Tham Cheng-E - Surrogate Protocol

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.”

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 hedges 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.