Identity Theft and Other Stories Read online

  “Do you have a picture?”

  “I can access one,” she said. She pointed at my desk terminal. “May I?”

  I nodded, and Cassandra reached over to grab the keyboard. In doing so, she managed to knock over my coffee mug, spilling hot joe all over her dainty hand. She let out a small yelp of pain. I got up, grabbed a towel, and began wiping up the mess. “I’m surprised that hurt,” I said. “I mean, I do like my coffee hot, but…”

  “Transfers feel pain, Mr. Lomax,” she said, “for the same reason that biologicals do. When you’re flesh-and-blood, you need a signaling system to warn you when your parts are being damaged; same is true for those of us who have transferred. Admittedly, artificial bodies are much more durable, of course.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Sorry,” she replied. “I’ve explained this so many times now—you know, at work. Anyway, please forgive me about your desk.”

  I made a dismissive gesture. “Thank God for the paperless office, eh? Don’t worry about it.” I gestured at the keyboard; fortunately, none of the coffee had gone down between the keys. “You were going to show me a picture?”

  “Oh, right.” She spoke some commands, and the terminal responded—making me wonder what she’d wanted the keyboard for. But then she used it to type in a long passphrase; presumably she didn’t want to say hers aloud in front of me. She frowned as she was typing it in, and backspaced to make a correction; multiword passphrases were easy to say, but hard to type if you weren’t adept with a keyboard—and the more security conscious you were, the longer the passphrase you used.

  Anyway, she accessed some repository of her personal files, and brought up a photo of Joshua-never-Josh Wilkins. Given how attractive Mrs. Wilkins was, he wasn’t what I expected. He had cold, gray eyes, hair buzzed so short as to be nonexistent, and a thin, almost lipless mouth; the overall effect was reptilian. “That’s before,” I said. “What about after? What’s he look like now that he’s transferred?”

  “Umm, pretty much the same,” she said.

  “Really?” If I’d had that kisser, I’d have modified it for sure. “Do you have pictures taken since he moved his mind?”

  “No actual pictures,” said Cassandra. “After all, he and I only just transferred. But I can go into the NewYou database, and show you the plans from which his new face was manufactured.” She spoke to the terminal some more, and then typed in another lengthy passphrase. Soon enough, she had a computer-graphics rendition of Joshua’s head on my screen.

  “You’re right,” I said, surprised. “He didn’t change a thing. Can I get copies of all this?”

  She nodded, and spoke some more commands, transferring various documents into local storage.

  “All right,” I said. “My fee is two hundred solars an hour.”

  “That’s fine, that’s fine, of course! I don’t care about the money, Mr. Lomax—not at all. I just want Joshua back. Please tell me you’ll find him.”

  “I will,” I said, smiling my most reassuring smile. “Don’t you worry about that. He can’t have gone far.”

  Actually, of course, Joshua Wilkins could perhaps have gone quite far—so my first order of business was to eliminate that possibility.

  No spaceships had left Mars in the last ten days, so he couldn’t be off-planet. There was a giant airlock in the south through which large spaceships could be brought inside for dry-dock work, but it hadn’t been cracked open in weeks. And, although a transfer could exist freely on the Martian surface, there were only four personnel airlocks leading out of the dome, and they all had security guards. I visited each of those airlocks and checked, just to be sure, but the only people who had gone out in the last three days were the usual crowds of hapless fossil hunters, and every one of them had returned when the dust storm began.

  I remember when this town had started up: “The Great Fossil Rush,” they called it. Weingarten and O’Reilly, two early private explorers who had come here at their own expense, had found the first fossils on Mars and had made a fortune selling them back on Earth. More valuable than any precious metal; rarer than anything else in the solar system—actual evidence of extraterrestrial life! Good fist-sized specimens went for millions in online auctions; excellent football-sized ones for billions. There was no greater status symbol than to own the petrified remains of a Martian pentaped or rhizomorph.

  Of course, Weingarten and O’Reilly wouldn’t say precisely where they’d found their specimens, but it had been easy enough to prove that their spaceship had landed here, in the Isidis Planitia basin. Other treasure hunters started coming, and New Klondike—the one and only town on Mars—was born.

  Native life was never widely dispersed on Mars; the single ecosystem that had ever existed here seemed to have been confined to an area not much bigger than Rhode Island. Some of the prospectors—excuse me, fossil hunters—who came shortly after W&O’s first expedition found a few nice specimens, although most had been badly blasted by blowing sand.

  Somewhere, though, was the mother lode: a bed that produced fossils more finely preserved than even those from Earth’s famed Burgess Shale. Weingarten and O’Reilly had known where it was—they’d stumbled on it by pure dumb luck, apparently. But they’d both been killed when their heat shield separated from their lander when re-entering Earth’s atmosphere after their third expedition here—and, in the twenty mears since, no one had yet rediscovered it.

  People were still looking, of course. There’d always been a market for transferring consciousness; the potentially infinite lifespan was hugely appealing. But here on Mars, the demand was particularly brisk, since artificial bodies could spend days or even weeks on the surface, searching for paleontological gold, without worrying about running out of air. Of course, a serious sandstorm could blast the synthetic flesh from metal bones and scour those bones until they were whittled to nothing; that’s why no one was outside right now.

  Anyway, Joshua-never-Josh Wilkins was clearly not outside the dome, and he hadn’t taken off in a spaceship. Wherever he was hiding, it was somewhere in New Klondike. I can’t say he was breathing the same air I was, because he wasn’t breathing at all. But he was here, somewhere. All I had to do was find him.

  I didn’t want to duplicate the efforts of the police, although “efforts” was usually too generous a term to apply to the work of the local constabulary; “cursory attempts” probably was closer to the truth, if I knew Mac.

  New Klondike had twelve radial roadways, cutting across the nine concentric rings of buildings under the dome. My office was at dome’s edge; I could have taken a hovertram into the center, but I preferred to walk. A good detective knew what was happening on the streets, and the hovertrams, dilapidated though they were, sped by too fast for that.

  I didn’t make any bones about staring at the transfers I saw along the way. They ranged in style from really sophisticated models, like Cassandra Wilkins, to things only a step up from the Tin Woodman of Oz. Of course, those who’d contented themselves with second-rate synthetic forms doubtless believed they’d trade up when they eventually happened upon some decent specimens. Poor saps; no one had found truly spectacular remains for mears, and lots of people were giving up and going back to Earth, if they could afford the passage, or were settling in to lives of, as Thoreau would have it, quiet desperation, their dreams as dead as the fossils they’d never found.

  I continued walking easily along; Mars gravity is about a third of Earth’s. Some people were stuck here because they’d let their muscles atrophy; they’d never be able to hack a full gee again. Me, I was stuck here for other reasons, but I worked out more than most—Gully’s Gym, over by the shipyards—and so still had reasonably strong legs; I could walk comfortably all day if I had to.

  The cop shop was a five-story building—it could be that tall, this near the center of the dome—with walls that had once been white, but were now a grimy grayish pink. The front doors were clear alloquartz, same as the overhead dome, and they slid aside
as I walked up to them. At the side of the lobby was a long red desk—as if we don’t see enough red on Mars—with a map showing the Isidis Planitia basin; New Klondike was a big circle off to one side.

  The desk sergeant was a flabby lowbrow named Huxley, whose uniform always seemed a size too small for him. “Hey, Hux,” I said, walking over. “Is Mac in?”

  Huxley consulted a monitor, then nodded. “Yeah, he’s in, but he don’t see just anyone.”

  “I’m not just anyone, Hux. I’m the guy who picks up the pieces after you clowns bungle things.”

  Huxley frowned, trying to think of a rejoinder. “Yeah, well…” he said, at last.

  “Oooh,” I said. “Good one, Hux! Way to put me in my place.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “You ain’t as funny as you think you are, Lomax,” he said.

  “Of course I’m not,” I said. “Nobody could be that funny.” I nodded at the secured inner door. “Going to buzz me through?”

  “Only to be rid of you,” said Huxley. So pleased was he with the wit of this remark that he repeated it: “Only to be rid of you.”

  Huxley reached below the counter, and the inner door—an unmarked black panel—slid aside. I pantomimed tipping a nonexistent hat at Hux, and headed into the station proper. I then walked down the corridor to McCrae’s office; the door was open, so I rapped my knuckles against the plastic jamb.

  “Lomax!” he said, looking up. “Decided to turn yourself in?”

  “Very funny, Mac,” I said. “You and Hux should go on the road together.”

  He snorted. “What can I do for you, Alex?”

  Mac was a skinny biological, with shaggy orange eyebrows shielding his blue eyes. “I’m looking for a guy named Joshua Wilkins.”

  Mac had a strong Scottish brogue—so strong, I figured it must be an affectation. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Who’s your client? The wife?”

  I nodded.

  “A bonnie lass,” he said.

  “That she is,” I said. “Anyway, you tried to find her husband, this Wilkins…”

  “We looked around, yeah,” said Mac. “He’s a transfer, you knew that?”

  I nodded.

  “Well,” Mac said, “she gave us the plans for his new face—precise measurements, and all that. We’ve been feeding all the video made by public security cameras through facial-recognition software. So far, no luck.”

  I smiled. That’s about as far as Mac’s detective work normally went: things he could do without hauling his bony ass out from behind his desk. “How much of New Klondike do they cover now?” I asked.

  “It’s down to sixty percent of the public areas,” said Mac. People kept smashing the cameras, and the city didn’t have the time or money to replace them.

  “You’ll let me know if you find anything?”

  Mac drew his shaggy eyebrows together. “You know the privacy laws, Alex. I can’t divulge what the security cameras see.”

  I reached into my pocket, pulled out a fifty-solar coin, and flipped it. It went up rapidly, but came down in what still seemed like slow motion to me, even after all these years on Mars; Mac didn’t require any special reflexes to catch it in midair. “Of course,” he said, “I suppose we could make an exception…”

  “Thanks. You’re a credit to law-enforcement officials everywhere.”

  He snorted again, then: “Say, what kind of heat you packing these days? You still carrying that old Smith & Wesson?”

  “I’ve got a license,” I said, narrowing my eyes.

  “Oh, I know, I know. But be careful, eh? The times, they are a-changin’. Bullets aren’t much use against a transfer, and there are getting to be more of those each day.”

  I nodded. “So I’ve heard. How do you guys handle them?”

  “Until recently, as little as possible,” said Mac. “Turning a blind eye, and all that.”

  “Saves getting up,” I said.

  Mac didn’t take offense. “Exactly. But let me show you something.” We left his office, went further down the corridor and entered another room. He pointed to a device on the table. “Just arrived from Earth,” he said. “The latest thing.”

  It was a wide, flat disk, maybe half a meter in diameter, and five centimeters thick. There were a pair of U-shaped handgrips attached to the edge, opposite each other. “What is it?” I asked.

  “A broadband disrupter,” he said. He picked it up and held it in front of himself, like a gladiator’s shield. “It discharges an oscillating multi-frequency electromagnetic pulse. From a distance of four meters or less, it will completely fry the artificial brain of a transfer—killing it as effectively as a bullet kills a human.”

  “I don’t plan on killing anyone,” I said.

  “That’s what you said the last time.”

  Ouch. Still, maybe he had a point. “I don’t suppose you have a spare one I can borrow?”

  Mac laughed. “Are you kidding? This is the only one we’ve got so far.”

  “Well, then,” I said, heading for the door, “I guess I’d better be careful.”

  My next stop was the NewYou building. I took Third Avenue, one of the radial streets of the city, out the five blocks to it. The building was two stories tall and was made, like most structures here, of red laser-fused Martian sand bricks. Flanking the main doors were a pair of wide alloquartz display windows, showing dusty artificial bodies dressed in fashions from about two mears ago; it was high time somebody updated things.

  Inside, the store was part showroom and part workshop, with spare components scattered about: here, a white-skinned artificial hand; there, a black lower leg; on shelves, synthetic eyes and spools of colored monofilament that I guessed were used to simulate hair. There were also all sorts of internal parts on worktables: motors and hydraulic pumps and joint hinges. A half-dozen technicians were milling around, assembling new bodies or repairing old ones.

  Across the room, I spotted Cassandra Wilkins, wearing a beige suit today. She was talking with a man and a woman, who were biological; potential customers, presumably. “Hello, Cassandra,” I said, after I’d closed the distance between us.

  “Mr. Lomax!” she said, excusing herself from the couple. “I’m so glad you’re here—so very glad! What news do you have?”

  “Not much,” I said. “I’ve been to visit the cops, and I thought I should start my investigation here. After all, your husband owned this franchise, right?”

  Cassandra nodded enthusiastically. “I knew I was doing the right thing hiring you,” she said. “I just knew it! Why, do you know that lazy detective McCrae never stopped by here—not even once!”

  I smiled. “Mac’s not the outdoorsy type,” I said. “And, well, you get what you pay for.”

  “Isn’t that the truth?” said Cassandra. “Isn’t that just the God’s honest truth!”

  “You said your husband moved his mind recently?”

  She nodded her head. “Yes. All of that goes on upstairs, though. This is just sales and service down here.”

  “Can you show me?” I asked.

  She nodded again. “Of course—anything you want to see, Mr. Lomax!” What I wanted to see was under that beige suit—nothing beat the perfection of a transfer’s body—but I kept that thought to myself. Cassandra looked around the room, then motioned for another staff member—also female, also a transfer, also gorgeous, and this one did wear tasteful makeup and jewelry—to come over. “I’m sorry,” Cassandra said to the two customers she’d abandoned a few moments ago. “Miss Takahashi here will look after you.” She then turned to me. “This way.”

  We went through a curtained doorway and up a set of stairs. “Here’s our scanning room,” said Cassandra, indicating the left-hand one of a pair of doors; both doors had little windows in them. She stood on tiptoe to look in the scanning-room window, and nodded, apparently satisfied by what she saw, then opened the door. Two people were inside: a balding man of about forty, who was seated, and a standing woman who looked twenty-five; the woman was a tra
nsfer herself, though, so there was no way of knowing her real age. “So sorry to interrupt,” Cassandra said. She looked at the man in the chair, while gesturing at me. “This is Alexander Lomax. He’s providing some, ah, consulting services for us.”

  The man looked at me, surprised, then said, “Klaus Hansen,” by way of introduction.

  “Would you mind ever so much if Mr. Lomax watched while the scan was being done?” asked Cassandra.

  Hansen considered this for a moment, frowning his long, thin face. But then he nodded. “Sure. Why not?”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll just stand over here.” I moved to the far wall and leaned back against it.

  The chair Hansen was sitting in looked a lot like a barber’s chair. The female transfer who wasn’t Cassandra reached up above the chair and pulled down a translucent hemisphere that was attached by an articulated arm to the ceiling. She kept lowering it until all of Hansen’s head was covered, and then she turned to a control console.

  The hemisphere shimmered slightly, as though a film of oil was washing over its surface; the scanning field, I supposed.

  Cassandra was standing next to me, arms crossed in front of her chest. It was an unnatural-looking pose, given her large bosom. “How long does the scanning take?” I asked.

  “It’s a quantum-mechanical process,” she replied. “So the scanning is rapid. But it’ll take about ten minutes to move the data into the artificial brain. And then…”

  “And then?” I said.

  She lifted her shoulders, as if the rest didn’t need to be spelled out. “Why, and then Mr. Hansen will be able to live forever.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Come along,” said Cassandra. “Let’s go see the other side.” We left that room, closing its door behind us, and entered the one next door. This room was a mirror image of the previous one, which I guess was appropriate. Standing erect in the middle of the room, supported by a metal armature, was Hansen’s new body, dressed in a fashionable blue suit; its eyes were closed. Also in the room was a male NewYou technician, who was biological.