SWITCH EPISODE 1

Prologue:



I don't sleep well anymore.

I was never what you might call a natural sleeper. A pack of Morley reds a day and an entire lake of coffee to myself meant I'd grab maybe a few hours a night. I'd rise in the morning and walk for hours around the dimly lit streets in that magic time when its too early for the normals and too late for the weirdo's.

The city is alone then. Its mine.

With no-one else around it shows itself to me, shares with me its secrets. The moments of tenderness in a place of unfeeling concrete and steel. The roses in the dirt.

When Jennifer came, my diet improved but my somnambulism was the one thing she simply couldn't change. Without the Stimulants my body had grown to rely on I became tired but simply couldn't cross over into anything approaching restful sleep.

I would lie awake for hours watching her breathe quietly next to me, marvelling at how easy she made it look. Even facing away from me I could tell she had that expression of quiet serenity on her face which made her look like she hadn't a care to call her own.

She never had nightmares and for this I envied her more than anything else. My own dreams though brief were always fraught with terror and a creeping unfaceable inescapable dread.

They would always start the same, I'd be washing the floor or chopping some vegetables or something similarly innocuous in my Mothers house where I'd lived there for most of my life until I got that cheap shithole flat on the east side. As I was going about my task I'd get the rising fear that something was wrong, something was happening as I was wasting my time on some mundane task. The fear rises into panic and into terror but I can't stop. I can't stop chopping or peeling or scrubbing or washing or whatever. I know I need to get upstairs to get to whatever's happening but my body just keeps on doing its boring task as my brain screams in its prison of flesh and bone.

Its just then I feel a dark presence behind me and rise screaming through to consciousness.

This time though it was the phone that woke me whilst I was halfway through scrubbing the brown rings on the bath.

Blinking my way into consciousness I felt for the reassuring weight of the receiver and Emitted a half question half cry into the black handle.

"Whharug!?"

The calm female voice on the other end, clearly used to dealing with waking people up at ungodly hours, patiently explained the relevant details, prompting only a few single word queries from me.

"Okay, I'll be there in twenty," I said swinging my legs over the side of the bed and plonking the receiver down onto its antique plastic housing.

"I've got to go," I said to the warm, curved form still sprawled under the duvet.

"Why can't you work a nine to five, like normal people?"

"Honey, nine to fives died out in the twentieth century," I replied.

"Says the man with a Bakelite phone," she said sifting in the bed slightly signalling the end of the conversation.

As I pulled on my coat and stepped out into the freezing air I realised what I didn't say was nine to fives never had existed, for cops.







Chapter 1:





The air was thick with the smell of
musk and cheap liquor, the downtown
perfume of faded dreams and shabby
fantasies. It was still raining with
a persistence and vigour that implied
God was trying to wash all the shit
off the streets and then drown the
streets themselves, start over again,
Noah style.

The cab dropped me off at the
junction of Wapner and fifth and I
walked the half a block until I saw
the tell tale yellow tape cornering
off a small alley set like a wrinkle
in smooth sandstone of the block.

I don't like arriving at a crime
scene in a cab, it sets the wrong
impression. Besides, my appointment
wasn't going anywhere.

"Over here boss!" Remy called out to
me from under a nearby shop awning
where he was sheltering from God's
streaming hate. A Frenchman by birth
he had adopted this country of
mongrels and chancers with oddly
enough, a European's passion.

In fact most people thought the dark,
scruffy officer with the air of
aloofness was the Frenchman not his
rotund beaming sidekick.
Unfortunately it was the other way
around although only one person has
ever had the balls to call me scruffy
to my face.

I waved to Remy and walked over to
the white sheet that was the blanket
for the concrete bed Jane Doe lay on.
This was the thirteenth Jane Doe for
me which is actually a low number
compared to the number of known
victims I've crouched beside.

I could hear Remy calling for me but
I wanted to take a quick look at the
victim before allowing myself to dry
out under the awning. I whisked the
soaked sheet back and gasped.

Homicide, Matricide, death by hammer,
death by carving knife and even in
one noticeable instance, death by
Satsuma, I flatter myself that I've
seen it all, but this? This I was
unprepared for.

A pair of sharp green eyes stared up
and through me in the rictus of
death. The eyes however were fairly
remarkable being both horizontal and
green. The whiskers didn't help
matters either. In fact if I'm being
honest the orange and black fur
covering every inch of her was pretty
surprising as well.

Remy came puffing up behind me.

"I tried to warn you. It kind of
takes you by surprise doesn't it?"

Stunned I nodded, my hand reaching
for a pack of cigarettes that hadn't
been there for two years now. In
times of stress my hands tend to act
of their own volition and they always
reach for the smokes they know they
shouldn't have.

She was clearly a gene-mixer. The
technology was decades old but still
illegal in every country that cared
about such things. She was clearly
born a human but at some point in her
past had had feline traits and
characteristics spliced into her
boring human DNA.

The mistake most people make about
genetics is that for every one
characteristic there’s one gene.

"Ooh there's the gene for big breasts
and look here's the gene for a big
bum, let's take that one out. Add the
blond hair and blue eyes genes and
that's your Aryan!"

In reality nearly every physical
characteristic has tens or even
hundreds of different genes which can
influence or block other genes
leading to a physical characteristic
which is clearly a mix of different
sources. Like an orchestra is made up
of tens of people all working
together to create a beautiful sound.

Its this blend of genes that creates
our unique makeup and proves a
nightmare for anyone trying to tinker
with it. Taking away a single gene
that seemingly has no function at all
can cause the whole pack of cards to
come crashing down. Understand when I
say a pack of cards I actually mean a
living human being whose un-tampered
genes are doing just fine thank you
very much, you can see the potential
for disaster is huge.

Jane Doe however was a work of art.
She had clearly been beautiful before
the switch and was lean in the way
track athletes were. Her coat was
plush and even strong shoulders
tapering down to delicate hands that
clearly had no paw in them at all.

"This kind of work's expensive." I
said out loud.

"Yeah," Agreed Remy," Not your usual
Thai botch job."

There were people for whom the thrill
of being, or being with, a part human
part animal was worth the risk of
permanently stunted genome. Some
traits would go in and come out like
Lego blocks. And some would stick
around and linger forever. Thailand
has always been a draw for
s*xtourists looking for a different
kind of hit.

For those born in the kind of poverty
we only ever see on telethons,
becoming part animal to milk money
from fat western perverts is a no
brainer. Unfortunately because of the
black market nature of the operation
even the pimps that put the money up
front for the procedure can't be
sure how well it'll go. The back
streets of Phuket are full of botched
jobs. Girls and boys whose beauty you
can almost still read through the
folds of mutated flesh and useless
extra limbs.

As ever, there’s still a market for
even these poor crippled beings but
its not the same as the animal
festishissation and worship that
happens in the slightly better lit
quarters of Thailand.

I looked down at the mangled body
with a mangled genome and wondered
how much of Jane had been human
before someone switched the lights
off.

I replaced the sheet. The rain was
keeping the vultures away although
one or two ghouls were being kept
back by the power of the yellow tape.

I knew where I had to go but If I was
heading into the darkness I'd need
more backup than My French companion
could provide.

"Stay here and wait for the coroner"
I said to Remy,

"Okay, Where are you off to?" he
replied.

"I've got to go and see a man about a
dog."







Chapter 2:



Smoke hung lazily around like a bad debt obscuring even further the dark recesses of the room. Half formed shapes and figures moved slowly in the murk. Here and there you could see a hand or an arm in one of the amber pools of light from the recessed bulbs. Bodies moved slowly around touching, grasping, pulling or stroking. Slow trance-like music burbled, its rhythmic pulsing adding to the dreamlike quality. Time seemed to lose its meaning. Seconds, hours, minutes all intermingled and became lost inside the space of the darkened room.

That is until I kicked the door through its hinges.

I'd known about this club for months now. Its location was changed regularly to keep people like me off the scent, we'd turn up days or even weeks too late, finding freshly painted walls and the sharp tang of bleach on every surface.

But this time we'd caught them at it, the gene switched body in the alley was all the leverage I needed to get some unorthodox methods sanctioned.

I'd pulled in the usual snitches and gave them the old once over. Most of them had seen it a hundred times before but on this occasion there was a small difference. The K-9 section had loaned us one of their finest four footed and we brought him in at the end of the usual merry-go-round.

Now most of the grebs and low lives didn't react. Why should you? Its just a dog. However when Low-k (really named Kevin Lomax) jumped out of his chair and cowered on the table screaming I knew we had something.

See dogs aren't clever. They just aren't. But they do have an amazing nose and a sense of smell better than anything we could ever conceive. Part of that sense is knowing when something smells wrong or altered or switched.

They can smell gene-switchers even after they've been switched back, don't ask me how. All I can tell you is that the person may look totally kosher to you and me but the dog can tell. And they really don't like it. It looks like a human but smells like a cat/shark/ring tailed lemur and the dog won't stop barking.

When we'd pulled the dog back off Low K but not too far, he told me everything I wanted to know and a few things I didn't. He spilled everything over his confession of a splice earlier in his life which he'd had changed back and his compulsion to visit this club. He'd go and enjoy other peoples changed genomes rather than the pain and expense of getting himself switched again.

I took the address to Vice and within hours we had a squad ready to bust down the door I'd just kicked through.

From either side of me streamed the uniformed officers grabbing the nearest body and cuffing them in a parody of the intimate scenes that had been happening just seconds before.

I strode past the flailing switchers and the humans that love them, through to the back where I knew my target would be.

I needed the help of the battering ram to get through the metal plated office door and there sat Simon Guanto beaming his big tusky smile at me.

"Inspector. So nice to see you. Won't you come in?"






Chapter 3:






The interview room was exactly as you'd expect. A windowless cupboard with cork board muffling the walls and unsettling stains on the floor. There was a camera mounted high on the wall. It was used for keeping cops honest or recording blood-soaked confessions depending on the suspect. I didn't know which way this one would go.

Guanto's presence was overpowering. Even though he was sitting peacefully in the middle of the interview room his aura seemed to fill the space to almost bursting. Thick set features, a turned up nose and little piggy eyes weren't helped by the prominent tusks that stuck up on either side of his jaw.

His confidence was almost as powerful as his odour, which burst through the pungent aftershave to assault the nostrils of anyone unfortunate enough to be sat close to him.

Like me.

"I want to talk about the girl."

He laughed and spread his stumpy arms, "Which girl? There were rather a few of them I seems to remember."

"Not at the party. We'll come to that later."

"Have you got a name for this particular girl? So I can tell you exactly where I was when she claims I was elsewhere?"

I leaned in.

"She isn't claiming anything. Take a look."

I dropped the stack of photos in front of him. He picked them up and started flicking through them.

"Don't know her." he snorted.

And that told me everything.

You see people have patterns in the way they speak and act. Under normal circumstances they'll just maintain their normal pattern. Five second with this guy would tell you he'd crack jokes through his mothers funeral. That's the way he is. He didn't take this seriously or he would have insisted on being lawyer'd up from the start. His casual attitude towards me and the law came from his secure knowledge that even though we'd caught him red trottered hosting an orgy, there wasn't much we could do. A slap on the wrist a big fine and next month he's in somebody else's city doing exactly the same thing.

But after his first look at the Jane Tiger photos he'd shut up tighter than a spinsters wallet. His tongue licked nervously across his twin tusks. He'd come in here on a procurment charge at best and now he was looking straight down the barrel of homicide. And I was about to rack the slide.

I reached into the cardboard folder by my side and slapped three pieces of paper upside down. I turned them over one by one letting him see my poker hand.

"Item one."

Slap.

"A one off payment from your account to an unidentified business in Thailand."

He shifted in the metal confines of his chair.

"Item two."

Slap.

"Two plane tickets for you and the alley girl before her change into Cheetara. But here's the rub, you flew back alone a week later with a large crate in the hold of the plane labelled LIVE ANIMAL."

"Now wait just a minute..." he started.

"Item three."

Slap,

"A substantial deposit of cash into your account two days after your trip."

He flustered, I didn't give him a chance to talk.

"So I'm thinking you pick up a stray girl on spec, give her the Thailand switch, let some bastard have his way with her and when he gets a little rough..."

"Hang on..."

"Maybe she gets too rough and he has to bite back? You put the squeeze on the poor sap blackmail him for your money back and dumping the body on the way to the bank. How are you liking this now?"

"STOP!"

I sat back impressed at the purple colour he'd achieved. The stink in the room contained more than just his musk now. That was raw fear mixed on in there.

I'd got enough to watch him be turned into bacon in any state with the right laws.

And then he totally turned the tables on me dropping a name I'd never heard mentioned in this stinking precinct.

"She wasn't for anyone, I sold her to Alexi Van Sant!"





Chapter 4:




I started out of the interview room like the hounds of hell were after me which they soon would be.

"Remy!" I yelled across the squad room. He came bumbling towards me his normally smiling face gaping and drawn. I knew he'd heard the blasphemy from Guanto from the interview room camera.

"Do you think its true, boss? Did he sell her to Van Sant?" He asked, searching my face for answers I didn't have.

"I don't know. It'll never stand up in court though."

I scratched my cheek trying to get a plan together. It didn't have to be a great plan or even a good one, just a plan that got me moving.

"Right," I said eventually "Get in there, take Porky's statement get it notarized and do not leave his side."

"Gotcha. Where are you going?"

"I'm going to give Van Sant a chance to talk before his lawyers gag him up like a gimp."

Remy nodded once and walked over to the interview room. Once again I blessed the Gods that gave me a partner who knew when to talk and when to shut up and get on with it.



I drove over to Van Sant's place in a unmarked squad car. No need to put the wind up him just yet. The twin towers baring his name rose, black and threatening in the distance. Looming over the road their unique architecture gave them the appearance of almost toppling over the drivers on the road below. All they'd need would be one good breath of air and they come crashing down around us.

Even then Van Sant would still be standing.

He was the last of The Twelve. The last remnant of humanities Golden age when science could conquer everything and our boundaries seemed limitless.

He was head of the research team at Everex Global when they made the discovery that made him and the other eleven world famous. Working with embryonic cells Everex had found a way of arresting the normal cell cycle.

Every cell in your body gets replaced many times in your life. The old cell reaches the end of its usefulness and dies. Think of it as a best before date, after that point the cell might go bad, form cancers do all sorts of nasty stuff.

Van Sant and his team found a way of stopping the cells from dying. A way of preserving the flesh as it was. Forever.

They'd inoculated all of the research team before the F.D.A. managed to bust down the door burn the lab to the ground and arrest them all.

The Courts tried them for crimes against humanity and in a bid to avoid the chair they all agreed to a memory wipe back to before they worked for Everex. What's a few years memeories and a long prison sentence when you're pretty much immortal?

Two of the twelve died in custody before they were all moved to a secure location. It seems the other inmates had their own ideas on what qualified as eternal life and what didn't.

Your cells may not die and so the body doesn't decay when you're alive but a slit throat or a shiv through your heart in the shower will sure kill you.

Fifty years later the ten all emerged together looking not a day older than when they were locked up.

One was killed in an auto wreck four days after his release. It seems fifty years of four walls and three squares hadn't prepared him for the nightmare that the freeways had become.

Some died through illness and disease but the rest survived for a couple of hundred years. And then of the remaining six, five committed suicide together. Nothing dramatic. Just gassed themselves using an old burner.

That leaves Van Sant. A man who hasn't left the top of the tower he built in the last hundred years. He's protected up there. Protected from knives, cars and disease. Protected from the things that got the other eleven.

But is he protected from the law? Is he protected from me?






Chapter 5:




The Secretary at the front desk was surprised when I produced my credentials and asked to see Mister Van Sant and was even more surprised when the monogrammed elevator doors pinged open signifying the acceptance of my request.

The express lift shot me skywards at an alarming rate. The smooth glass walls afforded an expansive view of the rooftops of the surrounding buildings. As we climbed higher and higher we rose almost through the cloud bank that was now only half smog thank to the efforts of the air scrubbers that were now mandatory on every building.

The golden metal doors eventually purred open and I stepped into a blinding white cube with no visible exits except for the one that had just clicked shut behind me. I stood still for a moment, disorientated before I felt the rush of gas filling the room.

"Hold still please," A disembodied voice breathed in my ear,"This chamber is just to make sure you don't bring any uninvited pathogens in with you."

After a breathless few seconds the light dimmed and the sections of wall in front and on either side of me rolled up into the ceiling leaving me standing in a plush apartment.

The entire top floor was obviously one huge room, with couches, bookshelves and tables placed seemingly placed at random. Every inch of wall and shelf space was occupied by a thousand photos, paintings and nick knacks. Here and there were antique weapons and musical instruments I was not familiar with, ancient photographs of smiling happy people, a hundred lifetimes worth of ephemera gathered in one place.

From behind one of the bookshelves the voice from the booth floated over to me, "I know what you're thinking."

I followed the voice behind the bookshelf to find a well built man with dark hair showing the first flecks of grey. His eyes were faded blue and were the only part of him that looked a few centuries old. He strode towards me and took my hand in his. His handshake was strong, but felt cold.

"You're thinking 'Where did all this stuff come from?'"

"Actually," I replied, "I was wondering how long it takes your house keeper to dust."

He laughed, "I do it myself. When you have so many memories Inspector its hard to keep them all in your head. There's only a finite amount of space in there. New thoughts keep forcing the old ones out." He swept his arms around him, "These are my memories. When I clean them all one by one, they keep fresh of all the experiences that I've had that I can no longer rely on my poor antique brain for."

I gazed around again, looking through his personal memories, here a photo of a lover, probably decades dead, there a wooden knife, a souvenir of a holiday taken before anyone on the planet was born. It was a creepy feeling, like looking uninvited through some ones private correspondence.

"Would you care for a drink?"

"No thank you."

We sat on a couch with a view of the downtown skyline. In the office I'd felt so sure about his guilt I'd rushed over here with no thought for how I was going to play this.

I was going to have to improvise.

"So what brings you to see me Inspector? I hardly think someone of your talents is part of a community outreach programme."

"No, I'm actually here about a murder."

"Really? A murder? How ghoulish. You don't think I had anything to do with it do you?

"Your name was brought up in an interview I was conducting. I just need to establish your recent movements."

"Who was it?"

"The witness or the victim?"

"Both."

"The victim was a poor girl who'd had her genes tinkered with, not quite as elegantly as yourself of course. She been spliced with a big cat. a tiger I think."

"Interesting and the witness?"

""A know procurer for people with interesting tastes."

"And you're taking the word of a known felon over mine?"

"Don't forget sir, that you too have a criminal record for altering your own biology. And you haven't actually told me where you've been.

"In that case I can tell you I haven't left the tower in weeks months in fact. Too many germs on the street for my battered immune system."

"What if I were to tell you a credible witness has you as the last person that saw this person alive?"

"I'm not falling for that tired line, you're jumping to conclusions..."

"We found a paper trail that lead this girl from grad school dropout through Thailand and into your hands. Two days later she's found in an alley. You bought her. You killed her. You dumped her body. What part of this is stretching things too far?"

"This is libellous..."

"Actually it would be slander but that's only if its not true."

He rose and in one movement pulled a polished kiri hunting knife from the wall and pointed it at my throat. I stayed exactly where I was, I could see the years of madness boiling away in his eyes.

"Give me your gun."

"I don't carry one."

"You don't carry a gun?"

"I don't normally think they're necessary."

"Even for defence?"

"Whenever I've seen a gun fired they seem pretty offensive."

I wasn't sure what he'd do. When you've seen generations of people die human life must become pretty much meaningless. I felt sure if he'd committed one murder another one wouldn't haunt him. I had to play this very smart.

"Of course the irony is it was your own DNA that caught you. In a sample under her fingernail. You do have a unique genetic fingerprint." I bluffed playing for time.

The three foot of steel didn't even quiver.

"Tell me your side of how it happened. Put it down and we can talk this thing through."

His eyes still locked with mine. I slowly put my hand over the top blunt edge of the knife and lowered it down.

He sat, defeated, a shadow of the imposing presence that had greeted me at the door.

"Do you know," he began "How lucky you are? How fortunate you've been? We are not built to live forever, we are designed to live like a match. Struck once we burn brightly before fading into the ashes of our dreams. We are not meant to dimly glow forever. The thing they never tell you about eternal life, the secret that is hidden is that Eternal life, is boring. Everything you do, everything you see, you've seen you've experienced before. There's nothing new nothing exciting nothing to discover."

He grew more impassioned.


"Do you know the weight of the things I've forgotten? Do you know the treasured memories that have been pushed out by the sheer weight of stuff? Even sex loses it joy after a while. So you start trying stuff that only interests you because it's different. I sunk so low I even got interested in Cricket for a while."

"Alison was something new and exciting but she wasn't right. I think she'd always wanted to become something more than she was born."

S"he went feral, inside every cat there's a lion dreaming of escape and in her there was a cat dreaming of a lion dreaming of escape. She attacked me, nearly killed me. I had to defend myself. That's what it was, self defence."


I'd had enough of his whining.

"Tell you what," I began "I could take you in. You could get the lawyers involved. claim mental anguish. You'll probably do twenty maybe thirty years. And be sat having this conversation in a hundred years with one of my successors about another poor dead girl. Or you could do what you know you should have done a long time ago but have never had the balls to go through with."

He looked up at me quizzically, tears blurring his eyes.

I walked over to the glass partition and opened the screen door leading to the balcony. The fresh air poured in for probably the first time in years.

I sighed theatrically "It appears I've left my handcuffs in the car. I'll have to go down and get them before I arrest you. Stay here."

I walked over to the lift and didn't look back.




I had gone about ten floors down in the lift before he overtook me. Unfavourable winds bounced him off the side of the building, as his body flopped and flailed, accelerating past the glass elevator towards the blurred ground below.



I don't care how vigorous your cells are, how resistant to decay or how immune to dying you've made them, when they're all spread out over a ten metre radius, you're screwed.

I walked past the squished remains of his centuries old body spreading its red load across the floor.

This was definitely someone else's mess, I'd dealt with enough dead bodies for one week.