"Maxine McArthur - Times Past" - читать интересную книгу автора (McArthur Maxine)

short-range channel that the Invidi ships use. For tracking control, I
used the computer in my work place, and an antique digital processor.
The only component I hadn't been able to find was the laser.

I couldn't buy one openly because I didn't have a National Identity
Card or a police registration certificate. The former would prove I
was a permanent resident, and the latter would show my arrest record,
if any.

Someone yelled something unintelligible at me. A small woman in a
scrap of bright dress. She shooed me over to the other side of the
path, then bent down and chucked a bucketful of dirty water where I'd
been walking. All the voices in these lanes spoke a language unknown
to me, although I'd been here long enough to recognize it as either
Vietnamese or Laotian.

These people probably had the same problem as me-no official
identity.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century millions of refugees
and illegal immigrants tried to find a new home in Australia after
unexpected climate change and a series of natural disasters damaged
Western European economies, and the ascent of fundamentalist politics
in the USA made that country less accessible. In Australia, the
Residential Restriction Law of 2010 originally proposed settling the
tens of thousands of illegal immigrants in restricted residency
areas.

It was at this time, Grace told me, that the new ID card system was
brought in.

"It wasn't the card so much as the zoning that pissed people off. They
shouldn't have cut us off from the harbor," she'd said.

She resented it, but that was the extent of her resistance.
Her own fragile links to social services depended on her job and
keeping out of trouble.

As soon as I arrived in the out-town I learned that, if caught, I would
be sent to a holding center, where I could be detained for up to a
year, then processed--my details, including DNA, would go into the
official database as "illegal," and unless I could prove refugee
status, I'd be sent either to a restricted area or to some far-off part
of the country to work. Many people in this position simply ran away
from their enforced work, but they had no ID card and dared not apply
for one because a record of their DNA was already in the official
database. Better to evade capture upon arrival and then make enough
money to buy an ID made on the black market. In my case, all I wanted
to do was evade capture, period.