Change Agent Read online

  He gripped the plastic wound around his hands as hard as he could.

  Suddenly Durand’s forearm pressed against a burning hot motor cowling. He screamed in pain and pulled away from it as the drone’s spin reduced—though it was still yawing from side to side. Durand heaved himself up and away from the deafening rotors and toward the center of the drone. The machine veered a bit more, trying to stabilize itself as Durand looked up and out at the world.

  They had already gained altitude and cleared the top of the unfinished tower. It looked like the pilot was edging away from all the surrounding buildings.

  • • •

  In the Singapore Police Operations Control Center, Technical Sergeant Zhang put down his tea and tapped at alert messages on a virtual screen. His LFP glasses gave him a full virtual reality view of the Central Business District—as though he was inside the cockpit of the vehicle. Normally it was a view he relished, but right now he was struggling to keep on a projected flight path as Tail 16 yawed from side to side.

  The software would normally find an optimal, safe route, but his bird was suddenly behaving unpredictably. A series of anomalies had turned his virtual board red.

  “Lieutenant! I seem to have an undefined technical failure on Tail 16.”

  He could hear his commanding officer take a seat and mimic Zhang’s POV with headgear of her own. “Ground fire?”

  “Negative. Engines and avionics are good. Uplink good, but trim is all over the place.”

  Error alerts warbled.

  “I’m having difficulty keeping Tail 16 on the glide path.”

  “Can you land safely?”

  He considered the risks. “Negative. Not in the tight quarters of the CBD.”

  She nodded and spoke into her radio. “AOC, Tail 16 returning to base on a code 3-3-7. Repeat: Tail 16 returning to base on a code 3-3-7.”

  Zhang heard her voice focused back on to him. “Bring 16 back to base via the logistics airway. If you need to ditch, do so over water. Understood?”

  He nodded. “Understood, Lieutenant.”

  • • •

  Durand clung to the deafening police drone. As he felt his adrenaline receding, the true magnitude of noise and vibration on this machine was becoming unbearable. Suddenly the engines increased in tempo, and he looked up to see the two-hundred-story towers around him pulling away.

  Durand lifted his head long enough to see that they were ascending and departing the area. Looking behind and below, Durand could see several other police drones and hundreds of police converging on the half-constructed building.

  He struggled to hold on as his own drone wobbled, then pitched forward, heading across town and toward the north coast.

  The entire city shimmered below and around him. After several minutes of rushing wind, Durand realized the drone pilot was bringing them toward the drone logistics highway that ringed the northern and eastern coasts of the island. They’d dropped considerably in altitude as they turned to merge into it.

  The logistics highway covered a fifty-meter virtual tunnel at roughly 150 meters altitude.

  Durand’s heart leapt into his throat as the drone tilted forward during its descent, causing him to swing around the antenna mast and hang from his hands on the far side. This only accelerated the drone’s downward glide—which the software immediately overcorrected for. Durand got swung around several sides of the aircraft as it yawed this way and that.

  By the time the police drone leveled out, he could see he was surrounded by dozens of commercial drones of all shapes and sizes, soaring over the water just off the coast. The idea was that if any of these machines fell from the sky, they’d be falling on water, not taxpayers’ heads—at least for most of their journey. Plus it was much safer than risking midair collisions over populated city blocks.

  Looking to his right, Durand could see a Domino’s Pizza drone, an Amazon drone, and several FedEx ones as well.

  Gazing back at the coastline, Durand could see Woodlands—the neighborhood he called home. He soon spotted the Hanging Gardens complex, but it receded behind him in the night.

  Rounding south toward Changi Airport, the police drone veered shakily left, away from the logistics highway, descending on a glide path toward a well-lit police aviation islet that Durand knew of. It was roughly a quarter mile off the coast, near the Tekong military island.

  Gazing down now, Durand could see he was about twenty meters off the water and cruising along Singapore’s industrial coastline at seventy, maybe eighty knots. There might not be a better opportunity to jump ship. He could hardly cling to the craft as it landed in the middle of a police base (if it landed without crashing, that is).

  Studying the dark water racing past below, Durand unlooped one hand from the rolled-up tarp, and then—before he could even prepare himself—suddenly slipped off the edge of the drone and into free fall.

  He heard the deafening engines recede—then it felt like somebody hit his entire body with a two-by-four. After several moments insensible, he started clawing instinctively for the surface and burst forth gasping for air and thrashing.

  • • •

  Back in the Police Operations Control Center, Sergeant Zhang reacted in surprise. His entire control board suddenly cleared of anomalies. Normal flight characteristics had resumed.

  He frowned in confusion. “Lieutenant, the malfunction to Tail 16 seems to have cleared. I’m fully operational again.”

  “Return to base just the same. Let’s have the techs check it out just to be on the safe side. Let me know when you’re landed, and we’ll review the black box.”

  “Will do.”

  • • •

  In the water Durand oriented himself and started swimming back toward Singapore. It was only a couple hundred meters away. Exhausted as he was, he was thankful not to be fully dressed. The extra weight of wet clothing might have pulled him under. He glanced back at the police drone. It was landing at the distant base. He couldn’t stay in the open water long. Other drones might spot him.

  The short swim to shore nearly killed him. Several times Durand almost slipped beneath the surface of the water, spitting out salt water. He wondered if his wounds would attract sharks, but then remembered that there were hardly any sharks left. He struggled, alternately kicking with his feet and pulling with one hand against the water.

  By the time the moon had crested the horizon, he tumbled through a mild surf and eventually stumbled out of the water onto a trash- and seaweed-strewn beach dotted with boulders. He crawled on all fours over debris in the darkness, finally reaching a cement seawall that ringed the north coast. He collapsed against it. He was shivering—not something he often did in Singapore. But then the water no doubt was cold—a fact he hadn’t concretely noticed at any point. Durand lay facedown on rotting seaweed and tried to gather the energy to move.

  Parasympathetic backlash was hitting him hard now. He’d been running on adrenaline for the past hour or more. He’d never felt such exhaustion. Durand couldn’t even turn himself over. Instead, his consciousness drifted away.

  Chapter 12

  Durand’s mind snapped back into focus as he felt hands rummaging over him. Then somebody turned him over.

  “Hey!” Durand shouted, as he got to his feet and grabbed at a thin, old Chinese man. “What the hell are you doing?” His voice sounded less hoarse now. Deeper.

  The elderly man backed away. Durand saw the man clearly in the moonlight.

  Not an old man—just an emaciated guy in his thirties in a threadbare sleeveless vest and shorts. Tattoos of molecular diagrams covered his sinewy arms.

  A synth addict.

  Durand, wide-awake now, watched the man back away in fear, and in that moment it all came back to him. He examined his own thick-fingered hands and beefy forearms.

  He was another person. Still.

  H
e glanced up at the thin sliver of moon—a dozen degrees higher into the sky than when he’d come ashore. He’d been out cold for at least an hour.

  Looking past the retreating junkie in the semidarkness, Durand could see more figures moving along the base of a seawall, along the coastline.

  He turned around and realized he was near an industrial road traversed by autonomous semitrucks leaving automated container yards. Facing back toward the junkies again, he could see in the moonlight where the beach ended a few hundred meters beyond. It wasn’t apparent where the junkies were heading, except maybe to drown themselves in the Johor Strait.

  Durand ducked down as a police drone roared past not far away. He saw that it was heading toward the police aviation facility just off the coast. Gazing back at the skyscrapers of Singapore, he could see more police drones in the sky—their searchlights stabbing down. The search for him wasn’t over yet.

  He started carefully stepping across the rocky, trash-strewn beach in his bare feet, following the junkies. As he proceeded, Durand saw a circular opening in the seawall ahead. He noticed the Chinese junkie glance back at him with concern before disappearing into the opening.

  Durand continued toward what soon resolved to a drainage tunnel—capped at its end by a series of galvanized steel bars, bent to permit people to squeeze through.

  Around the edge of the opening, Durand could see broken motion sensors and proximity lights. The entire area had been wired for security at some point, but apparently that was just on paper now. He made a mental note to pass this intel along to the Singapore Police Force.

  As he peered into the darkness, Durand could see soft light in the tunnel ahead. He could also hear music thumping.

  Music?

  He moved cautiously forward and felt plastic crunching underfoot. Kneeling down, Durand could see bubble paks strewn across the sand in the moonlight.

  Drug printing.

  It made sense. He’d always wondered where in the hell on the island this happened. Drug smuggling was a thing of the past in most countries now—not because of any great advances in drug treatment or human nature but because of synthetic biology. Just as algae, yeast, and bacteria were being custom designed to grow food, chemicals, and products—so, too, were they being harnessed to synthesize narcotics.

  No need to store or ship large quantities of drugs. No need to smuggle. Synthetic opioids a hundred times more powerful and pure than organic heroin could be synthesized from a surprising list of mundane, common-use ingredients. All you needed was the right genetically designed organism—one that consumed sugar or iodine or any number of substances to produce a pure molecular narcotic. Nearly impossible to stop. Nearly impossible to police. Also far more deadly.

  And that’s where the drug printers came in.

  Durand entered the tunnel and began moving toward a distant light. He stepped carefully to avoid cutting his feet on glass or rocks, crunching across trash. He passed alcoves where rail-thin shadows of people hovered, their crazed eyes catching a glint of reflected moonlight as they watched Durand pass.

  For a place to hide from the police, he could do worse than here. Invisible from the air, it already existed in defiance of the law—and in Singapore that was no mean feat. Durand was surprised he’d never heard a whisper about this place’s existence. But then again, he wasn’t really a cop. Not like Michael was.

  It did seem odd that authorities would let a coastal industrial drainage tunnel go open and unmonitored. Wasn’t there a risk of bioterrorists using this tunnel? As a data scientist, he was always shocked at how little of reality seemed to be modeled in the data—Internet of Things be damned. This place shouldn’t exist. And yet here it was.

  After traveling a hundred meters in darkness, Durand came to an intersection of three tunnels marked by bioluminescent light sticks. Green and blue and yellow light sticks formed an arrow leading down the center tunnel. The festive lights illuminated people rolling on the edge of darkness in the side passages. Shadows moaning. A grinning man with a bald head with wires inserted into drill holes at his temples leaned into the light, watching Durand pass. He laughed maniacally as he reached out to touch Durand.

  Durand batted the man’s hands away. “Off!” Durand had heard of biohackers who electrically stimulated the pleasure center of their brain. Stim addicts. Wireheads. They usually starved if the surgery was successful. For every one of them who’d suffered an unendurable loss that made them pursue the wire, there were others who were just pleasure addicts. Once the wire was in place, the motive made little difference.

  Durand moved deeper into the tunnel. The music grew louder—cacophonous, disjointed, and thudding. Laser lights flashed ahead. He soon entered a chamber thirty meters or so in diameter and five meters high, all smooth concrete. It was a junction for several tunnels radiating outward. Dozens of people languished in the preternatural twilight of light sticks, some trance-dancing alone in their own worlds, others staring into space at the margins. No one seemed to be talking.

  A thin man wearing glowing lipstick approached Durand. “Blow job, baby?”

  Durand shook his head, moving past into the crowd. He could see the dealers wearing LFP glasses, while the junkies carried cheap flexible phablets. Gazing around in the semidarkness, Durand saw glowing screens—actual physical screens. But it figured. After all, any junkie who’d had an expensive light field device had probably already sold it for drug money.

  Instead all around him were cheap-shit, thin film screens. Addicts laughing as they watched movies and TV shows. Porn. Played games. No photonics in here, he guessed. Just old-school silicon.

  Durand passed along a line of dealers. As he watched, an emaciated junkie pointed out a tattoo of a molecular model on his left arm to a drug printer. The dealer scanned it under the bioluminescent light, and a moment later the molecule appeared on a disposable phablet screen—ready for synthesis somewhere nearby.

  He’d never actually seen this in person—only read about it. Custom highs were the drug business now. Your drug was synthesized as you ordered it—specialized just for your DNA, to create the perfect high. To gauge the precise dose, to avoid death. At maximum purity.

  Buyers had to have their genome analyzed only once—a free service from dealers, of course. Genomic analysis software could compute the perfect drug structures for that person. A tiny change to a molecule here or there went a long way, kicking the high up to the next level. And what better way for dealers to write down your preferences than on your own skin? Something that wasn’t going to get pawned off or stolen when you were stoned out of your mind. Tattoos were forever. Another free service of the printers.

  Light flashed and another drug printer scanned another tattoo. Within ten or fifteen minutes, the junkie could have a small hit of his choice drug produced somewhere in these tunnels and transported straight here by drone.

  It didn’t take much to get high these days. Just a few milligrams would knock you on your ass for hours. Any more could kill you. But then, drug printers knew the precise dose their customers could handle. Big data had entered the black market, and the drug printers knew more about their customers than social media companies knew about theirs. The printers also knew dead customers weren’t repeat customers.

  By now some of the synth addicts had taken notice of Durand, backing away warily as Durand passed through. He still had bloodstains on his wet hospital gown and looked like an escaped lunatic even among the clientele here.

  • • •

  Sofyan Taniwan monitored his synth dealers with one eye and the Gujarat Lions cricket match with the other. He had serious money riding on both. The virtual screen created by his LFP glasses could have filled his vision, but as a pudgy, diminutive man he needed to keep at least one wary eye out while inside the Drain—the slang term for Singapore’s underground drug printing market. The place certainly drained the detritus out of Singapore, h
uman and otherwise.

  Taniwan raised his fist and stifled a shout as the inimitable McAllister shipped in with his fifty-third run on the video inset, making the spread. Taniwan smiled briefly before erasing his emotion. It never paid to express emotion among the losers spiraling through the Drain. Emotion was a tell, and tells could be exploited. But he had just won a substantial wager.

  Just then Taniwan focused his left eye beyond his dealers, onto a thuggish, thick-necked Eurasian man wearing—of all things—a hospital gown. He’d seen all types in the Drain. People escaped from rehab clinics. The rich. The poor. But they had a gaunt, zombified look about them. You could see the hunger in their eyes. This man, though, looked like the opposite of a synth addict. In fact, he looked like trouble, and if anything had earned Taniwan the trust of his bosses, it was his nose for trouble.

  Taniwan reluctantly dismissed the virtual cricket screen with a gesture and focused both eyes on the man, who was now passing by his dealers with the gawping air of a tourist in the bad part of town. And yet somehow this man looked like he brought the bad part of town with him wherever he went. Something was amiss here. What resembled bloodstains spattered the man’s hospital smock. Taniwan was willing to bet it wasn’t this man’s blood, either.

  Taniwan moved his hands with subtlety, so as not to attract undue attention, bringing up his gang’s facial recognition app (like any business, they kept track of their customers—especially the troublemakers). This sort of thing could readily be misunderstood here in the Drain. It was a poorly kept secret that the drug printing labs were tolerated by the SPF; they kept the synth addict problem out of the public eye, and no doubt greased a few palms as well. However, being a police informant was part of the deal.

  The positive match was almost immediate, and the man’s virtual, closed-eye 3D headscan and name soon rotated before Taniwan. Taniwan did not like what he saw—not one bit . . .