The house was a mess. Dad had let dishes pile up over the past weeks on tables, countertops, and bookshelves. Piles of laundry lay wherever he’d decided to get undressed. I ran the washing machine, scrubbed dishes, and mopped the floors while Dad told us he didn’t need our help. Later that evening, we found him in the basement, standing by the water heater for some reason only he understood. I led him back upstairs and got him in bed while Nin mixed us drinks from a bottle of gin she’d found in the pantry. We sat at the kitchen table, exhausted. I scrolled through my eye-screens looking for advice about Dad while Nin played a dumb game on her retinas.

“What about Nostalgia?” I asked.

“That app came and went in the twenties,” Nin said.

“Not according to this.”

I blinked the article to her and she scanned it without stopping her game. “Whoa,” she mumbled. “I had no clue old people were using it.” She blinked me a hyperlink from the comment section, and soon my eyes were opening other related posts.

Like most people, I’d briefly subscribed to Nostalgia to get over a breakup. I’d uploaded videos of Sam, and there was his hologram making goofy jokes that made my heart leap. When I doubted my decision to dump him, I accessed the app’s shadow side and suddenly his hologram was being his snarky old self, a dark cloud that confirmed how much better off I was without him. Nostalgia helped me get over Sam, but it also left me feeling clingy and pathetic, particularly on nights when I’d use a sex clip to get myself off to his ghost. Nin was more familiar with Nostalgia’s reboot. She’d uploaded holograms of old friends to her contacts as a way to remember her high school days, before she grew bored and deleted the app.

But Nostalgia had changed since then, and we skimmed article after article, clicked on suggested posts, and finally went to bed long after midnight, appearing red-eyed the next morning at the breakfast table.

“Dad,” we said, “we think we have a way to bring Mom back.”

We found Dad’s contacts in a dusty case at the bottom of his dresser drawer. There were no daily videos on his feeds, no photos blinked from vacations, no live-memories of him and Mom gardening together. He’d only accessed his contacts for video calls, and had never explored the apps or used them for anything more complicated than a remedial form of Skype.

“Why would I want the world watching Mom gardening?” he asked.

“Maybe so we could have the memories,” Nin said.

“You never took any photos?” I asked.

“Sure, plenty. On my phone.”

“You’re kidding, right?”