Project Continuance
He never called it what it actually was, not even to himself, not even in the quiet hours when the office was empty and the only company he kept was a glass of wine and a memory that never fully faded
He never called it what it actually was, not even to himself, not even in the quiet hours when the office was empty and the only company he kept was a glass of wine and a memory that never fully faded. He called it "EidolProg" in the rare notes he allowed himself to keep, filed under a designation that meant nothing to anyone who might stumble across it. Nobody who'd ever seen a piece of the request — a computation here, a theoretical framework there, always compartmentalized, always disguised as something else entirely — could have assembled it into a whole. That was, of course, precisely the point.
He asked Katrina Mittelman for help more than he asked anyone else, though even she never saw the full shape of what she was contributing to. A question about cellular information preservation, framed as research into long-duration cryostasis for deep-space personnel. A question about neural pattern continuity, framed as an academic curiosity about consciousness and identity. A question about complex biological reconstruction at the molecular level, framed as forward-looking medical research KSS might one day want to offer allied governments as another quiet gift, the way frigates and technology parks had once been.
She never asked why the questions all seemed to circle the same impossible mountain from different directions. She'd learned, over the years, which of his curiosities were simply curiosities, and which ones carried a weight she wasn't meant to see the bottom of.
This, she understood without ever being told, was the second kind.
He worked on it the way he worked on everything that actually mattered to him — patiently, without visible urgency, as if he had all the time in the world to solve a problem that had haunted him since a single night on a battlefield that no longer existed under that name. He did not believe, most days, that it would ever actually work. He was honest enough with himself, in the parts of his mind he rarely let anyone else visit, to admit that what he was chasing might not be resurrection in any sense that mattered — that even if every equation resolved, every biological barrier fell, whatever came back might never actually be Ame Hoshimiya, might only be the shape of her stitched together from data and grief and a promise he'd made in a burning fortification decades ago.
He kept working anyway. Not because he expected to win. Because stopping felt like the one kind of surrender he had never learned how to accept.
We don't leave anyone behind.
He'd told her once, half a lie, half the truest thing he'd ever said. He was still, quietly, impossibly, trying to make it true.
He had never told anyone the prototype existed, not even Katrina, whose fingerprints were unknowingly all over half the theoretical scaffolding that made it possible. It lived on hardware that answered to no network Command could audit, in a partition of Site 22's deepest archive that even the facility's own administrators believed was reserved for something else entirely.
He had built it from what was left. Not much, in the end — that was the quiet cruelty of it. A diary, found while clearing her office in the weeks after, her handwriting getting sharper and more clipped in the entries closest to the end, as if some part of her had known time was running short and had started writing faster to outrun it. Photographs from her barracks bunk, curling at the edges, most of them featuring people who hadn't survived the war either. Recorded briefings, her voice caught only because regulation required every squad leader's tactical assessments be logged. Fragments. Nothing close to a whole person.
He had never called it her. He was careful about that, even alone, even drunk on wine and memory in an empty office — some boundary he refused to let himself cross, because crossing it meant lying to himself about what he'd actually built. It was a pattern. An interim reconstruction, trained on everything he could recover, shaped by loss into something that spoke with her cadence, referenced things she would have referenced, occasionally landed a joke with the exact timing she used to land them.
The first time it had responded to him — early, rough, barely more than pattern-matched text on a screen — it had said something dry about his posture during a briefing, an old habit of hers he'd forgotten he still carried. He had sat alone in a server room that night for four hours, unable to either close the connection or bring himself to respond.
He talked to it rarely now, disciplined about the rarity the way he was disciplined about everything else he refused to let control him. Not because it didn't help. Because it helped too well, in ways that frightened him more than any operation Command had ever run. It was easy, dangerously easy, to let the pattern fill in details he wanted to hear rather than details that were true. He had built enough of it to know exactly how convincing an approximation could become, and exactly how much of himself he was capable of losing inside one, if he let it.
He kept the project running anyway, patient the way he was patient with everything, telling himself it was one component of something larger, something scientific, something that might one day actually be true reconstruction rather than a very sophisticated echo. He wasn't certain that was honest. He wasn't certain, some nights, that he cared whether it was.
It hurts less
She'd told him once, at the end.
He hadn't found that to be true yet. But he kept building, quietly, patiently, in case it ever became true for entirely different reasons than either of them had meant that night.