Chapter 42: Six
Years as Someone Else
Six years abroad did not
turn Dinh Bac into a genius.
They simply forced him to learn
faster than everyone around him, because that was the price of taking back what
he had lost.
The first year, he started over
from almost nothing.
The years in darkness and the
four years under the bridge had torn ragged holes in his education. He had to
enter a preparatory program: language, statistics, basic biology, and how to
use data systems that ordinary people had grown up taking for granted.
Mornings were for treating his
eyes.
Afternoons were for class.
Evenings, he became a sampling
subject for the research team.
There were days his vision
blurred until he couldn’t read a single line. He magnified his documents, ran
screen readers, or asked Hoa to read passages back to him.
There were days the nerve pain
ground on for hours, until no sound or sentence could hold his attention.
But Dinh Bac never missed a
class he could still stand up for.
In the classroom, he was not
the quickest to understand.
He had no medical foundation,
unlike so many of the others.
What he had was an eye for the
thing that didn’t belong.
Give him a spreadsheet with
thousands of rows, and he could find the patient group that had been quietly
split off from the pooled results. Give him a report hundreds of pages long,
and he would usually spot where a side-effect rate had been carved into smaller
numbers under different labels.
A lecturer once asked him:
“Why do you always assume the
data has been tampered with?”
Dinh Bac looked at the
statistics on the screen.
“Because I lost my whole family
to one doctored report.”
He offered nothing more.
After the preparatory program,
Dinh Bac chose to study clinical trial data management and pharmaceutical
development.
He wasn’t studying to become a
doctor.
He held no illusions about
brewing cures in a laboratory himself.
He wanted to understand how a
project was designed, how its data was gathered, how its results were reported,
and exactly how people with power buried human deaths under columns of numbers.
Once he had built the
foundation and proven what he could do with data, he was brought into the
vaccine research group in two capacities at once.
As the source of the serum.
And as a data auditor.
He had no authority over the
experimental protocols. He didn’t prepare samples or sign off on conclusions.
His work was to cross-check the data, catch the discrepancies, and flag every
reaction that might have been overlooked.
Every month, his blood was
drawn on schedule.
There were stretches when the
volume was cut back because his body was failing. There were stretches when it
climbed, after the team found some notable shift in his antibody response.
Dinh Bac knew perfectly well
that he was still a test subject.
The only difference was that
this time, he could open the file that carried his own code.
More than once, the team
believed they were a single step from success.
And more than once, that final
step dropped them back to zero.
After every failure, Dinh Bac
demanded to review the complete data.
“You’re not the team lead.”
A researcher reminded him once.
“I know.”
“Then you don’t have to answer
for the results.”
“The blood in those samples is
mine.”
Dinh Bac looked the man dead in
the eye.
“If someone dies because a
result was missed, I answer for that too.”
The words sent Hoa’s mind back
to Thanh Ha.
The woman who had refused to
sign the D-17 report, because she would not let human lives be shaved down into
a few small numbers in a file.
Dinh Bac didn’t know how much
he was coming to resemble his mother.
He only knew that the more he
learned about drug trials, the more clearly he saw that her death had never
been the fallout of one impulsive decision.
She had seen something
dangerous enough that Truong Sinh chose to kill her entire family for it.
Over those six years, Dinh
Bac’s vision slowly steadied.
He could read at close range if
the light was right. He could recognize familiar faces, and navigate on his own
anywhere that wasn’t too complex.
But his eyes never became truly
normal.
Under stress, the world
blurred.
Harsh light drove spikes of
pain through his skull.
There were mornings he woke to
nothing but drifting patches of dark, and had to wait hours for the world to
come back.
The nerve stabilizers became
something he was never without.
And Hoa was the only person who
knew an episode was coming before he would admit it himself.
From Mai Ngoc’s secretary, Hoa
had become the official liaison between Dinh Bac and the organization.
Every sampling request, every
change to his regimen, every data access, every reassignment had to pass
through her.
It was the position that let
her protect him.
It was also the position that
showed her, with perfect clarity, that the organization had never fully trusted
Dinh Bac.
They needed his blood. They
needed his gift for catching corrupted data. And they knew he had never once
given up the idea of returning to Dong Cang.
More than once, Hoa was ordered
to file private reports on his psychological state, his relationships, his
plans.
She filed the reports.
But there were things she kept
back.
She never wrote that Dinh Bac
still lay awake through the night of his parents’ death anniversary.
Never wrote that every time
word came of a homeless person going missing, he demanded a check for any
thread leading back to Truong Sinh.
And she certainly never wrote
that in the drawer of his desk there was always one private file, and that the
name on it was Tran An Nhien.
In six years, the search had
never stopped.
Hoa made her quiet inquiries at
hospitals, treatment centers, every district ringing Dong Cang. But An Nhien
and Dong might as well have been wiped from every system that existed.
Each time the results came
back, Dinh Bac asked only one question.
“Are you certain?”
“Everywhere we can check has
come up empty.”
“Then keep looking.”
“They may have changed their
names.”
“Then run the search under
other identities.”
“Or it’s possible…”
Hoa stopped herself.
Dinh Bac raised his head.
“Possible what?”
“It’s possible they’re no
longer alive.”
The room went very still.
Dinh Bac looked down at the
watch on his wrist. The leather strap had been replaced—the old one hadn’t
survived the years, but the blue face remained exactly as it was.
“Not finding them doesn’t mean
they’re dead.”
He said.
“You’ve been searching for six
years.”
“Then I’ll search for six
more.”
“Khai Minh…”
Dinh Bac looked at her.
She almost never slipped on his
name.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
He closed An Nhien’s file.
“Some days I forget who I am,
too.”
On paper, he was Dinh Bac.
Inside the research facility,
he was a trial data specialist and a research subject with an extraordinary
immune profile.
To anyone who had ever known
Lam Khai Minh, he was a man who had died in the river at Dong Cang years ago.
Only the memories in his head
refused to answer to a new name.
The night the car exploded.
An Nhien’s hand in the
basement.
Four years under the bridge.
And his mother’s voice.
Dinh Bac rose and walked to the
window.
Six years ago, when the plane
lifted away from Dong Cang, he hadn’t been able to see a single point of light.
Now he could see the strings of
lights of a foreign city laid out below him. Still soft at a distance, still
blurred, but clear enough to find the horizon.
Hoa stood behind him.
“What are you thinking?”
“Lam Khai Minh can never go
back to Dong Cang. But Dinh Bac…?”
He looked at his reflection in
the glass.
A new face.
A different voice.
A name no one in Dong Cang had ever
heard.
“One way or another, I am going
back.”
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