Soul Identity Page 2

  “Scott, what kind of wackos are you involving us with?” Mom asked.

  “Beats me,” I said. “We’re not involved. Yet. Let’s see the instructions.” I took the sheet from Dad and read:

  Using the Soul Identity Reader:

  Press and hold button for five seconds, until lens flashes red.

  Place lens two inches directly in front of right eye. Do not blink.

  Press and hold button for one second. Lens will flash green if successful. If lens does not flash green, start over.

  Place lens two inches directly in front of left eye. Do not blink.

  Press and hold button for one second. Lens will flash yellow if successful. If lens does not flash yellow, start over.

  Just then the tip of my fishing rod jerked down. I handed the paper to Mom and grabbed the rod. I adjusted the tension and fought the fish in close. It was a bluefish, the only kind in the middle bay that puts up a decent fight.

  Dad snagged him with the long handled net, and together we lifted him onto the dock. “Careful with his teeth,” he said as I grabbed the fish under his gills.

  Bluefish love to bite, and they have razor sharp teeth. Many bluefish fishermen have lost a finger or two by not paying attention.

  I got the hook out with my digits intact. “You’re one lucky fish,” I said. House rules: the first fish caught is returned to the bay to appease the fishing gods. I was about to toss him back, but then I stopped. “This guy can help us out,” I said. “We’ll read his soul identity.”

  “From the fish?” Mom asked.

  “They want an identity, so we’ll give them one. Dad, bring that reader over here. I’ll hold him steady.”

  Mom looked at the instructions. “They say press the button for five seconds. Did it flash red?”

  “It’s too bright out here.” Dad cupped his hands around the reader. “Let me try again. Yes, it’s flashing red.”

  “Two inches from the right eye,” Mom read. “No, the fish’s right eye—that’s his left one. Press the button for one second. Did it flash green?”

  “It’s flashing red,” Dad said.

  “You must have held the button too long,” Mom said. “Do it again.”

  Dad did the fish’s right eye, and the lens flashed green. He shifted to the left eye, and the lens flashed yellow. Mission accomplished.

  I tossed the bluefish back into the bay and watched him swim off. I wiped my hands on my towel. “Now what?” I asked.

  “We’re done,” Dad said.

  The tricky part was figuring out where to send the reader. We could not find Soul Identity’s address in the documents. Bob was right about the pen: written on it in white was “Delivery,” followed by a toll free phone number. I used Dad’s phone to call.

  A cheerful man’s voice answered on the first ring. “Dispatch.”

  “May I speak with Bob?” I asked.

  “Which Bob?”

  “Sorry, it’s not Bob. His shirt says Robert. He’s a delivery guy.”

  “Please hold while connecting to Robert.” I heard a click, and then another ring.

  “This is Bob.” I recognized the voice of our delivery man.

  “Uh oh. I was holding for Robert.”

  Silence on the other end. Then, “Is this Mr. Waverly?”

  I must have made an impression. “Yes, Bob, it’s me. I want to send the package back to Soul Identity. What do I have to do?” I slipped the key ring onto my finger and twirled the reader.

  “Sir, I can be there in five minutes.”

  “You left here a half hour ago,” I said. “Do you have turbo in that green van?”

  “No, sir. I am waiting at the end of your street. I was instructed to stay close and wait for you to call back.”

  “Am I your company’s only customer?” I spun the reader faster. It made a pretty yellow whirl.

  “No, sir. Soul Identity is our only customer.”

  The reader flew off my finger and landed inside the bait cooler. “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “No sir, I do not kid. We are Soul Identity’s delivery service.”

  I examined the green pen. The word Delivery and the phone number stood out in white lettering. But then in dark green I saw the initials SI. And after the phone number, again in dark green, I read “est. 1732.”

  “Okay, Bob,” I said. “You’ve got me interested. But give me a half hour to clean up before you return.” I hung up and fished the reader out of the bait cooler. I flipped it over and brushed the seaweed off the back. A strand clung in a crack near the key ring, and I wiggled it out and saw small dark yellow lettering underneath. Holding the reader up to the sun, I read “Access Port.”

  “Where’s that bait knife?” I asked. Dad passed it to me, and I wiggled the blade into the crack and twisted. The key ring end flipped open like the cover on a Zippo lighter and exposed a Universal Serial Bus, or USB connector. I could use it to see what was on the reader. “We’ll have to check it out before Bob gets here,” I said.

  We packed up the fishing gear, grabbed the package and envelopes, and walked up the dock to my house.

  I live on Kent Island, smack dab in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, on the western edge of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. My parents and I must cross the four mile Bay Bridge to visit each other. This gets tedious on the summer weekends when the highways are stuffed with cars bound for Ocean City, but my house faces west and gets gorgeous sunsets, so usually my parents come my way instead of me going theirs. The fishing also helps bring them over, and since we run our company out of my house, they commute here to work a couple days each week anyway. This morning they had come early for our trip to the airport.

  Dad put away the fishing gear and Mom got a mailing package ready. I fired up my laptop, plugged the reader into the USB port, and watched as the system grabbed and installed the driver software.

  The reader had a mini file system, which meant I could read its data from a regular folder window, much like an MP3 player’s music files or a digital camera’s pictures. My laptop popped the reader’s folder onto my screen, and I saw one file named “1608-233052.SIR.”

  Dad looked over my shoulder. “What’s a SIR extension?” he asked.

  “I’m guessing Soul Identity Reader. The sixteen-oh-eight looks like the day and month, and the rest is probably the time.”

  “It wasn’t eleven thirty when we did the bluefish,” Dad pointed out.

  “Universal Time,” I said. “That would be seven thirty for us.” I pointed at the screen. “Sixteen minutes ago, and that matches the time on the file.”

  I pulled up the file’s contents. It contained two sets of date, time, map coordinates, altitude, and spatial axis data. I scrolled down and saw a reader serial number and a large binary chunk.

  “Can you figure out what it says?” Mom asked.

  “We sure can.” Dad pointed at the screen. “Male bluefish, age six years, puncture wound on the lower lip and jaw.”

  Mom crossed her arms. “How can they know all that?”

  “He’s kidding, Mom,” I said. “Bob’s on his way, so I kept a copy to decode after he’s gone.”

  She slipped the reader into the package and taped it shut. “I still think these guys are wackos,” she said. “Do you really want to send this?”

  “We could use the work.” I walked out of the office and into the living room. “I’m going to wash off that bluefish smell. Say hi to Bob for me.”

  While I was in the shower I wondered what had triggered Soul Identity to contact us. We do more than airport security work; we provide computer security consulting. Most of our business comes right after our clients discover somebody has stolen their customers, money, ideas, or intellectual property. They call us to protect them from further losses; they are proof that people really do love to fix barn doors after their horses are gone.

  Soul Identity hadn’t yet told us what had been taken, but that was typical for our clients. Nobody wants to advertise their losses.
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br />   I walked back to the office and saw Bob sitting in my chair and drinking a cup of tea with my parents.

  “Bob’s waiting for your signature,” Mom said.

  “You look good in that chair, Bob,” I said. “You want to join our business? We could get you out of that green uniform and into a nice pair of shorts.”

  Bob shook his head. “No thank you, sir. I have been with Soul Identity for many years, and they have always treated me well.”

  Bob didn’t look old enough to have worked anywhere for more than a few years. “What does Soul Identity do, Bob?” I asked. “Why scan people’s eyes?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “Sir, I am not authorized to talk to you about our organization.”

  I grabbed the clipboard and scribbled another John Doe, this time with my left hand. The loops stayed inside their borders. I stuck the pen in my pocket and handed him the package.

  “Well, sir, maybe I will see you again.” Bob opened the door and stepped outside.

  “If I’m lucky and you’re not.” I waved goodbye and used the green pen to write down his license plate number as he drove away.

  I went back to my laptop and opened the reader file again. Time to figure out what Soul Identity was up to.

  Dad came over. “I looked on the Web,” he said, “and these guys have published nothing. There are a few sites out there referring to Soul Identity, but I don’t think they’re related, because they don’t mention anything about readers. No news articles, either. I’m going back to the public records.”

  “I grabbed Bob’s license plate, if you want to try that.” I handed him the number.

  “Did that already. Those plates are registered to SI Holding Corporation. And the only thing on them is a post office box in Baltimore.”

  “If they wish to hide, why are we looking for them?” Mom asked.

  We both looked at her as if she was crazy. “Because we can,” Dad said. “Besides, we have an hour before the bridge traffic lets up.”

  Mom shook her head. “You boys keep playing detective. I’m going to download my pictures and read my email.”

  “Pictures…that reader must be encoding pictures,” Dad said.

  I nodded. “That would be the binary chunks—pictures of each eye.” I extracted the data and saved it as a file on my desktop. Then I opened a photo editor and dragged the file into it. “Let’s see what it contains.”

  A window reading “Enter password to view images” popped up on my screen.

  Dad looked over my shoulder. “What’s the password?”

  I thought about this. If the reader collected eye images, either each reader had a built-in password, or the information in the attached file generated the password. Maybe it was both: the file contained the reader information. “I’m guessing it’s the reader serial number,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t that be too primitive?”

  “Many primitive people walk among us. We call them customers. Let’s try.” I typed the reader serial number into the password box and pressed OK.

  Two bluefish eyes filled the screen. “That was it,” I said.

  “But we still don’t know why,” Dad said.

  After my parents left, I thought about how big and diverse our world must be to include people who make devices that capture eye images.

  A person’s irises are as unique as his fingerprints. From a distance the iris looks brown or black or blue, but up close it contains many distinct shapes and colors. These change as you grow, but once you become an adult, they settle down and remain the same.

  A couple of companies made iris scanners, but few security systems relied on them. It used to be that anybody could fool their scanners by wearing contact lenses with iris images printed on them. To counter this, the scanners grew in sophistication; they now shine a light into the eye to verify that the iris moves as the pupil contracts. This takes time to check, and as that time increases, the usefulness of the scanners decreases.

  I figured that Soul Identity was collecting lots of eye images; otherwise they wouldn’t have their own reader. And if they were using the system because they needed my identity, Bob would have hung around to ensure I used my own eyes. He didn’t stay, so they were assuming it was in my interest to be accurate. They also read both eyes, even though a single iris image provides more than enough unique data points for identification.

  I looked at the letter: Use the enclosed reader to obtain your soul identity. These guys were assuming that people wanted to have their eyes photographed, but I couldn’t figure out why. The whole thing was a bit creepy, and I decided I didn’t want them as a client.

  Maybe it was tied to the airport. Bob did have a picture of me from this morning on his handheld. I wondered how Soul Identity had access to that kind of data. And the pen saying the firm was established in 1732: what was that all about?

  I filed away the images. I’d worry about this only if Soul Identity called back.

  two

  Eight days later I sat on my dock with my coffee and enjoyed a Monday morning on the bay. The rising sun lit up the western shore in yellows and pinks. An osprey searched for his breakfast; he plummeted into the water and took off with a large fish gripped in his claws. The fish wiggled and struggled and eventually broke free, but the osprey dove down and snagged him in midair.

  Maybe the osprey had caught the same bluefish we photographed with the Soul Identity reader. Probably not, but I get a kick out of searching for surprise connections. It’s part of my job, I guess.

  I had better chances of winning the lottery every day for one week straight than I did of seeing an osprey scoop up the same bluefish. Still, I strained my eyes and hoped to spot a connection between me and the fish in the osprey’s claws. Maybe I could coax the osprey to drop the fish onto my dock, where I could verify its identity.

  I shook my head. Soul Identity, although they had not called back, had wiggled their way into my morning coffee philosophy. Just like they had been doing all last week.

  I walked back to the house, ready to begin work. I still owed Jane Watson her airport security report.

  I waved to my neighbor as I opened my door. I secretly called him Santa because of his white beard and round belly.

  Santa looked up from his plants and waved back. “Morning, Scott.”

  “Morning.” Two years since he moved in, and I didn’t remember his name. I thought for the hundredth time that I should find it out before I embarrassed myself.

  I sat behind my desk and pulled out the unfinished airport security report. I glanced out the window and watched a green van pull into Santa’s driveway. It looked like the SI Delivery van, but the bushes in Santa’s front yard obscured my view. Then I saw Bob the delivery guy walk over and speak to Santa. They both went into Santa’s house.

  Interesting. Was Soul Identity running reference checks on me? Was Santa telling them if I was naughty or nice? The connection-seeking portion of my brain shifted into overdrive.

  I wanted to head over and ask, but first I needed Santa’s real name. Maybe public records could help. The Maryland State Department of Assessments and Taxation had an online form. I entered the county, street number, and street name. Bingo: Santa bought his house two years ago, was up to date on his taxes, and did his official business under the name Arthur Berringer.

  I saw nothing about a Mrs. Claus or any little elves. The name Arthur didn’t ring any bells. I probably had forgotten it, but just to double check, I searched for Arthur Berringer images on the Web. I located an unflattering, but a bit better groomed, photo of Santa boozing it up with his buddies at the Atlantic City Electric Wheelchair Manufacturers convention a few years before. I had found Santa.

  I gave up on the airport report. Figuring out what Santa and Bob were cooking up was more interesting than documenting the security holes at the airport. I walked across the lawn and over to my neighbor’s house.

  Before I could knock on the door, it flew open, and Bob burst out. He ran full tilt toward
his van. My neighbor chased after him and waved a shotgun in the air. Santa had been replaced by an old man with a wild fire in his eyes.

  “You’re a cheat!” Santa fired a blast into the air. Bits of leaves and branches showered us.

  Bob backed out of the driveway. He knocked over my mailbox, swerved at the last minute to avoid the drainage ditch, and scuffed up the corner of my lawn. A cloud of dust and junk mail drifted in his wake.

  “You all right?” I asked. If Santa wanted to shoot at me, I’d have to start running before he reloaded. Once I read that when you’re fleeing from somebody with a gun, you’re supposed to zigzag. I could get in maybe three zigs before reaching my door.

  I watched the wild look fade from his eyes. “Come on inside, Scott,” he said. “Have some coffee with me.”

  Why not? I followed my neighbor into his house for my very first visit and looked around. Two dusty electric wheelchairs sat parked along the living room walls where a couch and chair normally would have been.

  Santa put the shotgun on the dining room table and wiped his sleeve over the wheelchair seats. “Have a seat—I’ll be right back.”

  I noticed the pictures framed on the wall. One of them was the same Atlantic City photo I had seen on the Web. The other pictures showed more wheelchair conventions. I saw a red-haired Santa, a salt-and-pepper Santa, and an all-white Santa that looked pretty recent.

  He returned in a minute holding two steaming mugs. “I added cream and sugar. That all right?”

  I took a sip. “Thanks, Arthur. It’s perfect.”

  He froze and stared at me. The wild look crept back into his eyes, and I realized I had made a mistake. He set his mug down on the seat of a wheelchair and took a step closer to me. “What did you just call me?” His eyes flickered to the shotgun.

  Uh oh. Santa must not like being called Arthur. Or his name wasn’t Arthur. Maybe he went by Art, or Artie. I calculated the odds; there was no way I could guess this one right.