The Switch

Epilogue

It’s gotta be the laptop,” said John Thomsen as he held aloft the heavy oblong cardboard box. He was a second-year graduate student in classics at Princeton. He and his roommate and fellow grad student, Matt, were standing at the counter of the Frist Campus Center Package Room, where you picked up parcels.

“That piece of crap you bought on eBay for a hundred bucks?”

“Hundred twenty-five. Plus shipping.”

“For a MacBook Air? Dude, it’s gonna be a brick.”

“No way.” Matt was obviously jealous. He was complaining last week about how much he’d had to spend on a new Acer laptop — almost six hundred bucks!

By the time they returned to their town house on Prospect Avenue, John was beginning to wonder himself whether he’d just bought a dud.

“Hey, it works,” he said to Matt, who was sitting on the couch with his laptop on his lap, but really concentrating on the football game. “Booted right up.”

“Huh,” said Matt, uninterested.

“Oh my God, it’s got the last owner’s sign-on screen. They didn’t even reformat it!”

Matt laughed. “Without the password, you’re totally screwed.”

“It’s right here. On a sticky note.”

“Jeez. No wonder it was so cheap. They didn’t do shit to it. How many owners did it have?”

“I don’t know,” John said distractedly as he entered the numbers and letters into the passcode blank. “The thing’s only like a year old. Can’t be more than one owner.”

A commercial came on, and Matt muted the volume. “Where do you think this seller gets his laptops? You think they’re hot? Wouldn’t that be funny? You get in trouble ’cause you have someone else’s stolen laptop?”

John looked up from his computer. “It might be hot,” he said.

“Who’s the owner?”

“S. Robbins. That’s all it says. And most of the documents — wait... Huh, now, this is interesting.”

“What?”

“Check this out. ‘Top secret’ and ‘classified,’ it says. Check it out.” He handed the computer over to Matt.

“Dude, are you sure you should be looking at that?”

“Seriously?” said John. “What’s the harm?”