From Evan: You sure you don’t want me to come with you?
To Evan: Yeah. Not that I don’t want to invite you into my former life, I really do. But this is something I need to do on my own. I’ll take you next time I visit them, I promise.
From Evan: You bet you will.
To Evan: I’ll see you tomorrow when we pick you and Andrea up.
From Evan: OK. You take care of yourself, and stick to your system. I don’t want to have to fly up to Denver because they found you wandering the streets, not knowing where or who you are.
To Evan: I’ll be fine. I promise to do all the stuff I normally do to keep myself functional. Besides, my grandparents will keep an eye on me. You think you worry about me a lot, but you’ve got nothing on Grammy.
From Evan: Fair enough. Later, brother.
I’m taking my first personal day since Father died. I should have done this so long ago, I owe my grandparents that much, but I couldn’t face them. Not with what I’ve become. I could barely talk to them on the phone after I told them that I wasn’t coming home to live with them. But I’ve lost so much of what made me myself, and this is the only way I can think of to get any of it back. And anyway, until I hired Alan yesterday, I really thought the wheels would come off the place if I were gone for a day.
I pull back the snakelike tendril of bots that stretches my mesh network from the airstrip back to campus and lose the connection to Evan’s cloud. My flight suit melts from my body and I step inside the boarding door of the family jet.
“You comfortable, hon?” Cindy asks as I settle into one of the cushy recliners in the jet’s main cabin.
“Yes, thank you.” I am physically, anyway. Everything about this jet triggers memories of Father though, which doesn’t do much for my state of mind.
“Well all right, then,” Cindy says with her distinctive Southern drawl. “We’ll be leaving in just a few. I’m going to go buckle up in the back. If you need anything, you just holler.”
Once she leaves, it feels like I’ve got the jet all to myself. Just me and the ghost of Father. I pull all my bots into the plane and gather them up close to me before one of the pilots closes the door. I run through the shutdown checklist for my cloud. The bots will hibernate in a sleep mode until we land. I get them put down, but don’t bother to disconnect my brain implant from the processing appliance in my satchel. I know I’m supposed to, but the link between the implant and the appliance is such a low-energy and short range thing that there’s no way it’ll cause trouble.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
A few minutes later, I feel the smooth acceleration as the plane prepares to take off. The seat presses against me and the smooth motion turns to a rumble, then smooth again. It’s quiet for a moment and I have nothing that I need to do right now. That hasn’t happened in months.
Not since I killed him.
Just me, alone with my thoughts.
I hate me.
Why did I have to kill him?
I’m such an idiot.
Yeah, he had his faults. But he didn’t kill her. Not really.
I could have stopped it. I should have stopped it. It wasn’t too late. Once I remembered, we could have worked things out.
I couldn’t though. I just hated him so much.
And loved him.
And Jeff. That’s the worst of it. I loved him too. But I wrecked him anyway.
I ruined his life.
He trusted me, and I sold him out.
I am such a shitty person.
“You OK there, Noah?”
I hadn’t even noticed Cindy come back to the main cabin. Or the tears that are streaming down my cheeks. I’m so blind without my bots.
“Yeah, sorry,” I tell her. “I’m OK. Just thinking about Father.”
“Oh, you poor dear,” she said, taking a seat next to mine at the big table and pulling a box of tissues out of nowhere. “Tom was a good man. I miss him too. This must be so tough on you.”
“Yeah,” I croak, glad she can’t tell the difference between my tears of shame and self-hatred and the grief she seems to think she is seeing. I wipe my eyes and take an embarrassingly loud blow on my nose with the tissue she handed me.
“You cry, hon. There’s no shame in that. You let it all out.”
And I do. I sob for a long time. Eventually the tears run out and I’m able to regain my composure. Even with the steady stream of fresh tissues Cindy’s been handing me, I feel like a sloppy mess. I get up and wash my face.
Better.
I’m not better. I know that. But I feel better.
Clearer.
Better even than I feel with the dopamine hits I use too often.
“Nothing like a good cry, right Noah?” Cindy asks cheerfully as I take my seat back. “You want a bite to eat? We just have time before we need to get ready for the landing.”
“No, thanks. My grandparents would probably kill me if I didn’t show up ready to eat whatever they’re cooking up.”
“Well then, we can’t disappoint them, now can we?” she laughs.
I laugh too. That feels almost as good as the cry.
I needed that. That kind of opening of the emotional floodgates was due sooner or later. I’m glad that I only embarrassed myself in front of Cindy. I know she’ll keep it to herself. Much better to get through it now than when I get to Denver. I wouldn’t want Grammy and Gramps to see me like this.