I lay there, my mother snuggled up beside me in our bed, and mulled it over. She is not a foolish woman and never has been. I think, if I’d never come along, if she’d never had sex with her father, if her mother had never died, she might’ve grown into one of the most powerful women in the country. She was shrewd and objective about everything. As a mother, that made her an outstanding ally. As a businesswoman, that would’ve made her dangerous. So, after a moment of consideration, I found myself agreeing without especially liking it.
“You, more than I, will have to do the most changing,” she said abruptly.
“What? Why?”
She grew quiet again, but not as long as before, until she answered. “Because I’m not going to live forever. I’m in my late thirties now, Conrad. Even now, just a few weeks after giving birth to Amity, I’m starting to feel my insides changing. I fear that she will be our only child, that I’ll start going through menopause soon. When that happens, I won’t be able to have any more children and…” My mother heaved a great sigh. “I’m going to be too old, son. Hell, I’m ALREADY too old. I’m… the world I saw is not the world I know anymore. I see glimpses of it in the movies we see on TV, in the new books I read. I guess I’ve always sort of known that it was changing, but it didn’t really hit me how much until I saw it with my own two eyes. Everything’s being computerized now. I barely even know what a computer IS.” She let out a small chuckle. “You know what a computer was when our father was a kid?”
“No, what?”
“A Chinese man, sitting in the back of a room with an abacus and a notepad.” She let out another giggle but managed to squelch it into a snort. “Oh, don’t look at me like that! I WASN’T being racist. Back when he was a child, that’s literally what they called a computer- someone who COMPUTED arithmetic. Accounting, inventories and what-have-you. Not always a Chinaman, mind you, but usually so. Hmm. Maybe that WAS a bit racist. As may be, it was a hallmark of his time, when he was younger. When I was a child, a computer was a fictitious device in sci-fi novels and Batman episodes. The smallest computers we had when I was a kid were as big as a sofa and only a few dozen people in the country knew how they worked and not many more than that actually USED them. But now? Now it’s this little box of plastic and metal that makes a typewriter look like an abacus. The technology I grew up with and understand is provincial by comparison. I… WE have been so secluded from the world for so long that we can’t possibly catch up to it. Well, I can’t, anyway. You’re young enough that you might be able to.”
“I know what a computer is, Mother,” I said drily.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Perhaps. But I don’t think you know yet what they can do. You’ve read a lot of science fiction here over the years. The same stuff I read. Asimov, Heinlein, Bova, Robinson, Gibson… those gentlemen had glimpses into the future and I think we’re about to see a lot of their dreams become reality. Maybe not space ships and robots and Star Wars, but certainly a large world made smaller by computers. You’re a smart man, son. If you want to do our daughter any favors in the coming years, you’ll learn as much about them as you can. BEFORE I die.”
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