I wondered what Aiden was doing. Was he awake? Mum had said they’d tell me he’d died in his sleep. Did that mean he already had, or was that something that was going to happen? I tried to figure it out, but I couldn’t make sense of it. There was a banging on the door and Dad’s voice, muffled, shouting something. I couldn’t tell what it was. After a while, it stopped. Mum was still talking.

‘… and naturally one of the consequences of all this was that international trade more or less stopped, many of our farms were destroyed and we didn’t have enough to eat. That, added to natural disasters – tornadoes, cyclones, blistering heat, torrential rains, brought the population to just over seven million. We had created global warming. Now it killed us in the millions.’

‘Aiden …’ I said.

Mum crouched down in front of me.

‘What did you say, sweetheart? What did you say?’

But I couldn’t remember. After a while, she got up and continued pacing.

‘Australia was hit very badly, but many other places had it worse. It was close to an extinction event for humanity, but we survived, Ashleigh. Bruised, battered, but we survived. Many animals did not, as you know. There was once a time when Australia had a fantastic and diverse range of flora and fauna. Plants and animals.’ I knew what flora and fauna meant, but it didn’t matter. ‘Most died out, the mammals first, but then birds and insects. And that made the environment, already crushed, even worse.’

She stopped for a while. I thought about asking if I could use the bathroom, but then I remembered there was a bathroom in the media room. I wasn’t getting out of here until she was ready. A machine? How could my brother be a machine?

‘What food we needed, we had to grow. But there was virtually no fuel for the engines – we used to use fossil fuel back then, rather than renewables. That was a large part of the problem. That’s why the world now is basically vegetarian. The animals we used to keep for food would eat a huge amount of food that we could eat. A criminal waste of resources. It was wrong to eat meat then. It’s even worse now.’

I kept zoning out, but my head was starting to clear. I missed a lot of what Mum was saying, but then I knew most of it anyway. A part of me wondered why we were going over history. Then she told me.