Get Inspired: Week 5

First seen on the Space Trash blog.

What they don't tell you about biometrics (Get Inspired, week 5)

My boss was lying on the floor. Not a problem in and of itself; given the layers of security on this station, it should be reasonably unlikely that anyone who didn't know her would be in a position to report her to the powers that be.

The pool of blood and the missing hand, on the other hand, were problems, and unfortunately they were all mine.

I rechecked my helmet display, admiring the clueless series of green reads. Whatever or whoever was in here collecting body parts was apparently something completely outside our security program's experience. It seemed like a lot to expect that my heads-up display wouldn't be equally clueless if my mystery guest decided to add my head to their collection.

Happily, unlike my very ex-boss, neither my head, my hands, or anything else I need to do my job are vital to getting into anything important. I'm a firm believer in the first rule of biometrics: never use a part for identification you can't do without. I slid out of my boss's office, heading for the only thing on this station worth this much trouble, carrying the largest bit of my own personal collection out and ready for use.

My name is Shayanna Willow Anstrim, because three of my parental units were dancers. I chose the Special Forces, instead.

Believe it or not, this snippet showed up in my head by way of my job. I work for a financial institution, and there's currently a lot of noise about biometric identification being the wave of the future. The largest part of the enthusiasm sounds rather like 'because there's no way some idiot can forget their own fingerprint'.

The flipside to that is, to my sci-fi inclined mind, that the future of the annoying bastards who currently only hack files for passwords, birth dates or PINs, will likely at some point progress to hacking fingers, or eyeballs, or whatever else secures something they want badly enough.