The God Codex

15. Frontier

BOOK OF BILLY: 2030

Chapter 15: Frontier

"Billy, well done, mate."

"Congratulations, Mr Amour, the man of the hour!"

"The work you and your small team have done is astonishing."

"Healer of the paralysed, saviour of amputees galore! Billy, Billy, Billy, what will you come up with next?"

A thump here, a handshake there, a grin on her, a smile on him. Eyes wide stare as I pass them. Someone tugs me this way, another tugs me that way. All vying for my attention.

"Thank you for your generosity!", "Thank you so much for believing in the CodeTech vision!", "I will not let you or your funds down!" are just some promises I throw out to individuals in the crowd.

I grab a flute of champagne from a wait staff as I get to the middle of the room and clear my throat, calling more attention to myself as I continue to the front of the room. And when I reach the front, all eyes are on me. Perfect! I wait for the white screen to drop behind me, nodding to this dignitary then that, smiling at this donor and that during the wait. Tonight, I am smiling at money and I must make a good impression.

I bring up an image on the screen behind me. Thirteen-year-old me, strapped to a gurney, being loaded into an ambulance.

"2011. My 13th birthday. A half-hour before a friend took this photo, I'd severed my spine. One silly mistake. One accident. That's all it took."

I glance around the silent room and am thrilled when whispers erupt. They are shocked. Perfect! Many people in the room don't know this part of my history, or rather, CodeTech's history. A small nanotech company that began in my mind. One I used to push the boundaries of medical and bionic science within a small isolated lab of my home.

"I've been tied to a wheelchair for the better part of my life. Today," — I hold out my arms like a messiah — "I stand before you, thanks to the young, relentless man I was." With a press of a button, another one of my photos pops up. A twenty-four-year-old me holding a tiny grey metallic chip between my fingers and a wide grin on my face. "That thing I'm holding here is the very first lab-made neural chip — made completely with the liquid nanite technology I created remotely using with my coding system, in its infancy."

Picture changes to one of me, standing in front of a small enclosure with ten-odd rats. "A few months later, I replicated the process in live subjects. A couple of years after that, I tested it on my first human subject." Another click, another photo. My gaunt self hooked up to an IV drip on the screen. "Me. That is how much I believed in what I created."

Gasps abound in the audience. I love it! It gives me goosebumps.

"I had perfected the process in rats and mice. Severing their spines and then using this groundbreaking tech to build them a new neural bridge, so they could scamper on all fours again. But, as a lone scientist working out of my lab at home, those were tough times. For funding, or for anyone to take a chance on a new tech. Especially since the COVID-19 pandemic crippled most world economies for a decent while."

I pace the front of the room deliberately. "I needed definitive proof. Something irrefutable to show the progress I was making. So I took a chance. I injected myself with enough nanites to set off a metal detector." I pause for effect, eyeing the Defence Secretary standing to the side. CodeTech is finally going big, finally being taken seriously. I am close to getting my hands on large enough funds to take my research further, push more boundaries. It makes me giddy.