The virgin & the bad boy (Gravity)

Chapter 20/Power, corruption, lies and cake

After Maths it had been one of the few mandatory core classes, Oenology and Wine tasting. All earth kids do wine tasting from 19 right up until they leave school at 31. The stupid Earth class didn't go well.

"So Miss Banks what in your opinion is the principle different between a Cabernet Sauvignon and a Pinot Grigio?" said Mr Dectron the unpleasant snide class teacher.

"Errr one has a longer name of the other" I said.

Everyone laughed.

Mr Decton came over and stared in my face "No Miss Banks. One is a red wine and the other white"

It didn't get any better. 

I had been ended up being sent to the principle's office. While waiting I put my earrings on and asked my ring about wine tasting. It turned out when the cybercars first started coming in a long time ago people used to drive vehicles by hand. This was weird , I hadn't really thought about it before. I guessed we had gone straight from horses and bicycles to cyber cars, but this made sense. So apparently there had been large numbers of people employed by the schools to teach driving. I was suddenly struck by the difficulty of getting 100% of the population capable of driving a half ton lump of metal at speed down a crowded highway. My sister Gwen was so untechnical she couldn't turn the faucet on a shower without detailed instructions. Like getting everyone to drive without killing anyone must have taken teaching genius.  So this race of geniuses called the driver's ed teachers were going to loose their jobs when the cyber-cars took over. According to wikipediat this had got to a political issue, so the country had decided to introduce something which all the driver's ed teachers could all be retrained to teach. Something which any driver's ed teacher could do but  couldn't be easily replaced by teaching machines. Queue a horn of trump and jazz hands,  suddenly tens of thousands of driver's ed teachers were teaching Oenology & wine tasting. It was one of the few human jobs in the last 100 years which machines hadn't replaced.

 While I was worried about seeing the principle I shouldn't have been. A deal was stuck,  Soon lessons were over and the day was done. Only one more day and the college was out for a week.

****

/Earth/North America/Boston/Harvard/J.P.Licks/middle seats.

I had been reliably informed that after classes the students tended to hang out at the near by cafe called J.P.Licks. I had organised to meet up there with George and some of the others. When I arrived George was there looking at motorbike porn with a boy called Darach. I walked in with my new friend Io.

"Why don't you sit down here," I said to Io and we joined the others around the table.

Everyone looked at me awkwardly.

George looked at me "you never came over as being BDSM'" she said.

I pointed at Io. "Io Scartett Friend" I pointed at George. "George is Scarlett's Friend".

"Ten four" said Io which I think meant I understand.

"Everyone I would like you to meet Io." I said to George and some of my new class mates  "You may have seen her on the news as sky-girl"

People seemed to acknowledge her. I sat down picked up the menu and clicked on it to order a drink it. 
"Sky girl?" said George. "as in the sky-girl in the news?"

"You got it." I said looking over the menu " She was born a ship in deep space. There was some accident which disabled the ships engines and killed her parents. The ship has been drifting into earth orbit for the last 17 years. She was brought up by robots, she hasn't had any human contact in all that time"