The Transformation Agent

By David Penn

I first met Caro Field only six months ago, though she fills my head so much it seems I’ve known her all my life. I was assigned her as soon as she missed the response deadline for her Identity Tenure Expiry form. The first course in such cases is a gentle personal interview, and that’s usually enough. Tracking had shown she hadn’t fled and was still at home in West London with her husband, sticking to the same routine of two days commuting to her office, two working remotely, which at least made her easy to find.

Agents never warn of these visits, for obvious reasons. And we pick the timings for maximum effect. In this case, it seemed best to go round when we knew her husband would be out. Monitoring had shown him to be a possessive man, with strong individualistic tendencies, who exerted quite an emotional hold over Caro, so it was essential to meet her on her own.

As the Agency recommends, I dressed casually for this first meeting, not in uniform, and prepared myself to be relaxed, affable and persuasive: BDE, as the training drill goes – Befriend, Disarm, Encourage. I rocked up in my white mycelium jacket and leggings and a body-hugging nano shirt, and I’d let my hair down, uncombed, to my shoulders – a look that usually weakens people’s guards, especially the male-interested, with its Romantic signalling.

When Caro let me into her flat, I noticed two things: first how much more robust she looked in real life – long-limbed and strong-jawed – and second the open bottle of Rioja on the coffee table, a single glass next to it. Not a good sign at two o’clock in the afternoon.

Rightly, she’d insisted on reading my palm-code and checking who I was, and of course she knew why I was there. But that didn’t make her any more pleased to see me.

“I’m not coming,” she said. “I don’t want the Change. I enjoy my job. John and I have a happy life. He needs me around too, as I expect your fucking bugs have picked up.”

“Caro, Caro,” I said. “I’m not here to drag you away. All I want is to talk to you, see what your objections are and, well frankly, try to put the positives to you. I understand how you feel. But this is the system we all live under. The Change is integral. You know that. It’s not an option for any of us. And your time as Caro Field, Kensington architect, has come to an end. That’s your ten years. Ten years in which you’ve given your all to that identity. Now it’s time for a re-set, a refreshment. The Change. By the way, we can be open you know.” I held out my wristpad and touched the screen with my forefinger. “You’re right about the bugs. But I’ve just switched them off.”

As a senior agent, I have authority to do that; and I confess I’ve found the freedoms it gives me useful in all sorts of ways.

“Fine, then. Whatever. Anyway, I know all about the ‘positives’.” She laughed sarcastically. “Doesn’t the government drill those in through every media available? And everyone you meet reels them off – in the office, in the bars, commuting – everyone, not just the government plants.” She laughed again and gave me one of her direct stares. “So what happens if I just refuse? No one talks about that. But we’ve all seen people dragged off comatose or heard them screaming. I might have been one of those, before, mightn’t I? I wouldn’t know.”

I gave a mock-grimace of embarrassment for such unfortunate incidents. “Well, it’s different in every case,” I said. “But I’m not here to talk about any kind of extreme scenario. None of that will happen to you. And yes, you’ve had the propaganda, of course you have. And the horror rumours too. But have you heard about all the alternative ways of bringing in the Change? Of making it easier?”

She watched me with real curiosity, though tempered with suspicion, and for some reason it was then I really noticed her. Attractive. Not classically, stereotypically beautiful – but extraordinarily engaging nevertheless: a cascade of blonde hair which she hid behind when it suited her; yes a long face, but a fascinating one; a sceptical twist to her smile and reserved but brilliant grey eyes. Meeting so many clients and getting to know them so intimately – I mean, no job gets to the existential nub of things like mine – I’ve developed more intuition than most about people. I get the feeling with some that they are a person in full, in a way not everyone is. Caro was like that. She had an effortlessly vivid presence. For a brief moment, I felt plain and greyly bureaucratic in comparison, despite what I was wearing, even though I was only slightly older than she – both in our early thirties – had done all the personality training I was eligible for and was considered a bit wild by Agency standards. But I wondered: might she be one of those special ones, for me? They’re so rare, but they do come along. More than just a perk of the job I’ve developed a weakness for.

“We’re quite creative with the Change these days, you know. This doesn’t have to work the bureaucratic, mindless way everyone thinks. In the first place, you can opt for a random allocation or you can choose your own new life, within reason – and within your capacities, of course. You’re an architect now but, with training – based on what we already know of your intelligence and propensities, not to mention what you’ve proved you could do already in your life-record – you could become a doctor, a pilot, a space station assistant, a musician… The training facilities these days are superb. You needn’t have a full wipe all at once either, nowadays. You can do it in stages, over a few days or weeks. Say goodbye to sets of memories one by one, ready for great new memories, opening up to a new personality. And we can give you time, if you need it, to reach a decision. What we’re doing here is the start of a process. The ITE form is just the first contact. No need to be alarmed by it. Behind that, we’re all human.”

She looked me up and down. “Well, I see you make the effort.” I felt conscious of my nano shirt, etched around my gym- and bio-sculpted chest, but proud she had noticed.

I spent a little more time going over the choices and liberalities of the modern Transformation System, trying to dispel the most disconcerting stories she might have heard, but I could see I wasn’t making much headway. So I said I’d give her a couple of weeks to think.

Around the travellators – over- and underground – on my way back to the office, after what Caro had said, I couldn’t help noticing the adverts singing through the air. She’d been right: the media assault was relentless.

Embrace the Change. Be Everyone You Can Be.

Far-range: Change!

Then, of course, that ubiquitous corny holo of a supposedly average pre-Change era family burst into the air in front of me: father in suit and tie, mother in apron, one boy and one girl in school uniform, sitting around a breakfast table covered in a cross-patterned tablecloth, plates of toast, bowls of porridge. Faces blank, robotic. There’s a Pre-Change World… – the picture switches from that to one of folks gladly morphing through sequences of identities, child and adult alike – And a Post-Change one. Would you change back?

And Prime Minister Duffy staring us straight in the eyes: What does the Change do? you ask. How important is it? It liberates human souls from repetition, boredom, staleness, that’s what it does. It is the great social effort that means all of us, several times in our lives, can move on to fresh phases of creativity and potential, both renewing ourselves and our country, continuously. Saving our society from divisive middle-class individualism. Keeping the economy energetic.

I almost snorted aloud, which wouldn’t have been a good look, in public, for a transformation agent, who virtually represents the Change for most people. But I was beginning to slough off the propaganda even back then. What could I have done, though? That’s the system we have. The people, kept busy churning through identities, have no power to bring it down, to change the Change. The best you can do is use the system to your own advantage.

In the office that evening, I watched as Caro and her husband hugged and cried, got drunk and had sex. A couple very much in love, even as they come to the end of their statutory time. I wasn’t jealous. I’ve always liked being a loner. It gives perspective, like a wolf watching sheep. But as I sat there at the monitor, smelling the sweat of the other pack of agents around me, keenly observing their cases, drinking the undrinkable Agency coffee, I wondered if this wolf still liked his hunts as much as he used to.

***

The next phase of my interaction with Caro Field started long before the end of the two-week grace period I’d given her. Following my instructions, our monitoring AI alerted me in the middle of the night that her husband had walked out. I’d watched several conversations become more and more alarming, so I wasn’t entirely unprepared, but it still happened much sooner than I’d expected. I replayed the relevant footage. It seemed that John was even more cracked up by the disruption coming to Caro’s life than she was, to the point where he couldn’t stand it, couldn’t bear to be reminded of it.

“I know we knew this was coming,” he had said. “But I can’t see you here every day when I’m going to lose you. You mean too much to me. So I’ve got to go.”

I smiled to myself, perhaps a little smugly, at this sentimental bourgeois twaddle. He packed a bag and left.

She was in pieces when I got round there. A much emptier bottle of wine stood on the coffee table. I’d even caught her with a cigarette, which she’d somehow got hold of without us or any agency spotting it. (At the case review, we decided it had been John who’d smuggled the contraband in from somewhere and knew how to switch off the alarms.) I took one from the pack myself, of course.

She couldn’t speak, or didn’t want to. I found myself leaning close into her, studying her, as I had done on monitors for weeks, her features, her figure, becoming as familiar to me as my own in the mirror. But here too was the smell of her, the bodily spirits grasping at me from her flesh. I put my arms around her shoulders and held her. The feel of her confirmed that this could be the beginning of something very interesting. More interesting than the usual. The cameras were off.

She resisted at first but then cried in my arms.

“It’ll be all right, Caro. It’ll be all right. In the end, it’ll be for the best that John’s left you. You’ll see.”

She pulled back and stared at me, giving me the same look-over she had before. I thought I saw a flicker of approval in her eyes. It’s a strange thing, desire, so often coming at perverse moments – but healing, I find. I wondered if Caro might find it so too.

After some more conversation and reassurances on my part, I said I could let her have another three months to decide about the Change, tidy up her affairs, think of how to say her goodbyes, without financial worry either: she would still have to leave her job within a few weeks, but I could arrange for her Transformation Support Benefits to continue as long as she needed them. A risky offer, even within the creative leeway I’m allowed, but I was already concocting a plan. With feigned disinterest, I suggested that maybe, in that time, John would have a change of heart and she would be reconciled to him before she had to come with us. Or he wouldn’t and maybe she’d see the Change as even more of a blessing. But I also said I would come and see her, when I could.

All she ever heard from John, though, was that the break was final, and after a couple more visits I detected her mood phasing from one of heartbreak and longing to one of bitterness.

One night she said: “I’ll have a random Change. I don’t care. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ve had these before, haven’t I, like anyone else? And I don’t remember. Like it never happened. So, what the hell. At least I’ll wipe John away.”

She drank her wine and subsided into herself. But after another glass she said: “No, that’s not what I want. This is what I want.” And she walked over, pulled me up, took hold of my beard and kissed me. Moments later, we were in bed.

As I hopped the travelators and tube lines home that night, I couldn’t help smiling to myself. I marvelled at Caro’s decisiveness, her physical and emotional straightforwardness. I understood that she had consciously surrendered to a need for comfort, as well as a desire for revenge on John, and I had been in the right place at the right time. But was once enough for her? Or would that marvellous evening be repeated?

The next time I dropped in on her, she tugged me straight from her front door to the bedroom. There wasn’t any doubt.

The dice couldn’t have rolled better for me. While she remained undecided about how to approach the Change, I could give her the time I’d promised to think things through and adjust, and no one at the Agency would question my decisions. No, it wasn’t unusual for me that cases turned into liaisons, or that I ever denied myself – What would have been the point? And sex can be an effective persuasion technique – but this was turning out to be one of my luckiest breaks ever. My visits to her flat became weekly, then daily. I couldn’t stay away. Caro became addictive to me. The Change was never mentioned. Not until she brought it up again a month later.

“Tom, I’m confused,” she said. “We’re lovers and I’m enjoying it. But you’re still my transformation agent, and I’m still supposed to be Changing. You probably have to come up with some sort of result with me, don’t you? So this will have to end.” She looked miserable, while clearly convinced she had to reconcile herself.

I’d been wondering when this tension would make itself obvious to her. It always does after a while, of course. But I had my trump card. It usually worked.

“You’d be surprised what I can get away with,” I said. “They stop monitoring people in my position so much after a while. A question of resources. And I’ve been thinking… We could go away. Or if you’d prefer, I can get you out of the country, by yourself. I know ways. I have contacts.”

She brightened up. “We’ll go. We,” she said, and pulled my beard again. “Let’s get away. Let’s start a new life. But on our terms.”

I assured her I’d get going on sorting things out.

I must admit, in this phase of my affairs, when they happened, I would always begin to be nervous. I knew I could only string the “elopement” idea out so long before it became obvious it wasn’t going to materialise. Soon after that, inevitably, it was the end, and often a messy one.

Over my next few visits, though, I dropped hints of plans, started to talk about who would do what for us, false passport implants, untraceable funds – gradually built the whole castle in the sky. But I could see Caro growing restless, more and more unconvinced.

Then it came: “It’s not going to happen, is it?” she said once, in bed. “You can’t really do all this, can you, get us out?”

I shook my head. And, truly, I had an emotion I didn’t normally have at that point in proceedings: sadness. A sudden gulf of despair. It surprised me.

There was no point in pretending.

“No. Actually Caro I can’t. We’re not going to elope. I did want it. I dreamt it was possible, for both of us. But no, I can’t really manage that.”

I reached out for her hand but she snatched it away, lay back on her pillow and closed her eyes. I didn’t want to try any sugar-coating. I respected her that much. Though neither could I look at her. We lay in silence, except for her laboured breathing as, I imagined, she fought back her emotions.

“I don’t even know if I care or not,” she said. “I knew, I knew all along it was bullshit. But at least it was one last dream. Kept everything else at bay.” But she didn’t hide her tears either. I held her. She let me this time. The warmth of her body hollowed me out. I hated myself. I couldn’t remember feeling like that before.

Eventually she said: “So, what’s going to happen to us, really?”

“Really? I’m sorry Caro. I don’t know.”

She stared at me with a sort of grim, but intent expression. I’ve never seen anything like it. Summing me up. She could have hated me, raged at me. But she didn’t. It’s so weird, human life, so much of it a mirage. We want every last scrap of comfort. Every last touch of delusion that something lasting exists, an affirmative forever, something like Love with a capital L, even when the truth is staring us in the face. So maybe it’s not so strange that she reached out her hand and stroked my face, and – it seemed so natural, so uncomplicated in itself – we made love again, and didn’t mention the future any more that night.

We went on seeing each other for several weeks, but at last she began to seem more distant and I knew something was brewing.

“Tom, you’ve done this before, right? Pretty obviously.”

“Done what?”

“Seduced your clients. Abused your position.”

I couldn’t deny it.

“Sure you have. You’ve never seemed fazed or surprised about what’s happened between us, never resisted it. Never seemed to worry about breaking any professional code. I suppose we’re about the most vulnerable people you could meet, transformees – and you hold the most power over us anyone could. Practically life and death. And I’ve been a complete sucker.”

“Hey. No, don’t say that. Why this bitterness? It’s been good, hasn’t it? Why not grab what you can, when you can?”

“Yeah. Well, I was a knowing sucker. Of course, you don’t love me, do you?”

I didn’t say anything. Did I love her? I wasn’t even sure. Staying silent, at least I could spare her the crassest lie. And yet I didn’t want to deny it either, shut off the possibility for her.

“Do you care about me at all?”

“Of course I do.” But maybe I didn’t sound convincing.

She nodded in grim resignation. “All right. I want it Tom. I want it now. The Change. And not the gradual version. This is over. I want the full wipe, in one.”

I sat up.

“That’s it. I want it now.” She turned away from me and stared up at the ceiling, tears tracing her cheeks.

I could have questioned her motives, acted the counsellor, sprung into action with all the scripts from my training. But no. What was the point? I could see she meant it. She was Caro. She knew her mind. And it had always been inevitable anyway. Why prolong things, when reality had begun to loom so large, like a cloud between us?

Yet the lead weight that descended onto my chest amazed me. Still, girding myself, putting on my emotional armour, I said: “All right. I’ll arrange it.” What else could I say? Anyway, I still had a profession to practice. And if I let Caro escape the Change, or even delayed it too long, we would both be found out sooner or later. Even I couldn’t buck the system permanently. Whatever I’d said, yes we could have fantasised about leaving the country, with false identities, all that stuff, but when tracking identities is the business of half the state there was no real way that could happen. There never had been.

We made love one more time, a sort of ritual goodbye. Then I sat up, turned away from her, hiding my face from her, got dressed and left. The next time I came to her apartment, I wasn’t alone. We were a team in full uniform: hard black synthwool, with the yin-yang armbands that we know terrify people so much and are intended to. I led Caro out while the others emptied the flat of identifying contents, to be destroyed, recycled or edited. It’s that part of the operation that often really gets to people, when we start to dismantle their lives in front of them.

Luckily Caro didn’t kick and scream. She really was resigned to the Change now. She didn’t even look at or speak to me, not in our windowless government car or when I handed her over in the white corridors of the Agency. I was glad she didn’t. I could hardly face what I was doing as it was. I couldn’t stand the way she looked like a beaten dog.

But there were no half measures for her. She meant what she’d said to me. She asked for the full eclipse of her personality, in one. The end. No stages. The complete destruction of Caro Field, a blank slate at one stroke. A fortnight after I’d handed her in, I received the news that her process had been successful and she was training for her new life, though of course no one would tell me where – let alone who – she would be. Her whole self, all her memories, everything she’d felt, everything she’d been except her physical body, had disappeared, to be gradually replaced by new training, mind-enhancements, neuronic implants. Then, sometime, her new life would begin. She could even be with a new husband. How many times did I hang over a drink in my apartment at night, clawing myself to pieces with that thought?

I tried all the usual things to blot out what I felt. Throwing myself into work. New seductions. But they were all empty. Even the risk of being found out had lost its thrill. My life was a desert. On any occasion I came close to reconciliation with the loss, the thought of Caro would surface and obliterate everything else. I could still see, hear, smell, feel her, as if she walked or lay beside me. It was hopeless. Her image wouldn’t leave me. So there was only one remedy.

I, too, have asked for a wipe – an early Change, that other transformation agent’s privilege, only seven years into being Agent Tom Wilkes. There’ll be interviews and I’ll finesse my reasons, playing up the trauma of the last few years, but I’ll get it. The Agency looks after its people. Anyway, why would they want disgruntled, unhappy, disengaged agents hanging about, maybe causing trouble? And I don’t care where I go, who I end up as; I don’t care if I don’t work for the Agency anymore. Like Caro, I want full erasure in one and no delay, the curtain down, ready to be lifted on a new life. The Transformation can’t come soon enough. I want to be gone.

——–//——–

David Penn’s stories have appeared in Midnight Street magazine, Midnight Street Press anthologies Hellfire Crossroads (2017), Strange Times (2020) and Railroad Tales (2021), as well as publications such as 96th October, Theaker’s Quarterly, 365 Tomorrows, Infinity Wanderers and Fiction on the Web. His SF/fantasy poems have appeared in BSFA’s Focus and BFS’s Horizons and the Emma Press anthology Watcher of the Skies (2016). Originally a Londoner, he now lives in the green city of Norwich.