" and walked out." and walked out. Little did I know that that word, "sir," was about to become the basis of a whole new relationship. A week later, and I was cooking lambchops (or a synthesized version thereof), the aroma filling my domicile, when Wendy said "Ahem." That electronic throat-clearing was getting annoying. She didn't have to do that. "There's a young lady at your door, a Miss Katherine Hawkwind, to see you. I believe she's in your physics class." Snapping a statis field around my meal so it wouldn't burn, I asked Wendy to tell her to come in. She did so, and slapped a rammark onto the kitchen counter. "There. The whole thing, proven, with footnotes and bibliography. Happy now?" "Almost." "Almost? What else do you want?" "Working proof. A working test model." "You're kidding, right? I don't know that stuff, I'm not an engineer!" Her chin was quivering. "Alright, then, don't bother. But you get an ninety for my class, not a one hundred." She wasn't listening. Odd. She was staring at my bookshelf, which, believe it or not, is still full of old paper-pressed hardcovers. I still like something I can carry around, or read on the beach. Much to my surprise, so do a lot of folks. Books are comfortable, and easy, and it's my experience that they'll be around for a long time yet. Worse, even though any librarian AI will press you one in ten minutes, people still insist of borrowing them from others. |