Police Control

Author : Stefan Aeschbacher

The look down the barrel of a gun was frightening; much more frightening than I ever imagined it to be.

‘ID yourself citizen’ the cop behind the barrel barked.

I moved my left wrist, containing the ID tag, towards the reader. Much faster than I expected to. Must have been the gun. My picture and all my details appeared on the screen inside the cop’s eye. At least that’s what I guessed.

‘What are you doing here at this time of the night’ the cop asked me, as if any other time of the night would have made a difference. The curfew started at 23:00 and lasted the whole night.

‘Had to fetch medicine for my mother’ I lied
‘Medicine, I see’ he replied.

He started searching my jacket. That was bad, he would find it. My knees started to tremble. I’m sure he noticed it, but it didn’t matter anyway. After discarding some used paper handkerchiefs and my keys, he finally took it out of an inside pocket of the jacket.

‘What is this citizen!’ he shouted.
‘Nothing’, what else could I have said?
‘We’ll see about that!’

He contemplated the device thoroughly. The camouflage was good, very good, some of the best money could buy.
Nevertheless, he seemed to know what he was looking for.

‘This is no pen’ he proclaimed.
‘Sure it is’

That’s when he fumbled open the hidden cover and found the plug. It was nothing fancy at all, plain USB 8.2 nothing you expect in a pen anymore. I was surprised that he had a cable at hand. Maybe he wasn’t as regular a cop as I hoped him to be. He connected the pen to a specially secured connection analyzer. Nah, definitely no regular cop, they don’t have those.

The box started to play, at a very low volume. I recognized it immediately; it started at the top of the playlist with ‘shine on you crazy diamond’.

‘That’s settles it, you can explain this to the judge!’ he said while pressing the gun to my head.

What judge I thought, I knew the laws concerning possession of illegally copied music…