“Grandma, my teacher says I have to write a story about what life was like when you were a kid.” Jessie looked at the old woman expectantly. Sometimes it took a minute before Grandma started speaking.
The old woman made a noise, like she was clearing her throat. Her eyes grew animated as she began to speak.
“When I was your age, we had to walk to school. You’ve got it easy, learning from home from computer teachers.”
“They’re netbots, Grandma,” Jessie corrected her.
“I don’t care what you call them. We didn’t have all of that fancy stuff. Had to actually talk to real people back then to find something out.”
Jessie sighed. Grandma was in one of her cranky moods today. Hopefully, she’d answer enough questions for Jessie to get the paper done.
“What kind of music did you listen to?”
“None of that psychotic stuff you feed right into your head! We had real music, with musicians playing it.”
“You mean real people?” Jessie could hardly credit what she was hearing, but Grandma was old. Maybe her memory was going bad.
After a few more questions, Grandma started to sputter. Jessie wasn’t sure if it was out of anger or something worse. Maybe she should go to the RX tomorrow. Her father came in to tell her goodnight just then, rescuing Jessie from a diatribe.
“It’s time for bed, sweetheart. Tell Grandma goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Grandma.” Jessie reached over and flipped a switch. “I think Grandma needs to go to the Reality Xchange tomorrow. Some of her data seems corrupted.”
Roger eyed the 2.0 version of his mother with envy, savoring the silence. Too bad the original version hadn’t had an ‘off’ switch when he was growing up.
