Tham Cheng-E - Surrogate Protocol

The captain grasped Amal’s wrists in the wrestle. Amal led him away from Anton’s bed and deliberately gave in, allowing the captain to wrench the weapon from his hand with convincing effort. Amal pushed himself away, as if in fear of the coming execution. The Japanese captain, his face tightened into a look of dark triumph, lifted the weapon to a spot between the eyes and pulled the trigger.

The Japanese captain took pleasure in observing how the blast had ejected Amal’s left eyeball from its socket and taken out a piece of skull from the back of his head. He appreciated the backward jerk of head and the spray of blood. They were all very familiar to him—signs of Death to a single twitch of his finger. He watched Amal fall, and was pleased.

Anton anticipated the sorrow as he watched his friend fall. But it didn’t come because he saw no blood, no wound whatsoever. Amal had fallen like a victim in a children’s play. He lay on the floor unmoving, perhaps even unbreathing. He is only sleeping, Anton told himself. But it all made no sense.

Before Anton could grasp what was going on he found the Japanese captain before him. He was staring down the muzzle of the pistol when a great flash and a tremendous bang sent him reeling back onto the bed. There he lay in shock, mouth agape and eyes unblinking. He was profoundly astounded by the fact that he lived despite the shot. More surprisingly however, was the fact that the Japanese captain, having sated his murderous hunger, strode away as if Anton had truly been executed to his fullest satisfaction.

The captain left the ward and hollered off a series of commands, telling his soldiers that its occupants were dead. Groups of them rushed past the ward bearing their bayonet-tipped rifles. From neighbouring wards came the cracks of rifle shots. It went on for a good while before they began to thin and then stopped altogether.

Back in the first ward, Amal stole forward and peeked over the window sill. The soldiers who had been guarding the western façade of the hospital had been called away. In the wake of the carnage, they must have reasoned that the occupants of the wards were either rounded up or dead.

He went over to Anton and tapped him on the foot, making him jerk with a start. “That window, ah,” he pointed. “Not high, about four feet. You jump down and crawl your way out. You will see an old path. Follow it up the slope, okay?”

Anton clawed frightfully at Amal’s arm. “I don’t understand any of this. How’d you—”

“No time to explain, lah. You better go before they find us alive.”

He helped Anton to his feet and ushered him, hobbling, over to the window. He pressed the toy cricket clicker into Anton’s hand. “Count to thirty after you reach the path and then press this hard.”

Anton threw a leg over the ledge. “You’ll come with me?”

“Right behind you.”

Just as Anton was about to leap off the window he grasped the sill and turned back. “Where’s Vivian?”

“She okay, lah! Don’t worry.” Amal slid his arms beneath Anton’s armpits and lowered him. “Quickly go! And don’t forget what I tell you, ah!”

Anton slid down the wall and found himself in a backyard thick with foliage. Beyond a narrow, mossy drain a bluff led up into the forest along a trail worn out by frequent use. Anton took a backward glance and did not see Amal. Cautiously he hobbled forth as sporadic gunfire erupted from some part of the hospital grounds he could not see.

The Japanese captain returned.

Microscopic neuro-transmitters implanted in his brain had tricked him into thinking that his victims were lying dead in the ward. They provided visual cues attesting to the authenticity of the thought and allowing the captain to virtually “see” Anton’s blood on the walls and sheets; the realism of its spray calculated by means of fluid trajectories and artificially projected through his optic nerves.

But there was a peculiarity: the “bloodied” bed was now empty.

The captain scrambled towards it, unable to reconcile the death of his victim with the sudden disappearance of the body. Acting upon instinct he looked beyond the window and beheld a dead man hobbling away in flight, and his bearded jaw fell open.

“Nan da, omae wa?” he shouted—a harsh, guttural voice. “Tomare!”

Anton, still running, failed to realise that the sudden blare of the Japanese language was directed at him. Only upon the second shout of tomare did he venture a glance behind and see the captain staring incredulously back at him.

In the panic Anton had forgotten to count as Amal had instructed him. He began scurrying up the incline double-speed, clawing desperately at the kudzu vines, his adrenaline-charged body paying no heed to sutured wounds that were splitting open in the effort. He anticipated the stab of bullets in his back and did not realise that Amal had jumped the captain.

Like a rabid beast Amal lunged. The captain, struck by a second round of shock from the resurrection of yet another man he had killed, was stripped of his senses and began screaming madly for help. A squad of soldiers rushed into the ward and Amal knew it was all over for him.

“Anton, run !” he roared, stretching the last syllable for as long as he could until it was swallowed by a burst of machine gun fire.

At the top of the bluff Anton burst into tears and pressed his thumb into the cricket clicker.

The butt of the Nambu pistol went off like a firecracker in the captain’s hand, scattering his fingers all over the ward and leaving a shredded stump on his right wrist. The captain, his lips calcareous and eyes bulging with shock, sank slowly to the floor cradling the terrible wound. To the din of frantic shouting and the clatter of boots, soldiers poured into the ward and leapt over Amal’s bullet-riddled body in aid of their captain, whose moan began rising steadily into a deranged, teary wail.

It was such pity that neither Anton nor Amal witnessed any of it.

LANDON LEAPS FROM the bed and his opened journal, which has been lying upside down on his belly, slips to the floor. He feels the draft of the air-conditioning against his wet brow. Dr Peck stops the EEG recorder, picks up the journal and places it back on the bed.

“Quite a bit of activity.” He scans a gridded landscape of electrograms. “Managed to retain any memories?”

Landon shakes his head. He can’t explain the inclination to hide that his repository of memories is piling up. But he feels it’s wise to do so because he’d have a hard time convincing the doctor that his memories cover the span of a century.

“You sure you haven’t had any trauma that might suggest something?” asks Dr Peck. “After all there’s the scars and you seem to be having rather… brutal memories.”

“What did I do?”

“Shouted, trembled.”

“Was I saying anything?”

“Garbled, as with most sub-conscious speech.”

Landon actually finds relief in this. Or rather, could clearer speech have helped corroborate the veracity of what he might reveal? He steals a look at Casey and finds disgust and derision in her stare before she looks away.

Freak , he can almost hear her say.

But as much as the opinion displeases him it is honest and undisputable. It occurrs to him that if John has been lying about the cellular cybernetics he might well die one day without knowing the truth behind it. Or he could reveal the freak in him to someone else and get a second opinion on the marvellous true life of Landon Lock.