The Education of Mr. William Chamer

2026 December 26 16:00 UTC
Test Year 0, Day 113, 09:50 Caltech Time
Tau, Caltech, Millikan Library

Will waited outside the former Trustee’s Room in Millikan Library, his body in a ready stance, partially out of habit and partially because he wanted to focus himself. The BOC hearing was scheduled to start in ten minutes, but no one else had shown up yet. For the while there was the quiet ticking of a clock, slightly stained green carpet, light-colored wood paneling and upholstered chairs, and the strange 1960’s wrought metal decorations. Outside, the grass was long and peppered with invasives and fallout from the jacarandas. Lilypads and native aquatic plants had started to grow in the pond, feeding on the small amount of detritus that had accumulated.

His hands rested a few inches above the hilts of the daisho he had precisely arranged at his belt, careful to not disrupt his jacket and tie, which were the only articles of his wardrobe that he hadn’t worn since landing. Brown eyes stared through an imaginary opponent. One feature of the room was changed from how it had been on Earth: fifteen assorted urns sat on stands in front of the plaque dedicating the building to Millikan, in an improvised mausoleum.

Four tracks of thought ran through Will’s mind at once. It had been like this since the Examiners had brought them here, unless he calmed himself through mental tricks or complete exhaustion. One of those tracks now dwelt on those urns. Fifteen dead now, out of seventeen hundred and thirty-seven that the Examiners had brought to the eastern coast of this new California. Sasha, Cadmann, Mary, Ted, dead within a half-hour of landing. Wonjin two weeks later. Ten more from injuries, allergic reactions, and that accursed Page’s Folly that just looks like prickly pear. He’d helped with autopsies where needed, smelled the smoke of the cremations, spoken the prayers of eight religions. Eventually a cemetery would be built, but for now the urns were a reminder.

You’re probably reading my thoughts right now, Examiners. Fifteen people dead here, more at MIT. Eight people on the chain gang, one for more than a decade. Eleven disabled from injuries and diseases we simply can’t fix or manage. Elijah won’t ever be able to use his left hand again. He and several others will need psychological support for the next few years, probably. This would not have happened if we had been left at home. I think I know why you did this, why some of the best of us died, why you Test us instead of simply predicting the future. I think I see why it is necessary, but I don’t like that it is. In twenty-three and two-thirds Earth years, we’re going to have a long talk, unless you’d care to break your self-imposed silence. Not now? Well, you know where to find me.

The second track was one that always ran, and always would. His own personal grief. Maine. Mom. Dad. Grandparents, cousins, friends. Even Megan, the scamp. What time was it back home? Sometime on the day after Christmas. Mom and Dad will be at the cabin in Bangor, enjoying the snow and view of the winter-swept ocean, if climate change hasn’t ruined the weather. I hope Meg’s with them. She’s thirty-one now. Not my little sister anymore. She’s probably married, with one or two young children. At least she’ll have dumped and gotten over that loser boyfriend she met at Columbia. Mom’ll be okay by now, but she’ll remember me trimming the tree for her. Dad will probably still scorch the pudding. He never could get that right.

On a third register, Will was planning, estimating, forecasting, doing everything he could to keep the population alive and moving forward. Stricter quality checks were needed on the insulin: he’d been off his feet for two days in immune reaction from a dose last week. Good thing Ini caught that rogue Tau bug in Venkat’s cultures before any more was refined. But how can we shield against microbes that use foreign cell membranes and proteins with amino acids we can’t even digest? They just happen to like E. coli, and the vitamin C isn’t going to hold them off forever.

The number of diagnosable cases of depression was down close to normal (who’s to say what is ‘normal’ here), but some people needed to be reminded that the Examiners were always watching. They weren’t depressed or even hedonistic. They simply kept illusions that might become dangerous.

The turbine for the hydroelectric plant was being phased up. Millikan now had power to run one of the elevators and dimly light the stacks at night. Soon, there would be three hundred watts per person. Enough for more refrigeration, more computers to be brought online (but those need to be conserved), and even microwave ovens and hot water in the morning. Need to hack some more cellphones and wireless nodes and get computers and net access out to the iron mine and the houses people are building in the fields. I’ll ask Sadowski’s mafia. They’ve got a bunch of phones stored, I recall.

Only the fourth progression focused on the immediate trial. It was a formality: the BOC and GSC had no choice but to commend the self-appointed medical staff for all they had done. But they would ask for an explanation, and they were entitled to one. When an electrical engineering grad student with expertise in wireless communications and interests in amateur astronomy and Edo Japan starts refining insulin from cultures the Examiners gave him, even if he is a diabetic, something strange is happening. When he does the same with vitamin B12 and has assisted a second-year med school student in operating on a deeply lacerated abdomen, which would have been dealt with in a major trauma center on Earth, questions should rightly be asked.

There was an explanation, which implicated him, Townsend and over thirty of his undergrads, five Avery grad students (including Venkat), and a number of people at MIT in a conspiracy that had lasted since landing, when even the Four had spoken their secrets to everyone, trusting that someone wouldn’t scream them to Earth before the time was right. But now things were stable enough that he could speak and the victims of the benevolent conspiracy would probably not resent them too much. Still, how to say it?

A slight motion, seen out of the corner of one eye, partially quieted the reverie. Will straightened up. People were coming, walking over from the loggias to the east and west. Two ninjas, in the motley black that was the nearest they had to full uniform, were the first to come in. They had been asked to serve as bailiffs, if BOC proceedings ever came to that.

“Hey, Will. Always early.” Melinda Yang was short, with long black hair tied back and up, wearing black pants and a sweatshirt with Blacker’s Lowenbrau lion on it. She had been a junior physics major, specializing in nuclear particle, and now she spent her time on the fission pile project when she wasn’t working with the ninjas. Matt Wing had recruited her after she’d saved Mackenzie Long from a gas leak. Melinda would have seemed relatively innocuous, were it not for the geckel gloves and boots, the three knives, and the less visible skills of a sandan aikidoka and reflexes that won randori tournaments.

“Guess we just stand here.” She moved over to the ornate door of the Trustees Room. “John, you want to crack the lock?”

The other bailiff, John Stansted, had been on the Catalina patrol before joining the ninjas. He’d been a first-year grad student, at Caltech for less than a month before they were ripped away. There wasn’t much use for fracture mechanic mathematics on Tau yet, but he was a fairly good shot and had gotten a rifle from the Examiners. With the first harvest in, there wasn’t so much hunting anymore, but the ninjas had had openings for former members of the patrol when they’d expanded, so here he was. Being new, he hadn’t experienced the lock. It was a rite of passage for the ninjas now: they’d put a lock on the doors to the Trustees Room, and each had had to open the doors without the keys. “I suppose if I don’t, this criminal walks free?” He smiled at Will as he took a small box from his belt and drew out lockpicks. “I could just take one of those anime meat cleavers from you and smash the lock, but Melinda’s a purist, so…”

Will smiled at the jokes, but he could see the pain behind the cheerful mask. John had had a girlfriend at UCLA. He had been planning on proposing to her on the night after the Vanishing. Now he’d never have a chance. He still kept the ring in a box in one pocket. Almost everyone on Tau carried grief, but John’s hadn’t healed yet. There was a helpless anger there, against the Examiners, against the universe that had taken his future from him, against himself for not asking Xena, for then he would have been at home the last twelve years. He shielded the pain well, and did what needed to be done, but it had not healed, despite Townsend’s best efforts. John kept his barriers up and did not speak of serious matters to anyone.

As John fiddled with the lock, the judges of the BOC and GSC, and the Tech representatives started to arrive. The entire proceedings would be broadcast live, audio only to be sure, but the media were at least active and free. Dan Wing greeted Will with a smile. Without all of the martial inclinations of his brother, Dan fit media in between long shifts wrestling with the zards in the constantly growing herd. He’d even written a column about how to ride one. “Still nothing to say?” He held out a microphone.

“What do you think?” Dan knew that as a rhetorical ‘no’. “Just wait until the proceedings.” He heard Stansted slipping back the bolts of the lock as well as a bunch of people coming in the door behind him. The sound of their footsteps was distinctive. “Excuse me.”

He turned as Townsend came in, with eight undergrads and Venkat behind him. They were the rest of the accused, and the bulk of the medical staff. Pat had had two years of med school before starting in biochemistry, and had been serving as psychologist as well as general practitioner, Avery RA, and farmer. Sakhar was still passing out vitamins, although his job was easier now that terrestrial plants were approaching harvest. The others had done varied things: normal first aid and switching up Ai’s leg, but also dermatology, treating immune reactions to tau amino acids, surgeries that would normally have been evacuated a hundred miles, nutritional analyses beyond the biochemistry department’s normal skills, blood transfusions, and a small amount of gynecology. As Will greeted them, one mental track was forecasting who would need the most help in the future. Obstetrics in eight months, pediatrics in a few years.

“You’re sure you want me to lead?” Will asked. They’d planned this carefully over the past four months, but he hesitated still. One mistake, and Pat might need to save him from an angry mob.

“You’re the Screamer, Will.” Townsend smiled. The power the office wielded was out of proportion to the work it involved. It meant spending no more than an hour a day on assembling messages, checking the transmitter, and beaming them back to Earth, now that the setup had been largely automated. But Will, and Laura Sturm and Greg Iwanowicz at MIT, were still the strongest link to Earth, and hence visible and with some influence. So when the medics were called before the BOC, Will had to be the one who spoke for them. Townsend and the others knew this very well. “We’ll watch your back.”

“And the rest of me?” Will also smiled as he turned back towards the Trustees Room. The BOC, GSC, and the reporter had all gone in, and as he got to the door, Melinda came out and said: “The accused will present themselves.” They entered.

The Trustees Room was not as the former trustees of Caltech would have liked it. The lights were still without power here, so the curtains had been drawn back from the seven window-walls, surrounding the octagonal room with the water of the Millikan pond, which was now overgrown with lilypads, algal scum, native plankton, and turtles and large tadpoles. The kinetic water sculpture was no longer whirling, and was covered with fast-growing pseudo-ivy.

The furniture had been replaced by long tables and folding chairs, with the BOC seated against the window opposite the foyer, a much less crowded table for the GSC off to the left as the medics entered, and a selection of the IHC to the right. The Board of Control had been the undergraduates’ academic and social review board, tasked with nothing worse than students cheating on exams; the Graduate Student Council a mixture of social organizer and labor union; and the Inter-House Committee simply a forum for complaints about housing and the undergraduates’ House choices. This was the basis of the government of an entire hemisphere. Most of them don’t want this responsibility, Will thought as he exited the tunnel-like foyer, but they are the best public authority we have. And with less than two thousand people here, democracy is a strange thing anyway – we’re just barely above the level of the tribe.

Melinda motioned for Will’s swords. He unbound them and placed them flat on the table designated for the accused to sit at. A plastic tabletop was hardly a fit location for the work of Masamune, but there was a Mona Lisa hung in a Ricketts House bathroom, so he wouldn’t complain. Venkat set down a pouch of darts and one of the undergrads showed his kirpan. The rest carried no weapons. The ninjas moved back to the door, to hold sentinel.

The Board of Control still had the habits of Earthly bureaucracy, although it had reformed itself somewhat to account for due process and punishments unthinkable on Earth. So Will, Townsend, and the rest sat through long procedural debates. Looking over the tables, he saw that the majority of the judges were just as bored by this as the accused, Dan Wing and his backup, and the small audience that had sacrificed their too-rare free time to be here. At the GSC table, Mina was sketching on a notepad. She had recused herself from the GSC’s vote on this case, but was still a member. First notes in Slovenian, then … that pattern of strokes – an exercise in Chinese calligraphy? Will started to think about how to convince the native Chinese to improve their English skills, but quenched that train of thought.

Mina had just come back from another survey run, this one five hundred kilometers north-west. Her hair was sun-bleached to a shade almost paler than her browned face. This time, the surveyors had blown two tires on the vans, lost seismic data due to an insulworm infestation in one of the thumpers, and used up a hundred of the remaining five hundred bullets on animals that had yet to learn caution, but they had found what they were looking for. She’d given Will a liter of ‘Tau sweet crude’ as a Christmas present. Oil was not exactly traditional, but it was more useful than those three bottles of Champagne Leticia Benoite still had.

Her face was always ready to smile, even though there was a layer etched there that hadn’t been present before landing. She had reached acceptance of losing her parents and her younger siblings, but of course would never let it go completely. Field trips aren’t the same when there are no gas stations, rest stops, or small towns and every outcrop is unknown, but Mina had done her share of mapping before, so the field was a small inconvenience. Bureaucracy was not, so she wrote out hanzi, practicing the second language of Caltech.

Eventually, the forms were all dealt with, and the BOC chair, Mark Thye, stood. He had been thrust from obscurity into prominence, since only a half-dozen people outside of the BOC had known he was the chair before arrival and they had all been left behind. Despite having lost ten kilos of fat and gained five of muscle since landing, he was a little awkward in the face of the crowd, but he spoke clearly enough for the recorder microphone to hear.

“The accused will stand.” They did so. “You have heard the charges against you, based on evidence provided to the BOC by anonymous but reliable sources. The BOC has passed its judgment. We ask William Chamer to come forward, as declared representative for all the accused. The rest may sit.” Will walked around the end of the table facing the BOC, to the center of the room. “Mr. Chamer, do you swear to tell the truth, the full truth, and nothing but the truth, without any attempt at misdirection?”

Showtime. “I do.”

“Very well. While it will seem unusual, given our case history, the Caltech Board of Control, in consultation with the IHC and GSC, considering the benefits your work has had for the Institute and the many statements approving of you, has decided that all charges against you and your co-defendants be dropped, subject to one condition.”
Will’s divided mind was tightly controlled now, and focused on the task that was coming. The second track still went: Mom, you’re going to worry a lot when you hear this one.

“You will, here and now, explain to the population of Caltech, of MIT, and of Earth, the last subject to the approval of the Four Physicists, how you all have performed medicine that would not be out of place in a hospital on Earth, with only a small amount of equipment and no qualifications. We’ve seen what you can do, but we need to know how you can do it.”

Thye sat back down. Now no one was distracted. Mina had put away her notepad. Melinda had pulled herself a few feet up using the van der Waals force between the pads of her gloves and the wall, to see over the back of the crowd. Townsend and the other defendants had their eyes and ears about them, and only Will stood in the room.

Every motion he made, down to the tension of the muscles around his eyes, was carefully metered, to convey sincerity and earnestness. So was his voice: Will needed to be heard and believed by the entire population. This was going to be rough for everyone as it was.

“The explanation starts with the Examiners, as you might expect. Many of you know of my diabetes. The first thing I thought of asking for was a supply of insulin. Twenty kilograms would have lasted all of the diabetics here for a very long time, but the shelf life isn’t long enough, so I asked for a smaller amount of engineered cultures. When the vials appeared on the roof next to me, I realized that I didn’t know how to extract the insulin.

“So I asked my Examiner: ‘Can you teach me how to use this?’ This was the fatal question. The answer was ‘Yes.’”

Will looked around, seeing mystification in the faces of almost everyone, dawning comprehension in a few. Only the other members of the conspiracy completely understood so far. Here we go. “Then I suddenly knew how to grow E. coli, cook the culture, extract the insulins, and how to refine it to usable purity.

“You start to see. They communicated with us by vibrating the bones in our ears and direct stimulation of optic nerves, but the Examiners aren’t limited to that. In less time than it would take to say the subjects I had learned, I had acquired knowledge, forced directly into my brain.” Over a growing murmuring that paused as he continued, “This isn’t anything like the training software in The Matrix. It is far more subtle and quiet. The Examiners know our neurochemistry well enough to train us by shuffling synapses, changing neurotransmitter concentrations and adjusting potentials. The skill and speed that implies is incredible, even if they were working at gamma equals one instead of one hundred thousand.” Now there was an undercurrent of fear in the stares directed towards him.

“Once I had been given the first bit of knowledge, I ran with it. Those swords, the vitamin cultures, and the microsats I have sitting in Moore were trivial. I spent the bulk of my time listing things I would like to know. So now I have the knowledge base and skills necessary to be a physician and surgeon. It scares the living daylights out of me to operate, but it needs to be done. Fortunately, I am not alone.

“Pat was far better than I.” Bowing to the Avery RA, “Towards the end of the flight, while I was on the roof of Moore, checking resistances and potentials and listing sub-specialties, he had asked a similar question. I think it was about how to make an effective cast, because he’d fractured his wrist three weeks before.” Townsend nodded. “He then went through Avery, in the dark, shouting for people to think of things to learn. They learned.”

Indicating the other accused, “Those who sit before you requested medical and psychological training. Others requested other knowledge that would be useful here. In total, there are forty-two of us here who were trained by the Examiners. There are more at MIT.”

Turning to back Thye, Will said, “Now you have heard how we can do what we have done.” As the BOC chair leaned forward in his chair, as if to stand and dismiss him, he continued “But there are two other subjects that I would like to talk about. The first most of you can see in yourselves and in others: you are now very much more afraid of the Examiners than you were a few minutes ago.” There were nods, faint smiles, and awkward silence.

“They scare me too, and we had better treat them with the greatest of respect. Of course, we aren’t in any more danger now than we were at home: even though we didn’t know it, we have been at the Examiners’ mercy for all of our lives. We can’t stop them, can’t know anything about them other than what they tell us, can’t hide anything from them. They can do things that mess with physics to ethics: we have hundreds of live, healthy, and fertile animals they say were assembled from individual atoms and they put information into my head in a second that will take me years to transfer to others.

“Now that our worldview has been shattered and put back together, there are three possibilities. We can forget what the Examiners can do, forget that every word and thought we have is probably being recorded, act as we would act before. Some of you had begun to do this, until we reminded you. We apologize for the pain you are going through, but you now see the world as it is.

“We could treat the Examiners as divine, angles or demons depending on your perspective, and pray that they will not harm us. But we must not make the mistake of considering the Examiners to be gods. They have never claimed to be anything other than technology advanced sentient beings. The Test may be a very important event in the spiritual journey of the human race, but we aren’t sitting out our stay in purgatory, nor have we been consigned to hell. The Examiners aren’t saints, to intercede for us with the Almighty, nor are they Shaitan, to be fought with everything we have.

“The third way is the only one that makes sense. We must take the Examiners at their word, trusting them enough to not live in continual debilitating fear and doing our utmost to pass their Test. We could waste ourselves in dissipation and destruction, trying to fail the Test, just to spite them. But that condemns everyone on Earth, our families and friends, not just ourselves. So: we must work as hard as we can for our long-term survival, without harming this world or ourselves. We have twenty-four years on our own. Then we will hear from Earth and Examiners.

“We aren’t in a space opera, where highly trained and physically perfect heroes discover the deux ex machina at the right instant and eternal happiness ensues.” He smiled, “I may have been trained, but without insulin I’m a walking dead man. And you’ve all seen the urns. I would that they all still lived, but they do not.

“The next two decades will be red in tooth and claw and there will be pain as well as joy, but we have some certainty, based on the Examiners being trustworthly. We know that the Test will end at a specific time. We can control how they view us, because we know that we’re in the fishbowl. Who on Earth had that sort of foreknowledge? The Examiners or our families probably won’t be impressed by the paralysis of fear or helpless rage, or if those who have died have died in vain. Each of us will have to decide for her- or him-self what must be done, but most of you already have. Some of you had begun to forget, or have been nurturing hidden rage, and so those of us who have been trained speak now.”

Fear was still written on many faces, but now it was mixed with grief, sorrow, and the twisted smile you give to an opponent in a duel. Will noticed Stansted’s face, in the grip of a terrible emotion. He’s thinking ‘should I have asked to forget Xena?’. He hasn’t sent a message to her, knowing that she’ll hear anything as an echo from someone half a lifetime away. Couples have been torn apart before, but never by so far. You won’t forget her. She won’t have forgotten you. You’ll both move on – she has already, which only adds to your pain. And if you meet an Examiner in the flesh, you can punch it in the equivalent of the nose.

“You are all entitled to ask why we haven’t revealed our training until now. In part it was simple self-preservation. Immediately after arrival, we were all shaken up. Melinda,” he indicated the ninja, now nonchalantly perched halfway up the wall on the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands, “was attacked for simply being a physics major. The Four were quiet until they had had a long talk with each other, and I’d helped them arrange some level of protection. In that environment, confessing to our training was dangerous. It also would have been a hindrance to one of our largest projects.”

This was the most dangerous point. Here they might think of him as being even more manipulative than the Examiners. Watch tone, inflection, body language. “Several of us requested training in psychology to a level uncommon even back home. That was how, when I met Pat at the big meeting on the first day, he could tell I had asked for much of the same training he’d asked for and asked me to help. It was also how we saw how deep and common emotional shock was.

“Many of you noticed it yourselves – thousand-yard stares, people acting like automatons, depression. Enough of us were functional to a level such that we could get through those first few days, but it could easily have been much worse that it was. Many of you have been amazed at how much momentum we developed in such a short time. That was because we adapted the Institute’s emergency response plan, which includes food, water, and giving everyone a job to do, a short-term goal to focus on. Pat and I and the others with training were just as messed up as you, but we gave ourselves our own goal: to bring people out of shock and depression as fast as we could. That goal got us through our own hardest days.” There was a mixture of anger and gratitude on their faces now.

“You can’t come up to a person in deep emotional shock and simply say that you’ll help with skills you got from the same people who pulled us away from everything we learned. For the first month, we couldn’t speak of the training, because that might have led you to view us as saints or devils in our own right, asking us for solutions to problems that we simply can’t solve with the skills we have or attacking us as the closest thing to the Examiners. So, quietly we and our counterparts at MIT helped people organize and come out of shock into work without being broken. Also, if we had spoken then, we would have destroyed all the momentum we have. After the first five weeks, the community had healed well enough that we have had no need to practice psychology on a large scale since. The Examiners gave us a gift, which we used to prevent sudden destructive actions and start the process of building. All of the results since then – the power supply, the hexazard herd, even Decompression, have not needed the psychological tinkering the training made possible. So now we can speak, and have been asked to speak, and have spoken.

“We must apologize for psychological shock therapy without your knowledge, and ask your forgiveness. Some of you did as much in those first few weeks as anyone who had training. You we must particularly thank.” They understood now. There was still some anger, but it was dominated by gratitude and sympathy, at least with this group and at this time. He returned to his seat as there was a round of applause.

Thye stood again. “After that, anything I say will be an anti-climax.” Laughter. Looking up and down the table at the other delegates, he nodded. “The BOC accepts your explanation, and the charges are dropped. Just don’t practice too much psychology, any of you, or you’ll either be run out by a mob or made chair of the BOC.” More laughter. “This hearing is adjourned.”

As the crowd disbanded, Dan Wing came again with his microphone. “You can’t have any more to say, can you Bill? Pat, what about you?” As Townsend spoke to the reporter, Will received a few congratulations. Then, as he picked up the daisho and returned the swords to their spots on his belt, Mina came up, her mouth in a twisted smile.

“It wasn’t just medicine you thought of, was it?” she asked softly, quietly enough that no human in the room other than he could hear over the noise of the departing crowd.

“You saw through it, didn’t you?” He answered in Slovenian. Not only Slovenian, but Mina’s native Ljubljanasko. His accent was almost nonexistent.

Her eyebrows went up, and she answered in the same dialect, spoken by no one else within twelve lightyears. “They taught you Slovenian? Probably a bunch of other languages too. I doubt you’d have thought of just that one.

“But what tipped me off was the speech. Your motions seemed a little too … balanced. You weren’t uncoordinated before, but since we got here you’ve always landed on your feet. They tweaked your inner ear, probably. And I wondered where you’d learned that new kata you’ve been practicing.” She became more serious. “You could have told me, you know. What else was there?”

“I’ll tell you, but not here. It would take at least a half hour to explain it all.” Shifting back to English: “You don’t mind my mangling your language, I hope?” Looking around, at the now-empty room. “We might want to continue this at Moore.” Looking up, through the edge of the chandelier. “Hi, Melinda.”

The ninja released her feet and swung them so that they missed the strands of cut glass, then unstuck one hand, and dropped almost silently to the floor next to Mina after the last geckle pad let go. “How’d you get so hard to sneak up on?”

“Long story.” He smiled, as Mina burst out laughing. Melinda looked confused for a few seconds, then joined in the laughter.