The God Codex

16. Survive

BOOK OF BILLY: 2049

Chapter 16: Survive

The incessant beeps grate my aging ears. "Shut that thing off!" I scream behind the lead CodeTechnician, Zeke.

The younger man nods and ends the simulation, causing the room to fall back into the uncomfortable near-silence of before, where the constant hums of machines and humans meld as they try to fix the dying world.

"It keeps failing, sir," he says, a little deflated, and a little tired. The man has been working non-stop for a few days, with mere hours to take a nap, but I feel disappointed. Why do we need to sleep? It's stupid, the hours we waste so our bodies can do their thing.

Forget disappointment. I feel hope being crushed, and desperation latches onto my heart as slithering, suffocating tentacles. "Check the codec and try again. From the start." But just as the technician reaches for the manual, I take it off the bench and flip through the many pages.

"Go get a coffee, or bathroom, whatever." Absent-minded, I push him out of his seat. "Take half."

Zeke languishes a moment to see if I'm being real, but I am too engrossed in examining the codes to care what he does. With nothing to do, he leaves and returns in what I assume is the half-hour I'd given him. When he returns, he looks a little more rested. I vacate his seat and hand the manual back to him. "I changed a few of your codes. They should work. Try again."

Zeke swallows the nervous lump of spit and swivels back around, pouring over the codes to spot the changes I made. The simplicity of changes astounds the younger man a little. I can tell from the way his spine straightens as he reads, and mumbles wide-eyed, "A millionth time's a charm, I suppose!"

He supposes right, but I explode, to my surprise. "What did you say?" My temper flares thin today. "People are dying out there like moths to fire, and you hate that I'm asking you to do your job?"

Zeke blinks at the screen, his hands frozen stiff atop his keyboards. He doesn't know how to respond to me.

I take a step away from him. I can tell I've scared him, and that was never my intention. We all need to be working together, faster, better, and more focused than we've ever been in our lives. This is not the time for me to pull rank, I realise. I take a deep breath and steady my anger. I'm not angry at him. I'm angry at the situation. That we can't help, no matter how much we'd like to. I'd like to.

I know what it's like to be dying. To be helpless. I would never wish that upon my worst enemy, and right now, it's not even my enemies, dying. It was the world and every human in it.

As of 0:01 am on January 1st, 2049, a series of nukes went off around the entire globe, one after the other, like chips of dominoes. Tons upon megatons of nuclear bombs going off like a chain reaction. No one even knew the death toll yet. All around the world, as people kissed their loved ones and embraced them, it was likely for the last time. Billions. That's my estimate. The dead.

Billions of lives are gone. And for what? To strike terror? There was still no official news as to what caused the catastrophic events, but rumours were rife. Someone had wanted to wipe out all of humanity. But who? And for what purpose?

That was almost a month ago.

I look around the lab, at the nano-technicians and the immunobiologists; at muscular-skeletal experts, to oncologists and medical doctors, to game designer and weapons experts, not to mention the volunteer soldiers who already have the latest CodeTech system installed in their bodies. Every top brain I could retrieve and bring to the safety of this covert military CodeTech facility in the moments after the global catastrophe. Right after I felt the earth shake beneath my feet, tucked away under miles of concrete, when the earliest reports of nukes going off around the world came in.