Tham Cheng-E - Surrogate Protocol

“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, and 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.