Change Agent

  The Thai kid clambered away from the Filipino second mate—who himself was trying to get out from under the portly businessman. Blood stained the white upholstery and decking.

  The second mate crawled free of the dead businessman just as Durand reached him—and they all lost contact with the deck as the boat impacted another wave.

  They landed on the deck hard, and both Durand’s knife and the Skorpion fell away. The macaque screeched somewhere. Durand grabbed the second mate’s arm.

  But the Filipino drew a knife from his own belt and tried to stab Durand in the chest. Durand’s new reflexes surprised him—his hand shot out and twisted the mate’s wrist. The knife clattered to the deck. Durand head-butted him. They both rolled kicking and punching each other, tumbling over the businessman’s body.

  Multiple searchlights were on them now. Loudspeaker voices shouted angrily in a foreign language.

  Durand screamed as he pulled the second mate’s head back from behind. He spotted the grown knife rolling past on the deck. He grabbed it—plunging the razor-sharp claw into the second mate’s shoulder blade.

  The second mate screamed, “I fucking kill you! I kill you!”

  Durand repeatedly plunged the knife into the man’s back, feeling the air leaving his punctured lungs. But he kept stabbing. He lost track of how many times.

  Durand felt the strength in this new body. Blood ran down his own nose, and he shoved the body of the second mate onto the deck—then buried the knife in the back of the man’s skull.

  Durand stared at the dead eyes of the Hoklo businessman, who lay unblinking on the carbyne decking, blood washing from side to side over him as the waves rocked the boat.

  The Thai smuggler screamed from somewhere as an ungodly bright searchlight played over the boat from one of the huge container ships. The air was white glare all around them.

  The cigarette boat roared onward, thundering through waves. A dead man at the helm.

  Tracer rounds snapped past.

  Durand pulled the grown knife out of the Filipino’s skull and retracted its keratin blade, stowing it as he grabbed a handrail. He pulled himself toward the pilot seat, holding on as the deck leaped and rolled. The dead pilot’s body shuddered with the impact of each wave, the man’s arms and head flopping forward. Durand reached up and unclipped the pilot’s harness. He shoved the pilot’s body onto the deck, climbing up in his place.

  The blinding light did not waver. Tracers whined over the top of the windshield.

  Without turret-mounted stabilizers, though, the men firing weapons aboard the boats pursuing him were bound to be wildly inaccurate. Still, if they fired enough bullets, they might get a hit.

  Durand strapped himself into the seat, cinching the harness tight. He then turned the wheel slightly one way, and then the other.

  They were almost instantly out of the monster spotlight.

  He had no gauges, maps, or sensors to work with, but the lights of the Hulks behind him were to the south. That meant he knew the direction north. He adjusted his heading.

  Durand screamed in defiance as the searchlights illuminated a series of larger waves looming ahead. The boat caught air and pounded into the water with punishing intensity. He glanced back over his shoulder to see that the boats giving pursuit were not gaining on him. In fact, they were already falling behind.

  The troughs of the waves were getting deeper, and being low-slung, the cigarette boat occasionally dipped below visibility—the searchlights passing over him. No doubt he had a tricky radar signature, too.

  But Durand didn’t let up. He kept the throttle maxed out. He had no idea how much battery power he had left, but he wasn’t going to fail by not pushing with all this machine could do. He needed to get over the horizon before dawn.

  To the east lightning flashed, revealing towering thunderheads again. The wind had been coming from the east, and Durand knew if he could just keep heading north, his pursuers would have to factor in oncoming weather. The typhoons and storms of the South China Sea were getting more powerful every year. Right now that might benefit him.

  Durand looked forward again just in time to see the boat launch off a wave and over a deep trough.

  The sharp carbyne prow of the cigarette boat pierced the next wave at fifty or sixty knots—submerging the boat completely for a moment before it burst out the far side of the wave. A scouring deluge swept through the passenger compartment and nearly sucked Durand out of his harness. Only the transparent aluminum windshield and carbyne hull kept the boat intact. And though he’d momentarily lost half his speed, the motors jetted him forward again, causing the hundreds of gallons of water in the passenger compartment to pour over the stern in a sucking tide.

  Looking back behind him, Durand could see that the bodies and blood were all gone. The luggage was gone, too. Glancing all around the boat, he didn’t see the Thai smuggler or his monkey, either. Everyone was gone.

  The pursuing boats seemed to have disappeared as well.

  Durand reduced throttle by 15 percent, and then tried to get his adrenaline under control. With the reduced speed he would be able to go farther.

  Good.

  Durand focused on the waves ahead, illuminated by occasional flashes of lightning from the east. He tried to forget the young smuggler he’d just swept into the sea. Or the men he’d just killed.

  As he gripped the wheel, he noticed the tattoos on his wet arms fading.

  Chapter 21

  Radheya Desai hummed along to the soaring chorus of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cantata BWV 19. The music resounded through the racks of healthy plants stretching away in both directions. Of course, Desai could have listened on headphones, but then the plants wouldn’t have been able to enjoy it with him. He was convinced that beauty nourished them just as it nourished him.

  While it was true that the cantata was a choral presentation of strife from the Christian Book of Revelation—“And war was begun in heaven, with Michael and his angels fighting the dragon, casting out the old serpent, the Devil”—none of that came across in the joyous music, whose vibrations he believed to be highly beneficial.

  Besides, plants didn’t understand German, and fortunately neither did his Muslim relatives.

  Desai moved slowly along an aisle of aquaponic greenery bathed in indigo light, studying magnified leaves and stalks through his LFP glasses. Each aisle stood twenty racks high on either side. There were a hundred aisles like this on every floor, each a hundred meters long, and eighty floors in total. And that was just one tower. There were five others just like this one.

  But this floor was his to manage as he pleased. His research racks.

  Desai raised his arms, conducting an imaginary chorus as the voices rose in crescendo. This music was such an inspiration to him.

  And as long as Desai delivered for his employers, he was free to make his own hours and his own work. Solitude—something that wasn’t cheap in Singapore.

  Of course, this entire place glowed with purple light. Love of natural sunlight was, he knew, an evolved trait of humanity. But he’d grown to love this perpetual, otherworldly twilight as well. Plants flourished in it.

  Desai read augmented-reality labels that floated in an invisible, private layer in his LFP glasses. The labels identified the plants in front of him: “gRIA396,” “Pu19L,” “R193m”—a nomenclature denoting traits he was modifying. It was his own private language. No one but he needed to understand it. This was his job security.

  Job security.

  He chuckled to himself. That was something he might not need for much longer. He might soon be able to build his own farming towers.

  This in vivo editing technology could revolutionize everything. And he would be among the first to have it—if Frey came through. Durand might even get back to himself. In which case, Desai would have done a good deed. Doing well while doing good. What was wron
g with that?

  And Frey was reasonably trustworthy. Reasonably.

  A nagging doubt clouded Desai’s sunny dream. Frey had better be trustworthy . . .

  Desai paused. No. This was a joyous night. He had a lot to be hopeful for these days.

  Moving down the row, he was suddenly surprised to see—of all things—a gorgeous flowering plant in the aquaponic rack. It stood out like an angel against the greens and browns of his other agricultural varieties.

  “Hello, my lovely . . .”

  He moved down to it. It was exceptional—morphologically a cross between a rose and a white lily. But more intricate. Its petals were iridescent.

  It was breathtakingly gorgeous. What on earth was it doing in his research racks? Desai read the AR label floating over it, but frowned as he saw “Ub082A”—Araucarian, which this clearly was not. Clerical error? Did he accidentally cross the genomic sequence of a coniferous tree with something in the Lilium genus? If so, the result was a happy accident.

  Perhaps this was his year after all. First encountering in vivo genetic editing, and now stumbling into one of the most beautiful flower designs he’d ever seen.

  He reached out to touch its fragrant petals—and felt a sting in the tip of his finger.

  “Ah!” He drew his finger back and saw blood oozing. He laughed and sucked it for a moment, and then more carefully examined the flower’s stem to see unusually vicious-looking black thorns concealed beneath the petals.

  Okay, that’s a trait that can be removed.

  A sudden feeling of dread stole over Desai—as though he could sense a dark presence.

  A man’s voice behind him said, “Beautiful.”

  Desai spun around to see a man standing a couple meters behind him—blocking the aisle and the way back to the lab.

  The man wore a tailored black pin-striped suit and a blue pastel tie with a precise double-Windsor knot. The stranger looked to be ethnically Slavic-Mongolian or perhaps Inuit, with a broad face yet fair skin. His black hair was slicked back. He stared at Desai with the unliving eyes of a doll.

  The chorus of the cantata swelled again.

  Then the man’s hands rolled in time with the music, and he closed his dead eyes in contentment. “What is this called?”

  Fear radiated through Desai. He made a single hand gesture that ended the beautiful music. In the sudden silence Desai’s heart pounded in his chest.

  The man’s doll’s eyes opened again—his contented expression gone.

  Desai struggled to speak. “Who are you?”

  The man reached toward him.

  Desai sucked in a breath.

  But instead of touching Desai, the man reached for the beautiful flower, brushing its petals. “The thorns are deadly.” He spoke English with an undefined accent.

  The man then plucked the flower and brought it to his nose. “But the pollen is far worse. The merest touch brings death.”

  Desai gasped.

  The man held the flower against the light. “Designed specifically to appeal to the visual cortex of the human brain. Leveraging highly evolved traits of Homo sapiens to make it irresistible.”

  Desai tried to speak but could not. Something about the man before him was wrong. An affront to Nature.

  The man reached into his jacket to produce a book-sized device. He placed it on the nearest shelf, pressed down, and it unfolded into a pylon shape. White light glowed from within as it booted up.

  Desai managed to croak out, “What do you want?”

  “You may find this interesting . . .”

  Suddenly, a kneeling, pleading Spanish man materialized at Desai’s feet—as lifelike and real as if the man were actually present. But Desai knew it was only a light field beamed into his retinas.

  The apparition pleaded silently to someone offscreen. There was no sound. Only real-as-life imagery. Blood dripped down the man’s forehead in rivulets. From his teeth and nose. From his eyes. He wept and screamed as blisters formed on his skin.

  “The apaxi synbiotoxin breaks down cell walls. Attacks capillaries. And—most important of all—it binds to nerve endings, dissolving them like acid.”

  The virtual kneeling man began to shriek in silence—going insane with agony. He thrashed around uncontrollably. Pulling clumps of hair from his scalp. Pleading for mercy as he sweated blood.

  Desai felt sweat dripping down his own face. He touched his cheek—and his fingertips came back stained red.

  Fear enveloped him. He looked into the dissolving eyes of the silent, shrieking man. He, too, understood.

  “Please . . .”

  “There is an antidote.”

  Desai looked up, clasping his hands—and, yes, fell to his knees. “Please! Please! I beg you!”

  The man folded up the glim, and the dying Spaniard winked out of existence. The man slipped the glim calmly back into his jacket pocket.

  “The antidote, please!” Desai felt blood begin to run from his nose. A burning sensation began in his right arm. He looked up into the stranger’s dead eyes. He was looking at the face of death. He realized that now.

  “You brought him to Johor.”

  “Please, the antidote! I will tell you everything, but please . . .” Burning tingled in his fingertips. “Please!”

  “I have video of you together there.”

  “Please!”

  “Where is he?” The man studied Desai’s increasing terror. “Where is Durand?”

  It felt as though Desai’s fingertips were starting to go through a meat grinder. He shrieked. Blood oozed from under his fingernails.

  The man placed the flower under Desai’s nose—somehow unaffected by it himself.

  Desai wept in terror and pain. “Please! I beg you!”

  “Where is Durand?”

  “Malaysia! Federal Route Three! Headed to Thailand!”

  “Where in Thailand?”

  “Please!” Desai’s sinuses began to burn. “It’s spreading! Help me, please!”

  The man tossed the flower aside and grabbed Desai’s jaw. “Focus! Where is Durand? Details.”

  Desai tried to ignore the expanding agony. Tried to unsee the crimson color spreading beneath his skin. “Over the border. From Kelantan all the way to Pattaya City by truck.”

  “Pattaya City.”

  “Thailand!”

  “What’s in Pattaya City?”

  Desai wept. And then he realized his tears were blood. His terror increased by an order of magnitude.

  “What’s in Pattaya City?”

  “Dr. Bryan Frey! The man we met in Johor!”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s going to bring Durand to meet the Luk Krung—a genediting ring.” His eyes clouded with blood. “Please! The antidote! I will help you find them!”

  “What does Durand want from the Luk Krung?”

  “He wants them to change him back! To change him back into himself!” Desai’s spine began to burn like a tree in a wildfire. “Please! OH GOD! PLEASE! The antidote!”

  The man seemed unmoved. “Is that all you can tell me?”

  “That’s all I know! PLEASE!”

  The man gazed at the racks of plants all around them. “What an abomination life is to me.”

  “PLEASE!”

  He looked down on Desai. “I cannot wait until you are all extinct. You’ve poisoned this world. But your poisons mean nothing to me.”

  The man turned to leave, headed toward the freight elevators.

  “WAIT!” Desai tried to crawl after him, blubbering. He pulled himself along by the plant racks, knocking plants onto the floor and breaking fragile aquaponic lines. As the fire spread within him, he lost control of his muscles. Blood now oozed out from between his pores—every drop of it feeling like acid.

  “PLEASE! PLEASE KIL
L ME! MERCY!”

  It felt as though fire ants were trying to eat their way out of him now. He began to shriek.

  “KILL ME! PLEASE!”

  • • •

  The shrieks followed Otto toward the elevator bank. Singapore was normally a difficult place for him to conduct interrogations—too many witnesses. But this place had the virtue of solitude. And yet it was also infested with old life. He was eager to be clear of it.

  Otto summoned the elevator.

  An incoming encrypted call popped up on his display. As he stepped into the elevator, Otto tapped his LFP glasses to answer. The shrieks receded as the elevator descended. He turned to face a comforting view of the city—the built environment.

  He spoke into the hiss of encryption. “Yes?”

  Wyckes’s voice came to him. “Durand’s DNA just appeared in the trafficking network. I need you to head to the eastern Malaysian coast.”

  Otto remained silent.

  “They tried to bring him to a factory ship, but he escaped. He seems to have killed some traffickers and stolen their boat.”

  Otto stared out at the city lights. “As you, he’s full of surprises.”

  “I’m creating another twin, but it will be weeks. This fool has put my name all over the news. The police pressure is increasing on us everywhere. We need to put an end to this manhunt for Wyckes. I need his body.”

  “I understand.”

  “Bad weather is moving into the southern Gulf—the gangs there can’t send up drone flights. But we must find him.”

  “We don’t have to find him if we know exactly where he’s headed.”

  There was a brief pause. “Where?”

  “To the Luk Krung.”

  Only static came over the line. Followed by a rasping laugh. “What would I do without you, Otto?”

  Chapter 22

  Inspector Aiyana Marcotte had always been curious about the interior of these urban farming towers. They were appearing in more cities around the world, and had an appealing, earthy look.