I watched your professor’s pitch. it’s cool, of course, but how much data is it collecting without anyone knowing? I certainly didn’t know when I uploaded that picture of me and Meng that it would alert you. I mean, im glad it did. but you couldve been anyone. it just seems like it can be taken advantage of too easily

I avoided my phone after that. It was cowardly, yes, but I needed to retreat. Because, to tell the truth, I had not only been seriously considering the offer, I had been excited about it. So much of this year has been out of my control—grandmother’s health, Louise’s responses—while EMBRS has been a steady presence. I am proud of my coding work. My former classmates will eventually have a degree as proof of how they spent their semester, a shiny bullet point on their résumés. I had EMBRS, the various commits to the codebase, a proud log of look: this is what I was able to do even as my world fell apart. And for it to become an actual product spread to more users, for other people to connect in our increasingly disconnected world—I had been really excited about that.

Louise’s questions pricked. It wasn’t my job to understand how the terms of service worked, or who the consumers were, or how unscrupulous actors might take advantage of EMBRS. I was an engineer trying to make money to support my grandparents. Who knows how long grandmother’s illness will last, how long we can hold out with only me and grandfather as her caretakers, how long until I’m the caretaker for them both?

All of these questions are making me confront a separate, though equally uncomfortable, truth: If I really believe in EMBRS and radical sharing, it can only be a good thing to know more about grandmother, right? I should be able to tell her what I know, and we should be closer for it. I should want to learn everything about her in the time we have left. I should stop cowering and beg her to teach me to Reforge.

Armed with this resolve, I went to find her.

She was writing at the kitchen table. I sat next to her and peered over her shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. The paper was lined with her Chinese characters. The computer makes characters very boxlike, but her handwriting has always been beautiful to me, flowing and precise, even if I can’t read it.

Her pencil was dark; the wood somehow still shone after all these years. The tip appeared recently sharpened. Grandmother hand-sharpens her pencils, even now, even after I bought her an electric sharpener. The pencil heart drew my eye. Maybe there really was something in me that was organically drawn to it.