Tham Cheng-E - Surrogate Protocol

“SO WHAT DO they call you now?” The athletic young man had toned shoulders and an attractive, pearly-toothed grin over a long chin. He unwrapped his burger and nibbled a piece of onion that fell from it.

“John,” he replied, smiling.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“It’s nice. Short and apostolic.” The young man grinned as he chewed.

John and his associate always met at a different fast food restaurant whenever they had to talk. They wouldn’t discuss the venue; one of them would decide the location and bring the other to it. It was safer that way. The joint was packed solid ten minutes into lunch and they could hardly hear each other over the drone of voices. But it was good that way.

“There are those who’ve got it worse.” The associate squeezed out a pack of chili sauce and drowned a French fry in it. “I heard the chaps at Delta-Four get names like Titan and Dick.”

John laughed. “What did they call you before this one?”

“Helio,” said the associate. “Had it since the sixties.”

“Congrats on your new posting.”

The associate gave a modest smile and sipped his cola. “Forming a team to look into domestic terrorists. Thinking of infiltration, if it comes to that. Who would’ve thought of home-grown factions when we’d been busy with the usual jihadists?”

“It never was about religion, was it?”

The associate’s smile thinned. “It has always been about power.”

“I think it’s a better posting.”

“Maybe.” The associate took another bite and spoke through his chewing. “The less covert the better. You don’t get scrutinised that much. Even if you’re KIA they’d be obliged to give you a gravestone and a eulogy. Now I just want to settle down and have babies.”

John laughed again.

“Congrats to you too for becoming the lead,” the associate added. “It’s good to have your own Chronie, shows you’re up to it. When you getting him?”

“In nine months.”

“What trouble has he got into?”

“Not sure yet,” said John. “Some chap in a big old house at Clacton Road, fell onto my lap a month ago. The Seers could be pre-empting a move from the Other Side.”

“Probably.” The associate went on chewing. “What are you going to do with your other two Chronies?”

“Give them up for adoption?” John said in jest. “This one’s going to be my main.”

“Naturally.”

“Did any of your Chronies survive?” John asked him.

“One did. At least he was still living when I passed him on. The other didn’t.”

“A Tracker got to him?”

“No.” The associate swallowed and swiped his lips with a paper napkin. “We killed the Tracker and the Chronie shot himself.”

John’s brows furrowed. “Why?”

“The Tracker we killed turned out to be his lover.”

That answer hung between them for a while as they ate in silence and watched the crowd, until John rekindled the conversation.

“How are things with Stella?”

The associate’s eyes lit up at the name, and his lips twitched involuntarily into a bashful smile. “Good. We’re happy.”

“How long together?”

“Almost a year.”

“Does she know that you’re a…”

“Of course,” said the associate, his smile widening into a grin. “She’s in Inquiry, bound to find out sooner or later.”

“You told her?” said John with measured incredulity.

The associate shrugged. “A relationship is a commitment. And commitment is trust.”

“She’s okay with it? That you’ll outlive her and—”

“I was hoping one day Transfusion might work,” the associate replied. “I don’t own the Serum in the first place; they put it in me to rehabilitate my lungs when I got shot in ‘72.”

“Did she coax you into telling her?” John directed his finger back and forth. “I mean, did she… was she good at that ?”

Another diffident smile broke across the associate’s lips. “We’re not Caesar and Cleopatra. I wasn’t swindled into telling her anything if that’s what you’re thinking. But she’s got quite a kiss.” He pulled down his lower lip to reveal a red sore.

“Good,” said John. “You can make lots of babies with it.”

The remark drew more laughter. The associate threw his head back as he chortled, almost choking on his cola.

Then he started coughing and wouldn’t stop. His head spasmed at a grotesque angle over the backrest, his neck bent, his larynx protuberant. He was convulsing, and when John rushed to his aid his eyes rolled back and crimson foam oozed from his mouth.

John yelled for an ambulance and started pumping away vigorously at a lifeless chest as an audience gathered around them. Perspiration from his chin blotched onto his associate’s shirt. He only stopped himself from attempting oral resuscitation at the last second on account of a dark suspicion. When the ambulance arrived, he slipped a sample of the associate’s blood into the omnicron before the paramedics took him away.

The coroner’s report stated a case of myocardial infarction. John’s omnicron however, indicated the presence of cellular cybernetics—a synthetic virus modified from the Serum that could be programmed to disperse its toxins on a timed-release. He remembered the sore on the man’s lip and knew that his associate had, in the lingo of their trade, been tagged .

This usually happened when CODEX decided to fire someone.

But he wasn’t a bad operative. He just wanted out.

John’s hotel is a eight-storey tenement of sleaze and musky carpets. He checked himself in on a whim so there would be poor odds of anyone anticipating his moves—a trick he learned from his late associate. He insepcted the place nonetheless, and having convinced himself that he wasn’t followed, proceeded to set up his observation post.

Now he eats a boxed dinner broodingly and monitors the outer sensors. It is a chilly evening that augurs rain, and a north-easterly wind rattles the sliding windows on their rails. Almost twenty hours have passed since he had Landon’s home bugged. Nothing peculiar happened in the earlier part of the day and Landon mostly stayed home where he read and slept. The holographic screen on the dresser now shows Landon in the study, amid stacks of journals, tamping tobacco into an ivory pipe. The gardener lazes on the living room couch, watching a soap opera, arms flared over the backrests.

A status update arrives over a secured line and John checks the text.

This time there is no doubt about it. Landon Lock is the real deal.

In the wake of this revelation John has given up trying to make sense of his mission because it probably isn’t a mission in the first place. It is an order, and orders give you not a picture, but a pinhole that reveals only the point to which one has to go with the Chronie. Until this point Landon will live. Beyond it is anybody’s guess.

From the door comes soft, spiritless knocking.

The TV isn’t broken and John hasn’t ordered room service. Chambermaids enter only when the guest is out, and more often in the mornings than the evenings. John shuts the briefcase and stows his earpiece in a drawer. He steals over to the door and through the peephole he sees the made-up visage of a beautiful woman. The knocking grows louder. She must have detected his presence by the disturbance of light from the slit under the door.

He opens the door and leaves it latched. The woman wears her dark hair bundled above her nape in a chignon. Her eyes are soft but sad.

“Need company?” she asks. “A hundred for the night.”

“No, thank you.” John closes the door, though temptation beckons like the devil himself. The young lady wedges her heeled foot between the door and its frame.