The History of the Ear Men

Chapter 6: Catkaty’s Grandfather

Catkaty’s eighty‑six‑year‑old grandfather got out of bed in the long‑term care home in the middle of the night. He thought it was dark because it was January and he wanted to finish a doll for his six‑month‑old granddaughter. He climbed into his wheelchair and headed for the craft room. He was convinced he needed to make her a birthday gift for her. Now it really was April.

Because it was the middle of the night, the craft room was locked. The only staff working that night was sleep. A bell would only wake him up if a resident tried to escape the home.

The grandfather used a screwdriver he always kept with him. He used it to remove the hinges from the door. The noise woke the only staff member working that night.

The staff rushed to the craft room, muttering, “Not again! Why does he keep doing this every night? At three in the morning. It is not safe for him to be alone with all the sharp tools.”

The staff managed to get the grandfather back to bed by telling him that he would wake his grandbaby if he made too much noise at that hour.

The grandfather still thought Catkaty was only six months old, when she was really six years old. Not wanting to wake her, he agreed to stay in his room until sunrise. While there, he looked over the plans for the talking doll he was trying to make for her.

At five in the morning, as the sun began to rise, he realized he needed a part for the doll’s voice to work. He tried to leave the home to go to the store, thinking it was later in the day and the store would be open. As he left, the alert system went off letting staff know. Now no resident was allowed to leave without staff.

The twelve daytime staff had just arrived and had to wrestle him to the ground. Even though it had been six years since he was in Silla‑Tierra, his mind turned the staff into Ear Men in his imagination, scaring him so much that he went limp.

The grandfather said,“I was just going to the store to get a part for my granddaughter’s gift!”

The staff showed him a clock so he could see the store wouldn’t open for hours. The grandfather was so sleepy from working all night that he just fell asleep.

One of the new staff members asked, “Isn’t he getting too old to be using tools?”

An older staff member replied, “Maybe, but without him we wouldn’t have any of the technology we use here every day.”

There was a news story about him that said, “if it weren’t for him, none of this technology would exist for another thirty years.”

While the grandfather slept, they repaired the craft‑room door, hoping to stop him from doing it again. But since he was the one who invented most of their technology, it was unclear if that would make any difference.

Only an hour after they fixed it, they found he had tried again to get into the craft room. This time it was midday, a staff member was already inside, so it was safe for him to be there.

He had forgotten about the missing part and wondered why the doll wasn’t talking. He took it apart and saw the part hadn’t been installed. Looking around, he was puzzled that he couldn’t find it anywhere.

Suddenly, he asked to see his son, Zuphixy, but the staff knew his family had all vanished. They lied to him by saying “His family was on holiday.” He knew better as he knew that his son was a doctor, who only got one week off a year, and they had always taken him along since he’d been in this home.

So he hacked into his son’s home‑security camera system, The System is the kind that people had in the 1980s. He discovered his family was gone. Just as he was about to review the footage, his computer, a PS/2, got the blue screen of death. He restarted it, booted the operating system from a floppy disk, and reconnected to the camera. Everything worked again as long as he ran it off the floppy.

The stress of not seeing his family made him tired, so he went to his room to nap. When he woke, he transferred back to his wheelchair.

As soon as he was in his chair, the magic kicked in. The next thing he knew, he was in a greenhouse. Where he was creating a watering system for the heart‑shaped flowers. He was now a forty‑wheel‑old living wheelchair