The Never Army

by Hodges, T. Ellery

  “I wasn’t serious,” Jonathan said.

  They stared at one another. “Okay, I was 40 percent serious . . . 49 max.”

  “For what it is worth Jonathan . . . I think I trust you,” Heyer said as his fist closed on the stone. “See you at the end.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  HER FINGERS WERE not hers. They belonged to a child. Her feet didn’t reach the floor while she sat in this chair. The woman who sat across from her at the table towered over her. She’d never been in this kitchen or met the woman. Yet, Ms. Silva looked down at her like a daughter and pushed a small wrapped box across the table.

  Leah didn’t speak but words came from her. They belonged to the little girl. “I thought I opened them all at my party.”

  Ms. Silva shrugged. “This one is special.”

  Her hands reached out and tore off the wrapping paper. She pulled a diary from a bed of tissue paper, its pages empty but for an inscription: To Rylee, On her 6th Birthday. Love, Mom.

  “My mother gave me my first when I was your age,” Ms. Silva said.

  The truth was that every word spoken between them was in Portuguese, but Leah knew the script.

  “I can’t wait to write in it,” Rylee said. “Thank you, Mom.”

  Ms. Silva smiled down at her, and the projection faded into the void again. For a moment, Leah was herself, sitting on a chair far too large for a grown adult as the world around her shifted and became Rylee’s childhood bedroom.

  Later, that very same evening, she was Rylee now lying on a bed. She looked down at the hands holding the pen and the journal as she wrote.

  Mom gave me this journal after everyone went home . . .

  For the next few minutes Leah sat behind Rylee’s childhood eyes and watched the entry come into being. Some details were precise, others a best estimation. The hand produced text exactly as it existed in a stack of diaries in the real world. The room around her—that was more complicated.

  “Rylee, you better be in bed by the time I get up there,” Mr. Silva’s voice came from the hallway.

  Rylee closed the diary and set it on her nightstand. Leah caught a smile from the child as she looked in the mirror and switched off the light.

  The projection chamber returned to the void, then its defaults. Leah got up and left the chamber.

  This was the second day of testing. The previous day she had experienced re-creations of Rylee’s final moments. Those Mr. Clean could more easily simulate with near perfect accuracy because he could build the projections from footage stolen from The Cell.

  She had stood in Rylee’s shoes and watched as she punched a projection of herself in the face. From Rylee’s perspective, projection Leah seemed tall. She had to look up at her to aim her fist. This was strange because Rylee never felt short to her. The woman had possessed too much presence to ever feel small.

  The memory ran all the way up to the moment Rylee disappeared in Jonathan’s arms. This re-creation had not been strictly necessary for Leah to recreate as it was one of the few that Rylee and Leah had actually shared. As such it was a good baseline to begin. Allowing Leah to give Mr. Clean a sense of how accurate the details felt in the re-creation based on her own experience.

  The journal entries were a greater challenge. There was no footage. Only photos from photo albums. Rylee’s father and Mr. Clean had to work together to recreate the events Rylee recorded. Joao acting as the witness to most of the periods in Rylee’s life and becoming like a film director as Mr. Clean built sets for Leah to relive experiences.

  This meant Joao often had to stand inside a projection of a rental apartment he hadn’t lived in for ten years and try to remember if there had been tile or linoleum, if the kitchen sink’s faucet had been chrome or brushed nickel, or tell the AI that the My Little Pony comforter on his late daughter’s bed had actually had imperfections.

  He’d be hit by a wave of grief, tears running down his cheeks as he’d forced himself to tell the AI that when Rylee was a child, she’d spilled a bowl of chocolate ice cream on it. She’d tried to hide it, put the bedspread in the laundry with bleach. The colors had faded in places and left white patches.

  Their re-creations would never be perfect. But Mr. Clean believed it was more important for Leah to experience a likeness and build the necessary associations. Trick her mind into creating markers—coordinates of time and place.

  That said, every detail they got right improved the chances.

  As she walked out of the chamber in Joao’s screening room, she didn’t have to ask if the re-creation felt true to life. He was hunched over in his chair, his eyes far away as tears ran down his cheeks.

  Leah came in from the projection chamber and found him wiping away his tears again. She put a hand on his shoulder and sat beside him for a while. Neither spoke.

  It was unclear to him exactly when he had come to welcome the comfort she always offered. He’d found keeping a grip on the animosity he was supposed to feel toward her near impossible. Some of it was learning her story—what she’d lost and what she’d done to get here.

  More of it might have been that they spent most of their waking moments throughout the day together.

  But if he was being honest, he’d felt an affection for Leah before the first day had ended. He saw providence in her. She seemed made for what they endeavored to do, possessed of an innate understanding of the humanity she observed in people.

  Leah saw things in his daughter’s journals Joao never would have.

  When he was overwhelmed by grief, she never left when he needed her to stay, and never stayed when he needed to her to go. She always knew the difference—with one exception.

  He couldn’t always hide the pain of seeing his daughter like she was standing there, so real and alive. Once, Leah made the mistake of asking him if they should stop. He’d looked at her, tired red eyes holding hers.

  “Some pain is mercy.”

  He almost added that he didn’t ever want to discuss this again. As it turned out, he had not needed to. She understood.

  Now, it was an understatement to say that Leah sometimes lacked boundaries, but her trespasses were never self-indulgent curiosities. They always came from a place that thought she might do good. Most days, this only meant some awkward moments.

  This morning he had come to their lab area early. He found Leah already there. She’d either never slept, or she had woken in the middle of the night with some thought that wouldn’t allow her to sleep. That cathexis she possessed was what made Joao believe she would manage the impossible.

  He began reviewing work with Mr. Clean on his side of the room and she called out to him.

  “Mr. Sil—”

  “Joao,” he reminded her for the hundredth time.

  “Right, sorry . . .”

  He waited, but Leah had trailed off the way she did when a new thought struck her. “You know, most kids don’t call their parents by their first name. What did Rylee call you?”

  “Pai or Papai,” Mr. Silva said. “In English it’s dad or daddy.”

  “Papai,” Leah said.

  They looked at one another uncomfortably.

  “I’m sorry,” Leah said.

  “I would really rather you not,” Joao said.

  “I just thought the association might . . .” She blushed. “Let’s never speak of this again, Joao?”

  “Thank you.”

  He turned back to work, then back to her. “Wait, what did you want in the first place?”

  “It’s . . . never mind. It’s not ready yet anyway,” Leah said.

  With a sigh, Joao got up and came to stand beside her. He stood staring down at what she had been working on so meticulously.

  He’d been standing over her shoulder watching her work for some time before he spoke. “Leah, what is this?”

  She’d fallen back into a state of hyper-focus, had to mentally yank herself back from the work. She turned to see Joao squinting down at her monitor as though trying to translate a
lost language.

  “What? Oh, right. It’s easier to understand in the projection chamber,” she said.

  “Show me?”

  She hesitated, then nodded.

  A few moments later they stood in the blank slate of the chamber.

  “Mr. Clean, please load the MA map,” she said. “Start where we left off.”

  “MA?” Joao asked.

  “Memory Association,” Leah said.

  The void came and went, and soon Joao was standing inside the center of a strange grid of bubbles and lines. It surrounded them in a three-dimensional space, one of the bubbles pulling forward to display its contents.

  At a glance, the information contained within vaguely resembled the sort of evidence board fictional detectives used to solve mysteries in a Hollywood movie. People, locations, and various newspaper clippings connected by varying colors of string and pinned to a cork board.

  The difference was that, had Leah tried to do this work on a physical bulletin board she would have needed to rent out a stadium just to store the monstrosity. Mr. Clean’s assistance allowed her to build the framework into a three-dimensional web. Letting her pull which of Rylee’s experiences that seemed most important into the foreground and push what seemed more banal into the background.

  When one studied the connections long enough, the board started to look more like she was connecting star constellations. Taken a map of the galaxy and started playing connect the dots.

  “I started by asking Mr. Clean to build a map where any entries that seemed to reference one another in the text connected,” Leah said. “Then I began reviewing the connections with a human eye. Mr. Clean was often correct on the simple cause and effect connections . . . but . . . he couldn’t intuit the context of human association within Rylee’s life.”

  She turned and saw his eyes were wide with—wonder—like a child staring up at the ceiling in a planetarium.

  “This is what you’ve been puzzling out. All these nights you don’t sleep. This is what you see when you try to understand my daughter’s mind?”

  Leah nodded hesitantly.

  “It’s like watching art as it is brought into being. You’re . . . well, like Bob Ross.”

  Leah snorted at the comparison.

  Let’s add a fluffy childhood humiliation over here. We don’t want this entry—where Rylee loathed the second graders who laughed at the new kid who wet his pants on the playground—to get lonely. Perhaps, yes, it belongs here with this moment from summer camp, when the mean girl in Rylee’s cabin stole her underwear and ran it up the flagpole before the morning’s salute. Yes, they will keep each other company.

  Joao had a point through, there was far more art than science to what she had created.

  “Thank you, Mr. Sil . . . Joao,” she smiled.

  Hours later, Mr. Silva had admitted he had long ago lost any ability to navigate the web. Only Mr. Clean, Leah, and perhaps Rylee herself might have been able to steer their way through the thing.

  He was watching her, thinking, and Leah didn’t understand why until he spoke.

  “You never give up. You obsess. We’ve been at this for days. Mr. Clean has to tell you to eat and sleep. You’re not just good at seeing into people. It’s like once you start, you can’t stop until the puzzle forms a picture.”

  She slowed her work, moving another experience into place in the web along with the text of Rylee’s diary entry and the projection Mr. Clean had fabricated to reproduce it inside the chamber.

  “Profiling people—is it how you ended up working for The Cell?”

  “I told you, my brother disappeared . . .” Leah trailed off. “I never imagined I would be doing this with anyone’s life, let alone two.”

  “You’re good at it though,” he said.

  “I got a lot of experience trying to figure out . . .”

  She grimaced and trailed off.

  “Jonathan,” Mr. Silva said. “Did you? Figure him out I mean.”

  Leah frowned, then stepped back from her work. “I think I got close.”

  “But?”

  Leah gave him a sideways look. “Rylee. From the moment she showed up nothing Jonathan did made any sense to me. I understand why now, but at the time I might as well have been beating my head against a brick wall.”

  When she said this, the frustration she’d felt at that time slipped into her words. Mr. Silva noticed, but didn’t seem to take any offense.

  “It’s funny,” Mr. Silva said. “You say my daughter thought of you as an enemy. And, I see it got violent, but had she spent as much time with you as I have, I believe you could have been friends.”

  On the surface, she thought Joao’s words were said as a politeness. But she had once thought something similar, the first time she read a translation of Rylee’s journals. Friends might be overstating it, but allies had not seemed unachievable. Of course, that was before the woman caught her stealing from her diary.

  She shivered, her arms hugging her as though she’d grown cold. She stepped back from the projection.

  “Joao,” Leah said. “I’m terrified. I’m terrified this will actually work.”

  His face softened. “You’d be crazy not to be, Leah.”

  “When that device is put in . . . your daughter . . . she might actually be there. All of this will stop being a theory and be real. She might be in my mind. Know everything I’ve done—what I’m doing right now. This is the most complete invasion of a person’s private thoughts I can imagine . . .”

  Leah took another step back from the web. “She sacrificed her life for the world. And I’m . . . what? Just going to wake her up, tell her the job’s not done, and ask her to sacrifice everything all over again? What if she won’t? What if she’s trapped in the mind of someone she has every right to hate?”

  Mr. Silva was quiet, troubled for a moment. Then, somewhat awkwardly at first, he held out his arms to her. It took her a moment to realize he was offering a hug. She had to stop hugging herself to step into his embrace, and she didn’t manage it with much grace. Perhaps to both of their surprise, Leah didn’t feel out of place for long, and Mr. Silva didn’t feel he’d made an empty gesture.

  “Don’t be afraid of my daughter,” Mr. Silva said. “This is a two-way street. She is an open book to your eyes now. But, if you allow yourself to be just as vulnerable—she’ll see why you made your choices. She’ll know you were the one who sought my blessing. If that isn’t enough . . .”

  He pulled back but left his hands on her shoulders. “Look at me, Leah, memorize this moment, burn it into your brain.”

  She stared at him, curious at first, as when he spoke his words had the tone of a father lecturing a little girl. “Rylee Silva, you play nice with Leah. You listen to your father. Since the moment I found out you were gone, Leah is the only person who’s given me a moment’s comfort. So, if you can’t do it for her, you do it for me.”

  Leah smiled, but there were tears coming to her eyes. “Thank you, Joao.”

  “It’s the least I could do,” he said.

  A few moments later, they stood apart.

  “Course, Rylee had a rebellious streak. Often did the opposite of whatever I asked,” Joao said.

  “I was thinking it too,” Leah said. “Didn’t want to ruin the moment.”

  “I don’t pretend to follow all that you’re doing right here,” Mr. Silva said, pointing to a spot closer in Rylee’s MA map within the projection chamber. “Are you moving things around a missing piece that will tie them to one another?”

  “You aren’t wrong,” Leah said.

  “So, do you know what goes there?” Mr. Silva asked.

  She nodded. “Memories we don’t have. I’ve been avoiding going out to get them.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Jonathan and Heyer, they were both with her near the end—the real end,” Leah said. “I thought it best to ask Heyer, but he’s been gone for days and Mr. Clean isn’t telling anyone where he is. That leaves Jonathan
and . . .”

  Leah sighed, glancing back at Mr. Silva to see his face grow somber. “You don’t have to do that.”

  She frowned. “He told you how she died?”

  “It’s the only thing we’ve ever spoken about,” Joao said.

  Leah nodded slowly. “He blames himself.”

  Joao shook his head. “I don’t think that really covers it.”

  She searched his face but couldn’t be sure what he’d meant.

  “I knew the day I held her that nothing in this world could ever hurt me more than losing my daughter,” Joao said. “I looked into that kid’s eyes. I didn’t see a kid at all. I might as well have looked into a mirror.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  NOV 12, 2005 | 2 PM | JBLM FACILITY

  OLIVIA FLICKED ON the light, walked to her desk, and pulled out her chair. She was in her office early that morning. She had a meeting with Dr. Watts, and she wanted to go over the initial reports on the remains they had pulled out of the desert.

  The sound of someone speaking her name made her freeze. “Olivia.”

  Her breath caught as she recognized the voice.

  Agent Rivers had not been standing in that corner of her office when she’d turned on the lights. He’d appeared, in the seconds it took her to walk from door to chair.

  She closed her eyes, leaned over her desk with both hands, and let out the breath she had been holding. When she straightened, her eyes narrowed on him with suspicion.

  He wasn’t wearing a suit or tie. She realized she’d never seen him in anything else. What he wore today was casual but hardy. Something an agent might wear for field work if he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. High top boots, well-worn jeans, and a dark grey sentinel jacket buttoned all the way to the neck as though he were cold.

  “I’m sorry I startled you, but I couldn’t just walk back on to base.”

  Rivers—he looked worried for her. His expression more curious to her than his words as she slowly took her seat.

  “Jonathan wants to meet,” he said.