I’m sure your university friends are lovely, darling. No, I’m sure they are, that’s why I said so, why would I have said it otherwise? It’s just that I don’t understand. You know Mummy wants to understand you always, pet. Help me understand.
It’s not like we live in the Dark Ages. We’ve given you all the modern advantages. And for you to throw them away like this — well, yes, you’re throwing them away. I can’t see it any other way. To choose all your friends with no previous contact overlaps, what else do you call that? How do you know that they’re — well — that they’re our sort of person?
In your grandmother’s time, if someone seemed familiar, you couldn’t compare life-tracking data with them and find out where you’d seen them before. You’d have to muddle through with what you personally remembered: had they gone to your preschool, were they on the opposing team in that tournament once. And if you didn’t have a good memory for faces, you just wouldn’t know, can you imagine that, sweetheart? No, I think you can’t, even I can’t. Granny has told me, it’s too horrible to contemplate.
[
Read more science fiction from Nature Futures](https://nature.com/futures)
And you had no chance of knowing if their family had taken the same seashore holiday package the week before, or if they’d been at a birthday party in the same shop the hour after yours when you were seven. All of the little things that give you the comfort of knowing that you might not know this person, but you know this person — you had to rely on clothing brands and haircuts for that, and anyone might walk into a hairdresser and ask for the same haircut, darling, just anyone. You never knew. You had to talk for simply hours — well, at least quarters of hours — to make sure.
The world is so large, and yet the acceptable parts of it so small. I thought you knew that. I thought we taught you, before we sent you off to university.
And now here you are with these — these — let’s call them young people, that sounds polite — I don’t know who they are. I literally do not know who these young people are. Where are their parents? Who are their parents? I have run the tracker program and I have never been in the same shops as their parents, never. What do they buy? I don’t know, how would I know? Is it healthy, is it safe? Are they safe?
It’s not that I don’t understand teenage rebellion. I was a teenager, too. I turned off tracking data for a month once when I was in university — did you know you could do that then? The, what do you call it, when you use different people’s data to get to the one you’re looking for. Parallax. Yes. The parallax wasn’t good enough then, so you could just turn it off. I just about gave your poor grandparents a heart attack. And what did it get me? Nothing! I felt very clever for a week or so and then the novelty wore off and I was just being stubborn until I got a scare at a party, and then I turned it on damned quickly, you’d better believe it. Thank goodness your generation can’t flirt with that kind of nonsense. But I don’t want you thinking I don’t understand.
Why do you think we have tracking data, if not to help you with this sort of thing? You think it doesn’t mean anything now, you’re only a student, but soon you’re going to be applying for jobs, and then you’ll have to see where you’ve overlapped with the people who can hire you. Then you’ll see that you should have taken this seriously instead of mingling with people whose choices we can’t approve or verify.
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