Tham Cheng-E - Surrogate Protocol

She smiled at him. “You’re a darling, Arthur.”

“So when are you leaving?”

“That’s a rather unpromising remark. I just got here.”

Arthur laughed again at the irony of it and sat down on an armchair opposite the bed. He crossed his fingers over a raised knee and sustained a deliberate, practiced smile as someone who was about to begin an oration. “The last I remembered was the blast that burned off an entire repository of memories and left a void in my head. Then I got hooked up with a bunch of biker boys who offered me a job out of thin air, got holed up in attics, in sweaty little basements and practically lived off a duffel bag because I was being moved from one accommodation to another every three months. For an entire year I was haunted by the feeling that I had left someone behind. And it took a lot of hard thinking to figure out that someone was probably you.

“Then came these letters.” He sent the folded letter skittering over the two Matthew and the Mandarins records on the desk, still in their half-opened postal wrapping. “Mystery gifts of prawn crackers, canned trotters…” He alluded to the contents of his desk with a derisive shrug, “And they all led up to the grand finale of your voilà appearance just when I almost succeeded in giving you up.” He paused and polished his day-old stubble on his chin. “I don’t know what to make of this, Hannah.”

“With a friendly hug and an offer to take my bags?” She crossed her legs and cupped her chin innocently in her hand. The coloured glow of the Christmas lights bled through the window and flashed against the side of her face.

“You are Willow the Wisp, aren’t you?”

She looked into the darkness outside.

“I thought it sounded like you,” he added. “Detached and elusive.”

Hannah reached out and took him over and sat him down on the bed beside her. She wrapped his arms around her waist and held them there. But she made sure their shoulders did not touch, and Arthur made no advances either.

“Quite frankly I don’t know what the hell I’m running from,” he said.

“You really don’t remember?”

“I’m not sure if it’s something I want to remember.” “It isn’t.”

Arthur knew better than to pry. He found it difficult to meet her gaze, so he went on looking at her eyes as he struggled with indecision. When he made up his mind he held her tenderly by the elbows and began drawing her to him.

Initially Hannah did not resist. She made little snippy movements when Arthur’s head began listing to the side and his face came closer to hers. And just before their lips touched she stiffened and pulled away. Arthur’s eye flashed open.

“I’m not ready to cross the line,” she said.

Arthur did not persist. He gave her a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder and got up from the bed. But his disposition would not lie.

“I’m sorry, Arthur.”

“Don’t be.” He installed himself at the desk where his journal lay open.

“What are you doing?”

“Writing the day,” said Arthur, penning away as he spoke. “We should have a little celebration tomorrow for your arrival.”

Hannah went on looking at him.

“Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve. We’ve got all day.” Arthur threw her a smile over his shoulder. “We’ll have breakfast, then an afternoon picnic at Kensington Gardens, and a nice candlelit Christmas dinner over a bottle of sherry. They drink a lot of sherry here.”

Hannah smiled with her chin in her hand. “Can’t wait.”

“Take the bed. I have a sleeping bag.”

“You’re such a darling, Arthur.”

She kicked off her shoes and cocooned herself in the warm spread of down. Arthur could feel her watching him as the tip of his pen quavered to his strokes. From the window came the off-tune singing of drunken revellers.

The darkness was full. Hannah sat up in bed and wiggled her sock-clad feet which peeked from the far end of the duvet. She had not slept a wink, though she had kept her eyes closed for the past three hours—a skill honed and perfected over decades. The clock above Arthur’s desk read three thirty. Arthur was sleeping on the floor beside her, covered in a felt blanket, his torso rising and falling with the clockwork consistency of a deep sleep.

She retrieved a capsule-shaped object from her sock, twisted it and spun out a fine needle like the nib of a propelling pencil, scarcely a few millimetres in length. A nudge from her foot sent Arthur stirring and flipping to his side. She pulled away the felt blanket and jabbed the needle deftly into the mid-section of Arthur’s back where you would find the least number of somatosensory cortices and cause the least pain. It went past the cotton and punctured the skin. Arthur didn’t move.

Thirty seconds passed in Hannah’s mental clock before she rolled him onto his back. She slapped him twice, once on each cheek, and his head lolled lifelessly at the blows like a sloven corpse. There were occasions when longevity made her think she’d seen it all; it fortified her against death and gave her a penchant for it so that she could kill without remorse. This was one of them. For the next three hours she would be endowed with such dominance and power that it made her feel like Death itself.

She watched him in the darkness, taking her time to parse the situation and avoid sophistry in her lines of reasoning. It was never easy to be completely honest with oneself. She could put a cap in his head with a suppressor and end this silently, painlessly. She would be doing him a favour, protecting him and protecting whatever that was in him from falling into the wrong hands.

But this was never her intention. She still had scruples left in her.

She got out of bed and stepped over Arthur as if he were a log. From her patchwork bag she retrieved a pocket-sized touchpad and a vial of clear fluid. She attached it to a compartment at the bottom edge of the touchpad, and its black screen glowed. From the top of the device she extracted a tab fitted with a pair of silver needles. A thin conduit led from them, and pneumatic pressure sent the fluid coursing through it. Her fingers flickered across the screen, programming the cellular cybernetic organisms in the fluid and assigning them their tasks. Then she took one of Arthur’s feet, pulled off the sock, and plunged the pair of needles deep into the web of flesh between his toes.

The pain would’ve jolted Arthur awake if it weren’t for the capsule tranquiliser. The needles pumped tens of thousands of preprogrammed cybernetic cells into Arthur’s bloodstream. Matrices of information rolled across the black screen. The touchpad performed a synchronisation and logged into a covert network.

Profiles of individuals appeared as a list, each with a mugshot. She scrolled through one face after another—mostly unsmiling ones, some with inattentive gazes, others frozen in the middle of speech, and all of them taken against backdrops of streets and homes and workplaces—faces belonging to those who didn’t know their pictures were being taken.

She chose one of them at random—a man who looked to be in his early fifties, set the grid accuracy to ten metres and tapped out a track. The device whirred and whined for a moment before telling her that the individual had been triangulated to a spot in Chiang Rai, Thailand. She then went down the list and stopped at a profile.

The name Qara Budang Tabunai glowered at her from the screen. Beside the name was an orthogonal blank where the mugshot would’ve been. She set the device to work. Thrice the system attempted to triangulate a position, and thrice it failed.

And here he is, right beside me. Hannah indulged herself in a smile. The jamming worked, and perhaps this was the best she could do for him.