BOOK OF BILLY: 2049
Chapter 18: Billie
THREE DAYS LATER
My heart pounds against my throat as I peer over the Lieutenant's shoulder at the images on the screen. Night vision goggles show a giant underground reservoir in an eerie green hue. The men rush down a set of steps as fast as debris would allow.
"Alpha team entering the primary reservoir now. Beta team on standby."
The moment stretches as the team sweeps the vast cave for signs of life. "Anybody still alive down here? This is Captain Greens. Can anyone hear me?"
His voice echoes to us through the speakers. "Turning infrared on now. Stand by."
I close my eyes for the inevitable. There is no one down there, no one alive anyway and Alisha had the wrong piece of information.
"We're picking up a weak head signature 200 meters ahead. Confirming it now."
On the screen, two elite soldiers scurry on ahead towards the heat signature we cannot see.
"They're here!" one calls out from the dark, and the Captain with his head-mounted camera approaches what looks like a huddle of bodies. My stomach lurches. I don't think I want to see this.
~ ~ ~
I knock gently on the closed door in my best suit. My hair combed neatly for the first time in years. More nervous than I had been when I asked Alisha out on a proper date, terrified she'd say no. I even have a fake rose in my lapel.
I don't think they heard me, so I knock again. I hear voices chattering away inside. It is Josie who opens the door for me.
"Dr Amour."
"Josie," I nod courteously. "You two ready?"
Behind her, an almost spitting image of Alisha steps forth, dressed in a summer dress a little too big for her fifteen-year-old self. Her expression reflects mine perfectly. She is as nervous as I am.
"I'm almost ready," Josie volunteers. "But Billie... is."
The young woman nods quietly and joins me out in the corridor.
While we wait for Josie, I turn to the girl. "Thank you." She meets my gaze questioningly. "Your mother," I begin, so nervous my throat is dry. "Your mother is the only woman I've ever loved."
She stares at me as I fumble for words the grown-ass man that I am. I don't even know what I'm trying to say, so I take the velvet ring box from my pocket and hold it out to her. She takes it and eyes the diamond ring inside.
"I've had it since before she left," I say quietly.
The kid looks up at me, shocked. "You were going to ask her to marry you?"
I nod.
"Then why didn't you?"
I suppose I don't really know the answer to that. "I was young and foolish I suppose and thought I had time."
"And now you don't even have that," she sniffles as she hands the ring back. "I think it's nice what you're doing for her, and me but," she glances at Josie's door. "I mean, I'm almost of age and I can take care of myself. You don't have to do this if you don't want to."
"Are you kidding me?" I smile. "I have wanted to marry your mum all my life. This is as much for me as it is for you. I hope you understand that, Billie?"
"You can call me Quinn," she smiles at me.
I nod. I know. That's what we had agreed on the night she was brought here, so we could avoid confusion. "I suppose I should ask you if I can marry your mother?"
Billie Quinn gives me a look only a heady young teen can manage. "She's dying. Why do you want to? I mean I get it, but it's stupid! She'll be dead by tomorrow."
Her voice wavers, and she turns away from me to wipe her eyes dry. I signal Josie to stay inside the room a moment when I see her about to exit. Give us a moment.
"I know I cannot replace your father."
She scoffs. "Don't worry, he wasn't the perfect dad he made himself out to be. I'm over it. They've been divorced for years now."
I did not know this. How could I? I've only talked to Alisha a handful of times. One of which was to reunite her with her daughter, somehow the only survivor in that cold reservoir. Severe hypothermia was their best explanation as to why she survived. Smart kid. She'd piled on the bodies around her to keep herself insulated as much as possible, and she'd used whatever rations she'd found in the bags of other students.
"I have never had a family of my own. Thought I still have time, or they were never the one, and now. "I finally admit.
"The world's dying," she volunteers.
"So, Billie Quinn Shah, as you can see, I'm doing it for me." I nod and step a little closer to her. "Question is, can you take me to be your family?"
Quinn's eyes tear up and her lips quiver.
"I'm not the best guardian, and I don't know much about teenage daughters, but I have loved your mother with all my heart and will do so till I die. Will you do me the honour of letting me fulfil her last wish, that I look after you as if you were my own?"
She doesn't answer straight away and even Josie eyes me, standing behind the young maiden. Worried.
"I won't if you don't want me to."
But then she does something I never quite expected. She throws her arms around me and shakes her head.
A piece of my heart finds it's way back to me.
"Oh!" Josie turns our embrace into a group hug, and we can't help but laugh snotty laughs of happiness.
I hold an arm out to either of them. "Shall we?"
"I love weddings!" Josie squeals beside me, hanging off my arm.
The next hour or so is a blur as Alisha and I wed in front of a celebrant and our three witnesses, Quinn, Josie and Malika, in Room 206. Her daughter helping her write the words 'I do' on the note pad.
An hour after that, Quinn and I stand beside each other with Alisha's hand in ours as we let her go to sleep one last time.
Five minutes after the ventilator is turned off, Alisha stops breathing on her own, and I feel an odd sense of calm before a raging storm.
The sense of failure is whole. Every pore of my being burns from it.
A minute after I leave Quinn to be consoled by Josie in their room, I march back into my lab, driven to save someone else's Alisha if I can. No more deaths from preventable causes. No more stupid losses.
~ ~ ~
That night, fever drives me to brainstorm and start designing a programmable interface that could work in sync with the human brain with the help of a neural chip in the brainstem and the nanites coursing through the body, able to be controlled by the mind alone to complete tasks. I mean, the few codes we already have work by voice command, so why not give the brain itself the power to use the nanites for other needs of the body?
My main aim right this minute is to make humans immune to diseases, something for everyone so no other Alisha dies from poisoning, or exposure to radiation. Or from cancer caused by radiation.
I had just days ago asked my lab to focus on making humans cancer-free, but now, I wanted them disease-free. I want the nanites to act as part of the lymph system when need be.
I don't know how many days I stay in my private lab. I don't know who has come to check on me, or who said what, or whether I've even taken a shower. People are dying. Alisha keeps dying, over and over in my mind. She'd be alive if she had the means to protect herself from fatal radiation exposure.
Then a voice of reason breaks through one day.
"If you design a tech that can be programmed and controlled by a human mind, which is essentially hooked up to an external system, what keeps them from being controlled by people in power and governments?"
Who said that? I turn, jarred by the idea. Only to see it is young Billie Quinn standing over my notes, pouring through them meticulously. Notes, no one but I can decipher.
"See that right there," she points at a particularly problematic developmental idea I'd scribbled down. The idea? What if nanites could act as an extra defence system in the body, able to be utilised by the body how it likes. "Where would they live, when not in use? I mean, you can't just have them floating around in the body with nothing to do? They'd harm the biology in the long run. I mean, the only way for it not to cause damage down the line would be to somehow design humans from the embryo phase and fuse them with nanite that is fully biocompatible as it grows and develops, or design a housing that you can embed in a subject. I'd probably go with the embed idea, I mean, that way you don't have to muck up evolution necessarily."
"How are you doing that?"
"Doing what?"
"Reading my notes?"
"Oh, that," she brushes the question aside as if it was a mere how are you? "I have a very active brain." She flips to the next page, and I can't help but stare at this odd child. Her eyes skim the reading so fast it almost looks like REM movement. "I mean, it's probably doable, you just have to find materials the body won't reject and develop an isolated system that allows only the individual's brain to control their tech. Otherwise, bye-bye free will."
"Nobody is going to mess with free will," I scoff, pulling my notes towards myself. "And we need this tech now if we are ever to go back up on the surface again."
Quinn shrugs, moving onto the brainstorming on the PC. "I'd be careful if I were you. If you are going to design something that is a tech interface with the human brain, then you'd better make sure it's hack-proof, 'cause there's never been anything built I haven't been able to hack into. And I'm only fifteen. Imagine what my fully developed brain could do?"
I think over her query, and it sounds silly to me, but maybe that is just my pride getting in the way. Of course, CodeTech is not hackable. I made sure of it, and so, I express myself thus. Then add that she should go be a child somewhere.
While I try and throw her voice out of my mind and get back to my work, I hear a beep and turn.
"What are you doing?" I ask as she stands there smirking with her phone in hand.
She shrugs again and tells me to go back to work.
A moment later, for the first time since the neural chip bridged my injured spine, I lose function of my legs and fall to the ground.
"Mum told me about your accident, so I knew you have a chip. First CodeTech chip ever I believe," she hovers over me inquisitively.
"What did you do to me?"
She shrugs and types something else into her phone and a moment later, sensation and movement return to my lower half and I struggle to pull myself up again. She holds out a hand and helps me stand.
"What you're designing is brilliant. It will save lives, give people a chance to survive till the surface is safe again, but it will be far more vulnerable to the likes of me if you do not fortify your back doors and channels and make each system individual."
She taps my notebook. "You remember how CodeTech got here, Billy? To this facility? You think what you're designing will not be abused?"
"What do you suggest I do then?" I ask, a little shaken but enthralled. Her mind is sharper than mine.
"Design the best tech that makes humans essentially bionic, but don't ever give anyone your entire code. Once this is a success and you chip every survivor, they will want a piece of it. You are giving them what governments have always wanted, complete control over people. And perhaps for the first time in our history, a little bit of control might help us survive. But you have to make sure you only give them a piece of it. Enough to satisfy, but never the whole. Just like God. We are made in their image, but we will never be them."
I shake my head, in utter disbelief at the power of her mind.
"A mother of all codec you keep safe so when humanity loses its free will, and it will, you can restore it and they won't even see it coming, like a sleeping virus that reboots rather than destroys the system."
"Restoring free will?"
"It's every government's dream to have humans entirely under their influence, after all." She happily perches on a stool and swivels. For once looking like the child she supposedly is. "Now, can you take a break? You've been cooped up in here for weeks, Billy. I thought you wanted a family?"
I do. I do. I nod. The fever of work is yet to fully break, though. "Will you work with me on this? Our own secret project?"
She agrees, only if her involvement is never mentioned to anyone. She is just a child of mine. "No one shall ever know what I can do, Billy!" she drives the point home. "It's what mum always wanted, to keep me safe."
"Then safe you shall be! I'll get us a home quarter, so we can live as a family, and work in our own way, and no one will be wiser."
"Can we take Josie in?"
"Only if you trust her."
"Good. I trust her." Billie Quinn hops off her stool and threads an arm around mine. "She's making dinner tonight, and you need to look presentable."
I nod, grabbing my notebook and locking up my lab.
As we head back to our quarters, I can't help but whisper. "What else can you do?"
"Besides being an absolute genius in code-breaking and coding?" she smiles knowingly.
"What?" I say, and she repeats the word in echoing unison.
"How did you know?" I say and her speech perfectly overlaps mine.
I stare in awe. "What I was? How are you doing that?" I end up blurting as she echoes me.
"You know what mum's field of research was in the last decade?"
I nod. Yes, it was neuroscience and the study of untapped areas of the brain.
She leans close to me, and in a hush, says, "Let's just say, my brain works more than yours!" she laughs. "A lot more than yours!"
She pulls me along jovially. "You weren't the only one trying to advance the human race."
"You're a psychic?" I know it sounds stupid, but my slower brain obviously can't connect the dots.
She smiles. "We were destined to meet, Billy. We have a job to do."
"What's that?"
"Save humanity, of course."
"And the world?"
"The world as we knew it will never be, and mother nature will continue, but, she may not be inclined to make us again!" Billie Quinn's laugh has an unnatural characteristic. Like the girl can see the future, almost.
I don't know what to say to that other than I have a feeling she may be right. We will indeed need to save the world, now, and maybe in the future once again.
"What is Josie making?" I ask, hungry and hopeful at last.