Ruan's Fake ID

Ruan’s Fake Credentials:

Ruan has a very well crafted fake ID procured for him by Niska’s forger which includes family connections and a logical backstory to explain Ruan’s core world accent and appearance.

The name Weir is a very common surname on Londinium (but not the most common name which would invite scrutiny based on the greater likelihood of subterfuge). Instead, Weir is lower down on the list and has a ring of “ordinariness” like “Davis” or “Miller”. The name “Ruan” is also quite ordinary. It is a very very old Mandarin surname as well as a Gaelic given name so like many words and names in the sino-anglo melting pot of the ‘Verse, it is both a common first and last name on Londinium and Sihnon. To the ‘Verse ear, "Ruan Weir" sounds like something along the lines of “Martin Clark” or “Scott Murphy”; unremarkable and easily forgettable, but not deliberately so.

Ruan’s ID makes him a Londinium-born naturalized citizen of the planet Ezra. It claims he immigrated to the planet at the age of 12 with his parents Brody, a banker specializing in the livestock trade, and Tess, a school teacher. The timing of this move, during the first half of the Unification war, implies that his parents were among the many Patriots who fled their home planet in objection to their government’s political turn-about only to find that after the war, now carrying invalid planetary passports, they were considered defectors and could not return. Many of those displaced Londy patriots were granted naturalized citizenship by the Independent worlds they fled to. Ruan’s Ezra credentials, that go back only as far as Unification day, would not appear out of the ordinary to any border patrol.

All of the rest of Ruan’s papers: his Ariel Health Academy diploma, his medic’s license, the credentials towards his orbital rescue license, his Britannia paperwork, and the stamps on his passport* were all legally obtained and therefore have made him hard to track. Fugitives rarely leave such obvious paper trails.

To all but the most determined border detective, Ruan’s credentials check out.

*Spassport - or whatever the space equivalent of a passport is in the ‘Verse.

The Holes in Ruan’s Fake Credentials

Should that determined border detective decide to delve into the validity of Ruan’s ID here is what they would find:

  • Brody and Tess Weir were real people who lived on Londinium prior to the war. However, based on their birthdates, Tess would have had to have given birth to Ruan when she was 10. Brody would have been 8. Also, they were not husband and wife, but brother and sister. The only grain of truth is that Brody and Tess’ parents were part of the patriot exodus, and with so many Weirs leaving Londinium, it was easy to lose track of who was who.
  • The only records Ruan has from his life on Ezra are school records. These are very complete and have excellent grades. There are no medical, financial, or other civil records. Since Ruan only needed a record of his schooling to get into school on Ariel, those were all the forger gave him.