Fade-Out
by Matthew Harrison
George glanced up from his newspaper; Sarah was tapping a message into her phone, which lay next to her bowl of breakfast cereal. “I say, dear...” he began.
“Yes, dear?” his wife said absently, still tapping.
George pressed on. “This article says we are more efficient if we focus on one thing at a time. You know, not multi-tasking.”
“Mmm,” Sarah said. Eyes still on her phone, she drew back her hair with one hand and with the other lifted a spoonful of cereal to her mouth.
George tried again. “It says the brain can’t cope if it tries to do more than one thing.” When would she look at him?
“That so?” Sarah’s phone gave a little beep and, pausing in mid-chew, she tapped another icon and read the message. Then she resumed chewing as she flicked down her other chats.
“You’ve got a little bit of cereal on your chin,” George said. Sarah wiped herself absently with a handkerchief, still reading.
“What is it that is so fascinating about your phone?” George demanded. He put down his newspaper. “Can’t we have a conversation?”
“I thought we were having one, dear,” his wife said, looking up at him with mild hazel eyes. “I’ve got orders coming in, have to attend to them.” She pointed at his chest. “And you have a splash of egg on your shirt.”
George glanced down, and indeed there was a drying blob of yolk. He dabbed at it ineffectually, then got up and went to the kitchen for a wet cloth. Glancing at his own phone, he saw that emails from work were piling up, while another icon claimed to have fourteen messages from one conversation. That looked like the Sunday football team. George tapped the icon, and indeed it was: a sorry sequence of injuries and excuses that left them almost without a defence. George tapped in his suggestions and was immersed in the replies when Sarah came in.
“Got the egg off, dear?” she asked, filling the tea pot from the kettle.
“Oh...” George looked up, annoyed at the interruption. “Yes. Yes, I have.” He shut off the phone and grinned sheepishly. “You caught me there!”
But his wife had already returned to the breakfast table and her own phone. She was still there when he came down a few minutes later in his suit. “Call you later!” he called as he strode through the dining room and out into the hall. His last impression was that Sarah’s hair formed a sort of halo round her head in the morning sunlight, making it look almost transparent.
* * *
In the train that morning, wifi was good and George got a great deal done. Not only was the football team beefed up by the recruitment of friends from the local pub, but emails were replied to, messages were read and composed and sent, and software updates received and activated. George even sent a text to Sarah: “Arriving in Paddington, wish you were here!”
True, his eyes felt strained and, when he looked up, the train carriage seemed unnaturally bright, the man opposite abominably hairy — George didn’t like the current fashion for beards — but he did feel a sense of achievement. As he shuffled with the others towards the carriage door, he felt confident enough to put his phone away entirely. Nor did he touch it as he reached the exit and began tramping up the slope to the main road.
His abstemiousness put him ahead of the rest of the Paddington population, George noted with satisfaction. Just about everyone around him walked along stumbling, heads bent, focused on a single hand raised as if in prayer. The girl beside him was so close that George could almost read what she was reading on her device; he changed course slightly and peered.
Then, Whoosh!
It was so fast that afterwards George could not be sure what had happened. It seemed that a bicycle cruising down the incline, its rider absorbed in his phone, actually ran through the girl beside him. Certainly, the bike passed close enough for the draught to ruffle George’s trouser legs. But the girl stumbled on, unperturbed and unruffled, out into the pale Paddington sunshine. George looked back, but the rider had disappeared into the station crowd. And when he turned around again, the girl had likewise vanished into the commuters pressing along the main road.
“It must have been an illusion, I suppose,” George mused, as later that morning he recounted the incident to Andrew in Finance.
“It must have,” Andrew said, one eye on the screen on his desk. “Hope you don’t have them too often.” His own phone, on the desk, gave a little chirrup. “And if you’ll excuse me, I have to meet the boss.” He fetched a jacket from a wall cupboard and bent to check his phone again. “Good luck with the delusions!”
“Il-lusions,” George murmured. He had just time to notice that the handle of the wall cupboard remained visible as his friend walked in front of it. Then Andrew was ushering him out and locking up, before walking off down the corridor, head still bent over his device.
* * *
Reaching his own office, George found his assistant Tina wearing earbuds, and had to shout to make himself understood. But once he had got her working on corrections to the report and answered another wave of emails, hoping Sarah’s orders would pay this time, and opened the pack for the following morning’s training — and quickly closed it again — George sat back and wondered what was happening.
Was it an illusion? He got up and peered cautiously out of his door. Yes, there was Tina, back towards him, reassuringly solid in checked blouse, humming as she typed to what was presumably music on her earbuds, and glancing from time to time at the phone lying on her desk. Yes, all was as it should be.
George started to relax. Then out of the corner of his eye, he saw that what he had taken as the checked pattern was in fact the outline of Tina’s desk drawer and keypad somehow visible through her body. And the flowery bits at the edges were her typing hands!
George started back in horror, knocking against the cabinet. The sound was loud enough to startle Tina. She turned to him, taking out one earbud: “Are you all right?” .
George waved a hand, not trusting himself to speak.
His assistant’s body was solid again; she looked at him anxiously. “You’re a bit pale.”
George pulled himself together, allowing Tina to fetch him tea and generally fuss around until he was again sitting at his desk. Once she had left, he sat back, trying to calm his beating heart. What was happening?
The salient observations of that morning, each individually dismissed as illusions, came together with striking finality. People were fading away! The world was vanishing!
In a moment of panic, George gripped the arms of his chair. But his room with its worn carpeting remained as solid as before. The world, or at least this portion of it, wasn’t in imminent danger of vanishing.
George cautiously experimented. He tapped messages into his phone and read emails on his PC, while surreptitiously glancing at his own hands. But they remained impenetrably fleshy. He even called Sarah, and tried to explain his concern.
“You think I’m vanishing?” came his wife’s puzzled voice. “I wish. Do you know I’ve put on five pounds!”
“Have you? I mean, surely not,” George said gallantly. He then tried to explain what he had seen regarding Andrew and Tina.
“Your assistant has a see-through blouse?”
“No, not her blouse, her body. I mean...” Try as he might, George could only get himself into deeper and deeper water. He beat a retreat, acknowledging in the end that it had all been a mistake. Sweating, he clicked off his phone, focusing again on the room and catching a momentary glimpse of his desk pad before his arm reasserted its solidity.
* * *
“For heaven’s sake, George!” Andrew gripped his friend’s arm. “What have you been smoking?” It was lunchtime, and they were sitting in the nearby square, packaged sandwiches on the bench beside them.
“Just hear me out,” George insisted. Though still shaken, the scepticism forced him to get his thoughts into logical order. He tried to explain.
“You’re saying I faded out when I was looking at my phone?” Andrew repeated. He extended his hand and rapped the bench. “Solid enough, surely?”
Then George had an idea. “Why don’t you watch me?”
It took a little while, but by appealing to Andrew’s scientific bent — he had studied Chemistry prior to Accounting — George managed to persuade his friend. A plaque on the upright recorded that the bench was dedicated to someone or other; George sat firmly against this plaque so as to hide it from view while he phoned Sarah. Andrew was to watch for the re-emergence of the plaque if, as predicted, George faded from view.
Shaking his head, Andrew sat down on the grass and set the timer on his phone. Then they were off. George called Sarah and was immediately embroiled in the Tina-blouse-transparency issue, which took a full quarter of an hour to extricate himself from, and only then by promises to do the washing up all month, take Sarah out to dinner, and generally up his act as husband. George finally got to “good-bye” and clicked off his phone, exhausted. Then he glanced up at Andrew.
Faint, so that the sun shone through him onto the grass, his friend was flicking through messages, totally absorbed in his phone.
* * *
That afternoon, George walked around the office surreptitiously studying his colleagues. Now that he looked at them properly, he realised that most of them were less than solid. The senior management, presumably the most distracted, were almost vaporous, walking through walls and through one another without any apparent harm. And no one but George seemed aware of all this strangeness.
Standing in the lift lobby on the way back to his office, George felt very alone. The world — or at least the portion of it relevant to him — was dissolving, and there was no one he could talk to. And the lift wouldn’t come.
He was just drawing breath for a sigh of despair when his phone buzzed. He pulled it out of his pocket, sighing now with a relief that was tempered only slightly by the realisation that it was Sarah. “Yes?” he said, bracing himself for another round of Tina-and-the-blouse.
In the event, Sarah’s tone was softer this time, and she even acknowledged that she had been “a bit crazy” over the whole thing. George managed to steer the conversation to breakfast cereal; he would buy more on the way home, and to the orders, some already paid, and when he finally clicked off the phone, it was with warm feelings towards his wife and satisfaction with himself. Then he looked up. He was back in his office.
What had happened? How had he got there? The phone surely wouldn’t have worked in the lift. The fire escape? But did he even know where that was?
“Excuse me, Tina,” he said, putting his head around the door, “how did I get here just now?”
Tina grinned and shrugged her shoulders. “Sorry!” Then her own phone buzzed, and she bent to look at it, becoming slightly transparent as she did so.
George gave up and went back to his desk.
* * *
At home that evening, Sarah seemed to have forgotten about Tina-the-transparent. In fact, she seemed almost to have forgotten about George, looking up at him only now and then between bouts of messaging. She got so faint that in the dimness of their sitting room — she had a thing about saving electricity — that she was hardly visible. The entire evening might have passed without ten words of conversation between them had it not been for a friend sharing a particularly amusing cat video which Sarah in turn just had to share with her husband.
Sarah went to bed early, but George could tell from her icon on his own phone that she was still active. And this gave him an idea.
He tapped in Sarah’s number, this time for a video call.
“Oh, George, I’m not decent!” Sarah said coyly, holding the phone so that he was looking up at her face.
“Good!” he said, marvelling inwardly at how clear and richly-coloured the image was, how animated his wife appeared.
“Oh, George!” Sarah’s voice was now lower, almost sultry. Her image on his phone slipped tantalisingly to a bare shoulder, before reverting to her face. “But you’re still dressed!”
“So I am,” he said, undoing a shirt button.
“Oh, George!”
George had only dim memories of what happened subsequently, but as he lay back in bed, exhausted, his final thought before he fell asleep was that he wasn’t alone.
* * *
The following day, George continued the experiment. It was strange at first, watching Sarah eat breakfast via his phone, but they both got used to it, and indeed when George glanced away from the screen and saw Sarah in the flesh, her face tinged with early morning pallor, he found that he preferred her online. His only regret was that an early meeting left no time for another round of conjugal felicity.
At work, he logged on to the meeting — wondering briefly why he had to be in the office at all — and then immediately became immersed in the cut and thrust among the faces on his PC screen. He had not realised how outrightly good-looking many of his colleagues were. And how bright.
Andrew, in particular, was in good form, explaining to the Chief Executive why the project in question wasn’t financially viable. George contributed his two cents on the property side — for which he had some animated slides prepared — and that also seemed to go down well. As the meeting was winding down, Tina’s icon appeared in the corner of the screen to alert him to another upcoming meeting.
So the morning passed. George, surfing from one meeting to the next, fielding emails and messages along the way, hardly noticed the passage of time. The best part of it was that in the downtime he could video-call Sarah on his phone and indulge in a surreptitious spot of conjugality mid-meeting. The only thing was, to keep a steady face.
“What was up with you?” Andrew asked wryly, as he put his head around the door at lunchtime. It was pale, blotchy head, quite unlike his handsome on-screen visage, although at least solid. “You looked like the cat that has had the cream!”
George admitted to being less than fully focused on the project.
“I thought so. Well, you should see this.” Andrew came up to George’s desk, fading now as he clicked through icons on his phone. “Here.”
George read: “4D effect — intimacy anywhere!”
“You have to buy gloves, a headset,” said his friend. “Actually, there’s no end to the accessories. But the basic is good enough. Then — pheew!”
George couldn’t wait. He ordered the full Partner package online, paid the premium for next-day delivery, and hurried home the following day — only to find that Sarah had beaten him to it. She was already in the headset, waiting for him, one glove on, moaning softly.
George dropped everything and knelt beside her, struggling with his own gloves, then having to take them off to put on the headset. At last everything was ready. Sarah appeared before him, soft, curvaceous, resplendent — and he could touch, smell, even taste her. It was... Well, “pheew!” hardly did it justice.
And another thing: he at last understood why. Why would anyone not want to be where everyone else was: enhanced, networked, connected, related, loved? Welcome to reality, he thought. There’s a world to explore.
Copyright © 2025 by Matthew Harrison
