Watchers

Hyatt, who had been born that January and had perished that March in Portland, Oregon. The death would be expunged from the public record, and Travis’s new identity would stand up to fairly intense scrutiny.
    Strictly for fun (they said), the bearded young operators created a military record for Travis, crediting him six years in the Marines and awarding him a Purple Heart plus a couple of citations for bravery during a peace-keeping-mission-turned-violent in the Middle East. To their delight, he asked if they could also create a valid real-estate broker’s license under his new name, and within twenty-five minutes they cracked into the right data banks and did the job.
    “Cake and pie,” one of the young men said.
    “Cake and pie,” the other echoed. Nora frowned, not understanding.
    “Piece of cake,” one of them explained.
    “Easy as pie,” the other said.
    “Cake and pie,” Nora said, nodding.
    The blonde with copper-penny eyes returned, carrying driver’s licenses imprinted with Travis’s and Nora’s pictures. “You’re both quite photogenic,” she said.
    Two hours and twenty minutes after meeting Van Dyne, they left Hot Tips with two manila envelopes containing a variety of documents supporting their new identities. Out on the street, Nora felt a little dizzy and held on to Travis’s arm all the way back to the car.
    Fog had rolled through the city while they had been in Hot Tips. The blinking lights and flashing-rippling neon of the Tenderloin were softened yet curiously magnified by the mist, so it seemed as if every cubic centimeter of night air was awash with strange lights, with an aurora borealis brought down to ground level. Those sleazy streets had a certain mystery and cheap allure after dark, in the fog, but not if you’d seen them in daylight first and remembered what you had seen.
    In the Mercedes, Einstein was waiting patiently.
    “Couldn’t arrange to have you turned into a poodle, after all,” Nora told him as she buckled her seat belt. “But we sure did ourselves up right. Einstein, say hello to Sam Hyatt and Nora Aimes.”
    The retriever put his head over the front seat, looked at her, looked at
    Travis, and snorted once as if to say they could not fool him, that he knew who they were.
    To Travis, Nora said, “Your antiterrorist training . . . is that where you learned about places like Hot Tips, people like Van Dyne? Is that where terrorists get new ID once they slip into the country?”
    “Yeah, some go to people like Van Dyne, though not usually. The Soviets supply papers for most terrorists. Van Dyne services mostly ordinary illegal immigrants, though not the poor ones, and criminal types looking to dodge arrest warrants.”
    As he started the car, she said, “But if you could find Van Dyne, maybe the people looking for us can find him.”
    “Maybe. It’ll take them a while, but maybe they can.”
    “Then they’ll find out all about our new identities.”
    “No,” Travis said. He turned on the defroster and the windshield wipers to clear the condensation off the outside of the glass. “Van Dyne wouldn’t keep records. He doesn’t want to be caught with proof of what he does. If the authorities ever tumble to him and go in there with search warrants, they won’t find anything in Van Dyne’s computers except the accounting and purchasing records for Hot Tips.”
    As they drove through the city, heading for the Golden Gate Bridge, Nora stared in fascination at the people in the streets and in other cars, not just in the Tenderloin but in every neighborhood through which they passed. She wondered how many of them were living under the names and identities with which they had been born and how many were changelings like her and Travis.
    “In less than three hours, we’ve been totally remade,” she said.
    “Some world we live in, huh? More than anything else, that’s what high technology means—maximum fluidity. The whole world is becoming ever more fluid, malleable. Most financial transactions are now handled with electronic money that flashes from New York to L.A.—or around the world— in seconds. Money crosses borders in a blink; it no longer has to be smuggled out past the guards. Most records are kept in the form of electrical charges that only computers read. So everything’s fluid. Identities are fluid. The past is fluid.”
    Nora said, “Even the genetic structure of a species is fluid these days.”
    Einstein woofed agreement.
    Nora said,