The Last Emperox

by John Scalzi

  What wasn’t working particularly well, Grayland was discovering, were the legal proceedings against the traitors. It wasn’t that the Ministry of Justice lacked evidence—Deran Wu had provided plenty of that before his poisoning—but a matter of lawyers. The traitors were all part of noble houses, who employed all sorts of lawyers, most of them very good; the Ministry of Justice, on the other hand, had a relatively small number of prosecutors available, some of whom were good but some of whom worked for the government because they were aggressively mediocre and couldn’t get the plum jobs that the noble houses and guilds offered up.

  The lawyers for the various houses—who were well aware that if their clients were found guilty, they would be executed (the clients, not the lawyers, although, depending on the house, maybe the lawyers, too)—were burying the Ministry of Justice in paper and proceedings, searching for every possible delay or technicality to get their clients sprung. The Ministry of Justice, which had other things to worry about as well, was being overwhelmed. More than that, the minister of justice declared, the surge of popular support that Grayland had accrued after the coup attempt was ebbing quickly—the longer the traitors languished in their very posh prison ship, the more time the houses and their lawyers had to rally support, manufactured or otherwise.

  Grayland was for various reasons not particularly concerned about the public support issue, but did not acknowledge that to her minister of justice. There was no point going down that particular path with him. Nor, honestly, was she all that concerned about the traitors drawing out their legal process. Grayland herself was not adamant that the traitors had to be put to death; she did not have that sort of righteous bloodlust running through her veins. If the traitors were wasting their time, it was their own increasingly finite time to waste, and in the meantime they at least were out of her hair.

  Still, it wouldn’t do to have Grayland’s minister of justice feel that she was unresponsive to his concerns, so she asked for his advice. The minister had suggested two things: one, that the ministry be allowed to hire outside lawyers and deputize them to lead some of the higher-profile cases, so that the ministry would not find itself outgunned; two, to start cutting deals with some of the traitors, in which they would allocute and name names in return for not being executed and for serving their time in their home systems, in their house’s own penal system.

  Grayland assented to both, and suggested to her minister that he use the second strategically, to disrupt the emerging narrative that was sympathetic to the traitors, and to pit them against each other legally, which would complicate their lawyers’ machinations. She knew this was his intent in any event, but also knew it was useful to him to be able to say the idea came from the emperox herself. And indeed her minister seemed gratified that she went exactly where he needed her to go. They both came away from the meeting feeling like they had manipulated the other precisely, which meant it was a good meeting.

  A fifteen-minute tea with Archbishop Korbijn, which was as close to a purely social call as any that Grayland would have in her entire day. Archbishop Korbijn had famously thrown in her lot with the emperox on the fateful day the attempted coup had been meant to go down, and in the time since Grayland had shown her appreciation, opening up the imperial coffers to fund Korbijn’s initiatives within the Church of the Interdependency. But more than that, Grayland liked the archbishop; the older woman had always been kind to Grayland, and understood better than most what it meant to be in charge of a vast bureaucracy that was not always sympathetic to one’s aims, or sensitive to one’s ego. They had similar jobs, basically, and it was nice to be able to talk to someone who understood your specific set of extremely high-end problems.

  Grayland did not tell Archbishop Korbijn that at any point in the last three months she could have suffocated because of a line of code, or the lack thereof.

  Next, a brief trip by private train car to the other side of the Xi’an habitat and to the parliament complex and her own parliamentary offices—Grayland was technically the Interdependency parliamentary representative for Xi’an, and while as a practical matter she did not exercise the privilege, she still had office space—where Grayland in rapid succession took four ten-minute meetings with her fellow parliamentarians, in groups of six, and then walked to the floor of parliament, where she gave a fifteen-minute address to the Hub System Teen Model Parliament, which was on Xi’an for its annual convention. They were thrilled to see her, and Grayland was thrilled to realize she was finally old enough to have teenagers look impossibly young to her. That was new.

  Five minutes later she was back in her private train car, heading to her own palace complex and to the meeting she had been dreading the most. It was with Countess Rafellya Maisen-Persaud, of the House of Persaud, whose monopoly was in shellfish and certain cartilaginous fishes, and which was the ruling house of the Lokono system. The Lokono system had sixty-five million people in it, across six moons, twelve major habitats and over a hundred minor ones.

  It was also the first system forecast to be entirely cut off from the rest of the Interdependency.

  Currently its three ingress and four egress Flow streams were sound. In roughly six months, the first of its incoming Flow streams—from Hub—would collapse, followed by the collapse of the other six streams within eleven months. By that time nearly every other system in the Interdependency would have experienced its own Flow stream collapses, but all the rest of them would still be connected, even if only tenuously, to the rest.

  Grayland was expecting that the countess would be performatively outraged that, despite the fact that the emperox was obliged to give the parliament six months (and now rather less than that) to present options, she had done nothing to protect or rescue the sixty-five million citizens of the Lokono system from the oncoming collapse. The countess did not disappoint. As the representative of her noble house, and the youngest sister of the reigning duchess, Rafellya Maisen-Persaud gave an award-worthy performance, and all but rent her garments at the plight of the Lokono people. At the end of it, Grayland wondered whether she should applaud.

  She did not. Not only because it would be rude, but also because she knew that the countess was not all that concerned with the fate of the citizens of the Lokono system. Grayland knew that Rafellya Maisen-Persaud had been at the meeting that Kiva Lagos had spoken to her about, the one put on by Proster Wu.

  Moreover, she had known it before Lady Kiva told her about it. She knew because Jiyi had pried that particular secret loose from the same bank that Kiva had used social engineering against to discover the conspiracy. Jiyi had discovered more conspirators at other banks, as well as encrypted documents explaining the details of the conspiracy—including one from the countess sitting across from her at this meeting. Her particular missive to her sister had been one of the easiest to crack. The encryption on the note itself was state-of-the-art and would have taken Jiyi a couple of decades to get through, had not the countess dictated it on a speaker that connected to her in-house network, the nonbiometric password for which was the name of her current dog (a darling ball of fluff named Chestain), and the biometric password (a fingerprint) for which was in the imperial system.

  Grayland thought, not for the first time, how dangerous Jiyi actually was: a secret, empire-spanning personal agent of the emperox who knew all and would tell all if the emperox, in fact, knew to ask. Which Grayland did.

  Thus the emperox knew Countess Rafellya Maisen-Persaud was a phony, and that her demand for this meeting had been made under false pretenses; that rather than having an interest in the well-being of the sixty-five million people she claimed to represent, her interest was to report back to Nadashe Nohamapetan about the emperox’s current plan to save the Interdependency, the better to craft a trap into which Grayland might fall. Grayland had been dreading the meeting, not because she had no answer for the problem of how to save the millions of Lokonese—she did not, as yet, which was depressing in itself—but because she knew ahead of time how di
spiriting it would be to watch the countess pretend to give a shit about anything other than herself, and possibly her immediate family and friends.

  She was not wrong, but at the moment there was nothing to be done about it. So Grayland watched and listened as the countess gave her impassioned performance, and then when it was done Grayland thanked her for her visit, informed her simply that all that could be done for the Lokono system would be done, and dismissed the countess before she could wind herself up for a second dramatic performance. The meeting, all told, had been twenty-three minutes.

  Which meant Grayland was unexpectedly seven minutes ahead of her schedule.

  With roughly ninety seconds of that time, she made a personal call, to add a final meeting to her day.

  * * *

  “When did you know your reign was doomed?” Grayland asked Tomas Chenevert. The two of them were alone on the bridge of the Auvergne, Grayland having dropped her bodyguards at the door. The Auvergne was berthed in the emperox’s own dock; ostensibly she was as secure as she would be in her own palace. Her guards were still unhappy, but Grayland wanted privacy to talk to Chenevert.

  Chenevert raised an eyebrow at the question. “Are we expecting some bad news?” he asked. Of all the people Grayland knew, Chenevert was the one who treated her the most casually, not because of some pathological disrespect for royalty but because he was royalty himself—the deposed King of Ponthieu, which existed beyond the Interdependency. Chenevert treated Grayland as a peer, in other words, something Grayland found she appreciated. No one else did so, not even Marce, who despite their intimate relationship was all too aware of the gulf between their stations.

  “I don’t have anything but bad news these days,” Grayland confessed.

  “I know, and I’m sorry about that,” Chenevert said, kindly. “I meant specifically about a new coup.”

  “Not coup. Coups. There are several.”

  “Several. I’m impressed. It’s nice to be popular.”

  “Not like this.”

  “I suppose not. I can tell you my thoughts on the matter, of course, but I’m wondering why you don’t just ask your congress of dead emperoxs. Surely one or two of them fell to a coup.”

  “Not really?” Grayland said. “There were a few assassinations, and there were other emperoxs who were … replaced by the Wu family when it became clear there were problems with them.”

  “‘Replaced,’” Chenevert said. “I like that euphemism.”

  “But the assassinations weren’t part of a larger uprising, and I don’t think the Wu family replacing one of its own with another of their own counts as an actual coup. That’s just family politics.”

  “The last coup attempt against you had Wu participants,” Chenevert reminded Grayland.

  “But it wasn’t successful,” Grayland said. “Whereas…” She stopped.

  Chenevert smiled. “You can say it,” he said.

  “Whereas the coup attempt against you was,” Grayland continued.

  “Yes it was,” Chenevert allowed. “I barely escaped with my skin. And this ship. And a few hundred friends. And an appreciable amount of all human knowledge at the time. And, of course, a nontrivial amount of material wealth.”

  “All of which means you saw it coming, and knew you couldn’t stop it.”

  “It’s true.”

  “So tell me how you knew.”

  “I can tell you, but I don’t know if it will be useful to you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I was, how to say this, not a good king. Not nearly as good a king as you are emperox, my young friend. Or anywhere as good as a person.”

  “You’re not a bad person,” Grayland said.

  “I’m a better person now,” Chenevert allowed. “I’m also no longer human. I’m a constructed machine consciousness based on someone who used to be human. I remember being human, and I remember what desires and emotions drove me as a human. I can access those, but those same desires and emotions don’t drive me as I am now. Also, I’m over three hundred years old. I’ve had time to sit with my sins.”

  “So you’re not that different from my congress of emperoxs. Their recorded versions can access how their live versions thought and felt. They just can’t feel those things themselves.”

  “I can still feel them,” Chenevert said. “Just like you can feel an emotion from when you were five years old. But you don’t feel the same as five-year-old you.”

  “Sometimes I do.”

  “Well, fine.” Chenevert smiled. “I mean to say you would not act on those feelings as you would when you were five. You seem remarkably tantrum-free.”

  “Thank you,” Grayland said. “I’d still like to know when you knew the coup was coming.”

  Chenevert sighed, which was entirely unnecessary given he was an artificially constructed intelligence projecting a holographic version of himself, but even so. “The short version is I knew it was coming when I had burned through or betrayed all the people who could have been useful allies, and everyone left decided it was time for me to go. The longer version would take quite a lot of time and would, I’m afraid, rather definitively ruin your opinion of me as a good person. I will say it was a disaster of my own making, which is why I could see it coming from a long way off.”

  “If you could see it coming, why couldn’t you avoid it?”

  “Because some choices you make, you can’t come back from,” Chenevert said. “And very early on in my reign, when I was pompous and foolish, I made several of those sorts of choices. In rapid succession. Everything proceeded from there. Eventually—and by this time I had gained just enough wisdom to have a horror of some of those early choices—I realized that while I could delay a coup, I couldn’t keep it away forever. So I delayed it long enough to make an escape.” He smiled. “Which was ironic, because when the coup came, I was already dying—also because of some entirely optional choices I made early on. If the conspirators had just waited a couple more years, they wouldn’t have needed a coup at all.”

  “I’m sorry you made those choices,” Grayland said, after a moment.

  “Well, so am I, if you must know,” Chenevert said. “Looking back on your life and knowing how much better you could have been is never a great feeling. The one small saving grace of all of it is I get to be here now, with you, and Marce. Who, incidentally, is killing himself trying to figure out the math to save all of us.”

  “Has he told you this?”

  “No, of course not. But he comes to visit me to talk math, you know. He assumed that because I am a machine I would be able to follow what he does, and I absolutely could not. But I’m learning, because I want to be helpful to him. I’m not, yet. But I think I’ll get there eventually. I do learn faster than most humans now, at least. He’s actually kind of brilliant, you know. Your paramour, I mean.”

  “I think so, too.”

  “No, I mean more than that. He’s too modest to say so, or even to think so, but I see his work and can even follow some of it. If there is anyone who is going to save you, it’ll be him. At this point the question is whether he has enough data to work through. And if he gets enough sleep.” Chenevert noticed a shadow cross over Grayland’s face. “What is it?”

  “What is what?”

  “You had a thought just then. When I talked about data.”

  “It’s not important.”

  “All right,” Chenevert said. “But on the subject of data, you said that you knew of several planned coup attempts.”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know about those? If your security and intelligence people knew about them, I expect they would already be former coup attempts.”

  “I have other sources.”

  “Would these sources include the artificial intelligence that runs your emperox puppet show?”

  Grayland looked sharply at Chenevert. “What makes you say that?”

  “Because your friend Jiyi—that’s its name, yes?—has made several attempts to ge
t inside my systems. I noticed the first attempt not long after I got here. It sent a program to try to crack my firewall. I isolated it and took it apart to see how it worked and sent a message back telling it I would be happy to chat with it if it would just knock rather than trying to slip through the windows. It didn’t respond to the message. It does keep trying to slip through the windows. If it’s doing this to me, I imagine I’m not the only system it tries to get into.”

  “I’m sorry Jiyi keeps trying to hack you,” Grayland said.

  “It’s fine. Well, it’s not fine,” Chenevert amended, “but it’s not a problem so far. It keeps me on my toes. But I would rather just talk to Jiyi, if such a thing is allowed.”

  “As far as I know, Jiyi doesn’t talk to anyone but me. And the other emperoxs before me.”

  “Well, I am a king,” Chenevert said. “Or was. Maybe that qualifies.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you. To return to your question about knowing when my reign was doomed, I knew early enough to save myself. Is that why you’re asking? To know when is too late to save yourself?”

  Grayland shook her head. “I’m not looking to save myself.”

  “That’s noble to the point of self-sacrifice.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “I could stop these coups,” Grayland said. “I have the information and I know the actors and I know where they are. Well, most of them. I could declare martial law and throw all of them in jail, just like I did with the last coup. But when I do that, I just stop this set of attempted coups. There will be more. There have always been more. Since the very first day I became emperox. Stomp down on one and two more pop up. And meanwhile, what I need to be focusing on doesn’t get focused on.”

  “Saving the Interdependency,” Chenevert said.