The Traveler

Maya didn’t know if the man from Inland Revenue was a real government employee or just a Tabula mercenary with a fake ID. Either way, they were searching for her. Back at the flat, Maya found the key to a storage locker in a Brixton warehouse. She had gone to the locker with her father when she was a little girl, but hadn’t visited it for many years. After watching the warehouse for a few hours, she entered the building, showed her key to the clerk, and was allowed to take an elevator up to the third floor. The locker was a windowless room about the size of a walk-in closet. People stored wine in the warehouse and it was kept fairly cold with air-conditioning units. Maya switched on the overhead lightbulb, locked the door, and began to search through the boxes.

When she was growing up, her father helped her obtain fourteen passports from several different countries. Harlequins acquired the birth certificates of people who had died in car accidents, then used the certificates to apply for legal identification. Unfortunately, most of these fake documents had become obsolete now that the government was gathering biometric information-face scans, iris patterns, and fingerprints-then placing the information on a digital chip attached to each citizen’s passport or national ID. When the chip was read by a scanner, the data was compared with the information stored on Britain’s National Identity Register. On international flights to America, the passport data had to match the iris and fingerprint scans taken at the airport.

Both the United States and Australia were issuing passports with radio frequency ID chips embedded in the covers. These new passports were convenient for immigration officials, but they also gave the Tabula a powerful tool for hunting down their enemies. A machine called a “skimmer” could read the information on a passport hidden inside a coat pocket or purse. Skimmers were installed in elevators or bus stops, any location where people lingered for a brief amount of time. While a citizen was thinking about lunch, the skimmer was downloading a wide variety of personal information. The skimmer might search for names that suggested a certain race, religion, or ethnicity. It would find out the citizen’s age, address, and fingerprint data-as well as where he had traveled in recent years.

The new technology forced Maya to rely on three “facer” passports that matched three different versions of her biometric data. It was still possible to fool the Vast Machine, but you had to be clever and resourceful.

The first thing to disguise was your appearance. Recognition systems focused on the nodal points that comprised each unique human face. The computer analyzed a person’s nodal points and transformed them into a string of numbers to create a face print. Tinted contact lenses and different-colored wigs could change your superficial appearance, but only special drugs could defeat the scanners. Maya would have to use steroids to puff up her skin and lips or tranquilizers to relax the skin and make her look older. The drugs had to be injected into her cheeks and forehead before arriving at an airport with scanners. Each of her three facer passports used different doses of drugs and a different sequence of injections.

Maya had seen a Hollywood science-fiction film where the hero got through an iris check showing a dead man’s eyeballs to a scanner. In the real world, this wasn’t an option. Iris scanners shined a beam of red light at the human eye and a dead man’s pupils would fail to contract. Government agencies boasted that iris scanners were a completely reliable means of identification. The unique folds, pits, and pigmentation spots in a person’s iris started to develop in the womb. Although a scanner could be confused by long eyelashes or tears, the iris itself stayed the same throughout a person’s life.

Thorn and the other Harlequins living in the underground had developed a response to the iris scanner several years before it was used by immigration officials. Opticians in Singapore were paid thousands of dollars to manufacture special contact lenses. The pattern of someone else’s iris was etched onto the surface of the flexible plastic. When the pupil was hit by the red light of the scanner, the lens contracted just like human tissue.

The final biometric obstacle was the fingerprint scanner. Although acid or plastic surgery could change someone’s fingerprints, the results were permanent and left scars. During a visit to Japan, Thorn discovered that scientists at the University of Yokohama had copied fingerprints left on the surface of drinking glasses and turned them into gelatin coatings that could cover a person’s fingertips. These finger shields were delicate and hard to put on, but each of Maya’s facer passports had a different set of prints for that false identity.