“I was fortunate enough to escape. It took me months to find a way out.”
She wondered how anyone could want him back. “Your parents must be overjoyed.”
“It’s been a bit rocky actually. The drug the rebels used during the abduction impacted my memory—I’ve lost parts of my own childhood.”
Now she felt bad. Was that what was wrong with him? “How terrible.”
“But we will be a family again. I’m certain of it.”
“Well, you are safe now, at least. And fortunately, as a man of means, you will be able to enjoy all the finer things that life in the London Trade Zone has to offer.” She slid his virtual paperwork into an AR in-box he’d made available. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” She smiled, though it took effort.
“Thank you, no.” He stood, and one of his two suited bodyguards winced while helping him with his greatcoat.
She rose as well. “Mr. Taylor, it has been a pleasure. I hope to see you and your family soon. And welcome home.” She could not bring herself to extend her hand. She hadn’t been able to do it when he came in, either. She was appalled at her rude and illogical behavior. She could not overcome it.
Fortunately he turned away without offering his hand. “Yes.” He then departed, her gaze following as his bodyguards took up positions behind him. Dressed in a bespoke suit and greatcoat, he was the very picture of establishment wealth—or an old-world vampire. She couldn’t tell which.
• • •
As he and his bodyguards exited into the winter chill through security doors onto Lombard Street, he noticed not far ahead a crowd of hundreds of people knotting up around some invisible AR content. The growing mob created a choke point on the already crowded London sidewalk.
He moved away from the autonomous Mercedes waiting for him at the curb and donned designer LFP glasses. He walked toward the crowd, gazing up as an enormous AR public news screen appeared on the side of a bank tower. Audio came in through his earphones as the crowd parted uneasily around him. He looked up to watch breaking news unfold.
A matronly anchorwoman spoke beside the latest video from Myanmar—an inset showed dozens of identical movie stars being led away toward buses. “Recent revelations from Myanmar continue to draw international outrage—and also call into question the security model of the West.”
The screen showed Myanmar officials raiding the vast laboratories of the Huli jing. An Interpol official in a biohazard suit held up an ampoule filled with honey-colored liquid.
“The so-called ‘change agent’—capable of transforming the genetic sequence of living people—could radically alter the world as we know it.”
As he watched, he felt his anger rise and narrowed his eyes at the screen. But then he glanced down at the back of his own hand to see familiar tattoos fading into place there.
Focusing on the markings, he willed them away again and watched them slowly fade.
The anchorwoman continued. “This technology could well undermine the concept of identity itself. Who is who, personal accountability—these were until now the foundation of all law. And yet new live genetic editing technology may render such presumptions obsolete.”
He smiled to himself and nodded. With one more glance up at the screen, he walked through the crowd—which parted around him like nervous prey.
Further Reading
You can learn more about the technologies and themes explored in Change Agent by visiting www.daniel-suarez.com or through the following books:
Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves by George Church and Ed Regis (Basic Books)
Evolving Ourselves: How Unnatural Selection and Nonrandom Mutation Are Changing Life on Earth by Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans (Penguin)
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner)
Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa by Nick Turse (Haymarket Books)
Is the American Century Over? by Joseph S. Nye Jr. (Polity Press)
Synthetic Biology: A Lab Manual by Josefine Liljeruhm, Erik Gullberg, and Anthony C. Forster (World Scientific)
BioBuilder: Synthetic Biology in the Lab by Natalie Kuldell, Rachel Bernstein, Karen Ingram, and Kathryn M. Hart (O’Reilly)
Acknowledgments
Building the world of 2045 for this book required research into many subjects—genetic editing, synthetic biology, Interpol, human trafficking, geopolitics, economics, blockchain tech, light fields, renewable energy, climate change, and more. While ultimately a work of fiction, it began from a realistic foundation.
I’d like to personally thank the following individuals for their gracious assistance in making my research easier: Russell Baldwin, for guiding me through DNA processing in law enforcement, and Marc Goodman, for his firsthand knowledge of Interpol and his rather disquieting expertise on the future of crime. To the extent I stretched the boundaries of their respective disciplines for the sake of this narrative, the fault is entirely my own.
Thanks as well to George Church, Ed Regis, Steve Gullans, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Nick Turse, Joseph S. Nye Jr., Josefine Liljeruhm, Erik Gullberg, Anthony C. Forster, Natalie Kuldell, Rachel Bernstein, Karen Ingram, Kathryn M. Hart, Joseph L. Flatley, Christopher Lingle, Carl E. Walter, Fraser J. T. Howie, Antonio Regalado, Jeffrey Bartholet, Rory Buckeridge, Emily Singer, Ian Urbina, Oliver Wainwright, Robinson Meyer, Eric Holthaus, Sarah Zhang, Coco Alcuaz, Szu Ping Chan, Jane Langdale, and Elsa Vulliamy, whose published works informed critical parts of this story.
My gratitude also to the following individuals for providing translation assistance in various scenes: Rodney Van Meter and Amelie Geeraert for Japanese; Palash Sanyal for both Bengali and Hindi; Björn Persson and Thierry Renard for Thai; and Achmad Thamrin for Malay.
Sincere thanks to my longtime literary agent, Rafe Sagalyn, and the entire team at ICM—and also to my sagacious editors at Dutton, Ben Sevier and Jessica Renheim.
However, these acknowledgments could never be complete without a heartfelt thanks to my wife, Michelle—for reasons that would fill a book all their own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DANIEL SUAREZ is the author of the New York Times bestseller Daemon, Freedom™, Kill Decision, and Influx. A former systems consultant to Fortune 1000 companies, Mr. Suarez has designed and developed software for the defense, finance, and entertainment industries. His fiction focuses on technology-driven change, and he is a past speaker at TED Global, NASA Ames, the Long Now Foundation, and the headquarters of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. An avid gamer and technologist, he lives in Los Angeles.
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