We'll Meet Again (Original Book)

Prologue

San Francisco, 1956

The city streets were busy. There was the incessant sound of people walking and talking. The sound of cars, honking and passing down the street, and bad drivers, screaming at each other. The police on patrol were trying their best to maintain the flow of the traffic. Someone's gramophone was playing jazzy blues. Saxophones and trumpets were skilfully riffing all over the octaves, accompanying a talented female voice.

Amid another busy, chaotic morning, a woman walked amongst the countless people that flooded the streets. She was in a light blue shirt, stuffed into her long, dark blue skirt that reached just below her knees and whipped around her legs with every step she made. The sound of her black, short heels hitting the white pavement was drowned by everything else around her.

Her brown hair was tucked in perfect waves. Her lips were painted red, and her blue eyes stared behind the circular lenses of her glasses. A brown leather bag hung by her shoulder and her brown coat was shielding her from the cold, morning breeze.

She was heading towards that white, Greek-style building standing tall at the end of the road. She was supposed to reach the Burgess Laboratories by exactly 8:00 AM, and now it was 7:08 AM. She needed approximately five more minutes to get there. She had her reasons for being so early. Today's experiments were going to take more than the usual work time.

It was typical for a young Burgess hard at work.

She reached her location ridiculously earlier than she was supposed to. Nathalie swiped a card at that strange, peculiar device outside the entrance. It had been so odd for strangers passing outside to see a door without a lock. A door that unlocked with a single swipe of a 'magical' card. Nathalie slipped the card back into her brown leather bag and walked in.

Nathalie found her lab coat hanging by the very same coat stand that she had left it on yesterday. She greeted her cousins, uncles and aunts, and whoever else she ended up meeting on her way to the lab. This was a family business. Only a Burgess could work in the Burgess Pharmaceutical Company.

It wasn't until seventy-five years ago that it became a business. Grandfather Gustave said a stranger convinced him that the family needed to start sharing their knowledge and findings with the rest of the world. That strange man said that if they worked for other people, it would result in something terrible.

The Burgess Family was graced with greater intelligence than that of modern humans, but no one knew how or why. Only the head and the elders of the family knew. Grandfather Gustave said that the next head of the family was going to hear the story from him on his deathbed.

The Burgess Family did not concern themselves with anything that didn't have to do with science. They conducted research on all scientific fields, including the biological sciences, mathematics, physics, engineering, and chemistry, and only a few members of the family focused on the arts. The majority of them considered the arts to be useless.

The government funded their research and in return, the family provided the country with the most advanced medicine. Their technology, their tools, their labs, and their equipment were things that the world wasn't yet ready for. They kept their advanced technology hidden. All they offered was breakthrough medicine, and even most of that was still kept hidden.

Grandfather Gustave had only set one rule: to allow humanity to evolve at its own pace. If humanity had access to Burgess technology during the war, the damage on both the people and the planet would have been unimaginable – or, that was Gustave's most famous example when he had to explain why they had to keep their technology hidden.

Nathalie was about to complete ten hours of work. It was afternoon, and the light outside was orange. The lights were bright in the lab, all day, every day.