Morty Smith knocked hesitantly at the door to the garage.

"Rick, are you in here? Hello?"

The crack at the bottom of the door was dark and there were none of the normal drilling and welding sounds that accompanied his mad scientist grandpa's tinkering. But where else could Rick Sanchez be? He couldn't be doing business in an alternate dimension because Morty had found the portal gun abandoned on the coffee room table. And Morty had already searched the rest of the house.

Morty cracked open the door, casting a sheet of light on the floor.

"I have a big science test coming up and I was wondering if you could help me study or put some kind of chip in my brain ..." Morty trailed off as he saw Rick sprawled on the floor, his gangly limbs curled in like a dead spider. Nothing to be overly concerned about, as Morty was used to seeing Rick passed out in all kinds of places: the couch, the kitchen table, even once with the refrigerator propped open and a jug of milk soaking into his hair. Surrounding Rick's prone body were piles of mysterious golden eggs.

The boy was about to leave and try again later when his eye caught the sheen of something slickly organic curled in Rick's right hand. Although he was no expert in alien technology, Morty had been in enough firefights to recognize that the device Rick was holding could only be a gun.

"Oh my god. Rick!" Morty dashed to Rick's side, knocking apart the egg piles.

"Rick, please, wake up," Morty babbled as he shook Rick's shoulder. "You can't be dead; what about all the adventures we haven't had yet? You w-were going to take me to a strip club for my birthday! And you were gonna teach Summer how to drive the spaceship and put nanobots in Jerry's underwear and-and what about Mom?" sniffed Morty. "You're gonna make her, make her cry," The boy wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "Please, Rick, we just got started-"

Slap!

Morty's head turned 90 degrees from Rick's blow. Besides him, Rick propped himself upright.

"You woke me up from my dream," Rick groaned.

"Rick, please, don't scare me like that—"

"I was a pirate!" interrupted Rick in a chipper tone. "A space p-pirate! And I had an awesome 'paceship and went on adven'urs and found lots of tweasure! And then, and then I made cool nin'ventions to help people but then some ugly aliens got j-jealous and put me in space jail to make me m-make stuff for them. And I-I-I was gonna break out until you w-woke me up," Rick stuttered, rather more than usual. Spit sprayed from his lips from the sheer effort of speaking.

"A-are you feeling okay, Rick?"

"Who are you? How did you know my name was Rick?" The way he lisped the R's made his name sound like "Wick."

"I'm Morty, you know, your grandson?"

"Weird. How old are you?"

"Uh, f-fourteen?"

"I'm six and a half years old," said Rick, holding up the appropriate amount of fingers.

"Okay Rick, stop pulling my leg, you're really f-freaking me out here."

"I like you! You talk funny like I do. Do you wanna be my friend?" Before Morty could get in another word, Rick grabbed him into a hug. "None of the other kids l-like me and I don't like them too 'cause they keep muh-muh-messing up my stuff. When you're big, you get to do whatever you want and nobody can mess with you-" Rick babbled, spraying saliva into Morty's ear. Morty pulled away from the ear irrigation, his hand incidentally grasping a paper booklet that had been buried underneath the golden eggs. The back was covered in Rick's scrawled handwriting. Perhaps he had left an explanation for his temporary inanity. Maybe he was testing a new kind of drug?

The booklet was written in a variety of alien languages that Morty couldn't read. From the diagrams, it seemed to be instructions on how to operate the gun. Overlaying the alien script were paragraphs that Rick had written. The first part appeared to be a cramped explanation of how the gun worked, featuring technical terms such as "synaptic disruption" and "hippocampus scrambling". The next part was a translation of the instructions into plain English:

Hadronian Memory Extraction Gun

1. Set time period for memory extraction.

2. Place barrel in ear.

3. Pull trigger.

4. Extract memory egg from gun's sphincter.

Below the steps was a final instruction, written in all-caps: "IF SAD, SHOOT SELF."

"Rick, what's going on? Why did you write this?" asked Morty, holding the booklet up to Rick's face.

"I dunno," said Rick, averting his eyes as if the booklet was full of sin.

"C'mon Rick, don't you at least recognize your own handwriting?"

"No!" Rick exploded. "I can't read!" As quickly as his temper flared, it burnt out, leaving only sad ashes. "Words are dumb. Th-th-they move around too much. Who needs 'em?" A glimmer of tears gathered in the folds of his crow's feet.

Morty's stomach felt hollow, as if the floor had vanished and he was freefalling in the vacuum of space. In Rick's glassy eyes were reflected a boy who, no matter how hard he struggled, was always two laps behind his peers. A boy who sat alone at lunch and stretched out his sandwich to fill the space between one bell and another. Morty pulled Rick into a tight hug, crushing the booklet against his labcoat-ed back.

"Don't cry, Rick. I-I shouldn't have put you on the spot, pop quizzes suck. Hey, I'll be your friend, all right? So you never have to feel alone." Rick sniffed.

"Really?"

"Yeah, Rick and Morty, forever and ever, a hundred years. I'll take care of you, Rick, I'm never gonna leave you behind." Morty patted Rick's head, smoothing the wild hair over his bald spot.

"Okay."

Just then, Rick's stomach growled. "I'm hungry."

"Well, you did miss Mom's enchiladas." Old Rick had loved Beth's cooking, and never missed an opportunity to tell her how much it reminded him of his dead wife. Morty wasn't quite sure how to tell his mother that her father had intentionally regressed himself to childhood, though.

"Stay here, Rick, I'll get you-"

"Time to get my eat on!" Rick stood up abruptly, breaking out of Morty's hug. He stumbled through the garage door and into the main house.

"Wait, Rick!" Morty followed his grandpa into the kitchen. Rick was loudly flinging open the cupboards. After pawing through their contents, Rick pulled out a box of "Interracial Sandwich Cookies" in triumph.

"I knew it! The good stuff is always on the top shelf." Rick ripped apart the packaging and shoveled the cookies into his mouth .

"Hey, Rick, stop it, you can't eat all those cookies!" Morty jumped up, trying to grab the box out of Rick's hand, but Rick's height made it trivial for him to keep it away.

"Yes I can. I'm big and you're little, so you can't tell me what to do!" A shower of partially-chewed cookie crumbs rained down on Morty.

"Uhrg, gross, you're making a mess." In response, Rick stuck his tongue out at Morty, revealing a wad of chewed cookie.

"Dad, is that you?" said Beth, poking her head into the kitchen. "You missed dinner, so I kept a plate for you in the oven." At the sight of his daughter, Rick shoved the cookie box into Morty's hands.

"He did it!" said Rick, pointing at Morty.

"Did what?"

"He ate the cookies!" said Rick, brushing the crumbs off his mouth.

"Oh, Dad, I can just run down to the store any time to buy more boxes."

"Yay! Thanks, Mom." said Rick.

"Mom?" Beth raised an eyebrow. "Rick, did you accidentally inhale chemical fumes again? I keep saying we should install a vent if you're going to use organic solvents in the basement."

"Open your eyes, Beth," said Jerry, joining them in the kitchen. "Your beloved Dad is clearly 'tripping balls' on illegal drugs." At the sight of Morty's father, Rick hid behind Morty. The idea of the tall man using a teenage boy as his shield would have been hilarious had Morty not felt the trembling in Rick's hands.

"See? Rick's clearly suffering from some kind of paranoid delusion," said Jerry. "It's like they always say: it's 'drink and smoke', not 'trip and toke'."

"Wait, is Rick making acid?" interjected Summer. "No. Way. Robbie just posted how he wanted to get inspiration for a new song; if I get him some acid, I'll be invited backstage for sure!"

"I am putting my foot down," said Jerry, stamping his foot in a literal expression of his figure of speech. "No illegal drugs in this house! We already have enough complaints from the neighbors, what with the strange lights and the loud explosions-"

"Oh, just because you never had an original idea in your life, you're going to put a lid on my dad's creativity? Do you know how many inventions-"

"And you're just conveniently ignoring the fact that he's making illegal drugs, we could get arrested and thrown in jail-"

"Psst, Rick," Summer stage-whispered at Rick. "Could you hook me up with the good stuff?"

"Just because you had one bad trip-"

"I am not letting my kids rot their brains with-"

"Shut up!" shouted Morty. The room went silent. "Rick's not on drugs. He erased his memories with-with some kind of memory erasing ray! And now he thinks he's six years old!"

"Six an' a half," pouted Rick.

The Smith-Sanchez family convened at the kitchen table, Summer and Beth on one side, Morty and Jerry on the other, and Rick at the head. They'd lured Rick out from behind Morty by giving him Jerry's tablet, and now he was happily popping virtual balloons. On the center of the table was the memory gun and several bowls full of memory eggs, piled high like a decorative centerpiece.

"I just can't believe Dad would wipe his memories," said Beth. "I thought he was having a great time living with us. We were really starting to come together as a family."

"Yeah," added Jerry, "What's he got to be stressed out about? No job, living rent-free in his daughter's house, doesn't even pick up after himself."

"I think it was a setup," said Summer. "One of Rick's enemies must have snuck up on him and extracted his memories, then planted the notes to draw us off the scent."

"No, I think if Rick's enemies caught him on Earth, they would either arrest him or kill him," said Morty.

"Maybe it was a mistake?" ventured Beth. "My dad is pretty … impulsive. Maybe he wanted to get rid of one memory and accidentally removed all of them."

"But look at how many memory eggs there are," said Morty. "There's no way he removed all those in one go. He must have shot himself over and over again." Morty looked at the last scrawled instruction on the booklet: IF SAD, SHOOT SELF. "I think he only stopped because he forgot how to read."

"Well, we can't leave him like this. Just look at him!" Summer gestured at Rick, who was now gnawing on a corner of the tablet, eyes akimbo. "He's completely senile! Do you really think this is best for him?"

Morty chose his words carefully.

"Rick is—was—a pretty smart guy. He would have known he would act this way when he lost his memories. He must have wanted to forget real badly." Morty looked down at a scorch mark on the dining room table, courtesy of one of Rick's unstable inventions. "Do you guys even have any idea what we get up to when we go on adventures?"

"High-concept sci-fi rigamarole?" said Jerry.

"We've killed people! I've killed people! My own hand pulled the trigger! Sure, the aliens were attacking us, but they were just doing their jobs. I even had to kill you guys once!" Beth, Jerry, and Summer stared at Morty uncomfortably. "Well, actually they were weird demon spirit clones, but I still get nightmares about melting your flesh off. And I haven't seen even a tenth of what Rick's seen. You know what I'm talking about, Summer. You've seen how fucked up the universe can be."

"Yeah. It's like, whenever you try to make things better, you only make things worse."

"Well, it's true that I never asked Dad what he was doing all those years he was gone. I just figured … well … he'd tell us when he was ready."

"Mom, I don't know how much attention you pay Rick, but have you noticed that he's always distracting himself? When he's not making one of his crazy machines, he's watching a stupid TV show or drinking. He's never sober, not even when he wakes up. That's-that's not how a happy person acts."

"So, you think we should leave him like this?" said Beth. "All … childlike?"

"I think we should trust that Rick wanted it like this," said Morty.

"I agree," said Jerry. "Besides, we might even like him better like this. No more wacky inventions or crazy aliens invading the house." Some loud crunching noises drew Jerry's attention to Rick. "Hey, what are you doing to my tablet!?" Rick had cracked open the case and was now ripping apart the thin electronics with his teeth. "No!" Jerry bapped Rick on the head with the broken tablet. "Bad Rick! No breaking things!"

"I just wa-wanted to see what made the balloons!"

A/N: I guess you could say Rick … burst Jerry's bubble!