Erin was waiting for me, her legs dangling off the pier. I stared at her, a thousand thoughts rattling through my head. She wasn’t how I remembered her. I almost laughed at how ridiculous the idea was. I invented her. How could she not be what I remembered? Still, she was a little taller than I’d imagined, her hair a little darker. As she smiled at me, I noticed the shadow of a scar beneath her jaw, a trace of pain I’d never wrecked upon her. She gestured for me to walk over to her and my feet gave me no choice in the matter.
“Hey,” she grinned, her hands buried inside the pockets of her grey coat. I didn’t remember the sea breeze of Whitstable being quite so biting as a child. “It’s good to see you again.”
“You too.”
The words fell clumsily from my mouth. Then again, I struggled to imagine what else I could have said. Now that I was standing in front of her, could see her, could even reach out and touch her, every obvious thing I wanted to say melted away. Imagine how rude it would have been if I had blurted out that she wasn’t real. I couldn’t say that to her face. It crossed my mind that I was stuck here, as flexible as a brick wall. Erin and I were going to spend an hour together and I’d leave just as clueless as I started, all because of a sense of manners that had been hammered in from thousands of hours of life.
Erin giggled. I’d never imagined her giggling before and it sounded so foreign. “I reckon if I don’t say anything, we could go years without you ever bringing it up. Wouldn’t that be funny?”
Reaching up, her fingers wrapped around my hand, pulling me down to join her on the pier. Her skin was warm. It shouldn’t have been anything else, yet the warmth struck me as hard as any palm across the face. Compliant, I sat next to her, feeling her shoulder against mine, too stunned to say anything. Erin was here, my hand in hers, a figment of my imagination made flesh.
“I’m not real. But I’m sure you already knew that,” she said as we both stared out at the sea. The sunlight danced in between the waves, weaving between each rolling crest. “But then again, neither are you. So, I think we’re okay.”
Her words burrowed into my ears, almost leisurely sinking into the churning mess of my brain. They lounged there, waiting patiently for my comprehension to catch up. The penny dropped. There was no internal explosion. My stomach didn’t lunge down to my knees and my heart didn’t skip a beat. Erin said I wasn’t real and the idea wrapped itself around me with all the intimidation of a warm, woollen blanket. Looking at Erin, her eyes remained set on the sea, following a little boat vainly attempting to escape the wind’s thumb.
“So, I’m not real, huh?” I said it in such a way that it could still have been a joke. I could have walked away, left the detonator behind, and carried on with my life. “What am I then?”
“A trap person, like me. Well, we’re proof of concept anyway.”
Erin finally looked at me then, her eyes so round and bright. They kept me tethered on the pier, in windy Whitstable, my legs swinging just above the tides. If she wasn’t there with me, if her hand wasn’t wrapped around mine, I think I would have plunged straight into the water. Imagining reaching this conclusion on my own, in a darkened living room, I could see the trail of destructive steps that would have been mapped out for me. Alcohol and dark rooms where everything stank, broken bottles and jagged shards of glass chewing into flesh, the feral paranoia of madness, and then the death rattle of a bottle in a bathroom. Erin was saving me from all that. Not once did I think she was wrong. The only certain thing in my life now was that Erin didn’t exist. She was a figment of my imagination and now she was holding my hand. If she wasn’t real, then neither was I.
“So, who created us?”
“Oh, come on, you’re a clever boy,” Erin smiled, nudging me with her shoulder. The weight of it felt so real. “Didn’t you find it odd how Rebecca could read you like a book? Always knew what you were going to say? That’s how I first figured it out, anyway. I think we’re her Mona Lisa. Trap people, the perfect defence against piracy and corporate espionage. There’s a few kinks, though. I’ve found half a dozen issues with it. I think in the real world, she hasn’t gone public yet. Not that we can ever really know, I guess. I just have this feeling that no one knows about us. We’re a problem she’s working through. But she’ll figure it out. Rebecca’s a smart gal.” Erin sniggered at that. “What a narcissist. Having her own trap person call her that!”
So, I was an idea and not even a completed one at that. Existing inside Becks’s head, slowly being fine-tuned for a specific tool, I was only another invention for her to engineer. My hands didn’t shake. I wanted to be angry; I wanted to rage at the world, stand at the edge of the pier and scream into the sea. I wanted every ounce of fury that my life deserved, but the truth was I simply didn’t feel anything. In my head, I could see Becks sitting at a café, thinking this all through. Maybe it was too messy for her to imagine me breaking down. She had never been good with emotions. Or perhaps a breakdown simply wasn’t conducive to her experiments. Looking back to the beach, I tried to pick out a nice collection of rocks and pebbles, an opportunity to fill my pockets and walk out into the waves. I wondered if I even could.
“Thank you for telling me,” I said. “I mean that. It was better to hear this from you. I can only imagine how shitty it must have been to you, realising all this on your own.”
“Shitty?” Erin looked at me, eyebrows disappearing beneath her dark fringe.
“We’re not real,” I said, gesturing to the world around us. The boats still struggled in the breeze and the sleepy English town rumbled on behind us. “None of this is real. That can’t have been fun to realise.”
“Steve,” Erin said, squeezing my hand. I couldn’t escape the idea that she looked like a disappointed parent. “We’re a few years away from creating a simulation of the universe. And if we can build the simulation, so can the simulation, and the simulation’s simulations. It’s simulations all the way down. And if there are a million simulations and one real universe, then what’s the chances you’re in the real one. Or,” she carried on, just as my lips parted. “maybe it’s impossible to simulate this crazy, beautiful thing. It was designed by a god. A god who is all powerful and who is all knowing. A god who knows exactly what you will always do. A god that can see your entire life, and therefore it is already set in stone.”
“That’s just … you’re just…”
“Or probably,” she continued. “There is no god. There are no simulations. There is only one reality. And what do we know about that? That spacetime is plotted, that everything which has happened is happening and will always happen.”
I sat there, letting her words buffet me like the wind. “What’s your point? That everything is fake? It doesn’t change that we’re not real. That we’re just a game inside someone’s head.”
“I’m saying, why bother worrying? Who cares if this is real or not, as long as it feels real,” Erin squeezed my hand, her skin against mine. It still felt so warm. “I feel real to you. This all feels so real. So, I don’t care if I live inside Rebecca’s head. It’s no different than any other possible reality really. All I can do is live my life. Have fun. Laugh. Cry. Send a postcard to an old boyfriend because I felt lonely. All we can do is live, and that meant seeing you. Meeting you, I guess. Properly anyway.”
“So, what. We just act like this hasn’t happened? Live long and happy lives together?”
Erin laughed. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. All I’m asking for is a coffee. Let’s see if we really click, handsome.”
Looking out to sea, I didn’t see the water. Instead, I thought back to sitting in a café, being told about trap people for the first time. The smell of the eggs benedict came to my nostrils. Or, feeling the sand beneath my toes, running freely, laughing, thrilled to reach the sea before my parents could stop me as a child in Whitstable so many years ago. Mostly, I thought about Erin’s hand in mine, so warm and soft to the tou
ch. It all felt so real. Memories of a life I had enjoyed living. I struggled, stumbling over some crumbling, mental wall, at the idea that they no longer mattered because they weren’t so real. “I think I can do a coffee. But … I’m not sure I think like you.”
“We’ll take it one step at a time,” Erin said, beaming. She tugged me to my feet, leading me off the pier and toward some coffee house she had spotted.
Out at sea, the little boat finally caught the breeze just right and began to tack, escaping the wind.
The Fisher by Melanie Harding-Shaw
It was Wednesday and a man was standing on a small rock jutting out of the ocean a few metres from the beach in Oriental Bay. He had a fishing rod in his hands and an old paint bucket by his side for when his luck found him. He was wearing a tatty blue and purple jacket that looked like it wouldn’t keep the water out at all.
*
Neil disguised himself in his wife’s old jacket and came down to the beach to fish one day every second month. His wife thought he was at work and his workmates thought he was at home. The stresses of both were lost in the noise of the waves crashing and the anticipation of success. At the end of the day, he would take his catch to a local homeless shelter, change back into his suit and go home for dinner.
His wife was grateful that he came home early every once in a while. They were more like flatmates than husband and wife these days. She would try not to start up old arguments that day, although her mind couldn’t help but save them up for the next. Maybe this was the Wednesday she would bring up having children again. Surely a child would close the gap that had grown between them.
In two months’ time, his wife would go for a walk along the beach and see him standing on a rock fishing. She would feel betrayed, but at least they would have something new to talk about.
*
Jack lost his job three months ago, right around the time his fourth child was born. He’d suffered a brain injury at work and never gone back. His jacket came from the free bin outside a thrift store and his hands ached from the cold. He walked an hour to the beach to fish every day. His wife was breastfeeding and needed the protein. He’d heard fish oil could help with depression. Sometimes he thought if he ate fish one more time he would scream.
Each night as he walked up to his front door, he wondered if his family would still be there to greet him. His wife was exhausted and kept asking him to stay home and help. She glanced sideways at Jack as they sat on the couch watching TV, but only when she thought he wouldn’t notice. She wondered if he would ever be the man he used to be.
That Wednesday, she took the kids down to the beach to see him. They dug for pipis in the sand and pestered their dad to sing. She rolled her sweatpants up and waded to his rock in the ocean to take his hand.
“Come on. Let’s go home,” she said.
*
Steve’s Grandmother taught him about kai moana, the foods from the sea, when he was a little boy. Her tangi was two weeks ago. He had not been home for years and he cried almost as much for the memories he had lost as for her death.
He’d called in sick from his city job to stand on that rock and fish. It was a different ocean to the one at home, but if he closed his eyes the sounds of the waves and gulls calling started to restore his memories. He hadn’t worn the jacket in ten years. Even all these years later it still smelled of teenage angst. Its scent mixed with the smells of bait and seaweed to make him feel slightly ill. That brought memories back too.
His boyfriend was reading a book further up the beach, wrapped in the red picnic blanket they always carried in the boot of their car. When Steve grew tired of standing on the rock, he waded back to shore and sat with him. He told him about the fragments of his childhood on a wild coastline that had returned to him, and his boyfriend added his own. They had never realised they had this in common.
Two years later, Steve would propose at that same spot and six months after that they would exchange vows and rings with the sea breeze blowing around them. The rock sticking out of the ocean was just big enough for two men to stand with arms wrapped around each other, smiling into the wide-angle lens that would capture all 180 degrees of memory-restoring ocean.
*
Poseidon was far from home and searching for his lost trident. He was hoping if he stood out of the water in disguise that Tangaroa would not notice his encroachment in this ocean. Who would think a God would wear such a tatty jacket?
He had followed the trail of earthquakes up New Zealand from Christchurch, through to Hurunui and Kaikōura. Now he stood on a rock in Wellington harbour hoping he could get the trident back before the next earthquake struck. He wasn’t against earthquakes generally, unless someone made them happen with his stolen property. He didn’t know who had stolen the trident. It could be Tangaroa for all he knew, but he hoped it wasn’t. That would be awkward.
As he stood there fishing, the rod bent and he started reeling in the line. His muscles strained and his eyes narrowed as he realised whoever was holding the trident might be as strong as he was. He’d been reeling for 10 minutes when he felt a tremor travel through the rock underneath him. He looked across the harbour just as the pier in the main business district crumbled into the ocean.
“Fuck,” he said, and started reeling faster. The water around him receded out into Cook Strait, leaving him stranded on a rock surrounded by sand. He could feel the ocean preparing to lever itself up to flood the city quays lined with high-rise buildings. A tsunami-warning siren wailed in the distance.
He sighed in frustration. He may as well make the most of it though. He fashioned himself a surfboard from the sands around him, melding it into golden glass. Then he rode the 20-foot waves into the city as if it had been his idea all along.
*
Kate lies on a smooth hard surface. The man, the fishing rod and the bucket aren’t even real. They are just a virtual construct created for a woman who yearns for the days when the oceans were full of life; days she hadn’t been alive to see.
Does the jacket have special meaning to her? Perhaps it came from researching her family history. Or perhaps it was just made up by the author of the construct to give authenticity to an environment he had never experienced. Just another line of code.
The ocean and the sky start to flicker and then disappear. Kate sits up in a room with plain white walls, ceiling, and floor and pulls her headset off.
“I wasn’t finished, I didn’t even see a fish,” she yells to the empty room. “And why the hell did you make me a man?”
Only static comes from the room’s hidden speakers. The door opens to tell her it is time to leave.
“Bloody budget VR companies,” she mutters as she returns to her apartment.
It won’t stop her coming back month after month though, spending her savings to search a virtual construct for anything that might make her life more real.
*
Jeremy lies in a hospital somewhere. The scene at the beach is part of a years-long timeline that plays through his head in the hours between when he loses consciousness and when he regains it.
He stands on the rock with his son, teaching him how to fish. It was a spur of the moment trip. He’d grabbed the jacket from a bag of old clothes they had cleared from his mother’s house after she died. He should have taken it to the dump months ago, but he couldn’t bring himself to throw it away. They only stay ten minutes before the cold gets to be too much and he piggy-backs his son to the shore.
In a few hours, he will wake in the hospital to find he has never had any children. He will stifle his great heaving sobs in his pillow until his chest aches and he is dizzy from lack of air. One of the nurses will find him sobbing and hold him tight to her, even though she knows she shouldn’t.
Their first child will be a boy. Jeremy’s mother will come to stay for three weeks when he’s born. She will snuggle the baby close under her jac
ket to protect him from the wind when they take him for his first trip to the beach.
*
It was Wednesday and a man was standing on a small rock jutting out of the ocean wearing a tatty blue and purple jacket that looked like it wouldn’t keep the water out at all.
Henrietta and the End of the Line By Andi C. Buchanan
Henrietta’s mother is an engine driver and wants her daughter to become one too, but Henrietta prefers the buffet car. She can see her future self there, all grown up in a waistcoat with her hair cropped short, smiling as she dispenses tea and spoonfuls of powdered milk. She feels at home among the plastic plates and formica tables, the thin sandwiches and the drinks in cartons. Another girl might dream of other trains with silverware and fresh white tablecloths, a meat or chicken or vegetarian option served on a china plate, but this train is not like other trains, and Henrietta doesn’t want to be anywhere else.
This evening, as the sun is swallowed by the horizon, Henrietta is helping out. It’s easier to forget what they left behind them when she has something to do, easier to not think about what might still be seeping through the night after them. She loads up the little trolley with the jug and the teapot and the collection of worn, chipped cups, and pushes it through the carriages.
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