Sean, Big Dad on Campus
Joey came down the stairs earlier than usual this morning. His curiosity was piqued by a document he had received on his phone that morning.
Sean took a sip of coffee as he watched his son’s intense focus on whatever it was. He was building a good man. He checked his smartwatch. It said traffic through Fishtown would increase his commute by five minutes this morning.
“Dad?”
“Yeah, buddy?” he set down his mug on the pad so it could wirelessly warm up again.
“Who was ‘Puke’ Peterson?”
Sean swallowed. His throat felt tight. That name felt ancient, from a very different period of his life. That name had no place here, in his clean home.
“I don’t know who that is,” Sean lied, hoping to dismiss the whole thing quickly before getting his son ready for school.
“And did you really do a kegstand on the Rocky steps?”
The kitchen became absolutely silent. The air conditioning seemed to run overtime. Sean felt his blood run cold. He leaned back in his chair, causing it to groan.
“Where did you hear that?” he gasped.
“In this email,” he turned his phone to show the text. “It says it’s from Uncle Rob. From the past.”
Sean quickly scrolled through it. The email seemed to include a grainy picture of himself when he was in college. His hair was longer and he still had that tattoo on his arm before it was painfully removed.
Joey, I need to tell you a story when your dad was cooler, before he got busy with mortgages and commodity markets. He had a close friend named Puke Peterson. See, the Eagles had just won the Super Bowl and Puke bet him that he couldn’t finish a keg single-handedly. By this point we were already out on the streets celebrating. Your dad, the man of the people, had no choice but to accept...
The email continued, going into way too much detail for a child to know. His heart hammered in his chest as he saw the continued details that Rob wrote out. He nervously began tapping his fingers against the coffee mug.
“That’s just spam, Joey. Don’t think it’s real.”
“But the email definitely comes from Uncle Rob. See it has the verified badge. My digital literacy class says that is how you know it’s safe.”
Of course, Sean thought. I can’t believe Rob did this.
“Look, I did some dumb stuff in college,” he stammered quickly. “Anyway, the school bus is going to be here soon. Go back upstairs and get dressed. Make sure your homework is done.”
Joey could sense his father was acting a bit unusual and put his phone down on the table.
“Okay. But did you win the bet?”
“Go!” Sean said, his voice a bit too loud.
Joey flinched and ran upstairs.
Sean clenched his fist and criticized himself. He hadn’t meant to yell like that.
He moved over to the counter and leaned over it. All those memories of college came flooding back. Of Peterson. And the Rocky steps. He was a different person back then. He had changed a lot. He had pushed all of that away. He had a family now.
Tortellini’s, Northern Liberties, 2025
Sean was busy chatting with all the friends who had come to see him. The back room of the Italian restaurant was full of blue balloons and boxes of diapers.
Rob was sitting in the corner, at a table by himself. His face was buried in a laptop, as it usually was.
“So, Rob, you saw that sign at the front? Are you going to write an email to the baby? We’ll probably give him access in a few years so he can read it.”
Rob turned and was in the middle of eating a mini-quiche. He swallowed it hastily and rubbed the crumbs away from his face.
“What am I supposed to say to him? I don’t even know him! He hasn’t been born yet, hence why we’re all here!”
“I don’t know. Just something nice.”
Rob was always making things difficult. Sean didn’t know why. Was he trying to seem smarter than everyone else?
“Okay. Dear Joey. I hope you have your mother’s eyes and your father’s... I dunno. Love of doing calculus. That doesn’t really seem too emotional.”
“That’s the point,” Sean chuckled. “Just try to be sentimental for once.”
“Sentiment is so ephemeral,” Rob said as he continued to type on the keyboard. “I don’t want to whitewash anything. I’m going to give him the honest truth.”
“What are you talking about now?”
“I’m going to give him a real legacy. I’m spinning up a perpetual software container. It’ll run autonomously. The host can deploy it on their systems and it’ll run forever. Patches and power will be handled.”
“Forever?” Sean was half-listening as his wife was trying to get his attention. “What is it going to do?”
“This is a self-executing script that is set up to activate in like ten years. I’m going to pass along all your embarrassing stories. One piece at a time. One email at a time. You were a legend. Now that you’re turning into a mature guy... well it’d suck for that to be lost forever.”
Sean clapped Rob on the shoulder and laughed. Rob always built up these elaborate jokes. He had a rare habit of speaking sarcastically while coming across totally honest.
Then he walked over to his wife and another conversation. He forgot the script entirely.
Until now.
The joke wasn’t funny anymore. It was a bomb set on a long-enough timer he’d forgot all about it. But now it had just blown up. If this was just the first day, he worried what other kinds of stories would be revealed next.
He reached down for his watch. He was so nervous his skin had turned clammy. He stabbed his finger against the watch, pulling up Rob’s contact card. The picture, with his grinning beard, now seemed to be mocking him.
Sean tapped it, initiating a call.
Rob’s face flickered to life on the small screen. He blinked a few times and rubbed his eyes.
“Hey, you woke me up!” he accused.
“You wrote a program to send emails to my child,” Sean snapped, saying each word sharply.
Rob blinked a few more times as he searched his memory. Then an incredulous smile started spreading across his face.
“You’re not joking?” Rob said enthusiastically. “I’m surprised it actually works. The original host got bought up and split up half a dozen times since then. I guess I’m a better engineer than I thought.”
“It did work and it did send an email to my son. He asked me about Puke Peterson and a kegstand on the Rocky steps.”
“Yeah that was a good night.”
“Shut it down, Rob. Now.”
“You’re really serious?” the humor disappeared from his face. “The first email went out?”
“Yes I’m serious. He read me the email at the breakfast table! What the hell were you thinking?”
“I thought it was a hilarious idea. Don’t moan. This was my crazy project from a decade ago. You probably thought it was funny too. Let me see what I can do.”
“Don’t see. Do. You built it. Just find the off switch and flip it.”
Rob grabbed his laptop and started typing. His expression went from focused to grim.
“Sean, this is actually more complicated than I thought. It’s a scheduled task linked to a Google calendar. The container is fully autonomous. It is self-healing. It’s running on a decentralized cloud. I don’t even know who the hosting provider is anymore. I definitely don’t know what password to use. The container was set to migrate to the cheapest cloud provider each day.”
“I don’t care about the tech,” Sean was now gripping the marble countertop tightly. “I am not a ‘computer person’.”
“Don’t say that,” Rob said with a bruised pride. “That’s not a thing anymore. I just need to talk to the host support. The container is still active so they must know how to turn it off.”
“Good. Then do that.”
A soft chime then came out of Joey’s phone. Like hearing a ghost, Sean turned around slowly. He took a delicate step towards the device.
A new notification appeared. He swiped his finger down on the screen to see the preview.
Inbox: (Rob) That time your dad tried to dye the Schuylkill River green
Sean turned the phone off and pocketed it before heading to work.
As he sat in his office, bouncing between meetings, he could feel the phone burning in his pocket. Memories continued to flood back of rolling a five-gallon barrel of industrial-grade green dye to the edge of the river.
On his commute back, as the bus bounced along the poorly maintained streets, his mind continued racing. He thought of how he would explain himself to Joey. I was young. I made mistakes. But I’m a grown up now. Nothing convinced even himself.
Joey was home playing a game on the family computer, a relic these days but a necessary tool for the large Steam library that had been built up over the years.
When Sean came in, he saw another window hiding in the corner. An email client.
Then Sean got closer to the monitor and realized it wasn’t a game at all. It was a 3D environment of Penn State, a wireframe of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a top-down satellite map of the city.
“Joey, shut that down,” he ordered calmly. “I need to talk to you about those emails.”
“Me too!” There was a surprising excitement in his eyes, as he turned around in the gaming chair. “I did some searching. That keg must’ve weighed 165 pounds! How did you manage to carry it all the ?”
Sean paused. His rehearsed speech faded into the back of his head.
“I found this old article,” Joey continued.
He switched tabs to a website from Penn’s student paper. Students Caught Before Turning Schuylkill Green in St. Patrick’s Day Prank .
“You sprained your ankle as you were climbing down to the water intake? It says you did that to impress a girl. Was that mom?”
Sean had been dreading this all day. He loved his son and wanted to be a good role model for him. He had expected these emails to undermine his relationship. Instead, his son seemed to be diving into a deep investigation like some sort of detective.
Sean had spent the last decade with the idea that he had to be perfect. He had to be responsible and never do anything to cause his son harm.
Then before he could muster up a response, he felt his wrist buzz. He looked down at his watch to a timely message from Rob.
Finally got in touch with support. My account needed to be recreated from scratch. They don’t even know how it got so messed up.
Shutting it off now.
Sean looked up at Joey, whose face was still eager to hear the second half of the story. Killing that container wouldn’t erase the past. Those memories were always going to be thee. It would just erase that connection.
Sean typed “Wait” on the tiny smartwatch keyboard.
He paused before sending it. Then he tapped on the backspace and deleted the word.
“Let’s see what tomorrow’s story is first.”
He tapped the send button and stuck his hand in his pocket. He didn’t want any more distractions tonight.
“So, let’s talk about the Schuylkill River,” Sean grabbed a beanbag and leaned down into it, feeling his body melt. “Your Uncle Rob left out the best part...”