
Sean straightened and nearly lost his courage at addressing a group of female athletes he wasn't acquainted with, "Lillian ...Winters?"
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The girl at the center of the group - a tall skinny redhead - paused and turned in surprise, "Yes?"
Sean pulled out his phone, "Can I have an autograph of your picture, please?"
Lillian reared in surprise, "You want... my autograph?"
Sean nodded. Lillian narrowed her eyes, "Why?"
I need to use your social network, thought Sean. Aloud he said, "So I can sell it for a lot of money after you win your Olympics medal."
The other girls whispered laughing. Lillian glared at Sean, "If this is a prank..."
"It's not," Sean assured her, "I have an eye for promising athletes. If you step over there facing the glass, the light is just right..."
Lillian sighed in exasperation, and turned to her friends, "You lot carry on. I'll catch up later."
"You sure, Lill?" One of the girls giggled, "What if you can't resist his charms?"
"I'll let her down gently, ladies," Sean gave a mock bow. Lillian's friends laughed and left.
"So, I was looking at your social media page," Sean said causually, as Lillian stood awkwardly against the wall, "In your freshman year you wrote so much about your dream of making it to the Olympics. But you hardly mention that anymore. Can I ask why?"
"Are you a cyber stalker or what?" Lillian frowned, then continued grumpily, "If you must know, my dream died after I finished consistently second or third on the school team. I don't have what it takes." Her face twisted with an old pain.
"I think you have exactly what it takes," Sean put his phone away after a few shots, "Have you tried a swim club outside school?"
"Didn't you hear what I said," Lillian spat, her lips quivering with emotion, "What chance do I have in a club when I'm only second on the varsity team? Even after squeezing every hour I can into practice."
"I think you are operating under a false assumption," Sean said quietly.
"What do you know about championship swimming?" Lillian voice rose in indignation, "Who the heck are you anyway?"
"My name is Sean Cook," Sean took a step back realizing he'd touched a nerve.
"Wait... I've heard of you," Lillian paused, "You are the one they call Dream Counseller. Stupid nickname by the way."
Sean tilted his head in acknowledgement, "In terms of what it takes to win in high school versus college varisty versus club swimming versus the Olympics, what do think the fitness landscape look like?"
"Fitness landscape?" Lillian rolled her eyes.
"I mean, do you see it as an upward sloping hierarchy like a ladder?" Sean pointed to the bleachers behind the viewing glass.
"Duh," Lillian nodded, "obviously".
"Seems intuitive, doesn't it," Sean sighed, "Except it's dead wrong. Like the early biologists who thought of evolution as an upward ladder that produces ever more superior life forms. A virus or a cockroach or a human are all equally evolved for the niche they occupy. Notions of superiority are value judgements, objectively meaningless. It's more accurate to think of each as a different niche on a circle instead of a hierarchy. And so it is with championship swimming. What you think of as different levels of swimming are simply different niches. Olympic or club swimmers don't win by doing more of whatever they tried in high school but by using different techniques."
"That's... that's bullshit," Lillian blurted, but there was doubt in her eyes.
"The fitness landscape is not a single upward slope, but a bunch of different hills," Sean continued patiently, "There's no reason for you to get to the top of one peak before climbing another peak. Pick the hill you want and go for it. Your performance will get worse at first, as you descend into the fitness valleys, but with the correct technique for that hill winning an Olympic silver requires no more sacrifices than finishing second on the school team. Do you honestly think a Olympic medalist puts in five to ten times the effort you do? Is that humanly possible? For the best in any field, winning is mundane. Besides you have the right body type."
"Hmm?" Lillian asked with a far away look.
"You are tall as a giraffe and skinny, with large hands and short legs," Sean noted.
"Are you body shaming me?" Lillian growled.
"No," Sean shook his head hastily, "I'm simply saying you have the perfect form for swimming."
"Sorry," Lillian relented, "I'm a bit touchy about my height. I'll think about what you said. But... why are you trying to help me? You don't even know me."
"I'd like to change that," Sean suggested tentatively, "perhaps we can hang out at lunch?"
"You can join me and my friends during lunch," Lillian nodded. She turned to smile before she left.
"So, why are you really helping Lillian?" a girl's voice drawled behind him, "and don't give me that crap about wanting to be her friend."
Sean whirled around to find Tiffany leaning against the locker room door, eyeing him with a sardonic smile. Her tresses, still damp from the shower, gleamed like the fabled golden fleece under the light of the viewing glass. Sean swallowed. No matter how much he conspired with Tiffany, her physical proximity never failed to switch off his frontal cortex like a charm. With an effort he brought his breathing under control and tried to jump start rational thought.
"What if I told you I have a crush on Lillian?" Sean raised a brow in challenge.
"Gimme a break... she isn't your type," Tiffany gave a snort.
"Oh, now you know what my type is?" Sean sounded amused.
"I have a pretty good guess," Tiffany smiled and crossed her arms, leaning on one hip in what had to be a practised pose. Sean flushed and rummaged through his backpack to hide how flustered he was.
"What are you doing here anyway?" he muttered without looking up.
"I should be asking you that," Tiffany retorted, "This is the girls' locker room, remember? I had cheerleading practice."
Sean carefully pulled out an lopsided wire-frame object the size of a bowling ball. A closer look showed the many-faceted polyhedron to be an intricate network of tetrahedrons built from copper wire threaded through muticolored beads. Tiffany gave Sean a questioning look.
"It's a subset of Cardiff High's social network," Sean explained, pointing out various nodes, "this cluster is Jason's clique...this one is the girls' soccer team..."
"Ooh... that's cool," Tiffany whistled, "But how did you make it? And why?"
"Randall wrote a script that trawls through student social media and graphs the network based on who is friends or enemies with who," Sean smiled, "Nodes are students. Links indicate friendship status.The links painted red indicate enemity. Unpainted links are friends. As to why... I've realized simply nudging Jason's clique away from him isn't enough. Jason can simply make new friends by flaunting his wealth and social status. You saw how quickly he befriended that new girl from California." Sean paused, momentarily choked with rage fueled by resentment, "No... I need to apply enough pressure on his social network until it cracks. That's why I'm befriending Lillian."
"What are you talking about?" demanded Tiffany, "Lillian doesn't even know Jason. She isn't his type either."
"True. But suppose you take two students who are friends," Sean pointed to two nodes of a link on the wireframe, "and suppose you were also good friends with both of them," He picked a third node that formed a triangle with the other two, "Now what happens if the two friends have a falling out and can't stand each other anymore? How does that impact your friendship with them?" He pulled out a marker and painted the first link red.
"Oh, that can get awkward," Tiffany shrugged, "I might just pick the one I like better and ditch the other."
"Right, so we had a social triangle that became unstable, " Sean picked another side of the triangle and marked it red, "Now it's stable again. To express that mathematically, we assign a value of negative one (-1) to the unfriendly links and a value of +1 to the friendly links. So the condition for a social triangle to be stable is this: the product of all three link variables must be +1. If all three are friends, the product is +1. And if one link switches to -1, then another link must also switch to -1 to stablize the traingle."
"I see," Tiffany nodded slowly, "And with more than three friends, every triangle borders other triangles in the network. So when one triangle turns unstable..." She trailed-off in thought.
"Go on..." Sean nodded encouragement.
"...other triangles turn unstable too," Tiffany concluded, "the instability spreads through the network until a new stable state is reached."
"Correct," Sean smiled at how sharp she was, "there aren't many stable configurations. The students splitting into two large camps is one equilibrium."
"But Sean," Tiffany shook her head, "this is all theoritical. Social dynamics isn't so rigid in real life ..."
"Of course, people aren't that simple to model," Sean conceded, "It's better to assign probabilities to link variables. But once enough social pressure buils up, link variables approach values of plus or minus 1. There are cliques I can befriend that are unaffiliated with Jason.The girls' soccer team is one. Remember how they came to my defence when Phyllis roughed me up in the cafeteria. And Lillian's clique is another one I can cultivate."
Tiffany looked at the points on the wireframe Sean indicated, and then it clicked. For a moment she grasped the entirety of the social network in her mind, saw instabilities propagating like ripples in a pond, multiple waves crashing against Jason's clique. It could work. Tiffany blinked as the moment passed. Brandon had called it the thousand-fold thought. He'd bragged in private - not in Jason's presence - about what he'd learned from Sean, the ability to hold a complex cascade of reason as a single structure in one's mind. Until now Tiffany hadn't quite understood. She looked at Sean with a shiver of dread, wondering if that was how he always saw the world.
END OF CHAPTER