A work of fiction, inspired by the great resistors of yore, that imagines a brave and practical way to thwart modern day tyranny…
by: T. G. Metcalf
The couple sat outside, under an awning, on opposite sides of a small table in front of a taqueria on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard in Portland, Oregon. It was a little past one o’clock on a sunny day in early September. They had finished their meal and were halfway through their coffees.
Emily, twenty-eight, was the great-granddaughter of a timber tycoon. She had attended private schools, then Reed College, where she had earned a bachelor’s degree in Political Science, and then Berkeley, where she quit law school midway through. After living off a generous allowance from her trust fund for a couple of years, she returned to Portland and received, from that fund on her twenty-fifth birthday, the first of several payouts of ten million dollars.
Ben, twenty-seven, was a freelance IT security programmer. He had moved in with Emily, in her penthouse in Portland’s Pearl District, two years earlier and after that he had worked less and less. They had just returned from India, where, over the course of two months, they had backpacked and visited the sacred city of Varanasi, the desert city of Jaisalmer, the palm-lined beaches of Kerala, and the ruins of the Vijayanagara Empire in Hampi.
Emily leaned back in her chair, with her head against the taqueria’s front window, and daydreamed while people walked past. Ben sat slouched over facing the table with his chin on his chest as he looked down at his phone in his right hand. He was reading about the protests against the ICE raids in and around Portland, and the turnout at the protest he and Emily had participated in the previous day at Waterfront Park.
Ben put the phone on the table, straightened up, took a sip of coffee, and looked at Emily. “I can’t help wondering what the street protests, here and everywhere else in the country, are accomplishing,” he said.
“What would you have us do instead?” Emily said, without turning her head.
“ICE is banging on doors and pulling undocumented people out of their homes by their feet. They’re the Gestapo. What did the Resistance in Europe do in the nineteen-thirties and forties?”
Emily looked at him purposefully.
“One of the things they did was print identification papers that gave people aliases, as non-Jews. Why aren’t people using AI to make Green Cards for undocumented people?”
“They are. They’re selling them, the same way they were being sold on the black market in the movie Casablanca. Remember? Go ahead google ‘fake Green Cards’.
Ben typed ‘fake Green Cards’ into the browser on his phone.
“Shit,” he said. “You’re right. I should have known. So why isn’t anybody producing free Green Cards, passports, and work visas that nobody can detect as fakes?”
“That’s a great question.” She banged her hand on the table. “Let’s fucking do it!”
“Seriously?”
“Goddamn right. We either resist, or we do nothing — which makes us complicit.”
“We could do it on Telegram to protect ourselves,” he said. “Terrorists, neo-Nazis, drug dealers, and porn peddlers get away with doing their shit on it, so why not us? I can see it now on our website: ‘We are the latter-day reincarnation of those in the Resistance who saved people from being hauled away by the Nazis in the nineteen-thirties and forties. Send us a photo of yourself, give us the alias you want as your new name, and free of charge we’ll send you a Green Card that nobody in the United States Gestapo will be able to detect as fake. Keep them on hand, and use them if you need them’.
“People will worry it’s a trick the government is using to entrap them,” she said. “They’re afraid to go to their doctors now, court cases, even school, for that reason. That’s why women are dying during childbirth at home, and asthma and measles are killing their kids.”
“That’s true,” he said, “but a few people will take that risk. And after they’ve used our Green Cards to keep themselves out of jail, word of mouth will do our advertising, just like it did against the Nazis, or here, with slaves using the Underground Railroad. How’s your Spanish?”
“Lo hablo como una hablante nativa,” she said.
“We should probably read about how the most successful counterfeiters in Europe ran their operations while the Holocaust was going on.”
“Yeah. Who ever thought we’d have our own version of it here?”
Ben eagerly stood up, picked up their coffee cups, plates, and forks, and took them inside the taqueria.
Ben and Emily went back to Emily’s place, got online, and read about Adolfo Kaminsky, an eighteen-year-old Argentine-born member of the French Resistance, who specialized in creating false identity documents, and may have saved as many as fourteen thousand Jews. They read about Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who issued thousands of protective passports, or Schutz-Passes, to Hungarian Jews. They read about Giorgio Perlasca, an Italian who posed as a Spanish diplomat in Budapest, created thousands of Schutz-Passes, and helped save over five thousand Jews from deportation. They read about the Ładoś Group, a network that operated out of Bern, Switzerland, and Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a village in southeastern France that hid Jews, the way Ripley, Ohio hid runaway slaves.
“Jesus,” Ben said. “Why haven’t these kinds of groups already sprung up here?”
Emily laughed. “Who’s willing to stick their necks out for undocumented people?”
“Are you? Are we?”
“Sure. But like my financial guy says about Wall Street, winning is all about managing risk. In our case, that means not just protecting our own hides, but making sure none of the people who use our freebie Green Cards get caught, because if they do, word will get around and that’ll kill our operation. The biggest successes of those guys we read about stemmed from their ability not to get caught.”
“There’s only one way of doing that. We need forgers in China. They’ve got AI that’s every bit as good as anywhere in the world, and their forgers and pirates are producing stuff the idiots in Washington can’t detect. Complete with perfect holographic images.”
“We need somebody on the inside, at ICE, to help us,” Emily said, while not looking up from her laptop. “They’ve got a group called FDNS. The Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate. We need to find out who’s the brains of the operation, and hire that person, to point us to the right counterfeiters in China and be our Chief Strategy Officer. A tenfold increase in his or her salary would do it.”
“How do we identify who that is?”
“Let’s check out legal cases the U.S. government has brought against counterfeiters, and see who it has used from FDNS to testify at trials, on the technical stuff. I’ll subscribe to one of those legal databases.”
“Let’s say we identify that person. Who’s to say he or she won’t report us, instead of signing on?”
Emily looked up from her laptop. “That’s what private investigators are for. You can’t possibly believe that the best techies at the FDNS are all MAGA people, can you? There have to be some Kaminskys or Wallenbergs there, whose guilty consciences keep them up at night. We’ll hire a PI to do the data mining, surveillance, and whatever else they do, to give us the profiles we’ll use to pick our CSO.”
“Nice,” Ben said. “Do you know any PIs we can trust?”
“Trust isn’t the word I’d use,” Emily said. “Leverage is the word I’d use. My brother used a PI to get video of his wife cheating on him, and a couple years after the divorce, when that same PI got caught doing stuff that should have landed him in jail for twenty years, Bill got him the best criminal defense lawyer in the country, who got the guy an acquittal. Bill said the money he spent in legal fees was chicken feed compared to what the divorce would’ve cost him without the videos the PI produced. He’s the guy we’ll use. We just can’t tell him what we’re going to use the information for.”
Ben laughed. “Are you going to tell Bill about it?”
“Of course,” Emily said. “He’ll want in on this.”
“What the fuck is going on?” Trump shouted, seated at his desk in the Oval Office. Stephen Miller was seated in a rosewood chair next to the desk’s front right corner. No one else was in the room. “ICE is fucking up everywhere. It’s all over the headlines. Even FOX is saying stupid shit that even my idiot base doesn’t believe, to cover up all their fuck-ups. They’re a goddamn laughingstock.”
“We’re working on it, Mister President.”
“I want fucking results.”
“Our best intelligence says the Chinese are behind it.”
“Fuck!” Trump shouted.
Miller’s head jerked backwards when Trump shouted.
“Do you have evidence of that?”
“Nothing solid. Not yet.”
“How the fuck can I talk about it with Xi if I don’t have any evidence?”
“You can’t, Mister President. I understand that.”
“Do you think Musk might be behind it? He’s got big connections in China.”
“I’ll get somebody to look into that.”
“You mean you don’t already have somebody looking into it? Why the fuck do I have to come up with all the ideas?” He pounded his fist on the desk.
Ben and Emily sat outside at a café on Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris. It was April and seated across from them was James, the person they’d hired out of FDNS, and his French wife, Amélie.
Over a year and a half had passed since Ben and Emily had hatched their plan in front of the taqueria in Portland.
Emily had bought a two-bedroom flat for James and Amélie, three blocks from where they sat.
“We’re winning,” Ben said. “ICE continues to fuck up. Our Green Cards have gotten God-knows-how-many people released. Eleven thousand, at least.”
“That number is less important than the fact that our project has gotten lots of Republican governors and mayors into really deep shit,” Emily said. “Spanish-speaking candidates are beginning to pop up everywhere, in red states as much as in the blue ones. They feel empowered. Wherever it’s them versus MAGA’s lily-white Anglos, my money would be on the brown candidates from now on, if I were a betting woman. Trump’s approval rating is at twenty-two percent, which is seven points lower than it was after he incited the riot at the Capitol.”
“You think anybody will ever write about us the way Kaminsky and Wallenberg got written about?” Ben said.
“No. They took risks. We took none.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” James said.
“You’re right, James,” Emily said. “But you two are safe here in Paris. You’re here legally, Amélie’s a citizen, and the last thing in the world France would ever do is allow extradition of a latter-day Resistance guy, if that ever became known, which it won’t.”
James noticed a look of concern on Amélie’s face. “It won’t,” he said to Amélie. “They used heavily encrypted AI to run the operation for six months, on Telegram, and then they used intermediaries to hand off the whole thing to their Chinese contact several months ago, and neither he nor FDNS have any way to find out who Emily and Ben are, much less me. There are at least five degrees of separation between him and us, and his payments, based on how many requests for Green Cards he gets on Telegram, are being made automatically out of a bank account in his own country.”
“Vive la France,” Ben said, and raised his glass of red wine.
Five of T. G. Metcalf’s short stories have been published so far this year: “A Life Made of Words,” in the January issue of The Write Launch; “Tantric Umping,” in the Feb. 7 issue of Half and One; “The Reason the U.S. No Longer Exists,” in the Feb. 18 issue of Sage Magazine; “Dr. Thayer,” in the 2025 issue of Plexus Magazine; and “Anniversary,” in the 2025 issue of Twelve Winters Journal. Metcalf lives in Portland, Oregon.
