The lesson was not on a topic Lilly was particularly familiar with, so she had nothing to contribute. Since that first history class, however, Lilly began staying awake during Emily’s classes to see what was going on. The very night she turned in her report, Lilly and Emily began skimming her history book, digging deep into each topic, highlighting and annotating what they found. As they went on, Lilly became increasingly agitated with their findings. With no exception, every single chapter was wrong or misleading in some way.
After three weeks of this, Lilly and Emily visited the principal to see what he had found. To their dismay, he had hit a wall. He had been stonewalled until he got a call from the district saying they had received calls that he was participating in spreading misinformation, a felony which would get him banned from his career in education. He managed to talk his way out of it, but had stopped making inquiries.
Principal Benson had not, however, stopped investigating. He purchased several history books from other publishers and found that indeed they all told the same story. Emily and Lilly shared their findings with him, and found the same discrepancies in the other history books. He had to walk away from it all, since he had a family to think about, but offered any support he could in their investigations.
By that point, Emily had already become consumed with the research, but hearing the fear in her Principal’s voice strengthened her resolve. Principal Benson had given her a pass to be late to her next class, but she took her time getting there so she and Lilly could talk. The break in routine, however, brought about her crossing paths with Sean Lancaster from the soccer team. The tall, lean boy with shaggy brown hair locked his big hazel eyes on Emily and smiled. Before the teens could get close enough to get a word out, the grandgotchis had sensed each other’s proximity and started talking, their speakers echoing down the hall.
“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch, is that Lilly Evans?” rattled the grandpagotchi.
“Heya Burgo!” Lilly turned into a full-sized hologram halfway between Emily and Sean. Burgo did the same. He was a chubby man with a jolly disposition, a joyful presence at first sight. “I didn’t think you’d be the type to turn yourself into a grandpagotchi.”
“Well, one day my grandson came to see me at the hospital and I was making fun of these damn things, then he tells me a girl from her school has a grandmagotchi and you hang out all the time. I’ll be honest, I made fun of you until he showed me the videos and I realized it was you! I said, ‘son of a bitch!’ So I looked into it, talked to my family about it, and now I’m a grandpagotchi. Honestly I thought we’d run into each other a lot sooner.”
“Yeah, I kind of picked a fight with one of Emily’s teachers.”
“That’s the Lilly I remember.”
“Hey Sean,” Emily and Sean arrived, catching up to their grandparent’s holograms.
“Hey Emily, it’s nice to see you.”
“Come on, let’s go over here,” Lilly said. She and Burgo walked away and whispered amongst themselves while Emily and Sean caught up.
“Haven’t seen you in a while. Too famous for me?” Sean jested.
“Oh yeah, totally. I see you’re jockin’ my style with the digital grandpa.”
“Actually, thank you for that. Honestly, I’ve been wanting to thank you for weeks. I thought I was about to lose my grandpa and then he wanted to be a grandpagotchi. I get to hang out with my grandpa more now because of you, so, thank you.”
With a big smile, Emily jumped into a hug and squeezed him. “I know exactly how you feel.”
When they pulled away, Sean was blushing. “So, how’s life with your grandmagotchi?”
“Everything was awesome, and then she picked a fight with Mister Moore.”
“I heard about that. She ended up being right, right? That’s pretty awesome.”
“Yeah, but then she and I started looking through the history book and realized the whole thing is pretty much a book of lies. Everything we’ve learned in history class is bullshit,” Emily broke the news.
“What? No way! History is my favorite subject. What do you mean all of it is bullshit? Like… some of it? Like, the national history stuff, or the tech history?”
“All of it. Everything. We started looking at college history books and they’re the same. Some things are different, closer to the truth, but still bullshit. It’s really weird.”
“Okay, but… it can’t all be wrong. How do you know your information is good?”
Instead of explaining, Emily pulled out her storage device and projected its contents in front of him. She scrolled through some of the documents they were looking at, reading their titles aloud. Every one was a first hand source. Then, she scrolled back through her annotations of the book.
“Wow… How is so much of it wrong?”
“Messing up a date, or a name, or a location means something is wrong. Mistakes are by accident, but the whole book is like this. That means this is all on purpose. These are lies.”
“This is crazy…” Sean scrolled through the pages on his own. Paragraph after paragraph had lines highlighted, accompanied by annotations and attachments.
“I’ll send you the file if you want to look at it,” Emily put away her device.
“Yeah, please,” Sean said, his eyes catching their grandparents returning.
“Hey, would you kids be opposed to a grandgotchi party? Turns out there’s a growing community of us and we’d like to meet some others like us,” Lilly asked.
Emily and Sean looked at each other and shrugged awkwardly, unsure of how to respond to their grandparents asking them if they could have a party.
“I think we have to ask our parents?” Emily said.
“That’s a yes!” Lilly said. “Do you kids mind? We don’t want to impose.”
“I don’t mind. I don’t really go to parties, but sure,” Emily said.
“Yeah, that sounds cool. It’s something different,” Sean agreed.
Over the week they worked together to make the arrangements and invite guests. Since it was all for the grandparents to meet and be social, almost everyone happily accepted the invitation and made room in their schedules. The guests consisted of a variety of ages and backgrounds. Some grandgotchis arrived with their children instead of their grandchildren since the grandchildren were too young to attend the party, which started at seven in the evening. One young woman arrived with her dog, a tiny white pomeranian named Mister Sprinkles. The adorable little dog with a pink bow was smothered in affection the entire night.
The party was lively, with people talking and carrying on, getting to know each other. Everyone came from such diverse backgrounds that they ended up being sucked into various conversations. Everyone got along well, but eventually the grandparents wanted to hang out together, away from everyone else. So, Emily and Sean took them to Emily’s dad’s cellar which had been turned into a tabletop game room and lounge. It was usually reserved for her dad and his friends, but there was a game table set up they could connect to. The grandparents were guaranteed not to make a mess, so he was okay with it.
When Emily and Sean returned to the party upstairs, everyone else was already discussing the trouble their grandgotchis had got them into. Some were more resistant than others, choosing to put their devices into sleep mode instead of having them cause problems for them. But, there were those like Emily who had heeded their grandparents’ words. One of those people was Sally, a short blond with a perky personality and a stylish pastel outfit. Her dog, Mister Sprinkles, laid peacefully on her lap.
“I didn’t realize so much of what I learned when I was in school was wrong. I started relegating as much as I can at my business so I can do more research with my grandpa and get to the bottom of some of this. As a chef I know there are a lot of problems with what we feed people in our society, but I had no idea the depth of some of this information. Some of the stuff that’s allowed and abundant in our food is not only completely unnecessary, but extremely detrimental to our health to a degree that is intentionally downplayed in the media.”
“My father hasn’t said anything like what you’re all talking about. I don’t know if I even believe some of the things you’re saying,” said a middle-aged woman with short black hair.
“Yeah, same here. I think you guys are making something out of nothing,” said a short, dark-haired man in jeans and a t-shirt.
“Joey, was it? Didn’t you mention earlier you love eating Cheezy O’s?” Sally asked him.
“Yeah, they’re like crack. So?”
“Do you also eat ranch dressing, or bagels, or drink Shocko Cola, or anything with Chocofarm’s chocolate in it?” Sally asked.
“Oh hell yeah. I love Shocko Cola, I drink at least one every day, and I’m always at the Wing Dub, ranch is the best wing dressing. So yeah, I’m a normal person that eats normal stuff. So?”
“About ten years ago a new chemical started being added to foods to keep them fresh past their expiration date. Six years ago it became legally required to be added to all dressings with a short expiry, like ranch. Shocko Cola doesn’t need to add it to their stuff, but they do, and so does Chocofarms. Only a small percentage that is deemed safe is allowed in drinks and foods. Five times that amount will start to render a human infertile and then their sexy parts will stop working.” Sally explained.
“Yeah but… exactly, like five times the amount,” Joey nervously waved off the information she was giving him. Sally calmly held her hand up to display her watch. She tapped the screen and spoke.
“Shocko Cola ingredients list.” A small hologram appeared in front of her and she read it, then asked for the ingredients list of several other items, pulling the holograms away and lining them up next to one another then examined them carefully.
“Shocko Cola has the maximum allowable percentage, so two of those makes forty percent. The same goes for Ranch and Cheezy-O’s. So you’re regularly consuming at least eighty percent of the amount required to damage your body. You probably go over the limit on a daily basis and don’t even realize it because you don’t look at the ingredients of what you’re consuming. If you’ve been doing that for five years, you don’t even have ten years ahead of you before you won’t be able to get it up.”
Taken aback by the information, Joey sat up, wide-eyed, brow furrowed. His head swiveled around to the faces of the group. Some were in their own thoughts, considering their diets, while others looked at him hoping he would see the issues they were all discussing. Nobody laughed or giggled.
“Are you serious?” he asked Sally.
“Have you ever eaten at Sprinkle City?”
“Yeah, that place is awesome. It’s expensive but it tastes so much better than everywhere else for some reason.”
“Thank you,” Sally said with a big smile. She reached into her purse and pulled out a small pile of coupons, then handed them to him. “Here, treat yourself next time you go. Everything at Sprinkle City uses natural ingredients. I refuse to use any of these disgusting ingredients in my recipes. You don’t have to eat at Spinkle City, but please try to eat better.”
Mouth agape, the man’s eyebrows peaked in the middle as he looked back at Sally with immense gratitude he could not manage to put into words, so he nodded. It was not until that moment that he realized who he was talking to, and her immense humility and generosity.
“Do you know how to cook?” Sally asked, to which he shook his head. “If you want your partner to keep working, learn.”
For a moment, the room was quiet, and Emily saw an organic moment to slide into the conversation.
“It isn’t just the food. My grandma and I have been going through my history book and every chapter so far has been full of bold-faced lies.”
“Lies?” Sally raised an eyebrow. “I understand that high school is generally propaganda and indoctrination and in college you find out a lot of what you learned was bullshit, but are you being hyperbolic, or are you being literal?”
Emily pulled out her storage device and displayed the copy of her history book full of notes she and her grandma had taken. She skipped to the section that had started the whole thing, ION Industries, and summarized for them the differences between the history book and reality, then showed them how much of her history book was annotated. By the time she was finished, the detractors had their heads down and nothing to say.
“Emily, can I get a copy of that file?” Sally asked, the first to speak up.
“Yeah, sure, but it’s not done. We want to go through the whole thing and put everything online,” Emily said, to which Sally nodded contently with a mischievous grin.
The conversation went on, with everyone in the group eventually on the same page. By the end, the group agreed they’d continue to meet.