Stepping (Fiction) by Michael Anderton

The WiFi had been out for twenty minutes, which in Lily's world constituted a genuine emergency. She lay on her bed, refreshing the browser, watching the spinning wheel turn and turn and turn.

"Come on..."

Connection error. She checked her phone out of habit, knowing what she'd find. No signal. There was never any signal. The farmhouse sat in a dead zone—her parents had bought it for the views, the space, the distance from everything, and Lily had learned to hate all three. Twenty miles to the nearest village. Twenty miles of empty fields and unmarked lanes and darkness. Out here, the landline was the only connection to the outside world. Internet, phone calls, everything ran through that single copper wire strung across miles of nothing.

She found Noah in his room, controller in hand, staring at a frozen loading screen.

"WiFi's down," he said.

"I know. Go ask Dad to reset the router."

"You ask him."

"I asked last time."

They stood there, siblings in stalemate, and then they both heard it. Footsteps from downstairs. Steady. Rhythmic. The particular sound of shoes on hardwood, repeating.

"They're still up?" Noah asked.

It was after eleven. Their parents were usually asleep by ten—one of the many boring things about living in the middle of nowhere. Lily shrugged, and they headed for the stairs together.

The kitchen was her mother's pride: open-plan, expensive, all clean lines and ambient lighting. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out onto absolute darkness—no streetlights, no neighbors, nothing but fields and sky and the particular emptiness of rural England at night.

Lily stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Noah bumped into her.

Their parents were walking.

Her father followed two feet behind her mother. They traced the perimeter of the room in a slow, steady loop—around the island, past the dining table, along the windows, back to the start. Their faces were blank. Their eyes looked at nothing.

"Mum?"

Nothing. Her mother's gaze passed over her without recognition, without pause. She kept walking.

"Dad. Dad!"

Noah stepped toward their father, waving his hand. David walked past him like he wasn't there. Around the island. Along the windows. Back to the start.

Lily moved directly into her mother's path. Margaret stopped. Waited. Her face utterly empty, like a computer in sleep mode. The moment Lily stepped aside, her mother continued.

"What's wrong with them?"

Noah was still waving at their father, his voice rising toward panic.

"It's like they can't see us."

Lily planted herself in front of her mother again. "Mum. Mum, stop. Look at me."

Margaret stopped. Waited. That blank patience.

"Okay," Lily said. "Okay, you're going to stay right there."

She didn't move. Margaret didn't move. They stood like that for ten seconds, twenty, and Lily felt a flicker of hope—

Then her mother walked forward. Not around her. Through her. Margaret's shoulder caught Lily's chest with surprising force, knocking her sideways, and her mother kept going, resuming her circuit like nothing had happened.

"What the hell?"

Noah had dragged a dining chair into their father's path. David reached it and stopped. Waited.

"See?" Noah said. "He's stopping, we just need to—"

David walked forward. His shins hit the chair. He kept walking, pushing it ahead of him, the legs scraping against the hardwood. When the chair caught against the island, he simply changed angle, shoving it aside with his hip, and continued around the perimeter.

"DAD!" Noah grabbed his father's arm with both hands, pulling backward, digging his heels in. David didn't slow. He dragged Noah three feet across the kitchen floor before Noah lost his grip and stumbled back.

"Jesus," Lily breathed.

She tried tackling her mother. Actually threw herself at Margaret's legs like she'd seen in rugby matches. Her mother staggered—for a moment Lily thought she'd done it—and then Margaret caught her balance and kept walking, stepping over Lily's sprawled body without looking down.

They piled chairs in the walking path. Dragged the coffee table from the living room. Stacked boxes from the pantry into a barricade. Their parents walked into each obstacle, stopped, waited, and then pushed through with that terrible mechanical strength, shoving furniture aside, stepping over debris.

Lily screamed in her mother's face. Begged. Cried. Shook her by the shoulders. Nothing. Not a flicker of recognition. Not even irritation. Just those empty eyes and that steady, rhythmic pace.

"We need to call someone," she finally said, her voice hoarse. "Ambulance. Police. Something."

She picked up the landline in the living room. Dead. No dial tone, no static—nothing. She followed the cord to the wall, as if looking at it would help. The little status light on the router was dark.

"Line's completely out," she said. "That must be why the WiFi died."

"The car," Noah said. "We can drive to the village."

They ran to the garage. The Range Rover sat there, sleek and expensive, another one of their parents' investments in rural living. Lily pulled open the driver's door and slid in. The key was in the cupholder where her dad always left it.

She pressed the start button. The dashboard lit up.

ENTER PIN

"Shit." She stared at the screen. "It wants a code."

"What code?"

"I don't know, Dad set it up. Some security thing." She tried 0000. INCORRECT. Tried 1234. INCORRECT. Tried her parents' anniversary. INCORRECT - 2 ATTEMPTS REMAINING.

"Stop," Noah said. "If you lock it out—"

"I know." She slammed her palm against the steering wheel. "I don't know the bloody PIN."

They went back inside. Lily tried her father's pockets while he walked, her hands fumbling at the fabric. Nothing. No phone, no wallet, nothing written down. She searched the kitchen drawers, the study, her parents' bedroom. Nothing.

"We could walk," Noah said.

Lily looked out the window at the darkness. Twenty miles. No torch that would last that long. No phone signal for GPS. Just empty fields and lanes that all looked the same, lanes she'd only ever seen from inside a car.

"It's the middle of the night. We'd get lost in twenty minutes."

"In the morning, then. When it's light."

"Maybe." But even as she said it, she was doing the math. Six hours to walk to the village, minimum. Probably more like eight, if they could even find the way. And what would happen here, while they were gone?

She looked at her parents, circling the kitchen. Walking. Walking.

"Let's wait until morning," she said. "See if they stop. See if the line comes back."

She woke on the sofa to grey light and the sound of footsteps.

The walking hadn't stopped. Her parents had been circling all night—eight hours, nine, she couldn't count anymore—and now, in the pale morning, she could see what that meant. Her father's trousers were dark with a spreading stain. The smell hit her a moment later.

"He wet himself," Noah said quietly. He was sitting on the floor, knees pulled to his chest, staring at their parents with the hollow look of someone who had run out of ways to understand what he was seeing.

"We need to go," Lily said. "Now. Get help."

They put on coats and boots. Lily grabbed a bottle of water, a handful of granola bars. She stood at the back door and looked out at the fields stretching away to the horizon. Grey sky. Grey land. No landmarks. No paths.

"Which way is the village?"

Noah pointed. "That way. I think."

"You think?"

"We always go by car. I don't—I'm not sure."

Lily tried to remember. Left out of the driveway, then right at the old barn, then... what? There was a fork somewhere, she knew that much. And a crossroads. And all of it looked the same, field after field after field.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. We'll figure it out."

They walked for an hour. The sun stayed hidden behind clouds, giving no sense of direction. The lanes twisted and split. Lily chose left, then right, then left again, and after a while she realised she had no idea if they were getting closer to the village or further away.

"I don't recognise any of this," Noah said.

"Me neither."

"Lily, what if we're going the wrong way?"

She didn't answer. She was thinking about their parents, alone in the house, walking their endless circuit. How long could a person walk without water? Without rest? She'd read somewhere that you could die of exhaustion. That your heart could just give out.

"We have to go back," she said.

"What? No. We need to find help."

"We're lost, Noah. We could walk for hours in the wrong direction. And if something happens to them while we're gone—"

"Something's already happening to them!"

"I know." Her voice cracked. "I know. But I can't—I can't leave them to die alone. I can't."

They walked back. It took two hours to find the house again. Inside, the footsteps continued. Their parents hadn't stopped. Hadn't slowed. Hadn't noticed they were gone.

By the second night, Lily had stopped counting the loops. She and Noah made a camp in the corner of the kitchen, dragging blankets and pillows from upstairs, trying to create some small pocket of normalcy in the middle of the nightmare. They ate cereal from the box. They didn't talk much.

Their parents were slowing. Not stopping—never stopping—but each step came heavier now, more effortful. Their mother's lips were cracked. Their father's breathing had gone shallow and ragged.

"They need water," Noah said.

Lily tried. She held a glass to her mother's lips, walking alongside her, tilting it carefully. The water ran down Margaret's chin and soaked into her blouse. She didn't swallow. Didn't even seem to notice. She just kept walking.

"Mum, please. You have to drink. Just swallow, just—"

The water pooled on the floor. Margaret walked through it, leaving wet footprints.

The footsteps circled. Endless.

Lily watched her mother pass, and in the darkness, she noticed something she hadn't seen before: a faint green glow from Margaret's wrist. Pulsing softly. Keeping time.

She was too exhausted to think about it. Her eyes closed, and she slept, and the footsteps walked through her dreams.

The third day was when it started to feel like death.

The smell was unbearable—urine and sweat and something worse underneath, something her body recognized before her mind could name it. Her mother's legs shook with every step now, muscles spasming, tendons at the breaking point. Her father's face had gone gaunt, the skin pulling tight against his skull.

Noah sat with his knees to his chest, crying silently. He'd stopped asking questions. Stopped trying to help. Lily didn't blame him. There was nothing left to try.

She thought about walking out again. Just picking a direction and going, going until she found someone, anyone. But the fields all looked the same, and the lanes all looked the same, and she kept imagining herself wandering in circles while her parents died alone in an empty house.

She grabbed her mother's arms one more time. "Mum. Please. Just stop. Just for a second."

Margaret pushed past her with that horrible mechanical strength, and Lily stumbled back against the island, and that was when she finally saw it clearly.

The band on her mother's wrist. A fitness tracker. The screen glowing green.

She looked at her father. No band on his wrist—but as he turned, she noticed something else. A small scar at the base of his skull. Fresh. Pink. Almost hidden by his hairline.

She hadn't noticed it before. She hadn't been looking.

Noah's tablet still had cached pages from before the WiFi died. Lily scrolled through them with shaking hands, searching for something she couldn't name, until she found it.

A tech article. A photo of a smiling man pointing to a small scar at the base of his skull. The headline: I GOT THE IMPLANT: MY FIRST MONTH WITH NEURALINK.

She scrolled faster. Another page.

NEURALINK ANNOUNCES FITBIT INTEGRATION FOR COUPLES

She read the words out loud, barely hearing her own voice:

"...sync wellness goals across partners... shared step counts... move together toward a healthier future..."

She kept scrolling. A forum post, cached from weeks ago. Someone complaining:

"Anyone else having issues when their internet drops? My wife's implant freaked out during a power cut. Tech support says it needs constant cloud connection to 'maintain behavioral calibration.' WTF does that even mean?"

The replies were cut off. Page incomplete.

Lily looked up at her parents. Walking. Together. Step for step.

"It's the landline," she said.

"What?"

"Dad got that brain thing. The chip. Remember? He was so excited about it." The memory surfaced—her father at dinner, showing them the tiny bandage at his neck, explaining how it connected directly to his phone, his apps, his wife's fitness tracker. Couples mode. Shared goals. They'd synced their step counts so they could motivate each other. Walk together toward a healthier future.

"It synced with Mum's Fitbit. And when the line went down..."

She thought of her parents, preparing for bed that night. The landline dying. The connection to the cloud severing. And something in her father's head—something that needed that connection to stay calibrated—losing its signal. Crashing. Defaulting to some basic, endless loop.

Walk. Walk. Walk. Complete the goal.

"The car PIN," she said suddenly. "That's why we don't know it. Dad probably doesn't either. Not anymore. It's all stored in the cloud, in his—"

She gestured at her head. At that small pink scar.

Lily rushed to her mother, grabbed her wrist, tried to pull off the tracker. It wouldn't budge. The band had sealed itself to the skin somehow, fused there, locked.

"Come off. Come off."

Margaret pulled away with that awful strength.

Kept walking.

The morning of the fourth day, Lily woke to silence.

The footsteps had stopped.

She scrambled up, her heart pounding, and saw her father face-down on the hardwood. Still.

Her mother stood in the corner, swaying. Her breathing was shallow and wet, a rattling sound that Lily had only heard once before, when her grandmother was dying.

"Mum!"

Noah was already kneeling beside their father, shaking him, his voice breaking. "Dad... wake up... please..."

Lily reached for her mother—

And Margaret's arm rose.

Slowly. Mechanically. Her wrist rotated.

She looked at her Fitbit.

The screen glowed:

✓ GOAL ACHIEVED

10,000 STEPS

For the first time in four days, something crossed Margaret's face. A small, satisfied smile.

Then she collapsed.

Lily caught her—tried to catch her—and they went down together, and Lily was screaming, screaming into the silence of the empty house, the empty fields, the empty world her parents had loved so much.

No one heard.

Later—minutes, hours, she couldn't tell—Lily sat on the kitchen floor, holding her mother's hand. The hand was cooling. Noah was somewhere behind her, not crying anymore, just silent. The house was quiet.

On the counter, her phone buzzed.

She didn't look. Couldn't look. Couldn't do anything but hold on.

But Noah looked. "Lily. The WiFi's back."

The little light on the router had turned green. The landline repaired, somewhere out there in the empty fields. Connection restored.

Lily watched the status light blink, thinking of phone poles and repair crews and the world going on outside these walls, not knowing, not caring. Four days. If the line had come back one day earlier. Twelve hours. If they'd just lived somewhere with neighbours, with phone signal, with anything—

But her parents had wanted the isolation. The peace. The distance from everything.

On Margaret's wrist, the Fitbit screen flickered. New text scrolled across the display:

SEARCHING FOR NEW USER...

Lily's phone buzzed again. A notification.

She reached for it slowly. The screen glowed in the dim room.

FITBIT: Would you like to sync with a family member?

Below the message, two buttons:

YES | NO

Lily stared at the screen.

The Fitbit on her mother's wrist pulsed green, patient and steady, waiting for a connection.

Behind her, Noah's voice: "Is that the WiFi? Can we call someone now?"

Lily didn't answer. She was thinking about her father at dinner, so excited, showing off the little scar. It's the future, he'd said. You kids will all have these someday.

She thought about the twenty miles of empty fields. The car they couldn't start. The walks where every lane looked the same. How many times her parents had said they loved it out here, loved the quiet, loved being away from everyone.

She pressed NO.

The screen went dark for a moment. Then:

ARE YOU SURE? SYNCING HELPS FAMILIES STAY CONNECTED.

And below that, a new button:

SYNC ANYWAY

The Fitbit pulsed.

Waiting.