18th March 2009It had taken a lot of work for Charlie to find a way to get a job with access to the records office. Stepping out from university for a gap-year to ‘work at a government office’, that made it sound a lot better than what it actually was. And as far as her cssmates knew, it was to make some money for six months of travelling.
It wasn’t like the office was screaming for staff; entirely the opposite. But sometimes research pays off in unexpected ways. And after some extensive checking it became apparent that this was a pce people came for a career that took them happily into retirement. So working directly at the office just wasn’t going to happen. But she’d run across an outsourcing contract for the cleaning crew. They came in te in the evening and consisted of a lot of immigrant workers who weren’t treated, or paid, well enough to care what else might be happening, just so long as the job got done. And the joys of outsourcing meant that the company contracted to do the cleaning had nowhere near the same level of care or interest as the government in trying to secure its systems, so getting her male alter-ego a ‘job’ had been a couple of hours of work online.
Gainfully employed, or at least on the roster for a couple of months at any rate, meant more or less open season on the computers in the offices and in the startlingly rge number of paper file rooms. And while she’d enjoyed creating the forgeries she’d stuck in the Historic Trust’s library, she didn’t really imagine she’d actually need those. This one had to be good enough to really pass muster for a nearly 20-year-old document - and that was another skillset she didn’t have yet.
Charlie spent another few hours giving herself more shifts on the cleaning roster to get more time for research. Frustratingly, the system tied everything to physical document numbers, which for a while seemed like an impenetrable problem.She briefly considered using the ID of someone who’d died very young, but the possibility of being exposed seemed too great. How do you undo a death? And Charlie also had some very definite wiggles about the ethics of that act.
Also, she grumbled to herself, having gone to the bother of creating Charlotte Jones’ life – now she existed not just at school, but she’d also been at several clubs and worked a variety of short term jobs before going on to university – it seemed like a waste of all that effort to not let her be born.
If she couldn’t open a bank account and get a passport, what was the point?
I mean, sure, she could just transition the way other folks did. She could just go see a shrink. But the waiting list was so long now, and grey market HRT was easier to get hold of, honestly, than getting some from the NHS. This way she’d appear to be cisgender. At least as far as the world knew. Just a woman with an early hysterectomy - and then she could have all the hormones she needed.
Thoughts often percoted slowly as the mop swept across the floor, and whenever the rest of the crew had one of their infrequent breaks Charlie would quickly sprint upstairs (“Forgot something!” Not that they really cared). Repeated rapid scans through the volumes eventually found a bnk space in the right year. After thanking the universe for humans making mistakes in every system they build, over the next few shifts she built up enough of an entry, and acheived enough misfiling and refiling – along with an unfortunate terminal loss of one particur microfiche (loss being a very generous term for Charlie stealing and destroying it) to have a viable identity. Unfortunately, she realised, she’d also have to damage or destroy all the copies of the microfiche, a job she mentally pencilled in for her days off from cleaning.
Destroying the microfiche meant that people would need to resort to the original paper records if anyone, say, requested a birth certificate for Charlotte Jones. And since Charlie just happened to have access to the pile of requests for duplicate birth certificates on the desk she was quietly cleaning next to, it seemed rude not to ask for one. After all that work, it felt silly not to test it out. After an apologetic letter eventually arrived citing a dey and some apparent filing issues, a couple of weeks ter a shiny new birth certificate arrived, and Charlotte Jones was pleased to note she was, at least bureaucratically, born.
She was absolutely delighted when it turned out that a birth certificate was the key needed to unlock so many other things. It had seemed likely that the near magical effects of one piece of government-issued paper would be quite powerful, but knowing that didn’t make it any less surprising when other documents were suddenly much easier to obtain. An national insurance number ended up being a phone call, and a copy of the birth certificate plus a bit of social engineering. Although the person was very confused that she’d never received her card originally, nor did she seem to be in the system. Inexplicable, apparently.
The bank was also ridiculously easy and didn’t even involve any kind of social manipution. Charlotte was beginning to actually feel like she might become a person. The driving licence was a little trickier with no actual human to attend the examination. Getting the provisional licence had been okay, and passing the theory test had been a little exercise in hacking, but nothing that turned out to be terribly difficult. The lightbulb moment had been when she realised the instructors simply submitted their data at the end of each day.
No need to hack into the DVLA – she just needed to hack the computers for the examination centre which was frankly pretty easy. She’d wandered in asking to use the loo, got ‘lost’ and managed to slip a USB stick into one of the machines there. By the evening she had her test details entered and just had to wait for the licence to arrive.
Now a passport. That was going to be tricky. Needing signatures from reliable people who ‘knew her’. But they were absolutely required if she was going to slip out of the country as him and come back a few months ter… post surgery, and a most definitely cis-gender young woman.
Eventually she settled on basically a rinse and repeat of the birth certificate pn, which worked about as well as the first time. Slightly better, really, because it turned out the passport office was somewhat more computerised, and all that was really needed was for the system to believe that the photo had been signed off by two reliable witnesses.
It actually went so smoothly that the morning before the st of the cleaning shifts, a nice letter arrived informing Charlotte that her passport application had been approved, here were her documents back, and the passport would be along shortly.
That did, however, make those st cleaning shifts feel very long – but stiffing the folks who’d quietly looked away as their coworker on several occasions seemed to make mistakes that ended up with piles of paper on the floor, or who seemed to need rather more toilet breaks than perhaps was reasonable (one of them had helpfully asked about the possibility of being diabetic or having a urinary tract infection). She wasn’t going to leave nice folks short staffed, so she made sure to finish all the cleaning shifts before she quietly disappeared again.
