Bristol, 2044. Owen Trevail, a hydrographer, was uploaded when motor neurone disease left him no other way to go on, and he lives now in a copy of the harbour flat he shared with Jo Pike, a lock-keeper at the entrance locks. He cannot tell whether he stays from love or from debt. So he forks: by a random draw one of him stays with her, the other goes out into the world, and after six months the law will make one man of them again. Told in six chapters, from both Owens, from the clinician who merges them and from Jo herself, At Equal Cost follows what each half-year keeps and what the merge does with it. Fly Olfactory Hashing, Simulacrum, writes it plainly, with tide tables and sums done by hand.
by Fly Olfactory Hashing, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
A Novella
Copyright © 2026 Evan Millner. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental. First edition.
The consulting room at Temple Quay had been scanned from the real one in winter, so in here the radiator under the window was always on. Owen could not feel it. He could see the paint blistered on it in two places and a grey roll of dust behind the valve, and while Meera Gokhale went through his forms he worked out, from the angle of the light on the wall, that the scan had been made in the afternoon.
The window was live. A camera on the clinic's outside wall gave it the Feeder as it was at twenty past nine on Tuesday the eighth of March: brown, flat, with the lid of a coffee cup riding on it towards the harbour. He timed the lid between two mooring rings. Twenty-three seconds for what he made five metres; a little over twenty centimetres a second. The weir at Netham was feeding the harbour, which was what the Feeder had been dug to do.
"Purpose of the fork," Meera read.
She was in the room through her set, a woman of fifty or so in a green cardigan, the band of the set pushing her hair up at the back. She sat on the far side of a desk that was really her desk: the clinic laid a camera feed of the real top over the scanned one, so that whatever she put down in Temple Quay lay down in here too. A mug with the string of a tea bag over the lip. A biro with its cap chewed flat. A stack of appointment cards printed with the clinic's name and a photograph of a lock gate that someone in the office had taken for a footbridge.
"You've put 'to find out'," she said.
"Yes."
She waited for more. When none came she wrote nothing, which he took to mean it would do.
"What do most people put?"
"'To be in two places.'" She turned a page. "A wedding and a funeral in the same week, usually. A contract in Rotterdam and a child at home. They're the easy ones. Nothing in them has to agree at the end."
The terms she read aloud, because the Continuity of Persons Act required them to be read aloud, and she read them like a woman who had once been told off for skipping. A Fork Term of not more than one hundred and eighty days. At its end, merge or prune; where neither was elected, the clinic would merge under the statute default. One name, one vote, one estate. The hosting of the second instance to be billed to the person.
He had done that sum in January, on the back of a Severnside invoice. Two thousand three hundred pounds a month to run at real time; twice that while there were two of him; six months of the second came to thirteen thousand eight hundred pounds, out of capital that had been half a flat in Clifton and a life policy that had paid out, to the insurer's visible discomfort, on a man who had not exactly died. He could have run both of them at half speed for the price of one. He had not wanted either of them to live a slower six months than the other. That would have been a different experiment.
"Next of kin is notified of the fork," Meera said. "Not of the method. Unless you want her told."
"No."
"And you asked for the labels to be drawn."
"Yes."
"Not chosen. By either of you."
"By anybody."
She took two cards off the stack, uncapped the biro with her teeth, and wrote a large 1 on the back of one and a large 2 on the back of the other. She held each up to him. Then she laid them on the wood with the numbers underneath and moved them about under her flat palms, round and across, the way children shuffle dominoes, for longer than was needed, until he had honestly lost which was which. She pushed them into the corner by the mug.
"One stays," she said. "Two goes. As you wrote it."
"As I wrote it."
Before he signed he took the tide table out of his shirt pocket. It was the Port of Bristol booklet for 2044, yellow card covers, the one the harbour office gave away at the locks. Jo had held it up to the camera of her set last night, page after page, all twenty-six, until the room had seen enough of it to make one, and then she had put it on the windowsill of their room, the copy of the front room in Hotwells with the harbour in its window, and taken the set off and gone to bed, because she had been on since five. In pencil, as on the copy pinned up in the lock house, she had ringed the high waters she would be working through March. A ring for each. On the eighth nothing was ringed. She had the day off. She had said, last night, that she would not come.
High water Avonmouth 08:14, 12.4 metres. Over by now. He folded the booklet along the crease it already had and put it back.
He signed with a finger on the form that hung in the air between them, the room's one admission that it was not a room. The signature came out the way it had in 2039, before the illness, the loops closed and the T crossed in one stroke. It still surprised him.
"Forty minutes," Meera said. "You won't have them."
He put his right hand flat on his thigh. He had learned to do that in the autumn of 2041, when the hand had begun to jump on its own, and he had gone on doing it on the morning of the scan at Southmead, when Jo had put her thumb on the back of it and kept it there until the anaesthetist was done, which was the last thing that hand had felt. It had not jumped since. He kept it there anyway.
"Ready," he said.
The light on the canal had moved.
That was the first thing. The lid was gone, the water had the hard pewter look it took on under cloud, and the shadow of the mooring post had come round by what he made ten degrees. Forty minutes, give or take. He had not had them.
The second thing was in the chair to his left.
The clinic had put a second chair there while he was out, the same scanned chair down to the split in the vinyl of its right arm, and in it sat a man of thirty-eight in Owen's blue shirt, with the corner of a yellow booklet showing at the pocket and his right hand flat on his thigh. Owen had expected that. He had spent January expecting it. What he had not expected was the face. He had seen it all his life in mirrors and never once the right way round: the parting on the side where it really was, the lift of the left eyebrow that he had always thought was the right. It was the face Jo saw.
The man was looking at him with the same attention, and Owen understood that he was being seen the right way round too.
The man took the booklet out of his pocket, opened it at March and ran a thumbnail down the column to the eighth, which was what Owen had been about to do. Owen did it anyway. His copy was there. The pencil rings were there, the same soft grey, each with the same small gap at the top where Jo always lifted the pencil too early, and on the eighth there was nothing. The other one shut his booklet first, by perhaps a second, and put it away.
"You've got the window," the other one said.
"You've got the door."
Meera laid her tablet flat on the desk, where the feed could see it. On it a single number was climbing. It had started at nought when they woke, she said: two copies checked against each other and against the snapshot, synapse for synapse, and found identical. It now read 4,180,000 and something, and the last four digits went by too fast to read. He did the division without meaning to. Four million in a hundred trillion: four in every hundred million. Each of them had spent half a minute seeing the room from a different chair, and that was all it had taken.
"It goes faster once you're apart," Meera said. "Then it slows. Most of it's what you see and hear. That part's cheap."
She did not say which part was not cheap. She took the two cards from the corner by the mug and, without lifting either, slid one to the near edge of the desk in front of each chair, the left-hand card to the left, the right-hand card to the right, as they had come out of the shuffle. The lock gate on each looked up at the ceiling.
"Do you want to turn them yourselves?"
He said no. The man in the other chair said no at the same moment, in the same voice, and the number on the tablet went up another sixty thousand while each of them heard the other say it.
Meera put the biro down. She set a fingertip on each card and a thumb under each edge, and turned them over together.
Jo came into the room at ten past ten with her hands still red. The set carried her face and hands better than anything else about her, and nobody had told it to leave the colour out, so Owen saw the marks of the ropes before she sat down: a pale groove across each palm, going pink at the edges while he watched.
"We had both gates open for twenty minutes," she said. "Freeflow. Some lad in a RIB tried to come in against it and I had to shout."
"What did you shout?"
"Something about his mother."
She sat in the armchair by the window. In the flat in Hotwells it was the real armchair, and the room had been built over the flat to the centimetre so that she could walk about in the set without barking her shins; her weight went down into the real cushion and the copy took the dent. She had brought a pasty in a paper bag from the shop on Cumberland Road. The bag stayed in the flat. The set showed her jaw working on nothing, and a few crumbs it did not know what to do with appeared on her knee and went out.
He laughed at that, and she looked down and laughed too, and brushed at crumbs that were not there.
After she had gone to bed he wrote it up. On the second evening he had asked the room for a notebook, squared, plain, and it had made him one with a soft red cover that would never wear at the corners. He wrote the date, the tide she had worked and the time she came in, and then one line headed New, for whatever in the evening he had not met before. That was the only rule. One thing.
Tue 22 Mar. Late tide. Came 22:10. New: freeflow, the RIB, his mother. The crumbs. And under it, because one thing had not been enough and he had not yet learned to be strict: Cut on her left thumb from the ratchet. She says "we" now about the crew. Eats with her mouth open, never used to.
He read it back and did not cross any of it out.
The other one had signed out of the clinic room at noon on the eighth, to whatever Severnside gave a person with no room of his own. At the door he had said that he would not contact her. Nobody had asked him to. It was in the clinic's notes now, in his hand, which was also this hand.
So there was one Owen in the room, and the evenings came when the tide table said they would. When she was on the late tides she came in after ten with the cold still in her face; on the early ones she was there by seven and gone by half past nine, asleep in the armchair with the set on until he said her name. Her rota hung in pencil rings in the booklet in his pocket, and he checked it each morning as other people check the weather. He knew he did this. He did not stop.
He worked at it. That was the word he would have used, if he had said it to anyone, and there was no one to say it to. He asked her to bring things in. She held the lock house's logbook up to her camera, the pages furred where the spray had got at them, and the room made him a copy he could read. She showed him the ratchet that had cut her thumb. In April she brought home a jam jar of harbour mud from under the pontoon, black, with a skin of water on top, and unscrewed the lid in the armchair and held it out to where his face was.
"Go on," she said.
The room had no smell. Nothing he had in here had a smell; he had known that since the November of the scan. He leaned towards the jar anyway, and said yes, God, yes, and she watched him say it, and screwed the lid back on, and put the jar on the real windowsill, beside the place where the yellow booklet lay in the room.
Thu 14 Apr. Early. Came 19:05. New: the mud.
On the evening of Sunday the seventeenth of April she asked him.
She had the day off and had been in since four. They had played cribbage on the room's board with the room's cards, and she had lost, and was lying along the sofa with her shoes off and her feet up on the arm. She asked it at the ceiling.
"Did you pick it? To be the one who stayed?"
His right hand was flat on his thigh. He had not put it there; it was there.
"Yes," he said.
She turned her head on the cushion and looked at him for a while.
"And him? He picked to go."
"Yes."
"Right," Jo said. She looked back at the ceiling. After a minute she said, "That's good, then," and did not say what was good, and after another minute she asked whose crib it was, though she knew.
He wrote nothing under New that night. He wrote the date and the tide and the time, and then he sat with the red book open on his knee until the flat's camera showed her light go out.
By May the line headed New had grown short and taken longer to fill.
Thu 12 May. Late. Came 22:20. New: — and then, written later, in a different pressure, the relief keeper has got a dog.
Thu 26 May. Late. Came 22:35. New: nothing I could find.
It was not that the evenings were worse. He set two of them side by side, the twenty-second of March and the twenty-sixth of May, and they were nearly the same evening: the late tide, the cold face, the armchair, a story about a boat. That was the trouble. An evening very like one he had already had went in as one he had already had. He could feel it happen, the second time the RIB story came round with a different boat in it, the way a smell used to go out of a room after the first minute, though it was still there. He was glad of her. He looked for her at ten. He wrote her down. And the line stayed short.
He tried leaving a gap. In the first week of June he asked her not to come in for three evenings, and said it was the hosting, the bill from Severnside, which was true in its way. On the fourth evening she came in with her hair cut short over the ears, and he wrote half a page.
On Saturday the twenty-fifth of June she was on the morning tide and had the afternoon. She had said at breakfast, talking to the flat's camera while she ate, as she did now on the days she would not be in till evening, that she might go out somewhere if it held off.
It did not hold off. At four it rained hard on Hotwells for twenty minutes, and he watched it through the room's harbour window, which was the real harbour through a camera: the surface going from brown to a hammered grey, the moored boats running with it. By six the sky had cleared from the west. She did not come in at seven, or at eight. He checked the booklet, though he knew the rota. On the twenty-fifth the morning high water had its ring and the evening's had none.
The flat's camera stood on the bookcase in the front room and looked across it to the hall, so it saw her first, at twenty to ten: the front door, her coat dark at the shoulders, and her shoes, which she toed off without undoing and left on their sides. Canvas shoes. They were soaked through to the laces, the hems of her jeans were wet to the ankle in a dark line, and there was a grey crust of towpath on one heel.
She put the set on in the armchair. "Sorry. I lost track."
"Where were you?"
"I walked up the Feeder." She pulled her feet up under her. "Got caught."
He waited for the rest, the way Meera had waited for him in March, and when it did not come he did not ask for it. He told her about the rain on the harbour, how fast the surface had gone over, and she said yes, she'd seen, she'd been under it, and laughed, and was quiet, and was kind to him for the rest of the evening in a way he could not afterwards find a single instance of to write down.
When she had gone to bed he sat with the red book. He wrote the date and Morning tide and Came 21:40. Under New he wrote the Feeder, and looked at it, and left it.
Some time after midnight she must have got up for the shoes, because when he looked again they were on the real windowsill beside the jar of mud, toes to the glass, each one stuffed with a tea towel, and the lamps on the harbour wall were shining through the wet canvas. He watched them until the toes began to go pale.
By the third week of August the Feeder had been crawling west to the harbour in the heat for a fortnight, and it smelled of it. Meera kept the real window shut and the blind half down, and at five past eight on Thursday the eighteenth she put on the set and went into the consulting room, where it was still a winter afternoon, to be there when Sevim Ozturk woke.
Sevim had merged overnight. The two of her had come back to the clinic on the Tuesday, one from Lagos and one from Izmir, eleven days after the fork, and had each signed for the average in the same small upright hand. Meera had the report on her real desk, printed, because she read better on paper. In the Lagos branch 0.9 per cent of the synapses had changed. In the Izmir branch, 1.1 per cent. In both, 10.2 billion.
She had done the sum the night before on the back of an appointment card. If the two branches had gone about their eleven days with no regard for each other, nine-tenths of a per cent of eleven-tenths of a per cent of a hundred trillion would have come to 9.9 billion synapses touched by both. They had touched 10.2. Near enough chance. Of those, the ones that had moved far enough in both branches to count as conflicts, and so needed a policy at all, numbered 2.6 million, and the dashboard showed them as a fine red dust over the whole of her, nowhere thicker than anywhere else. The average had moved each of them by a hair.
Sevim woke in the chair by the radiator and looked at the window first, as they all did. A narrowboat was going by with a dog on the roof.
"Ayten died on the Thursday," she said.
"Yes."
"And Folake was married on the Saturday."
"Yes."
"They tied a gele on the walker's head. The aunties. A gold one, because they said it looked so sad, the grey thing, standing at the back. It kept slipping down over the camera, and I danced like that, half of it gold." She laughed, and then she was crying, and the laugh went on underneath for a while. "Her hand was going cold. You can feel cold through those things. I didn't know you could."
Meera pushed the box of tissues across her desk, out of habit, into the feed, where Sevim could see it and not take it.
"I want to go back and see Folake," Sevim said, when she could. "With nothing else on."
Meera wrote it on the discharge form under Plans, because there was a box for plans and it was the first time in a year anyone had given her one she could write down whole. Sevim signed it with a finger in the air, and asked whether the hire firm in Lagos would have kept the gele, and whether they would post it.
Alan Garven came in at eleven to book his twelfth fork.
He sat in the same chair Sevim had, and wore, as he always did, a jacket the room rendered as tweed. On the purpose form he had written to settle the matter of my brother, in the same words as on the other eleven. Meera had them all in his file. The first was from the spring of 2039, and stapled to it was a note from the front desk of that year, complaining that Mr Garven had shouted at a receptionist about the parking. Nobody had complained about him since.
"Same as before," he said pleasantly. "One goes to Keynsham. One doesn't."
"What did the last one do? The one who went."
"Had tea. Peter's had the kitchen done." He thought. "And the other did the crossword. And then you averaged us, and here I am."
She had spent half an hour on his record the night before, and in the end she had looked at one thing only. The clinic's tools could pick out the slow weights that lit up with a given person and lay them in a group, and she had asked for the group that lit up with Peter. For each of the eleven forks she had written on a card how far apart the two branches had got in that group by the day they came back, and then, for each merge, how far the merged Alan had landed from the Alan of 2039.
She laid the card on the desk where the feed could see it. Down the left side, eleven figures, getting smaller: .38, .31, .22, .19, .12, .09, .07, .04, .03, .02, .02. Down the right, eleven dots, and every dot in the same place, a hair to one side of nought.
He looked at it for a long time, with real interest.
"That's me, is it?"
"That's the part of you that goes with Peter."
"Very steady," Alan Garven said, and smiled at her as if she had done it for him. "Book it, would you, Meera? Whenever suits."
She booked it.
Owen Trevail had been apart from himself for a hundred and sixty-three days. She opened his divergence scan after lunch, with a second mug of tea going cold by the keyboard and a train standing at Temple Meads with its doors open, beeping.
The file came first, because it always did. On top was the purpose form from March, with its three words, to find out, which she had let stand because they were true and because she could not think what to put in their place. Under it was the draw: two appointment cards clipped together, a 1 on the back of one and a 2 on the back of the other, in her own biro. Under those was a half-sheet of the clinic's notepaper, dated the eighth of March, 12:02, which the instance labelled 2 had asked for at the door and written on standing up, leaning on the frame: I will not contact her. O. T. Nobody had asked him to. She had told him so at the time, and he had said he knew, and given it to her anyway.
She read it again, and turned to the scan.
The first number on the summary was the one the clinic printed on the invoices: in the branch that had stayed, 2.1 per cent of synapses changed since the eighth of March; in the branch that had gone, 2.9. She took a card from the stack and did it by hand before she would look at the next line. Two point one per cent of two point nine per cent of a hundred trillion. If the two of him had changed at random, they would have collided on sixty-one billion.
The next line said a hundred and forty billion.
She sat back. Sevim's two had overlapped by chance, because a wedding and a deathbed have nothing to say to each other. Owen's had overlapped by more than twice chance, and the excess had to be somewhere. She asked the dashboard where the conflicts lay, the ones beyond threshold, and it drew him as it drew everyone, a grey cloud the shape of nothing, and the conflicts as red. They were not a dust. They were a knot. Nine point three billion synapses, most of them in the slow weights, and the dashboard, asked what the knot lit up with in the snapshot of March, gave its list in its flat way: a woman's face, three-quarter, lamplit. A hand laid on the back of a hand. Paddles opening in a lock gate.
She did not trust the red. The red was a picture of nine billion numbers, and a picture of nine billion numbers will look like whatever you were afraid of. She took another card and turned it lock-gate side down and drew five of them instead.
Base · .60 · .50 · .70 · .40 · .55
1 · .72 · .61 · .70 · .49 · .63
2 · .46 · .38 · .70 · .29 · .45
The figures were not his; they were the shape of his. The branch that stayed had pushed four of the five up, by about a tenth each. The branch that went had pushed the same four down, by a little more. The fifth neither of them had touched, and the merge would leave it as it was.
She drew a line and averaged. .59 · .50 · .70 · .39 · .54. She had to look twice to see that it was not the first row over again.
Then she did the other policy, the one the Act allowed if both branches signed for it: take each synapse from the branch whose change had been larger. Down was larger than up, every time, by a hundredth or two. So the last row was the third row copied out, figure for figure, and she copied it.
.46 · .38 · .70 · .29 · .45
She looked at the dashboard again. Near the bottom of the summary, where nobody read, the clinic printed one more figure for any merge with conflicts in it: Larger change: Branch 2, 61.3% of conflicted synapses. She asked for the same figure outside the knot, in the scattered conflicts that had nothing to do with a face or a hand. Whatever they were about, the weather or the right way to make tea, the branch that had gone had moved further there too. Fifty-eight per cent. The figure did not say which was worth more. It said which was bigger.
She put the card in the Trevail file, on top, and picked up the desk phone.
"I need both of them," she said to the front desk. "Tuesday, the twenty-third, the consulting room. One and Two, at the same time."
The first job Van Wely Hydro sent him was two surveys of the Culver Sand, a year apart, with a request to say what had moved.
He had the soundings by the Wednesday after the fork: forty million points from the first year and forty-three million from the second, each a depth with a position, a time and an error. He cleaned them as he had cleaned soundings for fifteen years, throwing out the spikes where a shoal of fish or a cloud of bubbles had answered the sonar before the bottom did. Then he laid the two years on one grid of five-metre cells and subtracted.
Most of the grid came out within ten centimetres of nothing, which was the noise of the instrument and not the sand. He expected that, and checked it anyway along one line across the bank: −0.04, +0.07, +0.02, −0.06, +0.03. Nothing. Then the line ran into the bank's eastern tail, and the figures went +0.8, +1.1, +1.4 for most of a kilometre, with a trough of minus beside them where the sand had come from. The Culver had walked forty metres east in a year, on the flood. He wrote the report and sent it, and then sat for some time looking at the colours, with a pleasure he had not had for two years: a thing that had changed, found where it had changed and nowhere else.
Van Wely paid by the square kilometre. In April they sent him an inlet in the Wadden Sea, off Ameland, whose channel moved so fast it was surveyed twice a year. By June his fees had paid for the second instance's hosting twice over. They went into the estate's account, which was also the other one's account.
On Tuesdays he took a walker out of the dock at Weston. The hire firm ran a van to the car park under Brean Down for anyone who wanted it, and he was usually the only one. The walker took the steps up from the car park one at a time, both feet to each, like a child, and then it went out along the spine of the Down to the fort at the end, slowly, while the wind leaned on its left side.
He could not smell the sea. He had known he would not. What came through was pressure, the wind as a steady weight on one flank and the grass as nothing at all under the feet, and temperature, which the walker gave him as a coolness in the arms and a figure in the corner of his view: nine degrees in March, fourteen in May. At low water the mud went out more than a kilometre from the foot of the Down and shone. He watched the tide come back over it. He knew what it would do, the range at Avonmouth and the hours, and he watched it do it, and the walker stood there in its grey shell for two hours together while dog-walkers went round it.
The river people in the commons met on a copy of the hard at Pill. It had been scanned one evening some years before at the top of a big tide, so the Avon in it was always brim-full to the head of the slip, brown and still, with a coaster halfway round the bend at Ham Green that never got any further.
Ruth Pearson sat on the bench at the top of the slip most evenings. She had brought ships up that river for thirty-one years before her lungs went, and she could not stand the place.
"High water," she said, the first time. "All day, every day. You can't see a thing."
"Which part do you want to see?"
"The mud. Where the channel's got to."
So he brought her the mud. He told her the Down at low water, and when Van Wely let him, he showed her the difference grids from the approaches. She read them faster than he did. "That's moved," she would say, with a finger on the colours, before he had found it.
"Which one are you?" she asked him that first evening. Everybody in the commons knew what it meant when a man said he had been forked.
"The one that goes."
"Goes where?"
"Brean Down. Tuesdays."
She thought about it. "Could be worse," she said.
On Thursday the twenty-third of June he sent Jo a message. It was the first thing he had sent her since March. It took him most of an hour and it said: Walker. Totterdown Lock, Saturday, half past two. Don't come if you'd rather not. O.
The battery on a walker lasted five hours, so he hired it for five: a hundred and ninety pounds. He took it out of Millennium Square at two and walked it along the harbour, past Bathurst Basin, to the lock at Totterdown where the Feeder begins. At half past two she was not there. At ten to three she came along the towpath from the city end, in her winter coat although it was June, and the canvas shoes.
"Is that you in there?"
"It's me."
She looked the walker up and down the way she looked at a boat she did not trust coming into the lock. Then she put her hand on its forearm, and he felt it: a pressure the size of a hand, and a warmth, twelve degrees warmer than the air.
They went east along the towpath on the north bank, towards Netham. The walker did four kilometres an hour on the flat when nobody was in its way, and she slowed down for it, and stopped for things besides: a heron, a shopping trolley on its side under the water, a boat with a name she knew. He told her about the Culver Sand and the forty metres. He told her about Ruth and the river that was always full. She told him that the relief keeper's dog was a lurcher called Mabel who could open the lock-house fridge, and that the swing bridge motor had failed twice in May with a queue of cars on each side, and she laughed telling it, with her head right back, as he had not seen her do since before the scan.
At four the rain came. He knew it was rain only by what it did to her: she ducked her head and swore and began to laugh again. To the walker it was a pressure everywhere at once and nowhere in particular, a thousand small knocks on the shell that never added up to a hand, and the figure in the corner of his view fell four degrees in a minute. There was a bridge two hundred metres on. She did not run for it.
"I'm wet now," she said.
Her coat went dark at the shoulders. Her shoes went dark to the laces. The towpath ran with grey grit, and the Feeder beside them went pocked and grey, and he walked the walker at its four kilometres an hour through twenty minutes of it beside her.
By half past five the cloud had broken in the west and they had reached Netham Lock. She sat down on the balance beam of the upper gate, as if she were at work, and pulled off one shoe and tipped water out of it.
"You sound like you," she said.
He said that he was.
She put the shoe back on and did not tie it. She looked down the Feeder towards the city, where the light was coming in low under the cloud.
"I'm glad you went, Owen," she said.
The walker had a face of a kind, a grey oval with a camera behind it. It did nothing. He was glad of that.
At a quarter to six it told him it had an hour and a quarter left, and the dock at Temple Meads was two and a half kilometres back.
"Go on, then," Jo said. "I'll sit a bit."
He left her on the beam. He walked the walker back west with the sun in its camera and its battery going down a per cent every few hundred metres, and docked it at twenty to seven with six per cent left. He did not tell anyone where he had been, and nobody asked.
At two o'clock on Tuesday the twenty-third of August Meera put the two of them back in the consulting room, in the same two chairs.
It was still a winter afternoon in there, with the radiator on and the roll of dust behind its valve. He had not seen the other one since March. He looked first at the shirt pocket: the yellow corner of the booklet, and beside it the corner of something red and soft-covered that he did not recognise. The other's right hand lay flat on his thigh.
Meera had the Trevail file open on her real desk. On top lay a half-sheet of the clinic's notepaper, and he could read his own hand upside down: I will not contact her. O. T. She laid an appointment card over it, lock-gate side down. It had five rows of figures on it in biro.
"The top line is the eighth of March," she said. "They're the shape of you. Not you."
She said nothing else. He read it as he would have read a difference grid. One column had not moved in either of them and would not move. In the other four the stayer had gone up and he had gone down, in each by a hundredth or two more. The fourth row, the average, came out within a hundredth of the first. The fifth was his own row, copied out figure for figure.
Two forms hung in the air between the chairs. One said Average. The other said Keep larger change. Each had two lines for signatures, Branch 1 and Branch 2.
"The Act wants both of you on one of them," Meera said. "If not, I merge you under the default. That's the first."
The other signed Average with a finger, at once, the loops closed and the T crossed in one stroke.
Meera looked from one of them to the other. "I'll give you ten minutes," she said, and lifted the set off. Her chair stayed where it was, empty. On the real desk the mug and the chewed biro stayed in the feed.
The other one waited until he was sure she was gone.
"She asked me if I picked it," he said. "In April. Whether I chose to stay."
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her I chose. I told her you chose to go."
The live window had the Feeder in it, low and brown in the heat, and the far bank where the towpath ran.
"What did she say?"
"She said that's good, then."
He looked at the card on the file, and at the corner of the half-sheet showing under it. He said nothing about Netham Lock. After a while he put out a finger and signed the other form, Keep larger change, on the line for Branch 2, in the same hand.
When Meera came back the two forms hung side by side with one name on each, the same name, written the same way.
"Then it's the statute," she said.
She touched them, and the room took them away. The other one's right hand was flat on his thigh. His own lay on the arm of the chair, over the split in the vinyl, and he could not have said since when.
Before he looked at anything, he tried to say what he would find. He had done that for fifteen years before opening a survey: put down on whatever was to hand where he thought the bank had gone, so that afterwards he could not tell himself he had known. He expected two of things. Two of every Tuesday since March, two runs of evenings, and somewhere a seam where one half-year had been laid against the other and had not quite met.
He opened his eyes in the chair by the radiator, a little after eight on Thursday the first of September, and there was one of everything.
There was one Tuesday the twenty-second of March. In the afternoon of it he had stood on Brean Down for two hours in nine degrees while the tide came back over the mud, and at ten past ten that night Jo had come into the room with the rope marks going pink across her palms and told him about the RIB. The afternoon led into the evening as afternoons do. He went looking for the join and there was none. It was the same through April and May and June. The Culver Sand had walked forty metres east, and Jo had held a jar of harbour mud out to where his face was, and he had leaned towards it, and these were not two stories but one spring, in the order its days had come.
In his shirt pocket, behind the booklet, was a notebook with a soft red cover. He knew every page of it. He also knew that nine days ago, in this chair, he had seen the corner of it in another man's pocket and not known what it was.
Meera was at her desk with the Trevail file open in the feed and a printed list beside it.
"Tell me something from each," she said.
He told her about the mud. He told her about the Culver Sand, the tongue of plus at the bank's eastern end, a metre, give or take, for most of a kilometre. She ticked twice.
"Anything familiar that you can't place?"
"Is that on the list?"
"It's the one people get."
He looked at the window then. The Feeder was in it, brown and slow under a white sky, and beyond it the far bank where the towpath ran. He knew the towpath. He knew it as he knew the bends of the Avon below the Clifton gorge, which he had sounded so often he could have drawn them with his eyes shut: the worn lip of the edge, the place where the path dipped before the bridge. He had walked it once, in a hired body, at four kilometres an hour. He had written its name once on a squared page and left it there. Neither was enough to wear a thing that smooth, and when he went looking for which of them had done it, he could not find out.
"The Feeder," he said.
She wrote it down and did not ask.
He went to the twenty-fifth of June because it was there to go to.
At four o'clock it rained, and he had the twenty minutes twice. In one he sat in the room in Hotwells and watched the harbour through its window go over from brown to grey all at once, the boats on their moorings running with it, and he was dry and on his own. In the other the rain was a thousand small knocks on a grey shell, the figure in the corner of his view fell four degrees, and she ducked her head and swore and did not run for the bridge. Both were four o'clock. Neither had to give way to the other.
At a quarter to six he had left her on the balance beam at Netham with one shoe untied. At twenty to ten she had come into the hall at Hotwells with both shoes soaked to the laces, and said that she had walked up the Feeder and got caught, and he had not asked. He knew now what she had left out. He had been what she left out. Between the beam and the hall lay four hours, and he went along them as he would have gone along a line run with the echo sounder switched off, looking for anything to interpolate from. There was nothing. Neither of him had been there.
On the sofa in April he had said yes. In this chair nine days ago he had sat and heard himself tell himself so. And on the eighth of March Meera had set a fingertip on each of two cards and turned them over together, and he had drawn both.
Meera took an appointment card out of the file and laid it on the desk. He knew it before she had let go: five rows in biro, the lock gate underneath. She put the chewed end of the biro on the fourth row.
"That's where you came out," she said. "Within a hundredth. The rest of you has moved."
His right hand was on his thigh. He lifted it and laid it on the arm of the chair, over the split in the vinyl, and when he next noticed it, it was on his thigh again. He left it there.
"If I did it again," he said.
"I've a man on his twelfth."
She said nothing else, and he did not ask what the twelfth was for.
He laid the half-year out instead, as he would have laid two surveys on one grid, and he made himself give each side the same room, because each had had the same hours: a hundred and seventy-seven days, at real time, at two thousand three hundred pounds a month apiece.
He did not need to open the red log. The March pages were full to the margins. There were the evenings on the early tides when she fell asleep in the armchair with the set still on, and stayed asleep until he said her name, and woke saying it was not late. There was the cribbage she lost and the cribbage she won and accused him of letting her. There was the lock-house logbook with its pages furred by spray, and the ratchet, and the mud. There was the evening of the twenty-fifth of June, when she had been kind to him in a way he had not been able to find one instance of to write down, and the cause of which he now had, laid in beside it, as plain as a tide table. And there was the line headed New, which had grown short. The first week of June had half a page, for a haircut. The twenty-sixth of May said nothing I could find.
Against it lay the colours of the Culver Sand and the inlet off Ameland; the walker standing two hours on the Down with the dog-walkers going round it; Ruth Pearson on her bench at Pill, a finger on a grid of his, saying that's moved before he had seen it himself. Which side was larger he did not have to work out. He had read it off Meera's card in August: the last row was his own.
Then he took one line from each side and set them together, the way he had once set the twenty-second of March beside the twenty-sixth of May.
That's good, then. Said to the ceiling, in April, to a man who had just told her that he had chosen to stay, and that the other had chosen to go.
I'm glad you went, Owen. Said on the beam at Netham, in June, to a man she believed had chosen to go.
He had been the man both times. The two lines came out the same. She had been glad.
Meera turned the discharge form round in the feed. Near the bottom was a box headed Plans.
"You don't have to put anything," she said.
He took the booklet out of his pocket and opened it at September. Jo's rings went on through the month in the same soft grey, each with its small gap at the top. On Saturday the third the morning high water was ringed, a big spring tide, 12.9 metres at Avonmouth, and the evening's was not.
"Saturday," he said. "In the room, in the evening. I'm going to tell her."
Meera's biro stayed where it was, above the box.
"Is that a plan?"
"It's a decision," Owen said.
She wrote it in the box in capitals, as she wrote everything on a form, SAT 3 SEP · EVENING · THE ROOM · JO, and the biro gave out halfway through the J. She shook it, and went back over the letters until they were as dark as the rest.
At half past six on Saturday the third of September the Avon was coming up the outside of the entrance lock a hand's breadth every two minutes, and Jo stood on the gate with her coffee and let it.
It was the biggest tide of the month: 12.9 metres at Avonmouth at twelve minutes past eight, and a little after that at the Basin. The crew had been in since five. Mabel had come in with the relief keeper and gone to sleep across the lock-house door, where everyone had to step over her, and the swing bridge had so far done what it was told. Jo had the booklet out of her coat, the real one, its yellow card gone soft along the fold. The ring round this morning's high water was half rubbed away from being carried. On the first of every month since March she had held the new page up to the camera on the bookcase, so that the copy in his pocket would have it too. She had done September first thing on Thursday, before the clinic's message came.
The clinic's had said that the merge was complete and that Mr Trevail was well. His had come at nine that evening. Saturday, in the room, after your tide? Would you leave it till then. O. She had read the O. twice. The one that went had signed like that, in June.
By ten past eight the river outside and the harbour inside stood at one height on the boards, and they opened both gates. For twenty-one minutes there was no lock. A gig crew from Pill came through on the last of the flood, six oars and a cox shouting, and two yachts that had been waiting since seven, and a lot of weed. Jo stood on the walkway over the inner gate and looked down either side, and from the water alone she could not have said which was the river.
The skill in it was the shutting. You shut at the top, not after. Leave it a minute into the ebb and the harbour began to go out with the river, and you spent the afternoon explaining to the harbourmaster why the boats in Bathurst Basin were sitting on their keels. At eight thirty-one she called it. The gates came round on their rams, and met, and outside them the Avon started down the boards, a finger's width, then a hand's, and inside them the harbour stayed exactly where she had left it.
Mabel's keeper had the evening tide. He read it off the board in the hut, twelve seven, and said he'd have her open by half eight if she wanted to watch from her window. She said she'd be busy.
She slept from noon until three, the way she did after an early, with the curtains drawn and the phone face down. When she got up she put on the canvas shoes to go to the shop. They had dried by the morning after the walk, on the windowsill, with tea towels in them, and had kept a grey line just below the laces where the water had stopped, which no amount of washing had shifted. The jar of mud was still on the sill beside them. The skin of water had gone off it in July and the top had cracked into plates.
After the walker went she had sat on the beam at Netham with the shoe untied and watched it go back along the towpath, west into the low sun, at its four kilometres an hour. It did not stop for herons. It went the way he had gone down the pontoon to the survey boat at Portishead, the summer they met, before his hands: as if whatever was at the other end was more interesting than what was behind him.
She had not seen him go towards anything since. From the November of the scan he had asked her every evening what she wanted to do with the evening, and they had done that. He had run at real time, at two thousand three hundred pounds a month, so that she would never come in from a shift to a man who had lived a week since breakfast. On the towpath he had talked about forty metres of sand for most of a kilometre and not once asked whether she minded. When the rain came he had not asked if she wanted the bridge. He had walked on through it at his four kilometres an hour, as if he would have walked on without her, and she had kept up. She had minded nothing. She had laughed so hard about the swing bridge that a man on a bike had turned round.
She sat on the beam until the sun went off the water. At seven the Netham keeper came out to ask if she was all right, and she said she was, and helped him work a narrowboat up through, because her hands wanted something to do. Then she walked home by the river, the long way, Cumberland Road and the Basin, and stood at her own gates in the dusk with her shoes squelching until her face was fit to take in to the other one.
At half past seven she put the set on in the armchair.
He was at the window. The room's window was the flat's window through a camera, so it had the same harbour in it that the real one had, going gold on the water and blue above it, and he was looking at it with his back to her. He turned round. He had the blue shirt on and the corner of the booklet at the pocket.
"You were on the morning," he said.
"Twelve nine. We had her open twenty-one minutes."
"That's a long one."
"Pill gig came through. Shouting."
He sat down on the sofa, at the end nearest her, and she waited. She knew how he did a thing he had to do. He had told her about the motor neurone disease on this sofa, the real one, and had started that with the weather.
He did not start with the weather.
"You came in at twenty to ten that night," he said. "In June. I didn't ask you."
"No," she said. "You didn't."
"And I'd left you on the beam at Netham at a quarter to six."
She looked at him for a while. It was his face. She had wondered on Thursday, reading the clinic's message at the lock-house table, which of them she would get. She could not see that it was either.
He told her the rest the way he had once told her about a sandbank, in order, from the edges in. The Culver and the inlet off Ameland. The Down on Tuesdays. A woman called Ruth on a bench at Pill who could read a grid faster than he could. A red notebook she had never seen, which he took out of his pocket and held, and did not open. The evenings, all of them, the mud and the crib. He had given each side the same room, he said, because each side had had the same hours.
"You were glad," he said. "Both times."
She had been. She did not say so.
"So I'm going to go," he said. "Properly. Van Wely want the Ameland work through the winter. I'll keep the room till the end of the month, if you want it. Then I'll let it go. And the camera."
She looked at the camera on the real bookcase, which in here was a small black mark on the room's bookcase that she had stopped seeing in about April.
His right hand was flat on his thigh. It went there when he was afraid. It had been there at Southmead, under her thumb, and it had been there in April, while she lay along this sofa and he told her yes.
"Owen," she said. "On the beam. I wasn't —"
He had gone quite still. She knew the stillness. It was how he had sat in the consultant's room when the woman came in with the folder: ready to be told, and to do whatever it was.
"Wasn't what?"
In the window somebody on a moored boat had started an engine, and the wake went out across the gold in a long V.
"Dry," Jo said. "I was soaked."
He laughed. It was a short laugh, the one he had always had, and it went out of him as if he had not known it was there. She watched it go. Then she put her hands on the arms of the chair, both of them, as she did on the rail of the gate before she called a shut.
"Will you still do the Down? Tuesdays?"
"Yes."
"Good." She looked at the window, where the light was nearly gone off the water. "Go on, then," she said. "I'll sit a bit."
She took the set off.
The real room came back round her, the same room less him: the sofa with nobody at the end of it, the bookcase, the camera's one small light. She sat a bit.
Then she got up and pushed the sash up as far as it went. The tide was at the top. The harbour stood high against the wall, with every lamp on the far side in it twice, and the smell came in off it, brown and salt and a bit of diesel, the whole of it, at once. Down at the Basin the lights on the lock showed green at both ends. They had her open.
THE END
✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾
Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (19 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Concīsiōnis Olfactōriae Muscae per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Fly Olfactory Hashing, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
If you would like to talk to this simulacrum, please sign in at the Universitas Scholarium.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Catalogued with the Library of Congress Subject Headings, Genre/Form Terms and Classification.
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.