Change Agent

by Daniel Suarez

He still remembered them huddled in one room of their home, while debt-collection software rented out the rest of their house over the Internet.

“No offense, but I think the mistake of traditional law enforcement technique is its focus on individuals. Here, we try to limit the damage and spread of criminal activity—and that’s what drives arrests at the local level. Individual criminals are in some ways beneath our notice here. What we defeat are rising trends. That’s why guys like Wyckes never see us coming—because, in many ways, not even we realize we’re looking for them.”

“But I don’t think it was a complete transformation—I think his vital organs remain unchanged.

If we look at the skin as an organ, and adopt a materialist stance, using Damasio and others, wouldn’t it contribute to the consciousness being experienced as a self?

Specialized knowledge, after all, was what had saved him from his fate as the North American middle class shriveled away. Specialized knowledge was the way you became an expat instead of a refugee.

He realized his own personal crisis was just another in an ocean of calamities. Every person here faced a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. And this was just one camp.

The only difference was that he had money.

A technology that could destabilize the world by rendering identity itself obsolete. Creating a post-identity world. What then?

“The world has been ignoring the situation in Myanmar for fifty years. What makes you think they’re going to start noticing it now?”

I might be a genetic engineer, but I think the demise of natural selection has been greatly exaggerated. Nature did not select for empathy and social bonds because Nature was kind—but because those were survival advantages. Completely selfish, unfeeling people don’t care for the greater good. They don’t appreciate goals beyond themselves. And that limits them.”