Identity Theft and Other Stories

by Robert J. Sawyer

  The man took a swing at him—high-sticking indeed!—and Jerry started running for his car. The old guy continued after him. Jerry scrambled into the driver’s seat and slammed the door behind him. He threw the car into reverse, but not before the man brought the hockey stick down on the front of the hood—somewhere near, Jerry felt sure, the spot where the car had crashed into poor Tammy Jameson.

  Jerry had no idea what was the right thing to do. He suspected that the basset hound was correct: the police would laugh him out of the station if he came to them with his story. Of course, if they’d just try driving his car along Thurlbeck, they’d see for themselves. But adults were so smug; no matter how much he begged, they’d refuse.

  And so Jerry found himself doing something that might have been stupid. He should have been at home studying—or, even better, out on a date with Ashley Brown. Instead, he was parked on the side of the street, a few doors up from the man’s house, from the driveway that used to be home to this car. He didn’t know exactly what he was doing. Did they call this casing the joint? No, that was when you were planning a robbery. Ah, he had it! A stakeout. Cool.

  Jerry waited. It was dark enough to see a few stars—and he hoped that meant it was also dark enough that the old man wouldn’t see him, even if he glanced out his front window.

  Jerry wasn’t even sure what he was waiting for. It was just like Ms. Singh, his chemistry teacher, said: he’d know it when he saw it.

  And at last it appeared.

  Jerry felt like slapping his hand against his forehead, but a theatrical gesture like that was wasted when there was no one around to see it. Still, he wondered how he could be so stupid.

  That old man wasn’t the one who’d used the hockey stick. Oh, he might have dented Jerry’s hood with it, but the dents in the garage door were the work of someone else.

  And that someone else was walking up the driveway, hands shoved deep into the pockets of a blue leather jacket, dark-haired head downcast. He looked maybe a year or two older than Jerry.

  Of course, it could have been a delivery person or something. But no, Jerry could see the guy take out a set of keys and let himself into the house. And, for one brief moment, he saw the guy’s face, a long face, a sad face…but a young face.

  The car hadn’t belonged to the old man. It had belonged to his son.

  There were fifteen hundred kids at Eastern High. No reason Jerry should know them all on sight—especially ones who weren’t in his grade. Oh, he knew the names of all the babes in grade twelve—he and the other boys his age fantasized about them often enough—but some long-faced guy with dark hair? Jerry wouldn’t have paid any attention to him.

  Until now.

  It was three days before he caught sight of the guy walking the halls at Eastern. His last name, Jerry knew, was likely Forsythe, since that was the old man’s name, the name Jerry had written on the check for the car. It wasn’t much longer before he had found where young Forsythe’s locker was located. And then Jerry cut his last class—history, which he could easily afford to miss once—and waited in a stairwell, where he could keep an eye on Forsythe’s locker.

  At about 3:35, Forsythe came up to it, dialed the combo, put some books inside, took out a couple of others, and put on the same blue leather jacket Jerry had seen him in the night of the stakeout. And then he started walking out.

  Jerry watched him head out, then he hurried to the parking lot and got into the Toyota.

  Jerry was crawling along—and this time, it was of his own volition. He didn’t want to overtake Forsythe—not yet. But then Forsythe did something completely unexpected. Instead of walking down Thurlbeck, he headed in the opposite direction, away from his own house. Could it be that Jerry was wrong about who this was? After all, he’d seen Forsythe’s son only once before, on a dark night, and—

  No. It came to him in a flash what Forsythe was doing. He was going to walk the long way around—a full mile out of his way—so that he wouldn’t have to go past the spot where he’d hit Tammy Jameson.

  Jerry wondered if he’d avoided the spot entirely since hitting her or had got cold feet only once the cross had been erected. He rolled down his window, followed Forsythe, and pulled up next to him, matching his car’s velocity to Forsythe’s walking speed.

  “Hey,” said Jerry.

  The other guy looked up, and his eyes went wide in recognition—not of Jerry, but of what had once been his car.

  “What?” said Forsythe.

  “You look like you could use a lift,” said Jerry.

  “Naw. I live just up there.” He waved vaguely ahead of him.

  “No, you don’t,” said Jerry, and he recited the address he’d gone to to buy the car.

  “What do you want, man?” said Forsythe.

  “Your old man gave me a good deal on this car,” said Jerry. “And I figured out why.”

  Forsythe shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do. I know you do.” He paused. “She knows you do.”

  The guy told Jerry to go…well, to go do something that was physically impossible. Jerry’s heart was racing, but he tried to sound cool. “Sooner or later, you’ll want to come clean on this.”

  Forsythe said nothing.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” said Jerry, and he drove off.

  That night, Jerry went to the hardware store to get the stuff he needed. Of course, he couldn’t do anything about it early in the day; someone might come along. So he waited until his final period—which today was English—and he cut class again. He then went out to his car, got what he needed from the trunk, and went up Thurlbeck.

  When he was done, he returned to the parking lot and waited for Forsythe to head out for home.

  Jerry finally caught sight of Forsythe. Just as he had the day before, Forsythe walked to the edge of the schoolyard. But there he hesitated for a moment, as if wondering if he dared take the short way home. But he apparently couldn’t do that. He took a deep breath and headed up Thurlbeck.

  Jerry started his car but lagged behind Forsythe, crawling along, his foot barely touching the accelerator.

  There was a large pine tree up ahead. Jerry waited for Forsythe to come abreast of it, and…

  The disadvantage of following Forsythe was that Jerry couldn’t see the other kid’s face when he caught sight of the new cross Jerry had banged together and sunk into the grass next to the sidewalk. But he saw Forsythe stop dead in his tracks.

  Just as she had been stopped dead in his tracks.

  Jerry saw Forsythe loom in, look at the words written not in black, as on Tammy’s cross, but in red—words that said, “Our sins testify against us.”

  Forsythe began to run ahead, panicking, and Jerry pressed down a little more on the accelerator, keeping up. All those years of Sunday school were coming in handy.

  Forsythe came to another tree. In its lee, he surely could see the second wooden cross, with its letters as crimson as blood: “He shall make amends for the harm he hath done.”

  Forsythe was swinging his head left and right, clearly terrified. But he continued running forward.

  A third tree. A third cross. And a third red message, the simplest of all: “Thou shalt not kill.”

  Finally, Forsythe turned around and caught sight of Jerry.

  Jerry sped up, coming alongside him. Forsythe’s face was a mask of terror. Jerry rolled down his window, leaned an elbow out, and said, as nonchalantly as he could manage, “Going my way?”

  Forsythe clearly didn’t know what to say. He looked up ahead, apparently wondering if there were more crosses to come. Then he turned and looked back the other way, off into the distance.

  “There’s just one down the other way,” said Jerry. “If you’d prefer to walk by it…”

  Forsythe swore at Jerry, but without much force. “What’s this to you?” he snapped.

  “I want her to let my car go. I worked my tail off for these wheels.”

  Forsythe stared
at him, the way you’d look at somebody who might be crazy.

  “So,” said Jerry, again trying for an offhand tone, “going my way?”

  Forsythe was quiet for a long moment. “Depends where you’re going,” he said at last.

  “Oh, I thought I’d take a swing by the police station,” Jerry said.

  Forsythe looked up Thurlbeck once more, then down it, then at last back at Jerry. He shrugged, but it wasn’t as if he was unsure. Rather, it was as if he were shucking a giant weight from his shoulders.

  “Yeah,” he said to Jerry. “Yeah, I could use a lift.”

  Flashes

  Lou Anders edits some of the best anthologies out there. He’d invited me to contribute to his Live Without a Net, but other commitments prevented me from doing so. Undaunted, Lou invited me into his next anthology, FutureShocks. This is another of those books that it seems odd for me to be part of: I’m optimistic about “all the bright tomorrows yet to come” (as I once called them in an essay), but Lou wanted downbeat stories about the hidden dark sides of new technologies, discoveries, and breakthroughs. Here’s what I came up with…

  My heart pounded as I surveyed the scene. It was a horrific, but oddly appropriate, image: a bright light pulsing on and off. The light was the setting sun, visible through the window, and the pulsing was caused by the rhythmic swaying of the corpse, dangling from a makeshift noose, as it passed in front of the blood-red disk.

  “Another one, eh, Detective?” said Chiu, the campus security guard, from behind me. His tone was soft.

  I looked around the office. The computer monitor was showing a virtual desktop with a panoramic view of a spiral galaxy as the wallpaper; no files were open. Nor was there any sheet of e-paper prominently displayed on the real desktop. The poor bastards didn’t even bother to leave suicide notes anymore. There was no point; it had all already been said.

  “Yeah,” I said quietly, responding to Chiu. “Another one.”

  The dead man was maybe sixty, scrawny, mostly bald. He was wearing black denim jeans and a black turtleneck sweater, the standard professorial look these days. His noose was fashioned out of fiber-optic cabling, giving it a pearlescent sheen in the sunlight. His eyes had bugged out, and his mouth was hanging open.

  “I knew him a bit,” said Chiu. “Ethan McCharles. Nice guy—he always remembered my name. So many of the profs, they think they’re too important to say hi to a security guard. But not him.”

  I nodded. It was as good a eulogy as one could hope for—honest, spontaneous, heartfelt.

  Chiu went on. “He was married,” he said, pointing to the gold band on the corpse’s left hand. “I think his wife works here, too.”

  I felt my stomach tightening, and I let out a sigh. My favorite thing: informing the spouse.

  Cytosine Methylation: All lifeforms are based on self-replicating nucleic acids, commonly triphosphoparacarbolicnucleic acid or, less often, deoxyribonucleic acid; in either case, a secondary stream of hereditary information is encoded based on the methylation state of cytosine, allowing acquired characteristics to be passed on to the next generation…

  The departmental secretary confirmed what Chiu had said: Professor Ethan McCharles’s wife did indeed also work at the University of Toronto; she was a tenured prof, too, but in a different faculty.

  Walking down a corridor, I remembered my own days as a student here. Class of 1998—“9T8,” as they styled it on the school jackets. It’d been—what?—seventeen years since I’d graduated, but I still woke up from time to time in a cold sweat, after having one of those recurring student nightmares: the exam I hadn’t studied for, the class I’d forgotten I’d enrolled in. Crazy dreams, left over from an age when little bits of human knowledge mattered; when facts and figures we’d discovered made a difference.

  I continued along the corridor. One thing had changed since my day. Back then, the hallways had been packed between classes. Now, you could actually negotiate your way easily; enrollment was way down. This corridor was long, with fluorescent lights overhead, and was lined with wooden doors that had frosted floor-to-ceiling glass panels next to them.

  I shook my head. The halls of academe.

  The halls of death.

  I finally found Marilyn Maslankowski’s classroom; the arcane room-numbering system had come back to me. She’d just finished a lecture, apparently, and was standing next to the lectern, speaking with a redheaded male student; no one else was in the room. I entered.

  Marilyn was perhaps ten years younger than her husband had been, and had light brown hair and a round, moonlike face. The student wanted more time to finish an essay on the novels of Robert Charles Wilson; Marilyn capitulated after a few wheedling arguments.

  The kid left, and Marilyn turned to me, her smile thanking me for waiting. “The humanities,” she said. “Aptly named, no? At least English literature is something that we’re the foremost authorities on. It’s nice that there are a couple of areas left like that.”

  “I suppose,” I said. I was always after my own son to do his homework on time; didn’t teachers know that if they weren’t firm in their deadlines they were just making a parent’s job more difficult? Ah, well. At least this kid had gone to university; I doubted my boy ever would.

  “Are you Professor Marilyn Maslankowski?” I asked.

  She nodded. “What can I do for you?”

  I didn’t extend my hand; we weren’t allowed to make any sort of overture to physical contact anymore. “Professor Maslankowski, my name is Andrew Walker. I’m a detective with the Toronto Police.” I showed her my badge.

  Her brown eyes narrowed. “Yes? What is it?”

  I looked behind me to make sure we were still alone. “It’s about your husband.”

  Her voice quavered slightly. “Ethan? My God, has something happened?”

  There was never any easy way to do this. I took a deep breath, then: “Professor Maslankowski, your husband is dead.”

  Her eyes went wide and she staggered back a half-step, bumping up against the smartboard that covered the wall behind her.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” I said.

  “What—what happened?” Marilyn asked at last, her voice reduced to a whisper.

  I lifted my shoulders slightly. “He killed himself.”

  “Killed himself?” repeated Marilyn, as if the words were ones she’d never heard before.

  I nodded. “We’ll need you to positively identify the body, as next of kin, but the security guard says it’s him.”

  “My God,” said Marilyn again. Her eyes were still wide. “My God…”

  “I understand your husband was a physicist,” I said.

  Marilyn didn’t seem to hear. “My poor Ethan…” she said softly. She looked like she might collapse. If I thought she was actually in danger of hurting herself with a fall, I could surge in and grab her; otherwise, regulations said I had to keep my distance. “My poor, poor Ethan…”

  “Had your husband been showing signs of depression?” I asked.

  Suddenly Marilyn’s tone was sharp. “Of course he had! Damn it, wouldn’t you?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was used to this by now.

  “Those aliens,” Marilyn said, closing her eyes. “Those goddamned aliens.”

  Demand-Rebound Equilibrium: Although countless economic systems have been tried by various cultures, all but one prove inadequate in the face of the essentially limitless material resources made possible through low-cost reconfiguration of subatomic particles. The only successful system, commonly known as Demand-Rebound Equilibrium, although also occasionally called [Untranslatable proper name]’s Forge, after its principal chronicler, works because it responds to market forces that operate independently from individual psychology, thus…

  By the time we returned to Ethan’s office, he’d been cut down and laid out on the floor, a sheet the coroner had brought covering his face and body. Marilyn had cried continuously as we’d made our way across the campus. It was early January,
but global warming meant that the snowfalls I’d known as a boy didn’t occur much in Toronto anymore. Most of the ozone was gone, too, letting ultraviolet pound down. We weren’t even shielded against our own sun; how could we expect to be protected from stuff coming from the stars?

  I knelt down and pulled back the sheet. Now that the noose was gone, we could see the severe bruising where Ethan’s neck had snapped. Marilyn made a sharp intake of breath, brought her hand to her mouth, closed her eyes tightly, and looked away.

  “Is that your husband?” I asked, feeling like an ass for even having to pose the question.

  She managed a small, almost imperceptible nod.

  It was now well into the evening. I could come back tomorrow to ask Ethan McCharles’s colleagues the questions I needed answered for my report, but, well, Marilyn was right here, and, even though her field was literature rather than physics, she must have some sense of what her husband had been working on. I repositioned the sheet over his dead face and stood up. “Can you tell me what Ethan’s specialty was?”

  Marilyn was clearly struggling to keep her composure. Her lower lip was trembling, and I could see by the rising and falling of her blouse—so sharply contrasting with the absolutely still sheet—that she was breathing rapidly. “His—he…Oh, my poor, poor Ethan…”

  “Professor Maslankowski,” I said gently. “Your husband’s specialty…?”

  She nodded, acknowledging that she’d heard me, but still unable to focus on answering the question. I let her take her time, and, at last, as if they were curse words, she spat out, “Loop quantum gravity.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is a model of how subatomic particles are composed.” She shook her head. “Ethan spent his whole career trying to prove LQG was correct, and…”

  “And?” I said gently.

  “And yesterday they revealed the true nature of the fundamental structure of matter.”

  “And this—what was it?—this ‘loop quantum gravity’ wasn’t right?”