Change Agent

by Daniel Suarez

  Beyond the beach loomed a five-meter seawall of interlocking boulders dotted with palm trees and topped by a pedestrian path with lights. Sea rise in the past few decades had clearly affected the city—but rather than move their prime nightspots, Pattayans apparently had decided to put in a barrier. This meant Durand could see only the second story and above of the buildings fronting the beach—and even these were partially blocked by the silhouettes of people walking the pedestrian path. However, the glittering lights and noise coming from beyond the wall showed there was plenty to distract people from Durand’s arrival.

  The long-tailed macaque stared out at the lights and music, chattering excitedly.

  “Well, pal, if you’re real, it’s time we parted ways.”

  Durand turned the boat in toward the beach and eased the throttle down to just a few knots. Moments later the bow of the cigarette boat crunched up onto the sand. He powered down the electric water jets.

  Durand cast one more look over the boat and then slipped over the port side, lowering himself onto the beach.

  Behind him the monkey screeched and raced about, clearly upset. It launched off the boat, onto the sand, and up toward the illuminated palm trees blowing in the sea breeze.

  Durand walked toward the steps, passing by chaise longues and beach umbrellas folded and locked up for the night.

  A middle-aged Caucasian couple strolled past in the darkness. The man spoke with a British accent. “That’s a lovely boat you have there.”

  Durand nodded silently and climbed the steps.

  Up top he looked out at the busy beachfront street packed with pedestrians, scooters, autonomous electric cars, and songthaews overflowing with drunk tourists. Thumping music warred for people’s attention. Fast-food places, restaurants, bars, dance clubs, strip clubs, massage parlors, and VR dens lined the street. On the sidewalk stood lines of young women in short skirts, interacting with LFP links and also talking to real men passing by.

  Every light pole, palm tree, and wall along the street seemed to be slathered with video stickers running short clips of bands, sex acts, and pop divas. The cheap electric stickers had been illegal in Singapore for years—viewed as visual pollution. Now Durand knew why. Even if he hadn’t been nearly crazed with exhaustion, the stimulation would have been too much.

  He descended the steps. Drunks everywhere. It reminded Durand of every shore leave he’d ever been on.

  He noted a police pickup truck moving through the crowd with several Thai officers, male and female, standing in back clutching the roll bars. They wore vests marked “Tourist Police” in English.

  A sensor array stood above the cab. Durand had no doubt it housed license plate readers and facial detection orbs, but he suspected they were largely tasked with dealing a light touch to drunk expats. Finding repeat troublemakers. They didn’t look anywhere near as threatening as the Singapore police. However, Durand also knew that more serious tactical units were just an emergency call away.

  He descended the steps to street level and moved through the crowd. He was sweaty and a bit sunburned, but he’d kept reasonably clean during his journey using the boat’s onboard water systems.

  It felt surreal to be among human beings again. Exhaustion had his mind playing tricks on him—the hallucinations were coming fast. A hypersexualized manga girl in a miniskirt and stockings winked at him and jiggled cartoon breasts. Other computer-generated fetish models motioned for him to enter their clubs.

  And then it occurred to Durand that he wasn’t hallucinating—there were simply no laws about public LFP projection here. These were rogue AR models being beamed into his retinas. In his current state he almost thought he was going insane.

  He passed by a sex club and a young Japanese half cat, half woman whispered to him with an Asian accent, “Sex with me. Soft robotics. Clean-machine VR . . .”

  Sex with cartoons. The logical endgame of high-tech fanboy culture.

  Dozens of languages passed by Durand. Hindi, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, French, German, all sorts of English. Pattaya was an uneasy mix of family beach fun and red-light district sex market.

  But a quick glance was all Durand merited from passersby. People skirted around him and moved on to some new, unusual sight seconds later.

  Good.

  Durand was suddenly accosted by a gigantic cartoon bear in a Russian hat waving a liquor bottle and motioning for him to enter a walk-in freezer vodka lounge. Moments later, a large meatball with toothpick arms and legs walked past, smiling and carrying a sign that read: “Deathless Meatballs—400 baht.”

  “Goddamnit . . .” He’d forgotten how annoying unregulated AR could be. The cities in Africa were much the same. Durand shielded his eyes from the adparitions, and moved across the street toward a twenty-four-hour minimart.

  The older Thai proprietor smiled at him and offered a slight wai, peaking his hands at his chest. “Sawasdee krap.”

  Durand wai’d back and was relieved to notice he still had a bitring on his finger. “Mirror glasses, please.”

  The man grabbed a pair from a rack on the wall.

  Durand noticed a bin of burner phablets next to the pay terminal. They were cheap, flexible, disposable devices that tourists used so none of their vacation activities could be easily tied to them.

  Durand grabbed one and tossed it onto the counter. His ring had thousands of Singaporean dollars loaded. He hoped to hell the old man was honest.

  He fist-bumped the pay terminal and the transaction cleared—and for only a few hundred baht.

  “Khop khun krab.”

  “Thanks.” Durand headed out the door, donning his mirror glasses. His visual field calmed a bit, but the video stickers affixed everywhere still assailed him—often ten identical ones looping alongside one another.

  There would apparently be no cessation of the visual stimulation in Pattaya City.

  Durand moved to the edge of the sidewalk and powered up the phablet. The boot sequence was a parade of advertising—almost all of it sexual in nature.

  “C’mon . . .”

  Finally he got a main screen and entered the chat client. In his exhausted state he strained to remember Frey’s one-time number. But he’d had plenty of time to repeat it in his head. He composed the following message:

  Our mutual friend screwed up, but I made it here anyway. In town. Ready to meet. Contact me at this number ASAP.

  He sent the message and hoped it reached Frey. He put the earbud for the phone in, and double-checked that the sound levels were sufficient to hear over the thumping music in the street.

  Just then his phablet chirped, and he pulled it out to read a message.

  Sanctuary of Truth. 1 pm, tomorrow. Dress biz casual. Respectable. I’ll approach you (assuming you haven’t changed again).

  Durand felt his irritation at Frey rising already.

  Chapter 24

  Despite thumping music, shouting, and laughter all around his room, Kenneth Durand fell into a dreamless sleep almost immediately. He’d rented a sanitized cubicle bed for the night in an automated hostel in the red-light district. For this not-quite hotel room, he wasn’t required to provide a passport—no doubt a concession to privacy-seeking tourists.

  He maxed out the twelve-hour rental timer and closed his eyes. The next thing he heard was a loud female voice speaking in multiple languages set to a background of techno music. Looking up, he saw it was 0830. He’d slept straight through. The female voice was now pitching a VR sex parlor near his current location—loud enough that he was soon awake. From his sound patterns and the accelerometer in the phablet, the device also now knew he was awake and began leaking his data to local merchants. Breakfast pop-up ads rolled in fast.

  He showered and shaved in a common bathroom for another fee—going so far as to shave the stubble of hair on his scalp. He wanted to look clean. Orderly.


  Finished, he headed out into the street, ignoring the autonomous songthaews and cabs, opting to walk; there were facial recognition and security cameras everywhere, but he knew from experience how quickly that data piled up. He guessed it was mostly used to up-sell tourists or track down people after crimes were committed in a certain location. He’d find out if he was right soon enough.

  He bought an Aussie bush hat from a street vendor to give some measure of cover against street cameras, and walked Pattaya Beach Road along the seawall, grabbing degan khao kai jeow—rice and a cultured egg omelet—at a market stall.

  He moved with surprising ease among the Sunday morning expat retirees, embezzlers, vacationing gangsters, and locals. Bleary-eyed tourists were emerging into the daylight from VR parlors. Tourist police rousted junkies and drunks from sois and troks. He felt irrationally calm and confident in this strange body—strong, healthy. The sense of surreality his exhaustion had brought on was gone. He was ready to meet these Luk Krung. To get back to himself.

  Eating on the move, Durand pulled out his phablet. He’d already researched the Sanctuary of Truth the night before, and he had plenty of time before the meet. First he needed to get a change of clothes. Frey had requested business casual, and a more prosperous look was probably a good idea to keep the police off his back. It took only a moment to locate a nearby clothing store, and he made his way there on foot.

  • • •

  Durand arrived a half hour early to scope out Pattaya’s Sanctuary of Truth. The ornate temple was located on a stony cape near the city’s seawall and surrounded by a high, mildew-stained wall of its own. He had to pay admission to enter, and inside it became clear the place was a combination garden/temple/adventure park. There were electric all-terrain cycles and elephant rides, VR parlors and food stalls. Durand felt overdressed in his button-down shirt, jacket, khakis, and mirrored glasses. The security guards he saw looked bored, out of shape, and distracted. If there were police here, then they were doing a good job of concealing themselves.

  Ahead, through the trees, Durand could see a massive, Khmer-style wat with multiple curving roofs rich with ornamentation. Only when he got closer did he see that the entire structure was fashioned of wood—its peak easily a hundred meters high. It was segmented into four wings. Various parts of the exterior were fading and weathered. Others were brand-new. But almost every inch of the temple was decorated with carved faces and mythological forms from both Buddhist and Hindu faiths.

  He entered through a richly carved winding stair, passing beneath multiple porticos braced by leaning Chinese, Thai, Indian, and Khmer figures. In the shade of the sanctuary, tourists from all over the world sipped drinks and took selfie scans.

  A sign near the door read “No camera drones inside” in multiple languages.

  Durand wandered the different chambers, on the lookout for police or gangsters. But everyone looked like distracted tourists, watching the wood-carvers or looking up at incredibly detailed woodwork.

  After a while, Durand started reading plaques to kill time. He tried to use his phablet to translate the Thai script of one, but his low-cost phablet OS kept inserting ad copy for strip clubs into the middle of the translation.

  “Brushing up on Thai history, I see.” Bryan Frey stepped up alongside Durand, likewise dressed in a button-down shirt, slacks, and a jacket.

  Durand spoke without turning. “When do we meet these people?”

  “So much for pleasant chitchat.”

  “I didn’t come here for chitchat. When we do meet the Luk Krung?”

  “Shh.” Frey looked around. “Outside . . .”

  Frey brought them toward the exit and out in the sun. They moved away from the temple and tourists taking photos of elephant rides and walked along the breezy seawall.

  Frey glanced around to see that they were relatively alone. “I’ve rescheduled with the Luk Krung twice already. You certainly took your sweet-ass time getting here.”

  Durand looked down at Frey, lifted up his mirror glasses, and glared into the dwarf’s eyes. “People died so I could get here—do you understand?”

  Frey drew back. “Died? What the hell happened?”

  “Rad screwed up. He didn’t factor in how badly the police wanted Wyckes. They set up roadblocks on the highway. I had to make my own way here.”

  Frey grimaced. “Goddamnit, Rad. He’s not much of a criminal, you know. So how did you wind up getting here?”

  “I hired traffickers to take me by boat. They collected DNA samples from the passengers and figured out who I was out on the water.”

  “How on earth did you escape in the middle of the ocean?”

  Durand put his mirror glasses back on. “I did what I had to. Let’s just leave it at that.” He looked back at the ornate temple.

  Frey processed this. “I see.” He walked along for several moments in silence. “I did have an opportunity to sequence your current DNA and your past DNA.”

  Durand looked back at him with interest.

  “It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are Kenneth Durand. You’ll be happy to know your heart and most of your internal organs are unchanged. By my calculations your DNA is still 99.994 percent original.”

  Durand heard the news with a mix of satisfaction and dismay—glad to hear he was still mostly himself, but knowing also that the most recognizable parts of his identity had been erased.

  “I thought the news that you’re mostly unchanged would be better received.”

  “When are we meeting these people? I want out of this skin. I don’t like what I’m capable of in this psycho’s body.”

  “Well . . . again, your mind and vitals remain unedited. So whatever you’ve done or haven’t done is—”

  “When are we meeting?”

  Frey glanced into his designer light field glasses. “The car should be here in a few minutes. I’ve arranged for a consultation in their showroom.”

  “Showroom?”

  “Yes. Pattaya City is a destination for medical tourists. The Luk Krung run several very fine hospitals.”

  “This city is an R-rated beach town.”

  “Yes, if you stay down near Walking Street, but the city diversified in the last few decades—moved upscale. It turns out medical tourism is more profitable than sin. The nicer part of town now caters to medical tourists from all over—and also parents looking for truly novel genetic edits for their children-to-be.”

  Frey gestured to the city skyline. “Certainly you don’t think massage parlors paid for all this. Lots of wealth from around the world has come here. This is a thriving genetic marketplace, Mr. Durand—most of it quite legal, which, I imagine, is why you never found it.”

  Durand studied the city. “This Luk Krung gang . . . you said they do radical genetic edits.”

  “What they do will be self-explanatory, but for god’s sake, let me do the talking. Don’t even speak in the car on the way over. It’s their courtesy vehicle. As far as they know, we’re a married couple from Canada who’ve adopted an embryo that we want substantially modified.”

  Durand narrowed his eyes at Frey. “Wait. I thought we were going to see them because you’ve worked with them before. That we were going there specifically to discuss my situation.”

  “You can’t expect me to just ring them up and say, ‘Hey, guys, I’ve got a buddy who’s been transformed into Marcus Wyckes—can you change him back?’ I need to show them proof of what’s happened to you—which, thanks to you, we now have—and go from there. This adoption cover story gets us in the door.”

  Durand stared. “Let me get this straight . . .”

  “By all means . . .”

  “We’re going into this place as a couple of scumbags who would adopt someone else’s embryo and then modify it to suit our tastes—like a kitchen.”

  “You surprise me; I thought you were g
oing to be upset that I told them we were married. Fortunately for us both, public affection is frowned upon in Thailand so—”

  “You are on thin ice with me, Frey.”

  Frey pointed. “Right there: it’s exactly that sort of pissy attitude that will sell us as a married couple.”

  Durand leaned down, pulling off the mirror glasses completely. “You get us in there and get us to their top person. Because I’m telling you right now: if I discover you’re trying to betray me, we will have a serious problem, you and I.”

  “I assure you—”

  “I killed three men to be here.”

  Frey put up his hands in acquiescence, then looked up to see an autonomous electric Mercedes with black-tinted windows roll up the drive near the entrance.

  “Here’s our ride. Act like a genetic tourist. Look entitled. And remember, no unnecessary talking.”

  With a grim expression Durand followed Frey, who approached the silver-and-black sedan as it glided noiselessly to a stop at the curb.

  Frey opened the door for Durand. “After you, my dear.”

  “Fuck off.” Getting inside, Durand looked around to realize that the windows were even more opaque when viewed from the inside. Blacked out, in fact.

  Frey got in after him and closed the door with a thwup. Interior lights came on.

  Durand narrowed his eyes. “We can’t see out of the car.”

  Frey put a finger to his lips. “Yes, dear. They’d rather we not know where we’re going. Your devices won’t work in here, either.” He rapped the leather-inlaid door with his knuckles. “Faraday cage, you see. I hear it’s standard in this line of business. Can’t have the clientele knowing where the lab is. Otherwise, they could get raided.”

  • • •

  Dressed in street clothes, Corporal Bank of the Royal Thai Police Central Investigation Bureau stood in the gift shop of the Sanctuary of Truth, pretending to examine caged doves. He wondered if his daughter would like one of them. They were put on sale specifically to be released near a shrine, he knew, but perhaps one would make a nice pet? He glanced up at the inset video on a rear-facing camera of his LFP glasses.