Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick

“What can happen to a man, a good man without a pol record, a man who suddenly one day loses his ID cards and finds himself facing…” And so forth. It would hold them, all thirty million of them. Because that was what each of them feared. “An invisible man,” his intro would go, “yet a man all too conspicuous. Invisible legally; conspicuous illegally. What becomes of such a man, if he cannot replace…” Blah blah. On and on. The hell with it. Not everything that he did or said or had happen to him got onto the show; so it went with this. Another loser, among many. Many are called, he said to himself, but few are chosen. That’s what it means to be a pro. That’s how I manage things, public and private. Cut your losses and run when you have to, he told himself, quoting himself from back in the good days when his first full worldwide show got piped onto the satellite grid.
    I’ll find another forger, he decided, one that isn’t a pol informer, and get a full new set of ID cards, ones without microtransmitters. And then, evidently, I need a gun.
    I should have thought of that about the time I woke up in that hotel room, he said to himself. Once, years ago, when the Reynolds syndicate had tried to buy into his show, he had learned to use—and had carried—a gun: a Barber’s Hoop with a range of two miles with no loss of peak trajectory until the final thousand feet.
    Kathy’s “mystical trance,” her screaming fit. The audio portion would carry a mature male voice saying against her screams as BG, “This is what it is to be psychotic. To be psychotic is to suffer, suffer beyond…” And so forth. Blah blah. He inhaled a great, deep lungful of cold night air, shuddered, joined the passengers on the sea of sidewalk, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets.
    And found himself facing a queue lined up ten deep before a pol random checkpoint. One gray-clad policeman stood at the end of the line, loitering there to make sure no one doubled back in the opposite direction.
    “Can’t you pass it, friend?” the pol said to him as he involuntarily started to leave.
    “Sure,” Jason said.
    “That’s good,” the pol said good-humoredly. “Because we’ve been checking here since eight this morning and we still don’t have our work quota.”

6
    Two husky gray pols, confronting the man ahead of Jason, said in unison, “These were forged an hour ago; they’re still damp. See? See the ink run under the heat? Okay.” They nodded, and the man, gripped by four thungly pols, disappeared into a parked van-quibble, ominously gray and black: police colors.
    “Okay,” one of the husky pols said genially to Jason, “let’s see when yours were printed.”
    Jason said, “I’ve been carrying these for years.” He handed his wallet, with the seven ID cards, to the pols.
    “Graph his signatures,” the senior pol told his companion. “See if they superimpose.”
    Kathy had been right.
    “Nope,” the junior pol said, putting away his official camera. “They don’t super. But it looks like this one, the military service chit, had a trans dot on it that’s been scraped off. Very expertly, too, if so. You have to view it through the glass.” He swung the portable magnifying lens and light over, illuminating Jason’s forged cards in stark white detail. “See?”
    “When you left the service,” the senior pol said to Jason, “did this record have an electronic dot on it? Do you remember?” Both of them scrutinized Jason as they awaited his response.
    What the hell to say? he asked himself. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t even know what a”—he started to say, “microtransmitter dot,” but quickly corrected himself—soon enough, he hoped—“what an electronic dot looks like.”
    “It’s a dot, mister,” the junior pol informed him. “Aren’t you listening? Are you on drugs? Look; on his drug-status card there isn’t an entry for the last year.”
    One of the thungly pols spoke