The Impossible Resurrection of Grief

site, off-limits to the general public. They’ve been there for a few months already, so that we could observe them and adjust the programing if necessary.”
We followed him to that study area two days later, and were allowed to wander while Darren checked in at a small on-site monitoring centre. “There’s no guarantee you’ll see one, I’m afraid,” said Darren. “If I could guarantee it I’d know that I’d done something wrong.” Some behavior or programing that made the bird stand out from the rocks and scrub and scree in which the wren made its home and render the camouflage of its feathers useless.
“I don’t know if I want to see it or not,” I said to George, as we wandered over the slopes. In some ways, absence here would be success. When I’d said as much to Darren, his expression had been all anticipation, with the barest gleam of teeth.
The mountains were alive enough, but George still shook his head when he looked at them. He could see the changes from when he was a kid, he said, a small-town boy who’d gone on school trips to the Southern Alps, to see the fading of the glaciers and the ice in a warming world. The speed of it unsettled him. It had unsettled the Sea Witch, too, when she sailed over the Reef, but that was not a comparison to dwell on.
“Do you think it’s foolish,” he said, “to come up here and pretend? Are we going to have a world filled with simulacra now?”
I shrugged. “Maybe pretending is better than the alternative.” We’d pretended for so long, after all — that the climate wasn’t changing, that the consequences wouldn’t be as bad as they were. Was this really that different?
“Yes,” said George, when I asked him. He peered around rocks, winced when a sudden movement turned out to be rodent instead of bird; the site was infested with them. “I’m more interested in them now than I was before.” He wasn’t the only one. I’d seen the reactions at the museum, how both children and adults had been charmed by a facsimile altered enough to appeal to them. I’d read the media responses, had seen the fascination there as well. The fake wrens earned far greater approval than the real ones.
It was the friendliness that did it. The fluttering and the flirting, the way the fakes made up to us. I’d like to say all I felt for the effort was contempt, but the truth was if someone had created a lion’s mane jellyfish that rubbed up against me, that took my hand with friendly tentacles while we swam together, I’d have been the first in the water with it.
“Can you smell that?” said George, interrupting the fantasy.
The sweet stench of rot, of spoiling meat. And for a moment, for the tiniest microsecond, I wondered if it was dead bird we were smelling. Of course it wasn’t, and couldn’t be, but it just went to show how simulacra could affect even the most cynical of observers. They weren’t real, but they looked real, and want filled in the rest. I even felt relief when I remembered that the wrens were robots and incapable of decomposition.
The smell was dead rat. At first there was only one, but the more we walked over the mountainside, the more rats we found. All of them dead, all with the smallest puncture wound in them — George noticed it first, nudging at the stiffening bodies with his boot. The punctures were often hard to see. They’d barely bled at all. Whatever it was that caused them, it was effective.
Then we saw the wren, and we knew the invitation that had come to us across oceans had not been coincidence. A robot that looked like a wren, which acted in all ways like a wren … it would draw in the same predators that had killed the species, back when it was biology that fluttered over rocks, instead of aesthetic and mechanism.
“It’s not possible,” said George, as we watched, from a distance, as the wren flew at a rat and stabbed it, a small flash of too-small beak. The rats here were large and well-fed. “It’s not enough to kill it.” The rat died anyway, and quickly.
“Are you thinking poison?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah.”
The wren perched on a nearby rock and watched us, too steady in its lack of movement.
“Realistic my arse,” I said. “This is just as fake in its behavior as the ones at the museum.” Though I had to give it to Darren: his little robots would be wonderful pest control.
“Why would he tell us these were the normal ones?” said George. He stared at the wren, suspicious. “They are clearly not.”
“I mean, this is the study site. It’s like a practice round,” I said, sounding unconvincing even to myself, but before I could go any further he cut me off.
“This isn’t practice. First Tasmania and now this? I said it before, Ruby. There’s something dodgy going on here.”
“It hasn’t escaped me,” I said. “Are you getting the feeling we’re being shown something?”
“You’re being shown something,” he said, shrugging off his backpack and crouching over it, fumbling with the clasps. His eyes were still on the wren, and the wren watched us in return, the little wings neatly folded. “Here it is,” he said, under his breath, pulling out the thermos by touch and unscrewing the lid, emptying coffee all over the mountainside.
“Hey!”
“I don’t want to brain the thing,” he said, and barely having finished his sentence, he threw the thermos, overhand with surprising accuracy. The flask landed with a dull crunch.
“I think it’s pretty well brained,” I said, easing over to the bird. It kicked and whirred on the rock, pathetic and broken. I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t real;  I felt bad for it anyway. George used the lid of the thermos to nudge the bird inside, keeping his hands well away, and capped it off.
“You better hope they don’t make