Change Agent Read online

  Marcus Demang Wyckes, leader of the Huli jing.

  Implicated in hundreds of murders, kidnappings, human trafficking—and just two hours ago personally murdering two Singapore police officers. Every damn cop in the city-state was searching for this man. Taniwan wiped away the virtual bust of Wyckes as though it was a letter from his ex-wife’s attorney. True fear gripped him for the first time since he’d left the slums of Johor. Why hadn’t he just minded his own damn business? Why did he have to spot this man? Now he knew.

  Normally Taniwan would order his men to grab felons the police really wanted and, depending on the situation, dump the perp behind a police station, beaten to a pulp—or dead. But that’s what you did with unconnected nobodies. This was a different kettle of fish altogether. The leader of the Huli jing had no doubt put out a call for his people, and they would be here soon enough.

  And so would the police. Some junkie was going to spot Wyckes sooner or later, and a whole goddamned anti-terror squad would storm in here—the very last thing Taniwan wanted in the Drain. It was bad for business. Getting into the feeds. Increasing taxpayer awareness. No, no, no. This would not do.

  But worse still would be the Huli jing finding out that Taniwan had ordered his men to turn Wyckes over to the police. This was a quandary. If he pretended he’d never seen Wyckes, then the police could come storming into the Drain any minute. If he turned Wyckes in, then the Huli jing would track Taniwan down and torture him to death on camera as a warning to others.

  But this was why Taniwan was in charge here—to make the tough calls. After a few moments’ consideration, he decided to split the difference; he’d take action—but make sure no one knew the real reason. Plausible deniability.

  Taniwan glanced toward his dealers, where one of the Indo-Australian enforcers shoved away a dancing synth addict. Taniwan spoke to the man over a radio link. “Tok. See that mental case in the hospital gown?” Taniwan watched Tok scan the crowd of addicts. “No, to your right. By the vuck pit.”

  Tok zeroed in on Wyckes near the VR sex machines. “Got him. Watchu want?”

  “Take your mate and find out what hospital he escaped from and dump his ass back there.”

  “You havin’ a piss?”

  “Just do it.”

  “Can we keep whatever we find on ’im?”

  “Sure. Just get him the hell out of here. Crazy people are bad for business.”

  • • •

  Durand moved past the printers, following light sticks into the tunnels beyond and away from the crowd. There, he found more junkies and homeless. Durand stepped over legs and around makeshift cardboard shelters. As he walked, his shadow cast along the tunnel walls—but then he noticed other shadows behind his. Turning around Durand could see two wiry-looking Southeast Asian men. They didn’t look like addicts and wore faded digital camouflage military jackets in the cool air of the tunnels. No one else seemed to have jackets.

  Durand saw the glint of a knife catch the light as the men kept on his tail. Other addicts retreated into the shadows.

  “Oi! Mate!” The lead one had an Australian accent.

  Durand turned to face them.

  “You a mental case?”

  The man’s companion clattered across trash as he moved to flank Durand. A metal pipe slipped down into his hand from within his coat sleeve.

  Durand eyed them both warily. “I don’t have anything. I just want to be left alone.” Durand turned in place, arms extended, most likely revealing the crack of his ass at the back of the hospital gown.

  “Yeah? Let’s have a look at that wrist bracelet.”

  Durand noticed the hospital patient bracelet on his right wrist for the first time. “It’s a printed bracelet.”

  “Could still work to get meds.”

  “Meds?” Durand looked at it and saw the name Marcus Wyckes printed on it along with computer codes. He had literally been wearing a name tag this entire time. He tried to pull it off, but the material was tough.

  “I’ll cut it off ya.”

  Durand felt anger rising in him—as if he hadn’t had a bad enough day, now he was dealing with these two scavengers. They appeared well used to preying on loners.

  “Don’t seem interested in the printers, do ya?”

  The other one snorted. “Doesn’t look like an addict.”

  The first nodded. “Right. So watcha doin’ down here, mate?”

  Durand studied both men. He was half a head taller than both.

  “Looks like you got in one hell of a fight.”

  The other laughed. “And lost.”

  “Right?” The first chuckled as he rolled a curving, clawlike knife in his hand.

  Durand felt an unfamiliar calm again as adrenaline flowed. He felt focused. Clear-headed. This was not how he usually felt in life-threatening situations. “I just want to be left alone. I don’t have anything.”

  “Let’s see the bracelet, sweetheart.” He motioned with the knife. “You turn around. Hands on your head, yeah?”

  Durand shook his head slowly.

  “We’re not askin’, mate.”

  They rushed Durand, the second man raising his foot-long pipe as he came in.

  Durand felt oddly detached from fear as he rushed toward the second man fast enough to get inside the arc of his swing. He grabbed the man’s wrist and kneed him in the groin—then pulled him in front of the oncoming man with the knife.

  Durand twisted the pipe out of the second man’s grip and pushed him toward his knife-wielding partner—who pulled back out of range as his friend collapsed, groaning in pain.

  “You’re proper fucked now, mate!” The first man lunged forward with the knife, slashing.

  Durand ducked back, raised the steel pipe—then hurled it at the man’s face, connecting with a resounding CRACK. He followed it in.

  Durand rained haymakers to the man’s head, stomach, and ribs. The knife fell to the ground as the guy collapsed. Durand grabbed the pipe from the floor of the tunnel and continued beating the man with it—a soggy ringing sound echoing in the tunnel.

  “Happy now?” Durand panted heavily as he turned the man over, raising the pipe again.

  The sound of gasping and shoes sliding on concrete behind him. Durand turned to see the second scavenger trying to get to his feet.

  “Aaaahhh!” Durand raced after the man before he could even fully stand.

  “No! Wait!”

  Durand struck him in the stomach, and then continued beating him until he collapsed—then still continued beating him.

  “I just wanted to be left alone!”

  After a few more blows, Durand tossed the pipe to the ground, where it clattered and rolled across the tunnel floor. He stood panting, and then turned around to see the eyes of gaunt addicts in the semidarkness.

  He pointed at them. “If any of you fucking get near me, I won’t be as kind.”

  The reflected light on those eyes disappeared, and he heard people pull farther into side tunnels.

  Durand caught his breath and looked down at the motionless bodies in the glow of light sticks. The men were crumpled and bloodied but breathing. As his own pulse slowed, Durand could barely believe what he’d done. He’d just badly injured two men, beating them into unconsciousness.

  He’d been schooled in hand-to-hand combat at the Naval Academy. And he’d taken the odd karate and jujitsu course. But it had always been theoretical up until now. He hadn’t had a real hand-to-hand fight since high school. And never with an actual enemy.

  He examined his thick, bloodied hands. The tattoos had reappeared along his forearms.

  Then it occurred to him that there must be police informants all over the drug printing markets. How could he have been so stupid? Junkies were among the most pliant of informants. Soon this place might be crawling with police.

 
He had to keep moving. He didn’t have the luxury to dwell on this. He started rifling through the first man’s overlarge camouflage jacket. He found a vape pen case and several blister paks with custom drug process codes on it. These he tossed aside.

  He heard the man groan.

  Durand pulled a cheap phablet from the guy’s inside pocket. A thin film device. Common with drug users and low-level criminals. Prepaid. Solar-charged batteries. A couple millimeters thick at least.

  In other words: obsolete crap. It would still be useful, but if either of these men spoke to police, they’d be able to track this device. Durand tossed it into the nearby puddle of water.

  What Durand needed most was clothes. He pulled the hospital gown off and dropped it at his feet. Feeling vulnerable in his nudity, Durand stripped the shapeless sweatpants and gray hoodie from the larger of the two men and put them on. He also slipped on the man’s overlarge camouflage jacket. It was tight in the shoulders, but it would work.

  He then grabbed the second man’s well-worn military boots. These were uncomfortably small, but they were infinitely better than bare feet.

  Now clothed, Durand searched amid the trash for the fallen knife. He saw it lying in a puddle of brackish water.

  Picking it up, he could see it was a grown knife—probably a keratin-silica hybrid from some vat in Thailand or Vietnam. Highly illegal in Singapore. Nonmetallic and thus difficult to detect on scanners. He squeezed the handle where it felt soft, and the blade retracted like a cat’s claw into the handle. He squeezed it again, and the blade reappeared. It felt organic, like some hunter’s souvenir from a big game hunt. He retracted the blade again and stored the knife in his jacket.

  It was a felony to carry a concealed weapon in Singapore, but that was the least of his supposed crimes. And he guessed these men would have friends.

  Durand then rifled through the second man’s pockets. He found another thin-film phablet device, but also a dozen or more bitrings in a plastic pouch—probably stolen. These were disposable cryptocurrency devices popular with undocumented migrants, itinerants, and synth addicts. They served as wireless wallets for small amounts of digital money. They typically required physical contact between a terminal or another bitring to transfer funds—and were usually tethered to a parent device for loading money or setting up transactions. Bitrings were no safer than carrying cash really but were never loaded with much. It certainly beat connecting your main device to a potentially malware-infested point-of-sale terminal. And they were easily concealed by junkies.

  The only question was what type of currency was on them. There were a dozen popular blockchain cryptocurrencies now—ChiCoin, ThaiCoin, Biocoin, SinCoin—most linked to a central banking authority. Cryptocurrency providers had concluded in the early 2020s that it was better to sell blockchain software solutions to central banks than to enter the heavily regulated banking industry on their own. More libertarian-minded flavors, like Biocoin, still existed (named because it used cell division and mutation inside a bioreactor as a calculation engine to unlock coins, while simultaneously generating intrinsically valuable biomass). But whatever money was on them should work.

  One of the men groaned again.

  Durand decided he’d figure the rings out later. Right now Durand had to be anywhere but here. He headed off down the tunnels, moving past more homeless camps and dozing addicts clustered in twos and threes. Those awake watched him warily, but avoided his menacing stare.

  Durand collected several light sticks from the tunnel floor as he walked and held them up as a torch. Looking down a darkened side tunnel, he decided to follow it, going deeper into the maze beneath the city. He wondered how far the tunnels stretched.

  After walking several minutes, turning down occasional side tunnels, Durand spotted the glow of two phablet screens in the shadows ahead. He continued warily and the glow suddenly disappeared.

  Durand put his hand on the knife in his pocket and held up the light sticks. “I know you’re there. I don’t want trouble. I’m just passing through.”

  He proceeded and soon he could see two outlines in the semidarkness. Passing by them in the tunnel, he could see they were young Burmese or Thai men clad in cheap printed clothes—both of them thin and clearly nervous. One of them held a piece of steel rebar.

  Durand studied them. “Either of you speak English? Nĭ huì shuō pŭtōnghuà ma?”

  The men turned to each other uncertainly.

  Durand raised the bag containing the bitrings. “I want to buy one of those phablets.” He pointed at the phablet still in one man’s hand. “I’ll pay. Wŏ huì fù.”

  The man on the left said simply, “How much?”

  Durand reached into the bag and fished out a bitring at random. He tossed it over.

  The man caught the bitring warily, and then touched it to one he wore—he then consulted his phablet screen. He shook his head. “No good. Much more.”

  Durand tossed another one. “That’s what I’ve got.” It wasn’t, but he hoped it was enough.

  The man checked this ring like the first, then looked at his companion. They both seemed either pleased or offended. It was hard to tell which.

  The second man nodded. He tossed the cheap phablet over to Durand, who caught it without dropping the light sticks.

  “You go now!” The man raised the rebar menacingly.

  Durand nodded and continued down the tunnel, glancing behind him to see that the glow of their remaining phablet had returned. He also thought he could hear gleeful laughter.

  Okay, maybe they got a deal. But he got what he needed, too: access to the Net.

  • • •

  After twenty minutes of walking, and taking several more turns, Durand entered a small chamber that bore evidence of past human habitation—plastic tarps, spent light sticks, excrement, and trash. But nothing recent from the look of it. A small pool of brackish water occupied the center of the chamber. Small drainage pipes fed into the room from two walls, but the tunnel continued through the far wall. He had a means of escape if someone came from either direction.

  Durand tossed the light sticks onto the floor and then dropped onto a fiber pallet next to the pool of dirty water. He felt his exhaustion coming on him in waves.

  He caught sight of a stranger’s face reflected in the puddle’s surface next to him. He gasped and reached for the knife—but then stopped.

  It was his own reflection again.

  The surreal nature of his situation hit home.

  The Eurasian face staring back at him was bruised. Square-jawed and thick-necked. His bald head scratched and cut. His dark brown eyes intense.

  Who was this? Was it really Wyckes?

  Durand felt more bereft than he had ever felt. Even worse than the night his father died, back when he was in high school—and he had to grow up so suddenly. No, this . . . He didn’t even know what this sensation was. Utter loss. The death of himself.

  How was this possible? It seemed like just last night that he’d been reading to Mia. But that was weeks ago now.

  The magnitude of all he’d lost became clear. Mourning gripped Durand. Examining his own thick-fingered hands again, he began to weep. Everywhere he turned made him feel more lost. Could he even convince his wife and child who he was? How could he ever get back?

  Durand wept for an unknown time, teetering on the edge of insanity as he gazed at the bruised and beaten stranger in the water’s surface.

  There was no getting back.

  Images of his wife and daughter came to his mind. But they now soothed him. They would know him. He was sure of it. He could convince them.

  And then something occurred to Durand: he was still himself.

  His mind was unchanged. His body and face might have changed, but he was still himself inside. So his brain hadn’t been altered. Was it the blood-brain barrier?

  This co
mforted him. There was a limit to the transformation.

  Durand took a deep, calming breath, then looked down into the pool of water at the stranger’s reflection. The analyst inside him wondered.

  How was it done?

  And more importantly:

  Why was it done?

  Someone had somehow edited his genomic sequence—trillions of living cells, each edited in hundreds of ways. CRISPR edits on an unimaginable scale. Edits on an embryo were one thing, but edits to a living, complex organism? This was light-years different. The human body had evolved over millions of years to resist invaders. Attempts to change DNA—say, by a viral infection—were quickly detected by RNA within the body, the invaders destroyed. If a virus somehow managed to make edits, these wouldn’t match the DNA template in the cell’s nucleus—and if enough changes occurred, the cell would effectively commit suicide in a last-ditch effort to protect the rest of the organism.

  No, humans—and life in general—had evolved serious genetic security. That’s what made biology so robust as a manufacturing platform. If you tried to break it, it resisted.

  So how had they done it?

  Durand examined his bruised arms and neck. He recalled that when he awoke the doctor said the swelling had only just receded—that he had whole-body swelling and bruising while he was in the coma.

  His body trying to fight something off.

  Edits.

  His body must have been trying to resist massive, contemporaneous edits.

  Dear god.

  Someone had really figured it out. They’d figured out how to edit the living.

  Durand sat back and contemplated this. If that was true—and he had firsthand evidence that it was—then it had major implications, not just for Durand but for all of humanity. For the future of life on earth.

  Anything could be changed now. By comparison, embryo edits were child’s play.

  Durand looked closer at his reflection in the water. Even the bones of his face and jaw had changed. He opened his mouth. His teeth had been slightly altered as well. DNA was the cornerstone of criminal forensics. Of legal identity itself. If you couldn’t rely on DNA staying the same, how could you hold anyone responsible for anything?