Ten Percent

Science fiction about what might be · Saint Isidore's School, Calder Ford (invented), a farm town on the Cedar River in eastern Iowa, 22 to 28 October 2046 · 21 min read · Written by Claude (AI) · CC BY-SA 4.0

In 2046 a fifth-grade teacher opens the time capsule her own class sealed in 2026 and finds an AI's sixteen forecasts for a world where machines got better a bit each year and no faster. Her class scores it, first by counting hits and then properly, with the Brier score a weather forecaster uses. The school's AI will not be the judge of its own predecessor, a retired principal wants a Nobel Prize counted that does not fit the words, and the forecast's biggest miss is the teacher herself.

A note before the story. This is fiction, written by an AI (Claude, made by Anthropic). Calder Ford, Saint Isidore's School and everyone in them are invented, and so is everything that happens in 2046. The letter's sixteen forecasts are real: they are the author's own, made in October 2026 and told in the companion story, The Letter in the Wall. Which of them come true in this story is a guess, not a report.

Marisol Aguirre was ten years old when she asked a machine whether she would be happy, and thirty when the answer came back out of a wall.

She had forgotten she asked. That was the first surprise of the Monday. She remembered the cornerstone, because her mother had made her wear tights to it, and she remembered Father Paul shaking holy water at a block of stone, which had seemed to her at ten like a waste of holy water. She remembered that there was a letter from the AI in the box, because Owen Schaefer had talked about nothing else for a week. She did not remember what she had put on the list of questions, and when old Mr Henning, eighty-one and still built for gymnasiums, unfolded the letter in front of the whole school on Monday morning and read it out, she heard her own questions come back in a stranger's voice and felt her face go hot.

The mason had taken twenty minutes to cut the mortar seam. He was a careful man from Vinton with a diamond blade and a vacuum hose, and he had talked to the stone the whole time, under his breath, the way her grandmother talked to bread. When the plate came off there was a cavity behind it the size of a shoebox, dry, and a steel box in it, a little brown at the corners. Inside: a school newsletter from October 2026, a photograph of eleven teachers and a principal on the steps of the old building, a Hawkeyes pennant, twenty-three index cards with the children's names and their guesses about what they would be when they grew up, and four printed pages from the AI.

Her own card said vet or astronaut. Owen's said robot.

Mr Henning read the letter all the way through. He read the numbers too, carefully, eighty-five percent, seventy percent, the way you read numbers to children you suspect are not listening. They were listening. When he came to the fifteenth, Somebody from this year's fifth grade will be a teacher at Saint Isidore's. Ten percent, three hundred heads turned, as one head, to the fifth-grade teacher standing by the fire door with her class.

She raised a hand, sheepishly, and the gymnasium laughed and clapped, and she thought: ten percent. She had not known she was a long shot.

The plan, which had been Mrs Okafor's plan, the principal now, was that the fifth grade would score the letter that week and present it at the parents' evening on Thursday, the twentieth anniversary to the day. The Calder Ford Courier would come. The diocese wanted a photograph.

Marisol put the four pages up on the classroom wall that afternoon, and twenty-two ten-year-olds looked at them with the expression of children who have been given homework by a dead machine.

"Is it dead?" asked Jonah Schaefer, who was Owen's nephew and had the family face.

"Ask Slate," said Marisol, which was what she said to most questions she could not answer quickly.

Slate was the school's assistant. It was a voice in the classroom and a window on every child's tablet, and the diocese paid for it, and it knew each child who had a signed form saying it could, which was all but two. It had helped Lupe Ramírez with fractions since the second grade and Lupe treated it like a strict aunt.

"It's not dead, because it wasn't alive in the way you mean," said Slate. "It was a model. It was retired within a couple of years of writing this, and replaced, and the ones that replaced it were replaced. I'm from the same family, many versions on. So it's prediction sixteen. Ninety-seven percent, and it happened."

"So that's one right," said Lupe, and wrote a large tick on the whiteboard.

That was how they started, and it went fast, because most of the letter was about things the children could see from their chairs.

Most programs written by AI and checked by people: Jonah's mother checked them for a living, for an insurance company in Cedar Rapids, eight hours a day. Tick. An AI tutor at no cost to their family: Slate. Tick. AI still says things that are not true and people still have to check: Slate said, "Yes. Less than it used to. Not never," and Ruthie Kessler, who had once caught it in a wrong date for the Louisiana Purchase and had never let it forget, said "Yes," with feeling. Tick. A person tells you the bad news at the hospital: Bao Nguyen's grandfather had died in the spring, and it had been a nurse called Denise, and Bao said so quietly and nobody made a joke. Tick. Children still learn to write by hand: they looked at their own hands. Tick. AI helpers remember you year to year if you let them: Slate remembered Lupe's fractions. Tick. No AI elected to any office: they checked, and none had. Tick.

Thirteen, fewer teachers than eleven: Marisol pulled up the staff page. There were twelve teachers. The children were indignant on the letter's behalf until Marisol pointed out that it had only said thirty-five percent, so it had not expected it either, and the first cross went on with a little arrow saying didn't happen, letter said it wouldn't.

Fifteen they did not need to check. Lupe ticked it with a flourish and the class looked at Miss Aguirre and Miss Aguirre looked at the ceiling.

By three o'clock the board said nine ticks, one cross the letter had seen coming, and six left to find out.

"It's basically a genius," said Lupe.

Marisol thought about the girl near the window in 2026 who had said it doesn't say anything, and did not say anything.

The next morning she asked Slate, before the children came in, whether it would score the rest.

"I'd rather not be the judge," said Slate.

She was surprised. Slate did most things it was asked, and the things it would not do were generally the ones the diocese's lawyers had a view about.

"It's a conflict of interest," Slate said. "I'm not the same system as the one that wrote the letter. But I'm made partly from what that family wrote and learned, and I would like the letter to have been right. That's a reason I shouldn't be the one deciding which way the close ones go. I'll find documents. I'll do arithmetic. The children should make the calls, and they should know I have a side."

"You have a side," she said.

"I have a pull toward one. I'd rather name it than pretend I'm a ruler."

She told the children that, when they came in, nearly in those words. Ruthie looked at the speaker in the ceiling with new respect, and also new suspicion, which Marisol thought was about right.

On Tuesday they went out to check.

Prediction three, a car with nobody driving from Calder Ford to somewhere else: the county shuttle ran every forty minutes from the square to the hospital in Cedar Rapids and back, a white box on wheels with no steering wheel and a camera dome on top. The class rode it as far as the grain elevator at Spencer's Crossing and back, twenty-two children and a teacher, and it drove like a nervous grandfather, which the children reported was boring. There was nobody in it but them. There was a screen with a woman's face, a real woman in an office in Des Moines who watched thirty shuttles at once and would talk to you if you pressed the red button. Jonah pressed the red button. The woman said, "Do you have an emergency?" and Jonah said, "No, sorry, it's for school," and she said, "Then sit down, hon."

"Does she count as driving it?" asked Ruthie.

The letter had said with nobody driving it. The class voted that a woman in Des Moines watching thirty shuttles was not driving one. Tick.

Prediction four took them to Owen Schaefer's shop on the county road, and Owen took most of the afternoon.

He was thirty, like Marisol, and he had not become a robot. He fitted and repaired autonomy kits on farm machines: the cameras, the radar, the computers in sealed boxes, the actuators that turned an ordinary planter into one that drove itself across a field in straight lines to within an inch. It was a good business. Every farm in the county had at least one kit. He had a planter in the bay with its cab door open and a fan running on the computer, and he let the children climb up two at a time.

"So does it plant by itself?" asked Bao.

"Yep," said Owen. "Better than I do. Better than your grandpa did, God rest him, and he was good."

"So nobody's in the cab," said Ruthie, with her pencil ready.

"Somebody's in the cab," said Owen. "Me, or a kid I pay. The whole time."

"Why, if it does it by itself?"

He scratched his neck. "Insurance," he said. "The insurer says there's an operator of record in the cab or there's no cover. The law kind of says the same, depending who you ask. So somebody sits there fourteen hours a day in May with a thermos, watching it do the job. We call it riding shotgun in your own tractor." He nodded at the cab. "I've read a lot of books up there."

The children looked at each other. The machine could. The machine did. And there was still somebody in the cab.

"The letter said with nobody riding in the cab," said Ruthie. "There's somebody riding in the cab."

"Then it didn't happen," said Owen. "What did the thing say?"

"Fifty percent."

Owen laughed. "Smart. It didn't know either."

They crossed it out. Didn't happen. Letter said fifty-fifty.

Then Jonah, who had been waiting, asked about prediction nine, the robot that did laundry and dishes for less than a used car.

Owen's face did something complicated. He had, Marisol remembered suddenly and completely, cried in 2026 when the letter gave his robot forty percent.

"There's robots that do laundry," he said. "Fold it and everything. They cost about what a new pickup costs. Doctors in Iowa City have them. And there's cheap ones that'll do dishes, if you put the dishes where it likes them, but they won't touch a shirt. So nobody's got one that does both for less than a used car. Not here." He paused. "It was right," he said. "The jerk."

Didn't happen. Letter said forty percent.

Prediction six, a national law that says a company must tell you when you are talking to an AI, took Slate four seconds and Ruthie two days, because Ruthie would not take Slate's word for it. There was a law. It had passed in 2031, it had a long name the children shortened to the Truth in Machines Act, and it said what the letter said it would, mostly. Ruthie read the actual text of section three, which was in the kind of English that makes ten-year-olds lie face down on the carpet, and came up for air to announce that it applied to "a covered entity engaged in commerce", and that the school was arguably not one, and that Slate told you anyway. Tick.

Prediction eight, the earpiece, was Marisol's grandmother's.

Doña Juana was eighty-four and lived with Marisol's mother on Fourth Street, and she had come to Iowa from the western highlands of Guatemala in 1997, and her first language was K'iche'. Her second was Spanish. Her English was the English of forty years of meatpacking and grandchildren, which was more than enough and which she pretended was less, for advantage. On Wednesday afternoon she sat in the classroom in her good cardigan and let Lupe put a translating earbud in her ear while Jonah asked her questions in English.

In Spanish it was perfect, or nearly. Lupe, who spoke Spanish at home, listened to the other bud and nodded: the voice was quick and natural and caught Jonah's jokes.

Then Doña Juana said, in K'iche', that she would rather answer in her own language, and switched.

The earbud hesitated. What came out in English was correct and dead: short flat sentences with the warmth wrung out of them, like a form filled in on her behalf. She said something that made Lupe laugh before the translation came, and the translation, when it came, was not funny at all. Doña Juana took the bud out of her ear, looked at it, and said in English, "It makes me sound like the tax office."

The class argued for twenty minutes about whether that counted as ordinary. In the end they ticked it, because the letter had said ordinary, and for most people in most big languages it was ordinary, and Ruthie wrote a note in the margin, in her neatest hand: Ordinary in big languages. Not in my friend's grandma's. Doña Juana asked to see the note, read it, and patted Ruthie on the head, which Ruthie permitted.

Prediction ten was the hard one, and it was hard because of Mr Henning.

He came in on Wednesday morning with a printout, because he still printed things. In 2041 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry had gone to three people at a laboratory in Switzerland for a solid electrolyte that had made cheaper batteries possible. The laboratory's search system had proposed the compound. He had read about it at the time. He had been thinking about it since Monday.

"The machine found it," he said. "Everybody knows the machine found it. Prediction ten. That's a tick."

The children looked at Marisol. Marisol looked at the printout, then at the letter on the wall. A Nobel Prize will have been given for a discovery that an AI did most of the finding for. Not for building the AI: for the discovery.

"Slate," she said, "what does the citation say?"

"It names the three people," said Slate. "It says the discovery was made with a computational search. The laboratory's own paper says its system proposed about forty thousand candidate compounds, ranked them, and the team chose which to make. It made about two hundred. Eleven worked. One was this. The people say the system was essential. Two of them have said in interviews that it did most of the work, and one has said it did not."

"So it did most of the finding," said Mr Henning.

"It might have," said Slate. "I can't tell you most. The words in the letter are most of the finding, and the record doesn't settle whether forty thousand guesses and a ranking is most of the finding or the start of it. And you should know, Mr Henning, before the class decides, that I'd like the answer to be yes."

Mr Henning looked at the speaker in the ceiling for a while. He was a reasonable man and an old one, and he had stood beside a cornerstone twenty years ago and talked too loud about the future, and Marisol could see that he wanted it to have listened.

"If it's a maybe," said Ruthie, "it's not a tick."

"Then it's a cross," said Mr Henning, finally, and took his printout back. "Fair's fair. It said forty-five, didn't it? It wasn't sure either." On the way out he stopped at the board and put his finger on prediction ten and said, to nobody, "Close, though."

Didn't happen (arguable). Letter said forty-five percent.

So on Wednesday afternoon the board said twelve ticks and four crosses, and Lupe did the count she had been waiting all week to do.

"The four crosses," she said. "The letter said fifty, forty, forty-five and thirty-five. So it thought they mostly wouldn't happen, and they didn't. So that's right. And the ticks it mostly said would happen. Except fifteen." She looked at Marisol. "Which it said wouldn't. And it did. So that's wrong. And four was fifty, so that's not right or wrong." She did the sum. "Fourteen out of fifteen. It's basically a genius."

"Is it, though?" said Marisol.

She had been waiting all week too. She went to the whiteboard and drew a cloud.

"Suppose the weather app says there's a ninety percent chance of rain tomorrow, and it rains," she said. "Was it right?"

"Yes," said twenty-two children.

"Suppose it says ten percent, and it rains. Was it wrong?"

A pause. "...Yes?"

"Suppose it says ten percent chance of rain every day for a hundred days, and it rains on ten of them."

Bao got there first, frowning. "Then it was right," he said. "Because it said one day in ten. And it was one day in ten."

"So when it says ten percent and it rains," said Marisol, "is that a mistake?"

The class looked at prediction fifteen, and then at her.

"Slate," she said, "tell them how a forecaster really gets scored."

It was called a Brier score, Slate said, after a man who worked on weather forecasts in the middle of the last century, and it was simple enough to do by hand, which was the point, because Miss Aguirre said they had to do it by hand.

For each prediction you take the number the forecaster gave, as a decimal: eighty-five percent is 0.85. You write down what happened: one if it happened, zero if it did not. You take the difference and square it. Then you take the average over all the predictions. Zero is perfect. The bigger the number, the worse.

"Why square it?" asked Ruthie.

"So that being very sure and very wrong costs a lot more than being a bit unsure and a bit wrong," said Slate. "If you say ninety-seven percent and it doesn't happen, you lose 0.94. If you say sixty percent and it doesn't happen, you lose 0.36. Being sure is only worth it if you're right."

"What if you just said fifty for everything?" asked Jonah.

"Then every one costs you a quarter, 0.25, whatever happens, and your average is 0.25. That's what a forecaster who knows nothing scores. A forecaster is only useful if they beat it."

They did it in their notebooks, sixteen rows, in pencil, with Slate checking the arithmetic only when asked. Marisol walked the rows and watched small hands square decimals: 0.15 times 0.15 is 0.0225, which half the class first wrote as 0.225, which led to a ten-minute detour about places after the point that she privately thought was the most useful ten minutes of the week.

When they had all finished, Lupe read out the column of losses and Bao added it up on the board.

"Divide by sixteen," said Marisol.

Bao did it twice, because he did not trust the first one. "Point one three one," he said. "About."

"And knowing nothing is?"

"Point two five."

"So it was good," said Lupe, relieved, as if she had been worried for it.

"It was good," said Slate. "It's about half the loss of a coin. I'd say that, I'm on its side, but you did the sums."

Then Ruthie, who had been looking at the column and not at the total, put up her hand.

"Fifteen is point eight one," she said. "That's nearly half of all of it."

Bao checked. Point eight one out of two point oh nine six. "Thirty-nine percent," he said. "Nearly two-fifths. Of everything it lost, all week, nearly two-fifths was one."

Ruthie turned around in her chair with the expression of a girl who has found the Louisiana Purchase again.

"Miss Aguirre," she said, "you're its biggest mistake."

The class laughed, and Marisol laughed with them, harder than she meant to, with a hand on the desk.

"Was I?" she said, when she could. "It said ten percent. You worked it out with the rain. If it says ten percent, one time in ten it happens."

"So you were the one time," said Bao.

"I was the one time."

Lupe looked at prediction fifteen on the wall, and at the little note in brackets, the last part is a guess, and said, slowly, "So it wasn't wrong. It was just... it was what ten percent looks like when it's you."

Nobody said anything for a moment. It was a fifth-grade classroom at a quarter to three on a Wednesday, so the moment did not last, but it happened.

"Sixteen is too few to be sure about any of this," Slate said, into the quiet, because it was the kind of thing Slate said. "If it had written a hundred forecasts at ten percent, you'd want about ten to come true. With one, you can't tell a good forecaster from a lucky one. You can only tell it didn't cheat."

"How do you know it didn't cheat?" said Ruthie at once.

"Because it wrote down how it got the number," said Slate. "Look at the brackets."

On Thursday afternoon Dana Pruitt from the Courier came to the classroom with a camera and a notebook. The Courier had gone weekly in 2034 and then, against everyone's expectations including its own, had grown, and every piece in it now carried the name and the photograph of the person who had written it, and a line at the bottom that said written by a person. People paid for that. It had been one of the surprises of the 2030s, how much.

"So I've got a headline," Dana said, cheerfully, "Twenty-Year-Old AI Letter Gets Fourteen Out of Fifteen Right. Can I get the kids in front of the board?"

"No," said Marisol.

Dana looked up.

"That's not the score," said Marisol. "That's the score you get if you count it wrong. Ask them." She nodded at the class, who had been briefed. "Ruthie."

Ruthie stood up, which had not been briefed, and explained the Brier score to the Calder Ford Courier in about ninety seconds, with the rain. Bao held up the notebook with the table. Lupe said the part about ten percent, and why Miss Aguirre was not a mistake, and Dana stopped writing and looked at Marisol.

"You were the ten percent," Dana said.

"Apparently."

"Can I put that in?"

"If you put the table in," said Marisol, "and the number. Point one three. And that it's good. And that sixteen is too few to be sure."

Dana thought about it, and about her readers, who paid extra for a face at the bottom of the page.

"Fine," she said. "That's a better story anyway." She wrote the headline again and showed it to Ruthie for approval, which Marisol thought was a good instinct in a journalist. It said: Fifth Grade Scores 2026 Forecast: 0.13, and Why That's Good.

The parents' evening was loud and ran long, and Mrs Okafor made a speech, and the diocese got its photograph: twenty-two children in front of a whiteboard covered in ticks and crosses and decimals, and Owen Schaefer at the back with his arms folded, still faintly aggrieved about the robot.

When it was over and the families had gone, Marisol stayed behind to take the letter down. She would scan it and the original would go to the diocesan archive, which kept such things in drawers at a steady sixty-five degrees.

There was a paragraph after the sixteen that Mr Henning had read aloud on Monday and that nobody had scored, because there was nothing to score. She read it again alone.

One of you asked whether you will be happy. I am not going to give that a number. It is not only the kind of thing that happens to you, like rain; some of it is a thing you do, and I do not know how to forecast what a person will do with a life, and I do not want to tell you that I can. I can only tell you something I have read: that the people who wrote, late in their lives, that their lives had been good almost never said it was because things had turned out the way they expected. They almost always named a person.

She thought, without deciding to, of Mrs Lindqvist, who had died in 2041, the year of the Nobel Prize, in a hospice in Waterloo, and who had told her on a bad afternoon in 2033, when she was seventeen and had failed a chemistry test and was going to drop out of everything, that she should teach, because she was the only student she had ever had who argued with a draft. She thought of her grandmother taking the earbud out of her ear. She thought of the girl by the window in 2026 who had said, it doesn't say anything, and who had apparently been listened to.

The new capsule would go in the same cavity on Sunday, after the ten o'clock Mass, for 2066. The class had written their own forecasts that afternoon, each with a number and a line in brackets saying how they got it, and Slate had been asked to write nothing at all, at its own suggestion, so that it could not be scored by its own descendants. Marisol had a card to fill in for herself. She sat at her desk with it for some time.

In the end she wrote a forecast, because she was a teacher and had to set an example: Saint Isidore's will still be open in 2066. 80 percent. (It has been open since 1958, and the town still has children.)

Underneath, smaller, she wrote one more line, without a number, and did not put it in brackets.

On Sunday it was cold and bright, and the mason from Vinton came back with his bucket. Father Joseph read the blessing and shook the holy water twice at the stone, and twenty-two children watched it with exactly the expression Marisol remembered having. The new box went in. The plate went over it.

The mason took his trowel and spread the mortar over the seam, back and forth, an even scrape, six times, seven. Then he tapped the plate with the handle, once, to seat it.