It was supposed to be the border of the 21st century - smart, biometric, flawless. Instead of a passport stamp, a fingerprint and a face scan. Instead of queues, speed. The new Entry/Exit System for the European Union, known as EES, launched on April 10 after a full four years of delays. The result so far: long columns, technical crashes, and a story that sounds like science fiction but actually happened.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has already admitted the system needs „additional work“. But just how „additional“ is best shown by the case of a journalist from Britain. On her way back through Cluj airport, Romanian border police stopped her and accused her of illegally overstaying in the Schengen zone. According to their data, she had left Amsterdam in April, and that exit had not been properly recorded.

Just one problem: the woman had never been in Amsterdam. It was her identical twin sister who had.

When the machine looks only at the face

Officials mixed up the two sisters on the basis of the same facial features, the same surname, the same date of birth and the same citizenship. Even though the twins have different fingerprints, different first names and separate passports, Romanian authorities at first accused her of borrowing her sister's document. The other twin was in Britain at the time and had never set foot in Romania. The journalist was released only after some fifteen minutes of questioning.

Niovi Vavoula, a researcher in cyber-security policy at the University of Luxembourg who advised legislators on the technical aspects of EES, explained that the confusion stemmed from two errors at once - a wrongly recorded exit in Amsterdam and insufficient Romanian verification. „The officers were not adequately trained to distinguish the different procedures and relied only on the facial image,“ she said. Nobody checked the passport, nobody considered that the system is new and full of technical problems. And that disputed Amsterdam exit was registered on April 12 - just two days after the system went live at all.

The European Commission declined to comment on the specific case, saying member states independently manage the EES data. In other words: the system is European, but when it errs, no one in Brussels is to blame. Let the traveler who ends up on the wrong side of the algorithm seek justice from national authorities on their own.

The story is funny only until it happens to you. Millions of people from the region - those who have travelled toward Europe for decades for work, for family, for a holiday - will tomorrow pass through those same gates. And if the machine can't tell two sisters with different fingerprints apart, how much faith is there that it won't slip up with one of us?