It was a perfect day for fishing—or so I’d read.

I got out of my car and took in the old wooden pier before me.

A barrage of sensations hit.

The sounds of small waves crashing, the cool breeze ruffling my hair, the warm feel of the mid-morning sun kissing my skin, and the distinctive smell of salt-spray whipped up by the wind.

I had brought everything needed; a fishing rod with line, a tackle box containing a myriad of different hooks, sinkers, and swivels, pliers, several leaders, a handful of other tools, and finally, an ice-and-bait-filled cooler—

No, we call it an esky in Australia, not a cooler, I reminded myself, trying to undo years of integration training.

I felt eyes following me as I awkwardly wrestled all my fishing gear towards the pier.

A pair of teenage girls had their phones out, thinking they were discreet in their recording.

I was hoping it would take a little longer than that for someone to recognize me…

As I fought with the armfuls of equipment, and seeing another person with all his fishing gear in a cart, I made a mental note to purchase one.

The jetty was packed with anglers, at least a hundred people spread out along its length. I’d heard it got busy when the seasonal fish were around, but it was still shocking to see just how many people were present.

I eventually picked a spot half-way down the jetty with a young father and son on one side, and an older man with salt-and-pepper hair and weathered skin on the other. The father and son immediately started to glance at me, whispering to each other.

I did my best to not let it bother me.

“Don’t let other’s negative actions change your own good intentions,” my therapist’s words sounded in my head.

The older gentleman on the other side of me stood and watched the ocean.

I turned to him.

“Hey mate, mind if I set up here?”

“Not at all,” the older fisherman responded without looking up from the sea.

I smiled at the older man, then slowly and meticulously rigged my line, not making a single mistake with any of the knots after having absorbed the information of countless tutorial videos.

I picked out a small hook, a light sinker, and thin, five-pound leader for the small, seasonal fish I was targeting. The hook I chose was barbless; I wanted a challenge. Through my life experience, I’d learned it best to jump in the deep end if you truly desired to master something.

The goal for today was not to catch a fish, but to become a better fisherman.

Though, it would be nice to catch a fish…

I tried to put the bait on my hook, but the sand-worm bunched up and exposed the hook, not at all presenting the way it had on the videos I’d watched. I looked at it in confusion for a moment before a voice pulled me from my thoughts.

“It’s because of your hook,” the old fisher said, pointing at the slipping bait. “May I?”

“Uh, yeah, sure.” I held out the line for the man to take.

“Your typical hook has barbs on the back that help hold bait in place.” The angler deftly grabbed the line. “If you use barbless hooks like you’ve got here, it makes better sport, but the bait can sometimes fall down. What I like to do is slip part of the bait over the eye of the hook. That way, it will hold in place and look more natural to the fish.”

Calloused fingers grabbed the bait and slid it up and over the eye of the hook. He jiggled the line, and the bait stayed in place.

“Thanks mate, I appreciate it.”

The old fisherman smiled, crows feet bunching up in the corner of his eyes.

“No worries, lad. Happy to help.” He returned his attention to his own rod.

Following the directions of the seventeen videos I watched specifically relating to casting, I sent out the line.

Admittedly, the cast was terrible.

I let go too late, and the end of the line flew down closer to the pier than I’d intended. I didn’t let the embarrassment of the cast in front of so many onlookers linger—instead, I focused on the line. My index finger was held against it softly, waiting for the tug that I knew would come when a fish took the bait.

The first bite filled me with adrenaline when it came, and I tugged the rod up with a little too much enthusiasm. The hook pulled out of the fish’s mouth before it could eat it, and I wound the line in to find both the bait and fish gone.

The second bite similarly filled me with adrenaline, but I was a little more patient—I waited for the fish to take the bait for a full second before softly setting the hook, then I wound in the line.

Anticipation burned as I reeled the fish in, but before I could catch sight of it, it spat the hook. I once more wound the line in to find the bait gone, and no fish. Undeterred, I quickly reapplied my bait and made to cast it out again, but paused when I saw the crowd now arrayed behind me.

There were at least twenty people now standing and staring at me.

The news corporations had been relentless in their reporting of me over the past couple months, and even the spectacle of me going for a fish seemed enough to draw in the vultures.

More than half of the crowd had phones out and faced towards me, likely recording to show their friends or sell it to one of the bottom-feeding news companies.

I was used to the attention by now, but felt bad for the surrounding fishermen being subjected to the same attention by proxy.

I turned to apologize to the young father and child, but saw them both watching, not fishing; the child’s hands were wrapped around a recording cellphone, not a fishing rod.

I rolled my eyes and turned to the older man on my other side.

“Sorry about all the attention, old-timer. I’m happy to move on if you’d rather some peace and—”

“There’s nothing to apologize for, lad,” the man’s deep, raspy voice interrupted.

“You sure, mate? There’s a bit of a crowd following me—it’s no drama if you don’t want them here.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“It’s hardly your fault.” He turned and looked at me with startlingly blue eyes set in a sun-tanned and wizened face.

“I know who you are, but that don’t matter none. If you came here to fish, we’re all equal; we’re judged only by our actions and our day’s catch.”

He looked up to the sky, exposing his face to the warm rays of the sun as he breathed in deeply through his nostrils, a smile of bliss crinkling his features.

“Besides, who cares what anyone else is doing? It’s a perfect day for fishin’.”

I couldn’t help but smile at the wise words of the old man, and I too turned my attention away from the crowd of onlookers.

Baiting the hook as I’d been shown, I took a moment to appreciate the warm sun before casting out the line again.

The third bite came before the sinker hit the ocean floor.

I let the fish take the bait for a moment, then set the hook with a firm tug. I began winding, ensuring I kept the line tight as the fish tried to swim away. The wiggle of the fish’s head on the line filled me with excitement.

I caught the first glimpse of my prize as the sun reflected off of its silvery scales just before it broke the surface. I wound the line up more, and with an unpracticed motion, awkwardly flicked the fish over the railing and onto the jetty.

Knowing the fish to be toothless, I gripped it carefully by the mouth and rushed it towards my measuring mat. It came in at twenty-seven centimeters, well over the twenty-centimeter minimum size for the species. I quickly retrieved the spike from my tackle-box and dispatched the fish humanely before throwing it into the esky.

Looking up, the crowd had grown even more. Something behind them caught my eye, and I swore under my breath at the news van pulling up.

Time to go.

I thanked the old fisherman for his help as I hurriedly put the lid on my esky.

“Don’t mention it,” he said as he gazed over the water. “I’ll see ya round, lad.”

I spared a parting glance for the old man before turning away, a content smile on my face as I made my way back down the jetty and toward my car.

The crowd parted for me as I clattered along, esky in one hand, rod and tackle-box awkwardly held in the other.

Remembering something, I stopped in place.

I put everything down and fumbled for my phone. Placing two wireless earphones in, I pressed play.

The instructional video on how to properly fillet the fish I had caught quickly drowned out the sounds of the surrounding crowd. I’d already watched the video at least a dozen times, but I was nothing if not thorough.

I was determined to eat the fish as fresh as possible, and I’d clean and fillet my prize the moment I got back to my penthouse.

I pictured the video that went along with the audio in my mind’s eye as the instructor with a thick north-Queensland accent described where to slice with the filleting knife.

A second news van pulled up behind the other, and I smiled at the first reporter asking me questions as I swiftly walked past him. The second reporter all but sprinted out of his van, hand and microphone extended, mouth moving inaudibly as his words were drowned out by the north-Queensland man instructing how to remove the pin bones from the fillet.

It was in that moment, steps hastened by excitement, reporters yelling questions I couldn’t hear, with at least two-dozen cameras and smart phones pointed at me, and in front of almost a hundred witnesses, that I moved between the two news vans and walked directly into the path of an oncoming truck.

For his part, the truck driver had noticed neither the news vans nor the crowd.

He was looking at his phone, a phone made by a company my father founded. He drove a truck imported by a subsidiary of that same company, hauling a load of seasonal fish—the same such seasonal fish I’d been fishing for—to a supermarket my dad had helped establish as the leading grocer on five of Earth’s continents.

***

Jerry lived a menial life.

He relied upon podcasts and audiobooks to get him through his boring work days of hauling fish along the same monotonous route.

He looked down at his phone as he fumbled to hit the play button, and the two comedians with a podcast animatedly resumed their conjecture about what the richest man on Earth was doing after ruining his father’s legacy and walking away from it all.

***

As soon as I stepped out in front of it, I saw the oncoming truck and knew I had no time to do anything but think. I lamented my life choices, cursing the unfairness of the universe for taking me now that I’d had finally taken steps on the right path.

A profound desire to start things over was the last thing that went through my mind.

Well, technically, that thought was the second last thing that went through my mind.

The very last thing that went through my mind was the bull-bar of a 2015 Isuzu N-Series truck, filled with fish, and driven by a man about to discover firsthand what the richest man in the world was doing after walking away from everything.

***

In a world long since abandoned by the god that created it, something miraculous occurred.

Sound returned to a place of silence as an ancient construct struggled to start, its components caked with layers of rust and arcane waste.

The construct had lain dormant for centuries, the source required to power its magic having fled with the ascended being that created it.

That it tried to start at all in its current condition would have been sure to cause quite a stir among the ascended if any of them had been present to witness such an event.

The grinding complaints of the construct receded as the movement of cogs scraped away rust, and its self-cleaning function whisked away any lingering arcane waste.

It whirred to life and began its task.

The construct was a fairly common thing for gods to possess. It was quite simple, really. It would search for anything matching parameters set by its maker, and when finding a match, would harness part of its maker’s power in order to harvest it, hence the colloquial name used by the beings bearing the power to create them: harvester.

Many harvesters looked for multiple matches, the effort and expense needed to create such constructs causing their inventors to direct them toward multiple purposes.

This harvester, however, searched for a singular thing—souls.

Not just any souls, mind you. This harvester had exhaustive parameters that, if boiled down, came down to two distinctive requirements: the targeted soul must possess both incredible willpower, and must have recently gone through a monumental shift in the application of that will.

The latter requirement—that of requiring a shift or change in goal—is an aspect that would be lost on most of the ascended. Even if they learned of the parameters set by the creator of this construct, they would likely assume it was the neurotic act of a god gone mad, or a test performed by a god with too much time on their hands.

The god that created this harvester was neither.

In fact, if another ascended learned exactly which god had created this construct, they would have likely noted the parameter down for experimentation themselves—after they fled for their life, of course.

It was ubiquitously known that willpower was the main metric by which one could judge the weight of a soul. What was not so commonly known, however, was what it signified when a strong-willed individual possessed the ability to shift the application of that will.

It had a multiplicative effect on a soul’s willpower, something which the creator of this construct well knew.

And so, when a truck destroyed the body of an individual meeting and far exceeding the parameters programmed into the construct, it churned into action, reaching desperately for the severed soul.

The harvester recognized the weight of this soul, and lacking the creator that powered it, the harvester drew from the very world itself.

A perceptive denizen of the long-abandoned world might have noticed a slight dimming of the sun, that the wind had vanished for a moment, or that the waves on the churning ocean seemed to flatten almost imperceptibly.

All it took was a moment before the moving parts of the harvester wound back down into stillness, and the world returned to its normal state.

A sound rang out in the room, a great clunk coming from within the construct as a pivotal component snapped in half.

A small engine within the construct stirred, almost as if in afterthought.

Lacking the power to generate all the materials the soul needed, the harvester chose the most useful, focusing the retreating vestiges of power towards the creation of a small sack.

If a construct could feel emotion, the harvester would have felt content. It had completed one last task—its final procedure one of profound ambition.

The last whisper of willpower left behind by its creator dissipated, and it powered down for the last time as it sent the soul spiraling down to the world below.