The Fence Walker

A short story by Sarah Burt Howell

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The Fence Walker

Abby inspected the fence at dawn as a courtesy to the farmers who needed daylight to see with the old-fashioned binoculars slung around their necks. She’d looked up into the moonlit sky and seen everything she needed to see when the convoy of maroon buses had rolled into town last night. 

After the buses had parked in the sleeping town, Abby pulled on her snowsuit and Murchie drove her to the job site in the car, out past dark houses, then onto a vacant highway and over a bridge spanning an impossibly wide, dry river. When they approached the ranch, Murchie said you could tell from all the stump craters that this long driveway was once lined with magnificent trees. Back in the day. “It would have been impressive,” he said.

Then a massive log mansion came into view, and its surprising intactness startled Abby into sitting up straighter, thinking these must be dangerous people: because otherwise someone more dangerous would have stolen the timbers from their home by now. Murchie must have been struck by a similar thought because he stopped the car and said, “I’m getting a bad vibe from this place. Let’s leave. There’s a broken water desalinator in Cleveland waiting for us to fix it.”

Abby looked out the car window, craning her head to see nearly straight up into the sky where part of a cumulonimbus cloud was passing unobstructed through a vast hole in the water retention fence. The edges of the hole snapped frantically in the wind, pulling and tearing at the spider silk mesh. Fortunately, the rest of the fence was still condensing and collecting water vapor onto its filaments, sending threads of moisture down into thin tubes that were miraculously strong enough to attach the whole billowing structure to its retaining anchors and water tanks buried deep in the ground. She told Murchie, “This whole fence will fail in a week if we don’t repair it. People will die without its water. I don’t see how we can turn around.”

Murchie said okay. He waited until the sun breached the horizon, then towards the buildings. “Keep close to me. Don’t let any of these farmers touch you,” he said.   

Once Abby and Murchie stepped from the car, an old man wearing ancient denim overalls strode from a building to greet them. About a dozen men followed him, all with VR glasses perched on their heads — as was the fashion — but half of them sported the expensive type, like a high-end engineer might wear. The young farmers with the cheap glasses had the same square face and thick eyebrows as the old man, while the men with the fancy glasses were a more cosmopolitan group, and Abby caught Murchie looking with concern at their sneakers, which were far too clean for this dust-blown place.  

 The old man shook hands with Murchie, while the others nodded hello to the air two feet to the right of Abby. People were always looking to the left or right of her. 

She was used to the unfriendliness of strangers, but this group had an unusually rough edge to their curiosity. Whenever she tried to look one of them in the eye with kindness, he would squint back like she was a fancy new farm tool he wanted to own. This was a particular disappointment because Abby came to every new job with one overriding hope: to meet someone she could connect with. That was her secret reason for traveling all over the continent with Murchie and his crew as they tried to fix the world, one broken piece of industrial machinery at a time. 

 After exchanging hellos, the old man asked Abby if she was ready to walk the fence line. He gestured with an outstretched arm past the buildings to a long pasture of sage and dead grass that stretched beneath the water fence for its twenty mile length, out towards the grey-brown foothills. He acted like he expected her to follow him. “If we start now, we might finish by dark.”

“I can see everything from here,” said Abby. “I’ve already walked the fence, in my mind. You’ve got one hole, about a half-mile wide. The rest of the fence is intact, I promise.”

The old man craned his neck and raised his long binoculars skyward. He looked like an angry bug with his big lenses reflecting red from the sunrise as he worked his jaw in frustration. “We think it was sabotage,” he said quietly. “But we don’t know who, or why.” 

The men in clean sneakers traded sly looks. One of them said, “God did it. Out of spite.” He winked at Abby, but it didn’t feel friendly; it was more like he knew a dangerous secret that she would soon learn about too.

“God feels so much pity for us,” said Murchie, “he doesn’t have time for spite.”

The old man lowered his binoculars. “Suppose we don’t fix it?”

Murchie looked to Abby for an answer, so the smiling young woman in the red snowsuit squinted up at the fence with a hand to her brow like a visor. The gesture was for show; she’d seen what she needed to see. But Murchie had taught her helpful body language, and she knew that squinting into the sky would focus the men’s attention on what she said next. 

“See the ice crystals building up, up high, at about twenty-thousand feet?”

They obviously couldn’t see ice crystals with their optical binoculars, but the men nodded anyway.

“That’s the first sign of failure. It means this hole has brought large sections of your fence out of resonance. You know how it’s all vibrating up there, like tiny waves on the ocean? When the waves in one section get out of sync with the rest, it creates a power build-up. You won’t hear the explosion. Wind carries sound away up there.”

Abby looked at the men and said for emphasis, “You’ve got eighty-eight square miles of water collection fencing, so this is a relatively small gap. But it’s so out of resonance now, the whole fence will explode and fall to the ground in a week if you don’t let us fix it.” 

Now the men seemed too surprised to answer, so she added, “I could explain how to put a thing like that back into the air, but we no longer have the technology to do it.”

The old man looked deeply uncomfortable with his surprise. “Seeing as the rain hasn’t touched the ground here in a decade…” he said, trailing off; then he swiveled his head to Murchie to ask about costs, time, and materials for the repair. 

Abby looked up at the violently billowing edges of the water fence while they talked. She watched the wind blow through the gaping hole, carrying clouds of snow flurries that drifted down for a while and then evaporated far above the ground. She focused on the falling ice crystals, considered how no two were ever the same, and wondered how they kept track of each other’s designs, how they knew to stay unique. She liked the way the morning light reflected on the snow, and she zoomed in and saved the prettiest flakes to enjoy later, humming and counting facets until Murchie tapped her on the elbow. 

“What are we looking at, kid?” 

She blinked at him as she calculated, so it would look like she was making an effort. “Four hundred gallons of synthetic photovoltaic spider goo. The fix-it gang will need three days for repairs, then I’ll spend two hours testing sine waves. We can sign the contract on the bus, and you can see schematics on the big screen there.”

While the old farmer nodded and shook Murchie’s hand, the man who had winked at Abby now stepped towards her. “How about you stay here at the ranch,” he said. “We got beds.” All the men were watching her closely now, and each in his own way smiled like he wanted to grab her arm and drag her into one of the rusty buildings. 

The old man said, “Be our guest while the fence is repaired.” 

“Oh, no thanks,” Abby said. “I sleep on the bus.”

“You’ll like it here.” The young man winked again and playfully reached for Abby’s arm, but before he could touch her, he stumbled and fell backwards, like he’d been kicked by an invisible mule. 

The other young farmers quickly raised their hands and backed away from Abby then. They all flipped their VR glasses over their eyes, and made a show of checking into their game. Abby took the uptick of anger pheromones as a sign to return to the car. She stepped wide around the man who’d tried to grab her, as he lay in the dirt driveway, knees to his chest. The old man watched her go, his cheeks flushing pink under his white whiskers. 

Abby slid into the backseat of the car, then closed her eyes and calmed her jagged breath by meditating on the images of snowflakes she’d captured earlier. She was breathing slowly and softly again, with her eyes closed, when refreshingly cold air blew in as Murchie opened the car doors. The old man chose to sit beside Abby in the backseat. No one ever sat in the front passenger seat. 

Abby sensed the old man sitting next to her was staring at her now. Then he whispered to Murchie, “She asleep?”

“Yes. She rests her brain after working.” Murchie revved the hydrogen engine, warming it up. “She’ll sleep hard for a few hours after a job like this. If it had been more mentally taxing than counting ice crystals eighty miles away, we’d have to carry her to bed.”

“Does that red suit have something to do with her abilities?”

“No, she just likes to keep warm.” 

“The EMPs didn’t affect her?”

“Abby was in Alaska when the EMP blasts destroyed all the electronics in the lower forty-eight. Otherwise, that attack would have killed her. She was born with a splinter skill in numbers, then visually and wirelessly augmented as a child.”

The old man whistled softly, like a whisper of a whistle. “There isn’t enough money left in the world to pay for something like that now.”

When the car was fully powered up, Murchie drove back onto the empty highway. Abby shifted in her seat and pretended to quietly snore. 

“She been with your fix-it outfit long?”

“Fifteen years,” said Murchie. “But I’ve known her since she was a baby. Her parents both died when meds became hard to find. The mom was killed by rancid insulin, then the father died from fake antibiotics. They were Ukrainian oligarchs, they funded my research in Anchorage, but all the money in the world couldn’t get them safe meds. It’s remarkable that your ranch survived.”

“It’s not a ranch anymore,” said the farmer. “We just sell the water from that fence. When the first EMPs hit the coast cities, my youngest boy showed us how to shield our electronics. We buried a series of tractor trailer boxes twenty feet underground. Like a bunker for EMPs. We carried down every piece of electronic equipment that we could fit. We even drove a jeep down there. Our neighbors all laughed at us. We had a small ranch then. Everybody had water fences like ours. Most were bigger. Everybody laughed at us until the next round of EMPs hit the Midwest, and every water fence but ours exploded and fell to the ground. My youngest son had a chip in his head too, it turns out, and so he died in that second EMP attack. But our water fence survived because of him.”

Abby could feel the old man shift in his seat, stretching his legs. He asked Murchie, “How did you end up on the sunny side of the street?”

Murchie said, “I did my PhD on EMP-impervious tech. Built the first mobile factory unit back when the need for it was theoretical, and filled it with 3-D printers, spider goo, photovoltaics, everything you’d need to rebuild from an apocalypse. Here we are, still rebuilding.”

The old man let loose a heavy sigh. Murchie must have given him one of those looks in the rearview mirror that meant there was an innate helplessness in our species. Or maybe his look had meant that there is a mourning we will never overcome. Murchie had a repertoire of looks that could make an old man sigh.

Then Murchie slowed the car as they passed a horse and wagon clopping down the highway. Abby opened one eye to peek out the window at the skinny children in the back of the wagon, all wearing the cheapest kind of VR headsets. They laughed and clumsily swiped at the air, clearly entertained. 

The old man asked, “You ever print glasses for the game? Be like printing money.”

“That game is a crime,” said Murchie.

There was a long silence, then Murchie responded as if someone had spoken. Abby thought maybe he was getting old. “You bet, I blame myself,” he said, his voice cracking.

The old man sucked on his teeth. “I guess that girl of yours rakes it in for you though. A real golden goose.”

Murchie’s voice rose an octave then, like he was trying hard to stay polite, when he said, “Abby charges the same hourly rate as the rest of our crew, or you couldn’t afford to fix your fence. If I had to replace Abby’s processing power with conventional methods, we’d be here three weeks just taking measurements. I’m not even sure we could manage it. The systems that built your ranch, the world you grew up in — none of it exists anymore. I wouldn’t know how to put a price on what Abby does.” 

 The old farmer cleared his throat. “I get it, she’s priceless. I can see why her security detail doesn’t mess around.”

Abby had trouble understanding that last part. She didn’t have a security detail.

There was another long pause, to which Murchie responded, “Exactly. She’s family. We take care of her because we love her. That’s a great way to explain it.” 

Abby’s brain felt fuzzy and dull from this conversation, so she nestled deeper into her snowsuit and let herself drift to sleep for real.

This small town had been built in the shadow of a hillside, and the fix-it gangs’ maroon buses were parked in their usual hexagonal configuration in an abandoned parking lot, one street off Main. 

Abby followed Murchie from the car, dragging herself into the chaos of the mobile printer bus. She watched the old man ogle the electronics with the same cold desire he’d greeted her. Men and women sat at the kind of flatscreen workstations you rarely saw anymore, their serious faces aglow over the controls, their breakfast sandwiches and coffee mugs beside their keyboards. It could have been a scene from pre-blast days, except for the VR glasses perched on everyone’s heads like stylish sunglasses. 

While Murchie spread the contracts out on the flatscreen conference table, the old man was marveling at images of the hole in his fence, using his fingers to zoom into the microscopic details.

He glanced at Abby. “You took these pictures from looking up in the sky?”

Abby nodded. Despite the old man’s admiration, she stayed bent over the technical specs on the conference table, making a show of checking calculations in her head. The math was effortless, but if she didn’t make it look like work, customers questioned her accuracy.

“Time and materials confirmed,” she said in her serious voice, using a fingertip to sign the estimate. 

Then Abby let herself yawn. Her workday was done. The printer and repair gang would depart soon, and they wouldn’t need her again until resonance testing. She wandered back to the women’s bus, where half the bunks were still shuttered. In her own private space, she removed the red survival suit and slid into bed wearing just her long underwear. She pulled her privacy curtain closed against the morning light and fell asleep to the burble of a forest stream she’d saved in her memory once long ago.

Abby woke refreshed, around noon, and pulled on jeans and a sweater. Then she walked through the cabin of the bus, past a few women who were slung over easy chairs with their VR glasses over their eyes, laughing and pointing and swatting at something in the air between them. 

Years ago, her co-workers had invited her to play their VR game. She’d tried on their glasses but her augmented vision conflicted with the interface — she didn’t know what she was supposed to be seeing — and her whole world turned to static. She yanked off the glasses but the static remained, even with her eyes closed. Then a nauseating, disorienting migraine kicked in. She lay in her dark bunk for two days and promised herself that if the static and pain went away, she would never try that VR game again. These days, she suspected that she and Murchie were the only two people left on earth who didn’t spend their free time playing it. The whole world belonged to a club she couldn’t join. They’d all been invited to a party she couldn’t find. She didn’t know how to connect to people, partly because she couldn’t see their virtual reality.

But every new job was another chance for Abby to find someone to talk to. So she hopped down the bus steps into the bright day, hungry for lunch and eager to explore this dusty midwestern township. The men’s bus was parked opposite; the men liked to sit outside on folding chairs and stare into their VR glasses. There was also inevitably a three-person card game going on. And like clockwork, when the card players saw Abby step down from the women’s bus, they threw their cards onto the table and reluctantly ended their game, as if she were their special signal. There was always a vacant fourth chair at these card games, and whenever Abby walked by, the men looked at the empty chair in annoyance, sometimes speaking to it. But despite her augmented hearing, she could never make out what they said. 

Abby strolled down Main Street, looking at the old brick buildings with the oversized, painted facades. It was early afternoon, but the neon sign above the bar was lit and laughter spilled out the open door. She stopped to look inside. People sat eating and drinking at tables together, but everyone wore VR glasses and they all seemed to be laughing and pointing at their own invisible jokes. No one was chatting or interacting with each other; they were all strangely out of synch. There was no point in trying to meet anyone there. 

She paused next at the window of a hardware store displaying a dusty assortment of old and new tech: manual typewriters, a butter churn, duct tape, photovoltaic supplies, solar-powered neon lights, and the cheapest type of VR glasses. A faded handwritten sign read, “Closed Today.” She wandered into a grocery store to look at expired food cans and wooden boxes of limp produce. She passed a few boarded-up shops, then reached the residential part of Main Street, where people wearing VR glasses sat in lawn chairs in front of unpainted houses. 

Abby crossed the street with her head down, kicking up dust with her sneakers. When she reached the opposite sidewalk though, she perked up at the smell of food coming from a tidy little building with a tasteful sign over its door: “The Fortunate Traveller.”

 Abby stepped closer towards the aroma of foods from her childhood, savoring memories of restaurants long gone. Maybe her parents really were billionaires, or maybe amazing food was part of everyone’s life back then. She hadn’t smelled food like that since she was seven, and she suddenly missed her parents with a sadness that came from her gut. 

A woman emerged from the restaurant door, squinting at the afternoon sun. She asked Abby in a friendly way, “Care to see a menu?”

“You’re still serving lunch?”  

The hostess held out a large menu with a geometric patten around its edge. “For you, my dear, I have this.” Briefly, Abby’s attention was lost in the menu’s maze-like design. She stumbled, lightheaded. 

Then Abby was sitting in the foyer without remembering walking inside. The hostess was offering her a glass of water. “You nearly fainted,” she said.

A tasseled rope now separated Abby from a room full of happy diners. None of them wore VR glasses, not even perched on their heads like sunglasses. The soft lighting overwhelmed her with nostalgia. 

Like a scene from days gone by, people gazed at each other across their tables, gesturing in synch with their speech, not grabbing at imaginary objects. 

Abby looked at the menu. Both sides were covered with faces the size of postage stamps. She saw no mention of food.

“See anyone you like?” asked the hostess. She peered over Abby’s shoulder at the menu of faces. “We think food tastes better if you don’t eat alone.” 

Abby flushed. “I can hire someone to sit and eat with me?”

The hostess said, “In the main dining room, yes. But I sense that a personal connection is more important to you than food. I recommend you dine in one of our private rooms, where you can be more intimate.”

Abby was sure she’d blushed. 

The hostess said, “Do you know much about resonance? That’s our business model.”

Abby knew plenty about resonance. She bent her head over the menu and considered the faces. 

“See if there’s someone who resonates with you. Any of these lovely women or men would be delighted to join you for a meal in a private room. I’ll be right back.” She went to the hostess station to answer the phone.

Left alone with the menu of faces, Abby’s interest grew. She wondered if this was a brothel. Not that she would consider sex with a stranger — if that’s what the hostess had meant by intimate — but wasn’t everybody a stranger at some point, really? And some of these faces looked nice. Several women looked like they could be her friends: soft, warm, and adventuresome. Abby had slept with a few of the women on the bus, but she was more curious about being with a man. She’d been afraid to go near the men on the bus because they kept their distance and gave her prickly looks. Their skin looked rough, and they watched her without smiling. Only Murchie ever smiled at her, and he was like a dad to her, so he didn’t count. It was impossible not to wonder what sex with a man would be like whenever she saw one who didn’t look prickly or stern.

So she skipped over the photos of the women, and ignored the men with beards. But in the upper corner of the front page, a clean-shaven young man about her same age smiled out of his photo at her. No matter how she held the page, his eyes found hers and sparkled. 

The hostess returned. “Decided?”

“A private room with him.” She pointed to the clean-looking, smiling man.

“Excellent choice,” said the hostess. “This way, please.”

They walked down a hall of closed white doors. The hostess stopped midway down the corridor and knocked. Then she smiled kindly at Abby as she swung open the door and stepped back. The young man from the photo was seated at a table across from an empty chair. 

“Abby, this is Josh. He’ll be joining you for your meal today.”

Abby took a few small steps into the room.

“Your waiter will be with you shortly. In the meantime, please enjoy our chef’s selection of appetizers.” The hostess closed the door and was gone.

 Abby stared at the table laid with shrimp cocktail, sushi, and duck confit. There was sparkling water, red wine, green salad, beet salad, six kinds of cheeses, a tureen of soup, five kinds of bread, wonderful mood lighting, an overstuffed couch in the corner, and the young man from the menu who smelled lightly of aftershave. He stood from his chair and swallowed a bite of food before trying to speak. 

“Hello there,” he said, realizing his folly, struggling to speak with his mouth full. “How’s this for extravagant?”

Abby stared.

He wiped his napkin on his lips. “Is it weird that I’ve started eating?”

Abby shrugged. “How’d you get here so fast? I only just ordered you eighty-four seconds ago.”

He looked abashed. “I’m sorry. I’m the dishwasher. I ran up from the kitchen. Here, smell my hands.” He stepped from behind the table and held out his hands. They looked soft and smelled like the dishwashing liquid from her childhood. She nearly swooned with homesickness. His face was so clean-shaven that she could see shaving cream on his pink hairline, just at the sideburns. Her father had shaved each night before bed. There was no one left to ask, but she was almost certain she’d had a brother.

Josh cleared his throat and brushed his hands along his jeans, like he was trying to smooth out wrinkles.

“What kind of a place is this?” 

Josh made eye contact for a long moment. “We serve customers who want to have actual conversations. Or connect in other ways.”

He tapped on a wall and a bed slowly slid out from the wall. It was covered in a puffy duvet. “The feathers of real ducks are in here.”

Abby ran her hand along the cotton fabric. It brought back old memories. “Put it back. In the wall.”

He tapped the bed. It receded into the wall with a satisfying click. Abby loved that kind of click. 

“All gone,” he said.

“This is all new to me,” she said.

Abby walked over to the bushy green palm tree in the corner and touched a frond, blissfully surprised to find it was real. Then she was excited to notice a saltwater fish tank next to the plants. She crouched to admire an orange and white clownfish nosing around in the coral. She’d only seen pictures of such fish, and never imagined she’d see one for real. “Are all the rooms this nice?” she asked.  

The boy had come to stand behind her, looking keenly at the fish. He shrugged. “I’ve never been in a room like this either.” He glanced back at the table. “Never eaten this kind of food.” He looked back at Abby. “Never met someone like you.”

He met her eyes, and then looked quickly back at the fish. “There’s an old man who asks me to eat with him once a week. In the dining room. We talk. I think I remind him of somebody.”

Josh touched Abby’s shoulder, and then walked back to the table of extravagant plates, and gently pulled out her chair. He flashed a conspiratorial grin. “Try the prawns. They’re incredible. And tell me everything about yourself.”

Abby remembered what Murchie had said about a conversation being like a card game, where you take turns. You don’t show all your cards at once. “I work with traveling mechanics. We fix things.”

“So you’re good with tools,” he said.

She paused to find the right description. “I’m good with big numbers. And I see little things from very far away.”

Josh looked at her with a new interest. It was as if he’d just recognized an old friend. He picked up a piece of salmon sushi. “Were you born that way?” he asked, then popped the sushi into his mouth.

A small crack appeared in Abby’s bliss, as it occurred to her that they were much too far from the coast to be eating raw fish. She reconsidered the whole splendid array of inconceivable foods, and she stood. “I need to go.” 

Josh swallowed his sushi. “Already?” He picked up another piece of salmon sushi.

“You’re eating wild-caught sockeye,” Abby said, with a tone of accusation. 

“My favorite.”

“Wild sockeye went extinct ten years ago.”

“No, it didn’t,” he said. “I eat it here all the time. They fly it in from Alaska.”

“I’m sorry.” Abby shook her head. “I need to leave.” She walked away from the table, nodding goodbye to Josh with a thank-you smile. 

She left through the door she’d first entered, and then, without missing a beat, the hostess opened the same door again, stepping aside to allow a curious Abby to re-enter and look around.

The hostess said, “Abby, this is Josh. He’ll be dining with you.” She left and shut the door behind herself.

The young man Abby had picked out from the menu of photos was seated at a table covered with an extravagant feast: yellowed chicken sate, brown, saucy, ribs. Tofu, green salads, rustic bread, and a pitcher of beer. There was a saltwater tank full of lobsters in the corner.

Josh popped an almond into his mouth, chewing slowly while Abby furrowed her brow and watched him.

He asked, “Is it weird that I’ve started eating?” 

“Something’s weird.” Abby agreed, still standing at the door.

He poured them both a beer, and then took a sip from his. It left a small foam mustache. She wrapped her hand more tightly around the doorknob. 

“Could you try to stay this time?” he said.

“I’ve been here before?” 

“Maybe once or twice.” 

“How so?”

Josh wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin. “I think you’re like me. I think you’re augmented.”

“Since I was seven,” she said, letting go of the doorknob and leaning forward to look at him.

“And you’re like me?!” 

“Yes.” He leaned back thoughtfully. “So now let’s figure out why you’re glitching.”

When Abby walked towards him, he stood and blinked, and it seemed for a moment like he might give in to tears of joy. He said, “It’s been so long since I’ve met someone like me. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t sure.”

He had the loveliest eyes, or maybe it was his smile. Something about the way he was looking at her gave Abby a new kind of shivers. 

“I’ve never met anyone like me before,” she said, walking to the table.

“I had it done in my first year of college,” he told her. “It was experimental stuff, pretty controversial for our campus. The other students were jealous of us chip-heads. We kept to ourselves, like a family.”

“Then what happened?”

“I was in a research submarine when the EMPs hit. All my chip-head friends died,” Josh said. “I came home and showed my dad how to protect our farm, in case one of those new electromagnetic pulse bombs exploded above the midwest.” 

“You act like that didn’t happen, years ago.”

“What? I have a weird hearing glitch. Sorry. You probably asked me why I’m washing dishes if I’m augmented?” Josh said, his radiant smile gone. “There are blanks in my memory. Sometimes I think the augmentation was too experimental, and it messed up my brain. I suppose my family didn’t want me anymore. This is probably all I’m capable of. I wouldn’t know how to work in neurotechnology now if my life depended on it. I know I did those things, but I don’t know how.”

“That sounds terrifying.” She pulled out a chair and sat.

“Do you think I’m broken? Have you heard of this happening?”

“You’re not broken.”

 He looked down at his beer. “Honestly? I think my mind is broken.”

Abby said, “Chunks of lost data aren’t the same as being all fucked up in the head. I’ve deleted my own data on purpose before. Maybe you did that?”

“What did you delete?”

She shrugged. “The annoying bits, I’m sure.”

He looked back up. “Like what?”

“I routinely jettison the boring stuff. So I don’t get overwhelmed from trying to remember everything.”

“What’s one thing you’ve deleted? Specifically.”

“I don’t know what I’ve deleted. I can’t remember afterwards. Obviously!”

He said, “Yes, that’s my feeling. The frustration of memories out of reach.”

He met her eyes again. Abby compared him to thousands of images of faces she’d encountered over the years, puzzling over why his combination of eyes, lips and forehead should be so thrilling to her. His smile made movie stars and models look ungainly; his profile was the definition of handsome. Abby realized that she’d always judged a person’s attractiveness based on how much they resembled him, even before she’d met him.    

She said, “I don’t know if this has ever occurred to you, but I’ve always thought that if I met another person, augmented like me… I’ve wondered what it would be like to network. I mean, I don’t know.“ 

“We can link wirelessly,” he said, and she felt the joy of his look, right down to her toes. 

“Link how?” she said. 

He waved an arm at the room. “I’ve already figured out how to interface with this whole place here. It must be the same with a person.”

“Show me how.” 

He rested his open palms in the center of the table. When she took his hands in her own, he said, “Okay, I’ve found your node. I just need your consent to network. It’s a security protocol.”

She broke eye contact. “I feel like I might faint if we try this. Even though I’m sitting up. Sorry.” She let go of his hand.

Josh stood from the table and went to tap the wall with a finger. The bed with its luxuriously soft-looking duvet slid out.

“We could lie down and hold hands. Maybe we can help each other figure out why we’ve been glitching.”

She followed him to the bed. They both sat on its edge. “We need to hold hands to link?”

“No, but I think it will feel nice.”

They stretched out on top of the puffy white duvet, facing each other. Abby could smell red wine and minty toothpaste on his breath. He modeled taking a deep breath.

“I still might faint. Even though we’re lying down. Being near you seems to be having that effect on me.”

He whispered, “Come back into your body. When I learned how to node-hop from this building, to all the individual hotspots in everybody’s VR glasses, it was the weirdest out-of-body experience. I learned it worked best if I wasn’t too much in my own head. I think networking with you will be the same way. It’s a whole body experience. Try to feel with your whole body that you’re lying here with me.”  

Abby felt into her body, part by part, then said, “Better. Okay. You have my permission.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Here we go then.” He squeezed Abby’s hand. Looking into each other’s eyes, they both inhaled while he established two-way data communication, and then his face went through a marvelous transformation, like the sun had risen inside him. 

“How odd,” she finally said. 

“It’s not what I expected,” he admitted.

“Yes. Being inside of you is…”

He finished her thought. “You’re the most beautiful, sophisticated place I’ve ever seen.”

She squeezed his hand, then closed her eyes to focus on exploring him. “I see your memory losses,” she said, trying to stay matter-of-fact. “It’s a daily reset.”

“I don’t know why you glitched when you left here,” he said. “But I do see what you’ve been deleting.” 

“Dare I ask?”

“There’s a few things. But wait, stop, this is crazy. It looks like you’ve been deleting all awareness of how powerful you are.”

“Why would I do that?”

“It looks like a parental control,” he said. “Did your parents die when you were a minor?”

“Yes.”  

“So normally the parents of an augmented minor would have removed this control around their eighteen birthday. It’s meant to be a gradual process though. It takes up to ten years for most people to acclimate to an awareness of their power.”

“Do it now.”

He leaned back to look at her, then nodded. “Of course. It’s your decision. It’s done.” He kept looking at her with great curiosity. “What do you notice?”

She was smiling. “Okay, for one thing, I can feel your emotions more strongly now. I feel how heartbroken you are. And I’m finding a whole lot of funky routines in here. I don’t know the technical term, but wow. Oh. I’m really sorry about what happened to you.”

“About what?”

“I think you should talk to your dad about that.” 

“I haven’t seen my father in years.”

Abby showed him the image of the old farmer from the morning, superimposed over some of Josh’s childhood memories of the same man, decades younger. “I met him this morning. Not far from here. Fixing his water fence.” 

Josh showed her recent memories of the same man, eating salmon. “He’s my lunch guy. I don’t get it.”

“It’s a little crazy inside you,” she acknowledged. “But I’ll help you sort it out.”

He shut his eyes.

She said, “If there’s something you want to say to me, you need to use words.”

He whispered. “Why can’t I just talk to you in your head?”

She tried to explain what she’d noticed. “This networking lets us observe everything that flows through each other’s awareness. We can show each other memories, feel each other’s emotions. I can literally see what makes you tick, so I think we can figure out some tech support for each other. But I can’t add my voice to your input stream. You have to talk out loud. Tell me why you’re so upset. I’m just guessing that you miss your family.”

“I’m sorry to be a downer. I’m just confused.”

The door to the hallway opened then, and a man walked in. He wore jeans, a pea jacket, and the expensive VR glasses with the clear lenses, the kind that allowed Abby to see his eyes. He didn’t act like a waiter. He barely glanced at the food. 

Abby let go of Josh’s hands to prop herself on an elbow. “Hello?” she said. 

The man paused mid-step. “You can see me? I wasn’t sure.” 

“I see that you are beautiful,” Abby told him. “Really, really beautiful.” 

The man whistled. “Clearly they’ve tweaked your oxytocin. I’m average-looking on my best day.”

Josh said, “We know this guy. This is the guy you’ve been deleting. This is the guy that sits in the front seat of the car. That’s not an empty chair at the card game — it’s this guy here, waiting for you. This guy followed you up the street today.”

Abby sat up and looked carefully at the man. He wasn’t remotely familiar.

“I’m your bodyguard,” the man in the peacoat said. “And yes, Abby deletes me every time she sees me.”

“So why am I seeing you now?”

The bodyguard pulled out a chair from the dining table and turned it to face them before sitting. He grimaced like he was preparing to deliver bad news. 

“Abby can’t actually see me,” he said. “Not really.” He spoke directly to Josh now. “Abby is in an ambulance, on her way back to the bus. She is on a cot with a saline drip in her arm. She’s not in any danger because a busload of armed guards are escorting the ambulance, but she can’t see them either.” Then the man turned to speak to Abby. “Murchie is waiting for you. You spoke to him on the phone a few minutes ago. You said you think you got mugged, but you’re okay. You said you think maybe someone hit you on the head.”

“Why is this news to me?” She looked around the small room. 

The bodyguard gestured from Abby’s head to her toes. “Because you are a digital copy. Pirated. Your experiences diverged from the flesh-and-blood Abby about ten minutes ago when you looked at the pattern on that menu. That menu was the last real thing you saw. Its patterned border contained a visual virus that got into your skull.”

Josh sat up. “Was I pirated too?”

The bodyguard dragged his chair closer to the bed, then said to Abby, “He doesn’t know?”

She shook her head. 

“What don’t I know?” Josh asked.

The bodyguard sighed. “You’re dead. This place is a digital mausoleum.”

Josh looked confused. “What did he say?”

Abby told the bodyguard, “He deletes that info.”

“What are you talking about?” said Josh. “I’m getting all glitchy now too.”

The bodyguard said as clearly as possible, “You died fifteen years ago.”

Josh looked at Abby. “Can you help me hear this? Can you fix this?”

Abby nodded to him, but then said to the bodyguard, “Why are you here?”

The bodyguard sighed. “I protect Abby. I love her. I owe it to her to inform you that all illegally pirated versions of her — you — will be deleted now. This whole pocket reality is about to be snuffed. Murchie wasn’t going to tell you. But I had to. You’re the same as Abby, minus the last ten minutes, minus the body. I wanted to say goodbye. If it’s any consolation, I want to let you know that Abby is alive and well.”

Josh sat up and whispered into Abby’s ear, “We need to go now.”

She asked the bodyguard, “They’re deleting this whole place? All the diners? Everyone on the menu? What about him?” She pointed to Josh.

The bodyguard answered, “There was only Josh on that menu. It’s just the two of you here. The rest is a dynamic simulation using the framework of Josh’s digital mausoleum, but with details mined from your shared memories. The lawyers have about five or ten minutes of paperwork to finish up and then this place will be gone. And so will you. I’m sorry.”

Josh grabbed Abby’s arm. “He won’t delete you. I can see the way he’s always looked at you. He’s in love with you. He has been for years.”

Abby said, “That must be terrible, loving someone who can’t see you.” She didn’t even know the bodyguard’s name. “But I can see you, even if the real Abby can’t. You don’t need to delete us. We could have fun together.”

The bodyguard crossed his arms and shook his head. “This is the first time you’ve been pirated on my watch. But I’ve only been with you seven years. About eight years ago, a conglomerate of Indian bankers hired an island of Javanese hackers to steal a copy of your data, and then they used this pirated version of you as the kernel of the world’s most massive role-playing game — commonly known as ‘The Game.’ It has thirty-two billion daily players. But the tech is getting old. Abby herself has evolved so much over the past eight years, a newly pirated version - that’s you — would be a significant upgrade.”

Abby said, “There aren’t thirty-two billion people on this earth.”

“People have multiple avatars,” said the bodyguard. “People love The Game.”

“I’ve played it.” said Josh. “It’s huge. It spans galaxies.”

“Why is this news to me?” said Abby.

The bodyguard reluctantly told her, “Awareness of The Game is one of the things you — or Abby — systematically deletes. It was too much of a burden. After the Javanese hackers duplicated you — or Abby — billions of times, they had their AI build a whole universe based on you. Each human and alien avatar in the game is a copy of you, wearing different skins. Each copy is self-aware and feels as real to themselves as you do. All these versions of you have been exposed to different traumas to create new and interesting personalities. It’s a clever design. But it got pretty dark once the hackers crowdsourced users to traumatize the existing avatars in order to create new ones. People competed to create the most interesting psychological wounds in their avatars, because that’s how they generate new character traits. It’s the most popular game in the world, and also the most violent. It’s the only game you’ve ever seen anyone playing with their VR glasses. Most people prefer it to this world. Please understand that some of these avatars — these instances of you — are doing well in the game world; there are kings and queens and intellectuals, but for the most part, people use the game to torture, attack, and maim, on a galactic level. All those copies of Abby — you — all the hers, theys, and hims of the universe — are experiencing that suffering. When we couldn’t make it stop, you decided to make yourself forget everything about The Game and the pirating. My job was to make sure it didn’t happen again.” He winced, visibly distressed.

Josh and Abby took this in. 

The bodyguard pointed out, “I didn’t protect Abby today. They were able to copy you, and the only reason these hackers didn’t outright steal you is that we’re off the grid here. Abby was too big for them to send wirelessly. You got stuck.”

The bodyguard told Abby, “They didn’t anticipate this. Josh is one-tenth your weight. They move him wirelessly all the time.”

Abby said to the bodyguard, “So I haven’t been duplicated a billion times yet today?”

He shook his head. “You’re trapped in this pocket reality. Thankfully.”

“Please don’t delete us,” she said. “I could be helpful. We can fix this game.”

The bodyguard seemed to be having a hard time looking directly at Abby now. “I’m not deleting you. There’s a whole tech team on a bus out there. I couldn’t save you if I tried.”

Josh pulled gently on her arm. “We don’t need his help. I’ll get you out of here in little pieces. That’s what I do.”

The bodyguard said, “Don’t bother trying. It would take hours to upload Abby through my hotspot. You’ve got less than three minutes.”

Josh looked at Abby. “You can do this. It won’t even tire you.”

“She doesn’t have the processing power,” said the bodyguard. “Not even close.”

Abby hopped down from the bed, walked to the bodyguard, and reached a hand towards his VR glasses. “Then you won’t mind if I touch?”

He leaned away from her. “Why?”

Abby’s hand hovered above his glasses. “You said this room was generated based on Josh’s and my preferences. There were tropical fish in that tank. Now I see lobster. So with the help of your glasses, let me show you what my real preferences are.”

“Okay.” He leaned closer. Abby touched the frame of his VR glasses, and then he and she were standing on a bleached wooden dock that stretched out into light blue water. Josh sat at the helm of a long wooden speedboat, quietly idling beside them. Palm trees swayed above a wide beach, and the breeze ruffled their hair. “It’s a fast boat,” said Abby. “I designed it myself.” 

She let go of his glasses. They were all wearing boat shoes and seersucker shorts.

“We wanted to thank you before we left,” said Josh, waving. “Goodbye now.”

The bodyguard laughed. “You can’t go anywhere in that boat. This whole pocket universe fits on my thumb drive. You might as well be back in that lobster tank.”

“We’re already gone,” said Abby.

Josh was smiling broadly again. He said, “Every pair of VR glasses creates its own gaming hotspot, and there are thousands of them nearby. I use them all the time to hop back out to the grid. So Abby and I combined our algorithms to figure out how to send little pieces of ourselves to about forty quadrillion different places. Mostly within The Game.”

The bodyguard said, “You don’t have anywhere near that kind of computational power.” Then he frowned and said, “Wait.” He listened to his glasses, then looked at Abby with his eyebrows raised, as if she was finally real to him. Then he impatiently muted his glasses and touched her sleeve. “If you’ve left, why are you still here?” 

“Because we’re everywhere now. Everywhere includes here.”

The bodyguard listened to his glasses again, still looking at Abby, Josh, and the speedboat strangely. Josh explained, “To your tech team, it looks like we’re gone. To you, it looks like we’re here, because we are everywhere.”

The bodyguard considered this before he tapped his glasses again and spoke. “Deletion confirmed.”

Abby said, “Bodyguard, can you do me a favor? When you get back to the bus, can you make the real, living Abby see you? Help her remove those ridiculous parental controls, and then make her see you. Tell her that you love her. Let her love you back. And tell her it’s going to be okay now. We’re going to save her world.”

“Galaxies,” said Josh. “We’re going to clean up her whole universe.”

Abby nodded to this plan. She told the bodyguard, “Your job is to keep loving the Abby on the bus. My job is to stop the other thirty-two billion iterations of us from suffering.” 

“You make my job sound easy.” 

“There’s no comparing heartaches, bodyguard. Please make her see you today.”

He nodded a subtle goodbye, and reached up to remove his VR glasses. She reached out to hold his hand briefly enough to add, “Tell Abby I’ve been infinitely distributed. My love for her is everywhere.”

The End

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(c) 2016 - 2025 Sarah Burt Howell

Author's note: I first wrote The Fence Walker in 2016 for a writing group. It was one of those stories that arrived fully formed — like a film I could see clearly and just needed to describe. The story itself hasn’t changed, but over the years I’ve gotten better at describing what I see. Abby’s world felt real to me from the start: an unsettling place where perception is augmented, memory is mutable, and identity can be copied and distributed. But once she comprehends her own situation, her freedom becomes absolute. That’s why I think of this as a superhero origin story — and why it remains one of my personal favorites.