Moult
Cleaning day on the 115th. From the observation window the crickets look like brown beads. Two farmers shake them from their old containers and they crawl over each other to get the grain, grown under lamps upstairs and scattered in fresh, clean boxes.
I press my ear to the observation window, hoping to hear their song.
There’s a scream at my ribcage, rattling the bars. It’s for James but I’ll give it to the crickets.
The Glass will take it anyway.
You can’t scream here.
Out it comes, rush of air, the skin of my mouth stretched, acid-hurt on my tongue. It feels loud enough. I’m yelling as though it’s my bones about to be ground to bread. Of course, the Glass, made to cancel noise that breaks the 80 decibel rule, grabs my anger and stifles it. A spectacle or unchecked emotions are not in anyone’s interests.
*
Six years old, downstairs, outside.
Hands sweaty and cupped to my sternum, my heart hopping with joy at the black insect there.
That night, too warm, I lie in bed listening to the trill my catch makes. A lullaby. I try to join it and the others, five black field crickets in total, as they make this sound from their new home, a box on my chest of drawers.
I toot, roll an R at the roof of my mouth.
Then my mother is at the bedroom door.
“Go to sleep,” she says, “you can’t make that sound. You’d need wings.”
*
Two days after my 21st birthday. The 39 public electric vehicle grabs my senses by the scruff. The colours aren’t much but the noise… there’s no control, no select or mute. Ahead, one seat, a girl in a grey-green headscarf laughs, a staccato sound that stabs at the centre of my forehead. She doesn’t seem worried that I can hear. Further up is a man with biceps so pale you can almost see into him. They twitch at the line of his rolled sleeves. Near him, the dummy bot spins a wheel—it makes a sweeping sound slipping through the bot’s white gloves though its movement affects nothing on the bus.
The girl throws her head back, laughing again. I catch a waft of sweet, soy tang.
It’s too real.
Stop the bus I want to get off.
I stay seated, nostrils narrowed, jaw tight, trying to block it all from entering my body.
Up Dominion Road we roll. Outside, new, old, older jostling. Fifteen years ago this part of the city was a kind of Chinatown, my mother says. Herbalists, bubble tea and dumplings, made way for the apartments. The park I loved as a kid is gone. The tall Samoan boys you’d see playing basketball ushered into the indoor courts inside the new buildings.
Next to the designated PEV stop, flanked by concrete apartments, something new is growing. Adolescent, this building is already taller than anything around it. A tower made of something I’ve heard called Living Glass. It filters air and sound—and who knows what else.
We pull in. There’s a boy waiting.
This boy is tall, his hair black. His chest caves into the arc of his shoulders, bringing him down towards the rest of us. He nods to the dummy at the wheel, which is interesting. Most people don’t acknowledge the dummies. They’re not proper bots. This one is a relic, five years at least, from a time when people didn’t feel comfortable without a figure at the helm, something they could pretend was in charge. It’s beyond the dummy’s capacity but it seems surprised too. It raises one white gloved hand to the side of its cap and the boy walks on.
There is only one place to sit. I hold my breath, hoping he’ll take the empty seat at my left, hoping he’ll stay standing.
The boy sits, half of him hanging from the seat edge. It’s an effort to keep his knees from touching mine. He crosses his legs, twists them around each other. The flat top of one brown sneaker, a dull IRL shade, grips the ankle of his other leg.
This is how it is for me too. I’m not tall, but I feel it just the same—the need to take up as little physical space as possible. I hold my breath, I worry there isn’t enough oxygen to go around.
In Tank, you can take up as much room as you like.
*
“They could jump right out.”
I turn from the observation window, startled by the voice. A woman has appeared at my shoulder. A neighbour, she lives on the 129th, though she’s never spoken to me before. Her high, sculpted hair, yellow as the large-bellied seahorses on the escalators, is wilting. I can see a small stimulator dot on her scalp.
It means her experience will be mixed, her reality lifted.
“But they won’t,” she continues.
I nod, looking past the window to the crickets’ stacked tubs.
“Well they have no need.”
I don’t know if it’s actually me she’s talking to. It puts me on guard, squeezes all the air to the shallows of my chest, even though I know there’s plenty to go round. One of the benefits of living here.
“I often think, could we change that?” She taps her middle finger against her temple, then moves it up to stroke the dot in her hair. It’s grotesque. She may as well have licked a finger or pushed a hand into her underwear.
I walk away, towards the loops and tangle of escalator tunnels. The exterior wallpaper here is ocean themed, for now. Next season, there’ll be a new design—not just for the escalators, for everything—apartments, gardens. To keep us all interested.
“Is anyone still unfortunate enough to live down there, I wonder?” Her voice carries, just within the decibel rule.
I wonder too.
The day we arrived, Dominion Road was a gap-toothed smile. Nine towers, sharp adult incisors, stood pushing concrete apartments and ancient one-storeys from the horizon.
I stop to watch the wallpaper. A ray swoops in first then the seahorses. They drift in a slow current, tails gripping rocks on the way up to the 129th. I hold my fingers out, as if I could dip them in the water—my hand touches only the metal of the tunnel exterior but the seahorses scatter in response, swimming their rocking stroke further up, where I can’t reach.
The crickets are the only real animals here.
There’s a soft whir behind me, an electric barrow and a farmer. Close, like this, it’s easy to see the farmer is a bot. Her pupils stretch almost to the whites of her eyes—irises just slivers of hard-to-see colour. The barrow is piled high with cricket waste, moult and old grain. On the top, pale brown and perfectly formed, is a shed exoskeleton. The split where the insect has wriggled free is hard to see.
“Excuse me,” I say, stopping the bot, leaning forwards, taking it from the barrow.
It’s brittle in my fingers and so light I might not be holding anything at all.
*
In my mother’s low-rise apartment the Tank lid slides into place, the length of my arm above. Its web of black dots, haptic stimulators, close in to land gently across my torso, face, legs—like moths on a lit screen. The sensation as they settle is delicate, light—they stick slightly to the hair on my arms.
It’s a relief.
Tank, tub, box, tube, coffin, call it what you like, it’s ripe with potential. In here there are thousands of places, millions of players. I take a gambler’s approach. Close my eyes, count to ten, knowing that experiences are scrolling.
“Select,” I say, eyes still shut.
Eyes open now.
I stand in the bright, mixed light of an atrium, yellow daylight meets white bulb. Ahead, a fountain, concrete, its pool shaped like an open clam. Horses with mermaid tails, scaled and green, gallop from its centre. I’ve chosen a low-volume realistic soundtrack: the noise of water rushes into the rattle and chatter of people (synthetic and player avatars) on the move.
Above, the high glass ceiling is hung with paper signs, twice as long as I am.
‘Massive’
‘Reductions’
‘SALE’
20th Century Mall, it’s one of my favourites. Before I’ve taken a step, it’s dredged a nostalgia for things I can never really try—and the tingle of anticipation. The colours are beautiful.
“Select objective,” says the Tank.
“Clothes,” I say.
It’s like a lot of games—you collect things for points—but these are actual things my mother says people like her used to collect in real life, years ago. Clothes made of petroleum, shoes cut from cow skin, salted, stretched.
Is it horrible?
I suppose.
I’ve accumulated a wardrobe and a wallet. If you want to collect the best items, you have to find a way to make money: work or steal. I turn and look behind me. The long sweep of escalator and gold handrail. Lit shop signs in every colour, deep, bold and neon—strewn with pictures and prices. The window of each shop a glass box screaming goods. It’s invigorating. I want to eat it all up, pile everything into a bag and make it mine.
*
On the bus, the boy next to me has a smell too. Crisp, like cotton smoothed by a hot iron. It’s real but not an assault. In Tank, colours are better. Deep, vibrant hues. Flowers so velvet-purple I sometimes pick one and wring it in my fist, to see if the colour will splash the ground. But they don’t use smell much. Scented experiences are niche. In-Tank smell is more lemon soap than real citrus.
Development is marching though—it’s only a matter of time before scent is authentic and more, we’ll be able to siphon memory to create bespoke, personal experiences.
The boy is stroking his thumb, smoothing and scratching below the joint. There’s a bump there and I have a sudden urge to reach my fingers out and stroke the blemish too.
It’s the sort of thing I’d do easily in-Tank.
The rules and boundaries are different here.
I am different.
I turn back to the window; it dulls my sense of him. From it, I see the long line of people queuing for pop-crickets at the K-Road bars. The sight begins a wave of unease. I can’t look out the window and I can’t look at the boy.
I close my eyes.
How do you speak to a stranger? I’ve asked my mother but for her it’s like breathing, written into her cells and impossible to explain.
At the top of Queen Street he exits.
The doors are almost closed when I push my hands between them, jump and follow.
His name is James. The scar, he tells me, a month after we meet, was from his father.
“How?” I ask.
“Microchip.”
“Why?”
“Lost the access card to the apartment.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Only when I took it out.”
“How?” I’m a broken bot.
“With a needle and nail scissors. I locked myself in the bathroom, dug at the skin, kept digging.” His shoulders tell me he dislikes this topic, but I feel the way he might have then, bloody point in my hand, searching.
“Was he angry?”
“I didn’t tell him.”
“He would have noticed your scar though.”
“No.”
“Oh.” Everything else I’d like to say bursts, unasked, in my mouth.
The image he shows me of his father, later, gives me a short man in a white shirt. I’m careful to collect the similarities: hair, brows—thick and arched, curving like smiles the wrong way round, though his mouth is a straight line. I learn more. He came from the Philippines, worked in construction, had a hand in building the high-rise apartments that grew up in this part of town twenty years ago.
“What’s your favourite?”
It’s not his thing, he’s trying because it’s mine. We’re in his single bed, my leg under his. His shin bone at the underside of my right foot. I feel the way that, under the flesh, bone is sharp. I’ve grown accustomed to these things quickly, the abhorrent is almost normal. It’s the little things, grit in the bed, the way skin can feel warm and cool at once, details that I realise the Tank doesn’t capture, though I’m not sure it needs to. A green blanket covers us. I’m used to it now, rough cotton.
“In-home or out?”
“Either, your all-time favourite.”
“20th Century Mall.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that boring, compared to the volcano or moa hunt at Eden?”
He means the strip of VR parlours at Eden Quarter, where you can feel Rangitoto blaze and rumble, lie in the dirt of a hidden Gate Pa trench and fire a rifle up, into charging British boots, track a giant moa around the edge of Lake Wanaka and host a dinner party staffed by disgraced twenties politicians.
It’s like he’s pressed the right button, inserted the code. I’m home, here and present, talking about this.
“No. It’s opulent and decadent. It’s a quest. And the colours! You can almost buy anything you want.”
“I don’t think I understand why you would though.”
“It’s… hedonistic and gross but beautiful. It’s like sex,” I say, and then I find it hard to look at him, “anyway, it’s not real. No one really gets hurt.”
I’ve never met anyone who didn’t enjoy the Tank’s escape in some way. I remember my first sight of him. His nod to the 39 PEV dummy—he’s not immune to make believe.
I say, “don’t you want to grow wings?”
James smiles, and it’s warm, but the tuck at the corner of his mouth tells me he doesn’t really understand.
*
Out of the tunnel, off the escalator belt, like a bot on auto-ambulate, I’m driven by habit to the central garden on the 65th. There, only metres away, is the wood-like finish of our apartment door. I turn away, lifting my eyes to the plants, broad-leafed tikumu, that climb the garden’s rock wall. The wall rises like the escalators, a spine connecting the floors. The tikumu flowers, small daisies, look as though they’re there by accident. The wall is not yet a month old.
Not last season, not the season before, but in its first iteration, this garden centrepiece was a shell. It was that way when we first came to view the tower. I found that comforting, though it was a kina and not my mall clam. Clear spines of water shot from that kina, refreshing the surrounding plants. There were no fish-tailed horses.
“There’s something similar,” I said, back then, standing at our door—though it was not then ours—watching the kina splash and spray. James’ face had closed. He understood and refused my comparison. I faltered, changed topic. He was a man who believed in breaking things to fix them. No point in mentioning the escalators, or that everything we’d ever need would be right here.
*
It’s raining, pins of water that sting as we run to get the PEV. Inside, there’s rain on the bus window, it’s hard to make out much. The new tower is the only thing I really see, still growing, a glass weed, leaving the concrete block apartments far behind.
On K’ Road, at the Grafton end, we get out. I’m not sure why.
“Dinner,” James says.
He knows I don’t eat crickets.
He pulls me forward to an alley and a door. Oil and a scent, earthier than the usual sweet nuttiness of frying crickets, is in the air. I hold my breath to keep it away.
A bot greets us. He’s dressed as a man, salt-and-pepper hair steadied by a headband with two curling antennae.
“Follow me,” he says, inclining his head. The antennae wave. He leads us to a booth and draws four sliding screens around us, closing us in.
I reach for the back of the booth seat. The fabric is soft and downy and runs in lines, ribbons with hard centre seams. It’s not fresh or wholesome here. It’s like seeing my avatar in someone else’s play. I take my hands away, and fold them in my lap as I sit.
The ambience is DIY. I lean forward to take the control, to crank the walls up to hyper-real, an orange that will pulsate to the beat once I’ve chosen music to accompany it, to drown out the seats, the scent, but James is already at the dial, darkening the wall to the kind of blue that’s hard to distinguish from black.
It makes it harder to see. On the table, I think I see an induction top. I put my hand down and feel it, a cold, smooth surface.
“I thought, this might be as good as 20th Century Mall,” James says. He lifts two fingers into the air, raises his eyebrows. The bot leaves with this wordless order.
I can’t see any other people, the booths are all behind screens, but I know they’re here. Around us there’s the hiss of cooking, hum of conversation and, now, a raw gasp. It seems concentrated, a condensed, angry block of noise. It makes me itch for the ambience control.
The bot is back. He sets tongs and a bowl, glass with a strip of light around its lip, at the side of the induction surface. The light makes it easier to see. The two things inside are not crickets. The colour of wood—real wood, from trees—they’re monsters, each the size of my palm. They fill the bowl.
“What are they?”
“Wētā,” James says. “Giant ones. Get them on the grill plate quickly, so they don’t escape.”
I don’t understand.
He lifts the lid, grips a monster in the teeth of the tongs, snaps the lid back. The creature twitches, legs moving, trying to push the air away.
It’s alive.
Pop crickets are snap frozen. It keeps them fresh—and no one’s really culpable.
And I never eat them.
The wētā’s long antennae quiver, curving all the way to its barbed back legs. James passes the tongs and the decision to put it on the heat becomes mine.
Now that it’s away from the bowl’s strip light, it’s difficult to really see the insect. I lift it an inch from my eyes. It’s got tusks at its jaw and its eyes are black needles.
My chest tightens, there’s a curdling stir in my belly.
“They’re endemic.” I say.
“Yes.”
“It’s against the rules.”
“It’s not illegal. Breeding programs are on track and these ones are a sterile cross-breed, they can be sold commercially.”
“But—it’s not. It’s not ethical.”
“Who’s to say. Won’t you get a kick out of it though? Chuck it on the induction.”
I touch the wisp of antennae, an anorexic bristle, that feels like a single eyelash. I put the tip of my second finger to its back, stroke the shell. I want to please James, but I won’t do this. I exhale, the rush of warm air feels urgent and I adjust my grip on the tongs. There’s a crisp crack, I see the giant has one leg in the air, barbs out—in response to me and the metal at its abdomen. I wonder why it’s only lifted one.
The reason is limp against the other flank: a leg twisted and snapped in the crush of tongs in my hands.
I drop it, shocked, a get-it-away fling to the induction. A high-sided pan is there now. Hot oil jumps inside and the bot places a lid over the wētā. The lid is clear, you can see everything unfold. It jumps with the oil, a panic of legs and shell. There’s a sound as it hits the lid, again, and again. And I understand why we call them pop crickets—and why they arrive frozen.
The smell is sour, walnuts, earth and oil. It tugs at me, at the back of my throat where acid gathers. It begs me to leave.
I steady myself, one hand to the seat. The lights are brighter. Someone has changed the ambience. I’m a chain of realisation: the fabric beneath me is feather. I can see the lines, soft green, brown and gold flecked. I leap from the wētā to the understanding that I sit on the wings, tail feathers and down of kiwi, kea and kākāpō.
James takes my hand, slides the tongs from them.
He’s made his point.
Homeward bound, the rise of James’ scar against my wrist. I take my hand away, press it under my legs on the PEV seat. Soon, through the dark, I see the thing that’s in my mind’s eye. The tower. It glistens, like sugar, brought to the boil and cooled. I make a decision, I will live there one day.
It will be better to live in its protection.
*
At the foot of the tikumu and rock, there’s a ledge. I sit, grit scrapes my trousers.
I reach into my shirt pocket and take out the crisp, translucent cricket shell, thinking about the peeled living creature that crawled out.
We’re all out of our skins.
It’s years since James’ moult, a careless pile of clothes at the foot of the Tank, made me lift the lid. The memory, now, is as vivid as if I’m in Tank calling it up, bringing it back to life. In there, his eyes looked soft and sleepy, fixed on a dream. His body bloomed small black spots, haptic stimulator patches. They spread across him like a rash, the collection at his groin buzzing. I shut the lid quickly—if it slammed, the Glass swallowed the noise.
An old story: he found the thing he was set against attractive, underneath it all.
What does he choose? Not the volcano.
Later, I stepped into the still-warm Tank, to see.
“Repeat experience,” I said and felt the stimulators hover and attach themselves to my face, chest, arms, legs, groin. The ambience dim, I found myself sitting with a woman, young, familiar. I saw the glass bowl between us, something living inside. I can still summon the unease that caught me as I recognised my own face, fuller and riper than it is now. That me wore a look I’ve never shown the mirror. In response to her, the stimulators at my groin began to flutter. My mouth opened and the experience prompted me to speak.
“Chuck it on the induction,” I told myself, slurring, trying to change the pattern and say something different. The smell of wētā cooking. The noise of it at the lid. A raw retch in my throat, the other me gagging too. At my groin the stimulators intensified, drowning me in a roiling shock: desire and disgust. “Stop,” I shouted, too loud so that the Glass cancelled me and I had to calm myself and say it quietly. “Stop.”
Now, in the garden, tikumu leaves brushing my shoulder, I whisper to the cricket.
“It’s not real.”
*
He emerges from the apartment, rubbing the bump on his thumb. I take his hand, stop the old habit. It’s an effort not to see the flesh of the man in the Tank. At his chin there’s a pinch of skin, where his jaw used to be tight and smooth. I can see the ambulatory haptic dot behind his ear, I reach up to touch it and remind him I’m here.
“Have you eaten?” he asks, his eyes hopeful.
I don’t know whether it’s me he’s speaking to.
I slip my hand into my pocket and pat my empty cricket, close my eyes. Pat again, a heartbeat, a hop on the wrong side of my chest.
Kirsteen Ure’s short stories and creative non-fiction have appeared in journals and books including Landfall, Headland, Ko Aotearoa Tātou, Fresh Ink, Strong Words 2018 and Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy, Volume 4. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Auckland.