I sat on a firm chair in front of the screen as I examined its piles of information. Stacks of my parents' books lay next to me.
A few of them were handbooks on what they did. The Handbook to Government Science talked a lot about doing what you're told without questioning it because the government had your best interests in mind. It was a 500-page version of a paragraph and looked like it had been thoroughly read.
My mother had kept journals, I found out. They told the story of the day, not going into much description about their science. But I suppose that was the job of their online reports.
The pages were old and wrinkled, some of them ripped. My mother's handwriting was impressively elegant, an old form only someone like her grandmother could have taught her.
There was a page for almost every day until they disappeared. Every journal entry on my birthday talked about me as if I was there. It was like "She's finally sixteen! I'm so proud!" Then she reminisced on what a great person I must be becoming.
I bit my lip, trying not to imagine their disappointment in me.
I had looked more into their deaths and found out that they were found far away from here when they died.
They had just left one day without a word. All they took with them was their passports, no change of clothes or anything.
It was hypothesized in a few articles that they were heading to Trena, but they didn't even make it close to the border when both of them were found dead.
Scans on their body showed no brutality, the skin wasn't broken and it couldn't have been a blow to the head or anything like that. It wasn't a health issue and there was no poison in their system.
It was as if it had happened suddenly, with no explanation. One second they were fine, walking down the road. Next second they dropped dead and that was that
One day they stopped answering their calls, important ones from government officials. Soon after an officer came into the house and found them gone.
They disappeared for three weeks before they were spotted by a bystander who saw them getting a meal to go at a restaurant. A week later they were found dead.
The bystander's story had been backed up by others in the restaurant, including the guy working behind the counter. The story being fake was definitely off the table.
I had a virtual map in front of me, tacks on the house, the restaurant, and where they were found dead.
It was a reasonably straight line, they definitely planned to escape to Trena. The question was why were they fleeing? And why did they die so suddenly?
I rested my head in my hand for a moment, in the classic pompous thinking pose.
I pulled up the Trena Plague reports, the last one was dated 5/9. I looked through the journals but that year wasn't in the pile.
I looked through the drawers of the desk in the lab. One of them held a small journal the same size and type as all the others.
There it was, the date 5/9
I'm afraid this will be my last entry because recent developments cannot be left where they will be found. I have to go, I can't take a single thing with me. Mason...
My father, her husband
...says we cannot even take a picture of our daughter with us. He's right, but I really don't want him to be. I must promise myself to restrain from taking anything I cherish because it will be destroyed as our condition gets worse. I don't even know if we will make it, but we cannot stay. It makes me want to cry, that I'll never see my beautiful girl, but our mistakes have lead us here and there is no turning back now.
Tucked in the book was a picture of me in one of the annual pictures I took with my troop. We each had one of these blue uniforms with all our badges on it. The picture cropped out the rest of my team except for a bit of the person I was standing next to.
I really regret refusing to smile for those photos.
It really was the last entry, the pages beyond it were untouched by even a single drop of ink.
My thoughts incoherent and cramped, I put down the journal, two fingers up to the screen. I pulled up the search bar up, typed in: Death Records: Jonathan Howell"
I had already seen my parents' death record Death: Unknown.
Jonathan's had similar information. Birth and death date, jobs and ranking, family,
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Soldier In Me
الخيال العلميThis is an older story, I've gotten better I promise. "I first held a gun when I was eight. I remember a man strolling across a line of other children like me, he said: 'We all have a soldier in us.' I found my soldier. But then, it became all I...
