When they hit the queue to the exhibitor entrance, the Indian princess ran into an unexpected obstacle: Homeland Security had decided to come calling.
When they arrived they found a crowd of casual-Friday techies, salesmen, and suited women with conservative hairdos backed up in front of a security checkpoint that hadn’t been there the day before. Rita found herself corralled between crowd control barriers patrolled by local cops and DHS heavies in dull black body armor. A couple of small missile-carrying quadrotor drones buzzed overhead like angry hornets, scattering the seagulls.
“ID checkpoint!” called one of the officers, pacing along the side of the queue, watching through mirrored goggles with professional disinterest: “ID checkpoint! Everybody have your ID card and conference badge ready for inspection.”
“Oh shit,” whispered Deborah, clutching her handbag. She began to rummage through it. “Coulda sworn it was in here—”
Failure to present a federal identity card if challenged by a DHS officer was a misdemeanor at best. If it got Deborah barred from the convention center it was going to have consequences for all three of them: Rita knew that she and Julie couldn’t shoulder the workload on their own, and Clive would be pissed if his showgirls didn’t show on the last day. “Chill,” Rita whispered, touching Deborah’s arm reassuringly. Please don’t get us noticed, she prayed. Debs and Julie were white but Rita’s skin, although pale for her costume, was sufficiently Indian-looking to draw more than her fair share of attention from the cops. And she’d heard enough horror stories that the last thing she wanted was to come to the attention of DHS and CBP.
Deborah was shaking as she rummaged through her handbag again. Touch-up kit, emergency tampon, fatphone, data glasses, purse … a sudden gasp. “I found it.”
“Good.” Rita faked another smile as Deborah caught her breath. Panic averted.
“You. Step this way, please.”
For a moment Rita couldn’t believe her ears. She’d been so focused on Deborah that she hadn’t noticed the DHS guy pause on the other side of the barrier. Now he was looking at her. “Me?” she squeaked.
“Yes, you. Step this way.” He didn’t say “please” twice. The DHS might have hired Disney to train their staff in better people-handling skills but he was still a fed, with or without the smiling mask.
The cop directed her to a desk beside the checkpoint, at the front of the queue where a couple more DHS officers were hanging out. Some of them were armed with electric-blue pump-action shotguns: crowd control tasers. Her stomach lurched when she saw them.
“ID card goes here,” said the guy at the desk. He sounded so bored he could have been stoned. She handed the credit card–sized rectangle over and he ran it through the reader. “Okaaay, this is a cheek swab. You’ve done this before, right?” Blue-gloved hands extended a plastic test stick toward her. “Open wide. This won’t take long.”
Rita opened her mouth, let the cop collect a saliva sample and lock it into the tablet on the desk in front of him. “Please sit here.” He pointed at a plastic chair. “This will take a couple of minutes to develop.” Rita gathered the skirts of her sari and sat carefully. No zip-ties, she realized: That’s a good sign. Means it’s just a random check. Nevertheless, they were running a full genome sequence from the sample they’d just taken, comparing it against her record in the national database. Even with the newest nanopore scanners, it would take ten minutes. They couldn’t do it to everyone: they’d be here all day. Why me? she wondered. Well yeah, the usual: skin color. Mom and Dad might be of Eurasian descent, but one of Rita’s birth parents had apparently been Indian.
It had been bad in second grade, right after 9/11, but when the White House was nuked, the post-7/16 paranoia had taken things to the next level. The government had announced that the attack came from a terrifying new direction, hostile forces that inhabited another parallel version of our Earth. So that made any stranger a suspect, as anyone could be a secret “world-walker,” able to slip between universes and visit from a time line whose history had diverged long ago. Then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, there’d been the India/Pakistan nuclear war. From which point on, the US had become increasingly difficult for people who looked like her.
The machine on the desk beeped for attention and the DHS officer peered at it. For a moment she thought he was doing a double take; then he smirked. “Okay, you’re good to go. You have a nice day now, Miss Douglas. You can go right in.”
“Thank you,” she managed, heartbeat fluttering for a light-headed moment. The National Identity Database would have reported back, No criminal history. Because Rita was a good girl, and keeping her head down was an ingrained habit. And good girls tried not to get the post-7/16 national security apparatus mad at them, didn’t they? She faked a smile for the cop, then scurried hastily in the direction indicated, into the bowels of the bustling conference center, enormously relieved to be out from under the microscope. Behind her, Debs was staring daggers from the middle of the slowly shuffling line. As if she had anything to worry about …
*
HaptoTech was a Cambridge-based biomechanics start-up. Rita was a Boston native in her mid-twenties with a major in history, a minor in acting, an aptitude for interpretative dance, and no union card. This made her a decent fit for demoing HaptoTech’s newest motion capture implants at trade shows targeting the film, TV, and games production industries, although she drew the line at their more adult-themed customers. She needed the money, but not that badly: at least not yet.