Not long after Daphne was admitted to the home, there was a commotion outside. Tubby looked out the window to see a black limousine and a couple of news vans pulling up. She watched a grey-suited patrician emerge from the limousine and shake hands with a couple of the seniors sitting on the benches outside. The reporters and their camera crews followed.

"What's going on down there?" Daphne asked.

"The Congressman's come to kick up a fuss," Tubby said.

"The Congressman?" said Daphne. "The one who wrote you that letter? Is he coming to see you?"

Shit, Tubby said silently. She had forgotten that Daphne knew. "Yes," she said. "That Congressman. But he's not here to see me."

"Can I go see him?"

"No," said Tubby. "You have work to do."

"A-ma! It's the CONGRESSMAN."

Tubby tried to make herself glad that Daphne was excited about the Congressman and not whatever silly-haired Internet songmonger had recently metastasized to radio. "All right, sweetie. Don't forget your phone."

"I don't need to call anyone."

"You'll want pictures."

"Oh, yeah!" said Daphne. "Where will you be?

"In the computer lab."

"OK, A-ma. See you soon!"

Daphne grabbed her phone and darted to the elevator. Tubby stumped to the back stairs and picked her way down three agonizing flights. She guessed that Daphne would tell the news crews to go up to their room. Then there would be merry hell getting all those cameras up the elevators and, if Tubby was lucky, they would give up and go home.

Dr. Gaynor was in the computer lab. Tubby took her phone—which cheerily said "If you don't recognize somebody, take a picture!" in Daphne's voice—and snapped a picture of him. His name and information appeared on the screen, along with the time it had taken to retrieve them. 14 milliseconds. The engineers had been busy.

Tubby's email was full of bug reports and feature requests as usual. The bug reports she left for the engineers, but for feature requests she was the angel with the flaming sword. Most were duplicates of features that were already implemented, in progress, or considered and rejected—like a camcorder hookup, which simply wouldn't be accurate enough to justify the battery drain attendant on continuous use. Kanma LLC was in talks with a medical device company to prototype a dedicated system; the phone version would continue to rely on still photos. There were a few sleazy business propositions and one request from the husband of a blind woman, asking for the ability to capture and play back recordings linked to faces automatically, instead of putting them in a drop-down. Tubby was furious at first. There was plenty of money out there for the blind. But she put it in the implementation queue. It was the right thing to do.

"What's going on up there?" asked Dr. Gaynor.

"The Congressman's visiting," Tubby said in English. "He wants to take a picture with me."

"Well, congratulations," said Dr. Gaynor, as though Tubby had informed him that she was about to have a photo op with Batman. "And what did you do to deserve this honor?"

"I made him Speaker of the House."

"Oh?" said Dr. Gaynor. "And how is it that a woman such as yourself goes about making a Congressman Speaker of the House?"

"I pointed him at the Hypnologis scandal," said Tubby. "I told him that this monkey house was full of overgrown graduate students like you, who'd given themselves leaky brains from too much sucking on the dreamgame's tit. Now everyone thinks he's the Timely fucking Rain."

"Hypnologis scandal?" Dr. Gaynor said with gentle skepticism. "Due respect, ma'am, but as one of their élite users, I think I'd have heard of that."

Tubby looked appraisingly at Dr. Gaynor. "You know," she said, "I'm going to kill myself, eventually. When I've gotten Daphne as well prepared for the rest of her life as I can, when the application is perfect. Then I can do it. I've already got the sleeping pills saved up." She did, too. Everyone thought her spirits had risen so much, having her granddaughter nearby. They didn't like to think about why Daphne had ended up there, and what that meant for Tubby.

Dr. Gaynor's eyes had gone wide. "Jesus, Granny. Why are you telling me this?"

"It's a cry for help," Tubby said. "Better warn the nurse."

Dr. Gaynor got up from his seat and looked at her with wide, uncertain eyes. "Don't think I won't," he said.

"No, you should," said Tubby. "I need psychiatric assistance."

He left her in peace. He'd never get to a nurse in time for his "naked brain" to remember what to say.

There was a suggestion to use GPS as input to both face recognition and information retrieval: The user's location should help the software figure out who might be there and what the user might want to know. It took Tubby a long time to understand the language, but she read and reread patiently until she thought she grasped the point. She heard the ding of the elevator down the hallway and the mounting susurrus of a dozen conversations about one thing. She sighed quietly through her nose, scratched at the itchy patches on her ribs, and returned to her email, summarizing the request to her engineers in ragged, painstaking English.

+++

Hello again! I said I'd do this one more time at the end of the story, which is where we are, so here goes. 

I have a blog and a mailing list. If you're enjoying "Tubby's Letter," you might be interested in checking out either one; joining the mailing list will score you a copy of my novel, THE DANDELION KNIGHT, for free (you'd pay $4.99 at Amazon, B&N, Google, or Kobo). The URLs should make it clear which is which:

www.cobblerandbard.com/blog

www.cobblerandbard.com/mailing-list/

Thanks so much for reading!