expanding complexity. Lucy had half believed that by some strange transference of events, Dr Liu might have been erased from the website as she, Lucy, had erased her from life that morning. Instead, the doctor remained where Lucy had placed her from the beginning, lying in a replica of the street she had lain in that morning in Chippendale, shot dead. In this familiar screen image, the buildings around the prone woman were burning and the street was littered with debris from a shattered landscape, everything shining with the green-ant glow of nuclear poison.
There were images missing from this crossover world, unforeseen events which Lucy had encountered in the actual world less than an hour ago. Events which she needed to build into her website to allow her electronic vision to replicate actuality, to ease the memory by binding them into a pictogram. The man with the ruined face also lying dead beside the woman on the roadway, and a boy, staring at her from a distance close enough for her to touch him. As she drew on this memory it took control of her, flooding her thoughts. Her hands on the keyboard became weighted, frozen in action.
She had intended to kill the woman. She had not thought she would ever have to use the gun on anyone else, she did not remember how she had. No one else was supposed to be there. The sound of the first shot had deafened her and she was caught in an airlock, breathless and vacant with the shock, staring at the red stain soaking into the woman’s blue jacket. Then the man was there in front of her without warning, so close that he was almost in her face. As she stared at him, his face was suddenly and almost immediately unmade. She did not remember feeling the recoil of the gun.
She dropped a curtain in her mind over the memory. With a jerky, clumsy movement, she hit the close button and watched her other world fold back into its icon on the screen, collapsing inwards like a magician’s stream of silk scarves. Its absence left behind a clear blue light which shone out of the computer like a benediction.
Lucy dived into the light, out onto the web, desperate.
Turtle, it’s the Firewall. Are you out there? If you are, please talk to me, I need to talk turtle with you if you’re there. Please say you are.
I did it.
No, I did.
I’ve already told you why. You don’t have to ask me that.
Lucy sat staring at her keyboard, rubbing her forehead hard with her hands before typing again.
You say that but it’s not true. It was something I had to do. All last night, I was here in my sleeping bag and I saw it so clearly in my mind. You know better than anyone what it’s like to see things so clearly in your head like that. It was like that woman was standing in front of me in this blue light and I saw her for what she was. She was evil. I knew what I had to do. Your head takes you everywhere. But I can move, I can walk, and that means I have to do things. I have to go out into the world and I have to do things. I had to do what I did.
It’s that simple.
Something I should never have done ever. And I don’t know what to do about it now.
Shooting someone else as well. He was right there in front of me.
He was so close. Almost as close as my computer is now. I guess he wanted my gun, I didn’t think about that before. I just fired. I didn’t even know I had. But his face — Turtle, he looked — I didn’t think it would look like that. I’m asking, what have I done?
There was a kid there. He saw everything. I don’t know, Turtle.
What do I do?
I’m not doing that. What’s the point of that? Everything I’ve done would be wasted.
I didn’t say that. I’d never say you deserved what happened to you, Turtle. You can’t think that. It isn’t fair.
It fucking is not the same. Anyway they’re both dead now so what’s the point of saying that?
Lucy cut the connection before Turtle could reply and left her final words hanging in cyberspace.
‘I have to get out of here.’ She spoke aloud to the small room as she disconnected and folded up the notebook. She could not breathe, the quietness had begun to jangle. This place was haunted by her own ghosts, she could never come back here again. She pushed her sleeping bag and computer, her mobile phone, all her acquired and stolen things into her backpack. She walked out of the disused office quickly, leaving her stained clothes in a heap on the floor, and let herself out of the garage by a side door without once glancing at the stolen and now abandoned car.
She was ordinary, no one would look at her twice. Just a small young woman, nineteen perhaps, dressed in jeans and a white shirt, wearing a black hooded raincoat and lace-up shoes like a schoolgirl’s, carrying a compact backpack. Stepping out into ruined streets where the houses had been demolished to make way for a new housing development.
Walking through the rain past the cyclone wire fences, turning the corner towards the bus stop on Anzac Parade, passing a white-painted brick building sandwiched between a three-storey block of flats and a takeaway food bar. She paused to look at the white building as she went by, checking the red and white sign: The Women’s Whole Life Health Centres Inc., Randwick Clinic . Then she was just anyone else, a student perhaps, catching the bus to Central Railway Station on a winter’s day.
She sat next to a large woman in an orange coat who declared a boundary dispute by wedging her shopping basket against Lucy’s legs.
The skin of ordinary life settled over her like a muzzling cloth. The bus was full, the air steamy from the passengers’ wet clothing, their tangled hair. The sound of the bus driver’s radio fought against the noise of traffic and the softer voices of the packed-in travellers. Lucy listened to the talkback show host’s relentless patter as the bus edged forward in the slow traffic. Her breathing was suspended as he began to announce in his clipped and angry voice:
