Once the plane touches down in Denver, I get my cloud synced back up and say goodbye to Cindy and the pilots. The small, private airstrip where we landed is only a dozen kilometers from where my grandparents live, so I didn’t bother setting up a car for this trip. With the updates to the flight suit, I can make freeway speeds on my own now. I double-check the route to my grandparents' house. I don’t even take the stairs down to the ground. I just focus my bot senses around my body, encase myself in a shell of nanobots, and take off right from the doorway of the jet.
Chad was right. This is much better than the previous version of the flight suit.I feel the air pushing hard against my second skin as I get to full speed a few dozen meters off the ground. Looking down at the ground rushing by below, I feel a surge of adrenaline that puts me somewhere between terror and exhilaration. I try to avoid the busier parts of my grandparents’ suburb, but I get plenty of gawkers staring and pointing anyway. With the help of the map in my overlay, I get myself to the right general area before I slow down and lower myself to look around. Recognition floods back to me. I know where their house is. Once upon a time I knew this neighborhood well. I want to jog some more memories before I see Grammy and Gramps though, so I dissolve my flight suit and start walking down on the street about a block away from their home. The houses all look familiar. This was the way Mom used to drive when we would come to visit.
There’s a faint smoky smell in the air as I reach their street that pulls on something in my brain. As I walk along the side of the quiet suburban road, memories flood back. I remember strolls with Gramps around their neighborhood after dinner on Sundays. Their faces. I can almost picture the way they look. Almost. Vague impressions of Grammy’s smile and Gramps wrinkling up his nose and making faces to get me to laugh when I was little. I couldn’t pull the memories back until just now. But seeing their house, smelling Gramps’s cooking, they're coming back to me. I was worried I wouldn’t even be able to recognize them—it’s been over two years since I’ve seen them—but my fears melt away as I reach their porch and ring the bell.
“Noah!” Grammy shouts as she sees me through the little window in the door and fumbles with the lock. She finally gets it open and pulls me in for a hug that lasts forever. Gramps waits his turn, then takes an even longer one.
“My boy! How are you?” he asks, finally releasing me.
“I’m OK, Gramps. Something smells great. Is that brisket?”
“Oh, just a little something I made for the occasion,” he declares, pulling me in through the front door. “I’ve been smoking it for the last twenty-four hours and it’s just about ready.”
The rich aroma of his cooking brings back countless barbecues for every occasion over the course of my life. Celebrating my missing front teeth. The day I finished elementary school. Getting my driver’s license. The rush of memory is overwhelming and even though I didn’t think I had a tear left in me, a few creep out and slip down my cheeks.
Grammy and Gramps are polite enough that they pretend not to notice. Grammy bustles around getting plates on the table. Gramps slices into the meat and brings a heaping plate over to the table with a squeeze bottle of his homemade sauce. I grab forks and knives for us as I frantically write as many of the memories down in my index as I can. I can even remember the right drawer in the kitchen where they keep their silverware.
We catch up as we tuck in. They almost won the seniors league championship at the local bowling alley but lost in the finals when one of their teammates blew out his knee in the second frame. He’s fine now after his surgery. The neighbors across the back fence finally got rid of the big elm that was always dropping twigs on their lawn. Grammy was put in charge of the children’s choir at church last month. Gramps was elected as precinct chair for the party and was going to help one of the city council candidates walk the neighborhood for votes. I have superpowers now and a humanitarian organization to run.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
They want every detail about the trip to Africa, and thanks to my log I’m able to fake still having a great memory of it all. Eventually our bellies fill up too much for a single bite more of Grammy’s peach pie and we retire to the cushy chairs in the front room. I reach out with my bots and quietly clean up dinner as we continue chatting, knowing Gramps will leave Grammy to do it all herself if I don’t. She doesn’t really mind when he does that, she says cleaning relaxes her, but I’ve got enough attention to spare that I can do the job and save her the trouble.
I’ve got the dishwasher just about loaded when the conversation hits a lull. I’m still reveling in the rush of memories that every sight, sound, and smell bring back, frantically trying to capture as much as I can in my index.
“You tired from your flight, champ?” Gramps asks.
“No, it was only like ten minutes from the jet,” I say. He gives me a funny look and I realize he was talking about the flight on the jet, not the flight from it. “Sorry. That probably didn’t make any sense. No, I’m not tired, just making sure that I remember all of this. It’s so good to see you two again.”
“You could always move back,” he says with a hopeful smile. “You’re a free man now, and I’d let you have my den for a bedroom.”
“Thanks, but I really can’t. There are things that only I and my siblings can do, and we’re really making a difference in the world.”
He sighs. “I know. We see your brother on the news now and then. That’s good work he’s doing over there in Africa.”
“He seems like such a nice young man,” Grammy adds. “Now, tell us about the project you’re doing this week.”
I tell them all about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and how we’re going to use the trash in it to build floating resort islands. They seem really interested and keep interrupting me with questions, so it takes a long time to explain it, but I don’t mind. It’s just nice to talk to them. Finally, they seem satisfied and the conversation hits another lull. Gramps gets up and wanders to his den, returning with a large cardboard box.
“We thought about shipping this to you after your father passed, but we didn’t want it to get lost in the mail,” he says apologetically. “The house sold pretty fast, but we saved everything. We’ve got all the money in an account for you, though I guess you probably don’t need it or you would have asked about it by now. Anyway, this has all of her personal papers and photos. The rest of her things and yours are boxed up in the basement. Help yourself to anything you want, we’ll keep the rest safe for you here. But we thought you might want to take a look at these while you were here.”
He was right. I take a seat on the floor next to the box and dig in, spreading my new treasures across the floor as I scan every bit of them into my index with my bots. So many pictures of Mom. Even more pictures of me growing up. Letters from editors and publishers about her books. My old report cards. Her Master’s Degree. I remember it now, hanging on the wall by her desk. My birth certificate, with Father’s name there. I don’t think I’d ever seen that before, but given the state of my memory, I can’t say for sure.
I start organizing the links to all of these pictures and documents in my index. The memories that these papers trigger are the connection back to my lost humanity and I’m not going to lose them again. It’s painstaking work, trying to tie them to everything that I know about that should be related, but it’s worth it.
I finally look up and realize the day has gone. I start picking the pictures and papers back up as carefully as I can and pack them back into the box. Grammy is making another dessert in the kitchen and Gramps is at the table turning the leftover brisket into sandwiches for dinner. We eat, talking softly about Mom. The food is amazing, the company is even better.
I finally call it a night around midnight. I’m emotionally exhausted and I know my grandparents usually get to bed hours earlier than this. This has been a great day, though I can’t even remember what happened before lunch anymore. I’m sure it was good, whatever it was. I’ll find out tomorrow when I read things back in. I crash on the overstuffed couch and feel myself slipping into oblivion almost as soon as I lay down.