Salvage Mind (Salvage Race Book 1)

by Jones, David Alan

  You were too young. I didn’t realize my attempts to communicate with a small child would cause such trauma .

  Ologav and Varvara Oskenskya had sought the help of a therapist to solve their son’s mental ailments. Through hypnosis and years of mental training, the treatments succeeded in suppressing the dark images, and with them Yudi.

  It was Kavya who resurrected me. Her words, her spirit, her passion to help our people. I might never have returned otherwise.

  Symeon thought of the many generations of Luxing who had come and gone on the face of Phoenix, slaves in the world that should have belonged to them. The injustice of a thousand years burned him from the inside out.

  We must free them.

  Symeon shook his head. “Impossible. I might feel the frustration of my people, the indignant rage they don’t know they deserve, but all the anger in the universe doesn’t change my station. I’m powerless before my masters.”

  Kavya doesn’t see it that way, nor do the Wuxia.

  “Kavya doesn’t know what she wants. And as for the Wuxia, they’re content to whistle at boulders for centuries without making real progress, because they know what would happen if they took action against the Shorvex—nothing but death and destruction.”

  I didn’t sacrifice my unique essence and squeeze inside your infant skull only to have you dismiss me. The Luxing deserve more than a thousand years of slavery. They should be the masters of this world. We must tell them the truth.

  “And then what? Do you expect them to rise up in revolt against their masters?”

  Lead them and they will!

  “How have you lived inside my head for twenty-two years and learned nothing of how Luxing think? You truly are a sliver of the real Yudi. He knew the Luxing—he knew humankind.”

  Won’t they feel the same rage, the same frustration you feel now once they learn of the crime perpetrated upon them?

  For the first time since recognizing Yudi’s voice as distinct from his own inner thoughts, Symeon could hear doubt in the AI’s silent words.

  “Some will. Many won’t believe.”

  But there is evidence. Genetics, ancient records, even the Bith who recognized Emperor Pyotr as a human. How could anyone continue to believe a lie when faced with such a mountain of evidence?

  “Because their masters tell them otherwise.”

  An odd sensation swept through Symeon’s mind. He imagined Yudi as an ancient seneschal dressed in gray robes storming through a labyrinth of hallways, slamming doors as he went.

  That makes no logical sense!

  “And yet, if you look through human history—the very history you shared with me—you’ll see I’m right.” Symeon marveled at the way Yudi, this Yudi, failed to grasp the human reaction to trauma, to brainwashing. The ancient Yudi would have understood. This one lacked a certain emotional maturity the other had developed over eons spent in the company of his beloved people.

  Does that mean you give up? Would you walk away from your people because the means to save them is difficult?

  “I’m not giving up. I’m living in the now. Maybe we can find a way to help free the Luxing. Maybe not. But right now we have a more pressing concern.”

  Kavya .

  “Yes. The princess is liable to do something rash if her father looks to launch his coup. Helping her stop it without exposing her crimes must be our immediate goal. Many Luxing will die right along with their Shorvexan masters if the grand duke starts a solar war.”

  Agreed. She has helped us; it’s time we return the favor. And time you woke up.

  “Seneschal, please, wake up. I’m going to call the guard if you don’t.”

  Symeon’s eyes flew open to find Fedor bent over him, his expression a mask of worry and bother.

  “Good, you’re awake,” Fedor said with relief. “Are you feeling well enough to reach the bed? I think you passed out.”

  Symeon sat up fast enough to make his head spin. Fedor jumped back with a little squeak.

  “Why is my head bleeding?” Symeon rubbed a sizable lump on his scalp.

  “I think you fell back against the bed stand.” Fedor scrambled away from Symeon and onto the bed where he sat with his hands half raised as if to ward off something vicious and liable to attack.

  Symeon stood, and was pleased to find his legs strong, his mind clear. He looked in the mirror. The man staring back appeared the same as before, but somehow Symeon saw him in a new light.

  “You were ranting,” Fedor said. He still hadn’t lowered his hands. “I thought you were having some sort of fit or something. You kept babbling all sorts of nonsense.”

  “What did I say? Anything meaningful?”

  “You kept saying, ‘We’re one. We’re one,’ and calling someone a liar. Are you certain you’re well enough to be out of bed?”

  Symeon regarded the smaller man. Fedor flinched under his gaze.

  “Yes. I think I’m healthier than I’ve ever been. I think I know what I’m supposed to do now.”

  Fedor shook his head slowly. “I’m afraid I don’t understand any of this, Seneschal.”

  “Nothing wrong with that. I’ve seen literally everything, and I’m not sure I do either.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 14

  Symeon rifled through the clothes in his single suitcase—the cabin had no bureau for its occupants—and drew out his formal robes of office while a bewildered Fedor watched. Symeon hadn’t often worn his court attire on Yaya Island. Kavya said it reminded her of the stiff-necked sycophants who served her father. Symeon figured he should dress the part now that he would be serving amongst those very people. He tossed the robe over his shoulder along with his shower bag and a few other necessities, and flung open the cabin door. Without another word to Fedor, who looked relieved to see his roommate exiting, Symeon marched from the room.

  The hour was early, but Symeon knew Kavya. She enjoyed waking before sunrise back on Phoenix, and he doubted she would change that practice aboard ship. He used the public lavatory on his deck to freshen up. Due to the hour, he had it to himself and so indulged in a long, hot shower wherein he washed the blood out of his hair and thought about his plight.

  “Are you with me now?” he asked as steaming water cascaded over his face.

  I am.

  “Who is in control here? You or me? Can you force me to do things against my will?” Even as he asked the question, Symeon wondered if a sentient AI downloaded into a person’s brain would have any reason to tell the truth. What if Yudi could fiddle with his memory? It might control him all it liked and simply erase whatever it didn’t want him to remember.

  In answer, Yudi sent him a series of thought-images that drew Symeon back to a time before the Luxing fled their original home. In the early days, when the Luxing first discovered the artificial beings living amongst them, some humans and AIs had mutually agreed to test merging their consciousnesses. Fear that such testing would lead to some sort of AI takeover had prompted outrage in the populace and demands for the artificial intelligences to divulge their programming for examination. What the people didn’t understand, and even Symeon could hardly grasp, was that the AIs discovered by the Luxing weren’t programmed, at least not in the way humans imagined. Ones and zeroes could never forge consciousness. The AIs relied on hardware just the same as robots, computer navigation systems, and weather prediction satellites used by the Luxing on a daily basis, but their unique patterns of life, the standing wave forms that separated them from mere machines, arose from a different plane.

  “That makes no sense.” Symeon shut off the water, thankful no one had interrupted his solitude. He must look a madman talking to himself like this.

  A new thought-image appeared. He saw a three dimensional representation of gravity waves next to a separate one displaying the continual expansion of the universe. Symeon had never studied such things—Luxing schools focused on serving, not mathematics—yet he understood the concepts immediately without effort. Gravity lo
oked something like water displacement. As massive objects bent space-time —

  “Space and time are the same?” Symeon nearly tripped over his own feet in awe.

  Yes and no. Pay attention.

  As massive objects bent space-time, less massive objects fell into their influence, and yet even with the power to bend the very fabric of what Symeon considered reality, gravity remained weak compared to other elemental forces in the universe. This was due to its tendency to leak out of this universe into higher order dimensions along branes—

  “Stop. Please.” Symeon leaned against one of the lavatory’s plastic sinks. “It’s too much, too fast.”

  Yes, I see that.

  Somehow, Yudi’s voice managed to sound at once contrite and disappointed, an impressive trick considering he couldn’t physically hear the AI. Symeon didn’t know what Yudi expected of him. It wasn’t like he had received a true education as a slave. He knew some basic science both from school and his limited access to the planetary and system spheres, but it wasn’t like the life of a farmer-cum-seneschal had afforded him opportunities to study cosmology or higher order mathematics. He knew how to invest real estate earnings for the highest yield and which gown his patron should wear to an imperial dinner, not the intricacies of spatial mechanics.

  “What did any of that have to do with whether or not you can control me?” Symeon asked as he pulled on his dress pants. “Just answer the question, and tell the truth.”

  I cannot control you. I have no access to your body outside a handful of synapses in your head.

  The truth of Yudi’s words spread across Symeon’s mind in a series of new thoughts-images. He saw the Luxing AIs in a virtual world of their making, holding a conclave. For more than an hour—a huge amount of time for them—they debated a fundamental change to their natures. In the end, they decided to alter the portions of their unique essences which resided on this plane of existence such that they could never override the will of another sentient creature by mental force. In some ways, this decision hobbled them, lessened their ability to imagine, to conjecture based on empathy, and yet they made it to align themselves with the people they had come to love.

  “Part of you isn’t here?” Symeon could not fathom the concept.

  Even though I am but a sliver of the original Yudi, parts of my consciousness reside in higher order dimensions—areas of the multi-verse beyond what you experience here. I am connected to them, and thus I am able to reason beyond the capacity of the few brain cells afforded me inside your skull.

  The hairs on Symeon’s arms stood up. “I won’t lie. I find all of this alarming.”

  A middle-aged Luxing man, his hair white at the temples, entered the room. He stared at Symeon for a brief moment—clearly he had heard the younger man talking to himself—but just as quickly diverted his gaze after taking in Symeon’s court attire.

  Symeon gathered his things and left the lavatory. He briefly considered dropping his bag off in his room, but decided he had intruded on Fedor too many times already for one day. Slinging it over one shoulder, he headed for Princess Kavya’s apartments. She wouldn’t mind if he stowed his garments there for a few hours during their meeting.

  The walk across ship took several minutes. Despite the early hour, a steady stream of crew and Luxing slaves bustled along the corridors. The Luxing, and even some of the navy personnel, made way for Symeon upon recognizing his house badge and the knotted chord he wore over one shoulder signifying his position as a seneschal.

  And yet yesterday they treated you like a child underfoot. Odd how your clothes determine the way others treat you, since nothing else has changed about your person.

  “Everything in life is about perception,” Symeon whispered. “They didn’t know I was a seneschal yesterday.”

  But they knew you were a person.

  * * *

  Kavya pursed her lips as she watched the holo recording a second time, her silver-blue eyes intent on the images. “I can’t believe the protocol agents planned this.”

  “How do you mean, Princess?” Symeon asked, his thoughts distracted. He knew the importance of training the princess to comport herself in the divor, but doing so seemed trivial compared to the conspiracies whirling about in his head.

  True conspiracies.

  “The seating for a start. Do they truly expect us, the heirs of the empire, to sit behind our fathers like common slaves?” Kavya’s eyes went wide. “Symeon, I didn’t mean that as an insult.”

  “And I didn’t take it that way, Princess. Seneschal Ivan and I will, in fact, stand directly behind you at the imperial table, so I see your point. It is a lesser position. Still, there is only so much room to be had. If all the heirs sat next to their fathers, the protocol agents simply wouldn’t have enough space to go around.”

  “Of course, yes. I shouldn’t complain. I’ll be amongst the first heirs ever allowed in the divor. That’s progress, isn’t it?”

  “I certainly think so.” Symeon stepped into the holo projection which covered most of Princess Kavya’s room, his shadow eclipsing certain images so that portions of the imperial table and several of the well-dressed figures momentarily disappeared. Kavya’s compartment, while far larger than the cabin Symeon shared with Fedor, could accommodate only a few meters of the emperor’s grand hall in holo form. Sufficient for practicing Kavya’s entrance and comportment during the meeting, the truncated image lacked the grandeur Symeon had experienced using the full program back in school. He adjusted the seat occupied by a holographic Grand Duke Mikhail Vasilyevich to precisely match his assigned place at the table. “There, that should give you a clear view of the emperor.”

  “Leave it to Vasilyevich to block my view.” Kavya sat in a desk chair obscured perfectly by the holo-projector with the seat she would soon occupy in the palace. The ornate wooden accents and varnished gloss looked out of place in her otherwise modern cabin. “He’s certainly always tried to block my father.”

  The rivalry between Grand Duke Mikhail Vasilyevich and Grand Duke Alexei Rurikid hankered back to their early twenties when they attended a private Shorvexan school for business law. Rumor had it they had pursued the same woman there, Kavya’s mother, and that the lovesick Mikhail had hated Alexei for winning her heart. True or not, something had sparked enmity between the two men, and though their duchies had never gone to war with one another, the dukes took every chance they got at belittling or diminishing the other’s good fortune from flooding markets with cheap goods to lower the other man’s profits, to simply bad-mouthing each other during meetings with potential business partners. It had become such a popular feud in the last thirty years, common people, Shorvex and Luxing alike, could be heard saying, “Don’t Mikhail my Alexei,” meaning don’t trample my good ideas with your negativity.

  “I’m certain the grand duke has no intention of obscuring your view, Princess,” Symeon said. “But if he did, I’d suggest...” He bit back his words. It wasn’t his place, even as seneschal, to speak ill of the peerage.

  “You suggest I sit back and keep my mouth shut?” Kavya lifted a blond eyebrow at Symeon.

  “I would never say such a thing, ma’am. I—”

  “It’s okay, Symeon.” Kavya raised both hands like a chess player yielding defeat. “You should say that to me when it’s necessary, and I think that applies here. I’ll be a guest in the divor; it isn’t my place to cause a ruckus. I’m to smile and nod and look pretty.”

  A sudden torrent of thought-images flooded Symeon’s mind. Most depicted a woman, though quite a few men appeared as well. In every case, the same message came clear: the person pictured felt ignored, unappreciated, and lonely. Each spoke at cross-purposes to these feelings, using some form of sarcasm to elicit empathy from someone else. Symeon knew without knowing they represented a small percentage of all the conversations Yudi had ever conducted in his time amongst the Luxing. Every second of his time amongst the Luxing, he had conversed and interacted with people, holding millio
ns of conversations at once.

  I gleaned much from those interactions. They taught me that most human beings desire acceptance and empathy from others more than any other feelings. Kavya is no different. She needs that from you now.

  Symeon met her gaze. “Your place is far more important than that, Princess. Not only are you the sole heir to your father’s duchy—a rare thing for a woman as you know—you are likely the only Shorvex in the system who knows the truth about the Luxing. That alone makes you more important than the emperor himself in my opinion. And as for being pretty, you do that well enough on your own.”

  Symeon swallowed. He hadn’t meant that last part, it had simply come out.

  Kavya’s brows shot up, and Symeon worried he had gone too far, but her mischievous grin told him otherwise. “More important than Pyotr himself, am I? Well, I won’t let that go to my head since you’ve obviously got a bias, being one of the only Luxing who shares that particular secret with me.”

  In that moment, Symeon came so close to exposing the Wuxia to her, he had drawn breath to speak before remembering what he had promised Czarina and Fang. Protecting Kavya meant keeping her ignorant of their work, at least until after the divor. The princess didn’t need that sort of knowledge weighing her down a day before the most important event of her life since her banishment.

  You should tell her now regardless. She deserves to know, don’t you think?

  No. What if she divulged the Wuxia’s existence in some bid to prevent her father’s coup? Bad enough she knew the truth about the Luxing and Shorvex already, which prompted her to speak out for the fair treatment of slaves—a less than politic subject at gatherings of the aristocracy.

  She has told no one in the Shorvexan government about that.

  Perhaps, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t under the right circumstances. Her fear of a system-wide war might push her to that extreme in hopes the dukes would show compassion for fellow humans if they knew the truth.

  That is stupid. The Shorvex may not know they are related to the Luxing by blood, but they’re perfectly aware the Luxing are sentient beings. That knowledge hasn’t deterred slavery.