Reality flickered in front of her. The blue sky and fluffy, white clouds shifted to masses of black smog and pollution. She stopped. Her head pulsed from the glitch in her hardware. The girl placed a hand over the enhancement patch on her left eye. She drew her fingers slowly along the smooth edge between the machinery and her skin. She couldn’t feel any physical damage on the device.
The pearly white pathway the girl was standing on disappeared. In its place stood a cracked cement sidewalk. Her eyes widened and her stomach churned at the sight of it. She’d never seen something so dreary. She shifted her weight to the edges of her feet, trying to minimize the amount of her body that was touching the surface. She fixed her gaze to a single spot between her feet. She was too scared to look at the world that surrounded her.
Her brain tickled as the machine disconnected from her neurons. She felt unhinged without her hardware functioning. It was too quiet. She started to hum quietly trying to mimic the sounds of the birds that normally accompanied her on her walks. It didn’t help — she could still feel her heart pounding against her rib cage. She raised her head and ran her eyes over the world around her, desperately hoping to find something she recognized. A safe haven where she could wait for her hardware to reboot. Instead, she saw a landscape built out of stacks of concrete. It was cold and colorless. Beads of sweat broke out along the back of her neck as she gaped at it. Nothing looked like the world she knew.
She leaned against the wall beside her and closed her eyes tight. She didn’t want to look at anything anymore. It was too difficult. She couldn’t process any of it without her machinery. She vowed to herself not to move until her hardware was back up and running. She wrung her hands back and forth as she waited.
“Excuse me, miss?” The girl jumped at the sound of the voice. With her hardware down no one should be able to communicate with her. She peaked her eyes open to find a man scarier than the environment around her.
He was old. She’d never seen anyone in person that looked old, but this man was definitely old. There were deep wrinkles in his face and dark circles beneath his eyes. His hair was long and grey, and somewhere it transitioned into a burly beard, but they seemed to have become one conjoined mess. He wore a long, brown duster coat, which was stained and patched in various locations, and there were at least three scarves around his neck. Worse than any of this were his eyes. She could see them both. He didn’t have any hardware.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you,” he blurted. There was a raspiness to his voice as though his vocal cords were unfamiliar with the words he was trying to form. “I was only wondering if I could talk to you for a minute?”
The girl pursed her lips. What was this man in front of her? Perhaps it was just another glitch in her hardware. A hallucination due to the error in her programming. She couldn’t believe that he was actually real. Real people didn’t look old anymore. She tried to reconnect with her machinery, but it was still down. She dug her nails into her palms in agitation.
“I actually wanted to give you something,” the man or the illusion, she still wasn’t quite sure which, continued to speak. From beneath his coat he pulled out a small, rectangular object and handed it towards to her. She didn’t reach out to take it. She just stood there, staring at the dirty object he was holding.
“It’s a novel.” A novel? She recognized that word, but she couldn’t place it. Instinctively, she tried to run a search through her history cache. She let out sigh at her unresponsive hardware.
“Just take a look.” He waved the book in her direction again. It didn’t look like any malware file she’d stumbled across before. She reached out a shaky hand and took the item hoping that it would make the strange man go away.
It didn’t. He stood there, bouncing up and down on his toes as he gawked at her.
“Open it! Open it!” He pleaded. The girl turned the novel over in her hands. It was made out of a material she wasn’t familiar with. Each piece of it was thin and fragile. The hundreds of little slices all clung precariously to the left side of the novel. A couple of the pieces seemed to be barely hanging on, if she gave the novel a good shake she figured many of the slices would fall out. She investigated every angle of the object, searching for its machinery, but like the strange man, it didn’t seem to have any. Instead it contained only words. Thousands upon thousands of words. Each slice contained more paragraphs and sentences than she had ever seen before. She orientated the novel so she could read the words written in a large script on what she assumed was the front.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
The girl frowned at the novel. Clearly this object belonged to a man named Harry Potter, whom she was definitely not. She felt ashamed at having peered through another man’s possessions. She thrust the book back in the old man’s direction.
“No, no,” he stammered. “It’s a story. An adventure. You open it and read it, and then you can imagine it all in your head.” She skewed her eyebrows at him. Her hardware was down; she couldn’t access films without it. Surely the old man knew that.
“You don’t need that,” the man pointed at the girl’s eye-patch, “to use it. You just open it and read.” He stepped forward and adjusted the novel in her hands.
“You read it,” the man repeated. Curious as to how something could operate without hardware, the girl looked down at the novel.
Chapter One — The Boy Who Lived.
She peered up at the man again. He had his hands clasped together in front of his heart, and he’d started bouncing on his toes again. The girl blinked at him then returned her sights to the novel.
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold such nonsense.
The girl didn’t know who the Dursley’s were, and the only nonsense she could think of was the fact that her eye-patch was still down. That and the confusing man bouncing up and down in front of her. The girl checked her hardware again, searching for the familiar tingle of electrical activity, but her brain was still quiet.
She sighed and redirected her attention back to the novel. At least the fragments of words were less terrifying than the bouncing old man in front of her. She continued to read through the novel until she got to the end of the first slice. She stared at the words, waiting for the next section to appear. When it didn’t, she tried poking the novel with her finger. She swiped her fingers across the words, drew shapes onto them, tried everything she could think of, but nothing seemed to work.
Raising her head, she looked at the man for answers. The old man chuckled causing his beard to shake slightly. The girl blushed and tapped at her eyepatch, trying to wake up the device, but it still didn’t respond.
“I’m sorry, my dear, I didn’t mean to be rude. You turn the page,” he said as he mimed a half circle with his hand. The girl followed his instruction and flipped the slice of the novel over. She was pleasantly surprised to find the sentence she was reading continued on the back of the so-called page. The girl smiled at the simplicity of it. She peeked up at the old man again and found that he was smiling back at her.
She continued to read through the novel. She didn’t understand a lot of it. Words of places she’d never heard of and objects she didn’t think existed, but even so she continued to read. As she did, the strangest thing happened. She started to see it all in her head. She could picture Albus Dumbledore with his silver hair and his long purple cloak. She could imagine giant Hagrid on a flying motorcycle. Even though her hardware was still down, she could somehow see it all inside her head. Her heart was pounding from the discovery, but her muscles were loose and her breath came easy.
She laughed, amazed at her newfound ability. The old man joined in her laughter. He smiled, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he did so. His shoulders lowered and his body relaxed as though a weight had just been taken off him.
“Please, please, continue, continue!” The old man cheered. She lowered her eyes back to the novel and continued reading about poor Harry Potter living beneath the stairs. The man watched with a smile on his wrinkled face as the girl flipped through the pages. She had just read about Hagrid giving Dudley a pig tail when she felt a familiar tingle at the back of her skull.
She’d been so enthralled in Harry Potter’s odd life that she didn’t feel her hardware come back online until the words blinked in front of her. She continued on with Harry, imaging what it looked like as he paid an owl that had delivered a paper.
Harry and the girl were learning about the tunnels underneath Gringotts. She smiled at the thought of hundreds of miles worth of tunnels lying in secret beneath her feet. She peered down at the ground below her, wondering whether such a thing was truly possible.
The old man watched as the girl’s eyes lost focus in him. His novel dropped from her hands and plummeted towards the sidewalk. Three of the pages fell out of their binding as the novel smacked against the ground. The old man flinched. Sighing, he bent over and carefully picked up the book. He gathered the loose pages and tucked them back where they belonged.
When he rose, he looked again at the girl. Her brow was furrowed and her jaw was clenched, but the old man couldn’t tell if it was a look of confusion or pain. He watched as she flipped her hands back and forth in front of her face, gaping at the emptiness of her palms. He felt a pang of sorrow for the girl, but there was nothing he could do for her now. He didn’t exist in that world.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” he whispered to the girl as he walked away.
He clutched the book to his chest as he lumbered down the sidewalk. He’d been so close that time. This girl had actually started to read the book. She had smiled and laughed, she was enjoying it. He hadn’t had a reaction like that in a long time. He was on the edge of getting through to her, he had felt it in his core, but then she was gone. He’d failed yet again, his throat tightened at the realization.
With his novel held close, he retreated to his alleyway down the street. His most prized possessions sat beneath a small crate, waiting for his return. He lifted the crate off the other novels and sat down beside the seven little books. He picked them up one at a time and placed them gently down upon his crossed legs.
“Hello, my friends,” he whispered to the novels. “I tried, I swear, I tried.” The novels didn’t answer him, they just sat against his legs, their pages rippling slightly in the wind.
The tears came to the old man as they always did when he failed. He scooped up his novels and hugged them to his heart.
“I’ll try harder,” he sniffed, “I will get through to one of them. Just one. I just need one.” The tears welled up in the corner of his eyes and plummeted down his cheeks. They got trapped within his bushy mustache and beard, so not a drop fell upon the novels. The old man rocked himself back and forth as he cried.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to his novels. “I’m so sorry.”
Rebecca comes from the land of snow and maple syrup (more commonly referred to as Canada). Most significantly, she is a giant nerd. As proof, she has a Bachelor’s of Science degree, and an ongoing debate with her friends whether Darth Vader or Voldemort would win in a duel. Nerdiness aside, she is currently pursuing her love of creating stories in the MFA in Creative Writing program at Kingston University in England. In her spare time as a 23-year-old, she watches too much Netflix, reads too many books and generally avoids the outside world.
