BOOK OF MIA: 2081
Chapter 28: Program
An hour later, a guard knocks on my door to take me to Dr Shah. To the 'debrief' she promised before her henchmen marched us to our quarters. Quarters sounds lovely like they were expecting us, and to some extent, I guess she was — except there are bolts on the outside locking us in, in our separate chambers. So perhaps Dr Shah isn't that much different from Dr Hill...
Her words still echo in my mind on a loop as I follow the guard out — another march to somewhere unknown and this time, Nate and I, and I guess Dev — we can't make a run for it. If only humans could run on water.
'I know exactly how you work. I made you after all.' Those words, spoken over an hour ago, still haunt me.
The rig is a giant labyrinth once you enter. What looked like a small building was a big, if not an enormous, minor city of its own below the surface. We walk along the outer 'viewing pods' as the guard calls it. The sheer size of the gloomy ocean — with murky rays of sunlight barely filtering through — is astounding. The further we descend, the deeper the gloom gets; the bigger my panic gets. We are underwater. How far under, I have no clue. I just hope when the time comes to escape — and that time may come soon — I can hold my breath long enough to reach the surface.
The guard opens a door and we enter a fluorescent-lit, sterile concrete corridor, painted white. Several closed doors line either side of it with biometric security. The doors boast small panel windows to see in, but the mounting is too high for me. I only spy the tops of the rooms and they look like various laboratories.
A chill courses up and down my spine. Her words are still rattling around in my brain. 'I know exactly how you work. I made you after all.'
Could this be what she means? She 'made me', not in a womb, but in her lab? I feel it is the latter. Okay, not a feeling, but a strong sense that it is the latter. Definitely the latter.
What does that mean for me if I'm right? If I'm a lab-grown human — nay, specimen?
We arrive at the end of the corridor, at the last door there. As the guard scans his left eye to the biometric scanner, I get the urge to back away. Go back the way we came, even if I can't remember the exact way back to my quarter or the surface. I don't want to go inside. I don't want to go inside.
The lock beeps, and the light above the door turns green. The guard pushes open the heavy door and waits for me to enter. He's not coming with me. This is the end of the road for him. I try not to panic.
Where am I going to run to anyway, even if I get to the surface? And I want answers. I want answers to all the questions that have been rattling around in my mind since Camp Sweep. Why did she wake me and not the siren? Why did she save me? How?
Why me?
I pull in a breath as if I'm getting ready for one of my violin recitals — those things are scary — and I step in, not knowing what to expect. Here I go, happy Mia. Happy, happy Mia.
When I enter, I see Nate's already there, and Dev, along with Captain Light and one other guard of his. Then, there is Dr Shah, looking regal behind her giant mahogany desk. It's her office. The light in here is not fluorescent but warmer halogens. They give the sense of warmth and coziness, or the warm glow of a fireplace which isn't safe down here, meters below the water's surface.
"Ah, we were just waiting for you." Dr Shah smiles and points to the only empty chair left in the room. It's between Nate and Dev and it gives me some comfort. I'm not alone.
I take my seat and glance around at the faces of those present. Everyone sits except Light and his man.
Three against three — doable if needed. Fight, that is. Though, with Survival Mode still disengaged, I think it's safe to assume I'm on the losing side. Yeah, Dev was a soldier, but he was under someone else's control. Yeah, Nate's one of the best in combat classes, but those environments were controlled, safe. And yes, I got lucky with the crossbow once, on my own, but I can bite, and I know for sure those will hurt. I will bite my way out of this if I have to!
Dr Shah takes a moment to adjust her computer screen and fix her wire-framed glasses on the bridge of her nose. No one speaks for a long moment. I guess we are all lost for words.
She clears her throat and looks at us. "I suppose I should introduce myself before I take your questions."
I nod. Nate purses his lips, fidgeting with his hands on his lap. Dev stares at the doctor, still awed. He even sits up straight and at the edge of his seat. He has been waiting to hear her confirm his claim since he called her 'Billie' up on the platform upon arrival.
"I am the owner and lead scientist here on The Rig, our main research and developmental facility for our secret biotech company, ShahAmour, which my father and I started before his noted death."
She pushes her seat back and stands, straightening out her pencil skirt. "My name is Billie Quinn Shah-Amour, or sometimes known as Love."
My head snaps up at the mention of the name. It's my mum's name, except she goes by Billie Quinn Love. She dropped the Amour when I was young to keep our private lives private and not public. She and I — the only two surviving heirs with half of CodeTech share to our names, not that she wants to claim it.
"It has bad juju," she often says to me, whatever 'juju' means.
"I knew it was you!" Dev utters beside me, beaming at Dr Shah. "You have changed very little, Billie."
"You are correct in that I had a brother named Devendra Quinton Shah," Dr Shah says, with an awkward smile, but her reservation is clear as day on her face.
She's not convinced Dev is who he says he is. Maybe in her shoes, I wouldn't take him for his words either. He was one of Hill's men for a long time, even if she controlled him.
"It's me, Billie!" Dev tries to convince her. As he rises from his seat, Captain Light pushes him back down to sit.
I see why they are here now. Light and his man — to keep us in line.
Dr Shah clears her throat. "You can understand why I am sceptical, Dev. You look nothing like my brother. And you have no identifiable features. If you are my brother, we will know soon from the DNA test that was ordered. Until then, I'd like to talk about the other elephant in the room. The kids."
She turns to Nate and me as she approaches the front of her desk. She leans on the desk's edge and waits. "Ask me anything you want and I will answer, but first I must make certain you are the right Mia." She looks at me as she says this before nodding to Light.
Light approaches me with some scanner in his hand and reaches for my right arm.
"Left. Check her left," she instructs him.
I try to keep my arm away from Light. Hill prodded and poked me enough to send me skittering at any kind of test now.
"It's just a microchip scanner, Mia," Dr Shah says, calm as a cucumber — not that I've tasted actual cucumbers. "I planted it on the baby girl before I had to flee. It was the easiest tech to embed in you without interfering with their codex. Old ancient technology they probably don't remember existed."
She nods at Light again, as if she is saying 'trying again,' and continues talking to me. "If you are the right person, then you will have a chip under your skin. Just a simple verification that it is the same chip I inserted into your arm years ago. To confirm your identity."
"But you already took my blood," I squirm, unable to win this brief fight with Light. Upon our separation into our quarters, lab techs had collected blood and urine samples. "My DNA should confirm who I am, no?"
She laughs and nods. "Do I remind you of anyone in your life? Look close, Mia." She takes off her glasses and ties her hair up in a ponytail, reaches into her top drawer, and fetches a red lipstick. She applies a coat onto her lips and smiles.
Suddenly, I'm looking at my mum. A little darker — from the sun reflecting off the ocean, no doubt — a little thinner, probably from lack of nutrients and food. But she is a clone of my mother, back home, wherever home is.
"Mrs Love?" Nate whispers in awe. "You look like Mia's mum!"
Dr Shah's smile grows wider. "That's because I am."
Light releases my wrist as the scanner beeps, and he shows the information to his superior. Shah scans the screen and nods her approval.
"Mia, you came across a sealed lab while you were at Hill's, right?" she asks.
Nate and I nod. Yes — granddad's lab.
"Oh, thank God." She sighs. "Please tell me, were you able to get him out?"
"Get who out?" I ask, even though I know who she might mean, but I'm hardly going to tell her the Einstein of our times lives in my head.
"Dr Amour, my father."
Her father?! Fudge. She had said that earlier, hadn't she? Amour was part of her last name?
"Granddad?" I mumble.
"Yes, shorty?" he chimes in.
"You did get him out and destroy the lab, didn't you?" she asks.
I don't want to, but I nod. God, I hope I'm doing the right thing here. Only Nate and I knew about Granddad and his AI being uploaded into my system.
She nods and turns to Light. "Get the retrieval unit ready. We must make a backup before we upgrade anything on Mia."
"Retrieval of what?" I ask, feeling again like I'm back in Hill's lab, and all she wants is the tech I carry, and possibly Granddad. Which is an eerie thought.
"Come, I'll show you! No need to be afraid." Shah stands and heads for the door. "We have been able to come up with a better interface for upgrading. It will not hurt you as the old, barbaric mechanism dad made did."
"Who do you keep calling dad?" Dev interrupts, annoyed. "Our dad is dead."
"As I said earlier, my mum got married again, to the man she should have married in the first place." She nods towards the door, not waiting for us. Light and his man flank us and push us out the door, back into the corridor.
Shah, her heels clipping on the concrete — echoes abound — starts giving us a tour.
"Amour built a technology that could cure most neural damages by using bionanites as a bridge, all because he didn't want to be a cripple all his life. His technology even made cancers curable, however, every lab needs funding for research, and he teamed up with the military in the beginning."
She opens up a lab. Inside, I see glasses upon glass cases, stacked high along a wall of various creatures, sleeping, eating, fornicating — some glowing, some with activated nightshade. Their lab rats.
"What began as ambitious medical research and operations into curing diseases and illnesses soon went fully private and wholly military. He was researching a dangerous territory — remote control of nanites within a particular body; allowing the military to control their soldiers, and their actions."
She walks us through more labs with various machines and setups. I do not know what they are for. Jars of dark matter swirl in various formations in one lab. "With the Dark Day of forty-nine and radiation killing almost everything on the surface, they used his tech on the remaining public, to block radiation or cure cancer in the beginning so they could ensure humans survived."
She stops at a station in an autopsy room, where, to our utter surprise, is a soldier from the ambush — or a body, rather. One from Dev's unit.
"What the?" Dev glares at the body as Shah reaches for a tablet and starts typing something on its surface.
"Dad had no choice but to give the governments what they wanted after the disaster," she says, pressing something with a flourish on the tablet. "Something I pushed him into when I was teen — to save people."
Before us, the body, with limbs at odd angles — damage I did — starts straightening out. Within a minute, the body sits up and salutes us, despite being dead.
She turns the tablet to us and shows us the command she entered: Salute, soldier.
"Soon, the government used it to control the people, whether they knew it. It gave them complete and utter control," she adds, watching our horrified faces. "It was the only way we could save what little of the population survived. In those days, riots and chaos were rife after the nuclear disaster. People killed people for the few resources we had left. And this was the only way we could keep people compliant and non-violent, so injuries could be dealt with faster, safer. So that we could move the citizens into bunkers without protests and blame."
Dr Shah chews her lips, as if battling old memories, and looks up to meet my eyes. "The control was supposed to be temporary. That was one of dad's conditions when he agreed to allow the government access to CodeTech mainframe and remote-nanite programming — that, when the dust settles, CodeTech would cease control of the people."
Nate and I turn to Dev. Shah's words have a heavy implication. If she is right, if governments or whatnot can control people without their knowledge, all because of the little nanites floating around in their bodies, that means we were controlled, too. Dev said he had done things he hadn't wanted to do under Hill. Did that mean Hill was making him do things? Commanding him with a touch of a button, much like Shah did with the dead body.
"You said only the government controls CodeTech?" I ask, still looking at Dev.
Dev's eyes are as wide as they will go. He too realises the enormity of it all. He had no choice. No choice under Hill. He had been a puppet, much like the body on the slab.
As if reading my mind, he turns to Dr Shah. "Could someone else do the controlling? Someone other than CodeTech, or the government?"
Shah nods. Her shoulders drop. "Yes. As you just saw, anyone who can hack into your code can divert control to them, or back to you, if they are feeling generous." She eyes the body on the table as she says this and we all understand.
"Are you saying, the government has been controlling people since forty-nine, and we do not know about it?" Nate, who had been quiet so far, chimes in beside me, his booming voice startling me.
Dev pulls in a sharp breath and turns to his claimed sister. "So let me guess, the government refused to comply with your dad's condition?"
Dr Shah smirks. "If you were them, and for the first time in human history, you could truly control the masses, total control, would you give that up?"
Shah aborts the command on her tablet, and Light and his man assist the body back onto the autopsy table.
"You... you mean..." I stammer, and I never stammer. "They control people with commands via a coding system?" I nod at the tablet as Shah places it back on the autopsy table, next to the now limp body.
She nods. "Understand, in those early days, with utter chaos, it was the only way to calm the masses. It was also the fastest and the safest way to protect against radiation. CodeTech had a biocompatible nanite technology that could be programmed to shield against radiation. We based it on dad's own nanite-neural bridge he had in him. It also allowed the nanites to seek and destroy cancer cells, like little robots. It had to be done for that time. People were dying everywhere, by the millions. Those that were rescued could not stay safe for long because the radiation level on the surface was astronomical. Dad just wanted to save people, as many as he could since he couldn't save—" her voice cracks.
She clears her throat before continuing, "It wasn't his mission or his desire to control them."
"So why did he give his program to the Hive?" Nate hisses beside me. He's getting heated, but I can't tell why. Maybe I just never knew he prized people's autonomy.
"We didn't call them the Hive back then. It was just a bunch of devastated, crumbling governments, desperate to hold on to society." An unmistakable glimmer of pain passes over Shah's face. "And it was my fault," she says, walking out of the lab.
We all follow behind, Nate, Dev, myself, Light, and his man — hooked on her words like moths to light. "I knew the potential of what he was building when I first got to his CodeTech lab, the same lab Hill now controls. He was already working for the military back then, so it was only a matter of time before they realised what he'd created and took control of it. He had a way of making humans part-machines; stronger, but, vulnerable. So being the smart-ass I was, I told him to give them only the tip of the iceberg, enough to placate them until it came time for the Titanic we built to sink."
"What's the Titanic?" I lean closer to Nate and whisper.
"Beats me!" he replies with a shrug.
I'm quite surprised that he doesn't know this reference. Nate's usually a sponge when it comes to knowledge.
"So you gave them the iceberg?" To my surprise, I am the one asking the question.
"No, not the iceberg, just the tip. She was right. We couldn't give them the whole thing." Granddad, who's been listening in since Light disabled Survival Mode, chimes in.
"The whole thing?" I whisper, though the moment the question slips out, I wish I hadn't.
Shah cocks her head my way, a knowing smile spreading across her red lips. "I almost forgot, you have the very man who created it, in you. I'm sure you already knew this."
I shake my head. No, I know nothing — much like the guy in that gore-filled old tv show our maid liked to watch while cleaning. Jon, something or other.
"He hasn't filled you in?" she asks, surprised. "I thought that would have been the first thing he did when he met you."
"It wasn't the best time to tell her things, amidst crazy Hill and her men, miss smarty pants!" Granddad spits and I almost laugh.
"I guess we never had the right time," I volunteer on his behalf.
She nods and leads us back out into the sterile corridor where she turns to me. "We knew, if his tech worked, it could help save lives and restore order. In the months since the dark day, it was imperative the two of us kept our heads down and out of trouble. Billy Amour would give the governments around the world CodeTech, but we also knew what could happen once they had it."
She shifts her weight from one foot to another, as if uncomfortable under our stares. "Governments are greedy. Human history can attest to that, so he and I both wanted to reserve the right to disable CodeTech when the time came, if it came. Give people back their freedom. The freedom they didn't know they were being cheated out of."
"You knew what they were going to do with it, and you still gave it to them?" Nate takes a step towards Shah with gritted teeth. I put my hand in between them to hold him back.
"What's gotten into you?" I whisper, quiet enough that only he can hear. "This is also an armed facility and we have nothing on us. Back the fudge down, tiger!"
Nate throws me a hard glare and thrusts my arm away. "Do you not get what all this means, Mia?"
I shake my head. I have no clue what is going on. Dammit, Nate. I'm not the sharpest tool in this shed, not right now with doctors and CodeTech creators yammering at me.
He scoffs, and takes a step back, away from Shah, though his gaze continues to bore a hole in her. "They programmed the kids to kill, didn't they?"
"What kids?" I ask before it dawns on me. "You mean the students at Camp?"
Nate nods, glancing at me once before he resumes starting down Shah. "We did not know what we were doing. One moment, we are standing there, confused, and the next," — his lips quiver and tears glisten in his big, brown eyes — "I killed my own friends..."
His eyes flicker to meet mine before they dart to his feet, torn. His voice trembles when he says, "We were inhuman. Why would they do that?" He turns to Shah then, while my mind wonders what he's not telling me. "If it wasn't for you, I... I would've killed M..."
Oh, my god. I stumble backward until the cold wall keeps me from going any further. The images of the students, only half awake, staring at Governor Assistant Tribes on the screens, confused, floats to mind. Then she'd said something about instructions having been sent, and then the confused, innocent flock turned on one another. Killing their peers with their Article 34. Another memory flashes to my mind — Nate, glazed-eyed, turning to me; his gun lifting to aim at my chest.
Gasp for a breath — which is tough right now — I shake my head. I can't believe what I'm hearing. But every fiber in my body knows it's true. Nate had almost killed me. Earlier, I had my suspicions that something wasn't right that night, but now, I know for sure. There was an evil presence there, on the screen, whispering as if the devil herself — 'Kill, or be killed. Survive and you will be rewarded.'
"Why didn't he shoot that night?" I look from Nate to Shah. "Why wasn't I affected the same way?"
I see Dr Shah's jaw clench. She knows something. And by God, part of me doesn't want to know it. I swear I don't want to know.
"I have been watching you two since you were young... since I couldn't bring you with me without raising suspicions," she says. "The moment I knew what was about to happen, I rewrote your security codes one at a time to keep them out. I wrote yours first." She turns to me.
"Come again?" I stare at her, snot and tears dripping down my face. "You hacked us?"
She nods. "I had to. I couldn't watch you—" her voice catches in her throat and she turns to Dev. "It's what we thought happened to you, if you are Dev. And I couldn't watch that happen to the kids."
"You know what happened to me?" Dev asks, flabbergast.
She shrugs and nods and shrugs again. It's like she doesn't know what she wants to say, or not say.
"You were at the same Camp when the nukes went off. You disappeared from the site. We could only find evidence of violence, mass massacre. Camp guards who probably believed everyone was dying. They killed the kids, then themselves, before help arrived. The irony is, they were in one of the few radiation-free zones and would have been fine, for a while. There were rumors for years that the camp resumed. But for the past couple of years, we've been catching wind of something about a training camp or sorting camp at that place. Unfortunately, it's in a satellite dead zone, so we knew very little of it until you two got there. With a direct link I had with you, listening in was finally an option — and thank God I listened."
My head is swimming. I don't understand what she's saying or what's happening. But I remember what she said to me earlier. "You said you made me, us. How, or rather, why?"
"To rewrite CodeTech's mainframe code within the Hive, we needed a mechanism that couldn't get flagged. Something resilient and adaptive that could walk right in, undetected." Her lips curve into a smile. "That's where you come in."
"Walk in?" I hear my ghostly voice echo in the long, white corridor.
"By the time we finished the mother codex, or as Dad liked to call it, The God Codex — and come up with a plan to replace the government one, dad was under suspicion. They were watching us and our lab, day in, day out. Our scientists were being used to spy on us."
At the end of the corridor, when it looks like we have hit a dead-end, Shah waves a hand across the white wall, and like the sealed lab back at Hill's compound, a door opens into what looks like the control room.
Hundreds of screens mount the walls, and behind multiple desks and mini-screens, are several people working. Surveilling. Shah waits for us all to enter the windowless room that resembles a giant silo before she continues.
"It forced us to speed up our coding. It was barely a prototype. One we hadn't even tested, but we had to place it in the subjects, dormant — hoping, when the time came, we could activate our code and overwrite the government's. Which is why your system needed an upgrade... something you went through at Hill's. It was a more direct rewrite."
She continues walking the gangplank above the floor, above people, to the other end. She nods for us to follow.
At the other end, on another wall, I see biometric locks plus a three-lock system that requires three laser-cut keys. One, she carries, and the other two, by her two soldiers following behind us, Light being one of them.
Another door, another room — and to more and more things I'm expected to take in. Like all this isn't too much already.
As they place one key in after another, I can't help but notice how my hands shake. I fist them to stop the nerves. It doesn't work.
This is going to be something big. I can just tell.