Leaving the Nest — Part Three
By Robin Pond
Hurriedly retracing my steps, I locate apartment 719. The door is unlocked but when I rush inside everything is subtly different. Even my mother, while still clearly her, looks different, leaner, younger. She is down on the floor, playing with a little toddler who looks very much like a little me, but my sister should not be this young.
“Mom,” I declare, “something’s terribly wrong.”
She looks up, squinting in confusion. “Who are you? What are you doing in our home?”
This isn’t my home. This isn’t my mother. Everything is similar but altogether different. Mr. Wilde comes up behind me, putting a hand on my shoulder. “You really can’t go home again.”
I fight back the urge to cry. “None of it is real.”
He smiles benignly. “Reality is in the eyes of the perceiver.”
“But—“
“The illusion of reality is often less than the reality of the illusion.”
My mother has already lost interest in us as intruders and has gone back to playing with the toddler Jennifer. I ask, “What do I do now?”
“You come with me back to the conveyance.”
So I let him lead me away, possibly because I’ve been bred to be obedient but also because I have nowhere else to go. As we ride down in the elevator I conclude, “So you’re churning out lots and lots of identical Scott’s and Jennifer’s.”
But he shakes his head. “Never identical. There’s always a bit of randomness to the process, uniqueness in each result. Take you, for instance. That extra bit of awareness, perceptibility, creeps in sometimes, despite our best efforts.”
As we leave the building I ask him, “But what’s the point? Or is there even a point to any of this?”
He chuckles heartily. “This would be a lot of bother to go through if there really wasn’t any point to it.”
Robin Pond is a Canadian writer of plays and prose fiction. His mystery novel, Last Voyage, was published in 2018 and in the last several years he has published numerous speculative short stories in various magazines and anthologies, including Ginger which was voted Best Steampunk Short Story in the 2024 Critters Annual Readers Poll. Robin’s sci fi novella, Assimilation, and full-length novel, Canaan Within, are both available through Amazon.
Copyright © 2025 Robin Pond