The only reason Grandma still speaks to us is because she thinks she’s still at the pinnacle of her youth, a time when her hair curled in big waves—“all-natural, of course”—and the envy of all the women in Shanghai who sought perms and mousse over husbands, but not Grandma who picked men like flowers from overgrown fields. The Glasses make her think her hand-pushed waves ripple and bounce around her shoulders even though her ears are empty as corn stalks in the abandoned countryside, the remains of her silvery hairs nearly invisible, a wispy halo protecting her scalp. It’s fine. Grandma can’t leave the house anyway. She’s in the at-risk group at her age, which means even if she wanted to venture outside, we’d have to submit a request, route out her schedule, wait for an evaluation of population density in our specified locations, and obtain a final approval from all the neighboring district leaders as well. We just want her to be happy, and the Glasses accomplish more than enough—for her, and most of us.

The funny thing is Grandma once opposed Marketed Isolation initiatives so strongly that she’d stumble out the front door and walk a few blocks down the street out of spite, only for us to collect her back to the safe indoors. I obtained our first pair of Glasses a decade ago for work, but my wearing them into the kitchen while observing structural protein models floating in space resulted in the rest of my family purchasing their own devices—initially to let me feel what it was like being ignored, but ultimately, the Glasses won them over. Grandma was the only one wandering around the house without screens hovering in her line of sight, hands swiping and pinching aimlessly in the air, faces half covered so often we identified each other by our Glasses configuration and head straps.

“Back in my day, we’d cram ourselves on buses until we got outside Penglai Park and ran around the soy sauce factory trying to get a whiff of the sauce jars covered by bamboo hats,” Grandma would say. The factory has long since been demolished, but now she can relive the scene whenever she wants with her Glasses. Sometimes, when I take breaks, I’ll see Grandma praying in the middle of the living room, knees on the carpet, kowtowing in the direction of the coffee table, whispering about a tree on the top of a rockery—the “miracle” tree in Penglai from which Grandma swore Guanyin emerged while she was trying to pilfer a jar of soy sauce. Grandma will kowtow and then stand with her arms out in front, spread a tree trunk’s distance apart, stroking the empty air up and down as though the bulldozed tree stood tall and strong.

Before Grandma grew accustomed to the Glasses, we’d remind her daily that her body wasn’t what it used to be. She couldn’t just flounce to the street markets—which no longer existed—and expect to emerge without catching one of the many illnesses being spread like dandelion seeds. “We’re all safer inside,” I’d repeat to Grandma. “If you want to watch people make begonia cakes on the street so badly, just do it from the Glasses. If you want to eat them, we can order a box.”

“Not the same, not the same,” she’d shake her head. “There’s nothing like watching it dumped from the mold, cut fresh with scissors, and served piping hot.”

In the end, I never won Grandma over. It was my daughter who caught Grandma in a coughing fit. My daughter burst into tears since she’d never witnessed someone so sick before. She rarely saw anyone besides her family since school was held over the Glasses, and she was taking an advanced, custom-tailored curriculum since the Education Board deemed her faster than average.

“Are you dying?” My daughter cried while clutching to Grandma’s waist.

“Let me see your face,” Grandma replied as my daughter loosened the strap around her head, the Glasses eating up her small, lily bud-shaped face.

“See, I once had curly hair like this,” Grandma said. “You will be so beautiful. All the boys will chase after you. You have to make sure you slap their hands when they pull their hair.”

My daughter tilted her head, confused. “What boys? Pull my hair? That’s dirty.”

Then Grandma turned to me. “At this rate, my great-granddaughter is going to be deceived by some pretty boy before she has a chance to even consider her options.”

“Grandma,” I sighed. “No one gets married anymore. Not for three decades now.”

“No marriage!” She humphed. “How do you have kids then?”

“Lab orders, remember? That’s how your great-granddaughter got delivered after she developed past the test tube phase. It’s safer and more hygienic for everyone,” I told her.

“Won’t you live forever?” my daughter pined.

“No,” Grandma replied coldly, unreceptive to my daughter’s small, tight fists. Expecting a hug but receiving none, my daughter withdrew, face red and eyes watery like soaked mushrooms, and ran to her room. That was all it took for Grandma to try on my Glasses the next day. I later bought her a new pair since her head was too angular and sharp, the straps abrasive against her thinning hair.

Nowadays, Grandma travels within the house without complaint—without much word at all beyond hums and whispers and sporadic giggles. I don’t know what scenes make her laugh, but I know that she has downloaded far more than I initially programmed on her Glasses, converting her old photos and memories into vivid, fleshed-out panoramas. I’ve never asked her to share. If the experiences are immersive enough for her to forget about sharing—and Grandma was once a woman who had to broadcast to the world whenever her head hurt or her eyes itched—I figure she’d prefer to keep these parts of her life private. These days, we work with our Glasses, eat with our Glasses, and rest with our Glasses from the safety of the house.

The only time I leave the house is to re-register our identification cards, a monthly process that requires in-person signage. The streets are empty. The only signs of human life are the perpetual lights inside houses and the routine sprinklers spinning to life each evening. I no longer need to worry about someone taking care of Grandma while I’m away—she knows to engage in passive scenes that don’t require any standing or walking, like embroidering and creating cotton yarn gloves, the first in her family to develop such a skill outside of generations of workers in a grain warehouse. Sometimes she’ll watch the children play and feed the pigs crushed pumpkin while her grandma sneaks the knife hanging on the wall into the kitchen and slaughters what will later be braised pork belly and pork trotter soup. Grandma claims the dishes taste exactly as she remembers even though the sensory immersion technology leaves residuals of bitterness, like food seasoned with insecticide. I suspect she’s not truly tasting but rather eating with her eyes as she often does—“old women like me don’t need food,” she used to say. “How are you supposed to live without food?” I’d ask.

Identity card registration is a simple task. I only need to provide evidence that everyone in my household is alive and confirm any changes in health. In two or three years, I’ll report my daughter’s incipient puberty so she can receive her hormone treatments. The System lowered the required age for treatments after discovering rogue children engaging in orgies on the outskirts of the city, an abandoned area only frequented by waste disposal automata that’d drive through once in the morning and once in the evening.

The registration procedure will change once Grandma’s vitals deviate too much from the norm. I will have to schedule a time for Cleaners to remove Grandma and purify the house of any lingering illness her body may have hosted. I will have to find a place for the urn she already chose, a blue-white porcelain monolith whose sides look less shiny and more murky the way a swamp colors over a lake. I will need to take the family out of the house briefly so we can send her off in a space unfettered by a ceiling and rooftop, her soul free to drift as high as it’d like, the neighboring farm ruins and overgrown squash vines in view.

When I return home, I find Grandma lying on her bed, arm waving at the ceiling, hands pinching and loosening like pincers.

“Oh, are you home?” She asks. “Someone dropped all the freshly hatched chicken eggs. Freshly hatched too! That could’ve bought us a small jar of sugar.”

“Eggs are dirt cheap,” I reply from the door. “Do all your tests look good? No sign of additional neuron deterioration?” I need to report significant changes in numbers, even though these diseases of the brain aren’t contagious. The System likes to stay alert on changes in the elderly who, for the most part, shun Glasses even after the huge marketing initiative of setting up holograms on rarely-traveled walkways, advertising the “experience over physicality.”

“If I can swing this ax over a dozen chickens’ heads and still have enough energy to drop their blood on the door of the house, can my health get any better?” Grandma’s foot twitches on the mattress. She raises her arms together and touches her palms as though praying to the room. Her blanket falls to her waist, exposing her shoulders, rigid and narrow, beads of white bone shaping the protrusions of her skin like chunks of peanut brittle.

“We don’t need to leave drops of chicken blood on the door and glue feathers to the wall to ward off evil spirits,” I say. “Not anymore. Nothing impure can get into the house. Now, where are your test results?”

Grandma laughs loudly. “All these wasted, cracked eggs and you’re worrying about test results? At this rate, we’ll die off before our future generations have a chance to take exams and such nonsense.”

“Sure,” I say as I fish for the digital reader hidden in the corner of her bed. I stare at the numbers. I place the device face down so the screen kisses the sheets. I will report No Change next month, too.