“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.
“Where then is my father?” he asks.
“That’s for you to remember.”
A pair of assistants in lab coats ushers them through a steel door in the steel-clad wall and into a white corridor. Another assistant emerges from another unseen door trundling medical equipment bristling in a tangle of tubes and plungers. Together they pass into a darkened room with an enormous mirror on one side of the wall. At the centre of it all rests an empty surgical bed, its stainless steel frame gleaming beneath a surgical lamp.
Thaddeus gestures at the bed. “I’m afraid our journey ends here.”
Landon looks wanly at it and sighs. Everything he sees augurs the grim possibility that he is about to be cut apart. With tons of bedrock and fathoms of seawater above them the thought of an escape is as preposterous as a trip to the moon.
“Seems I haven’t got a choice,” he says.
“I offer you normalcy, which you may choose to reject,” says Thaddeus, “But in doing so you return to the protocol and the tracking will continue. Chronomorphs who subject themselves to such scrutiny usually don’t get to live very long.”
“I was told that no Chronie ever survived a Transfusion either.”
“If there is as much chance to life as there is to death, would you take it?”
A moment’s thought, and Landon nods.
Thaddeus breaks a smile. “Then trust me.”
“Wait…” says Landon. “What happens to the Serum once it’s taken out of me?”
“It comes into our custody.”
“Are there options? I mean… is there a chance of putting it into— better use?”
Thaddeus reads well between the lines and carefully considers the proposition.
“We might work something out.”
It feels rather odd that after the spate of bizarre events Landon should be subject to the dreary process of form-filling and indemnity endorsements. An assistant is on hand to dish out one form after another as he fills and signs them rather negligently, their tiny print being too profuse to be read in a short span of time.
When it is done Thaddeus collects and checks them. Good. He hands them over to the assistant, flicks out a business card and offers it to Landon. It reads: Odds & Ends Antiques & Collectables. There is an address and a mobile number.
Landon looks at him quizzically.
“In case I don’t see you when you wake,” says Thaddeus. “Call this number if you’re having trouble adapting to life. Just say the code and someone will direct you to me.” He bats out a wink. “Take it as an after-sales service.”