Lifespan of Starlight Read online

  That’s when I stormed out.

  * * *

  In the cool morning light, I make my way up the ramp that leads out of Footscray Park.

  The park isn’t open yet, so I duck out the same way I came in. I reach the crossing point on Ballarat Road, swipe and wait.

  Just a girl. Crossing a road.

  Nothing happens at first. Voom. Left to right. And then another. Way busier than last night. For a moment I wonder if maybe it’s not going to work, but then I hear the familiar drop in tone as smartcars are brought to a stop in both directions.

  Then there’s a ping and a green light, just for me. Just for standing here.

  My breath sounds too loud as I cross. The people in the cars wouldn’t even bother to glance up, but I feel as if they’re watching me. My fingertips press the chip hard into my palm so there’s no chance of losing it. It’s sticky, still fleshy, and in a gruesome way I’m glad, because I don’t want to forget where it came from. I’m carrying part of that woman with me, even as I leave her behind.

  Before I do anything, I’ll need to hack into the system and clean off as much of her life as I can. Some things are set, but most records can be changed. When I’m done they’ll have no way of tracing her chip to me, even if they find her body.

  When I make it to the other side, I break into a run because I can’t wait to see the look on Mum’s face when I tell her:

  See? Told you I’d handle it. Everything’s going to be okay.

  I ROLL OVER AND sigh at the empty space beside me. Shouldn’t have let myself doze off. Mum didn’t stir when I burst in earlier, so I slipped in beside her, planning to lie here until she woke. When I check the time it’s even later than I thought; Mum would have left an hour ago.

  Groggily, I tap around on the upturned box beside the bed until my fingertips touch the chip. It’s still there, tucked out of sight between the lamp and the wall.

  I hitch myself up on an elbow and examine the chip in my palm, feeling the weird sense again of that woman here with me.

  I’ll make this count for something, I say silently. Promise.

  Carefully I wipe it on an old rag, trying not to touch it any more than I have to. Then I slip it inside my boot, beneath the lining, aware even as I do that there’s no point hiding it. The grid would have mapped the chip making its way from the park to here.

  Mum’s typed a message on my compad: Left you an egg. We’ll talk tonight. Much love.

  Immediately, I hit reply. She can’t talk on the phone at work so I message her terminal. Call me if you can? I have something to tell you.

  The reply comes back in seconds. You OK? I have clients all day.

  Yeah, I type and then I go blank, staring at the screen. How do I explain what happened? It’s a risk to say anything in a compad message anyway; the authorities are all over these things once they find a reason to go looking. In the end I just type: I’m OK. See you tonight.

  I cook the egg on a stovetop in the corner of our room, aware that this will be the last time I eat food that should have been Mum’s. She’ll need most of her water rations so I take only a few mouthfuls from the potable tap. I could swipe the sensor with that woman’s chip, of course, but I don’t want to risk that until I’ve cleaned her deets.

  The comscreen flickers to life. Let’s see who we’re dealing with here.

  First up, I run a bot that moves the screen through a set of news sites, automatically selecting random links. It used to run on a continuous loop, but then Alistair taught me how to code it for random clicks, which makes it much more lifelike.

  Alistair lives in the room next to ours and he taught me everything I know about computers. He’s ninety-one years old, and is as close to a genius as anyone I’ve met. Most people his age have been forced to retire, which means only G-level rations, but he’s been on AA-level for years, way higher than Mum. No matter how many different ways I ask, he still won’t tell me what job he does.

  I let the bot run for a while to make sure it’s working, watching fake-me scroll through the extreme weather alerts for today. Security would have to be pretty smart to pick that it’s not a person browsing. Maybe a person with attention deficit disorder, but still.

  While the bot keeps running, I hack into the back end of the system and set up a smokescreen to hide the fact I’m back here. Alistair describes this bit as sort of scuffing dirt over a path to hide your tracks.

  Now, I bring up the grid.

  A map of our street comes up with every person here pinpointed as a single bright dot. Normal citizens aren’t meant to be able to see this. Out of habit I check for Kessa and her twin sister in the house at the end of our street, but no-one is there of course; they’d be at school and their parents at work. Two dots come up for Mr and Mrs Richardson in our front room after the late shift last night; and, for the first time, I find one in our room that’s not Mum.

  I stare, mesmerised by the dot. It’s strange to have wished so hard for something all my life and feel so weird now that I have it. I guess because it’s not mine, really. And because of the way I got it. I shudder, suppressing the memory.

  Now I layer a history map over the top and the street becomes a 3D grid. Instead of dots, long worms stretch back from each person in 3D, mapping the paths they’ve taken to reach their current location. It’s possible to track back in time to see a snapshot of where everyone was on, say, Christmas morning. Or any time you like.

  You can pretty much track entire lives in reverse, at least as far back as when they first received their chip. You can access other stuff too, like ration points, health records, job history. Alistair says names and birth certificates are kept in a separate place because of privacy laws, but it’s pretty easy to work out who is who from the other information.

  Before I clear out the woman’s deets, I want to check out her history map. She looked like a homeless woman, and sure smelled like one, but I can’t help wondering whether someone might want to know what happened to her. I owe her that much. Once I wipe her past, she’ll pretty much disappear from the grid.

  I track back my own history map since I’ve been holding the chip, along the streets of Footscray, crossing Ballarat Road this morning and then back to last night and the park. She must have found the underground spring around six o’clock …

  And there, I stop. Or rather the worm stops, which doesn’t make sense. It’s as if someone’s already wiped the history map clean. Either that or at six o’clock last night the woman suddenly appeared out of thin air.

  I lean back in the armchair, staring at the empty grid, trying to work out what’s going on. Maybe it’s just a glitch. So I pull out of the mainframe and then hack back in to see if that fixes the problem.

  Instead of tracking backwards from now, I type in the date and time: last night at six o’clock.

  There it is again, a dead end. For a while I scroll around the park at a few minutes before six, trying to find the woman again, but it’s hard to pick up a history map when I’ve lost the thread.

  Still not sure what’s going on, I check out her ration points. Maybe I can track her by the delivery locations. The ration points are low level, but good enough for someone my age and the best thing is, she hasn’t accessed them. Not even water.

  I spend time tracking back her ration points, trying to see when she last accessed them and finding nothing. Maybe she was surviving on rubbish scraps or something, because her points are complete for months. Or perhaps her chip was malfunctioning and she never did anything about it.

  For a while I just stare at the screen with my nose scrunched, deciding whether it’s okay to feel pleased about what I’ve found. Or rather what I haven’t
found, because it seems there’s no need to worry about anyone noticing that the woman’s gone; according to the grid it’s as if she barely existed in the first place.

  The job history is blank, and her school records only go as far as junior school, which can’t be right. Her chip must have been glitchy, that’s the only way to explain this. Plus the insertion stamp is too recent for her age, so maybe this is a replacement chip.

  A sharp sigh, and I make a decision. I set about wiping all her deets anyway. Maybe I can use the glitch if I’m ever questioned. It’s the chip that’s the problem, not me.

  With her deets cleared, I start adding my own: the grades I would have been given if I’d been going to school, my date of birth, health records, adding the things that would have been recorded by my chip if I’d been a real citizen. Making myself legit in reverse. I’m expecting the glitch to cause gaps and deletions like it did for the woman, but it all works fine.

  Finally, once I’ve added all I can, I shut down the session in the mainframe. When the front screen comes up I see I’ve been busy reading about a train crash in India, just outside the war zone. So I switch off the bot, and regain control of the front end. The real me, this time. Then I click through to the central website for all the select-entry high schools and hit ‘register’.

  An alert comes up warning that registration for the select-entry test will cost 550 energy rations, which I didn’t expect, but since the woman had a full quota saved, it’s not a problem.

  Then it flashes for a swipe request. I’m expecting I’ll have to take the chip out of my boot, but first I try swiping the sole.

  I hear it, for the second time this morning: a ping. Application accepted. The date for the entry test comes up: ten days from now, already added to ‘my’ diary for convenience. All I need bring to the test, it tells me, is a pencil and eraser. And a chip hidden in the lining of my boot.

  * * *

  I sleep for a little while longer, but it’s not long before my eyes zap open. Why waste the day in bed when I can do so many things? A haircut in a real salon, a ride on the fast train. But before I do anything else, I’m ticking off my number one.

  It takes me a few tries before I actually make it into a cafe. The first two I pass, my legs just keep walking, as if they simply can’t believe I’m allowed to join the end of the queue.

  Finally, I reach a small cafe near the overpass with no-one waiting outside and a couple of spare tables near the back. I make my way to the counter as a woman with spiky blue hair passes a table number to the guy in front of me. She looks my way and raises her eyebrows.

  ‘Three hundred mil of water, please.’ I clamp my mouth shut, waiting for something to happen, an alarm to sound or something.

  ‘Anything else?’

  Such a simple question. ‘Maybe a …’ My eyes flit over the cakes and muffins on display on the counter. ‘What are those?’ I ask, pointing. It comes out quietly.

  ‘Cornbread muffins.’

  ‘One of those, please?’ I ask, half-expecting her to tell me I’ve ordered too much. But she keys it all in without blinking. The woman gestures towards a compad on the counter as it flashes up the cost: 300 points potable water, 513 points food.

  A simple swipe of my wrist past the receiver, my hand in a fist to hide the chip pressed between my palm and a finger, and there’s a ping.

  Transaction approved.

  The taste of the muffin makes my brain melt. It’s like the flavour of all the meals I’ve ever eaten, all at once, in one bite of muffin. But halfway through it, a wave of nausea washes over me and I realise that if I keep eating I might see it all again. I sip the water in between bites but it’s not long before I have to stop. I shuffle back in the chair.

  How insane. Half a glass of water and half a muffin sit in front of me. I’m so used to having half and only half of everything that I seem to have a barrier against eating more. I suddenly wish that Mum were here now, sharing with me. Except this time, I’d be giving half my rations to her.

  The other people sitting at tables are mostly adults, washing down sandwiches with the latest coffee concentrate. A couple of guys in Murdoch High School uniforms are getting stuck into the biggest triangles of orange cake I’ve ever seen, and I find myself calculating how many illegals they could accept into the city if they cut back citizen rations by maybe 300 points each day.

  There are more like me, of course, mostly living outside the city limits: other single mums like mine who couldn’t bear to lose their babies, people who campaigned against the ration system, or are too ill to work. They’re not exiled, exactly; it’s more that without access to water and food rations, they’re forced to go looking. Anywhere but here.

  It feels wrong to leave anything to waste, so I force myself to finish the glass of water. Then I wrap up the remains of the muffin and take it home with me.

  It’s not long until Mum’s due back so I get busy ordering food for tonight – veg sausages, mushrooms, real butter. I still have a whole 80 points of my daily maximum left once I’ve hit the final order so I blow them on a fresh orange, all the way from northern New South Wales. It costs 50 credits on top of the ration points because of transport costs, and I have this pang at the extravagance.

  Just this once, I promise myself. We have reason to celebrate.

  * * *

  As soon as I hear the ping from the delivery drone, I dash out to the front chute in bare feet.

  Mrs Richardson must have been waiting for her delivery too. She steps out of her door at the same time as me, immediately looking away when she sees me.

  ‘Hey! How are you, Mrs Richardson?’ It’s a bit immature, but I can’t help it. Mum hates it when I do this.

  ‘Yes, hello,’ she mumbles without making eye contact. I hang back while she selects her package and shuffles towards the kitchen. She’s always worried, I think, that I’ll ask to share her rations, but Mum and I have always coped on our own. And anyway, we already owe the Richardsons enough for keeping quiet all these years.

  When Mum moved here I was a few months old, just a single woman and her baby. The Richardsons were really kind at first. I think they must have felt sorry for her. In their minds, the only way that Mum could be a single mum would be if Dad had died.

  It took a few years before they realised that wasn’t true. I still remember the first time Mrs Richardson turned away after I’d called out to her in the hallway. As if I didn’t exist. It was around the time that I was due to start school. They must have worked out that if I wasn’t going to school, I wasn’t chipped.

  The truth is that my father’s an Egyptian national who was working here as a tactical specialist when he met Mum. But once he’d trained the local staff, they cancelled his visa, citing limited resources. It didn’t matter that Mum was pregnant by then, or that he faced persecution from his own government because of the work he did here.

  Now we can’t find any record of him at all, but Mum still clings to the hope that he escaped detection when he returned and is living underground. We can’t search for him too often because of what it would mean for us all if we were found out.

  Our evening delivery is way fatter than usual tonight. Heavy. I pull it out of the chute and carry it proudly to our room. Alistair and the Richardsons use the big share kitchen to prepare their meals, but Mum installed a small stovetop and sink in our room years ago so our split ration sizes aren’t obvious to everyone else in the house.

  The veg sausages are sizzling nicely when Mum comes home from work. She makes a questioning sound and frowns at the pan. ‘Hold on, there must be a mistake.’

  ‘No mistake.’ I make a big show of dropping
mushrooms into the pan then lift a whole orange out of the box.

  Mum grabs my arm before I can slice the orange in two. ‘Wait, I didn’t order any of this. We’ll have to trigger a return request.’

  ‘It’s fine, Mum. Trust me.’ I slice the orange in half, take her hand and guide her to her armchair. ‘Now, sit and eat.’

  For some reason I can’t get enough of the confusion on her face as I balance a plate on her knees. She just stares at the orange half in front of her. I can see her calculating how many weeks of hunger we face if we’re charged for it.

  ‘Enjoy.’ I leave her sitting there and get back to stirring the mushrooms. The veg sausages seem dry but they smell delicious.

  Mum’s only eaten a quarter of her orange when I turn back, so I carry our two plates over and sit next to her.

  ‘You can eat all of that, you know.’ I settle in and take a bite of sausage.

  Mum watches me for a while and then her eyes track down to the pile on her plate. Finally, she turns to me again. ‘What’s going on?’

  A grin with full cheeks. ‘Told you I’d handle it.’ The sausage is sort of disgusting and sort of delicious at the same time.

  Mum watches me eat, her mouth a straight line. ‘Coutlyn, what have you done?’

  Fork on the plate, I click the comscreen on and bring up my deets. My name. My address. My ration points. At least the glitch doesn’t seem to be affecting the stuff I added.

  Mum blinks, still taking it in, then motions with her hand to bring up her own deets. They’re all still there. She turns to me and at last I see a flicker of delight cross her eyes.

  ‘I know, right?’ I raise my eyebrows at the amazingness of it all and finally Mum lets out a disbelieving laugh. It’s the best sound in the universe.

  ‘But … how?’ she asks, shaking her head.

  ‘Well …’ I cringe. ‘It’s probably best if you don’t know, but from now on you’ll have your own rations all to yourself. Pretty good, huh?’