Change Agent

  The tactical officer grabbed him by the hospital gown, dragging him forward. Durand felt a gun barrel shoved into his ribs. “On your feet!”

  Durand stumbled, at first barely able to walk after weeks on his back. But adrenaline flowed through his system. He found reserves of strength he didn’t think he had as he glanced back to see blood spreading across the floor of the open elevator. He limped forward.

  “Move!” The tactical officer practically dragged him up a short flight of concrete steps. At the top, he kicked open a fire door.

  Fire alarms immediately squealed. Strobe lights flashed.

  The tactical officer shoved Durand out into the darkness beyond. Durand tumbled onto pavement, pain blinding him for several moments.

  But then Durand rolled over to see the metal fire door swing slowly closed as the tactical officer spoke into his shoulder radio. “Officers down! Officers down! The prisoner escaped—he has a weapon!”

  The steel door slammed shut, muffling the fire alarm and leaving Durand on a concrete sidewalk behind the hospital amid the humidity of a tropical night. There was no door handle on this side.

  Durand got shakily to his bare feet and tore at the Velcro fasteners of the muzzle—finally pulling it off.

  “Fuck!”

  What the hell is happening?

  This nightmare refused to end. His mind raced as he tried to understand. But then he heard police sirens over the muted fire alarm. Lots of sirens.

  If this was real, then two police officers had just been murdered. In a city that often went years without a single officer fatality, that was going to result in a massive manhunt. And he was clearly supposed to take the blame.

  But why? Wasn’t he already headed to prison as Wyckes? It dawned on Durand that now he wasn’t likely to survive long enough to reach prison.

  Durand gazed out at the skyline of downtown Singapore towering around him, at autonomous vehicle traffic, bright street lights. The navigation strobes of drones flitting about on delivery runs. He tried to get his bearings, but without LFP glasses, he realized, he wasn’t as familiar with the Central Business District as he had believed. Hell, he didn’t even have shoes. All he was wearing was a blood-spattered hospital gown with his ass hanging out—blood spattered his bare arms and legs, too.

  The sirens drew closer.

  Durand chose a random direction and fled into the evening streets. It hardly mattered which way he went since there were cameras everywhere.

  Chapter 11

  Durand clambered through a hedge line and crossed onto a three-lane road busy with autonomous cars and buses. He waved his arms and the autonomous vehicles lurched to a stop—as he knew their algorithms required. Comcar passengers shouted at him to get out of the road.

  “What, you crazy?”

  Durand could see nightsun searchlights already stabbing down from approaching aircraft in the distance. Strobing police lights passed on nearby blocks. Sirens grew louder.

  Durand’s bare feet slapped across the pavement, moving toward crowds of people—toward restaurants and cafés on the next block—and deeper into the Central Business District. He loped along, wind kicking up his hospital gown—his near nudity making him feel even more vulnerable.

  Hallucinations be damned; he was propelled by instinct now. How all this had happened wasn’t clear, but if he wasn’t brain damaged and imagining all this, a police officer had just set him up. Set him up and reported him as an armed escapee who had already killed two cops. With that added to the other heinous crimes committed by Wyckes, he had no doubt the Singapore police would shoot on sight. They’d have to assume he was a clear and present danger to the public.

  As futile as it felt, Durand ran. He needed time. Time to figure out who to talk to. There had to be a way to straighten this out. But he had to reach friends to do that.

  Durand glanced up at Ping-Pong-ball-sized surveillance cameras on every light pole. Facial detection would make short work of finding him. How long would it take to load his likeness into the SPF surveillance system? Minutes?

  Pedestrians stared at his bloody hospital gown as he passed by.

  Durand wiped blood off his face and arms. More passersby gazed after him and shouted in alarm as he fast-walked past. He hoped that he looked like a runaway surgical patient.

  As he rounded a corner, Durand noticed autonomous vehicles up the block turning away en masse—avoiding the area. A synthetic voice spoke from a passing car as its windows automatically rolled up, “Rerouting vehicle. Police activity, this area . . .”

  “Shit . . .” He was beginning to realize the foolishness of all this. Running would not help him escape. At most it could buy a few minutes. Yet a few minutes might help him find an answer.

  The roadways rapidly emptied of autonomous cars as sirens surrounded the area. Durand moved more calmly now as he tried to slow his breathing. He passed cafés and bistros lively with a dinner crowd. A discordant alarm tone sounded on every device in his vicinity. A synthesized voice announced, “Alert: police activity in your immediate area. Be on the lookout for this suspect . . .”

  Durand noticed people glancing up at virtual screens he could not see. Others were gazing up at the sides of buildings, where he suspected the normal AR ad rotation had been replaced by his likeness displayed forty stories high.

  The same voice echoed on dozens of devices as he walked. “. . . do not approach. Suspect is armed and extremely dangerous.”

  Durand noticed his new strange face filling a lone physical screen still active over a nearby bar. His image was bordered in red and marked “Extremely Dangerous.”

  While looking through the glass, Durand suddenly focused on a stranger’s reflection staring back at him—a brooding scowl. An intimidating visage.

  He raised powerful hands to the window—the reflection moving to meet him. It was him. He could feel horror gripping him again, his heart pounding. This was him. It really was him.

  And even as he watched, on his forearms the lines began again to draw themselves across his bruised skin—like something floating up from the deep. Within seconds he had a full complement of black, red, and green Thai or Malay letters, Chinese characters, as well as images of a nine-tailed fox on his left biceps, a trefoil knot on his right. Another tattoo of Asian script on the left side of his neck, and more running across his scalp. He was as menacing a character as he’d ever seen on an international arrest warrant.

  It had to be an LFP projection—a virtual trick. He shielded his eyes with his hand—protecting against an unseen LFP projector, but the tattoos did not disappear.

  Someone shouted, and Durand turned back to the street to see someone pointing at him from a café.

  The synthetic voice could be heard all around him: “. . . if you see this suspect, alert police immediately. Use the hashtag ME9_PURSUIT. Repeat: hashtag ME9_PURSUIT.”

  Others pointed at him. There were shouts of fear as the patrons of cafés and restaurants moved away from him, even as they turned their LFP glasses and thumbcams onto Durand. Pedestrians ahead on the sidewalk dodged out of Durand’s way and collectively started filming him as they crossed the now empty roadway.

  Durand turned and walked briskly in the opposite direction—only to be met with more pointing people and more thumbcams. He glanced up to see searchlights of approaching police drones weaving between two-hundred-story skyscrapers—en route to his location. The roar of racing police cars and sirens converging.

  Dozens of people filmed him from all angles. He knew what was about to happen; crowd-sourced policing was kicking into action.

  “Great. The system works . . .”

  • • •

  In the Singapore Police Force Operations Control Center on Ketam Island, technical officers tracked dozens of virtual objects in their light field projection glasses—manipulating their perspective with gloved hands.
r />   Already the ME9_PURSUIT hashtag was trending in local social media, and video streams were pouring in—pinpointing the suspect’s location with a hundred different feeds.

  Police software immediately identified the hashtagged video, pulled it from public streams, and stitched it together into a live 3D video feed of Durand’s chase from constantly shifting civilian perspectives.

  The officers gazed down on the live 3D projection and highlighted Durand in the shot. The system tracked his movements from there on. The police had him zeroed in.

  “All units, positive identification on Marcus Wyckes moving eastbound on foot along Orchard Road.”

  • • •

  Durand noticed more people holding up thumbcams on the sidewalks ahead—the entire city bearing witness, triangulating him. This was about to go very badly.

  He fled the sidewalk, clambering over a wooden construction-site security wall painted with utopian visions of the multihundred-story office tower to come. At present beyond the fence was a fifty-story maze of exposed girders and decking, lit up at intervals by laser sintering robots that were printing the carbon lattice girders as they went. Work carried on around the clock.

  Durand hit the ground on the other side, skinning his knees. He carefully navigated in bare feet across rock-strewn soil and onto the concrete foundation. Sintering flashes stabbed at Durand’s eyes, and sparks sprayed downward on him from above.

  Directed by civilian camera streams, truck-sized police quadcopter drones roared overhead, converging on the construction site—blinding nightsun lights stabbed down, bathing him in white light. A thunderous voice shouted from loudspeakers, “Marcus Wyckes, stop where you are and place your hands over your head immediately!”

  Durand fled between robotic construction machinery as a dozen police cars arrived beyond the perimeter fence on all sides of the construction site. He jumped onto another inner security fence, climbing up and over it with surprising ease. He was amazed at what the human body was capable of under circumstances of life and death. He couldn’t believe he was standing upright, much less fleeing.

  Fleeing to where? was the question.

  Durand could see body-armor-clad tactical police units streaming out of a truck as it pulled up. They looked ready to deal with a terrorist attack.

  Durand fled beneath the decking of the unfinished office tower, moving up an open stairwell. He triggered several alarms on the way. Warning sirens whooped. Robotic machinery in his vicinity shut down for safety, allowing him to pass.

  As he glanced down at the streets from the fourth floor, Durand could now see dozens and dozens of heavily armed Singapore police surrounding the site, with more vehicles on the way. In the air, large police drones descended from between neighboring office towers, moving into support positions.

  “Goddamnit . . .” Looking out, Durand realized there was nowhere to run, no escape. And for what reason?

  He caught his breath and pondered the situation. He needed to talk rationally—to get authorities to understand who he was and what had happened. Lie detector tests or some other method. There had to be a way to prove his identity. There had to be. Because he really was Kenneth Durand.

  Durand heard boots clattering on the decking just a couple floors below—could see the darting beams and shadows from tactical lights. He raised his hands and began walking down the stairwell.

  “I’m here! I surrender! Don’t shoot!”

  Almost immediately a tactical squad in black body armor rounded the stairwell. Startled, the point man raised his MP6. “There!”

  Durand instinctively jumped aside as bullets sparked off the metal deck and girders, the shots thundering in the partially enclosed stairwell.

  Shouting of police. “Shots fired! Shots fired!”

  More deafening gunfire.

  Durand crawled up the stairwell and then broke into a run. “Stop!”

  His voice was drowned out by more gunfire. Bullets whined past him as he kept rounding the corners on his way up the stairwell.

  In the lulls between, he could hear echoing radio chatter on his heels.

  “Suspect in south stairwell.”

  Durand ducked down as several shots came up from street level. One snapped close by, and the others disintegrated in sparks against a girder.

  “Hold your fire on the ground! We’ve got people up here!”

  Exhausted as he reached floor fifteen, Durand moved at a crouch out of the stairwell and across the metal decking. He ducked behind a pallet of construction filament and tried to stifle his panting as he heard boots not far behind him.

  The lead tactical team moved past in the stairwell, headed upward, gasping for breath. He could hear a couple of them linger in the doorway—tactical lights scanning the deserted floor. But in a moment, they, too, passed, clanging farther up the stairwell.

  Durand sucked for air. He glanced around the pallet toward the far stairwell to see tactical lights approaching on that side as well. He took the moment to move at a crouch between pallets—heading toward a third stairwell on the east side of the building.

  Behind him, tactical lights shined across the floor. Durand ducked into the east stairwell as police spread out and more lights approached from below.

  He broke into a run, panting almost immediately as he kept climbing.

  Powered by adrenaline, Durand managed to get to the thirtieth floor before he collapsed onto the decking, gasping for air. Covered in sweat, he could hear the turbofans of the police drones thundering below. Flashing lights reflected from the mirrored glass on neighboring office towers. Scanning searchlights cast stark shadows everywhere.

  Durand had no idea what to do. The extra minutes had clarified nothing. Solved nothing. Surrender clearly wasn’t an option.

  He dragged himself to the far edge of the thirty-first floor and hid behind a refrigerator-sized sintering robot covered by a tarp. Durand caught his breath as the noise and blinding lights of his pursuers closed in all around him.

  He could see in the reflection of nearby towers that the police drones were circling the building several floors below—their nightsun searchlights stabbing out, clearing each floor. He knew they were scanning in infrared as well. Their lidar memorizing the geometry and zeroing in on the movement of human-shaped objects. The drones were large—bigger than comcars, with powerful turbofans in cowls on each corner. Bundles of antenna masts on top, and arrays of searchlights, cameras—and a pod containing both nonlethal and lethal weapons—on the bottom.

  Durand felt what little hope he had vanish. Wyckes was a cop killer. A slaver. They would not take him alive. And as far as the SPF was concerned, he was Wyckes.

  Drone turbofan engines drowned out the radio chatter and shouts of approaching police teams.

  It wouldn’t be long now. He closed his eyes for a moment. How had this insanity happened?

  He thought about his mother back in Colorado. His brother and sister. He should have stayed in the States. But then he wouldn’t have met Miyuki or been blessed with Mia.

  Then again, he wasn’t going to have them, was he? He was going to die here. Tonight. As someone else. A villain.

  Could he really just give up? He thought about his wife—and about his daughter growing up without him.

  He looked around. He was not going to simply let this happen. He had to do something. Durand’s eye fell upon the tarpaulin thrown over the inactive sintering robot. He ran his hand across the tarp. A thought occurred to him.

  He crawled toward the edge of the building and, from behind a girder, looked down at the drones rising as they scanned each floor with their blinding nightsun lights. They were only two floors below—the closest one marked with a bioluminescent number 16, its engines unbelievably loud. The air around it rippling with heat distortion. Durand studied the half dozen antenna masts clustered at the center of its upper surface, in
the flat portion between the four turbofan engines.

  Durand looked lower on the mirrored face of the building opposite to see reflections of tactical teams moving upward from the floors, close behind and below the drone scans. He rolled back into darkness and grabbed the plastic tarp. He started rolling it and wrapping both ends of it around his bandaged, thick-fingered alien hands many times—linking his arms together. Muscular arms that were now covered with a profusion of gang tattoos.

  The turbofans of the drones grew louder as they ascended—scanning the floor just below Durand.

  He moved into a crouch near the edge of the decking and could see drone 16 edging in from the left—still fifty meters away, its searchlights and sensors scanning for him below. He leaned out, while gripping a girder, and saw that the police drone flew perhaps fifteen feet from the building.

  Fifteen feet.

  Durand looked below, at a thirty-one-story drop. A sea of flashing police lights ringed the building.

  He could hear the drone roaring in from the left.

  Durand looked up at the nighttime skyline of mid-twenty-first-century Singapore glittering around him. He soaked in the beauty of the scene, taking one last deep breath of this life.

  Durand stepped back ten feet or so, feeling more than hearing the howling wind of the drone’s turbofans.

  I love you, Miyuki. I love you, Mia.

  With that, Durand ran and launched himself off the decking, across the fifteen-foot gap. As he fell, he stretched out his bound arms toward the drone’s antenna masts. His vision narrowed and the noise—previously so deafening—suddenly dimmed.

  His focus was total. Sounds muted.

  Durand landed hard on the quadcopter’s broad back, between all four rotors—knocking the wind out of him. He couldn’t immediately tell if he’d succeeded in wrapping his bound arms around the central antenna cluster. But almost immediately he felt the drone yaw aside, losing flight trim. The world around him started to spin.

  Durand slid toward one of the four large rotor wells, but he was suddenly jerked back by his wrists. He felt as though his arms were going to come out of their sockets as he spun faster, veering this way and then that.