Identity Theft and other stories (collection)

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.