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Once a year, I cross the border as a dead Canadian. Most recently, Gloria MacDonnell of Thorold, Ontario, a retired schoolteacher with no spouse, children or history of smuggling. According to the breadcrumbs of data she sprinkled all over the internet, she voted, volunteered, gardened, exercised in her condo gym and accumulated over $1.5 million in investable assets. If Gloria had had a superpower, it would have been invisibility.
Her death no doubt came as a shock to those close to her. Not that anyone was.
Her obituary’s request for in-memoriam donations to an animal shelter, rather than, say, cancer research, hinted that Gloria’s passing was unexpected. Her travel documents are the last thing her grieving (and inconvenienced) next of kin will find time to cancel. She was the type of traveller who never triggered a random deportation or quarantine order. Why let such a pristine identity go to waste, when an undocumented migrant in the continuum of alternate worlds like me, can use it?
I send her name and vitals to my business manager and best friend Pasquale ‘Bum Bum’ Pesce, one of his many sidelines being postmortem identity theft. He does a digital switcheroo, substituting my faceprint and retinal scan for Gloria’s, and 3D-prints me a counterfeit NEXUS card. Bingo, I board a plane without so much as a blink of suspicion from the Fortress robots at the border.
Given the weather in Toronto, you might expect me to join my fellow snowbirds in sunny Sarasota or Phoenix, but no. I head to Fort Lee, New Jersey, home to the world’s largest community of migrants from alternate timelines. If you’re a fan of my comic book, Sputnik Chick: Girl with No Past, you know them as Exceptionals — or Twisties, to use the ugly term vomited up by racist trolls on Reddit and Twitter.
Exceptionals may look human, but their twisted strands of mutant DNA endow them with unusual powers, shape-shifting among them. The downside is that their bodies become unstable whenever they’re drunk, high or under stress, temporarily turning them into steaming piles of yeast enzymes or creeping carpets of slime mould. Despite these spontaneous mutations, Exceptionals flew under the radar until conspiracy theorists starting blaming them for the so-called ‘Twistie Flu.’
To push back against the haters, a convoy of Exceptionals crams the George Washington Bridge every weekday morning, commuting to Columbia Medical School and other institutions of higher learning to research their own endlessly mutating bodies. A few have founded successful biotech companies. Not that their achievements have earned them much respect. On any given night, in cowboy bars in Paramus, Hackensack and Elizabeth, an Exceptional will shape-shift after a few too many Bud Lights and some neo-fascist yahoo will shout, “Go back where you came from, you filthy, disease-ridden alien!” Impossible, of course, since Exceptionals come from an alternate world that was destroyed long, long ago.
I should know; I’m the one who destroyed it.