The Memory Room was established by the Prophet-Emperox Rachela I not long after the foundation of the Interdependency, and her ascendance as its first emperox. Each emperox was fitted with a personal network of sensors running through their body that captured not only every sight seen, and every sound heard or spoken by the emperox, but every other sensation, action, emotion, thought, and desire apprehended or produced by them as well.
Within the Memory Room were the thoughts and memories of every emperox of the Interdependency, dating back to the very first, the Prophet-Emperox Rachela I herself. If Cardenia wanted, she could ask any one of her predecessors any question, about them, about their reign, about their time. They would answer from memory, from the thoughts and recordings and the computer modeling of who they were, girded on decades of every single thing about their internal lives recorded for this very room.
There was only one destination for this information: the Memory Room. There was only one audience for it: the current emperox.
Cardenia subconsciously touched the back of her neck again, in the place where the network seed was implanted, to grow inside her. One day, everything I do as emperox will be in here, she thought. For my own child and their children to see. Every emperox will know who I was, better than history will.
She looked at the apparition of her father, now directly in front of her, and shuddered.
The apparition noticed. “Are you not happy to see me?” it asked.
“I saw you just a few hours ago,” Cardenia said, standing up from the bench, and looking over the apparition of her father. It was perfect. Almost touchable. Cardenia did not touch it. “You were dead then.”
“I still am,” Attavio VI said. “The consciousness that was me is gone. Everything else was stored.”
“So you’re not conscious now?”
“I’m not, but I can respond to you as if I were. You may ask me anything. I will tell you.”
“What do you think of me?” Cardenia asked, blurting it out.
“I always thought you were a nice young lady,” Attavio VI said. “Smart. Attentive to me. I don’t think you’ll make a very good emperox.”
“Why not?”
“Because right now the Interdependency has no need of a nice emperox. It never does, but it can tolerate one when nothing consequential is going on. This is not one of those times.”
“I wasn’t particularly nice to the executive committee today,” Cardenia said, hearing how defensive the words sounded coming out of her mouth.
“I’m sure that in the wake of my death, for your very first meeting with them, the executive committee made a fine show of being restrained and deferential. Also, they are seeing at what length of chain you’re most comfortable, in order for them to get every single thing they want from you. They’ll yank on that chain presently.”
“I’m not sure I like this entirely honest you,” Cardenia said, after a moment.
“If you like we can adjust my conversational model to be more like I was in life.”
“You’re telling me you lied to me in life.”
“No more than to anyone else.”
“That’s comforting.”
“In life I was human, with an ego, just like anyone else. I had my own desires and intentions. Here I am nothing but memory, here for the purpose of assisting you, the current emperox. I have no ego to flatter, and will flatter yours only if ordered to. I would not suggest it. It makes me less useful.”
“Did you love me?”
“It depends on what you mean by love.”
“That sounds like an evasive, ego-filled answer.”
“I was fond of you. You were also inconvenient until the moment you were needed for succession. When you became the crown princess I was relieved you didn’t hate me. You couldn’t have been blamed if you had.”
“When you died you said you wished you had had time to love me better.”
Attavio VI nodded. “That sounds like something I would say. I imagine I meant it in the moment.”
“You don’t remember it.”
“Not yet. My final moments have not yet been uploaded.”
Cardenia dropped the subject. “I chose the imperial name of Grayland II, as you suggested.”
“Yes. That information, at least, is in our database. And, good.”
“I read up on her.”
“Yes, I had planned to ask you to.”
“You did, before you died. Why did you ask me to name myself for her?”
“Because I hoped it would inspire you to take seriously what’s coming next, and what it would require from you,” Attavio VI said. “Do you know about the Count of Claremont, on End?”
“I do,” Cardenia said. “An old lover of yours.”
Attavio VI smiled. “No, not at all. A friend. A very good friend, and a scientist. One who brought me information that no one else had, and that no one else would have wanted to see. One who needed to do his work and research insulated from the stupidities of court, and government, and even of the community of scientists in the Interdependency. He’s someone who has been collecting data for more than thirty years now. He knows more about what’s coming next than anyone else. A thing you must be prepared for. A thing you are not in the least prepared for, now. And a thing I worry that you will not be strong enough to see through.”
Cardenia stared at the apparition of Attavio VI, which stood there, a small, pleasant, distracted smile on its face.
“Well?” Cardenia said, finally. “What is it?”
Chapter
4
“Who here knows what the Interdependency is?” Marce Claremont asked, from the well of the planetarium.
From the chairs of the planetarium, the hands of several eight-year-olds shot upward. Marce scanned the hands, looking for the one who seemed to most urgently need to answer the question. He picked a hand sitting in the second arc of chairs. “Yes? You.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” the child said. Behind the child, Marce saw one of the adult chaperones roll her eyes, get up, grab the child by the hand, and start walking him to the bathrooms. Then he picked another kid.
“It’s the nation of systems we all live in,” said the girl.
“That’s right,” Marce said, and pressed a button on his tablet to dim the lights and start his presentation. “It’s the nation of systems in which we live. But what does that really mean?”
Before he could continue, the planetarium rocked slightly as what sounded like two interceptors buzzed the university science center the planetarium was part of. The children started at the noise, the chaperones trying to hush them and telling them everything would be all right.
Marce doubted everything was actually going to be all right. The University of Opole, which housed the science center, was far from the capital and the focus of the fighting. But in the last week things had taken a decisive turn against the duke and his loyalist forces, and now even the far provinces had sprouted rebels, and the violence that came with revolution.