Lifespan of Starlight (5 page)

It’s only now that I focus on the screen and have to suck in a breath at the location:
my cave at Footscray Park.

The air goes dry in my throat as he brings up the history map and types in a date
and time: six o’clock, two nights ago. The same moment when that woman seemed to
just
appear
out of nowhere.

‘We’ve been waiting for you to come back,’ Boc says simply.

I search for words that won’t give me away, trying to get my head around all this.
‘But how did you know where I’d be when I … came back?’ I ask slowly.

‘We found the dead end. On the grid, I mean.’ Immediately Mason keys a new date into
the history grid, nearly two years ago. And there it is, the dot in the exact same
spot in my cave. ‘We know that you have to return to the same location, so we’ve
been watching.’

‘This is the first time we’ve had real proof that it’s possible,’ finishes Boc.

They’re both staring at me, two sets of eyes tracking my every change of expression.
It’s the most unnerving feeling. I’m not used to being around people this close to
my age, but even I can see this is weird.

‘Sorry, I have to ask. When were you born?’ Mason asks quietly.

‘It’s all on the grid,’ I say slowly. ‘24th of March, 2070.’

‘No, he means … really,’ Boc steps in. ‘When were you
really
born?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say, because they’re not asking about me. They’re asking when that
woman was born. This is all about her. ‘Around 2024,’ I say dryly, estimating that
the woman looked around sixty years old. Dumb joke, but they’re not making any sense
either.

Mason’s whole face breaks into a broad smile. He leans so close that for a moment
I think he’s going to breathe me in. ‘It’s so, so good to
finally
meet you,’ he says,
his voice low. ‘We can help you too, if you need. We have a place where you can stay–’

‘Listen,’ I say, backing away. ‘I’m sorry, but you’ve made a mistake. It’s just a
glitch in the chip. It’s not what you think.’ Whatever that is.

‘Wait, please.’ Mason holds out his hands. ‘We’re not going to expose you. We just
want to ask –’

‘I can’t help you, okay?’ I snap over the top of him. ‘It’s a fault in the system,
that’s all. Maybe there was something blocking the signal.’

‘– but I need your help to understand where I’m going wrong.’ Mason’s voice is pleading
and breathless. Boc goes to move forward, but stops himself and balls his fists.

‘Leave me alone!’ I spin away and sprint down the alley.

When I turn at the end, I’m glad that they haven’t tried to follow.

The train trip home is different from the trip in. I stand with my back to the corner
of the carriage, watching people swaying around me. Somehow, I’ve lost the fun of
the moment.

What were those guys talking about? In my head I go over the conversation, trying
to make sense of it. They weren’t police, at least, or government officials. But
still.

As soon as I get home, I fire up the comscreen to check for myself, make sure what
Mason showed me was real.

Quickly, I set up the smokescreen and head straight to the woman’s history map from
nearly two years ago. There she is, in my cave. The seconds tick past …

She disappears.

What’s going on? I wet my lips and begin to track backwards, watching her dot appear
again and then following her movements in reverse before she came to Footscray Park
two years ago. She’d walked there in the early hours of the morning from the city
tip. Food scraps maybe? There’s not much food waste these days; I know from experience
that there’s little reward from scavenging in the tip.

I sit back, thinking, then lean forwards again.

I’ve tagged Mason and Boc, so I find their dots and track them back to the same date
as when the woman was at the tip. They’re together, at basement level somewhere in
Moonee Ponds. No surprise. It’s a rich person’s suburb, where families still live
in entire houses all to themselves. In my mind, I picture
them hunched over a comscreen,
tracking the exact same history map that I was just watching.

Now I return to study that woman’s history map, tracking backwards again. Two days
earlier, the worm hits another gap.

I lean back in the chair, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing. It could be a
complete fabrication, of course. Anyone with enough coding skill could add glitchy
stuff like that to the grid. But those guys said they’d hacked into the grid, not
that they’d been messing with it.

We’ve been waiting for you to come back.

We know you have to return to the same location.

Leaning forwards again, I zoom the history map right out so that I can see years
at a time. The mistake I made last time was not tracking her worm over enough years.
Now I move backwards in larger chunks of time: one year, two, five …

After a gap of seventeen years, I find her again. In the same spot at the tip is
another moment when the woman’s dot disappears. In 2065 she spent three hours at
the tip, but after that the worm comes to a dead end again. It makes no sense.

When I zoom out as far as I can, I see that her map goes back as far as 2050, but
that’s the year chips first started being inserted, so it’s not clear when she was
born. She looked way older than that.

Only now does a thought come to me. I pull up the map from six o’clock the night
I stormed out on Mum, then change my mind and switch to ten o’clock the same night.

I can’t find the exact moment when I first found that woman,
but I know more or less
what time I walked out on Mum. So I use that to make a rough guess of when I found
the woman lying under my blanket.

Instead of zooming out, looking at the history map over a number of years, I zoom
right in, tracking her worm minute by minute, second by second. Nothing stands out,
so I zoom in closer still and track her history map millisecond by millisecond.

It’s slow going and I give up more than once, rubbing my eyes and standing up to
stretch before coming back. I’m not even sure what I’m expecting to prove, but when
I find the moment I’ve been searching for I just sit here and stare at the screen.

At 10.17 and 09.34 seconds, on the night I found that woman, is a gap in her history
map.

It only lasted a couple of milliseconds but that was the moment that made me stop
and turn back, when her frame flickered in front of me as if she were a hologram.
Matching that same moment on the woman’s history map is a gap of 0.026 seconds.

Whatever was going on with this woman, I saw it happen.

F
OR MOST OF
the night I lie with my eyes closed, replaying the night I found that woman. The way her frame flickered in front of me …

At the time I thought I’d lost concentration for a moment, blinked, perhaps, but
now I realise that I saw something very weird. Something impossible.

When Mum’s alarm sounds I’m immediately awake, but I lie still and listen to the
faint rustle of fabric as she dresses and leaves. As soon as the front door engages,
I’m up and clicking the comscreen on.

It takes me three minutes to hack into the computer in Mason’s basement. Maybe I’ll
be able to uncover a clue that will help me work out what’s going on.

There’s a heap of noise to get past – internet searches, news updates, messages between
friends and family. I don’t know what I’m trying to find, exactly, so it’s hard knowing
what to search for.

I skim through some day-to-day messages and filter out basics like ration points,
then I search for ‘gap’ or even ‘history map’. Nothing interesting comes up. I try
a few more key words, and then type in certain dates and grid references. No luck.

I think for a bit, and come up blank.

So then I just go browsing, trying to find clues in their daily lives. It feels somehow
wrong trawling through their private stuff, but the slight guilt isn’t enough to
make me stop. Whatever’s going on, whatever that woman was doing, I need to find
out what it was. From watching how well Mason knew his way around the grid, I can
tell that he knows how to hack other stuff too.

A lot of the time I just sift through boring stuff in case it uncovers some sort
of clue. Mason’s school reports are littered with national academic awards. The guy
clearly has a seriously high mega-IQ.

Boc’s reports are okay, but I can tell that school isn’t exactly a priority. Most
weekends it looks like he heads out of the city to go mountain biking. I spend ages
squinting at the screen to make sure I’m reading the map contours right because when
he’s coming down the side of a mountain, the terrain he covers is insane.

When he isn’t flying down a mountainside, Boc trains with a climbing group that calls
itself ‘The Spiderboys’ because they scale city buildings rather than heading out
to cliff faces. He was even arrested once, but from the way it was written up in
the news, it seemed like a slap on the wrist more than anything else. The headline is: F
UTURE
E
LITES
A
IM FOR THE
S
KY
. There’s a picture of Boc next to some guy with pale skin and black hair called Amon Lang. I roll my eyes. If anyone on F-level
rations had been caught climbing the Macquarie Bank building, they’d have been hit
with a permanent crim stamp.

Just from pulling up their history maps over the past six months, I actually get
a pretty clear idea of who these guys are. Mason’s map is neat and contained, travelling
the same path to school and back, with most of his spare time spent in his basement.
Boc’s looks like a crazy scribble flower, looping all over the city and spiking out
to mountain areas every few weeks. He’s always seeing people, always doing stuff.

As my eyes travel over Boc’s crazy scribble, though, I realise there’s a constant,
in the centre of his flower. Mason. Every few days, Boc always returns to his centre.

The next morning, I’m searching through Boc’s computer when I find a document – a
letter from Boc addressed to the school principal. It’s an apology after Boc was
suspended for triggering lockdown in the middle of exam week. In it, he says he’s
sorry for the trouble he caused but then goes on to say that the school should be
aware how easy it is to hack its security, as if he did them a favour.

Sort of interesting, but it still has nothing to do with gaps in anyone’s history map.

I’m sifting through messages between Mason and Boc from around that time, when I
realise that the identity tags are out of sequence. My eyes narrow at that. Interesting.
Some of the messages must have been swiped from both hard drives.

It takes me a while to hack into the mainframe backups and then it takes me a day
to work out how to bring up Mason and Boc’s messages out of all the billions stored
in there. Not easy when a mega brain like Mason was trying to hide them.

After some clever workarounds and by targeting specific dates, I manage to find the
exchange that Mason was trying to hide.

Once I start reading, it all makes sense. It seems that Mason was the one who hacked
into school security and wanted to own up for what he did. It took Boc two days to
talk Mason out of it. It was Boc’s idea, so he thought he should be the one to take
the hit. I guess they’d stopped talking face to face because the arguing all happens
via messaging, even during school hours.

It makes me a bit less wary about these guys, somehow; they just get up to a bit
of hacking and stuff. At the same time, I can’t help being disappointed. None of
it had anything to do with people disappearing after all.

By the end of the day I’m still no closer to working out what’s going on, so I move
on to a different search tactic. How do you find something when you’re not sure what
you’re searching for?

Just go looking for the stuff that people are trying to hide.

I’ve already worked out how to access emails that were deleted,
so the next day I
write a bot that filters through all the deleted files that still exist on the mainframe
backup, searching for anything that originated from Mason’s or Boc’s computers.

The comscreen starts churning through. For a while I sit and watch, then I leave
it chugging and cook some oats for breakfast.

When I come back it’s still searching, but already some files have begun to appear:
a whole new series of emails between Mason and Boc and months of browsing history.
All stuff they tried to delete.

No-one’s watching, but I make a show of breathing on my fingernails and polishing
them on my pyjama top. One of the best things about hacking is the buzz you get when
you find your way into some place you’re not meant to be.

I can tell that I’m onto something as soon as I start reading.

It’s possible, I promise it is,
Mason writes in the earliest message on the list.
Not in some future reality, once a time machine’s been invented. Time travel is possible
and always has been. It all makes sense once you understand the true nature of time.