Unremembered (26 page)

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 heading. 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.

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. No 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.’

‘But,’ I begin pensively, ‘clearly somebody else figured out how to manufacture the gene correctly. Because I’m here. And Zen. And Rio.’

‘Precisely,’ she says, pointing at me. ‘Of course, you’re not the only ones.’

I know right away who she’s referring to.

The men who took Zen.

The thought of them makes my fists tighten and my teeth clench.

Maxxer must be able to read my reaction because she nods understandingly and says, ‘Diotech security agents. Ruthless ex-military men that Alixter hires to do his bidding. They’re
probably the only people at that company who are more depraved than he is. And if they’re here, it means Diotech has the correct code for the transession gene.’ She lowers her head and
whispers, ‘And God help us all.’

‘So this is
my
fault,’ I whisper.

She lets out a soft laugh. ‘This is not your fault, Sera. This is so much bigger than you.’

‘But they’re here because of me!’ I rage. ‘Because I tried to escape. If it wasn’t for me, none of them would even know about transession. They followed
me
here.’

But a thought suddenly stops me and I glance down at my tattoo. ‘Wait a minute,’ I muse. ‘Zen said they could only track me within a two-mile radius.’

Maxxer nods. ‘Zen is mostly right,’ she admits. ‘Now – in
this
time – yes, they are limited to a two-mile radius. But one hundred years from now, Diotech
has satellite systems in place that allow them to track you anywhere on the planet. However, those satellites won’t be sent into orbit for nearly a century. Which means when you’re here
– in this time, or any other time before the satellites are created – their tracking technology is extremely limited.’