Free Genocidal Organ by Project Itoh Page B

with, I was already career Forces. I couldn’t tell you what life’s like on the other side.”
    “Well, think about it,” I said. “It’s a pretty massive operation, taking down your full medical history, fingerprints, retinal scans, brainwave patterns, facial contours, and other details, not forgetting things like your full credit rating. They have to be kept absolutely secure but also easily accessible, so that any part can be checked at any time. It’s not cheap.”
    “That’s it!” said Williams, pointing at me. “John Paul. How is he getting around all this? All those layers of security? We needed our thumbprints just to get hold of these jalapeños here. When I was ten years old you could sometimes just about get away with a signature, but these days you need your fingerprints, your retina, your face scanned, to get anywhere. So how the hell is this John Paul getting from Europe to Africa to Asia and back again?”
    I hadn’t thought about that before. You needed ID before you could buy a plane ticket. Or rather, your ID was how you bought a plane ticket, no matter what type of bank account you used, or in what country.
    So how on earth was John Paul managing to travel from civil war to civil war?
    Then Williams’s cell phone started ringing. I could barely believe my eyes as he shoved his greasy fingers, still dripping with pizza and jalapeño juices, straight into his pocket to retrieve his cell. He pressed the button without qualm. Well, it was his cell, he could do what he liked, but my body couldn’t help but shudder, purely as a physiological reflex. That was Williams for you.
    “Roger that, sir,” he said into his phone, sucking the fingers of his other hand as he did so. “Yes, sir. Right away, sir, within the hour.”
    Williams cut the call. He used his still-greasy index finger on the wall to call up the command pad. I grimaced. The thin nanolayer membrane on the wall picked up his request and soon the command pad materialized out of nowhere on the wall, ready to accept his oily orders.
    Williams tapped the stop button, and Saving Private Ryan stopped streaming. I asked him what happened, but he just sighed …
    … and at that very moment my own cell started ringing. I fished it out of my back pocket. Headquarters.
    “All units summoned to headquarters,” said Williams.
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    “Take full precautions to avoid being identified along the way.”
    Williams and I followed our orders from the Pentagon and proceeded to Washington in our civvy suits. It would have been ridiculous to try to make it there in our uniforms, as our nameplates and decorations would have made us easily identifiable by definition. Basically, the orders were to come as you are, although Williams wasn’t happy about this—he never felt comfortable meeting the top brass unless he was in uniform, he said. As long as you were squeezed into a tight uniform with plenty of medals and ribbons on your chest you didn’t have any tiresome considerations such as fashion or style to worry about. Uniform is just uniform. With your own clothes you always had to worry about other people judging you based on their own values. I don’t like people I don’t know seeing me as an individual, said Williams.
    We took an ordinary commercial flight rather than a military plane. It looked like they were trying to keep the general summons as low-key as possible, not just to the general public but within Forces as well. If John Paul was indeed part of a wider organization then it was quite likely they would have a surveillance network in place to monitor any unusual activity among the Secret Service and Special Forces. There was also probably something about the general summons that the Pentagon didn’t want to be broadcasting to the forces at large.
    So we did our best to blend in with the crowds as we made it to Washington on our own steam. We were under strict orders not to take a cab from Reagan National, so we took the metro to Pentagon