James Knapp - The Silent Army

She zoomed back out, then back in on a square shape. That one had hundreds of lines connected to it.

“When enough entries reference the same thing, it’s considered an ‘event’; something that most likely will happen, but we don’t know when or how. If the rate of recurrence gets high enough, meaning enough entries reference the same event over and over persistently, then you get something like this.”

She zoomed out again then panned over to a spot where the lines were so dense they formed a white star around a little diamond shape.

“The diamond means an event is almost certain, and that the event will have a serious impact.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“That’s the wasteland,” she said.

I stared at the diamond shape. It looked like thousands of lines were connected to it.

“That many people have seen it?” I whispered. Penny nodded.

“Now watch.” She tapped the screen again and the whole thing zoomed out until the lines blurred together and became the nebula shape again. The diamond and all the connecting lines became that bright star that sat on the edge of the dark hole in the middle.

“What’s in the middle?” I asked. “In the dark part?”

“We don’t know,” she said. “Ai’s trying to close that gap, to find out.You can see that all around the rim there’s nothing much, nothing conclusive, except right there. That one big event happens right on the edge there.”

“Then what?”

“No verifiable entries. The model falls apart.”

“But why no entries?”

“Maybe there’s nothing left to see.”

Nothing left. I remembered the wasteland and how everything was gone.

“But even in my dream, it’s just the city,” I said weakly.

Penny shrugged. “Ai calls it the void. It doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t anything after the event, just that no one has seen anything after it.”

“Why not?”

“No one knows for sure. Maybe it means no one will be left.”

I stared at the image on the screen. The star sat on the edge of the dark like it was being sucked into a black hole.

“You get it now?” she asked.

“But what are the visions?” I asked. “How do they work?”

“We’re not completely sure yet, but there are some things we know, some rules they all stick by.”

She held up a finger.

“One: the people and places seen in the visions are real. If you see a person in a vision, they exist in the real world, somewhere. Same for places.”

She held up a second finger to form a V shape.

“Two: visions modeled here have probabilities that can change, but once an event hits one hundred percent probability, it always occurs, with no exceptions. A vision modeled at one hundred percent can’t be changed, as far as we know.”

She held up a third finger, forming a W.

“Three: no one has ever seen something in a vision that couldn’t feasibly happen in their lifetime. So no one has ever seen anything hundreds of years down the line or anything like that. We think that no one can see past their own death.”

She tapped the dark center of the ring.

“We expect to see some emptiness then, here,” she said. “No one lives forever, but the problem is that this bright star, this ‘event,’ is less than five years away. It could happen tomorrow. So this void is troubling. You follow?”

I nodded weakly.

“But what does it have to do with me?”

She tapped the screen and a tree of icons appeared. She tapped on, and it zoomed in to show my face.

OTT, ZOE. POTENTIAL E1.

“Potential what?” I asked, still staring at my name on the screen. Penny panned back, showing other faces in the tree. I saw Nico’s go by, and some others I didn’t recognize. It landed on an image of Penny.

BLOUNT, PENNY. POTENTIAL E1 (DISPROVEN). E10.

“Significant people are termed ‘elements’ and assigned numbers,” she said. “Just like there are significant events that people report seeing, there are significant people. Based on the events people see and their probabilities, we can get a sense of who will be significant …who will be directly involved in what’s to come.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

She pulled up one of her sleeves and held out the arm so I could see. There were pocked scars all down it from her wrist to her elbow, following the veins there. They were needle tracks.

“Ai pulled me out of the gutter,” she said. “She saved my life. For me, though, when I got clean, I lost my pre-cog ability. I can still do everything else, better than most, but I stopped having the visions.”

“You don’t see them anymore?” To me, that sounded great.

“I get the odd sighting, but not like I used to. Not like Ai. Not like you. We’re not all the same. All of us can influence others, but not everyone can see. Even those that can, not everyone can see as well as Ai. It’s what makes her special. You see that out there?”

She pointed out a window across the room. Through it I could see the lights of the city as it sprawled off into the distance. From that height I could see the two other major, huge towers, lit up like colored spikes.

“Ai doesn’t run the show alone,” Penny said. “She’s got powerful friends. You’ll meet them someday, for now just know we run everything. We’ve got our own organization, but it all comes back to Ai. She’s the one with the vision. She’s the one that sees and knows everything. It’s all for nothing without her.”

She pointed to the big star shape again.

“She’s looking for someone, someone related to that event. Element zero begins it, but element one ends it. Ai’s been looking for this missing element. She was wrong about me, and she’s been wrong before, but she’s been looking. She’s been looking for you.”

I looked at the star on the screen.

“Is everything really going to be destroyed?” I asked.

“Not if we can help it.”

She put one hand on my shoulder and squeezed. Gently, not like she had before.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “In some ways, I don’t envy you. I know it’s hard. I was in your shoes once, but it is what it is. You might need to step up, and soon.”

She stood up and walked to the doorway, turning back before she left.

“Enjoy your new digs,” she said. “You’re totally free to do whatever you want at any time, but don’t cross Ai. Understand?”

“Yes.” That part I got.

“Sorry about your friend,” she said, and left. I heard her walk back out to the front door and close it behind her. I barely heard her, though, because I was still looking at the screen and trying to figure out what was going on.

“Yeah, me too,” I said, but she was gone. I was alone.

It was too surreal. The night before, I was sitting at a table in a fancy restaurant with a bunch of people I didn’t know, practically dying of embarrassment. Someone shot at us and all hell broke loose, and then my best friend died right in front of me. I fell off the wagon, and Nico hit me in the face. Just when I thought I was at rock bottom, I end up in a palace. I’m told I’m important, and that my dreams and crazy visions are not only not insane, but also that they could help stop a disaster.

“How much of this is real?”

Any minute now I’m going to wake up. I’ll wake up on my couch in my apartment, and Karen will be alive.

I got up and walked around the apartment, trying to shake the feeling that I was trespassing. It didn’t feel like home. It was too much. It was too nice. The bed in the bedroom looked really comfortable, though. The inside of the bathroom was all tiled, and along with the giant hot tub was a cascade shower the size of my old bathroom.

In the bedroom I opened a huge walk-in closet and saw what Penny meant when she said that Ai got me some stuff to wear; it was filled with expensive clothes for pretty much every occasion. There were more shoes in there than I had ever owned in my life. Hanging from the door on the inside was what at first looked like a bra, but turned out to be a shoulder holster, like the kind I’d seen Nico wear, but smaller. It had a gun in it too, a little silver one with a pearl handle. There was a note pinned to the holster: FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY. I closed the door.