Surrogate Protocol

by Tham Cheng-E

  A car pulls up behind them without its headlights on. A man emerges, his hair waxed and combed sideways, his sharp, studious gaze bearing down coldly upon the thrashing body, and with the same unassuming poise he had exuded when a Chronomorph named Anton Lock had singled him out to a pair of constables for stealing a dead man’s omnicron.

  He was at once the dapper young man who had led Hoo to Aldred, the freshman down at Rookie Row who had dropped John the warning of Marco’s imminent arrival.

  And through his ailing sight Marco remembers the headlock…

  Julian.

  Their gazes meet, if only for an instant. Julian doesn’t speak to Marco, but continues watching him with chilling apathy. “Tag type?” he asks Casey.

  “It’s old.” She checks her pad. “Nineteen-fifties—the time when they made him Agent, thereabouts. Works through the blood, delivered via the standard tongue-and-lip micro-cuts.”

  “You have the source?”

  Casey flips the pad over to reveal Hannah’s pensive monochromatic portrait—the same one John had discovered in Marco’s computer. “Alpine-One.”

  Marco, his back arched and fingers curled, now convulses in a pool of his own vomit. He defecates in his underwear. His face bloats. He starts weeping blood from his eyes and ears. “Fabian…” He croaks into his shirt collar.

  Aversion develops in Julian’s gaze. “Sure the Chronie’s clean now?” he asks. “I don’t want any glitches when we do the pickup.”

  “Positive.” She slaps Marco’s omnicron in his hand. “We got his guy an hour ago.”

  “Fabian…” Khun strains a whisper, his good eye darting madly about.

  “We’re all part of the same system, Marco. Tracker to Tracker.” Julian finally speaks, tucking his hands thoughtfully into his pockets. “Nothing personal.”

  The dying centenarian is helpless to respond. That arch in his back has crushed a few vertebrae and the pain has stalled even the muscles in his jaws. Drool spills over his lips, and then a crimson foam follows. Julian turns around and saunters back to his car.

  “Check his vitals, note time of death.” Marco discerns Julian’s voice above the whine of the engine. “And call the Morgue. You know the rest.”

  / / /

  What is a century in eternity? Not even a microsecond in a minute.

  Thunder still rumbles even though the rain has ceased. Landon drifts along the roadway; insensate and soulless. He is walking away from the racetrack, away from a past forever lost. Everything feels unreal, as if entombed in the ashes of a powerful and malignant secret the world would be better off without.

  Another road takes him towards the giant observation wheel, now closed but still illuminated in a ring of blue light. A street-sweeping vehicle closes in from behind, its circular bristles scrubbing away at the kerb gutters, and Landon imagines someone leaping off it and slitting his throat. Farther on a car turns into view, and its headlights blind him.

  It does a turnaround and pulls up beside him. The rear window rolls down and he prepares for a fatal shot. Instead, Julian’s face appears. “Mr Lock,” he calls out.

  Landon walks sullenly on.

  “I was hoping you’d come with us, if John meant anything to you.”

  The words hit home. Landon halts and the rear door swings open.

  Julian taps the seat beside him and Landon enters. The airconditioned interior is dreadfully cold and Landon’s damp clothes worsen the chill. There are two others in the car: the driver and a passenger in front.

  After riding in silence for a while Julian asks to be dropped off at the Fullerton Hotel. Before he leaves the car he offers a hand and Landon, still in a state of considerable shock, takes it absently. “I wouldn’t worry about Marco,” he says. “We’ve been tracking him for years before we gathered enough grub to take care of him. He’s been spinning tales and getting elimination orders to serve his interests. This guy’s got many enemies. You’re just one of them.”

  Landon listens with a drab expression and makes nothing of it.

  Julian eyes him searchingly. “That day at your home wasn’t the first time we met.”

  Landon looks up at him, his sights finally drawing focus.

  “Day of the sepoy mutiny,” Julian smiles. “You were driving a donkey cart then.”

  “I was?”

  He taps Landon on the shoulder. “You’ll remember.”

  The door shuts and the car cruises on. Landon watches the tinted windows and in his own wretched reflection he sees the face of a wimp. He despises himself for his weakness, for his failure to even weep and mourn for Amal, for John.

  For Hannah.

  Now there is nothing in him but an insidious void that threatens to grow and dominate his entire existence. It quenches all emotions and puts him in a state of unnerving quietude. It turns him placid, and allows him to discover the source of his fatalistic apathy.

  He is preparing himself for his turn.

  “I hope you’re mourning for John,” says the man in the front passenger seat. He looks over his shoulder and Landon finds his olive-shaped face familiar, along with his long snowy sideburns and sprigs of hair sprouting from the top of his ears. “He was a dear friend of mine.”

  “His daughter…” Landon says softly. “Is she ill?”

  “Her name’s Fanny. Diagnosed with terminal neuroblastoma.”

  Landon, unspeaking, turns his eyes back to the window.

  “I’m Thaddeus, by the way,” says the man. “I don’t suppose you remember me.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  Thaddeus faces front. “Someplace safe.”

  / / /

  When the car passes a landmark at a traffic junction Landon knows they are heading for Labrador Reserve down at the southwestern coast of the island. A straight and narrow road takes them to a car park where they alight. They follow a mouldering brick path that winds into the forest. Thaddeus leads the way with a penlight and Landon can tell they are now trudging uphill. The ground transitions from brick to asphalt and then to concrete, and he finds himself in an old bunker. Just ahead he makes out the glint of metal and the barrel of a large gun emplacement.

  Thaddeus fishes out something and speaks into it. He does not rush the phrase, but articulates it with precision. “Iftahya simsim.”

  “What is it?” says Landon.

  “Arabic.”

  “What does it say?”

  In the darkness he hears Thaddeus chuckle. “Open sesame.”

  There is the grinding of stone and the moan of metal, and Landon blinks hard against the gloom to clear his sight. The massive gun is swivelling impossibly on its base, as if it has suddenly become operational after a century of disuse. A ring of light pours through a gap in the floor as the gun detaches itself from its base, rises to a mechanical whine and reveals a cylindrical elevator and its shaft.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t blindfold me on the way up,” says Landon.

  “Open sesame and a secret hideout?” Thaddeus ushers him into the lift. “Try telling that to the authorities.”

  “Won’t anyone else see this?”

  “This park has more eyes than you know.”

  The elevator descends upon magnetic rails, slowly at first, then accelerates for a few seconds before slowing down to the cushioning of an opposing magnetic field. Its metallic walls revolve to reveal a circular room cladded in some kind of ceramic material. Landon sees a few pods set against a wall punctuated by tunnels just large enough for the passage of a grown man.

  “We call this the torpedo room.” Thaddeus tells him. “You may lie down here, head to the tunnel, please.”

  Landon complies and two assistants move forward to buckle the straps.

  “What is it?”

  “Transport,” says Thaddeus. “Don’t lock your knees. There’ll be a bit of a jar.”

  A burst of pneumatic energy sends Landon careering through the tunnel. The narrow space is lit at regular intervals in thin bands of light, a
nd the air in it is rather cold. For a minute or so he beholds an endless rush of lights and pipework, and the spot of light at the end of the tunnel explodes into a vast, cavernous space of craggy rock walls and rows of powerful droplights illuminating an immense laboratory-like facility.

  A jet of air slows the pod and a different group of assistants moves in to unbuckle Landon and help him to his feet. One of them even hands him a towel, which he gratefully drapes over his shoulders. Thaddeus arrives in another pod and unstraps himself as if he’s done it a thousand times over. “We’re under the seabed,” he says, taking Landon by the elbow. “Best way to hide from prying satellites and submarines.”

  “What kind of facility is this?”

  “The classified kind.”

  Landon trails Thaddeus broodingly. The experience alone would have blown anyone away but he is too tormented by the icy gazes of the facility staff to savour it. In every pair of eyes he finds indictment—that he alone is culpable of the deaths of all the people he owes his existence to.

  “I can’t help but feel responsible for everything,” he confesses.

  Thaddeus struts down a corridor that leads to another part of the cavern. “Spare us the guilt, Mr Lock,” he says. “Every operative is prepared for this. Our job is to monitor Chronies and let them live their lives with as little intervention as possible. If you must, blame it on the day you fouled up.”

  “You could’ve brought me here right from the start.”

  “And do what?” Thaddeus’ unflinching gaze shifts to him. “If you’re good by yourself we’d be happy to leave you that way, as a means of protecting what you represent. We intervene selectively because it’s all about priorities, Mr Lock.”

  “Are there many of—my kind?”

  “In almost every major city we know.” Thaddeus taps a button and enters a white corridor. “Every one of them struggling to live by their masquerades, their own surrogate protocols. Their lives entwining with ours, their tragedies unfolding as we speak.”

  Landon lets his gaze drop to the spotless floor. “It was much easier in the past. These days you can’t get by without an identity.”

  “The world forces one upon you.” Thaddeus’ brisk strides show no signs of slowing. “You groom yourself to be seen. You are defined by the world because you care too much about what people think of you. Principles are eroded, values and ethics contorted. It’s now glitz and glamour, fame and comfort—a societal show-business no longer confined to the entertainment industry but fuelled by it, ever more this century than others. And history tells us that when things get to this stage they often precede change.”

  “What kind of change?”

  “A great and terrifying one.” Thaddeus reaches the end of the corridor, scans his retina, and a wall slides open.

  They now enter a sterile-looking space as large as a warehouse, and stocked full of glass vials, huge stainless steel flues, massive air ducts and a dizzy array of touch-sensitive screens. At the centre of it all sits an enormous concave screen where a pastiche of images depicting maps and mugshots flashes in quick succession.

  Thaddeus retrieves an omnicron from his pocket and hands it to an assistant. He then beckons Landon over to a spot on the floor in front of the screen.

  “You might want to see this,” says he.

  “Is it John’s?”

  “It was, and it once belonged to someone named Origen.” Thaddeus taps on a console of touch-sensitive glass and calls out to the assistants. “SR-Five on Chronologue SG.”

  Someone echoes the instruction.

  “SR-Five on Omni-Extraction.” Thaddeus instructs. “Conclude and commit.”

  An assistant transports the omnicron with an elaborate suction instrument and drops it into a small tank of colourless gel. The omnicron lingers on its surface before sinking to a point midway along the depth of the tank where it hovers in balanced buoyancy.

  The phenomenon astonishes Landon.

  “Density alteration,” says Thaddeus. “It’s a nano-fluid that extracts omnicron data.”

  A low hum radiates and breaks the surface of the gel into concentric rings of miniscule ripples, and the screen comes alive in alternating images of striking familiarity—memories of ancient days, mundane events and scenes made interesting with age, lucid episodes of a forgotten epoch that preceded even the discovery of daguerreotypes. Yet they are now alive in a magnificent splurge of vivid colours as if they had been filmed only yesterday.

  Rapidly they flash in chronological succession, like a fast-forward that takes the viewer through crowds and spaces; from a distant past to the present. Every scene incites a spark of emotion, and in them there are faces: Origen, Amal, Helio, Raymond, Cheok, John, Hannah.

  Landon finds himself remembering more than he thinks. His heart leaps at the image of a small house on a knoll. It offers glimpses of his mother, still relatively youthful and beautiful. There is a heap of nutmeg fruits beside her, and she is opening one of them and separating the mace from the nut. Then he notices a stocky, sunscorched man crouching by thatched wall mending a wicker basket, his brown, bald pate glistening with perspiration. He looks up, gives a toothy smile, and the scene blacks out.

  Landon’s heart races. There is a certain detachment in the scene from what he thinks he remembers. It lingers like a disembodied clip from a documentary. The man could be anyone long dead and forgotten.

  “That man is your father, Mr Lock,” says Thaddeus, as if he read Landon’s thoughts. “Records indicate he was born in the year 1644. His name is Qara Budang Tabunai, and we believe what you have inside you once belonged to him.”

  Assailed by the deluge of revelations Landon holds onto the back of a swivelling chair for support.

  Thaddeus returns to the task at hand. “Commence erasure,” he instructs.

  From a corner of the cavern someone echoes it, and the low humming resumes, then fades away as the omnicron rises to the surface. An assistant extracts it from the tank and the gel slides cleanly off its chromium surface.

  “AR-Zero-Niner,” proclaims an assistant, his voice reverberating across the vast space. “Concludes archival, Chronologue, SG-one seventy-two.”

  This time, Thaddeus echoes and affirms the statement.

  The ritual is complete. The screen turns cold, and the facility staff resumes their seemingly banal chores as if nothing of significance has taken place.

  “So many people, so many lives…” Landon’s voice quavers with emotion, “and the oath…I don’t even know what I’ve been given to keep and what I’ve lost…”

  Thaddeus observes the sadness in him. “The Unknown could take us to realms beyond the comprehension of science. It breaks natural laws as we know them, and it has given us a glimpse of eternity.” Here he pauses. “I’m afraid this is as far as I can reveal.”

  “I understand.”

  “You might want to know,” he adds, stepping off a platform and taking Landon’s arm. “Your father too had been tracked for assassination.”

  “He was killed?”

  “No.”

  “Someone killed the Tracker?”

  Thaddeus lifts his cheeks. “She became your mother.”

  A surge of bittersweetness wells. There is so much behind his existence, yet he does not know what good it would do in knowing any of it. He could let it go; lash it to an anvil and toss it overboard. It would reach the depths, forever forgotten, never to surface. And a part of his existence would be truly excised. A limb lost. He would be incomplete.

  “Where then is my father?” he asks.

  “That’s for you to remember.”

  A pair of assistants in lab coats ushers them through a steel door in the steel-clad wall and into a white corridor. Another assistant emerges from another unseen door trundling medical equipment bristling in a tangle of tubes and plungers. Together they pass into a darkened room with an enormous mirror on one side of the wall. At the centre of it all rests an empty surgical bed, its stainless steel frame gleaming
beneath a surgical lamp.

  Thaddeus gestures at the bed. “I’m afraid our journey ends here.”

  Landon looks wanly at it and sighs. Everything he sees augurs the grim possibility that he is about to be cut apart. With tons of bedrock and fathoms of seawater above them the thought of an escape is as preposterous as a trip to the moon.

  “Seems I haven’t got a choice,” he says.

  “I offer you normalcy, which you may choose to reject,” says Thaddeus, “But in doing so you return to the protocol and the tracking will continue. Chronomorphs who subject themselves to such scrutiny usually don’t get to live very long.”

  “I was told that no Chronie ever survived a Transfusion either.”

  “If there is as much chance to life as there is to death, would you take it?”

  A moment’s thought, and Landon nods.

  Thaddeus breaks a smile. “Then trust me.”

  “Wait…” says Landon. “What happens to the Serum once it’s taken out of me?”

  “It comes into our custody.”

  “Are there options? I mean…is there a chance of putting it into— better use?”

  Thaddeus reads well between the lines and carefully considers the proposition.

  “We might work something out.”

  It feels rather odd that after the spate of bizarre events Landon should be subject to the dreary process of form-filling and indemnity endorsements. An assistant is on hand to dish out one form after another as he fills and signs them rather negligently, their tiny print being too profuse to be read in a short span of time.

  When it is done Thaddeus collects and checks them. Good. He hands them over to the assistant, flicks out a business card and offers it to Landon. It reads: Odds & Ends Antiques & Collectables. There is an address and a mobile number.

  Landon looks at him quizzically.

  “In case I don’t see you when you wake,” says Thaddeus. “Call this number if you’re having trouble adapting to life. Just say the code and someone will direct you to me.” He bats out a wink. “Take it as an after-sales service.”