I had to scavenge whatever dinner I could find in Grandpa Joe’s cupboards. There wasn’t much to choose from, but I did find enough to cobble together a decent meal. I didn’t like the idea of eating canned corned beef, but after heating it up it wasn’t so bad. Mixed in with the vegetables, it filled my belly and left me feeling satisfied enough. Although I did eat quite a lot. My young stomach could hold a lot more than the withered, ancient one could before feeling full.

Now that I was done with today’s work, I needed to find something to fill my time before going to bed. With all the excitement of today and the harsh reality I’d come to face with about the nature of our universe, I wasn’t ready to sleep. Even though my muscles were aching and my eyelids felt heavy, my brain was still whirling around at the speed of a tornado.

I took a really in-depth tour of the farmhouse to see what I had to work with. Pretty much every house or apartment in the world I had come from was built for co-living. It was impossible to buy or rent a property yourself unless you had an extremely high paying job. And even then it was still rather difficult. Almost everywhere came with at least an ensuite attached to the main bedroom and a separate bathroom for whoever else was living in the house.

I had learned throughout my work during the day that Grandpa Joe’s house didn’t even have an inside bathroom. It had a rickety old outhouse with a big fat black spider living in a web in the top corner.

I’ve never really been squeamish around bugs or spiders, so the appearance of the spider didn’t perturb me. I left him there while I went about my business, and I was sure I would end up saying hello to him every time I needed to do the necessaries.

Well, actually, it was probably a female spider, because spiders in my world were subject to something called sexual dimorphism. Usually the lady spiders were the larger ones, the scary looking ones, and the males were diminutive little things. Spiders generally tipped the normal human gender trait binary on its head.

I did need to find a flashlight somewhere in the house in case I needed to use the outhouse during the night. I didn’t really like the idea of having to wade through the long grass in the middle of the night if the urge came. Flashlight or not, that sounded like a bad time.

The house itself had two bedrooms. One was a modest master bedroom with not much room in it for anything more than a queen sized bed and chest of drawers. The other bedroom was essentially a storage room for my grandpa's stuff. There were boxes upon boxes of things that looked like they hadn’t been touched in decades. That light spattering of dust I mentioned that covered everything in the farmhouse? Well it was much thicker in the storage room. Just stepping on the carpet sent a great cartoon style billow of dust from under my feet. I sensed that there was going to be a lot of deep cleaning my future

Most houses from my world had a combined kitchen and living area, without any unnecessary walls breaking things up. Grandpa Joe’s house was very different. The kitchen was self-contained, but it had a serving window that attached it to the living or dining space. It didn’t look like Grandpa Joe did much living in this living room. There was no television, and there was only a single rocking chair sitting in the corner which had seen better days.

Don’t get me wrong, the living space did have its own personal charm. There were photos hung up on the walls with lots of pictures of my Grandpa Joe with different people doing a whole bunch of things.

In one he had pulled a massive fish on a hand line and was holding it up for the camera. So Grandpa Joe was a fisherman, and he obviously went fishing with someone who was happy enough to take a photo of his trophy for him. That meant there was probably a fishing buddy out there somewhere in town.

There was another photo of Grandpa Joe standing in front of a display box filled with fruits and vegetables, but grandpa was much younger in that picture. He still had a full head of black hair, just like mine.

A little girl stood by his side with a matching grin on her face. It was the same smile that I had seen in the reflection of the bus window. The same one that I had in this new body. This must have been Grandpa Joe and my mother when she was a little girl. She looked proud as punch of her father's delicious looking fruit and vegetable display.

I took the picture down off the wall. The frame mountings did not want to move, but I was stubborn. I wanted to see whether there were any notes written on the back of the photograph. When I pulled it out I was happy to see if there was a handwritten note on the back of the photo. It simply said Joseph and Linda, Harvest Festival, 255 AB. If this photo was taken in 255 AB and I was born in 263 AB then my mother probably had me fairly young. She couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen in this photo.

I had never met my mother in this world, but looking down at her sweet and wonderful smiling face, I couldn’t help but be sad she was gone. According to Grandpa Joe’s letter both she and my father had died in a tragic accident, but I still had no idea exactly what happened. I put the picture back and hung it back in its place. The dust had formed a square around the photo frame on the wall.

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Searching through the photographs further, I found one that looked like my mother and father on their wedding day. My mother grew into a beautiful woman, with long black hair the same colour as Grandpa Joe and me. My father was taller than her by about a foot, and had the same strong jawline I’d seen in my reflection. I was the perfect fusion of both of them. The notes on the back of this photo said “Sam and Linda, Wedding, 262 AB”

So my father’s name was Sam. According to the dates they had only been married the year before I came along. Did they do it because they knew I was coming? Or once they were married, did they start trying for a family right away?

There was another photo of Grandpa Joe holding a little baby swaddled in a pink muslin wrap, and it turns out that this was my mother. Through memories pieces together though fragmented photos I started to think that Grandpa’s wife must have died during childbirth. There were photos of him and his wife on their wedding day, and she was just as resplendent as my own mother on her big day. But there were no photos of my grandmother holding her own daughter. That left only one option, and it was not a pleasant one to contemplate.

I hadn’t really thought about how in a world where technology has not progressed as far, that meant medical advances hadn’t progressed either. Mothers dying during childbirth happened so rarely in my time that I just didn’t think about it.

The thought of Grandpa Joe raising my mother alone here on the farm just made everything fall into place. Mom and Dad had left Yuca Valley to seek their future in the big city – Zazen Town – but something had happened. Something that killed them both. I must have been old enough to stay to finish my schooling by myself in assisted housing or something. Maybe someone had taken me in? I didn’t have access to those memories.

It sounded like Grandpa Joe really did have as many regrets as I did in my original life. But I wouldn’t let that happen to me this time. I refused to live a life filled with regrets again.

I didn’t have the heart to start unpacking anything in the storage room just yet, not after the revelations of my new family’s history. Instead I made myself another cup of tea and sat down in Grandpa Joe’s rocking chair. The moment I sunk into it, I immediately realized why he liked it so much. It enveloped you in comfort and tried really hard to not let you go.

There were an assortment of books sitting on Grandpa Joe’s coffee table. They were novels from the looks of it. They had titles like Take The Leap, Watch Your Back, and A Taste Of Chrome. The blurbs on the backs of the paperback books revealed them to be pulpy action novels, and I smiled to myself. Back in my old life I had a stack of pulpy action novels just like this on my own bedside table, but I didn’t recognise any of these authors.

I’d never actually gotten around to finish reading the Ajax Miller series, and that was one regret I did leave in my past life. But the author wrote something stupid like fifty full length novels in that series! That was far too many, especially when some were of questionable quality. But still, I wanted to know how it ended. There was probably no Wikipedia in this world that I could use to look up plot summaries. Those books probably didn’t exist in this world either.

I decided to open Take The Leap and allowed myself to get lost in the novel until I started really getting tired. It was serviceable enough, but with a clunky, stilted way of describing things that would just bring the narrative to a jarring halt at the most inopportune places.

I got up and headed to Grandpa Joe’s bed, but it was horribly uncomfortable. The mattress clearly hadn’t been replaced in a very long time. Maybe even as long as his car? That was a bit of a gross thought. Springs dug into me no matter which position I tried to get to sleep in, and the blankets were itchy. The pillows were odd flat things with sweat-stained pillow cases covering them. I tried to find some replacements, and the ones in the linen closet weren’t much better.

I wouldn’t be able to do anything about the uncomfortable mattress just yet, but I should be able to afford some new pillows. If $250 was enough to take care of myself for a month, then the $67 I had in cash in my wallet should stretch far enough for some new pillows. Yes, I pulled all the money out and counted it. I still couldn’t get used to the strangely colorful money with all its strange patterns and faces of people I didn’t recognise.

One lesson I learned as I grew older in my original life was that sleep was one of the most important things. Without a good night’s sleep, the rest of your life had a way of slip-sliding out of your grasp.

I lay there in the lumpy bed for quite some time while I waited for sleep to take me. There was a part of me that still didn’t believe this was happening. One little nagging voice in the back of my head told me over and over that this was a just dream.

It was just the result of that blue liquid Diane the nurse set up into my painkiller drip. It wasn’t real. That moment I shared with the weirdly youthful angel could have just been my mind’s way of coming to terms with my transition into death. An explanation of the dream that I would soon find myself in.

I moved my legs under the blanket and took notice of the sensation. The prickly blanket caught on my leg hairs and pulled them uncomfortably. I took notice of my breathing, the feeling of cold air flooding my chest, then the warm exhalations exiting my body as I breathed out. I paid attention to the ambient sounds of the farm drifting in from outside. The wind rustled through the long grass and unseen insects made their nightly noises. Birds called in the night, and I thought I heard the occasional clicks of a bat’s echolocation.

Each of these sounds and sensations grounded me here in this world, here in this body, and I was sure that this was real.

Sleep took me eventually, and I did not dream.