Legally, they can't say that it's fish.

The package they came in only referred to them as "seafood fillets", while carefully avoiding the topic of what they're fillets of. They let the meat do the marketing instead, strips of perfect pinkish flesh showing delectably through the wrapper. It's only if you glance at the back of the label that you see the ingredients: Water, hydrolyzed soy protein concentrate, glycerin, salt, monosodium glutamate...

It's supposed to taste like cod, you think. Since actual cod hasn't been available in stores since you were thirteen, you're not actually sure.

Whatever it is, it's dinner. Hydrolyzed soy protein concentrate nitsuke. You're treating yourself tonight, after turning in a couple of essays and getting ahead on your lab work. Now that you have a gap in assignments, your weekends are free again, and you're thinking of getting some Sealing Club activities in. So, you lay on the floor, with your meal and every lead you've gathered lately sitting in front of you. As always, there are dozens of them, more than you could possibly investigate. They range from Man Returns From Near-Death Experience With Map Of The Afterlife to Extraterrestrial Transmission Provides First Glimpse Of Alien Life.

The second article contains a photo that the aliens supposedly transmitted, a tract of barren land below a starry sky. Something about the sky doesn't feel right. You squint at it, and your eyes decipher its secrets as easily as most people see colors. That star in the left corner is Theta Geminorum, and there's 66 Aurigae... the photo was taken near 45°33'N 75°50'W, about seven months ago. A quick online search informs you that the coordinates are near Ottawa, Canada. You sort that article into your 'debunked' pile.

The TV drones on, providing background noise. Like most of your belongings, it's on the cheaper side, and the translation software isn't quite state of the art. The voices are still understandable, but you catch the occasional moment of polyphony when the translation doesn't come quite fast enough. "... preorder collector's edition comes with one of five different VR chips, covering all of your favorite characters..." "... financing, and with no proven side effects, a deal like this won't last long!"

The commercials transition back into a program, and you try to filter out the characters' banter and the ensuing laugh track. It fades into background noise, and you almost forget that it's turned on until a voice says, "Renko! Renko, can you see me?!"

You glance up. Onscreen, a girl is standing a little too close to the camera, eclipsing the sitcom hijinks happening in the background. Whatever you'd been expecting to see, she doesn't really fit the profile. She looks foreign, with wavy blonde hair under a puffy hat, and her eyes are red and swollen, like she's been crying. None of the other characters seem to notice her.

You've heard about commercials like this. They skim your network traffic to detect when you aren't paying attention, then insert interactive commercials into whatever you were watching. The viewer's attention gets pulled back to the TV, the marketers get an audience who wasn't watching the show anyway, and the network makes a few extra yen, all for the price of a shoddy off-the-shelf expert system that can just barely hold a conversation. As marketing gimmicks go, it isn't a bad one, you suppose.

It also isn't something you really want to get involved with. You go back to reading the article about the afterlife map, even though it's becoming increasingly clear that the whole thing is some kind of ARG.

"Please, Renko, you can see me, right?! I, I'm not even sure how long I was gone. Everything's so weird... Nobody else can even hear me."

She's tenacious, you'll give her that. If this is a commercial, it's a damn weird one. Using the viewer's name is old hat, the kind of thing that started screaming 'spam' a decade ago. Maybe that's their angle. The crying girl gimmick is definitely novel. You're sure that if you talk to her, she'll start telling you about how she inherited a fortune, and she'll be happy to give you eighty percent if you just help her transfer it to another country. All the more reason not to reply. You keep your eyes on the article. Surely she's programmed with some kind of timeout.

"... you can see me, can't you?" The girl goes quiet, fidgeting. A laugh track plays behind her. "Come on, this isn't funny..."

You sigh. "Whatever you're trying to accomplish here, you'd be better off picking somebody else." You shuffle through the papers, digging out the next article without looking up. "I'm a broke college student."

"Renko... I. Please tell me you haven't—"

"Please remove me from your filtering criteria. TV off."

Soundlessly, the TV shuts off, leaving you in peace. You turn on a fan for some white noise and resume reading, hurrying to eat the last of your hydrolyzed soy protein concentrate before it gets cold.

A few days pass. You investigate one of the paranormal claims over the weekend and don't find much.

By the time the girl pops up again, you've almost forgotten about that first encounter.

"Your name is Renko Usami, you grew up in Tokyo and won't shut up about how much better it is than Kyoto, your grandma's name was Sumireko, and you had a pet cat named Maru when you were in elementary school!"

She blurts it all out in one go. It gets your attention, at least. You look up from your textbook and glance at the TV. As before, she looks like a wreck. The outburst left her half-breathless, her eyes have bags under them, her hair's a mess, and her clothes look like she slept in them. She watches you apprehensively, reminding you of nothing so much as the abused dog your aunt took in when you were little. This time, she's popped up in the middle of an action movie. She flinches at every gunshot, glancing worriedly over her shoulder.

You study her and consider all of this. The fact that she's back, with even more information... well. You consider the possibility that it's just a very advanced targeted advertisement, digging through ages-old metadata to find the exact right thing to grab your attention. That seems like a bit of a waste, considering that you barely dodged an overdraft fee for buying a bag of chips a few weeks ago. More information needed. Time for page one from the old AI testing playbook: seeing how she deals with completely unexpected input. "I'm reading about quantum reductions of the spatial diffeomorphism constraint," you say, and lift the book just enough for her to read the cover. "Do you have any thoughts on the subject?"

"H-huh?" The girl falters in confusion, and you smile at your apparent success. "What about it?"

"Just checking if you have an opinion on the topic."

"Er, well, not really, but I think I recognize the book? That's the physics one you're always studying at lunch, isn't it?"

You try not to let too much surprise show on your face. It could just be an educated guess based on the cover or something, but it's a lot better than a cheap AI could ever manage. You're talking to a human, then. "Close enough," you admit, and push yourself up to sit cross-legged on the floor. "So, are you a hacker or something?"

She looks relieved for a moment, but it doesn't last long. She slowly deflates. "You... really don't remember me, do you?"

"I remember that we spoke a few days ago. If we met before that, I don't remember anything."

She nods glumly. "My name is... M-maribel Hearn." Her voice cracks mid-syllable. "I'm the other member of the Sealing Club."

You study her face, expecting to find some tic to prove that this is all an over-elaborate prank, but she looks dead serious. If she's an actress, she's wasting her talents on this. A prickling sensation spreads across the back of your neck, and you stare incredulously. It raises a thousand questions, and you don't even know where to begin. How did she find you? How is she inserting herself into the movie? Where is she broadcasting from? You decide to start with the obvious ones. "There hasn't been another member of the Sealing Club since I took over, and I've never known anybody by the name of Mari—" You can't even remember what she called herself. Too many syllables. "Your name."

"I'd thought if anybody would remember me, maybe you—" She sniffs, and turns her head to the side to hide the fact that she's crying. "Nobody else can even see me now."

This is not a conversation that you're mentally prepared for. Seeing her in this condition stirs some protective instinct you didn't even know you had, but you have to maintain a healthy skepticism. You resist the urge to scoot closer to the TV. As calmly as you can, you ask, "Can you explain what you mean?"

"That monster, it—I guess you don't remember that now, either, do you? This... thing. I accidentally let it loose, and it—I don't think I exist anymore. Or ever existed. It took that from me." She finally turns back to you, her eyes puffy and wet, and gives one last sniffle. "Please help me, Renko. I'm so scared."

You let out a slow breath and try to gather your thoughts. You wish you were recording this. You have the feeling that you're going to be doubting your own memory of this incident by tomorrow morning. "Let's say that I were to believe you," you say. "What do you mean? It... made you stop existing? Do you mean it killed you?"

"I mean that my existence is gone. You should know me, we're friends, this is all wrong and—"

The scene ends, cutting her off mid-syllable. She disappears from the screen along with everything else.

A commercial break starts up. She's nowhere to be seen.

When the movie resumes a few minutes later, she doesn't come with it.

It takes twenty minutes for your hands to stop shaking.

The next morning, you write a list of possible explanations, ranked from most to least likely.
* Weird practical joke
* Hallucination
* Advanced AI
* Ghost
* Girl who stopped existing
* Communication with a parallel universe

The possibility that the girl was telling the truth is nowhere near the top of the list, but whatever is going on, it's piqued your curiosity. And your anxiety. Encounters with the unexplained are fascinating when they take place in old graveyards and history battlefields. When they're happening five meters from where you sleep... well. You like to think that you're brave, but you had to unplug the TV and turn it toward the wall before you could relax.

That isn't the only thing that's making you uncomfortable, though. The desperation in the girl's voice sounded real, and something about her story just felt right to you. You have to drag yourself back to a neutral viewpoint, remind yourself that there's no real evidence for anything she said. Even if there really is something paranormal going on, that doesn't mean she's telling the truth. Maybe she's a ghost who's mistaken you for somebody she knew when she was alive. It's best to tread with caution.

The first step, you decide, is to buy a camera. You've been meaning to get one for your club activities anyway, but it still hurts. You want the full suite: visual, infrared, ultraviolet. If there's anything supernatural going on around your television, you want to know about it. All those features don't come cheap, and you cringe as you hand over two months worth of discretionary cash. It takes another two hours to get it integrated with your computer and hide it near the TV.

That will let you check for ghosts and reassure yourself that you aren't hallucinating. You aren't sure how to check if she's an AI. Most of the other possibilities are almost as hard to test.

But, you're an investigator of the supernatural. You've read a thing or two about ghosts. You pull out the few books you own on the topic, rent a few more from the city's single occult bookstore, and skim every reliable-seeming resource that you can find. You're still sure that 90% of what you're reading is completely fabricated, but you're used to that. If it were that easy to find legitimate magic, the supernatural would be common knowledge. The only way to sort the good from the bad is through empirical observations.

Some of the rituals require the name of the spirit you're dealing with. It's a problem in this case, because you barely caught the girl's name to begin with, and it was an unfamiliar, foreign one. You sit down with a notebook and try to capture your hazy memories in syllables. Maebiraebi? Merubari? Berireru? None of them sound right. In the end, you settle on Maeriberi. The fact that a quick search suggests that isn't a real name doesn't fill you with confidence, but you're not even sure what country she's from. You'll just have to settle for the approximation.

So, you spend the better part of a day carrying out rituals, one-woman seances, and scryings over your television. It does feel a little silly, chanting and sprinkling salt over what is possibly the least esoteric potential artifact in the world—Samsung EA65ZZB9900FZN, 'Made In Malaysia' stamped on the side—but it's all part of being a modern-day occultist. Part of you even finds it a little cool, wonders if you can find ways to slip it into conversation later. "Yeah, I've been experimenting with necromancy lately. It really isn't so hard if you're willing to just take the time and do it right."

This is probably why you're still single.

Despite your best efforts, your television refuses to give up its secrets. It is, as far as your techniques can reveal, no more supernatural than your socks.

You can't let disappointment slow you down, but your other theories all require you to observe the TV when the girl is on it. It means that you're going to have to let her show up again. You find yourself looking forward to the prospect. How often do you get to interact with a real, unexplained phenomenon? But, it's probably best not to get your hopes up. Occam's Razor still says that she's way more likely to be a very dedicated hacker with a strange sense of humor.

Your preparations for the next stage don't take long. You load some software onto your phone to capture all the network traffic in your apartment. You double-check the camera. You turn the TV's screen toward the room again. Since the girl vanished when the scene changed last time, you tune to the single longest-running thing you can find, a four-hour late-night infomercial. And, with a two-day supply of snacks and coffee, you settle in on the floor for the world's strangest stakeout.

"Renko? Hey, Renko, do you hear me?"

You hadn't realized that you'd drifted off to sleep, but here you are. You have that strange feeling of waking up with noise around, realizing that you've been aware of the sound of the TV all along, but only just now becoming conscious of it. You groan and blink the sleep from your eyes. The view is coffee cups and potato chip bags, strewn on the floor in front of you. Towering above them: the TV, with the girl's concerned face looking down at you.

This sinks in slowly, until you remember why you're here. With a jolt, you push yourself up from the floor. It isn't as easy as it sounds, since one of your arms has fallen asleep beneath you. With your non-tingling hand, you fumble for your phone, and mash the icon to signal the camera to start recording. "Hey, uh, good morning," you say, and glance out the window to make sure you guessed right.

Your infomercial is long over. This time, the girl—Maeriberi or whatever—has appeared over some sort of animated series, and it shows. Her body is rendered in the same style as the drawings behind her, sketched out in black lines and with a stylized yellow poof for her hair. If she's a hacker or something, she's getting very inventive, you suppose. You're not sure if it's the art style or a change in her attitude, but she looks a little calmer than the last two times she's appeared. Tired, but not on the verge of tears. "Good morning," she says. "Did you sleep well?"

"I, uh." You rub at your cheek. It's still imprinted with the pattern of synthetic tatami mats after being smushed against the floor for hours. "Not really, no." You clear your throat and try to gather your thoughts. Like any experiment, this needs to be approached with the right procedure. "Do you mind if we cut the pleasantries? Unless you think you'll be able to stick around longer this time."

"Oh, um." She glances back over her shoulder. Behind her, two women in lacy dresses are slipping comically oversized guns into their handbags. "I think I've only got until the commercial break again, so that's... probably for the best." Even drawn, you can see a hint of sadness in the smile she gives you.

"Right..." You grab the notebook you already prepared for this occasion, its top page filled with questions to ask her, ranked from most to least important. "First of all, can you repeat your name?"

She looks surprised. "... oh. Of course. It's Maribel Hearn. That's Ma-ri-bel, and Hearn is all one syllable."

You nod, and do your best to remember it. "Well then, Mari—Merib—" You fumble with the foreign name, trying your best to repeat it syllable for syllable. "M-mae..."

"You can just call me Merry," she interjects, with a lopsided smile.

You nearly wilt with relief. "Well, er, Merry. You said before that you'd stopped existing. Can you explain that a bit more?"

"I'll... try my best." She sighs out a long breath. "Well, okay, to start with, strange powers run in my family."

"What kind of powers?"

"I can manipulate... boundaries. This is the point where you always ask what I mean by boundaries, but, um, I still don't have a good answer. They're the lines that distinguish one thing from another... both conceptually and physically."

"I see." This is already far weirder than you'd expected. You write 'boundary manipulation' in your notebook and underline it half a dozen times. It's not a supernatural ability you've ever heard before. You get the feeling that the now-familiar social media circles full of self-proclaimed psychics, clairvoyants, and other assorted superhumans won't have a single mention of the ability. That's probably a good thing. "Could you give some examples?"

"Well, um. Think about a mirror. When you look at it, you're seeing a bunch of photons and things that make your reflection, right? But you still see your reflection on the other side. We could call the surface of the mirror the boundary between truth and illusion."

"And you could manipulate that?"

"I could, yes. Doing something that drastic is still kind of hard, but if I wanted, I could probably reach into the illusion and pull objects out, or step through the mirror to whatever location it showed..."

"I think I get the idea," you say, trying to maintain a neutral tone of voice. You remind yourself that you're only supposed to be gathering her side of the story right now, not evaluating it. You can already think of half a dozen ways that the mirror trick violates laws of physics. Would violate, rather. Obviously, something like that couldn't actually happen. "Is that how you're getting into my TV?"

"This is... something similar, but it's a bit more complicated. I can explain later, but... um, anyway. We've done a lot of experiments to figure out how my powers work. This time just... didn't go very well."

"Is 'we' you and I?"

"Right..."

"You said before that you're a member of the Sealing Club. Is that why we were doing these experiments?"

"Mmhm.'

"... I see." You try to summarize it in your notes as neutrally as possible. ... claims to have been performing an experiment in her capacity as a member of the Sealing Club. This is all starting to feel a bit surreal. "Okay, please continue."

Maribel fidgets, looking just as uncomfortable with this as you are. Before she can continue, behind her, a quiet conversation erupts into violence. One of the characters pulls a gun from her purse and sprays a dozen bullets across the room. Maribel yelps in surprise at the noise, dropping toward the floor.

"... sorry. Should I play something calmer next time?" Only after the words are out of your mouth do you realize what you just said. Yes, better make sure the girl inside of your TV is comfy. That definitely doesn't sound crazy. Even so, unease is worming through your brain now. Her reaction was too genuine. She still looks terrified. Even if she were a world-class actress, she would have needed to rehearse that.

"Please." She shoots a worried glance at the fistfight that's brewing behind her before she continues. "Um, anyway. I've used my powers before to pull items from other places and times, and after that thing with TORIFUNE we know that it—"

"... TORIFUNE." You hadn't meant to cut her off, but it happens anyway. "The... satellite?"

"Um, right. We traveled to it a few months ago. Using my powers, I mean."

"That. Uh." You're not even sure how to put that down in your notes. This is going from 'surreal' to 'outlandish.' Are you really supposed to believe that a college occult club visited the Earth-Moon L2 point? You jot 'TORIFUNE' in your notes, and underline it so many times that the paper rips beneath the tip of your pen. You really hadn't intended to let yourself get sidetracked, but you can't resist a question on the topic. "... why?"

"I... saw it in my dreams. There were weird creatures up there. It was kind of a paradise. … you really liked being weightless, you know. You got so distracted doing backflips and stuff that you didn't even notice a creature sneaking up to attack me."

It doesn't sound like a lighthearted sort of memory, but she laughs under her breath anyway. Something inside you twists. When she approaches it like that, laughing like an old friend about your little foibles, you can almost convince yourself that you feel the absence of the memory. A void where it should be, like a missing tooth.

You clear your throat and force your mind back to the topic at hand. You still don't even have an answer to the first question on your list, and the program behind her looks like it's rapidly approaching its end. "... sorry. Please continue."

"Oh, um. We were pretty confident that I could move people and things between two places. So we... decided to push my limits. We thought a good first test would be seeing if I could move things across abstract boundaries, too. The plan was for me to pull this fictional ice cream flavor out of a TV show. It was supposed to be really safe. I mean, ice cream, right? It isn't very dangerous."

"And that's when the... monster, er. Attacked you?"

She nods slowly. "It happened really fast. I opened the boundary and, um, something came out. It... it took everything from me. I don't know how to explain it, but I could feel it. And then... I was gone."

"You're here now, though."

"It was really hard. I think it took me a few days. And then I found out nobody could see me. By the time I managed to get your attention, I was afraid I might just... fade away. I don't, um—I don't think I was even born anymore. How am I supposed to fix that?"

Her voice grows quieter and less steady throughout the explanation. By the end, she's barely even audible. She glances aside, wiping her eyes and stifling a sniffle.

Sometime during her explanation, you'd stopped taking notes. Now, numbly, you write, 'invisible, erased history.' Your pen drops from your hands at the end, and while you don't remember deciding to put it down, you have no intention of writing anything else.

What is there to even write? Scientific observations don't give you much insight to the girl in front of you, shivering as she tries to stay calm enough to talk. It would tug at your heartstrings even if you'd never spoken with her before. And paired with the assertion that you know her, and have forgotten years of your life spent together... a sense of helplessness and nostalgia chokes you up, like a snake around your neck.

You fake a cough to buy yourself time to steady your own expression, and clear your throat. "I know it's hard. But, please try to focus. Uh." You glance at the list of questions you prepared. They aren't much help anymore. You didn't really come prepared for the 'girl in my TV claims to be my very good friend whose life was eaten by a monster' scenario.

"You have to understand that this is, er, a lot to take in. Is there anything you can point me at? What about that monster? If there's a monster running around campus, I would have heard of it, wouldn't I?"

"I don't know. Everything's gone, and..." She sighs. "Maybe seeing my apartment might jog your memory, or there might be something left behind? It's above that corner store east of the river, apartment 203. But I'm not sure if—" Another gunshot rings out behind Maribel, and this time, she only winces. Behind her, a character slumps dramatically to a table, oozing blood through his fingers, and gasps out a few final words.

Credits start scrolling up the screen. They slide right over Maribel, but she watches you through the gaps between lines, like the bars on an old cartoony prison window. Between EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: SAKIYO TAIHEI and CO-PRODUCER: TOYOHIKO FUKUDA, you can see her expression turning more and more anxious. "R-renko, do you understand? You're the only one I can turn to. If you can't help me, I might... I might disappear for good, or something even worse. Please tell me you believe me, Renko. Please."

"I..." Your voice catches in your throat. You don't know how you'd planned to finish that sentence. 'I believe you'? 'I don't know'? You search desperately for something to say, but you're too slow. The scene fades away, replaced by a solid black credit screen. Maribel fades with it.

You could swear, though, that at the very end, you saw her wilting in disappointment.