The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency #1)(38)

“Welcome to my world.”

“I’ve been in it a while. I hope you noticed.”

Cardenia laughed, stepped to exit the elevator, and then was knocked back into the elevator as the presentation balcony exploded. She was unconscious before her body slammed into the elevator’s back wall.

*

“There’s a very real possibility that the Flow streams that connect the Interdependency will collapse during your reign,” Attavio VI, Cardenia’s father, or rather the computer projection of him, said to Cardenia in her dream.

Cardenia was aware she was dreaming; Cardenia was also aware that the dream was, for the moment at least, replaying her first conversation in the Memory Room. She was not aware of how or when it was that she fell asleep, and the part of her brain that was lucid enough to register that she was in a dream was strongly shying away from thinking about it that much. Go with this conversation. It’s safe, that part of her brain seemed to be saying, so Cardenia did, saying her part of the conversation again as if reading off a script.

“How will that happen?” Cardenia asked.

“I’m not a scientist,” Attavio VI said. “But the Count of Claremont is. He’s been collecting data for three decades now. He sends me updates from time to time. The data he’s collected suggests that the stability of the Flow is an illusion and that over a long enough timescale everything shifts, and that we’re about to enter a period of shifts. He says it’s already been happening slowly, and it’s about to start happening very quickly indeed. It’s happened before.”

“To Dalasysla. When the first Grayland was emperox.”

Attavio VI nodded. “Yes. She was given information, just like I have been given information—information you’ll now have access to.”

“She had information, but why didn’t she act on it? If she knew they were about to lose the stream to Dalasysla, why didn’t she do something about it?”

“I could tell you, but you can ask her yourself.”

Cardenia blinked at this. “She’s in here?”

“Of course.”

“She was lost in the Flow. I didn’t think she existed.”

“She updated before her final trip. Everything but those last few days is in here.”

This took Cardenia aback. On one hand it made sense. On another, the idea of a person being … incomplete was odd. “Jiyi, show me Emperox Grayland I.”

A shimmer and a tall, wide woman appeared and walked toward Cardenia.

“You’re Emperox Grayland I,” Cardenia asked.

“Yes,” the woman said.

“You … know what happened to you? How you died?”

“I’m aware of the information, yes.”

“How do you feel about it?” This was all an aside, but Cardenia had to know.

“I don’t feel anything about it. I’m a computer simulation of a person. That said, given what I know about it, I imagine the actual Emperox Grayland I was exceptionally pissed about it.”

This made Cardenia smile. Then she got back on track. “You knew the Flow stream for Dalasysla was collapsing.”

“I was given models by scientists that suggested that the stream was in danger of collapsing, yes. Given the data and my understanding of it, I thought it was possible, and likely.”

“But you didn’t evacuate the Dalasysla system.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Politics,” Grayland said. “Evacuating the twenty million people who lived in the Dalasysla system would have required immense planning and capital on the part of the Interdependency. There was no will for it.”

“The parliament didn’t want to save the lives of twenty million people?”

“They didn’t see it as a matter of saving those lives. They considered it a matter of someone they saw as a weak emperox trying to manufacture a crisis, as a way of shifting the balance of power away from the parliament. They also saw it as a threat to trade and the economy, since a large number of ships would need to be committed to an evacuation, at a huge cost.”

“What about the data showing the possibility of a collapse?”

“They held a commission which featured other Flow physicists poking holes in the findings, introducing enough doubt to undermine any political drive to do anything. Even the representatives from Dalasysla voted down my recommendation to begin an evacuation. What eventually passed was a recommendation for further study. But money wasn’t appropriated in the imperial budget for that further study, so nothing came of it.”

“So—” So you did nothing, Cardenia was going to say, but then stopped because it would be rude and would make Grayland almost instantly defensive. Then she remembered she was talking to a computer who didn’t have feelings. “So you did nothing.”

“I sent the local duchess an advisory, and told the military and local imperial bureaucrats to assist, on an expedited basis, any Dalasyslans who wanted to leave.”

“And did they?”

“We don’t know. The Flow stream collapsed almost immediately after I sent the advisory.”

“So twenty million people died because of politics and bureaucracy.”

“Yes. Not immediately, of course. But the intentional nature of the Interdependency is that each system is reliant on the others for essentials. Remove one system, and its ruling house and monopoly, and the dozens of other systems will survive. But that one system will not. Over time it will begin to fail. The habitats in space and outposts on otherwise uninhabitable planets and moons will fall into disrepair and over time will become harder to fix. Farms and food production factories will also start to fail. Social networks will break down predictably, commensurate to failures of the physical plant and the realization that ultimately nothing can save the people in the cut-off system. Between the physical and social failures that will follow the collapse of the Flow stream, system-wide death is inevitable.”