Muck Man

Asa Graybar leaves the courtroom with a sentence hanging over him, a crime he insists was fabricated by the powerful Hazeltyne corporation. Instead of serving a conventional prison term, he is offered a grim bargain: spend a year as a specially engineered “changeling” to earn his freedom. The process, regulated by the Conversion Corps, reshapes a human into a form suited to the most hostile environments—an option few criminals ever choose.

In a future where humanity has mastered organ regeneration and can redesign bodies for alien worlds, a handful of specialist types are in demand. For Jordan’s Planet, the most brutal of them all, the “muck man” is a squat, resilient creature built to survive acid‑rains and dig through toxic mud while hunting the prized Slider eggs. Asa decides to undergo the transformation, hoping the harsh year will give him the chance to expose the corporation’s secrets and perhaps turn his sentence into a revenge mission.