Short Fiction: The ID Printer
Like my work? Donate what you can: paypal.me/langdonhickman1
*
The ID Printer
I would have given them gunpowder if I had any. But I didn’t; what I did have was the printer. We were the depot that the soldiers and officers would come to when their clearances were overdue, when the paperwork had been processed, when new facilities or processes needed to be accessed, in order to acquire the badges which would allow them to continue their duties to the army and state.
They arrived in droves in those days. The important ones would arrive by car in ones, twos, and occasionally threes, but most came by train. Buses were forbade from the depot grounds following an incident with gunpowder and masked figures which, while certainly exciting, sadly led to less fatalities than one in my position may have desired, instead resulting merely in a summary ban on a mode of travel which linked us most concretely to the nearby town which was a mere two miles away.
The train deposited people right at our doorstep, admittedly, which allowed us access to a more steady stream on paper, but those that arrived would have to wait for another train back to the town or take the two mile walk, where they would stay for the days it would take to process and manufacture their IDs before, following a brief and jovial phone call first to the desk woman at the local hotel used for such things, a cheerful if weary woman preparing to exit her thirties, the soldiers and personnel would once more have to walk or take the train down the two miles before a final circuit of either waiting for the train to take them from the depot back to their station, home, or other resting place, or else walk back to town to take the bus back to the same. While the addition of busses would not have fully alleviated or deeply truncated the number of steps between their arrival in town and their exit from the same, even a simple shuttle service would hasten this procedure greatly, but such a thing was only made available to officials or important personnel and not the lay servicemen.
There was an awareness, it seemed, in the upper brass, that the conscription campaign was no longer bringing in the most reliably patriotic and motivated potential crop of soldiers. The constant warring had thinned the ranks, be it from the physical death on the field of battle or the spiritual death of promotion to chauffeured cars, steak dinners and idle meetings over already out of date maps. We’d always had conscription, whether openly revealed or not, but the ongoing war efforts gradually left no other choice but to openly press gang people in the streets, pasting up posters on brickwork declaring the virtue of patriotic service against the ever-encroaching enemies.
And they were encroaching now; while the early days of the wars saw our forces sailing effortlessly across the fields, cities, oceans and streams of Europe, Asia, Africa, the near and Far East, the islands of the pacific and even the mountains and plains of the Americas, those early gains were being whittled away bit by precious bit and had been for more than a year now. The problem, obviously, with a conscript army is you are by nature recruiting those least motivated by the struggles, both fair and unfair, of your nation. Furthermore, a nation that does not begin in conscription only resolves itself to the process when it is least likely to find a sudden unforeseen patriotism and sense of duty arise in those same people. The upper brass knew this, of course. We would hear them grumbling about it as they came for their badges and paperwork, read it in the messages, telegrams, radio transmissions and coded electronic mail we’d receive as warnings about the new recruits. The ban on busses would likely have come at some point even without an attempted bombing, we were told, though we were split in the depot of whether we agreed with it.
They would not have expected me as a double agent, I do not believe. My years of dutiful service convince me of as much, splitting my time between my active and stated tasks and my quiet perpetual subterfuge. The range of motion of the soldiers of our nation obscured these events; there was, of course, the likewise perpetual motion of secret police, of codes and marks being decoded and disseminated both accurately and inaccurately, accusation and scorn, the methods of social capital and social control wielded by all from the lowliest street urchin to the bakers to the soldiers and even up to the chancellorship itself. None, in truth, were free from this checking and rechecking of devotion, though obviously to strike above one's station one needed more and more exceptional proof, even if they happened to be correct. We knew of many compatriots who had been jailed, tortured and killed who were, in fact, truthfully revealing counteragents above them. Such was life at war.
Many of the elements I have relayed, I must admit, were and are pure supposition on my point. Due to logistical problems, I was unable to make contact with local counterinsurgents. Part of this issue was, I believe, due in part to the time in which I revealed myself, to the world as much to my own heart, to be a true revolutionary, waiting in the darkness of the corners of my psyche until the weakness of the colossal war machine laid itself bare and made me believe that a sure sudden push from my position would critically imperil the behemoth which I knew now that I loathed. Given my years of service and the contractions of witnesses, eyes plastered everywhere and every pair of lips confessing to every set of listening ears, I could not risk the all-important cause of revolution by being so crass and self-serving as to make clear overtures to agents currently at work. Instead, I had to deliver unto them a service that could not be witnessed, only known. And so began my tampering with the ID printer.
While clearances were typically marked in standardized manners, reflecting little of the importance of its wearer such that figures of certain rank and prestige could not be targeted as easily by insurgents and secret agents and revolutionaries, I instead used carefully calibrated inks to give hues of separation to these varying figures. In my heart of hearts, I was creating in pieces the new flag of the world, written in bright and brilliant reds and blues, yellows and greens, black and gold and white and silver. The truth was, admittedly, a bit more muted. However, I was sure that, upon lifting a few from the bodies of those captured and slain, my comrades in the revolution would begin to note the slight discrepancies of colors, certain corners and lines being just a bit too thick, the tint being a hair toward one wedge of the color wheel or another, and would begin to determine the code I had placed which would guide them to more worthwhile targets.
Soon, I knew, they would understand that this work had to be carried out by someone producing the IDs themselves, that they would know a commiserate spirit and noble comrade was within the printing depot, that I could be trusted with great missions of vast and noble intent. The walls were closing in on my nation. The borders of the fronts were contracting little by little, with ground lost day after day on the seas, on islands, on continents both abroad and near. There were Russians walking up behind us while the Americans and assembled Europeans bared down on us from the front. Even Africa and Arabia, worlds we'd long since written off as pitiful, worthless, without wisdom or nobility or soldiers worth a damn were beginning to put pressure on our southern border. I had participated in those cheers of violence against their kind, sure, and had even helped at times with the rounding up of those and similar figures to be sent to the camps where many of my fellow comrades lay. But the oncoming rush of my fellows would certainly understand; this was the cost of doing business behind the lines, after all. Any supposed collaboration with the regime I had participated in was merely to maintain cover, to keep eyes off of me. That I had been so zealous and participated with such rigor in the days when it appeared we might win the war was merely a way of convincing those around me that, on the inevitable day of our dawning losses, I could still be trusted.
They would know as they approached that those slight differences in ID printing were done by a member of the resistance. They would know that I was free from the sin of my nation, that its evils created and enforced by people like me did not in fact stain me, that my virtue and the wisdom of maintaining deep cover absolved me. As I read of collaborators and prisoners being hanged for crimes against humanity, I stayed certain in my safety, assured with faith beyond faith that my looming comrades would greet me with cheer and open arms. My fingers and elbows shook. My knees wobbled. But this was with excitement, not fear. They would come and they would know what I had done and they would reward me thusly. Of this I was certain.