Helena adjusts the camera, zooming in on the myoglobin dripping from the juicy steaks, and adopts her most sorrowful tone. “Well, I hate to rush you, but I haven’t had much money for food lately…”
Mr. Cai chortles. “Why, that’s got to be hard on you! You’ll receive the fund transfer sometime this month, and in the meantime why don’t you treat yourself and print up something nice to eat?”
Lily gives Helena a thumbs-up, then resumes crouching under the table and messaging her darknet contacts, careful to stay out of Helena’s shot. The call disconnects.
“Let’s assume we won’t get any further payment. Is everything ready?”
“Yeah,” Lily says. “When do we need to drop it off?”
“Let’s try for five A.M. Time to start batch-processing.”
Helena sets the enzyme percentages, loads the fluid into the canister, and they both haul the steaks into the dry-ager unit. The machine hums away, spraying fine mists of enzymatic fluid onto the steaks and partially dehydrating them, while Helena and Lily work on assembling the refrigerated delivery boxes. Once everything’s neatly packed, they haul the boxes to the nearest podcar station. As Helena slams box after box into the cargo area of the podcars, Lily types the delivery codes into their front panels. The podcars boot up, sealing themselves shut, and zoom off on their circuitous route to the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel.
They head back to the industrial park. Most of their things have already been shoved into backpacks, and Helena begins breaking the remaining equipment down for transport.
A Sculpere 9410S takes twenty minutes to disassemble if you’re doing it for the second time. If someone’s there to help you manually eject the cell cartridges, slide the external casing off, and detach the print heads so you can disassemble the power unit, you might be able to get that figure down to ten. They’ll buy a new printer once they figure out where to settle down, but this one will do for now.
It’s not running away if we’re both going somewhere, Helena thinks to herself, and this time it doesn’t feel like a lie.
There aren’t many visitors to Mr. Chan’s restaurant during breakfast hours, and he’s sitting in a corner, reading a book. Helena waves at him.
“Helena!” he booms, surging up to greet her. “Long time no see, and who is this?”
“Oh, we met recently. She’s helped me out a lot,” Helena says, judiciously avoiding any mention of Lily’s name. She holds a finger to her lips, and surprisingly, Mr. Chan seems to catch on. Lily waves at Mr. Chan, then proceeds to wander around the restaurant, examining their collection of porcelain plates.
“Anyway, since you’re my very first client, I thought I’d let you know in person. I’m going travelling with my… friend, and I won’t be around for the next few months at least.”
“Oh, that’s certainly a shame! I was planning a black pepper hotplate beef special next month, but I suppose black pepper hotplate extruded protein will do just fine. When do you think you’ll be coming back?”
Helena looks at Mr. Chan’s guileless face, and thinks, well, her first client deserves a bit more honesty. “Actually, I probably won’t be running the business any longer. I haven’t decided yet, but I think I’m going to study art. I’m really, really sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Chan.”
“No, no, pursuing your dreams, well, that’s not something you should be apologising for! I’m just glad you finally found a friend!”
Helena glances over at Lily, who’s currently stuffing a container of cellulose toothpicks into the side pocket of her bulging backpack.
“Yeah, I’m glad too,” she says. “I’m sorry, Mr. Chan, but we have a flight to catch in a couple of hours, and the bus is leaving soon…”
“Nonsense! I’ll pay for your taxi fare, and I’ll give you something for the road. Airplane food is awful these days!”
Despite repeatedly declining Mr. Chan’s very generous offers, somehow Helena and Lily end up toting bags and bags of fresh steamed buns to their taxi.
“Oh, did you see the news?” Mr. Chan asks. “That vertical farmer’s daughter is getting married at some fancy hotel tonight. Quite a pretty girl, good thing she didn’t inherit those eyebrows—”
Lily snorts and accidentally chokes on her steamed bun. Helena claps her on the back.
“—and they’re serving steak at the banquet, straight from his farm! Now, don’t get me wrong, Helena, you’re talented at what you do—but a good old-fashioned slab of real meat, now, that’s the ticket!”
“Yes,” Helena says. “It certainly is.”
All known forgeries are failures, but sometimes that’s on purpose. Sometimes a forger decides to get revenge by planting obvious flaws in their work, then waiting for them to be revealed, making a fool of everyone who initially claimed the work was authentic. These flaws can take many forms—deliberate anachronisms, misspelled signatures, rude messages hidden beneath thick coats of paint—or a picture of a happy cow, surrounded by little hearts, etched into the T-bone of two hundred perfectly printed steaks.
While the known forgers are the famous ones, the best forgers are the ones that don’t get caught—the old woman selling her deceased husband’s collection to an avaricious art collector, the harried-looking mother handing the cashier a battered 50-yuan note, or the two women at the airport, laughing as they collect their luggage, disappearing into the crowd.
The Last Boat-Builder in Ballyvoloon
FINBARR O’REILLY
Finbarr O’Reilly is an Irish speculative fiction writer who likes to explore how broken technologies or unearthly events affect intimate locales. Why would you want to write about alien battleships invading New York when you can imagine little green men asking for directions from a short-tempered undertaker in Carrigtwohill, County Cork? Finbarr has worked as a journalist for almost twenty years, most of those as a subeditor (copy editor) in newspapers such as The Irish Times, Irish Examiner, and The Daily Telegraph. He currently works as the production editor of a magazine for car dealers. He believes it is a testament to his powers of imagination that he has never purchased an automobile and doesn’t drive.
Like many Irish writers, Finbarr lives in self-imposed exile. He currently resides with his wife and two children in a small town in Lincolnshire, England, too far from the sound of gulls and the smell of saltwater.
In the frighteningly plausible story that follows, he takes us to a near future in which the seas have become places of dread, places that humans dare not venture upon for fear of a terrible, grisly death.
There are of a certainty mightier creatures, and the lake hides what neither net nor fine can take.
The first time I met Más, he was sitting on the quayside in Ballyvoloon, carving a nightmare from a piece of linden. Next to him on the granite blocks that capped the sea wall lay a man’s weather-proof jacket and hat, in electric pink. The words “petro-safe” were pin-striped across them in broad white letters, as if a spell that would protect him from the mechanical monster he whittled.
Short of smoking a pipe, Más looked every inch a 19th-century whaler. Veined cheeks burned and burnished by sun and wind to a deep cherry gloss, thick grey hair matted and flattened from his souwester and whiskers stiff enough with salt to resist the autumnal breeze blowing in from the harbour mouth.