Surrogate Protocol

by Tham Cheng-E

  The café settles into its usual lull after lunch. John sits alone with his third coffee, surrounded by empty tables and used crockery. When Sam tells him they’re closed for the afternoon, he idles by the lawn outside and smoulders away two cigarettes in succession. He lets the third one linger between his fingers.

  Sam passes Landon and nudges him with a shoulder. “Got your wife waiting. Maybe you should call the police.”

  Maybe he should. Landon storms out of the café and into the sun. His eyes rove over the lawns and find them empty.

  “Home isn’t safe.” A voice drifts across the sultry afternoon air. Landon whips about and sees John ambling towards him in the dappled shadows of sindora trees.

  He stiffens. John’s unexpected appearance throws him off the script he’s rehearsed for their encounter. “Who are you?”

  “John.” He extends a hand and retracts it because Landon wouldn’t take it.

  “What do you want?”

  John taps a cigarette over his palm. “We should find a better place to talk.”

  “Are you a police officer?”

  “In some ways.”

  “You got ID?”

  “Not the kind you’d expect.”

  “Quit following me or I’ll call the real police.” Landon starts walking away.

  “Where’re you going?”

  “None of your business.”

  John succumbs and pops the cigarette between his lips. “I wouldn’t go home if I were you.” He flicks a lighter and Landon walks on.

  He ejects a stream of smoke. “Fine. Go straight home and find out what’s waiting. Or you can take my advice and live a great deal longer. Your choice.”

  / / /

  The cigarette-flavoured interior of John’s sedan titillates something in Landon’s memory but fails to give it clarity. They leave Fort Canning Road and round into the driveway of a NeoPalladian masterpiece. It stands on high ground, its dome rising over a handsome porte-cochère that has received a great many nobles since the golden jubilee of Queen Victoria.

  “Why are we going to a museum?” Landon asked.

  John nudges the gears into reverse and backs into a lot. “Museums are nice.” He strains to look behind him and leaves Landon hanging on his response. “Never trusted the rear sensors. I like museums. Don’t you?”

  “Just cut to the chase, okay?”

  “I’m an operative.” John kills the engine. “Quasi-government. Coterius Extra-Terrenus—an inner circle of scholars founded in 1627. Two centuries later it was assimilated into the League of Nations and renamed Coterie of Discarnate Extra-terrestrials, or—CODEX.”

  A smirk breaks across Landon’s lips. “ET?”

  “It is known as the Unknown,” says John without humour. “We safeguard its existence.”

  “That’s an easy thing to believe.”

  “Even kids know better than to go along with a stranger.” John looks at him through the congenital severity of his face. “Unless a part of you thinks I can be trusted.”

  The response drums the sick feeling of inanity into his chest. He wants to jest about it, to ridicule its absurdity. Yet he stands ready to believe fiction because he already knows how much of a freak he is. And he loathes admitting to the precision with which John has read him over. “Museums are safe.” John tells him. “Their cameras cover everything.”

  “Wouldn’t matter if someone’s out to get me,” Landon says. “The guy’d just walk up to me and shoot me in the head. It’s that easy.”

  “Ease up on the movies, Landon.” John leads him into a perfumed lobby fitted with omni-directional cameras. “In our profession the death has to be all-natural. Spilling brains doesn’t do anyone good.”

  “All-natural like what?”

  “Like a cardiac arrest.”

  They enter a lift and John stares down at Landon, scrutinising the discomfited look on his face—one he’d seen many times over in the faces of Chronomorphs who had died in his charge. In time, he might have to tell Landon about them.

  “Who is after me, then?” Landon asks.

  “The Other Side of CODEX.” John says. “The faction that seeks to kill Chronomorphs like you, whom we seek to protect.”

  “Chrono-what?”

  “Chronomorph—one who’s become immune to time, figuratively.”

  “Why isn’t the government stopping them?”

  “The factions were born of a rift inside CODEX.” John looks up at the ticking numbers. “And they’re both very much backed and funded.”

  “How? By who?”

  “Recall how we met?” John’s lower lip twitches knowingly. “That explosion was the fruit of home-grown terrorism.”

  “I thought it was out to get me.”

  “You haven’t got that important yet, Landon. But it wouldn’t have occurred if it wasn’t backed by a faction that’s out to destabilise this country.”

  “No—” Landon whispers. “A rift in the government?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  The lift drops them off at a rotunda that accommodates galleries at its fringes. They enter one titled “700 Years” and John leads Landon past one exhibit after another without according any attention to them. A corridor opens to a larger room that displays crusty artefacts entombed in glass boxes. There is a broken shard of limestone set into a wall, and John goes to it. “I’m about to tell you a short story,” he raps a finger on the glass. “The Stone. Know anything about it?”

  Landon squints at the information board. “Whatever that’s written here.”

  “A boulder inscribed with the riddle to an ancient mystery once stood at the river’s promontory called Rocky Point.” John draws Landon’s attention back to the artefact. “Blown up in 1843 for the expansion of Fort Fullerton. This piece is what’s left of it.”

  “It says here that it’s about some strongman legend and a—”

  “Forget about the text.” John interrupts. “Truth is the boys who built Fort Fullerton were in a big hurry to blow it up. A chamber was buried underneath it, and the fort was built over this very chamber.”

  “Never knew we carried such secrets.”

  John ventures a rare smile. “Where’s a better place to hide secrets than a god-forsaken tropical island at the southernmost tip of the Asian continent?”

  “What exactly is the Unknown?”

  “Something we’ve lost in parts.” John sidesteps the question. “Centuries ago men and women were chosen to find it. A Serum was put inside them so all that they saw and heard would be tracked and recorded like human black boxes.”

  “And what’s in the Serum?”

  “Cellular cybernetic organisms.” John answers. “Advanced forms of nanotech.”

  “Impossible.” Landon scoffs. “They don’t make cell-borgs—not then, not even now.”

  John turns away and does a cursory examination of another artefact. “There’s reason to believe the Serum’s origin is beyond Earthly means.”

  Landon’s sight fell out of focus. “You’re really talking aliens?”

  “It doesn’t preclude the possibility that its source might still be human.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  John looks up at him. “The Serum communicates, legibly.”

  “In English?” says Landon, incredulous and not without sarcasm.

  “Chaldic.”

  This is too much. Way too much. Landon massages his face and leaves his hands on his cheeks. He looks at the Stone, at its worn and marred inscriptions that so many had allegedly attempted to decipher and failed.

  “What does all this have to do with me?”

  “Everything.” John says, curling his lips. “That Serum—is in your blood.”

  17

  MARCH 1965

  FIVE YEAR-OLD Poppy always got the window seat because that way he could be wedged between Arthur and the window. The public bus had to pass Whitley en route to Orchard Road, and Poppy loved looking at the rows of wild simpoh and kemunting hed
ges unreeling beside the window. The child attempted a hazardous reach between the horizontal steel bars, trying to grab at the rushing hedges, and Arthur yanked him back into the rubber-holstered seat that hissed and whistled under his weight.

  Poppy was clutching a little pink ticket with a hole punched into a spot where the number “4” used to be, his arms resting over a biscuit tin that contained his prized possessions. Restlessness quickly got to him and he started scraping his finger at the grit and cigarette ends that choked the tracks of the sliding window. Arthur wrenched his arm away and delivered a stinging slap to his thigh. Scoldings wouldn’t work because Poppy couldn’t hear very well.

  Poppy blew raspberries in protest and left his tongue between his lips. When he became bored he laid himself against Arthur. Rocked by the bumps, he soon fell asleep. Arthur drew him up against his arm and patted him.

  They alighted at a bus stop that consisted of a single slab of concrete under zinc roofing. The bus went sputtering away into the traffic, spitting black exhaust from its side. Then the lights turned and a parade of automobiles roared down Scotts Road and poured into Orchard Road.

  Poppy’s right leg was two inches shorter than his left; it gave him a limp and slowed him. So Arthur had to carry him through the perilous traffic to where Shaw House stood. The tower was a hulk of a building with vertical rows of angular fenestration. Its forecourt was an open car park, studded with Technicolour rows of Datsun Bluebirds, Mini Minors, Borgward Arabellas, Renault Dauphines, Ford Taunuses, and Austin A40s. In front of them stood a line of coconut palms proudly rustling their spindly fronds. Beyond the russet roofs of whitewashed shophouses peeked the upward-curving tips of a department store building, painted green to resemble bamboo.

  They turned west along Orchard Road and continued past a stretch of shophouses, up to the slope of Orange Grove Road. Realising he was late, Arthur widened his stride. In good time they conquered the incline and arrived at the circular driveway of an oblong, modernist building. A concrete canopy ran the length of the façade just above the first storey. Tubular neon signage proclaimed in winding script: Orchard Hotel. Large steps ran up to heavyset doors of dark glass set into silver frames.

  There was nothing of interest at the lobby except for a few very tall Caucasians whom Arthur almost mistook for mannequins. They paid no attention to Arthur when he passed them and instead tracked Poppy with shameless curiosity, apparently unable to reconcile his physical appearance with his infantile dribbling. A carpeted spiral staircase led to the basement. A few more steps ushered them past a bust of Milo de Venus, through heavy oak doors and into the Golden Venus Club.

  A dance floor sat empty, circumscribed by plush crimson seats with tables, while the cheaper seats, bereft of backrests, occupied the rear. Private rooms lined the perimeter of the club, and at the front of everything there was a stage of lacquered timber. On golden drapes hung a sign of foam crusted in blue glitter: Beat and Blues. Under it a drum set glimmered. On one side of the stage a board on an easel peddled the resident band—Checkmates and the Cyclones, featuring Vernon Cornelius and Brian Neale; Sunday from 2.30pm to 6.00pm.

  Along a corridor wedged between the private rooms and the club’s back-of-house Arthur punched in his card while Poppy scaled the empty stage. His covert little operation was betrayed by the juvenile rapping of the snare drum, and he was promptly whisked offstage. They proceeded to the kitchen and Poppy greeted, rather ardently, a group of chambermaids who returned token, awkward pleasantries.

  This was a Wednesday, and the aftermath of Sunday’s tea dance session—a prodigious assortment of glasses and dishes—awaited Arthur in green plastic crates piled against a tiled wall. He took grudgingly to the soaping and rinsing. Arthur used to make coffee at a popular joint until a fateful incident consigned him to a job of a “lower profile”. Scarcely a month into it he had already learned how much stolidity was involved in getting through the repetitious, humdrum routine in an isolated basement chamber. Reading too much into his job prospects would make anyone neurotic.

  Poppy excelled in it because his simple mind needed nothing to satisfy it beyond assisting Arthur in drying the dishes and placing them on clean trays. He took to the tasks with fervour and the height of his accomplishments consisted of breaking no glassware by day’s end.

  Lost in such monotony, Arthur didn’t realise they had been washing and drying for three hours straight until the maître d’hôtel called out to him from the raised threshold that separated the washing area from the other parts of the kitchen.

  The maître d’ was a middle-aged Chinese man, slightly plump at the waist and spiffy in his dressing. He wore fashionable glasses with a top frame. Arthur got up and Poppy, who was crouching beside him, waddled aside to let him pass. He was drying a cocktail glass with immense concentration, his tongue protuberant, his eyes slightly crossed.

  “There’s someone looking for you,” said the maître d’.

  Arthur dried his hands on his apron. “Who?”

  “You tell me.” The maître d’ pushed up his glasses with a thumb and forefinger.

  Beyond the grand oak doors of the club’s entrance a man was standing by the foot of the spiral staircase, dressed in a crisp white shirt with cropped sleeves and black trousers hiked high above his waist. He had a rather flat face and a long jaw that gave him an affable appearance. His hair was combed and oiled and his tanned skin glowed with a healthy sheen.

  “Arthur Lock.” The man held out his hand.

  From the tone of his voice Arthur knew it wasn’t a question. He shook the man’s hand and put on a slightly puzzled expression.

  “I’m Helio,” said the man. “It’s regarding your asylum.” “I don’t understand.”

  “This concerns your life, and I need you to do exactly as I say.”

  / / /

  The stranger named Helio related the instructions sotto voce to Arthur and departed. In compliance with them, Arthur lobbied successfully for an extended lunch break. At precisely two-thirty in the afternoon he set off with Poppy for the Magnolia Snack Bar next to the Cold Storage self-serve mart, a 15-minute walk away. Both joints were on the ground floor of a pair of flagging shophouses. Dark clouds were gathering even though the afternoon baked. It was a fifteen-minute walk.

  With three scoops of vanilla ice-cream Arthur negotiated a deal with Poppy to wait at the snack bar because he was required to rendezvous alone. The child had sufficient wit to comprehend the deal, and though swayed by the rare treat he was palpably distressed over the prospect of being left alone. Arthur paid the man behind the counter and got him to dispense the triple treat one at a time. But as he turned to leave, Poppy lashed out at his leg and stubbornly held on to it.

  Twice Arthur coddled him, and at the third attempt Poppy finally lowered his teary gaze into a dubious glare and gave approval for him to depart. In his pudgy fingers Poppy clasped the icy steel cup and refused to touch the ice-cream until Arthur was out of sight.

  The Cold Storage wasn’t crowded at this time of the day and there were a few empty tills where cashier ladies sat nattering to one another. Arthur went up a narrow wooden staircase, and at the top he found the boutique called Hilda’s. It was furnished in dark oak, had a British flair to it and had neat rows of fabric displayed across the length of its rear wall. Behind an oak-panelled counter a woman was leaning over a newspaper. She had hair like a beehive and glasses shaped like owl’s eyes.

  She looked up and Arthur cursed his moth-eaten memory. He stole a glance at a piece of paper and tentatively recited the words, “I need buttons for an Arabian fabric.”

  “What kind?” she adjusted her glasses.

  “Al Chalka.”

  The woman called out a name and a gaunt man appeared from a side door that led to the back of the shop. He had a tape measure around his neck and the shirt he wore hung on him as if it was emptied of a body.

  He beckoned Arthur over without a word and led him through a poorly-lit corridor flanked by high s
helves bulging with fabrics and sewing paraphernalia. A rickety wooden door at the end opened to the muted, cloudy daylight, and there a serpentine concrete staircase wound to the car park below.

  The gaunt man pointed to a black Chrysler Plymouth idling a few yards away from the staircase.

  As Arthur approached the Chrysler the window on the driver’s side rolled down and Helio’s smiling face appeared. A toss of his head indicated he wanted Arthur in the back. Arthur warily obliged and found someone inside with him—a small-shouldered young man with ruffled hair and a face shaped like an olive. He regarded Arthur with sharp, witty eyes and a slight, amused smile.

  Arthur addressed Helio. “I can’t stay. Got someone waiting.”

  “It won’t take long,” said the stranger in the backseat. “I’m Thaddeus.”

  “Arthur.”

  The handbrake released with a metallic crank. A shift of gears, and the car began rolling forward. It turned onto the main road and Arthur perked up, alarmed.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “Nowhere,” said Thaddeus. “Just throwing off curious stares.”

  Arthur began mental rehearsals of how he should bail from the car if he had to. “So what’s the business?”

  “Survival.” Thaddeus unsnapped a compact steel briefcase. It opened to a flat glass screen of very high gloss and two horizontal mirrored discs that resembled vinyl records cast in glass. Automobiles roared down their way along the opposing lane of Orchard Road and the Pavilion Cinema panned slowly past them. Rain began pelting down the car windows.

  “Your hands.”

  Arthur lifted both of them, palms upturned.

  Thaddeus pointed to the mirrored discs. “Verification.”

  They looked innocuous enough. Arthur placed his hands over them and at once a magnet-like force held them in place. The surface of the discs glowed where it made contact with skin. Arthur howled as his fingertips sizzled. Thin trails of smoky residue rose and for the first time he caught the stench of his own burning flesh.