And then, within their first one hundred days in office, their greatest test. Mim didn’t personally know anyone at the MCG on the day of the attacks, although, by degrees of separation, there were a few. Someone shoots that many footy fans in a city like Melbourne during a preliminary final and everyone’s going to know someone. Likewise, the bank hack didn’t affect them directly. She didn’t go through the months of hell of getting the administration of their life back on track. But, like everyone else, they did bear the pain of soaring interest rates.
And then the bio-threat. The government tried to keep everyone level-headed, at the start at least. There were protocols in place for the media by then, supposedly to counteract scaremongering and division. So for a while they only knew that security at the MediSec facility outside of Geelong had been compromised. Eventually it got out. Two security officers and a virologist were dead. The terrorists had known what they were doing. They only took one frozen vial. Only needed one. Enough terror in that particular strain to last a generation.
So that’s what they lived with. The knowledge that nothing was sacred, and nothing was safe. Not their money, not their health and not their football games.
After that, the government changed the terror laws again. People could be detained without charge for six months while investigations were pending. A new Treason Code. The punishment for violations? Loss of citizenship. The offender and their family. Loss of all assets. Stateless. You bring terror to our nation, you don’t deserve a nation. No one could argue with that kind of rhetoric.
The ensuing authority creep hardly caused a ripple. In this, the lucky country, the land of the lackadaisical larrikin, no one demanded you jumped on board the new system. No one legislated. No, it was much more powerful than that.
You got a chip to protect a mate.
You got a chip ’cos you had nothing to hide.
Because we are all in this together.
The publicity campaign was a triumph. Rumour has it that they paid 5 million to one influencer alone to livestream her own chipping through her social media feed. Football clubs got chipped together. There were cross-cultural chip days in the inner suburbs – even the most strident of small L liberals on board.
And all in all, it seemed a rather small price to pay. It seemed increasingly likely that there might be a moment when you would like to know that your loved ones could be located in the blink of an eye. Less.
They were all doing it anyway, more or less. Geolocating their every move in exchange for Points! Rewards! (conditions apply).
You want to know where your people are when the world becomes a shifting, wild, hungry thing. When there are mass evacuations at least three times each summer on the outskirts of every city, tidal floods up the mouth of the river, a wave of eco-terrorism – bombings at a proposed radioactive waste repository site, and that storm – they couldn’t call it a hurricane on an atmospheric technicality but anyone within fifty kilometres would say it was.
When they brought in the legislation she was heavily pregnant and had to wait until she’d given birth before she could get herself chipped. And Essie. Easier to do it now for her, the smiling nurse had said, she won’t even remember the nick. Mim – leaking, weeping, feeling like she had been torn asunder – said, Yes, of course.
They did Mim first, a click, pearl of blood, nothing compared to the blind vortex of pain she’d just endured.
And then her tiny daughter, Essie, another click, a scream, eyes squeezed shut then open – the treachery of it! Of what she’d let them do to her. The nurse soothed, Now you’ll always know where she is. Doesn’t that feel wonderful?
She had grown this child, had been attached. How would she ever not know?
I will always know where you are, she had whispered.
* * *
By the time Essie arrived, the Department had started rolling out the estates. She remembers watching it on her feeds while she nursed Essie late at night, and feeling hopeful that there was finally a solution to some of the problems that had plagued the city. The residents of those first estates were homeless women, crushed by poverty, violence, and the market crash that ensured their already minuscule super accounts crumbled to dust. Their children went too, of course. The overworked and underpaid former Human Services workers collectively breathed a sigh of relief. The Department had this in hand. Children in safe and secure housing with equitable access to education, adults in work and re-training programs, their healthcare and finances all overseen by the high-tech, omniscient eyes of the benevolent state. BestLife, they called it. No pun intended.
There was some unease, of course, there always is. But, how could anyone argue?
It wasn’t until later that the gates to those estates became one way. And by then it was too late.
* * *
Her head spins slightly when she stands.
‘Lights out, OMNI.’
‘You are still in the kitchen zone.’
‘Lights out.’
‘As directed.’
The lights fade to dark around her, punctuated by the green and white glow of her networked kitchen. She stands at the bench, wondering where her husband is, trying to remember to breathe.
* * *
In the morning the school traffic is heavy and Mim is on edge as she waits to find a gap. She has two days before the kids expect Ben home. She suggests casually that there might be a delay.
‘But can we call him?’ Sam asks from the back.
She hedges. ‘We’ll try after school, huh?’ Essie catches her eye in the rear-vision mirror, but Mim looks away. Tries to remember the last conversation she had with Ben but still can’t make out any specifics. They all feel the same when Ben is away, the space behind him, even when it’s a cramped comms room, seems to expand infinitely. After they sign off she can’t help but imagine him, standing, stretching, walking away, back to work, his brain, the pulse of it all, to quiet perhaps, to solitude even. She accelerates, pulling out to get into a tight space. She cranes her neck to see what the hold-up is, but there is only the line of cars ahead, the smooth contours of all the hybrids. Keeping up with the Joneses is a competitive sport in this neighbourhood.
‘Maybe there’s an accident?’ Sam says.
The familiar flash of lights in the mirror.
They all stare out the window as the grey SUV rushes past on the kerb, siren wailing, followed by the white van emblazoned with the block green font of the BestLife logo.
‘What do you reckon it is?’ Essie says, her voice low, even though Mim and Ben have been so careful not to scare them. Children always know.
‘Must just be someone who needs some help,’ Mim says.
Essie grunts, unconvinced, and slides back in her seat.
The BestLife squad don’t even try to block the view as the traffic slows past the scene and the commuters rubberneck. High visibility is part of their effectiveness these days. So effective in its messaging and consequent public compliance, in fact, that they hardly even bother with the farce of the judicial system anymore.
A man is on the ground, his hands already cuffed behind him. He does not look especially dishevelled, although it’s been a long time since she saw anyone looking that way. And even though they are already painting over it, the graffiti is still easy to read. Wide and pink across the concrete wall: RESIST!