Then he pulls me close and whispers in my ear, ‘Close your eyes.’
I do. But not willingly. Because I know what it means. It means he’s leaving me and the bitter cold is near.
But I also know it’s better than the alternative: watching him go.
His lips brush delicately against mine and then I hear the all-too-familiar heart-wrenching sound of his footsteps retreating, the scraping of his shoes against the concrete as he hoists himself to the top of the wall and the soft thump of his feet as he lands on the other side.
I wait, shivering slightly as I count slowly to fifty like I always do.
It’s just enough time for the sound of his footsteps to completely disappear. A calculation I once had to make and have despised ever since.
48 . . . 49 . . . 50.
When I open my eyes, my ever-fixèd mark has vanished.
39
TEMPORAL
I wake up to the feeling of the cold hard ground beneath me.
The room is small and dark. There are no windows and no doors. A single lamp illuminates the tiny space. It takes me a moment to realize that I’m lying on a cement floor. I turn my head to the left and see Cody lying beside me, still unconscious.
What happened?
I try to remember how I got here. Or even where here is.
I remember getting into the car with a woman who claimed to be Maxxer. She said she didn’t think we were being followed but that you can never be too careful. We stopped at a red light, and before I could react she turned and deactivated both of us.
Then I was . . .
Where was I?
I seem to remember being with Zen. Yes, we were back on the Diotech compound. We were reading poetry on my front lawn. Sonnet 116. My favourite poem. Everything was wonderful. Then he started acting very strange and he left.
But wait. Did that really happen?
It couldn’t have happened. Zen was captured. I saw it.
Unless . . . I sweep my eyes around the room again. Unless I’m on the Diotech compound now.
But that doesn’t make sense. Why would Maxxer bring us there? In the car, it seemed like she was afraid of Diotech.
The floor trembles and I glance upward to see two feet stalking towards me. From this strange angle, I can only barely make out her features although I’m fairly certain it’s the woman from the car.
‘You’re awake,’ she says.
I push myself to a seated position and rub my eyes. ‘Where are we?’ I ask groggily.
‘My storage unit.’
I glance around the small, dank space. There’s nothing in it except the lamp, a mattress that appears to be filled with air, a shabby metal table and one metal chair behind it. On the table is a collection of mostly unfamiliar devices. The only one among them that I recognize is a laptop.
‘You live in here?’
‘Temporarily, yes,’ she says. ‘I tend to move around a lot. Storage units are easiest. You can rent month to month and there are no nosy neighbours.’
‘Why did you deactivate us?’ I ask.
‘I had to make sure you had no memories of where this place was. Nothing for Diotech to steal later. It’s safer that way.’
‘When will he wake up?’ I nod to Cody.
‘In a few minutes,’ Dr Maxxer replies. ‘His brain chemistry is slightly different than yours. It will take a bit longer for the effect of the Modifier to wear off.’
I rub the back of my head, which is somewhat sore from lying on the cold concrete floor. And that’s when I feel the small rubber disc at the base of my neck. My hand darts to my left ear and then my right. The cognitive receptors. I never took them off.
‘What else did you do to me?’ I ask frantically, standing now and looking around.
‘Just returned what was rightfully yours.’ She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small silver cube. I immediately recognize it as the hard drive Zen used to store my stolen memories. It’s glowing green again.
I gasp and take a step towards her. ‘How did you get that?’
She looks at it and then back at me. ‘I found it when I searched you.’
‘Me?’ I ask in surprise.
She nods. ‘It was in your pocket.’
I shake my head. ‘But that’s impossible. The last time I saw it, Zen was putting it in his own pocket. Right before I fell asleep. Then those men showed up at the gas station and they took him and I never saw it again.’
Maxxer raises her eyebrows tauntingly at me. ‘Maybe you should take another look at that gas station.’
I hastily play back the scene in my mind. Moment by moment.
Zen told me to stay in the car while he paid for the gas. Then the girl with the cellphone took my photograph. A second later the men appeared. I ran to Zen but he pushed me away. He placed his hand on my hip and told me to get as far from there as possible.
On my hip.
I reexamine the action more closely and, suddenly, now I can feel him slip something into my pocket before he shoves me away. I didn’t even notice it at the time because I was so distracted by everything that was happening around us.
But Zen was clearheaded enough to make sure I had the drive before I left.
He wanted me to have access to the rest of the memories.
He wanted me to have the final pieces of the story.
And most of all, he wanted to make sure Diotech didn’t.
‘You,’ I say with sudden realization, blinking at Maxxer. ‘It was you who triggered that memory? The one about the poem?’
‘Actually,’ she replies, ‘I didn’t have to. You triggered it yourself. I just turned on the drive.’
I blink. ‘How did I do that?’
She shrugs. ‘You must have been thinking about Zen when you were unconscious. Clearly that was enough.’
I can’t help but smile at this.
‘It should make my explanation a bit easier though,’ Maxxer says.
‘What explanation?’
‘The one you’re about to ask of me.’
I stare at her in astonishment. ‘How do you know what I’m about to ask you.’
She smiles, her slender eyes crinkling at the corners. ‘I know a lot more about this conversation than you might think.’
This whole exchange is making no sense whatsoever. My head is starting to pound. I shut my eyes tight.
‘Go with your instinct,’ she advises. ‘Ask whatever question pops into your mind first. I promise, it will be the right one.’
‘Where is Diotech?’ I ask without thinking.
‘It’s not a question of where,’ she says. ‘It’s a question of when.’
‘Huh?’ I’m so confused now, the walls feel like they’re closing in.
‘Keep asking,’ she encourages. ‘You’ll get there.’
I take a deep breath and ask the next thing that pops into my mind. ‘How do you know so much about Diotech?’
She lowers herself into the chair and folds her hands in her lap. ‘Because I used to work for them.’
‘Used to?’
‘Yes. I was one of their lead scientists.’
‘Why didn’t you want me to know how to get here? Are they after you too?’
She nods enthusiastically, as if to tell me I’m on the right track. ‘Yes. Keep going.’
Her little game is exciting me and frustrating me at the same time. ‘Why are they after you?’
‘Because when you work at Diotech, especially on such a high-profile project as I did, you don’t get to simply quit. They don’t let you.’ She leans forward, holding my gaze. ‘You see,’ she continues, ‘I escaped too.’
She takes a deep breath and presses her hands together. ‘When I started working for Diotech they were a small company. Innovative. A collection of forward-thinkers who wanted to take science to the next level and use it for the betterment of humanity. I liked that. But then things started to change. Motivations started to change. And I no longer agreed with where the company was h
eading. So I left.’
‘Why, on the message board,’ I begin tentatively, ‘did you talk about Diotech as though it doesn’t exist yet?’
She nods, as though this is the very question she expected to hear next. ‘Because it doesn’t.’
I blink rapidly. ‘What?’
She leans back in her chair again and sighs. ‘Diotech won’t be created for another hundred years.’
My muscles start to go numb. The feeling drains from my arms first.
‘When you said you “escaped”,’ I say cautiously, ‘you meant . . .’
But my voice trails off. I can’t finish the thought.
She seems to find amusement in my reaction, which elicits a soft chuckle. ‘Sera, I got here the exact same way you did.’
I think about the memory I just saw. The one that was triggered while I was lying on this floor. I told Zen that I thought Shakespeare was lucky. Because he lived in a time without technology. When life was simple and eternal love was possible. I told him that was the only place we could truly be together.
My mind automatically drifts back to the conversation I had with Zen in the car today. When he tried to explain to me how we fled the compound. A few crucial sentences suddenly stand out in my mind. Sentences that are now starting to form a very different story.
‘Maybe I should start with the poetry.’
‘Sonnet 116 was your favourite.’
‘But it eventually became more than that. It became the inspiration for a very complicated plan.’
‘Something happened when we tried to escape . . . something went wrong.’
‘You ended up here and I ended up . . . there.’
The feeling in my legs is the next to go. My body is crashing, falling down, down, down, until once again the cold, cement floor is beneath me. I reach desperately for the locket hanging around my neck and clutch it tightly between my fingers as the truth hits me like a bolt of lightning.
There isn’t a place. It’s a year.
40
EXISTENCE
1609.
The number that’s been haunting me from the very beginning.
The year I said it was when they pulled me from the ocean.
Because evidently it’s where I thought I would be going.
That was the elaborate plan Zen tried to tell me about in the car. Before we got ripped apart. We were planning to escape . . . to the year 1609. A time of renaissance and love poems. A time without technology. Without Diotech.
Which is why Zen engraved it right on to my locket. Right on to my heart.
S+Z=1609.
Seraphina plus Zen . . . in a time when we could actually be together.
I want so badly not to believe Maxxer. To discount everything she’s saying, but I can’t. As much as it frightens me, my logical brain welcomes the ridiculousness of her claim. Because, ironically, it makes perfect sense.
It miraculously explains so much of what I haven’t been able to explain.
Why there’s no mention of Diotech anywhere on the Internet.
Why Cody had never heard of it.
Why they have technology that seems so futuristic.
Which means all those stolen memories – everything I’ve been watching in my mind – the compound, my house, the day I met Zen – those things didn’t happen in the past. They happened in the future.
Dr Maxxer rushes over and helps me up. She puts me in her chair and tells me to try to relax and take deep breaths. I’m so overcome by emotion and confusion that it takes me a few moments to be able to ask the most important question yet.
‘How is that even possible?’
Maxxer perches on the edge of the table. ‘You mean, how did you manage to journey one hundred years into the past?’
I nod dazedly. ‘Well . . . yeah.’
‘The science of it is actually quite complicated. But I’ll try to simplify it as much as I can. You see, I’m a quantum physicist. One of the best in my field. That’s why Diotech originally hired me. And several years later they asked me to spearhead a new, highly secretive project. Its code name was Project White Flower. I was saddled with the daunting and seemingly impossible task of determining if and how human beings could relocate themselves across time and space. We called it transession, or, in the verb form, to transesse. It’s a word based on the Latin roots trans, meaning “across”, and esse, meaning—’
‘To be, or exist,’ I say softly.
She smiles. ‘Very good. Transession literally means to cross-exist. Or to change where, or when, you exist. The full, official term evolved to become chrono-spatial transession. To exist across space and time.’
She takes a deep breath and stands up. ‘We immediately abandoned the usual suspects that scientists had been trying for decades – wormholes, travelling faster than the speed of light, etc. And we focused more on genetics.’
‘Genetics?’ I repeat. ‘You mean a gene that allows you to transplant yourself to another time?’
‘Transesse yourself,’ she corrects with a playful grin. ‘But yes. The transession gene. We were able to develop it in only a few short years. But we could never get it to work in any of our test subjects. We tried to implant the gene in mice and send them a few seconds into the future, or simply across the room, but they never left. And all of them ended up dying a few weeks later. The gene was literally eating them from the inside.
‘Let it suffice to say we weren’t making much progress and Diotech was thinking about shutting the project down. Looking back, I should have just let them.’
‘But obviously you didn’t,’ I confirm. ‘Because we’re both here.’
She nods solemnly. ‘Exactly.’ She presses her hands together and starts to pace in front of the table. ‘One night when I was alone in my lab, I made a major breakthrough. I figured out why the gene wasn’t working. What we had been doing wrong. I was so confident that I had fixed the problem that I implanted the gene directly in myself. Without even testing it on anything else. And I actually was able to send myself two minutes into the future.’
‘Transesse yourself,’ I correct with the same playful grin.
She chuckles. ‘Of course. By that time, however, I was already starting to have serious doubts about the integrity of the company. And the people who were making all the decisions.’
‘People?’ I echo. ‘I thought Alixter is president of the company.’
‘He is,’ she confirms. ‘On paper. But I had suspicions that it was more complicated than that. That there were other people pulling the strings. People much more powerful and dangerous than Alixter.’
‘What made you think that?’ I ask.
‘Diotech started out very small. A five-person company running out of Dr Rio’s basement. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, there was this massive influx of capital. Alixter was very cagey about where the money came from or what it would be used for. But the next thing I knew, we were being moved to an enormous compound in the middle of nowhere. Hundreds more scientists and staff were hired. Security was ramped up to the point of ridiculousness. We couldn’t go anywhere without scanning our fingerprints. We weren’t allowed to leave without clearance, or talk to anyone outside of the compound who wasn’t on a preapproved list. And even then our conversations were all recorded. The whole thing was just . . . eerie.’
Maxxer gets a far-off look in her eyes before shaking her head clear and continuing. ‘Anyway, it wasn’t until we moved to the compound that some of these very expensive (not to mention secretive) endeavours were initiated. Like my own Project White Flower and the project that created you. I know for a fact Alixter couldn’t have funded those on his own. Which means someone – or some group – must have been sponsoring them.’
‘Do you know anything about the project that created me?’ I ask hastily. ‘Like what they were doing to me? Or even why?’
Maxxer shakes her head. ‘Unfortunately not. Your project was kept highly confidential. Only Rio and Alixter were given full clearance. N
o one else on the compound even knew that the first synthetically engineered human being was living among us. In fact, I didn’t even know you existed until very recently. But I’ll be honest, I’m not optimistic. Alixter is fueled by one thing: money. And whoever he’s working for – well, who knows what’s fuelling them. Whatever the reasons were for creating you, I’m fairly certain it goes beyond just you.’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask numbly.
‘I mean, why create the perfect human only to keep her locked up in a cell all day? I know they didn’t spend trillions of dollars just to admire a pretty face. If they’re trying this hard to find you and bring you back, then the project is not over. I have a feeling you’re just a small piece of a much larger plan.’
I feel my chest tighten to the point of pain. I want to run. Run far. My eyes dart around the poorly lit space for an exit but the only door I see has a steel lock on it. I force myself to stay put and breathe. The inhales and exhales seem to calm me. Not completely. But enough.
Maxxer starts to pace. ‘So like I said, when my breakthrough in the lab came, I was already having misgivings about what Diotech had become. And I was starting to wonder what my research was really going to be used for. It was funny – since the time I started working on White Flower, I never stopped to think about what a technology like transession would do. What kind of repercussions it could have. Especially if it was used for the wrong purposes. I guess in my heart, I never really thought it would work.
‘But it did work,’ she continues. ‘And so then I was burdened with the idea that if I turned my research over to Alixter, I really had no idea whose hands it would end up in. And if something horrible happened, the responsibility would fall on me. I had horrific nightmares about waking up to find that Hitler had won World War II, or that the planet had fallen into a nuclear winter because someone had intentionally changed the course of history. I couldn’t let that happen. So I destroyed the evidence of my success, submitted the final report containing a mock-up of the older, flawed version of the gene, claimed that transession would never successfully work and recommended that the project be shut down. Then I left. And I’ve been hiding out ever since.’