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.
FOR 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: FUTURE ELITES AIM FOR THE SKY. 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.
I read that email through three times, mouthing the words to make sure that I’m reading right. This is crazy. I can’t keep reading fast enough.
Most of the deleted browsing history is linked to sites about something called Relative Time Theory and a lot of the emails are from Mason explaining it to Boc.
I get the feeling that they were talking during the day and then messaging at night. Some emails seem to pick up in the middle of a conversation and then drop out before it’s finished, I guess when they met up again at school. But even with the gaps, I find myself reading through the strangest, most amazing of ideas …
All our lives, we’ve been moving with the flow of time because that’s all we know, that’s what we expect, says Mason in one email. But in truth, time isn’t flowing. Reality only exists as separate moments, like frames in a movie.
Or dots in the grid? from Boc.
Mason again: Yes, that’s it exactly. We think we move with the flow of time, allowing it to carry us along because that’s what we believe is happening. Our mistake is that we believe time is outside ourselves. Steady. It’s not. The way we connect with time is changeable. That’s the clue.
That’s the clue …
Except, I can’t find the rest of that message sequence. I search around for a while, and read through one of the sites on Relative Time Theory until my brain is about to explode.
After that, I give up on the site and pick up another conversation:
We already experience changes in time without realising, Mason writes. Sometimes whole hours, whole days, fly past. Right? Other times, when you face a split-second crisis, everything slows down. Your mind will slow its experience of time in order to survive. Think about it. Our sense of time changes because we control the passage of time within ourselves.
I lean back, thinking it through. I’ve never heard time described this way. We control the passage of time within ourselves.
Soon I lean forwards and re-trigger the session. I pick up the rest of the conversation:
That’s all very well about controlling time, Einstein, Boc says in another message. But you haven’t said anything about travelling through time. Jumping ahead like the gap you found on the grid. That’s way different.
Mason replies: I had trouble getting my get my head around that, too. Maybe it will help if you think of time as a river. Okay with that?
Sure. Okay. The river of time.
Mason continues. Everyone thinks they’re stuck inside the present moment, being carried along with the flow of time. But the whole river exists at once, not just the bit you’re travelling in, right?
Got it.
So instead of being swept along with the river, imagine if you could freeze it. Then you could move to a different part of the river – just pick whichever part of time you want to be – then unfreeze the river so time starts flowing again. Only you’ve changed where you are in it.
Yeah, I guess. Except time isn’t really a river is it, Mase?
No, Boc – I was making a point. Here’s the thing you need to understand: we need to learn how to slow our sense of time to a stop. From there, you have the power to return at any point you choose. In theory, at least.
Fine. No problem, replies Boc. But how exactly do you plan to do that?
Mason’s reply came back as a single word: Meditation.
* * *
Alistair’s in the share kitchen when I collect our evening delivery on Saturday. ‘Agent X, reporting for duty?’ he calls slowly with his eyes still on the chopping board.
I dump our bag on the island bench and check out his spread of ingredients. Baby carrots, bean shoots and a shrivelled green capsicum half. ‘What you cooking?’
‘Stir-fry surprise.’
‘What’s the surprise?’
‘Leftover chilli beans,’ he says, and glances up. ‘We’re in beta testing. Want some?’
I shake my head, chin in my hands, because of course it’s rude to accept someone else’s rations, even a five-year-old kid knows that. But I keep watching anyway. Now that we have enough rations to cook some decent meals, I’m on the lookout for ideas.
We’re quiet while he chops, but that’s just how it is if you want to catch up with Alistair. It’s a slower world where he lives, one with few words.
‘How long until the test?’ Alistair says after a while, still looking at the chopping board.
‘Four days.’
‘How’d the practice tests go?’
‘They were okay. I got 93 for maths and 89 for problem solving.’
‘Reading comprehension?’ He picks up the half capsicum and slowly begins to scrape out the seeds. His hands look stiff as he works, as if his joints need to be oiled.
When I just shrug, he stops scraping and waits.
A sigh. ‘76?’
‘That’s okay. It’s enough.’ Alistair pushes his chin forwards when he sees the look on my face. ‘You’ll be fine, Scout.’
‘Maybe.’ But I don’t say more than that. Don’t want to jinx it by hoping too hard.
Mum’s probably wondering why I’m taking so long, but I don’t take our delivery back yet. Instead I hang around, pulling dry skin from beside a fingernail.
‘Have you heard of something called Relative Time Theory?’ I ask.
Alistair stops with the capsicum and looks up. ‘Can’t say that I have.’
‘It’s sort of the idea that time is just in our mind. That it comes from the way our brains make sense of each separate moment.’
There’s no
movement from Alistair at first, he just stares at a point on the bench.
I’ve almost given up on a reply when he says,‘Time definitely seems different for me these days. Each year seems to fly past faster than the last.’ A slow shrug brings him out of his thoughts as he focuses on me. ‘Who knows? Maybe you’re onto something.’
I think about showing him the gap in that woman’s history map, but if I head down that path, I’d have to tell him where the chip came from.
Years ago, Mum sat me down and told me how dangerous it could be for the people we care about if I was ever found out as illegal. There’s no way I want to put Alistair in danger, so we’ve always had a bit of a speak-no-evil, hear-no-evil agreement between us.
I’m not sure where to go next, but I don’t want to stop. ‘Some people believe that if we understand time properly –’ I search for the right words. ‘We can learn how to move wherever we want in it.’
A frown. ‘Where did this come from?’
‘Just something I read.’
Alistair goes quiet again. ‘So you’re saying we could travel through time if we understood it properly? A case of mind over matter?’
‘Sort of. I guess …’
‘Interesting,’ he says. ‘Never heard of that one before.’
‘Yeah, don’t worry.’ Now that I’m saying it out loud, it sounds impossible. ‘I know it sounds crazy.’
‘Maybe it does.’ Alistair’s watching me closely. ‘But they said the same about lots of things that turned out to be true. Ever heard of Galileo?’
‘Yeah. Think so.’
‘I’ll send you a link.’
‘Okay, thanks Alistair. Better go.’ I grab our delivery and head for the hall. ‘Hope the beta testing is a success.’
* * *
Lifespan of Starlight Page 4