2024-03-01: Mom and I creeped past the house I grew up in at two miles per hour in the rental car, peeking in the windows at the changed furniture and different color paint on the walls. We both sighed audibly and continued on down the street. Some of the houses were changed completely. Bigger, for the most part. One little house was still tucked into the trees, wrapped in foil. Some kind of asbestos remediation process I guess. "That was Peter's house, I helped them move last summer." "I still think you should have gotten paid for doing that," she scolded. "It's Peter's grandfather! The guy doesn't have any money, and besides I owed him for everything he did for me growing up." I set my jaw and continued on, taking a shortcut through a forested area. There were signs of a homeless encampment on the side of the road behind a fence that wasn't there before. We pulled up the gravel bend through the trees near the highway, and I saw a car drive over the grassy median strip. Things weren't like they used to be. Everything here seemed so... spread out. Run down. Maybe it was just the contrast from living on the coast. I pulled onto the highway and sped on to our real destination, some friends of the family who held annual get-togethers to keep everyone from drifting apart. When we pulled into the house there was a large object under a tarp in the driveway, at least the size of a boat. I wondered what it could be. I opened the door and a warm smell of cooking came out immediately. The party had already started it seemed. A dog came up and sniffed my hands expectantly. I carefully stepped over the bags of groceries and spilled rice on the carpet and made my way to the kitchen. "Hello?" I peeked under the row of cabinets from the living room. "Hello!" Lou greeted me from behind the counter. "Eat some sushi!" She pushed a plate into my hands. I accepted the sushi and laughed. Lou has gotten a lot prettier since I last saw her, and her voice is different. And she seems very flirty. Isn't Lou married? Wait, no, that's not Lou, that's her baby sister Noomi. Oof. Noomi was all grown up now. What a weird feeling. I laid down on the couch by the table in the open space connected to the kitchen and the rest of the house. It was a small house but there seemed to be plenty of space due to the open design. Some more guests arrived and started talking in the living room and playing with the dog. Noomi's twin brother Cody was going in and out of the garage with a funny grin on his face. Cody's chubby girlfriend sat across the table from me and sighed. "He always does this. Just wait. You'll see what they recovered." She leaned on the table and poked glumly at the sushi. "Shanelle." She stuck her hand out and I shook it reflexively. I took a nap on the couch and thought about what could be in the garage, and what was under that tarp in the driveway right about where last summer I had done a demonstration of my electric rock smelter. A fancy name for a stubby length of stainless steel tubing with a flared end. The key insight was to think about it as a kind of pulse jet, designed for a resonant frequency a couple octaves higher than the 60 Hz electric mains frequency, to keep the combustion products moving through the system. In practice this just meant making the pipe about a foot longer to increase the inertia of the column containing hot hydrogen gas. It worked well enough for a science fair demo. There was a weird warbling sound as something rolled into the house through the door to the garage, a wheel about two meters in diameter. I sat up and gawked as it lifted into the air and spun around slowly to face me. Inside the wheel was Cody, wearing full motorcycle gear, his head hidden behind some sort of display system that wrapped all the way around. As the wheel turned to face me it made it look like Cody's head was tall and skinny like a japanese ghost or monster tale. He laughed and the sound was transmitted through electronically to the room. "Pretty cool, eh? We found it inside the wreck out back and I put these sweet HOG handlebars on." He slapped the motorcycle handlebar he was using to steer with. I acknowledged that it was indeed much cooler than my smelter was, but actually it looked pretty dorky with the hunched forward posture forced by being inside the wheel and having your head in the display. I watched as Cody drove this flying monowheel around in the air, bouncing off the walls haphazardly, the dog barking. It was great fun. Shanelle told me about the recovery effort and made me swear not to tell anyone outside the family, as this was all part of some sort of paramilitary organization Cody had gotten involved with a few years ago that was tracking UFOs. "Isn't it weird how you can feel exactly where it is even without looking?" Shanelle mused idly. I understood what she meant. You didn't even have to open your eyes, it was like that warbling was part of the fabric of space itself. I remembered feeling such sensations before, but far away, practically on the other side of the planet. "I had psychic experiences." I blurted out, to nobody in particular. Cody floated over in the monowheel and parked directly above me. "Psychic experiences? Show me your psychic powers then, haha!" I reached out and pushed the monowheel away with a pinky, annoyed. Then I sat up and pushed the monowheel with my mental pinky and it kept going across the room, until I stopped pushing and the wheel stopped moving. He drove back over and tilted down to look at me. "Hey man, that was cool! You gotta teach me how to do that!" said the electronic voice through layers of black plastic. "I don't think I can, it's genetic." Or so my viewing of Stargate SG-1 had led me to believe. I reached out with my mental fingers again and pulled Cody's wheel down to ground level. "Okay it's my turn to drive, that's too fun to hog to yourself the whole time, so let's get you out of there." As I used my mental hand to stop the rapid internal rotation of the wheel and pull Cody out of it, suddenly the whole thing collapsed and turned inside out with a sound like a buzz-saw and a strong electrical smell. There was a splattering sound as large hunks of meat and broth hit the floor. Spray and bits of grit sandblasted my face. "WHAT?" I gaped at the scene not comprehending what just happened. "WHAT?!" There was a strip of Cody's face with the eye, and I pushed it next to the matching strip of Cody's face, but they wouldn't stick together, it was just hunks of cooked meat. Metallic strips and black plastic were scattered around. I picked up Cody's hips by the soggy pant pockets and tried to move the pieces back together but I couldn't figure out which was what. "Oh, no... no, no, no." This shouldn't be happening. This didn't happen. Why am I not hearing screaming? Is the table blocking their view? I looked around the room and everyone was gone. --- I woke up, thankful I could finally swallow without accidentally committing cannibalism.