When Brad walked into the den, he found someone already sitting at the computer. “What’s going on?” he asked.
She turned around in the chair. He recognized Meiko, with a bit of a guilty look on her face. On the monitor, he could see a body rotating in the Chronivac window.
”I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said -- Brad felt a pang because she sounded just like Robin, even though she only vaguely resembled the daughter he remembered. “Shane was using my computer to check his Facebook, so I came in here and I found this program running with Mom’s picture on it, so I played around with it a little.”
”What do you mean, ‘a little’?” asked Brad. “This program is very powerful.”
”Oh, I know, Daddy, I figured that out,” said Meiko. “I just did a couple things, but I changed them back right away. There’s still some more ideas I had, though.” She swiveled around quickly and hit Enter on the keyboard.
”Sure, why not?” asked Brad. What was the harm in letting Meiko make changes with the program? She should get to have whatever she wanted, he thought. “Do you want me to be the one to run the program?”
”Okay,” said Meiko, a smile now on her face. She got up from the chair, allowing her father to sit there. She perched on the arm of the nearby couch so she could still see the screen. “I don’t know how much you’ve been using it, but I found out there’s a window where you can just type whatever you want, and it interprets it. It was kind of hidden.”
”Huh,” said Brad. That might have come in handy last night, when he was -- well, he knew he was using this program last night, but couldn’t quite think what he’d done. Oh, well, it didn’t matter anyway. It was time to work on Meiko now. “So what ideas did you have?” he asked her.