This excerpt from Journey to 2125 illustrates how important our family stories are in shaping our kids’ lives. When my children grow up, what will they remember about me? What legacy will I leave them? I hope this story encourages you to reflect on how much our pasts shape the futures of our children, and how important it is to share that history with them.
What will life be like in the year 2125?
An Excerpt From
"Journey to 2125: One Century,One Family, Rising to Challenges”
By Gary F. Bengier
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1 Max Yang MacGyver—2033 (Taiwan),
Present, 2125 (California)
It begins with a splash, then rushing down the unknown river of life, each unique as Heraclitus said, around and through each oxbow and rapids, no doubt ending at an astonishing waterfall.
That visceral memory still wakes me after all these years—a recurring nightmare of bone-chilling cold water. Salt in my mouth and the burn in my eyes. The big man behind me pushes me up and I dog-paddle toward the white ship with the big red cross. People surround me in the water, crying, swimming. My life vest is too big, the straps loose, and the big man lifts me when a swell splashes over. I am tired, and my arms are heavy. I swallow seawater with each wave. Some people are sinking, and their heads disappear.
He hollers at me in Mandarin, his hard face close to mine.
“Help me help you. Swim!”
We reach the ship, and he boosts me up to the thick, hanging rope net, and I grab hold and pull myself out of the cold water. It’s like the playground bars, and I climb to the top.
I sit shivering on the deck next to the big man as a nice woman in white dries me with a towel and wraps me with a blanket. He tousles my hair, then he looks at me, and tears come from his eyes. I can tell he is thinking of someone else. His muscled hand is not too rough, though I still flinch when he reaches out. I lose track of the big man, and when the ship fills with so many people from the water like me, I don’t see him again until days later.
The nice woman points me to a doorway to descend into the ship, but I duck to the side and stay by the railing to watch everyone else come up the net. I’m short, and it is noisy and crowded, so I can hide by the rail. The tiny boat is now empty. It drifts away from the ship.
Before we all jumped off the boat to get to the ship, a jet had roared overhead. Everyone screamed, and many had prayed. But the ship was near, and people on its deck watched, and nothing bad happened. Now the boat’s sail flaps in the wind, and it bobs sideways as the ship’s engines vibrate the deck, and our big ship turns away.
The fishing boat grows smaller behind us, and the jet returns. It flies low over the little boat. Fire shoots from the jet, there is a huge explosion, and the boat is gone. I watch the pile of drifting wood where it had been. The jet streaks away. My heart beats in my chest like a drum. The nice woman in the white dress is back, and she takes me inside the ship.
“How old were you when this happened?”
I am brought back to 2125. To my grandson. To my story. “I was eight when we were rescued by the Americans.”
He sits at the table eating eggs and bacon. He has a full head of black hair, as much as I ever had, but his is curly. Do his cheekbones resemble mine? He has an oval face with an attractive chin like so many in our family. Sadly, I see few signs of his grandmother in him, except for a softness around his mouth and fullness to his lips. His arms are tanned and muscular, more than I’d expect for a fourteen-year-old boy, like he spends time outdoors doing heavy labor.
“And the big man? Who was he?” His eyes are alive for the first time since he arrived near sunrise. Some of the trapped expression he wore then has disappeared. I’ll tell him stories for a while and let him decide when to tell me his story.
“Someone who kismet placed on that fishing boat, and then swam for safety, like me. I know he was separated from his family because he was alone. I reminded him of some-one close. I last saw him at the refugee center but never learned his name. Afterward, I never saw him again.”
“He saved your life. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be here.” A shadow passes across his face. Good. My story has become personal to him.
“We make choices that affect other people, sometimes in profound ways. Sometimes they notice, but often they never know.”
The allbook is on the end table. It feels solid. Books—such an old technology, and the antithesis of most of our tech, which now passes by voice and blinks through our AIs. I call up an old 2D photo to help me remember.
“Momma Ginger must have snapped this one a few months later in Berkeley.”
Grandson looks at it with interest. “You were a cute kid.” “Yes. It didn’t hurt my chances.” I had an angelic face, looking hopefully toward the camera in the photo, dark brown eyes framed by straight hair, pure unwrinkled skin. I sat on a playground swing. As if through a distant mirror, I see the boy separated from me by a century minus eight years.
“Is that an earliest mem’ry?”
“No. Of course, I remember my birth mother and father. I recall details of growing up in Keelung City outside Taipei. I was their only child. We’d go to the night market, with colorful stalls and people milling around and the smell of food.
Mama loved the crab soup. Baba—my dad—liked the stinky tofu.” Like a sprite floating in the air, the pungent aroma is in my nose.
“What were your parents like?”
“Baba was tall and a bit gruff. He was a research chemist and spent long hours at work. I have this memory, sitting in the kitchen, of him making me memorize the periodic table of elements, however unsuccessfully.”
Grandson snickers at this. Perhaps he relates as a young boy.
“Baba had a job with a global company and used English there, so we spoke both Mandarin and English at home. I’ve lost most of my Mandarin. Mama taught school, so she was home early every day. I remember her tucking me into bed.
”Her voice comes softly to me, singing the lullaby:
Jīntiān wǒmen chéngzhǎng zài yángguāng xià, Míngtiān wǒmen qù chuàngzào qī cǎi shìjiè. Today we grow under the sunlight, Tomorrow we will create a colorful world.
There she is again, standing next to Baba, both dim ghosts, their faces not sharp like the allbook photo of me. I have no photos of them since I brought nothing with me, and everything was lost in the rubble.
Was the memory of Mama from that last morning when they sent me off to school? It could be, because she looks worried, as they were for weeks before the attack. Everyone held their breaths, waiting, but life went on as before. My class took a field trip to the museum downtown.
Recollection of the day comes back sharp, ahead of his questions, and my heart is beating hard again. We are walking back when the bombs start to fall. The noise hurts my
ears. Everyone runs like a spooked herd of animals, and I am by myself and running. I see the ocean, and two fishermen pull people onto the boat at the pier.
He crunches on the bacon. His eyes are curious now. “How did you land in a boat alone?”
“The Chinese were bombing the town. I was afraid of the explosions and ran away from my school friends. I jumped on a fishing boat.”
“That’s terrifying.” Grandson reaches for the photo again and studies it. “So young. Pa never told me this story. Besides getting wet and cold, it sounds like that experience didn’t traumatize you too much. You were lucky to find the boat and lucky the American ship picked you up.”
The rest of the story comes brutally to mind. The part when the big man saved me, shoving me off the boat and into the water. It’s the same then as now, that in times of acute distress most worry first about survival; humanity and our fellow men are a distant abstraction. A very few big men and women don’t forget everyone else.
The man puts an adult-sized life vest on me. There are not enough vests to go around. I paddle beside him, the life vest hanging loose.
“Too big for him anyway,” yells the other man in the water as he tries to steal my vest.
My head goes under, my mouth full of salt water. I can’t breathe. I’m drowning. Then my head is up, and there’s air again. The big man hits the other man on the head and wrestles with him, both shouting. The smaller man fights desperately, pulling me under water when he pulls on the vest. More salt water.
The big man holds him down until he stops struggling. “It was never yours. It belongs to the kid,” he says then to no one.
The smaller man’s limp hand disappears under a wave. The big man tightens the vest straps on me and begins towing me away from the boat. Everyone else swimming pretends not to see anything.
“Yes, lucky.”
“Pa told me I was part Chinese and part other things, read from my DNA. He and Ma never mentioned details.”
“The details are missing because your mother leads a simple life without modern science. Your Pa followed her.”
My grandson pursues his and my roots. “What was your original family name?”
“My name was Max Yang. Max, because Western first names were already popular then. But I left Yang behind. At age eight, I became Max MacGyver. With no regrets.” It’s been my name for so long, and I’m proud of it. It’s who I made myself.
I look him in the eye now over my eggs and smile. “It’s good to see you. My only Grand. Do you mind if I call you that? It’s grand to have a grandson.”
His dark brown eyes stare back. “I’m not so sure what could be grand ‘bout me. But you can call me that. Though I’m proud to be called a MacGyver. Pa said to never be ashamed of your name.”
“That’s a fact.” However, he doesn’t know how some people resented that association. He’ll learn about that history in due time.
“Shall I call you Grandpa?”
“Let’s go with Grandfather. Then we’ll both be grand.” I prefer to leave that ‘Pa’ in the Piney Woods, or in whatever century that it belongs. I like the grand and proper. So one should live one’s life.
The robot comes from the kitchen with a tray of drinks. Robert’s oval head swivels toward Grand, the eyebrows raised in inquiry mode. “Coffee, tea, cappuccino, or salakorange juice, young sir?”
Grand seems confused, and I help him out. “Salakorange juice is from a bioengineered fruit, popular these days.”
“Salakorange juice, please. And a glass of water.”
Grand finishes breakfast before anything to drink arrives. He likely hasn’t eaten since before stepping on the train. Robert sets down Grand’s two drinks and then serves me my usual cappuccino. I begin to eat the eggs and toast on my plate. Robert moves to stand at attention near the wall. Grand tastes the juice. His eyes light up with surprise, and he sips again.
How sheltered is his life there, deep in the woods in East Texas? And why does he choose to leave now? “Did you come here to wish me a happy birthday? That was last month.”
“I heard that you turned one hundred, but no, that ain’t the reason. But happy birthday, Grandfather.”
I learned to fish a long time ago in Yosemite, and now I dangle a line to find what he is hungry for, and to put together what he knows. “So, why the sudden mysterious message? I didn’t know that you had my contact ID.”
“I’m pretty good at figurin’ out ‘lectronic stuff. I got it from Pa’s contacts.”
The robot’s lenses move back and forth between us. Robert is recording all this.
Grand cradles the juice glass and bites his lip. Was he going to tell me anything? I eat the eggs and wait.
“It was disheartenin’ living there. I had some ideas about how to make life a bit easier, but they wouldn’t listen. Not much patience with any new idea. I didn’t like everyone telling me what to do. Everyone was repeatin’ the same things that the Commune leadership said.”
“So you got fed up, and decided to leave?”
Grand’s face hardens. The trapped expression returns. “I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Understandable. Well, glad to have you here.” It has been too many years since Grand and his father, Wyatt, last visited. How did I allow that to happen in the family? The hurricane that pummeled the Commune kept them busy with cleanup. That was followed a year later by the fire, and further rebuilding. They weren’t encouraging visitors.
But the real reason was because Lily, Grand’s mother, wanted to forget the real world, to keep him a child, to shield him from the truth. Still, I should have pushed more to see him, and his appearance today makes for both joy and regret. “It seems you had no trouble traveling here.”
“I stole a com unit to message you first. Thanks for sending the money, pass, and train ticket. I put ‘em in the com unit. A big robot stopped me at the Commune’s south gate, but it let me by when I showed the pass. I got to the train station on foot, a good hike. I figured out how to hop on the right train. It was a long trip. And the robot here met me with the autocar at the station.”
“Very enterprising.”
At the word “stole,” Robert’s lenses flick back and forth again, and a metal eyebrow rises toward me. “Sir, perhaps the boy’s parents should be informed of his whereabouts?”
“The young man is fourteen. I can decide when to tell them. There’re no reasons under the law to report anything, correct?” I don’t disguise a glare. Robert has been more presumptuous since the latest software update. But the robot nods yes and stands against the wall.
Grand leans closer at the bot’s question, making his rumpled clothes and dirty face obvious. He traveled all night, no doubt with only catnaps on the train.
“Grand, I’m sure you’d like to shower and change into clean clothes. Then we can talk more. I’ll sit here and enjoy my cappuccino.” He smiles gratefully, and Robert leads him to the guest suite and bathroom.
The robot returns.
“Robert, did the new clothing we ordered for Grand arrive? It looks like we guessed his size about right.”
“Sir, the drone will deliver them in seven minutes. I will go outside now to await the landing.”
“Thank you, Robert.” I look out the window and sip. Robert walks into view outside, and soon a delivery drone is visible against the blue sky, its black shape gliding like a raven.
It approaches and settles on the lawn.
The ocean sparkles in the distance, too far away to hear. It will be a good day for a stroll. While we walk, I need to figure out what he wants to do next. But first, I must learn what he already knows. Given all that has happened these last years, maybe they’ve kept him more in the dark than I imagined possible.
Now that he is here, the task feels paralyzing. Once I discover how much of the family story he’s missing, I’ll have to disclose some parts. I’ve long contemplated this conversation, both wishing for and dreading it.
My hand quivers around my cup. There’s a bitterness in my throat, not from my drink but rising from my very soul—an angst from holding these secrets inside. What should I share? What dark secrets should be left buried for his own good?
We’ll start the story from the beginning. I’ll call it a hundred-year story. The story of the MacGyver family.
Gary F. Bengier is a writer, philosopher, and technologist with a deep interest in how technology and human experience intersect. After a notable career in Silicon Valley, including his role as eBay’s
Journey to 2125: One Century, One Family, Rising to Challenges by Gary F. Bengier is available on Amazon and everywhere books are sold. You can also follow Gary on Facebook @garybengierauthor, Good Reads @Gary_F_Bengier and Twitter (X): @GaryFBengier or by visiting his website: GaryfBengier.com/journey-to-2125/
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