January 12, 2018 AD
Nathan Cowdrey called his brother Josh in Broken Hill to confirm delivery of a padded envelope posted two days earlier from Hobart. Josh had received nothing. The tracking page that had logged the parcel's progress through Adelaide now returned a void — no information available. A call to Australia Post confirmed and surpassed what the blank page suggested: the tracking number lacked not merely current data but any data at all. No lodgement scan, no transit events, no metadata. The parcel had not been lost within the system. It had been excised from it. A fading thermal receipt was the only remaining evidence that the transaction had ever occurred. By late Friday afternoon, Nathan had booked a flight — Hobart to Melbourne, connecting to Adelaide — and transferred three remaining Portal Keys from his desk drawer to his bag.
Two days after a padded express envelope entered the Australian postal system at a Hobart branch office, Nathan Cowdrey called his brother in Broken Hill to confirm delivery. Josh had received nothing. No delivery had been attempted, no card left, no parcel waiting at the local depot. The address was correct. The postal code was correct. The envelope had simply failed to arrive.
Nathan opened the tracking page on his phone — the same page that had recorded the parcel's progress through Adelaide that morning with the precision of a system designed to log every scan and transfer along the delivery chain. The result was a void. No tracking data available. Not a delay notification. Not a pending scan. The complete absence of any record that the tracking number had ever been associated with a physical object. He refreshed the page repeatedly with the irrational conviction that persistence might compel the database to remember what it had forgotten. The number continued to produce nothing.
But it had existed that morning. Adelaide, timestamps, depot codes — the parcel's journey documented with the granular precision that modern logistics demanded. That data had been present eight hours earlier. It was not present now.
A call to Australia Post customer service confirmed what the blank tracking page suggested and then surpassed it. The representative who processed Nathan's enquiry discovered that the tracking number did not merely lack current data — it lacked any data at all. No lodgement scan from the Liverpool Street branch where the envelope had been physically handed across a counter and paid for. No transit events. No metadata entries of any kind. The supervisor accessed every available system. The search was conducted twice. The result was comprehensive and, by the representative's own audible assessment, inexplicable. The parcel had not been lost within the postal network. It had been excised from it, as though the transaction two days earlier had never occurred.
The receipt existed. Nathan held it between his fingers — thermal paper, black ink, a tracking number printed by a point-of-sale system that recorded transactions as a matter of operational necessity. The receipt confirmed that an express post envelope had been lodged, weighed, paid for, and accepted into the system's custody. The system that had generated the receipt now denied that the transaction had ever taken place. Physical evidence contradicted digital record. Paper did not delete itself. Thermal print did not retract its statements. Which meant the data had been altered — not corrupted by system failure but removed with a surgical completeness that left no trace of the removal itself.
Somewhere between Hobart and Broken Hill, a padded envelope containing a Portal Key had crossed a boundary that the postal system's architecture could not map. Whether intercepted by human hands or claimed by something less easily categorised, the result was identical: an object had entered a logistics network and the network had forgotten it completely, as though the forgetting were the point.
The late Friday afternoon in Nathan's fourth-floor Hobart office collapsed into a single decision. The weekend stretched ahead — two days during which the postal service would not operate, during which no investigation could advance, during which a Portal Key that had been removed from institutional memory would continue to exist somewhere in the physical world in someone's custody. The desk drawer beside his knee contained three remaining Portal Keys, its ordinary metal construction offering a security that was almost certainly illusory. If the people who had taken the posted Key knew where it had been sent from, they might know the sender, the workplace, the desk, the drawer.
The airline app offered what the tracking page could not: a departure time, a destination, a direction. Hobart to Melbourne, departing 7:15 a.m. Connecting to Adelaide. The booking confirmation arrived with a cheerful automated chime that the circumstances rendered absurd — a transaction logged, timestamped, documented, all the digital courtesies that the postal system had extended and then revoked.
Nathan transferred the three remaining Portal Keys from desk drawer to bag. The fading receipt was folded into his wallet, where it would continue its slow chemical retreat towards blankness. The office settled into the particular stillness of a workspace that might or might not see its occupant return on Monday. Seth's instructions — be careful who sees it, be careful who knows — had carried the cadence of paranoia when they were first delivered across a café table. They carried something different now. They carried the sound of a man who had understood, from personal experience, exactly how thoroughly inconvenient knowledge could be made to disappear.
