Light streams through a window that doesn’t seem right as I wake up. Where am I? This isn’t home. My daily reminder to read through my logs triggers and eventually I’m able to understand that I’m back at my grandparents house. I make my way to the bathroom and get showered as I continue reading my memories. I’m current by the time I’m done shampooing my hair. I should start timing how long it takes to get through my essentials. I suspect my speed-reading is getting pretty impressive. I emerge with just a towel around my waist, having forgotten to bring clothes into the bathroom with me. Gramps is up already and chuckles at me as he puts some bacon into his thick, black frying pan. I grab my boxers, shirt, and pants and get back into the bathroom to get presentable before Grammy sees me and gets embarrassed.
Dressed and clean, I reemerge in time to help Gramps with the eggs while he seasons the hashbrowns. Grammy comes in and hugs me from behind at just the right moment to make me break a yolk as I flip one. I’ll take that one, I don’t mind. We talk about nothing as we eat.
“Do you really need to leave so soon?” Grammy asks. “You just got here.”
“I really do, Grammy,” I say. “The world has a lot of problems that only my siblings and I can solve. Serious problems, things that are life and death for a lot of people. Besides, I need this as much as the world does. It’s what I’ve decided to dedicate my life to.”
I don’t tell her that it’s the only relief I can get from the crushing guilt and shame that are all I feel most of the time. I think I even keep the pain off of my face when she tells me what a good man I’ve become. I wish people would stop saying that.
She asks a few more questions about the project as I clear the table and I do my best to put together answers that will make sense without a good background in nanotechnology. I let my bots take care of the dishes right in front of my grandparents this time. Grammy claps and laughs, Gramps smiles. At their doorstep Grammy hugs me for what seems like hours, but is less than a minute. Not that I don’t love it.
“Remember who you are,” Gramps whispers in my ear as he takes his turn embracing me. If he knew who I was, he wouldn’t say that. He’d want nothing to do with me. But it’s the kind of thing that Gramps says. His version of telling me to be good.
With a final goodbye, I step off their porch and encase myself in a black flight suit, tucking a small box with pictures of Mom and a few other papers I’d like to keep under one arm. The kids in the house next door are loading up in their car, it must be time to get to school. My bot vision sees how their eyes widen as I lift off the ground and take flight back to the small airfield. I come in low and fast and get there just as Cindy is opening the door. Right on time.
“How come Tom never fancied himself up that way?” she asks as she beckons me into the plane.
“He was probably too practical,” I replied. “Father was always more concerned with substance than style, and until recently a car was faster.”
“Well, I can say he missed out,” she says with a sad smile. “He would have looked mighty fine in one of those outfits.”
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She bustles around, makes sure I don’t need anything, then disappears into the back. I stash my box of mementos in the storage locker in the plane’s bedroom. Bob comes on the intercom and announces our flight time. I put the bots in sleep mode and we’re off. I spend the flight reviewing and tweaking the plans for Hawaii. Cindy must think I’m asleep here, with my eyes closed as I focus on the documents and figures I have in my index, because she doesn’t say anything to me the whole flight.
Finally, I feel the plane descend and touch down. Evan and Andrea are ready to jump on as soon as Cindy opens the doors and they get settled while the crew refuels us.
To Evan: You ready, man?
He doesn’t seem to notice. Wait, no. He’s not getting the message. My bots need to be turned on for that to work, since the comms work through them signaling each other. Evan would be proud of me for having that in my daily read now along with his reminder for me to put it there.
“You ready?” I ask with my voice this time.
“Yeah, just ran through my shutdown,” he answers.
Andrea nods too, pulling out a sketch pad and laying some colored pencils on the table. She pointedly does not look at me. Fair enough. I really should have told her the whole plan when we killed Father, but I didn’t think she’d be willing to do it if she knew how much damage it would do to Jeff. Instead, I told her he was in on it, that his freakout would be an act. It would have been great if that could have worked, but it wouldn’t have. He’s not that good of an actor, and Father would have seen right through it and suspected something was up. According to my electronic memory, I’ve tried to explain myself, but Andrea isn’t interested in my explanations.
Evan puts on a movie once the plane is in the air, some action hero flick where the good guy saves the day, gets the girl, and walks away from explosions. If only life were simple like that. I pop into the bedroom and grab a book of short stories by Asimov off the shelf. I really am getting to be a fast reader, I make it through the whole thing in well under an hour and it was a few hundred pages. I wasn’t nearly this fast a few months ago. More remodeling?
DIAGNOSTIC_MODE
Yeah, sure enough, increased activity and connections in the angular gyrus compared to some previous scans. I have to look up what that’s for to see that it’s the part of the brain that impacts language, attention, and symbol recognition. So yeah, I think my brain is specializing again.
It’s not surprising that I can’t remember the neuroscience details even when I get prompted by my software. By the time I got to Mr. Johnson’s amazing lectures on neuroscience I was in full cheating mode on all my schoolwork, so most of this only ever made it into my electronic brain. Fortunately, I scanned all my textbooks into my index along with his words and diagrams. My system isn’t as good as normal memory in most situations, but for academic stuff like this it might be better.
That part of the brain impacts language, attention, and symbol recognition, so yeah, I think my brain is specializing again, this time in reading. There are no massive headaches with this change though, for which I’m tremendously grateful. I wonder what the cost has been for this improvement. Everything is a trade-off with the brain, neurons recruited into doing one job are no longer doing whatever they did before. At least there weren’t massive headaches this time around, for which I’m tremendously grateful. Or at least if there were I didn’t bother to write about them in my logs.
Oh well. Given how much I have to read every day just to fake normal humanity, it’s an upgrade I’ll take. Plus, I don’t have any way to reverse the changes. I grab another book, Arthur C. Clarke this time. I end up chewing through a good chunk of the shelf with some Niven, Heinlein, Dick, and Bradbury before Cindy pops in to offer lunch.