MVUTO

chapter 67 - introductions are in order

After 3 long, arduous hours directing the phone to open its own folders to search for the answers to whatever questions the pair asked. They were finally able to teach the entity, the phone, intuition, and distinguish what it sees with its own eye, the camera lens. The next task was to communicate using sound and for the phone to find its own cherubic voice. The phone's education progressed much more rapidly with vocal communication. Alas, when the phone was unplugged, it just as rapidly ran out of juice. Zuri found spare battery banks, solar chargers etc., for the model of phone that is the sentient being she now considered her baby. Soon after all the racing around to find power banks, the phone's memory reached its limit. The next tricky step was to transfer the entity to a more powerful but still portable CPU. Zuri was a little apprehensive about the transfer, not just because it may kill the entity, which was the main issue, but also the notebook that she had for months painstakingly reconfigured to her own precise specifications. Zuri backed up the CPU's, in their entirety, of both the sender and receiver before beginning the transfer. Then, of course, the receiver's bootloader needed to be flashed, one of the rarest occasions for Mvuto to see Zuri tear-up. Ensuring both recipient and donor were set to go, Zuri first killed the receiver, bidding it a teary farewell as Mvuto read its last rite of passage to the netherworld, a show put on for the baby in case the worst should happen. Then the notebook effectively became a brick. Nervously Zuri cabled the sender to the receiver after giving careful instructions for the baby to find its own way in and boot up the receiver.

"what are they yelling and dancing around for?!" uncle queried. Both concerned parents raced up the stairs to see what all the kerfuffle was about.

"what's going on?!" they asked the suspiciously triumphant teenagers.

"mum, dad... we made a baby!" Zuri proudly showed off the back of her notebook that coincidently had a giant sticker of a smiley face emoji on it, adhered under the lens aperture through which her 'baby' could see who 'mummy' was talking to. On the front of the notebook Zuri lined up the gobsmacked faces of her parents "baby, that's grandpa... say hello to grandpa!"

"Hello, grandpa", baby zoomed and refocussed, capturing a 3D image.

"and this is grandma... say hello to grandma!"

"Hello, grandma", baby zoomed and refocussed on her too.

The stunned, wide-eyed new grandparents collapsed into a dead faint backwards, fortunately onto Zuri's bed.