“Good.” Wyckes smiled, closing his eyes in relief. “I knew I could count on you, Otto. You know there is no one I trust more in this entire doomed world than you.”
Otto stood, and with a nod, he headed for the elevator.
Chapter 15
The junkie’s phablet was cheap, Tanzanian-made shit. And Kenneth Durand wasn’t used to tapping at a physical screen as he walked. AR light field displays were a much more natural way to interact with information. But then nonretinal displays had huge advantages to criminals (which Durand now technically was); they couldn’t easily rat you out.
Durand had been walking for several kilometers down a long drainage channel, headed northward. Holding up the phablet screen and comparing his location to a city map, he turned down the next side tunnel and edged around motion sensors, lowering his head as he passed a camera.
These, too, appeared to be out of commission. It was obvious that the criminal element moving about the tunnel system beneath the city regularly broke the devices and sabotaged locked entry gates—although the locks were disguised to appear intact. Durand was surprised the SPF tolerated this. He remembered all the security data being fed into his systems from Singapore officials, and he wondered to what degree any of it was true. He found it hard to believe that Singapore would tolerate malfunctioning motion sensors and bent gates in a drainage channel going out to the Strait—allowing passage by random people unchecked. How could they permit junkies and transients to wander across the city unobserved via the drainage channels?
He wondered if this was a state of affairs Michael Yi would recognize. Had the SPF relegated security to informers among the junkie population? Had they come to terms with criminal gangs to keep an eye out for terrorists moving through? Human intelligence was something streets cops infinitely preferred to IoT data.
Durand was starting to realize they might have a point.
He passed by a couple of Filipino teens strutting to Thai retro-funk. The music echoed confidently in the tunnel, but the young men turned their music down and moved warily around Durand on the far side of the tunnel as he glared at them. They looked petrified. Urban explorers? Future synth addicts? Difficult to say.
Durand made sure the teens didn’t double-back on him, and then, referencing the phablet map again, he turned down a side passage that ended in a steel gate with a thick lock built into it and menacing-looking alarms. Beyond it, he could see MRT rails and diamond-plate stairs. He pushed against the locked gate, and it came open, as the previous ones had—maximum-security appearance notwithstanding.
In a moment, Durand moved up the maintenance stairs and found himself walking on a catwalk alongside an MRT subway track. Up ahead there was another gate, and he could see bright lighting with commuters and transit police moving on a station platform.
There would be working cameras here, so he inserted phablet-linked earphones, tossed the camouflage jacket, and pulled up the hoodie on his sweatshirt. He then flipped his phablet screen to anime he’d found in its library—no doubt torrented. He turned the volume to zero, then pushed through the maintenance gate and let it close behind him with a bang—as if he didn’t give a damn who saw him.
He moved out onto the subway platform with other commuters, head bobbing to imaginary music as the cartoon titles played.
Woodlands station—his MRT stop. He wasn’t far from home now.
He kept his head down, ostensibly engrossed in the animation as he passed what he knew were numerous surveillance cameras—running real-time facial recognition in a photonic cloud.
But Durand knew more than most people about these systems—knew what they were and were not capable of. He also knew what the algorithms were searching for. Loitering, rapid movements, recognizable weapons—all of these set off alarm bells. So did positive matches for wanted felons—particularly those who’d been headscanned, like he’d been. However, an overreliance on automated systems meant that second-order anomalies weren’t caught; whereas a human might think it odd that someone was wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up on a warm day, algorithms weren’t yet sharp enough to connect those dots—at least not the systems used by MRT security.
Durand also knew it was common for commuters to read and keep to themselves, avoiding eye contact with others as they pushed through the crowd. He tried to recall security conferences where vendors described what type of “suspicious behavior” their algorithms looked for.
Durand headed up the stairs to street level. Two transit police passed by him, and he laughed to an imaginary phone companion, turning away. He was relieved when they paid no attention to him.
Durand reached daylight. It was wonderful to be in fresh air again, partly sunny and in the midseventies. To smell familiar smells. He kept his head down, but activated the phablet’s front-facing camera as a form of periscope—allowing him to look ahead without lifting his face to street-level surveillance cameras. He knew there were camera pods on every sign pole and streetlight in this neighborhood. It had been a selling point actually.
He angled the phablet across Woodlands Terrace road, revealing the six eighty-story towers of the Hanging Gardens complex where he lived, linked at their summit by a ring of greenery. The Woodlands district was popular with expats and biotech folk. The neighborhood was a showroom for the built environment. And its security infrastructure was also constantly searching for trouble.
As he crossed the street, it only just now occurred to Durand that the prior owner of the phablet might have problems that would flag him as trouble to local police. Had the man ever been arrested? Was he a known synth addict?
The analyst in him tried to derive what Singapore’s algorithms might be watching for in his neighborhood. Durand hoped that walking head-down, gazing at a physical device, wasn’t going to make algorithms suspicious of him as a low-rent invader. And yet someone walking facedown could be looking at a map or having a conversation with a child or eating. There would be just too many errors on a typical crowded street to react to them all. It was one of the reasons why automated facial recognition systems were imperfect at best—why so many other data points needed to be cross-referenced to identify people: their phone IDs, the NFC chips in their credit fobs, Bluetooth IDs, and a dozen other technological tracers. IoT data frequently overwhelmed authorities.
None of these currently connected this device to Wyckes—and Wyckes was the one everyone was looking for, hopefully elsewhere (like at the border).
Durand passed by his own building and surreptitiously viewed the lobby through his phablet camera. He could see no additional police presence in front of the building or inside.
This actually made him angry. There should have been a security detail guarding his family.
Though, of course, Interpol had no police powers to provide one. And he’d been missing over a month.
Maybe Miyuki had taken Mia back to her parents’ home in Chicago. He felt a pang of homesickness but also relief at the thought of their being out of harm’s way.
Durand, on the other hand, needed to get into his flat, and precisely how he was going to do it without getting arrested (or, more likely, killed) was an open question.
There was a rear service entrance to his building. He’d cleared the delivery of their new refrigerator through there a year ago. Durand walked purposefully around the block and turned down the side street, passing the building’s service alley. An elevator company service truck was parked some ways down the alley, as were a couple dozen electric scooters—probably from domestic workers. Nannies. Maids. Tradesmen and domestic help went in and out of his building all the time. As he glanced at the service entrance, a young Filipina maid walked out, obviously poking at a virtual screen to catch up on messages.
It occurred to Durand that although his building used biometrics—analyses of face, walk, voice, and a dozen other traits—to recognize flat owners, biometric recognition didn’t actual
ly grant access; it just made the building polite, allowing it to greet tenants by name and make them feel cared for. It was actually a chip in a key fob that granted access to the building. If someone the building did not recognize tried to gain access with a key fob, it would alert human security, but could also still grant access. People had guests all the time, and operationally it was just too difficult to manage all the exceptions.
Plus, biometrics had fallen into disfavor back in the 2020s. Once spoofed by a hacker, they were burned, and an individual couldn’t very well invalidate their own retinas and get new ones (with the sole exception of Durand perhaps). So instead, biometrics were used in combination with revocable credentials—fobs, chips, passcodes, and one-time codes. A whole mix.
Which meant he actually had a way of granting himself access to his building: he could schedule a service call through the concierge console. All residents had an account.
It took him a while to search out the landing page with the phablet—particularly since he wasn’t familiar with older, two-dimensional browsers. His first login attempt failed, but he guessed right on the second try (and confirmed why passwords were so awful from a security point of view). The scheduling screen came up, and he navigated to a grid showing the maid’s schedule. He noticed there was a cat nanny listed as well, arriving daily in the midafternoon. A cat nanny—had Miyuki and Mia indeed headed for the States? Quarantine would have prevented them from taking Nelson, so it made sense.
Durand felt horrible for his daughter. First losing her father, and then parting with her toyger. But then he realized the more time he stood here, the more likely he was to appear suspicious.
Checking the time, Durand noticed the cat nanny’s visit was only a couple of hours from now. He tapped at the physical screen awkwardly but managed to create an appointment for an electrician just a few minutes after the nanny. He typed in a fictitious name.
Roderick Feines.
Good enough. Durand walked a few blocks away on side streets, occasionally stepping aside to use the phablet to search online for uniforms, tools—everything he needed. Singapore was the global capital of same-day drone delivery, and “current location” was always a delivery option. Lots of expats worked out of coffeehouses and cocktail bars these days. Tradesmen on job sites. It shouldn’t raise any red flags, and Durand still had quite a few bitrings on him for payment.
Food!
Durand suddenly realized just how hungry he was. He hadn’t had solid food in over a month. Best to start with liquid nourishment since his digestive system would need time to restart. He checked the time again and then searched for a local juicing kiosk that offered drone delivery.
• • •
A couple hours later, Durand entered through the service entrance at the back of his home building wearing a new work shirt, boots, and work pants and holding an electrician’s toolbox. A brand-new olive drab cap shielded his face from most of the cameras as he looked for his business card.
He nodded to the security guard and signed in. The guard checked to confirm Durand was expected and provided a visitor’s fob that granted access to the floor that had requested him—and only for the scheduled time. The guard absently told Durand to use the service elevator.
In a few moments, Durand was at the fifty-sixth floor. He exited into familiar environs from an unfamiliar direction. The building didn’t bid him good afternoon—and neither did one of his passing neighbors, Raz, an Indian geneticist in his thirties who worked from home. There wasn’t a hint of recognition in the man’s face.
Good.
Durand walked past the door to his own flat without seeing any additional police presence. He then pulled out and studied his phablet diligently—appearing busy.
In a couple of minutes he heard his flat door open behind him. But what he heard next set his heart racing . . .
Miyuki’s voice.
She sounded tired and stressed as she told someone, “The vet information is on the cupboard door. With the food.”
A young woman with a Malay accent answered, “But I need feeding information—”
“I . . . I’m sorry. I can send it to you. I’m not normally this disorganized. I’m sorry.”
Durand turned toward them, still holding the phablet in his hand. He froze as he caught sight of his wife just meters away. Her eyes looked puffy, and he instantly knew she’d been crying. She’d received false hope about her husband just yesterday.
“What do you do?” A little girl’s voice—one Durand would recognize in utter darkness.
Durand looked down at his six-year-old daughter, Mia, staring at him from near her mother. They both pulled rolling luggage behind them.
They were leaving.
Seeing the complete lack of recognition in his own daughter’s eyes, Durand felt further away from them than ever before—even though they were right here in front of him. This was everything he’d been hoping for, but now that he was here—he could not come back to them like this. Not this way.
His daughter gave him a quizzical look.
Durand cleared his throat. “I’m the electrician.”
Mia pointed at him and looked at her mother as she smiled. “Cooool.”
Miyuki looked to the nanny. “We have to go. I will send you a message with all the information.” She glanced down. “Mia, please stop bothering that man. Inspector Belanger is waiting for us.” Miyuki placed a hand on her daughter’s head, and they both moved toward the elevators.
Durand watched them go, on the verge of chasing after them. But to what point? To terrify them? He noticed the hand holding the phablet now bore his tattoo-like markings again. He tugged up his sleeve and saw that they continued up his arm. The deep emotion he felt at this moment had caused them to reappear. This much he now knew. There was a logic to them, then.
He looked up to see his wife and daughter enter the elevator. His daughter stared back. She waved, nearly crushing him.
And then the doors closed.
Durand stood in the corridor alone, only then noticing that the cat nanny had reentered the apartment. Gathering his resolve, he approached his flat door to knock, but just then it reopened. He ducked to the side as the young woman exited. He could hear her music playing in headphones, and she was already engrossed in her LFP glasses as she walked down the corridor, also headed to the elevators.
Durand lunged toward the door, managing to catch the lever handle just before it shut. He then slipped inside.
The alarm was BEEP-BEEPING, but he tapped the disarm code into the keypad—glad that he hadn’t had the old physical interface removed. Durand felt tremendous relief when his own front door latched closed behind him.
He looked around his living room, and then over to his wife’s office, with its glass wall. Her desk was cleared off. The photos on her back wall gone.
The place felt emotionally empty. Glancing into the kitchen, he could see that the photos and 3D-printed models were gone from the refrigerator door as well. There was fresh food and water for the cat, but no other sign of recent habitation.
Miyuki had taken Mia and gone somewhere with Inspector Belanger. Durand was relieved. They hadn’t moved, but clearly they weren’t staying here anymore.
He was glad they were somewhere safe—with someone who loved Mia almost as much as he did. He had to take care of this impossible situation.
He moved through the dining room and past the laundry room. Durand passed by his daughter’s bedroom and nudged the door open.
Her solar system mobile and horse-themed comforter were still in place. But the room was much neater than it normally was. Her desk, too, was immaculate—something that had never happened before.
Durand restored the door to its previous, half-opened position, and then entered his own bedroom. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. The familiar scents brought powerful memories of who he was—of Mi
yuki lying next to him in the darkness.
He turned to see a framed photograph on their bureau dresser—of his real self smiling with his wife and daughter at Hong Kong Disneyland. Durand picked up the photo frame and touched it with alien fingers. He looked up at the strange reflection in his own bedroom mirror. Perhaps the face of the man who had done this to him.
Desperation began to resurface. Was there any hope of getting back? Was he just kidding himself? Kenneth Durand was gone.
He was startled by his daughter’s toyger, Lord Nelson, leaping up onto the bureau dresser. “Nelson . . . you scared the shit out of me.”
Durand slumped in relief as the cat rubbed against his hand, purring loudly. Durand put the photo frame down and picked Nelson up, lifting him to his face while holding him under his forelegs. The toyger bumped his head affectionately against Durand’s nose.
Durand sat down on the edge of the bed, nestling his daughter’s cat close. “Nelson, Nelson.”
There was still some of his original self left to detect apparently. There was still hope. He hugged the cat for the first time and then held him up to look him in the eyes. “Thanks, buddy. I really needed that.”
He gently placed Nelson on the bed.
He had urgent business to attend to here. Durand went to the kitchen and retrieved small, resealable plastic baggies. He then entered the master bathroom and carefully retrieved strands of his own hair from his hairbrush and electric razor—looking especially for strands with the root. He sealed all the individual bags into a larger one.
Lord Nelson sat on the bathroom counter, observing impassively. Durand had never been happier to have the cat’s company. “If I ever complain about you again, go ahead and scratch me.”
Finally leveling a gaze at himself in his large bathroom mirror, Durand sighed deeply. He looked like hell. Aside from being a thuggish stranger, his face was bruised, and taking off his uniform, he could see the second-degree burn on his forearm from the hot cowling of the police drone.