Read Lifespan of Starlight for Free Online

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