The Centurion's Empire

by Sean McMullen

  "No, most of the gates behind my imprints have not been explored as yet," he replied. It was a smooth, convincing lie. Vitellan had been imprinted with Fujitsu Shakespearean 6.2 that very morning.

  "Just as well, the real Robert's mind was ... hopeless. We thought it—well, we imprinted some of my own memories and attitudes on Robert to try to provide a level of stability for him. It was highly illegal, you understand, but the boy was beyond hope, so my conscience was clear. Only Icekeeper McLaren and I knew the truth. My son was gone, just a vegetable . . . but maybe not forever. It took nearly a year to transfer temporary imprints to test his brain function."

  "A year, you say?"

  "Yes, and the Resources War was not far off by then. It became hard to scrounge up supercomputer time, and we needed a lot of processing power to do the transfers and imprint fixing. It was so slow because we were doing illegal work, so we had to do almost everything by ourselves—we even invented some new technologies."

  "Two men, working alone?" said Vitellan skeptically. "I find that unlikely."

  "You are the living proof. For example, we had a problem with heat dispersal in Robert's brain, because there was so much neural rewiring going on. We had to cool the arterial blood supply while boosting the oxygenated red cell level."

  "All this so that you could check out my emotional stability? You could have done that by just reviving me and having a chat. It would have saved you billions."

  Lord Wallace hung his head, obviously disappointed that Vitellan seemed neither to believe him nor share his enthusiasm for the work.

  "The Resources War alone cost the world hundreds of times what we spent on your imprinting."

  "This is still not credible," Vitellan insisted, rubbing his eyes. "Someone in the Village must have noticed that a lot of investment capital was out of circulation, and that a lot of work was going on that involved my body." Lord Wallace sighed and shook his head. "No wonder there is such a legend surrounding you, Centurion. You really are fantastically capable and adaptable. Yes, you're right, there was a secret within a secret. Your body also needed medical treatment and extensive surgical procedures. The ice and rocks where you were last frozen had a slightly higher level of background radiation than in most other parts of the Alps—there was a radioactive mineral deposit nearby, pitchblende or something. Over the centuries your frozen cells accumulated tissue damage, and when you were unfrozen you developed tumors and leukemia. The medical work to save you disguised the, the other procedures. All right then, it was not just McLaren and me, but all the other people involved only had a small part of the picture. We disguised it in the general research budget, and oddly enough it paid off. We developed technologies and patents that made Durvas a world leader in imprinting while working on you. The whole exercise may turn in a profit by as early as 2035, according to the Durvas Councillor of Treasury."

  Vitellan considered this with care, painstakingly drawing facts out of his imprinted learning, matching them up with other facts, then placing them in a bigger picture. He was oddly annoyed when forced to concede that Lord Wallace was telling a plausible story.

  "And if I'd passed the tests, if I was not another Jacque Bonhomme? What then?"

  "The real you would have been revived."

  "And the me in this body?"

  "Centurion, that imprint is not stable, it will fade suddenly after a few weeks. Our idea was to put Robert's body into a comatose state and let the test-imprint of you fade without you regaining consciousness. The real Centurion would not have your memories, but that would not matter."

  Vitellan considered this carefully, but did not take long to make up his mind.

  "We have a problem, Lord Wallace. I have been awake and active for a month, and now I do not want to lose my experiences from that time. It would be like having an alternate 'me' die. Besides, I have had experiences and collected insights that I would have been shielded from as a two thousand-year-old celebrity. You say I passed your tests for ... whatever you wanted to know."

  "Oh yes, better than our wildest hopes."

  "But if I failed you'd hardly tell me."

  "Centurion—"

  "Can you transfer my memories of the past month to my real body?"

  "It would be possible to get some of your experiences across and permanently fixed, but the longer you leave it the more you will lose when your overlay in Robert's brain begins to fade. You must return to Durvas." The explanation was convincing, but a long-dead Roman teacher's words returned to Vitellan yet again. Never be completely satisfied with any report, always probe for cracks.

  "Durvas security still worries me," he responded doubtfully. "Why was your security so lax for a project worth billions?

  How did the Luministes get into your research clinic so easily and abduct this body?" Lord Wallace waved his hands in exasperation and seemed to lose his composure. "Pah, hindsight, the wisdom of fools!" he snapped. "Whoever briefed you did a very one-sided job. Check your imprint cyclopedia for Challenger, January 26th, 1986. A billion-dollar American spacecraft and its crew was blown out of the sky for the sake of a couple of rubber rings. History is full of that sort of thing, and people never learn. Back in 1969 a huge Soviet moon rocket exploded because some idiot left a spanner in the fuel system and it fell into a pump. Sheer importance and cost does not proof a project against stupidity."

  Vitellan thought back to the Battle of Poitiers and could not help but agree. "Well then, what did happen?" he asked.

  "Durvas security was good, but we trusted the Luministes more than we probably should have. We had a lot in common, after all, and had a good business relationship with them. We even did some cooperative work on cryogenic research. Some of their scientists on secondment with us must have been spying. Initially your brain and my son's were connected by a long and expensive data bus, but Icekeeper McLaren began to complain about access delays and data bottlenecks. The Village Corporate eventually gave permission for your body to be brought up to the surface clinic so that a shorter, higher-capacity link could be used. The imprinting arrays were too bulky to take down to the Deep Frigidarium. Maybe it was all a Luministe plot to make you more vulnerable. If so, it worked only too well." Yet again, Lord Wallace's story continued to be plausible. When the Luministes had attacked and taken the wrong body, they had not been far away from the original. The Roman had not been in the vault, a quarter of a mile below the clinic, he had been on the surface inside the clinic itself. They had detonated a lattice bomb to act as a diversion. The interlocked-slab clinic had partly collapsed, and the wrong body had been taken in the confusion.

  "Would you like to see yourself?" Lord Wallace asked, now genial again.

  "How difficult would it be?"

  "Not hard at all. Merely a switch of your hologram reference point to down into what we call the Deep Frigidarium." It took Lord Wallace some minutes to arrange a switch to the other projector node. "I happen to be down there with some medical staff just now. Allow me a moment to detach from the telepresence transponder and brief them, then you will be switched down."

  Vitellan waited, and after no more than a minute his hologram was switched to a brightly lit chamber with a low ceiling. The real Lord Wallace met him and gestured to the door in a partition. He was more slow on his feet than his holographic projection.

  The Roman centurion contemplated his own body lying on a padded bench. Familiar old scars were there, white weals amid new, thin, red and white lines.

  "What are those new scars?" Vitellan demanded.

  "Ah—oh, those are for various operations. To repair damage done by the antifreeze oil to your stomach, for example. The form that you had been drinking was full of toxins and they were slowly killing you. Other work was to remove tumors, cysts, and part of an arrowhead, and to repair minor injuries from the Luministe attack." The chest was rising and falling with regular breath, and a monitor followed its pulse.

  "Don't be alarmed by what you are about to see," warned Anderson, whom Vi
tellan recognized from the Village Corporate meeting. "An operator is controlling the movements from a VR board in the next room." The body's eyes opened, then it raised itself slowly on chalky white arms. A flaccid amber cable trailed from beneath its left ear, as limp as a dead worm. It swung its legs over the edge, but did not attempt to step down to the floor.

  "Vocals please," said Anderson.

  "This is a sensory test," the body said with the Welsh accent of an unseen operator. "I can hear your words clearly, and can see you standing together. Mr. Anderson has his arms folded. Lord Wallace is also there, and the hologram of an unidentified visitor is present. The hologram needs boosting, it is attenuated enough to see through. The visitor's hologram has his hands behind his back."

  Vitellan peered intentiy at the automation that his body had become. It was not readily familiar. There had been few good mirrors in his pre-twenty-first-century life, and he was not used to seeing himself so clearly. The eyes and head were alert, but they only paralleled the operator's movements.

  "What is in the head?" Vitellan asked.

  "Your brain, in bypass mode," replied Anderson. "The real Centurion Vitellan will remember nothing of this."

  "But I want the real Centurion to remember this, and the month past as well. Lord Wallace tells me that I am running out of time. Can a transfer be done before I fade from this host?"

  "I say yes," said Anderson. "A restoration could take as long as six months of live body time, but there are leading-edge methods that might work faster. We could imprint selections of your memories onto a dozen volunteers—not enough to hurt them, we would just use redundant capacity in their brains. Each of those would in turn be imprinted and fixed in your real body's brain, and you would be brought to a full revival with your present memories in, say, August next year. I'd stake my career on it."

  "That's all very comforting, but I'm staking my identity," replied Vitellan. "I'll have to think about what you propose." Houston, Texas: 17 December 2028, Anno Domini

  The telepresence meeting left Vitellan drained mentally, yet physically fresh. He wandered about aimlessly in the SkyPlaz clinic for an hour, unable to make much of what he had just been through. Finally he called Baker and Hall, and asked them to meet him in an executive ward that had been converted to a lounge.

  As he had done many times in the ninth and fourteenth centuries, Vitellan told the story of who and what he was. For twenty minutes their side of the conversation was little more than whistles, "In-credible!" and "Hey man!" yet Vitellan thought that they assimilated the wonder of what he was remarkably well. It was a century of wonders, however, so perhaps their attitude to yet another wonder should not have been so very surprising. Hall had also lost a lot of his spontaneity: Vitellan could tell when people were being guarded; he had spent too much time with kings and nobles not to have learned that.

  When he had finished recounting what Lord Wallace had just revealed they became more animated.

  "What he told you is downspeak, but it's accurate as far as it goes" was Hall's verdict.

  "Are you sure? You said it would take me six years to be made into a stable imprint on another brain."

  "Oh yeah, that tech's all well known and understood, but from what my scans show, the imprinting has not been going on for six years. You began the overlay treatment in around 2025, so that's only three years. Imprint experiments with capuchin monkeys back in 2020 showed rapid fading to be a problem with big overlays that have not been boosted enough times to bed down."

  "So the me in here is fading," Vitellan said, tapping the side of his head.

  "Well, yeah, but very slowly right now. The end will be one big rush, then nothing." Vitellan shook his head and stared at the. rose-patterned carpet. "It's like the barbarians moving into the old Roman Empire. They just kept enslaving Roman officials to herd sheep, and pulling down Roman buildings to make their fortresses until Rome's identity died."

  Baker blinked, then nodded vigorously. "Sure, that's just like it. Mr. V., the Wallace guy, is right, you have no real choice. You either trust him or you fade anyway."

  Vitellan did not answer.

  "What plans have they got for you?" asked Hall once the silence had stretched uncomfortably long.

  "Oh, I'm to be their figurehead leader and provide a focus to take the spotlight away from Bonhomme for a few years. People are vulnerable to novelty, they always have been. That's what makes Bonhomme dangerously special, and that's why I have value as a counter against him."

  "And if you want to time-travel again, what then?" asked Baker.

  "I'll be injected with glycenal-AT4, that's the new name for Oil of Frosts."

  "Yeah, I know. My father was on the team that did the analysis," said Baker. "They won the Hotchkins Award for that."

  "Your—yet you work in a black market gang clinic?"

  "Pop still drives a 2007*Toyota and lives in a rented apartment in Durvas. He even became a British citizen to stay on that research team. He's crazy. I live a whole lot better. Now then, after they freeze you it's off to bed in a vat of radioac-tively stable liquid nitrogen, right?"

  "Yes."

  "And that's in the Deep Frigidarium?"

  "Temporarily. The Village is planning a new Frigidarium about a mile beneath—well, somewhere hard to reach. It's all very secret for now, but they plan to market it as a high-security body store in decades to come. One-way time travel has potential as big business, or so Wallace told me during one of our talks. Thousands of people have been injected with glycenal-AT4 and had themselves frozen, either to wait for a cure for illness or just see what the next century is like. I'll just be another one of them."

  Vitellan stood up and walked to the wall-window. He stood with his hands behind his back, staring out over the flat, green cityscape of Houston for a while.

  "Could you stabilize my imprint overlay in here?" Vitellan asked without turning.

  "We need big iron, and big iron like that is only available to the likes of you in Durvas. SQUID arrays with thousands of elements, that sort of thing."

  "Couldn't you even try?" Vitellan asked.

  "Hey there, I can help with what's known and not strictly legal, but real bleeding edge games are not my bag. Durvas is the only place where they can do what you want."

  "Could you at least tell me how much time I have until the fading starts?"

  "Yeah, no problem. You should notice dropouts in a week. Little things, like, well, the overlay will not be able to reference the cyclopedia imprint properly, even though we give your cyclopedia a boost every day. It can't stick with nothing to stick to. Where was the cyclopedia work done?"

  "Moscow."

  "Oh yeah? In that case, you could have big dropouts in a day or two. You will be you until the middle of February, but after that—hey there, I can't really say what it will feel like, a human's never had a total overlay until now." Vitellan turned to see Baker glance to Hall, who was nodding.

  "I need to think things through while I'm still me," said Vitellan, stroking his chin and still savoring the novelty of being so incredibly close-shaven.

  "You don't have much time, man," said Hall.

  "That's my business. In the meantime, Lucel is due out of the medical unit today, and she's going to be angry. I was supposed to give her a line outside, but I didn't."

  "Ahhh—but that's cool," said Baker. "Don't you trust her?"

  "No. I want her out of here as soon as she can walk. How many weeks until she can do that?"

  "Weeks? More like hours. She can get out and get dressed as soon as the cover is raised on her unit."

  "Hours!" exclaimed Vitellan. "Impossible. Scars like she has take weeks to heal or they'll tear open."

  "Not so. Collagen bonds and braces are holding her muscles and internal organs together, and her skin is bonded with Dermal Clear over the scars. She'll have to get the internal scaffolding stripped out in a couple of weeks, and she isn't going to be winning any races for a while, but she will be walking
today."

  Vitellan sighed with relief that he hoped came across as amazement.

  "Before she revives could you put a tracker implant in her and have her movements monitored?" he asked Baker.

  "You're payin' the bills, Mr V. Do'you want Durvas told she's still alive?"

  "Ah ... no. They don't know who she is anyway, and neither do I."

  "Mr V., you sure learned about not trusting people in a hurry."

  Faster than you realize, Vitellan thought to himself. Everyone had been lying to him. Hall had been smoothly contradicting what he had let slip several days ago, Vitellan was sure of it. It had been just after Hall had been probing the memories beneath Vitellan's imprint overlay, and he had been exclaiming in amazement at what he had seen. Classy

  work and fully stabilized. Hall had said.

  Houston, Texas: 17 December 2028, Anno Domini

  "After all the fuck I've done for you and you had to do that to me!" snapped Lucel furiously as she flung her green hos- pital gown to the floor and snatched a black sportsbra from the couch where Vitellan was sitting.

  "You did not trust me!" Vitellan retorted. "I asked you for the truth and all you did was hide it from me!"

  "I didn't know the truth!" she screamed back. "I had a few clues and theories, I would have told you what I knew once I knew more myself."

  "Would have, would have. Words are cheap."

  She dressed stiffly, unsteady on her feet as she pulled on her jeans. Vitellan's eyes kept drifting back to the tracery of scars at her midriff beneath the strips of Dermal Clear.