The Tracers

'Did it hurt?' Sam's long legs dangled over the seawall, one exposed knee blue with cold from the tear in her jeans. Easy in the sunshine, she unconsciously kicked the heel of her left boot against the stones. In the distance, a medic boat was moving slowly away from a cruise liner, dominate on the seascape. Leviathan and redundant, these travelling cities had anchored and stayed put. Their shimmer of glamour was giving way to rust, housing prisoners rather than travellers. She had tried to swim out to one last summer, but they were further offshore than their gargantuan hulking presence had suggested.

'You can touch it', Olly said. He offered his skinny forearm toward her, opened up it's pale white underside. She pressed her heels into the wall and leaned even closer to him where he stood on the wet sand, holding onto his shoulder for support. The skin was puckered and ridged, but imperceptibly so - a tiny white scar that you'd not notice unless you were looking. What was underneath the skin was more important than the scar. She thought of her uncle, who worked for the tracers. Could he see them on the beach together, one blinking green dot on his screen, a little too close for the blinking red one? Were they close enough so that one disappeared under another? 1.5 metres distant at all times might apply to teenagers as well as adults, but the punishment was up to the individual tracers. Some remembered being young, once. The need to be close. But if they didn't empathise, the fines went to the parents. Three and they'd be for the death ships, called so because in the first pandemic, the passengers had died there of the virus. If you survived a stint on the ships, you wouldn't survive the second.

The scar meant that Olly moved in circles that Sam did not. He had been to Fiji, and to Germany on a school trip, although that was the year of the Great European floods and it was only by luck that they had left the day before most of the cities in the north and east of the continent were swept away under landslides and the breaking of dams and rivers that once gently burbled past centuries old churches. Neither the chipped nor the unchipped could visit those places now, because they no longer existed.

Still, there were other countries she would like to visit, though she was raised to not dream of those things. Exemption via her family's belief mean reasonable small freedoms on the reservations, but none elsewhere. If she chose to get the vaccination and the chip, she'd be allowed to go to university, to fly, to attend concerts, to receive a loan on her own home, a baby bonus. Carrots and sticks, that's how the government worked these days. Carrots and sticks.

'Have you thought about it?' he said, staring at her seriously through his dark fringe. He removed his Airpods and gently jammed them into her ears. Her brain exploded with noise - wailing guitars and a rolling bass shot through with the unmistakeable voice of Zee Wilder. She closed her eyes and swayed. When she opened them, he was grinning at her. 'You know you want to', he laughed. She kicked him playfully, landing it softly on his bony hip as he stood below her.

'But the tracers, dick!' she pouted. Only last week someone on her reservation had been taken away. She looked toward the death ships and imagined him staring at her from one of the port holes, but in reality they were too far away to make out anything but the soldiers patrolling the deck. His infringement was relatively benign. A harmless act, in the pre-viral world.

He'd shopped outside the twice fortnightly times set aside for the jabbed.

It was a calculated risk. Sometimes tracers ignored the minor infractions that came up on the smart sensors and looked the other way, especially if it was a justifiable flouting of the law, like buying baby formula. Sometimes they didn't. The trick was to make yourself less noticeable on the screen, her uncle had told them. Go when it's crowded, so you're lost in a sea of red dots, but keep your distance at the same time, so people don't notice you on the ground. Or go to the black stores, the old school shops that hadn't got the tech installed yet. But they were more expensive, as they did not qualify for government incentives and rebates. Their shelves were less well stocked. Still, the black store owners held off against the tide, staunchly resistant. Many were ones owned by migrants who'd come from places who'd been heavily surveilled long before the third pandemic in a decade. But they'd disappear before long. Carrots and sticks.

Her family were a little luckier, being in a rural reservation with a river on it's western edge, lined with a thick cover of trees. Not having to pay extra water for the garden was a real boon, and no one minded the daily trudge down the steep steps to haul back buckets to pour on the vegetable seedlings. In the summer, they could swim there, sheltered by a tall rock gorge that led down to the sea. The trees provided cover from the drones when they needed a small corner of privacy, and sometimes Olly even clambered through a hole in the wire to join her there to study or listen to music, or, like today, they'd find their way down the river to the sea and walk the three kilometres to the wharf to watch the boats.

She wondered how long her family could keep living on the reservation, and in fact, why they did so when the benefits for getting the vaccination would make their life easier, and give their own children a much greater degree of social mobility. They listed themselves as exempt each six monthly census, submitting themselves to gruelling question sessions by the medics. There were small liberties that were worth being stubborn about, they argued. In some ways, they were right. She did not miss school anymore. She did not suppose she even needed a job, so long as they had the fish in the river, the goats and the garden. Her father always said that the reservations were not a punishment, but the last remaining paradises in the country. But the reservation did not have Zee Wilder, and though Sam could officially could cross the boundary fences, there were very few public places that she could go without being vilified, interrogated, or her parents fined. With too many infringements, parents had to shoulder the responsibility for their errant offspring. Whole families would be moved shipside, forced into cramped and airless cabins. When they returned they'd take the shot alright, or disappear into the wilderness for good.

'Come on,' he urged, pulling her off the wall onto the sand with him. 'We can trick the tracers...'

'...like this?' she said, threading her hand under his elbow and along his forearm and crossing their fingers together. His scar was touching the exact spot hers would be, if she chose to get it. It was said that if you were skin close, sometimes your red dot disappeared under the green. The uncertainty was deterrent enough for most.

'...they won't see you. It's a crowd - there's too many dots'. He kissed her, hard. She could hear the crescendo of guitars and mad beat of the drums cumulate in their post punk overload of noise. She let herself imagine being there. Slipping through the gates with the rest of them. The tracers not noticing. Once in the crowd, if they saw the red dot on the screens, they couldn't name her, only him, because he was chipped. They'd have to find her, and interrogate her, fine her, but it would be worth it.

She imagined the hot bodies pressed up against each other in the pit, her feet leaving the ground as she leapt skyward with the frenetic chords and undulating percussion. He let go of her hand and pulled her hips close to his. She imagined herself liquid sound and slipped into the rhythm of his heartbeat and Wilder's final shout before the song ended.

In the silence between tracks, she heard the drone hovering above them, it's cold eye blinking. Olly pushed her away from him, hard, and stepped back the regulated one point five, his plea for breaking the virus laws forgotten. Landing hard on the sand, she felt the familiar hot flush of shame. The machine clicked it's camera twice in quick succession. She knew the mail would arrive within seconds, the fine coming out of her parent's account, already low. Two more fines and they'd be on the ships.

And Olly would be dancing at the Wilder gig, his reservation friend forgotten.