“Check it again Randy!” Amy demanded, her voice laced with urgency.

  “I’ve already checked it three times,” I replied, feeling a bit exasperated.

  “CHECK IT AGAIN!” she shrieked, her anxiety cutting through the early morning air.

  What she wanted me to check was the date on my phone. It read 6:03 AM, July 18th, 2003. It was the day we moved to Colorado after graduating from college. Back then, I had landed a job with a company that delivered books and magazines to supermarkets, a gig that lasted a year before I went back to school to earn my master’s degree in education. Amy didn’t work at the time because our son, Alex, was only five, and needed a stay-at-home parent.

  Alex, our little devil, suddenly chimed in, “I can’t believe we got truck-kun’ed. I mean, I’ve read about it in so many online stories, but how could it actually be real?” Alex and I are avid web novel readers, and he had even written two of his own stories, though they were transmigration and reincarnation without trucks.

  “You know what’s going on!?” Amy pleaded, turning to Alex, desperation in her eyes.

  “Yeah, when you do really good deeds in your life or have an act of heroics in your final moments, sometimes God will isekai you with a truck and either send you back in time or to a planet with magic or cultivation. Usually, you’re given some kind of gold finger. I wonder if we’ll get one,” Alex explained, his excitement barely contained.

  I looked over at Amy. She was staring into space. Mumbling “Isekai?...” She looked to be around 25 again, with her short stature, black hair, brown eyes, and fair complexion. Although I wouldn't say she had jade like skin, that is just weird.

  The same striking features that had always caught my eye. And even though she was petite, had a presence that filled any room she was in.

  “Let’s all go look in a mirror,” I suggested, needing to see for myself if we really were back in our younger bodies. We rushed to the bathroom and stared at our reflections. I was just under six feet tall, with short brown hair, hazel eyes, maybe 160 lbs, and no facial hair—exactly how I looked back in 2003. Alex was only five years old, a miniature version of me but with a hint of Amy’s Korean features. I lifted my shirt, and to my amazement, I saw that I had a six-pack again. “Oh how I have missed you, my precious abs.”

  Amy was still on edge, but Alex and I were adjusting more easily, probably because of all the stories we had read about situations just like this. We had the whole weekend to wrap our heads around this new reality since it was Friday, and my new job didn’t start until Monday.

  After a few minutes, we finally managed to calm down enough to start discussing our next steps. “First of all, we should write down any important events we remember and plan what we need to do about them. Also, Alex will need to start school in a month,” I said, trying to steer the conversation into practical territory. School started in early August in Colorado, pretty weird I know, but that is where we lived.

  Alex’s eyes widened. “Crap, I have to go through school again? At least I can improve my writing even further in this life. You guys need to buy me a laptop! I can start writing slowly now, and start releasing it in 15 years. I will have so many chapters saved up by then.” Alex smiled, while although depressed about school, he at least was happy about writing.

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  “Yes, you turned five a couple months ago, so you legally have to be in school. No problem about the laptop, but let’s focus. What are some important events in our lives that we need to change now that we know what’s coming?” I asked, looking from Alex to Amy.

  Amy looked thoughtful while Alex grabbed a pen and notebook, ready to jot down our ideas.

  I start by saying, “First, we should wait until 2008 to buy a house, because of the housing crash of 2008. Might as well buy at the lowest price possible.” Amy had to chime in, “no way do I wanna live the next 5 years listening to neighbours stomping around, we need to buy asap. Besides, after the crash, it is much harder to get a loan.” I can only nod and agree.

  “We should use all our extra money to buy Apple stocks,” Amy suggested, her voice steadying as she focused on the future. I chime in, “I agree, I think the stock prices skyrocketed after the iPhone was released, but that’s still a few years away. We have time to accumulate a lot of shares before that happens.”

  “Now, what should we do about jobs and school?” she asked, turning to me.

  “We already said Alex will start school again, but let’s aim for him to skip grades every year. Last time, he skipped third grade and graduated college in just 2.5 years. This time, let’s try to skip as many as possible and finish even earlier.” “Agreed” we all felt the same way.

  “As for me, I really don’t want to be a teacher again. I need to think about it some more. And you, Amy, you can go back to school if you want, but maybe not for an MBA this time. It didn’t really help us before, just added a ton of student loan debt that we never fully paid off. And the animal shelter job was not fun when you constantly had animals dying.”

  “I don’t want to go back to school either, but that doesn’t leave many options for jobs. We…”

  Knock Knock Knock!

  “Someone’s at the door! What do we do?” Amy exclaimed,not finishing her previous sentence, her panic returning.

  “Just calm down. I’ll answer it. We’re normal humans, remember?” I said, trying to keep things under control. “We will finish this conversation later.”

  I opened the door to find a Hispanic man in his late 20s standing there. “Hello, how can I help you?” I asked.

  “Hi, my name is Emiliano, and I’m your neighbor. I just wanted to welcome you to the Shady Acres apartments. My wife made some tamales as a housewarming gift,” he said with a warm smile.

  I smiled back, thanking him while accepting the tomales. I vaguely remembered him from our previous life. He was a good guy. We lived here for a year before buying a house and losing touch. He had a son around Alex’s age, and I didn’t want to lose touch with them again in this life since, as I just said, he was a cool guy. Friends are hard to come by, and they should be cherished.

  “I wanted to invite you to a BBQ the complex is hosting on Sunday. There’ll be free food, and you can meet your other neighbors,” Emiliano added.

  “We’ll be there,” I assured him. We exchanged a few more pleasantries before he left.

  We spent the rest of the day setting up our phone and internet. We had to use a landline, stupid 2003, for the internet. Because there was no cable internet in our area yet, only dial-up or DSL internet was available. We remembered a trick from our past lives: when you signed up for AOL you would get the first month free, then we’d call AOL every month to cancel, saying we couldn’t afford the service, and they’d give us a free month to keep us as subscribers. This trick worked for a year until we moved to a place with cable. AOL just needed to show their investors high subscriber numbers, not caring much about profitability. It was probably part of why they eventually went out of business, but for now, it was a nice hack to get free internet until we could get cable internet from Comcast.

  At night as I was gazing at Amy, filled with inconsequential thoughts, I told Alex. “Amy and I have some private things to discuss, go to your room.” After he leaves Amy asks “whats up?” I look at her lasciviously and say with my eyebrows going up and down. “We should check if everything under the hood is younger as well…”

  We spent all of Saturday running around with errands needed at a new place. Like new furniture and groceries and also a new laptop for Alex. Amy and I still had the ones we used in college. The next day, something amazing happened that would really throw our life in a specific direction...