Snapshot — Tuesday, 2046
The wall behind the desk had been wood for two weeks.
Frank ran his hand along the top edge as he came in. The grain was Karri, felled in the south-west in '42, milled in Bunbury, fitted two weeks ago by carpenters who had spent three days in the lobby while the building tried not to look like it was being renovated. The wood was still settling, the smell thinner than people who hadn't been around new timber expected — Frank had been around it; his mother's house in Toowoomba had been re-floored when he was twelve, and the smell had stayed in the hallway for a month.
He set his coffee down — real coffee from Anna at the corner, who roasted her own (Northern Rivers, never anything else) and would, on current trends, be out of business in four years. Frank had been buying his morning coffee from her since he started on the desk, and would until she closed.
The lobby's surface lit at the desk position when he sat, and the roster came up: two deliveries before nine, a courier requested by 14B at ten thirty, the building manager at eleven about the capture-skin retrofit. Frank skimmed; he had read the brief on his tablet on the tram in. The state was offering a forty-percent grant, the body corporate would have to find the rest, and the meeting on Thursday would have two of the older tenants shouting and one of the younger ones putting forward the climate argument — the building would go ahead with it anyway, because the credits would, by GEMS's modelling, pay the rest within four years.
Frank had no opinion he could safely give from the desk, which was a place from which opinions weren't given, but privately he thought the mandate was right and the way it had been rolled out wrong, and that the people who would pay for it most were the people in buildings older than this one, which wouldn't get the grants because the engineering wouldn't work on their walls. He had said this once at the pub to his cousin, who had repeated it to his cousin's manager, who had repeated it back to Frank with the word socialist attached, which hadn't been Frank's point.
The lobby door opened and Mrs. Tan from 9C came through, returning from her walk: fast walker, in her sixties, halo behind her ear, the orange light steady. Frank said good morning, Mrs. Tan said good morning, and the halo's orange light meant Mrs. Tan was on a call or was recording or was both. The convention was still new enough — three years, four — that people made small adjustments around a visible halo without quite knowing what they were adjusting for, and Frank hadn't yet decided whether the adjustment was politeness or self-protection or both. There were articles. There were always articles.
At nine the deliveries came: first a chilled box from the city's largest cellular-agriculture supplier, addressed to 7A, with the new compliance label down the side: cultured product, lot CA-04461, schedule under review, the result of three years of senate fighting, which would in time become as invisible as the milk labels of the previous century but for now was still political. The courier who handed Frank the box was apologetic about the size of it: people in 7A had ordered a fortnight's worth. Frank signed for it.
The second delivery was a paper-wrapped parcel from Frank's uncle in the Hunter: a dozen eggs inside, packed in straw. His uncle still had chickens and would keep them until he died, which wouldn't be soon; the eggs would last Frank a week and a half. He set them under the desk in the cool spot where the cleaners wouldn't knock them.
At ten past nine the woman from 11D came through the lobby with her son: perhaps five years old, with a small white band fitted just above his left ear. Frank hadn't seen one in person before, only in the school-pilot piece in the Saturday paper, and the band was unobtrusive enough that he wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't been looking; he had been looking, because the article had said the bands were being trialled at three of the inner-suburb private primaries and the woman from 11D worked in education policy. The boy looked at Frank, and Frank said good morning to him as he said good morning to all the children, and the boy said good morning back, and Frank watched them cross the lobby and step out into the morning, and the door closed behind them.
He realised, after a moment, that he had been waiting for the band to do something: light up, change colour, signal that the boy was settled or distracted or attending. The band had done nothing visible; whatever it did went silently, into whatever read it. Frank didn't know what read it, or what was in the read. He sat at the desk for some time after the door had closed.
At eleven, the building manager came down and they talked about the retrofit.