by Rudy Rucker
“That’s right,” said Vanna. She was still holding her screwdriver. “We haven’t figured out how to generate our own authentication numbers, but we do have a way into the current State Department passport files. What we’ll do is to find the name of someone who has a passport and who resembles you. Then we’ll use his passport’s authentication number on our forgery.” She smiled and gave a quick nod for emphasis.
“Crypping the State Department can’t be very easy,” I said politely.
“Well, we have this killer can opener program that we got from a phreak friend of ours,” said Bety from her chair. “Ex friend, that is.” I had the feeling she was talking about Riscky Pharbeque. From what I’d heard Bety and Vanna say in cyberspace, they were mad at Riscky for spray-painting “Hex DEF6” on the wall of the Cryp Club library. But I had nothing to gain by chatting about this topic.
“Do you have to take my picture first or what?” I asked.
“First you have to pay us,” said Bety.
“Here’s two hundred dollars,” said Vinh, stepping forward and holding out two of the bills I’d given him.
“I told you seven hundred,” cried Bety.
“Three hundred dollars is my final offer,” said Vinh Vo and added another bill to the little fan he held out toward Bety.
“We won’t do it for less than four hundred,” said Bety. She unwrapped a stick of green bubble gum and popped it in her mouth. “Bye, Vinh. Bye, Jerzy. Show ‘em out, Vanna.”
Vanna laughed in that meaningless Asian way, but she didn’t immediately do anything—she just stood there holding her screwdriver. I fumbled in my pocket to find one more bill. Vinh Vo watched me with unblinking, predatory interest. I passed him the bill and he tendered the four hundred dollars to Bety. She tucked the money into her pants pocket and gave Vanna a nod.
“Okay, Jerzy,” said Vanna. “Lets narrow in on a name.” She laid down her screwdriver and put on control gloves and a headset.
“How tall are you?” she asked. “How much do you weigh? Place of birth? Date of birth? Scars?” She input my responses by making flowing hand gestures in midair; she was dancing her way up the search tree of the sample space. “Here’s twenty good ones,” said Vanna presently and snapped her fingers.
A list of names appeared in a box on the computer screen next to me. I chose a forty-two-year-old divorced electrical engineer named Sandy Schrandt.
Bety Byte picked up a small video camera and slid her headset down over her eyes. She began walking rapidly around the cluttered room while pointing the camera at me.
“In case you’re wondering, I’m not going to bump into anything,” said Bety, chomping on her green gum. “I’m seeing through this videocam. I’m using a pass-through.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Just like stunglasses.” It was a hacker point of pride to be down with the latest street tech.
Bety kept on shooting video of me, occasionally flicking a finger to capture a still image. The images accumulated in a grid on the computer screen. Before long, Bety had filled the grid with pictures of me: the central pictures were full-on, or nearly so, and the pictures at the edge of the grid were shot from sharper and sharper angles. It was a discontinuous Mercator projection of my head.
Bety sat down and gestured in the air for a minute and then the color laser printer coughed and spit out the eleven double pages of my new passport, each page with Sandy Schrandt’s passport bar code on the edge. On the top page there was a shiny reflection hologram that showed a three-dimensional image of my head. Bety and Vanna’s software had fused the grid images of me into a single holographic image that turned as you tilted it from side to side.
“Great!” I exclaimed.
Vanna changed the paper tray and the copier coughed once more to produce a thick passport cover. She and Bety Byte took off their headsets and studied the pages for a minute, and then they used hot glue and a small sewing machine to bind the passport up.
Bety handed the passport to me—it looked perfect. But then I thought of something.
“What if the real Sandy Schrandt happens to come through customs in the same place on the same day I do? Won’t the officials get suspicious when they check the same number twice?”
“If that happens you’re a dead cow,” said Vanna. “I mean dead duck.” She began giggling so wildly that she had to put both hands over her mouth.
“You just have to hope for the best,” said Bety. She was laughing too.
Was this forged passport part of the ongoing international get-Jerzy burn? Or were the girls just being silly? I started to say something—but what could I say? I fell back on the standard California nonreaction:
“Whatever.”
I got out of there and split off from Vinh Vo as rapidly as I could. I swung in a circle through the San Jose State campus to make sure I’d lost him. Then I got my car from near Wells Fargo and drove out to Carol’s.
Tom and Ida had gone off with friends and Sorrel was waiting for me. We hugged each other and then we sat down and talked for awhile. I loved her lively confiding little voice and her vehement opinions. She often used a fragmented creative grammar that Carol and I called “Sorrelese.” She and I talked about my trial and about her life at college. Sorrel had a new boyfriend, and she was doing cartoons for her school paper.
“So, Da,” said Sorrel after awhile, “Don’t you want to make us scarce before Ma and Hiroshi get home?”
“Yes. Why don’t we go for a drive? We could go over to where I rent and take a walk in the woods.”
“Okay.”
I left my Animata at Carol’s and got Sorrel to let me drive her rented car. Sorrel looked at me and I looked at her in the shitty tiny rental car with wheels so small you worried they would get stuck in the grooved highway’s corrugations.
“Your eye looks just like Mom’s,” said Sorrel, using our family name for my mother, now dead one year. “The way your skin is all wrinkled at the corner. Mom used to have such a nice cute old eye. And your eye’s just the same.”
“Poor old Mom,” I sighed. “At least she’s not here to see me in so much trouble.”
“You’re going to run away, aren’t you, Da?” said Sorrel. “Tom and Ida suspect. Is it true?”
“Yes. In fact I’m planning to do it today.”
“In fact that’s what we’re doing right now?” said Sorrel. “We’re going back to the stupid airport I just came from last night? So that’s why you wanted me to get a rental car. Mmm-hmmm.” Sorrel made her Big Sis “knowing face,” an expression in which she pressed her lips tight together and nodded her head up and down with her chin sticking out. “Are we still going to Queue’s?”
“I have a brand-new forged passport,” I confessed. “I think the smartest thing I can do is get out of the country as fast as possible. Somebody—the cops or the cryps or the phreaks or West West or GoMotion—somebody probably has a miniature TV camera watching Queue’s place anyway. And Carol’s place, too. The less I give them to go on, the better. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to drive straight to the airport.”
“Let me see your passport!” Sorrel looked through it with interest. “This hologram of you is neat. What country are you going to?”
“Switzerland. My lawyer—that Stu Koblenz who did such a lame job in court today—he said Ecuador and Switzerland are good havens from U.S. law. And there’s a guy in Switzerland I reeeeally want to see.” I was thinking of Roger Coolidge, rich Roger, who’d started all this by releasing the ants and firing me from GoMotion. I aimed to find him and to beat the truth out of him if need be. But there was no need to burden Sorrel with this information.
At the San Francisco Airport, I pulled up in front of the American Airlines terminal. “Run in there, Sorrel, and see if they have a direct flight from San Francisco to Zurich or Geneva tonight. And if they don’t have a flight, then ask who does. Don’t give your name!”
“Right,” said Sorrel, her mouth a short determined line. She darted into the t
erminal and emerged five minutes later.
“Swiss airlines,” said Sorrel. “They’re flying direct to Geneva tonight at seven-thirty. It’s a twelve-hour flight.”
“Beautiful.” I got out of the car and moved over into the passenger seat. “You can drive me up to the Swiss part of the international terminal. Just drop me off there and go back to Carol’s. How much is this trip costing you, anyway? For the ticket and the car?”
“About six hundred dollars.”
I drew out the smaller envelope of hundred-dollar bills and took out six of them for Sorrel.
“This is for you, and you give the rest of the money in this envelope to Ma. And here,” I handed her my keys as well. “Tell Ma she can have the Animata, too.”
Sorrel messily stuffed the money and keys into the glove compartment.
“Oh, one other thing,” I said. “There’s a cyberspace deck with glove and headset in the trunk of the Animata. You tap three-one-four-one on the right side of the headset to turn it on or off. But it’s a phreak deck, it’s not registered, so you probably shouldn’t use it.”
“Tom and Ida are sure to grub and fiddle with it,” said Sorrel loftily. She drew back her chin for “geek face,” and spittily lisped, “Thyberthpayth!”
“Cyberspace is important, Sorrel! Tell Tom not to let the police find the deck. It might be better to throw the deck away. Ida, Tom, and Carol will have to decide.”
Sorrel drove me the short distance to Swiss. I hugged her and kissed each of her nice soft cheeks. That had been one of the first things I noticed about her when she was a baby: her cheeks.
“Good luck, Da,” said Sorrel. “Take care.”
“Thanks, Sorrel. I love you.”
Before buying a ticket, I cruised the souvenir shop for travel gear. I got a small black leatherette satchel, a toothbrush, and—some business sweats.
These days a lot of businessmen were wearing sweat suits all the time. In principle, you could jog or work out in these cotton and polyester outfits, but business sweats were not normally used for exercise. Business sweats were for display purposes; they were meant to say, “I’m fit and I’m rich.”
I snagged a pompous gray XL outfit for $300. It had shiny gold stripes down the pant legs, and a sewn-in burgundy sash angling diagonally across the chest. The sash had a gold medal embossed on it.
In the men’ s room I changed into the sweats and stuffed my shorts and sport shirt into the satchel. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I looked like the Swedish ambassador, man—except for my sandals.
Out in the lobby I sat down for a minute to arrange my junk. I positioned my passport and my money in the satchel’s outside zipper pocket, and then I folded my shirt and shorts. The plastic packet of chips was still in my shorts pocket. Was it worth trying to take the chips through customs?
I took out the packet and opened it. Inside were four square chips snugged into plastic pin protectors. The backs of the chips read National Semiconductor Y9707-EX. I hadn’t seen the “-EX” suffix before, but I assumed it meant that these chips had been made a little faster and smarter than the last batch. Chip makers were always upgrading to longer product names.
I closed the chip packet and put it in my satchel under my shirt and shorts. Nobody was going to care about four standard production chips. If anyone asked me, the chips were my own property, to be used solely for demonstration purposes. I, Sandy Schrandt, was thinking about designing some custom applications for the Y9707-EX chip in the Swiss industrial market, yes.
So that was that, except for one thing: I hadn’t said good-bye to Gretchen. I’d been so excited about seeing Sorrel, and about my escape, that I hadn’t thought of Gretchen since leaving her apartment this morning. But I couldn’t very well phone Gretchen now because—it had finally occurred to me—Gretchen might be a spy paid to watch me. So, yeah, that was that.
I walked up to the Swiss counter and bought a ticket with no trouble, though all they had left was business-class. To look less suspicious, I made it a round-trip ticket. At the baggage X-ray station, I handed the guard my chips; he sleepily glanced at them and passed the package through the machine. Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting in the plane. Business-class was luxurious, with widely spaced seats, instant free cocktails, and lobster.
After supper, the stewardess told us that in Swiss business-class, the in-flight entertainment was cyberspace, with the fees to be charged to your credit number. When she got to me, I told her I had no credit number, and she let me buy a hundred dollars worth of prepaid credit. She told me that was generally enough for three hours.
The steward behind her issued me a bottom-of-the-line headset/gloves kit that plugged into a socket on the top of the seat in front of me.
When I put on the headset, I was in an Alpine meadow with three guys off to one side blowing long Alpine horns. There was a crossing of two trails nearby. An Alpine guide strolled up to me; he was a software daemon like Kwirkey Debug. “Hello, Mr. Schrandt,” said the daemon. “My name is Karl. I will be your guide for this session. There is an urgent e-mail message for you. Do you want to view it?”
It seemed Sandy Schrandt was quite the up-to-date engineer. But I had no desire to look at his e-mail—it would probably turn out to be a video of some dweeb holding up a circuit diagram and talking about it.
“No messages now, thanks.”
I walked over to the signpost at the trail crossing and looked at it. Some of the little signboards read:Duty Free Shops
Entertainment
Exercise
Information
Communication
Netport
I decided to try some exercise first. As I started down the trail in the indicated direction, my guide caught up with me and told me that when I pressed a certain button on the arm of my seat, bicycle handlebars and pedals would pop out from the floor. He said that I should take off my headset, push the button, get myself positioned on the pedals, and then put the headset back on so we could continue.
“Where will we go?”
“We’ll mountain-bike up the Matterhorn,” the guide replied. He had cheery, twinkling, pale blue eyes. He pointed up to the left, and there was the Matterhorn itself: huge, rocky and snowcapped. Its crag castles made wondrous silhouettes against the blue sky. A gauzy puff of cloud trailed from the downwind side of the mountain’s crooked peak.
I slipped off my headset and pushed the special button on my seat. The floor opened up and a heavy-duty pair of bicycle pedals appeared, with a sturdy pair of handlebars sticking out over them. I leaned back, put my feet on the pedals, and grabbed the handlebars. The setup felt more like a pedal boat than a bicycle—but it worked for me. I put on my headset.
“You can adjust the drag with the left hand grip and the motion-speed with the right,” virtual Karl told me. “Let’s start by heading for the Hörnli Hutte—it’s a mountaineers’ hut up on that ridge.”
I pedaled along, watching the lovely mountain scenery go by. No matter how fast or slow I went, the guide always stayed in front of me, pointing out the path I should take. When I ran over big rocks it didn’t matter—they’d flatten out under me. It was fun. At the top of the Matterhorn I finally caught up with the guide.
“What do you want to do now?” he asked me. “Ride back down?”
I felt good and aerobic. “That’s enough exercise. Let me retract the pedals.” I slid my headset up and pushed the button to fold the pedals back down. All the other passengers were asleep or in their headsets. I returned to the pristine summit of the Matterhorn.
“What would you like to do next?” repeated the guide daemon, eager to spend my money.
“Can I find out the address of somebody in Switzerland?”
“I can try for you. If the person has a telephone they will be in the telephone directory, as there are no unlisted phones in Switzerland. What is the name?”
“Roger R. Coolidge.”
“Yes, we have a Roger Reaumur Coolidge in Saint-Cergue,
” responded the guide in a flash.
“Can you show me where Saint-Cergue is on a map?”
“Hold my hand,” said the guide. “We’ll fly.” I took his hand, and then he leapt up into the air. It was a fabulous feeling to fly straight up from the top of the Matterhorn. Soon we were at such an altitude that our virtual Switzerland had become its own map.
“Saint-Cergue is near Geneva,” said the guide. We flew out of the Alps and up the great curve of Lake Geneva. Soon we were near the city of Geneva at the far end of the lake. The guide pointed away from Geneva toward a meek range of rounded mountains to our right. “Those are the Jura Mountains,” he said. “See that little peak? That is the Dôle. Saint-Cergue is in the saddle of the pass beside the Dôle.”
He flew us lower, showed me the Geneva airport, and jovially instructed me to make steering wheel motions so as to remotely pilot a distant virtual car up the serpentine road that led from the Geneva/Lausanne Autoroute to Saint-Cergue. The simulation reminded me of a recurrent nightmare that I’d had when I’d been in my twenties—a dream where I’d be driving a car with a steering wheel column that grew to be hundreds of yards long. I declined the simulation, and the guide flew us straight on up to Saint-Cergue.
“Do you know which building Roger Coolidge lives in?” I asked.
“Yes,” said the guide, and one of the properties began blinking. It was a compound of two large buildings up in a meadow two or three kilometers above the main drag of Saint-Cergue. I stared for a few minutes, fixing landmarks in my mind. I could rent a car at the Geneva airport and drive right up to Roger’s. I’d buy a big hunting knife at a Swiss knife shop first. It was kind of too bad I’d never gotten that plastic gun Keith had told me about.
“Was there anything else?” the guide asked.
“Okay, yeah, I’d like to see a movie. How’s my credit holding up?”
“You have more than enough credit for a movie. We have several special made-for-cyberspace productions, and many of our standard films have been cyberized.”
