Identity Theft and other stories (collection)

That poor woman. That poor dead woman …

It wasn’t just GR-7’s fault. It was his fault. Her death was a direct consequence of him wanting to live forever.

And he’d have to live with the guilt of that forever.

Unless …

Desperate circumstances make one do desperate things.

He picked up the magnetic pistol—astonishing what things you could buy online these days. A proximity blast from it would destroy all recordings in nano-gel.

George Rathburn looked at the pistol, at its shiny, hard exterior.

And he placed the emitter against the side of his stainless-steel skull, and, after a few moments of hesitation, his golden robotic finger contracted against the trigger.

What better way, after all, was there to prove that he was still human?

The Stanley Cup Caper

The 2003 World Science Fiction Convention was in Toronto, where I live. The Toronto Star, Canada’s largest-circulation newspaper, decided to commemorate that fact—and my then-current Hugo nomination for Hominids —by commissioning a short story from me predicting the future of Toronto some thirty years down the road (seeing as how it had been thirty years since the last time the Worldcon had been in Toronto).

I’d just finished reading Dan Brown’s runaway bestseller The Da Vinci Code (which I thoroughly enjoyed), and puzzles and mysteries were very much on my mind. I’m not a hockey fan—sacrilege for a Canadian, I know— but somehow hit on this premise.

To my delight, the four opening words—a riff on famed Canadian sports-caster Foster Hewitt’s trademark “He shoots! He scores!”—are included (along with twenty-two other quotes from me) in The Penguin Dictionary of Popular Canadian Quotations, edited by John Robert Colombo.

* * *

“She shoots! She scores! For the first time in sixty-seven years, the Toronto Maple Leafs have won the Stanley Cup! Captain Karen Lopez and her team have skated to victory as the 2031 NHL champions. The hometown crowd here is going wild, and—wait! Wait! Ladies and gentlemen, this is incredible … we’ve just received word that the Stanley Cup trophy is missing!”

* * *

Detectives Joginder Singh and Trista Chong let their car drive them east along the Gardiner Expressway. At Bathurst, the vehicle headed down into the tunnel. Jo shuddered; he hated the underground portion of the Gardiner. Sadly, his fear of tunnels also kept him from using the subway, even though it now ran all the way from Pearson Airport to the Pickering Solar Power Plant.

Still, the one tolerable thing about going underground here was that he didn’t have to lay eyes on the spire of the Quebec Consulate; Trista, fifteen years his junior, didn’t really remember a united Canada, but Jo certainly did.

At Yonge, their car resurfaced. South of them was the Toronto Sun-Star building. But they were going north: their car let them out across the street from the Hockey Hall of Fame. Of course, there was no place to park; the car would just keep driving around the block until they signaled it to pick them up.

Jo and Trista had spent most of yesterday fruitlessly examining the crime scene at the WestJet Centre. Today, they were going to start by having a look at the duplicate Stanley Cup—the mockup that was on public display at the Hall of Fame—just to get a feel for the dimensions of the stolen object.

Once inside, Jo stood in front of the glass case containing the duplicate, while Trista walked around the case, taking pictures of the duplicate’s engraved surface with her pocketbrain. When she was finished, something apparently caught her eye. “Look!” she crowed, pointing to the adjacent glass case. “There it is—taken apart, but there it is!”

Jo glanced at the other case and laughed. “Those are just retired bands.”