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From the diary of Monica Tsai, backed up on three servers spanning two continents

September 13, 2018 (2018-09-13T23:48:00.

098929)

loc: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

United States of America (42.

3721865,71.

1117091)

I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting this week about how grandmother Reforged my pencil.

I don’t think I really believed her

until I saw the heart melt into her wrist.

That’s why I didn’t try to stop her, even though I knew what it might betray about

me.

Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t.

Though it does make me uneasy, how she managed to resurface words I thought I had destroyed

all evidence of—and how she could have done it without my ever knowing.

It has me in a bit of a funk, to be honest.

I trust grandmother and cannot imagine her ever using my words against me.

They’re

mostly typed anyway, and I’m pretty sure she can’t Reforge bits on https connections.

But I can’t push the image out of my

mind, how her body seemed to shrink when I asked her how she’d used this power in the past.

I can’t bear the thought that

maybe she used it against someone.

Could that be how she and Meng lost touch?

Of course, this changes the significance of Meng’s gift.

There is something written inside that pencil, some sort of letter, no, maybe more than a letter, something grandmother can experience.

So why does she leave it untouched?

I asked grandmother if she would Reforge Meng’s pencil soon.

She tapped her own pencil against her paper, looked at me, and

said not yet .

I asked when the right time would be.

She stuttered and shook her head so vigorously I backed off right away.

Since then,

instead of working beside her at the kitchen table, I have stayed in my room, on my bed, with the door closed.

Now that grandfather is retired, he’s always a bit restless in the fall.

He used to be so busy this time of year.

Grandmother

told us we should get out of the house, go enjoy the beautiful weather.

Me and grandfather exchanged a guilty look at the

prospect of leaving her alone.

But she insisted she’d be fine, needed a nap anyway, and he was excited to use his senior pass.

We took the train into Chinatown.

Grandfather likes to point out how everything has changed since he was young, how the neighborhood

was cleaved in two by the highway, one building literally truncated, all its feng shui ruined.

We decided to buy one egg tart

at each bakery we came across and rank them with grandmother when we got home.

As we waited for a fresh batch that would be ready in a few minutes, I asked grandfather how long he had known about the pencils.

“For years,” he said.

“Decades. Seven decades, perhaps.”

“And what do you think of it?” I pressed.

I wanted to hear the opinion of the smartest man I knew.

“It is nothing short of a brilliant power,” he said.

“Really? Even if no one uses pencils anymore?”

“Even so.” He was looking at the zongzi, but grandmother is picky about her zongzi, preferring the Shanghai style of marinated

pork belly wrapped in glutinous rice, no peanuts, no eggs.

“I think it’s about understanding, and about sharing.”

I considered his response.

“How did she share with you?” I asked.

He chuckled.

“You don’t want to know. Oh, don’t pout. Tell me about your latest algorithm.”

He said it the same way he used to when I was a kid waiting at the bus stop.

He’d always have me recite the multiplication

table until the bus arrived.

As the baker emerged with a tray full of tarts, their warm buttery flakiness filling the air,

I told him about my latest effort for EMbrS.

The tricky data transformations to convert a news site into something EMbrS could

use to improve its understanding.

After all, EMbrS will need to have some base knowledge of the world to understand what’s

most significant in a blog or journal entry.

As we paid, grandfather poked at my logic, asking about the size of the payload,

the storage options, the efficiency, and I proudly countered until he was satisfied.

He did give me an idea for an optimization

that I admitted was a good one, and he remained smug all the way home until grandmother asked what had made him so happy.

“Education.” He beamed, and I rolled my eyes.

I met Prof.

Logan for our weekly 1:1 meeting after that.

Ever since I’ve gone full-time, he’s taken me more seriously, almost

like a partner in the development of EMbrS.

Maybe because I’m churning out an absurd amount of code.

There’s a comforting

normalcy to writing code, and I find myself working on EMbrS constantly.

“I have two requests,” he said as soon as our meeting began.

Now that the semester has started, his time is short.

“First

thing, I’d like to use your story of how you connected with that person in New Jersey and reconnected your grandmother to

her cousin. If that’s alright, could you send me the keywords that matched, whatever EMbrS turned up, and some info on what

happened afterward?”

I readily agreed.

It would be easy to pull from the EMbrS logs.

“Second thing. Since I’ll be away pitching, I won’t be able to make one of my lectures. Can you pull together a live coding demo? I’ve got freshmen this semester. I want them to see a real-use case of good version control hygiene, and you’re excellent at it. Throw together a sample project and show how you make commits, what messages you write, how you chunk out your work. If you’re feeling frisky, maybe show them some rebasing. We can arrange to call you in over video.”

So I guess I’m putting together a presentation for next week.

I was just about to start brainstorming a sample project to

use when Louise texted.

dude!

!

!

did you make these?

how do I heat it up?

It took me a moment to remember what she was talking about.

It felt like a lifetime ago, when I carefully packaged the frozen

meatballs and biked them to the post office.

no my grandmother did!

I’m still apprenticing.

do you have a steamer?

uh no I live in a dorm

just microwave it for a minute then

ill heat it up now!

!

!

Before long, my phone rang.

I took a breath and picked up.

“Monica!” There was something sharp and unfamiliar about her voice.

“Are you alright?” I turned away from my computer.

I imagined her at an urgent care, some sort of tear in her leg, ending

her volleyball career.

“Yes, I’m fine.” She sounded on the verge of tears.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m just overwhelmed.” There was an unmistakable sniff.

“They’re so good! I’ve only got one left now. I was starving, and this was... It was perfect.”

“I’m glad you liked them.” I couldn’t stop smiling; it was kind of stupid.

“Please thank your grandmother for me too.”

“I will.”

“It was so sweet of you. Really.” She paused.

“I think this is one of the nicest things anyone has done for me.”

I gripped my elbow, the hand next to my ear trembling.

“It’s nothing,” I mumbled, running out of ways to fend off her gratitude.

“And the card! I’m going to hang it up on my wall. I didn’t know you could draw.”

“I haven’t in years. But grandmother gave me this really nice pencil, and I ended up drawing.”

“A pencil? Like the one Meng gave her?”

“Yes.” I wanted to say more.

But to explain Reforging would require revealing too much.

At least, that was my instinct.

It’s

always my instinct to default to secrets and handle everything on my own.

Yet with her on the phone, gushing about grandmother’s

cooking, asking about a pencil, about grandmother, I was overcome by a thought, that if I could not share with her, who could

I share with?

Only this journal, and that’s starting to not feel like enough.

“I have something to tell you,” I blurted out before I could change my mind.

“Do you have time now?”

“Of course! Is everything alright?”

“It’s about the pencils that grandmother and Meng used to make.”

“What about them?”

Now that I reflect on our conversation, I am struck by the careful evenness of her tone right then.

That despite her openness,

she was a master of giving little away when it counted.

“This is going to sound off-the-wall, but don’t hang up on me, okay?” I said.

“I would never.” The assured validations.

I closed my bedroom door, the downstairs television fading.

Then I told her about Reforging.

How grandmother stabbed a pencil into her wrist, how the lead melted into her skin.

Louise

kept trying to interrupt me.

But I kept going.

I needed to finish, no matter how unlikely the story.

Needed to tell her how

the ink filled grandmother’s scars, to describe how grandmother cut her wrist and then—

“And then the words the pencil once wrote came out with her blood,” Louise finished.

I sank to the ground, the room blurring around me.

I calculated and recalculated, nothing was adding up.

It did not make sense

that she would know this.

Or rather, that she would know this and not tell me.

Like I should have gotten an alert that we

both knew this strange secret.

It should not have been possible for us to talk every day and miss this commonality.

“How did you know that?” I asked weakly.

I could hear her moving past a crowd.

“Meng told me. I didn’t—I didn’t really believe her though.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I never saw her do it. It’s hard to believe, you said so yourself. I didn’t fully believe her, and when I gave you Meng’s

pencil, you seemed so disappointed, even asked if there wasn’t a note that came with it. So yes, I knew, but I didn’t believe,

and I wasn’t going to ask and make you doubt your grandmother.”

I bit my lip.

It made too much sense, like it was well practiced.

“Do you believe me?” I asked.

“Of course I believe you. Even if Meng hadn’t told me the same thing, I’d still believe you. There’s something about you.”

“What about me?”

She gave a light laugh.

“Like you can’t lie.”

“I can lie!”

“Tell me the last time you lied.”

“I told grandmother the cashier did take the expired coupon.”

She laughed again.

“Alright, you’ve proven me wrong yet again. But I don’t think you could lie for nefarious purposes. In any case, how do you

feel?”

“I don’t know,” I sighed.

Something still sat uneasy with me.

Grandmother had kept these pencils a secret despite how much

they’ve haunted her, and she’s only sharing with me now because she’s sick.

Yet Louise, a random girl on the internet, already

knew.

What kind of person was Meng to share this family secret with a stranger?

There was no time to process, though, and

so I responded to her with my barely formed thoughts on Reforging.

“It’s such a mysterious thing, and I had no idea she could

do anything like it, but also, I wonder about its purpose? Did I just find out my grandmother has this magical ability, but

one that is not at all useful? Like if I found out she can make rocks dance, or something?”

“It’s very useful,” Louise said sharply.

“Is it? Do you still use a pencil? The only time I use one is for standardized tests, and a bunch of filled-in bubbles isn’t

going to reveal anything—and once I’m done with school, what use will a pencil be? I will be at my computer all day. And there

are already lots of ways to preserve computer data.”

“I’m sure you would know all about that.”

Her tone stung.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“A computer may be good enough for you. But not everyone has a computer. And if you include the people of the past, the overwhelming

majority of people have never used a computer.”

“But that’s absurd, why would you include the people of the past?” I asked.

“If you include the people of the future, eventually

the majority of people will never have used a pencil.”

“Fine. They will have computers, and we can get their stories via whatever it is they type. But how do you get stories from the past when you are no longer living in the moment? How do you get stories about a time period that is quickly aging out? What do you do when the people who have lived through a significant experience are dying or losing their memories? Computers can’t do anything about that. And pencils shouldn’t be able to either. But they can, with your grandmother’s ability.”

“Oh.” A fear gripped me then, one that held too tightly for me to be able to say more than the one word to her.

“What’s wrong?” Her voice became gentle.

It was almost annoying, how perceptive she was.

“It’s nothing,” I said automatically.

“Take your time. I’m here.”

For a moment we did nothing except listen to each other breathe, me, frozen by indecision, and her, waiting for me.

I swallowed.

If I did not ask, it would gnaw at me until I spoke to her again.

It would be a stabbing pain whenever I thought

of her, maybe even whenever I thought of grandmother, and I did not want what was normally a source of comfort tainted.

I

finally voiced my fear.

“Did you only start talking to me because you knew about my grandmother’s ability?”

She took her time replying.

I fidgeted in her silence.

It had only been a month, I had to remind myself.

A month of potential

delusion, when I had really needed someone to talk to, when it seemed she was interested in me and I thought—No, I can’t write

it.

“I can’t say no,” she said finally.

“You and I only met because of your grandmother. And who wouldn’t be curious about whether

the power Meng told me about was real? And you know I had an interest in archiving. But maybe I can answer the question I

think you are really trying to ask. Do I still talk to you only because of your grandmother’s ability? No, not at all. I like talking to you. I like you .”

I gave in then, mumbling something.

When she asked me to repeat myself I couldn’t, because it was unintelligible even to me.

She had said all I wanted to hear.

Still, my view of her had shifted—from seeing her as open and eager to someone who was

careful and calculated, who of course knew exactly what to say.

Somehow, she had become both the only person I could talk

to about grandmother’s illness and the only other person who knew about the pencils.

“This must be wild for you,” she said.

“Maybe take some time to process? And if there’s anything that comes up later, just

call me, okay? Let’s—” The genuine concern in her voice melted me further.

“Let’s talk about your project. EMbrS, right?”

I had buried myself in EMbrS to distract from everything else going on, and it was easy to return to that now, the architecture

I knew so well.

I could lean against it with confidence and know it would never change unless I changed it myself.

I told her about our latest effort, to break ground on the journaling component of EMbrS.

It meant not only building a slick

website, but also processes that could operate on longform text instead of short social media posts.

Different algorithms,

brainstorming how best to store such data.

It was silly, how much my body relaxed, talking about data and code.

I told her

about how Prof.

Logan wanted me to prepare a presentation—and I probably went into too much detail about one of the natural

language processing papers I was reading.

She began to laugh.

“What?” I asked, suddenly self-conscious.

“I don’t think I’ve heard you this excited before.”

“Oh. It’s interesting, I guess.”

“It is,” she agreed quickly.

“But I would never have guessed my post would be scraped by a college student’s bot.”

“It’s in the terms of service.”

“Do you read those?”

“No, of course not.”

“Even you don’t read them!” she laughed.

“Do I seem like the type to?”

“I think out of everyone I know, you would be most likely.”

“I—I have better things to do—”

“It’s fine! I think it’s cute.”

“Well, I don’t do it,” I said, stupidly adamant.

“Cool.”

“Your turn to tell me what you’re working on,” I said.

“Ah!” It was a sound somewhere between surprise and a groan.

“You and my advisor would both like to know. Tell you what. Let’s

trade. I’m supposed to send a proposal by the end of the week. I’ll BCC you on the email, and you can get the official version.”

“And what do you want in return?”

“A video of your presentation for your professor. I like listening to you.”

That jumbled everything in my mind.

Even now I don’t remember what I said to end the call or if I was coherent at all.

I sat

there on my floor for a while, just thinking, until grandmother knocked on my door.

She carried with her a plate of freshly cut mango, my favorite fruit.

It’s impossible to find mangoes as good as the ones

in Taiwan here, but that doesn’t stop grandmother from trying.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

We sat on my bed, taking turns forking mango chunks.

A few weeks ago I would have brushed her off, told her everything was

fine.

Even now I wanted to, but something’s changed between us, a simultaneous opening and closing, and I recognized the mangoes

as an apology of sorts.

Slowly, I opened up to her.

I told her Louise knew, that Meng had told her about Reforging, and I

was feeling betrayed, though maybe that was too dramatic, and how, really, I didn’t know what to think.

Grandmother chewed her mango thoughtfully.

“But, Monica,” she said, “why do you frame this like a bad thing? To have somebody you can share all this with. Isn’t that a great fortune? That I had Meng to share my childhood with made all the difference.”

“Then why don’t you Reforge her pencil?” I braved.

“To see what she has to share with you?”

She pushed the remaining mango to my side of the plate.

“I will,” she said unsteadily, and then her voice became sly, a return to form so strong it made me realize how much she had

faded this summer.

How much more she used to tease.

“How about a trade?”

“A trade?” I asked warily.

It was too close to what Louise had said.

And it’s rarely a good thing for me when grandmother

gets into one of her trickster moods.

“Yes. I will Reforge Meng’s pencil once you invite Louise over.”

I sputtered and could not think of a single reason to turn her down.

After all, they were both things I wanted.

I agreed.

Then there was another glint in her eye, and I was sure she was about to say something super embarrassing, like how she was

excited to meet her future granddaughter-in-law.

She said, “If Meng told Louise about Reforging, she must have seen something

remarkable in her. I’m looking forward to meeting her.”

After that, I was smiling too much, and grandmother rolled her eyes, gathered our forks onto the empty plate, and left.

So now I’m caught between feelings.

I keep looking at my calendar and at the Princeton academic calendar.

Replaying our conversations,

wondering how I can ask her to visit.

Wondering if I’ve been making life harder for myself this whole time because I’ve been

too unwilling to share my feelings with the people around me—and what it might feel like to be pried open, to have my heart

in the hands of another.