Unremembered (Unremembered #1)(67)

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.





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.’