Déjà Vu: A Technothriller

May 2003: The West Lothian Centre, Scotland

From his retirement, Professor David Proctor would see only pieces. Ticks of the clock. Each a tableau, none truly still. Before the explosion, he plucked the last notes of the opening concerto. After it, the blood on Helen’s scalp would be black in the red emergency lighting.

At the coda, he met the eyes of his audience. It was a vain flourish. His wife’s eyes, Helen’s eyes, would be closed, never to open again. Bless him, David thought, now seeing Dr Jeffreys, who sat in the front row with his eyes closed. David would discover his wife in the corridor, grasp her face and shout her name, “Helen, Helen,” because, even as masonry struck his head, he knew that hearing was the last light to fade. He slowed, his arpeggio slowed, and his left hand slipped from the neck of his antique guitar, The Nymph. She had been played by Fernando Sor at the court of Tsar Alexander I. Concrete would concuss him and blood sting his eyes but it wouldn’t be enough because Helen was dead and his survival was treachery. The arpeggio meandered to a stop. David felt the vibration die against his chest. His colleague, Bruce Shimoda, would slap his face and heave him clear of his wife. Choking, they would follow the strip lighting and stand, mute, at an emergency exit. Jeffreys dug a tear from his eye. He would fall on glass and bleed out before help could arrive. He was the first to stand and clap – fingers on palm, oh, quite wonderful – and nod seriously to his neighbour. Bruce and David would climb into the night air and collapse on the grass. Beneath them, the research centre would vibrate like the deepest drum. The applause covered David’s modest smile as he took a sweeping, medieval bow.

The nightmares had lasted years. In them, David had run through the research centre as if it were a submarine stuck in a crash-dive. Post-traumatic stress, the psychologist had said. But those nightmarish corridors had been faded memories from a younger man’s mind. They were ghosts of something already dead. Here and now, they were more hostile and grotesque.

The Nevada Center, USA

Friday, 8th September 2023

Twenty years and four months later, Jennifer Proctor heard a splash. She heard it quite distinctly. She stopped mid-stride on the gantry and raised her goggles. Professor Michaels was nearby. He leaned on the rail until his knuckles were white.

“Extraordinary,” he said. “It worked.” He tapped his earpiece. “All sections report.”

On her own earpiece, Jennifer listened to the replies.

“Comcon, green.”

“Powercon, green.”

“Retcon, green.”

“Techcon, green.”

“Wormcon, green.”

Michaels sagged. “I honestly didn’t believe it would happen.”

A voice on the loop said, “Retcon.”

Michaels replied, “Go, retcon.”

“Permission to retrieve, Jack?”

“Negative.” To Jennifer: “Shall we?”

It took them thirty seconds to reach the floor by crane. As they stepped out, a quick-thinking technician took some photos and a group of suited VIPs, mid tour, no coincidence, gave them a round of applause. Michaels blushed but Jennifer curtseyed gracefully.

Michaels headed towards the centrifuge. Jennifer hurried after him. They collected a crowd. Michaels walked so briskly that his ID tag fell off. As they neared the centrifuge, he veered left and began to jog, skipping over the thick electrical cables.

The 1000-gallon tank was vertical and still. It rocked gently on its hinges. Water spilled. Jennifer felt her muscles quiver. She had just witnessed the most significant technological event since the moon landing.

Though the professor was ten years past retirement age, nobody was surprised when he climbed the ladder alongside the tank and jumped in. The closest onlookers were caught by the wave. There were chuckles. Jennifer felt people stare at her.

Michaels’s bald head reappeared. He spat water and wiped his eyes. He threw his arms over the lip of the tank and rested for a moment, panting.

“Professor?” she asked.

Michaels opened his right hand. A camera flashed. In the palm was a polystyrene box. He removed the tape that bound the two halves together. They fell open to reveal an old analogue watch. He was careful to cover the back of it. “What time is it, Jennifer?”

A few voices beat her to it, but Jennifer said, “11:02 a.m.”

“By my watch -” he held it up, to more hearty laughter - “it is 11:32!”

The crowd broke out into full applause and the words that Michaels had been practising for over six months were lost in the noise. Like Armstrong, he’d fluffed it, but Jennifer could see that he didn’t care. Two technicians helped him from the vat.

The professor was reeling from claps on the back when he reached Jennifer. They embraced again. The crowd made a circle around them. Michaels was relaxed. He showed her the watch. In reply, Jennifer produced a small polystyrene box of her own and opened it. There was also a watch inside. Jennifer’s had the correct time. Michaels’s was half an hour ahead.

He looked at the back of his watch without letting anybody see. Then he produced a small notepad and pen, juggled the three, and finally wrote something on the pad. He covered it immediately.

“Generate the code word,” he said.

Jennifer produced her own notepad. Hers was electronic. She said loudly, “I’m now generating a word randomly from the Oxford English Dictionary.” She stared at the screen. She looked at Michaels.

Michaels nodded. “Write it on the back of the watch.”

She reached over and took a magic marker from Michael’s sodden labcoat. He smiled. She wrote the word on the watch. “You done?” Michaels asked.

“Yes.”

“Tell folks what the word is.”

Jennifer said, “The word is ‘electron’.” She showed the watch around. Some VIPs nodded solemnly.

Michaels raised his eyebrows. Milked the moment. He held up his own watch. On the reverse, in Jennifer’s own bad handwriting, was the word ‘electron’. The crowd exploded. The younger technicians whooped and hugged. The older ones watched them proudly. Michaels showed the VIPs his notepad.

They clapped him on the back and shook his hand. Nobody could accuse him of cheating.

When the moment was old enough, Michaels raised his palms. The crowd became quiet. He thought about saying his poetic words. No. They didn’t have time. “OK, everybody. Look sharp. We’ve got an appointment to keep. It looks like we’ll be sending this watch back in half an hour.”

That night, Jennifer dreamed of her father. He was young. He was running down a smoky corridor with a flashlight – torch, he would say – calling for his wife, and her mother, Helen. There were rumbles of impending collapse. Jennifer wanted to call a warning but she was only a ghost from the future.

“Helen!” he called. “Helen!”

The walls began to collapse. Debris fell like tears. The larger chunks exploded on the floor. The light was snuffed out. The underground research centre had vanished. Like a gut expelling trapped air, the space had simply disappeared.

“Jennifer!” he called. “Jennifer!”

She couldn’t breathe.

She awoke and looked around. Her muscles ached. The air had a dull resonance, as though a great sound had come and gone. Had she screamed? Light and dark traded places as a cloud crossed the moon.

The night embraced her once more and, with trepidation, she fell asleep.

Professor Michaels offered his elbow to Jennifer as they approached the outer edge of the biome. They passed through a plastic curtain into its cool, wet interior. High above them was a domed transparent ceiling and, beyond it, the sandstone roof of the cave. Suspended light panels provided energy for the plants. The air conditioning drew a wind across them. They stirred like chimes.

They walked on. Jennifer waited for Michaels to speak. He said nothing. The gravel path meandered among exotic species that reached ten feet in the air. Below them were red, green and blue lines in the gravel, representing ten minute-, half-hour- and one-hour walks. Michaels followed blue.

“I would like you to meet an acquaintance of mine,” he said finally. They were near the centre.

“Who?”

“John Hartfield.”

Jennifer stopped. She knew the name. Hartfield was a millionaire who had earned his first fortune in race-horse breeding and his second in revolutionary cancer treatments. That was public knowledge. But he also had a third interest. He part-funded the Nevada Center with the US government.

“Is this meeting going to make or break my career?”

Michaels adjusted his glasses. “You’ve already made it, Jennifer.” Abruptly, he took her hand and kissed it. Jennifer smiled. Perhaps this was the intoxication of success. She looked into his seventy-year-old face and realised, as he smiled back, that he would have been a handsome man in his youth. “Take care of yourself.”

“And you,” she said, still holding his gaze. He backed away.

As she walked, the hedges became thinner. She entered a clearing with a beautiful pavilion at its centre. Its black eaves curled toward the roof like the helmet of a samurai. Around its perimeter was a wonderland of bridges that crossed hidden streams. She could hear the flutter and call of birds, but see none.

The pavilion had no walls. Its varnished wooden floor was empty.

“Good morning,” someone said.

She turned. Standing behind her was a man in his mid-forties. He wore a blue suit and a broad-brimmed hat, not ten-gallon, but close. His smile was lopsided and friendly. He was tall, but not very tall; thin, but not very thin. His eyes were cold and blue. The sun had bleached them. As he walked towards her, she noticed his limp. He had a cane.

“Good morning,” she said. “Mr Hartfield, I presume?”

“The same. What a beautiful day.”

He was very close now. She could smell his aftershave. She could see his hearing aid.

“Would you like to walk with me? Slowly, I’m afraid. My leg.”

She smiled. He had no accent but English was not his first language. She recalled her dream of the night before. Her father running through the doomed research centre. Looking for Helen, his wife, her mother, who was dead.

They walked for minute in silence. He said, “There was a time, many years ago, when I fell in love.”

“What was her name?”

He laughed and made an odd, dismissive wave with his cane. “Science was her name. It was Christmas 2002. I was in France. I bred horses. I was happy. But I began to develop headaches. They grew worse and worse. I went to my doctor and he diagnosed a brain tumour. It was cancerous.”

He paused as they passed a gardener, crouching to plant some bulbs as a small robot handed them over, one by one.

“Go on.”

“It was inoperable. They gave me six months to live. Give or take six months.” A smile touched his lips, then was gone. “I tried various therapies. Alternative treatments. Chinese medicines, Japanese pressure therapy, Indian remedies. Nothing helped. After six months, I was desperate and ready to try anything. I offered ten million dollars to anyone who could cure me.

“Of course, I received a vast number of communications from fakes, con-artists and idiots. But one letter, from an Argentine medical student, intrigued me. He had an idea for a surgical procedure using, in essence, legions of tiny robots, designed to hunt and destroy cancerous cells.”

“Orza’s nano-treatment,” Jennifer said quietly.

“Yes, it is quite famous now. Not so then. I gave him the money and all the resources he needed. He developed an experimental treatment. I was already experiencing blackouts, memory lapses and language problems. I was desperate. I took the treatment and it cured me.”

“I heard,” she ventured, uncertain of her role, “that the technique was rather imprecise in the beginning. Non-cancerous cells were also destroyed.”

Hartfield’s face was blank. “True. The same may be said for more traditional treatments, of course, such as chemotherapy. But the nano-treatment demonstrated to me the effectiveness of science. I fell in love with its conquering power. It was love at first bite.”

He smiled. To Jennifer, it was the smile of someone who did not know humour; someone who had taught themselves to smile by looking at pictures. They walked into the shade of the pavilion and sat down on some chairs near the centre. The chairs had not been there a few minutes ago. She pictured a group of sycophants who scuttled around this rich, powerful man, arranging his world.

“A great man once said that science lights a candle in the darkness of ignorance and fear. I have lit my candles here in Nevada, in Siberia, in Australia, in Canada and in northern Africa. My research centres specialise in fast-track, radical endeavours. I am particularly proud of the work being undertaken here, Jennifer.”

“Thank you, Mr Hartfield.”

Here it comes, she thought. The rub.

“I had a research centre in Scotland, once upon a time. It was my first. It was bombed back in 2003.”

“Yes, West Lothian,” said Jennifer. “My father worked there before moving to Oxford.”

“Your father?” he asked.

“David Proctor. He is an artificial life researcher.”

There was a long pause. Jennifer examined her nails. “Mr Hartfield,” she said, “is this about my father?”

Hartfield smiled. “My dear young lady, you are quite perceptive. Like your father. Have you seen him recently?”

“Not in five years.”

“Pardon me. I do not mean to intrude.”

Jennifer shrugged. “We don’t get along, I guess. Separated by a common language.”

“The language of science?”

“No, I meant English. You know, he’s a Brit, I’m an American.”

“But you were raised in England.”

“I did my growing up over here.”

Hartfield’s on-off smile surfaced again. “Jennifer, your father may be in some danger.”

“Danger? What kind of danger? Physical danger?”

“It pains me to say this, Jennifer. I believe your father has fallen in with the wrong people. I knew your father a long time ago. Somebody has tricked him. Now he is in danger.”