Camouflage

1974
    T he chameleon decided to stay in one place and make a fortune. It had been wealthy in the past, spoils of war, but it had never been a rich capitalist, which sounded interesting.
    It kept the core identity of a man who went to the office every morning, did his administrative work like a good drone, and then went home to his bachelor apartment, presumably to watch TV and read. He seemed uninterested in women, and most of his coworkers thought he was gay.
    What the chameleon actually did at night was become young and gay, in both senses of the word. It dropped ten or fifteen years and pounds, which it could do in a painless second, and exchanged the office uniform for something eye-catching but tasteful. Then it either went on a date or went trolling for a new source of money.
    It had three wealthy men paying regular “gifts,” for discretion as well as services rendered, and made even more per month by picking up men and robbing them after sex. If they fought, it would sometimes have to kill them, butusually the threat of exposure was enough. It preferred to leave them alive, so it could identify them months or years later for a repeat performance, with a different face and body. There was a gay “scene” in Washington in the seventies, and the chameleon moved through it like an invisible predator.
    It didn’t prefer gay sex to straight; one was much like the other. It made less money as a woman, though, and as a gay prostitute it ate at better restaurants, and the other man still picked up the bill.
    The seventies and eighties were good for the stock market, at least for conservative investors, and all of the money the chameleon made from sex and extortion went straight to its broker. After the first million, it became a broker itself, handling its various identities under yet another false one.
    It didn’t have a plan, in the sense of ambition. It watched its various fortunes grow and shrink and grow again like a horticulturist tending a garden, fertilizing in one season and pruning in the next.
    It slowly became the richest creature in the world, though the wealth was scattered among a hundred identities and a thousand accounts. It started two small wars, as experiments, and profited from both, though not as well as it did in drugs and dot-coms.
    It left dot-coms a year before they tanked, but then, instead of pushing its advantage, left the money to marinate for a year or decade or two. Something would come along.
    Maybe money could accomplish what research had not, finding another one like himself. Humans were no challenge to kill.

- 32 -
melbourne, australia, 1997
    T he changeling settled into the Gippsland campus of Monash University in 1997, and spent four years earning a double degree in marine biology and biotechnology. It enjoyed Melbourne, but often spent its free time in the water, being a subject as well as a student of marine biology, and enjoying fresher fish than any sushi chef could offer.
    Its academic performance was flawless, Monash being no more difficult than Harvard or MIT, and it accepted a full scholarship to James Cook University in Queensland, where it spent four years getting its M.S. and Ph.D. in marine biology, specializing (naturally enough) in the behavior of marine animals.
    It took its fresh doctorate to AIMS, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, where it began researching “wonky holes,” the fisherman’s name for muddy holes that foul trawling nets near reefs. Many kilometers offshore, they turned out to be fresh water percolating from subterranean streams—a natural process that was having anunnatural effect on the reefs, because the water carried nutrients from farms, which fed algae, attracting fish. Fishermen kept the locations of wonky holes secret, because they attracted schools of fish—an easy day’s catch was worth the occasional fouled net.
    Investigating this phenomenon gave the changeling its first opportunity to see itself as a great white shark. AIMS was using underwater videocams to monitor fish populations, and one weekend the changeling went out to visit a camera site. It grabbed the bait box, used to attract smaller fish, in its powerful jaws, and crunched it flat, thrashing around in a natural reaction to the strange metallic flavor. It made for some great footage, which had gone all over the oceanographers’ world by the time the changeling had turned back into a human and returned to the lab.
    “Ugly customer,” it said when it saw