[continued from previous message]

told me Cammy is the most important thing in the world to you, even more than me." She nuzzled his neck. "And I know what you'll do for me."

* * * *

"Mom."
Jennifer recognized Cammy's voice before she felt a hand shake her shoulder. Even half asleep, she knew what her daughter needed. "You want to get in bed with me?" It was curious that Cammy wasn't already in bed with
her. Usually she just climbed in behind her.
"Yeah, but..." Cammy looked up, past Jennifer.
"Oh!" Jennifer's eyes fully opened. She rolled over to Cameron and
shook his shoulder. "Deedee, scoot over. Make room for Cammy."
His eyes opened a crack, and after a couple of seconds of staring into nothing, he worked his way over to the edge. Jennifer inched closer to Cameron, which gave Cammy enough room. She snuggled closer to her mother, rested her head on Jennifer's left arm, and Jennifer hugged Cammy with her right one.
"Not much room," Cammy teased in a whisper.
"At least you're not the Jennut Butter in a Camwhich," Jennifer replied jovially.
Cammy raised her head slightly, then let it fall on Jennifer's arm as a kind of love pat. "Mom...."
That was the last thing said for the rest of the night. Soon Cammy was breathing regularly.
Cameron too was back to sleep. Jennifer could feel his regular breaths
on the back of her neck. It felt perfect. With Cammy getting older, there wouldn't be many times she'd need to get in bed with her mom because of nightmares. It dawned on her, in a mix of sadness and joy, that this night could be the only time they would be like this.
Jennifer decided that if that was the case, then she was thankful,
happy, and content to have this night. From the day she found out she was pregnant, to Heathrow's attempted theft, it was a long road. Lying between
her husband and daughter, having her family together, it was worth the
journey. It was the perfect place to be.
Jennifer was warm.

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Editor's Notes:

Of course, I actually have a 3.5" floppy drive. Somewhere. Well, I'm pretty sure it's in one of the boxes stacked next to my entertainment
center. But it's USB and I could try to read old floppies if I had to.

On another tech note, because of the rather more...comprehensive... changes to the world wrought by the Godmarket crash, the iPhone never
happened in mainline ASH. Something with a very similar form factor showed
up, but Apple itself didn't make it past the collapse (Jobs was a worshipper, go figure, as were most corporate bigwigs), and the term "smartphone" never came up, people instead just called them cellphones even as functions multiplied and the phone part got less important. The term "blackcel" was introduced in the late 2010s to refer to highly illegal phones with security systems that ranged from "doesn't include mandatory government backdoors" to "will electrocute unauthorized users," and then back-constructions of
whitecels (regular smartphones) and graycels (either very smart "gray cells"
or those that skirted the edge of tech laws, or both).
Yeah, privacy rights, and civil rights in general, are still recovering from the State Of Emergency in the ASH universe.


Author's Notes:

Being a single person, I can only approximate parenthood based on observations and mental simulacrum, so I apologize to any people out there
with kids who read this and think, "You sad simple person, is this how you imagine parenting?" This is how I imagine it. :-)

It's been established in previous ASH stories that consumer technology
was a few years ahead of our world, specifically MP3 players. Smartphones existed long before the iPhone, but weren't widely adopted. Jennifer was probably using a flip phone until after the iPhone formfactor saturated the market.

Finally, a small timeline:

July 1998: Benefactor Crisis
February 1999: Cameron's sentencing
March 1999: Cammy is born.
June 2007: iPhone is released.
May 2012: Cammy wins the robotics competition and is kicked out of her club.
June 2012: Cameron comes home.

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For all the back issues, plus additional background information, art,
and more, go to http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH !

http://ash.wikidot.com/ is the official ASH Wiki, focusing on the Fourth Heroic Age, but containing some information about other Ages.

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