NULLPORT

> cat /home/bug/three-numbers.txt

The three numbers

Rent is $120. Your grandmother's heart medication is $340 a month and the pharmacy does not do instalments. Mel's prep course is $2,800 a term, three evenings a week. The woman from the course has started calling in the afternoons, when she thinks an adult will answer.

There is $180 in the kumbara. Mel counted it twice. She will tell you the second count was not for you.

> cat /var/log/port/claim-4471.txt

Why there is no father in this

He died at the port. He was on a subcontractor's payroll, so when the claim went in the answer came back that a subcontracted man is nobody's employee — and the refusal was correct. That is the part that does not go away. Not that somebody lied. That the paperwork was in order and the answer was still no.

claim 4471 — REFUSED. no employment relationship on record.

You left the technical high school in the final year. Nobody asked you to. It was the one thing that could be dropped that month without anyone else in the flat losing something.

> status --counter

What you actually do for money

You fix phones at a counter in the Sunnyside market. Cash, no receipt, no rent on the counter — it belongs to a man who owes your family a favour eleven years old and getting thinner. Screens, batteries, water damage, a charging port a week.

counter, sunnyside   14 repairs this week, $96 taken
kumbara              $180
due friday            $120 rent
due friday            $340 pharmacy

Fourteen repairs is a good week. A good week does not reach Friday.

> tail -f /threads/mellll

Mel

She is seventeen. She does the shopping, she manages Rose's tablets, and she counts the kumbara — which is how she knows before you do. She wants to study architecture somewhere that is not this city, and she has one exam and one chance at it.

Tonight she wrote the three numbers on the back of an envelope and left it where you would find it. She worked out that you will read a thing you can pick up and will not listen to a thing she says to your face.

mellll · 23:12 i'm not asking where the money is from. i'm asking you to look at me when you say we're fine

> scan --block

The light in the window

Across the block, on a roof, a woman of sixty-one is photographing your window. She repairs amplifiers, hearing aids and cash registers from a unit in Sunnyside. In 1998 she ran the biggest board in the region out of a room above her father's shop. In 2009 she and a partner did something for money. Nine years went to the partner alone: she was the one who got away, he was the one who stayed.

She knew your grandmother; your grandmother used to bring her broken radios. She watches your light because the hours it burns say something, and because the last person she taught did not come out of this.

dialtone · 08:00 your light is on. third floor, second window. four minutes to find you.

> probe net.5b_short_let

The door two floors up

5B has been empty since August. A short let, the owner abroad, the key with an agency that sends somebody once a fortnight. The router inside is still plugged in and still shouting its name down the street, because nobody switches off a thing they are not paying for.

Your own line runs through one cabinet in the stairwell with your flat number written inside the door, in your grandmother's name, on her pension. That is the whole first lesson, and Fay will not hand you a job until you have it: the first thing you learn is not how to get in. It is how not to be the address.

You have not done anything yet. You are on a landing at twenty to midnight with $180 downstairs and a stairwell going up, and the only question left is whether you walk up it.

> shots

What it looks like

Six screens from the build that walked the whole story, on an iPhone 17.