4338.12 · January 12, 2018 AD
No Digital Footprint
Two days. No word from Josh. No delivery confirmation. Nathan tells himself it's just a delay — that his brother received the package, laughed it off, and hasn't had time to ring back. Then the tracking page loads. No information available. Not delayed. Not misrouted. Gone. Every scan, every depot log, every metadata entry — erased as though the transaction at the Liverpool Street counter never happened. A receipt printed on thermal paper is the only proof it did. And somewhere between Hobart and Broken Hill, a device capable of rewriting the laws of physics has simply ceased to exist.
Two days since he posted it. Two days of silence from Broken Hill, broken only by the hum of traffic and the occasional screech of a seagull beyond the office window. Nathan stares at his phone, cycling through the same reassurances — Josh is busy, the post is slow, no news is good news — but each one rings hollower than the last.
He calls Josh. The answer is immediate and devastating in its simplicity: nothing has arrived.
The tracking page takes an age to load. A spinning icon revolves endlessly, some corporate parody of a black hole. When the screen finally updates, it delivers two words that shouldn't be possible for a package with a valid receipt and a paid express sticker: tracking information unavailable. Not delayed. Not misrouted. The data that had logged the parcel's progress through Adelaide — mechanically, precisely, at every depot — has simply ceased to exist.
Nathan rings Australia Post. A customer service representative named Laura tries a hard refresh, then a different database, then her supervisor. Each attempt peels back another layer of impossibility. The tracking number doesn't merely lack current data. There is no lodgement scan. No transit events. No metadata entries. No digital footprint of any kind. The system insists the parcel was never entered into the network at all.
A receipt printed on thermal paper — flimsy, already fading — is the only remaining evidence that two days ago, Nathan handed a padded envelope containing a device older than recorded civilisation to a bored clerk on Liverpool Street and paid thirty-four dollars for the privilege.
The package hasn't been lost. It has been excised. And as Nathan sits at his desk, fingers grazing the remaining Portal Keys in their foam slots, a new and colder question takes hold: if whoever did this can erase a parcel from every system in the country, do they now know about him?
