Identity Theft
One Sunday, Pete got back to his dorm to be greeted with an unlikely sight: Chelsie Brookhaven, one of the bigger deals at Georgetown U.’s Delta Delta Delta sorority, was puttering around the common area of the quad, busily feather-dusting the coffee table. In fact, the room was spic and span—a state he’d never seen the room in before—and Chelsie’s presence made the place seem even less familiar; she was probably the last person Pete would have expected to run into in the four-way apartment its denizens called “The Lair.” Pete and the other residents of 313 La Plata Hall usually kept the living room littered with beers cans, half-empty chip bags and the other usual detritus male college students tend to leave around, but while Pete had been at class that day, apparently, she’d picked it all up. Now here she was, busily dusting around a bottle of Windex on the communal drinking table.
“Chelsie?” Pete asked querulously. She didn’t answer him at first. She didn’t greet Pete; in fact she scarcely acknowledged him, focused as she was on the task at hand. Well, too-prim-for-sin Chelsie Brookhaven, blowing him off. At least something felt familiar. He shrugged and set my bookbag aside.
“Chelsie Brookhaven,” he repeated. “Imagine seeing you here.”
She was holding a cell phone smartly to her ear with her right hand under a smooth canopy of blonde hair. Without looking over, she said into it: “Owner, one of your roommates wants to talk to me. May this be allowed?”
Owner? Pete mused. What the hell kind of name was that?
She nodded into the phone then turned to him. “Hi, Pete. Remember me from sociology?”
“Yeah, ‘course. Not that I mind,” though he did, “but what the fuck are you doing here?”
“Tidying up.”
“Yeah, but, um, why?”
A lifelong local, Pete had known Chelsie Alders Brookhaven since second grade. But, with the exception of a pair of unpleasant recent incidents, she’d steadfastly ignored him, and most of his friends, all that time. This was understandable. The Brookhavens had long been part of the in-crowd in Georgetown on account of the clothing shop—called, predictably, Brookhaven Tailors—the family maintained in that upscale part of Washington. A storefront in the right place can get you anywhere and even now Chelsie showed it, with the pricy-looking, undersize pink silk purse she’d left perched erectly on the upright La-Z Boy, and her snug pink spaghetti top with visible, violet bra straps, casual but at the same time woven from a shimmering, natural fabric Pete didn’t recognize. The Lair, on the other hand, was a smelly rabble of computer nerds and creeps, and Chelsie, that fine piece of wool, surely knew this. What was she doing here?
Pete fixated absent-mindedly on Chelsie’s slim, bosomy torso as she crossed her other arm under the crooked elbow of the arm holding the cell phone. Aside from her summery blouse, she was also wearing crisp, bleachy-white, fashionable shorts with a high hem that left virtually all of her trim thighs bared. She cocked to one hip, seeming irritated. Then she pursed her lips, seeming to consider what she should say next.
“Your weirdo friend Adam uploaded my will into this creepy phone.” She gave her head a tilt to indicate the cell phone she was holding against her ear. “I can’t pull it off my ear and I have to do everything he says as long as he says it into the phone. He owns me now. Owner gave me permission to say I’m here to dust and clean up your dorm.”
“I’m sorry,” Pete said. He was really through the looking glass here. “Adam has whatted you into the what…?”
“Cell phone. Somehow he’s uploaded my free will into it and I have to do everything he says as long as he says it through the phone.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I don’t, either. I just know it’s happening, ‘cause I can feel it inside.”
With that Chelsie put down the duster and started wiping off the table with the Windex and a paper towel, and Pete noticed then that she never lowered the phone from her ear, not even when she was cleaning. Instead, she squirted the bottle, set it down, then picked up the paper towel, all with her one free hand.
“Dude, can you close the door?” Pete heard, and turned to see Adam strolling into the common area from his room, a phone like Chelsie’s at his head. “I’m not trying to show off to the whole third floor.”
“Yeah, sure.” Pete rose and did as Adam asked without taking his eyes off him and Chelsie.
Adam mock-muted the mouthpiece with two fingers of his Coors hand and told Pete, “Don’t believe her.”
“Believe her? I don’t even understand her,” Pete said, not inclined to give credence to anything that was unfolding in front of him, and at the same time wanting to accept it very much.
“I mean the part where she has to do everything I say.”
“Okay, whatever. Now I don’t know what you’re talking about, either. What’s up with all this?”
Adam tapped the phone at his ear, and pointed at Chelsie’s with his other hand. “It’s a new trinket I’ve been working on. I’ve been trying it out all afternoon, so far so good. It’s experimental as all hell and I seriously doubt it’s legal so I’m trying to keep it between friends.”
He went over to her. “I call it the Influence Phone. Watch this.” He patted Chelsie patronizingly on her luscious bottom, then pinched her through her bleachy shorts, and, as Pete looked on in stunned disbelief … nothing happened. She didn’t pull out a knife and stab him. She didn’t slap him. She didn’t even move away. She seemed to sneer subtly, though Pete mused that this may have been his imagination, and then she kept cleaning.
“I’m using it on this Chelsie Brookhaven chick,” Adam continued, “because she fucking sucks. Remember the day we moved in?”
Pete did indeed. Even though it had happened more than six months ago—and it was nowhere near as bad as Pete’s other unpleasant run-in with Chelsie and her coterie—his face flushed with anger and shame whenever he thought about it. On move-in day, he and Adam had walked into the La Plata lobby for the first time when some dumb jock behind the desk asked them for their social security numbers. The pair had exchanged skeptical looks, Adam and Pete, but when the jock asked again, an intimidated Adam had told him, and the jock and several friends of his sitting behind the front desk had burst into peals of laughter. Chelsie, Pete had noticed, had been the one laughing the hardest.
Adam apparently had noticed this, too. He was an awkward grad student in his forties who had endured the humiliation of being assigned to freshman housing by a feckless university bureaucracy, and Pete a skinny, geeky teenager away from home for the first time. Both, for their own reasons, felt the humiliation keenly as they stood there, allowing themselves to be openly laughed at. “C’mon,” said Adam finally, barely whispering, “let’s go,” and he and Pete had skulked to the elevator without saying anything in answer. They hadn’t dared.
“Sure, I remember.” Pete felt a hot flush of anger. “But what is she doing here?”
“Didn’t she tell you?”
“Right. I can see she’s cleaning. But what’s with the talk about the phone? I couldn’t figure out what she was saying.”
Smiling proudly, Adam came over, lowering the phone from his ear and handing it to Pete. It looked ordinary enough, but it was plain Adam was quite proud of it.
“Talk into it,” said he. Pete studied the phone and paused, unsure what to say. “Give an order.” Adam gestured at Chelsie. “Give her an order. Nothing crazy, you know, be reasonable. Into the phone.”
Feeling silly, Pete lifted the phone to his ear as though unclear which end to speak in.
“Stop for a second,” he said. Chelsie halted mid-wipe and stood upright. Pete had a failure of imagination and issued the tritest command in hypnosis history: “Stand on one foot.” Chelsie complied without looking over, wobbling a bit on her left leg and finger-tipping the end table to keep her balance.
“Well, ain’t that the damnedest,” Pete mulled.
“I call it the Influence Phone,” Adam repeated. “I’ve been working on it for weeks now, case you’ve been wondering where I’ve been.”
Pete had, in fact, been wondering. Adam had largely holed up in his dorm room since the beginning of the year, it seemed, which was something the rest of the Lair—Jake, his little sister Camille, and Pete—had commented on among themselves more than once.
“A-And you’re saying this thing controls her mind somehow?” Pete examined the phone but nothing seemed remarkable about it.
“Yup,” Adam went on, “but don’t believe her when she says she has to do what I tell her no matter what. There’s definitely limits.”
“I’m still trying to get my head around the fact she’s here at all. It all seems too … sci-fi. If I wasn’t looking right at it there’s no way I’d believe it in a million years.”
“It’s even weirder than you think. I was able to hack into a military satellite network. I think it’s experimental, something for population control, maybe. All these different ways to use cell phone and RFID signals to influence decision-making and whatnot. I piggy-backed off of it. Only way I could do it.”
Pete understood about half of what Adam was saying. Chelsie stumbled anew with a “whoa” and he remembered he’d set her up on one foot. “Put your leg down,” he said, and added with a mischievous smirk, “Get back to cleaning, you spoiled little snot. What’s the matter with you?” She shot him a nasty look but sullenly did what she was told. Although Pete was having trouble grasping Adam’s explanations, he’d intuited—based on what Adam had told him in conjunction with the fact that Adam had been able to manhandle her a moment before without consequence—that he could get away with insulting Chelsie right to her face.