The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(80)

“Are you lying to me right now?”

“I am not intentionally lying to you. It’s possible I am telling you information you either think or know to be wrong, but if so it’s because the information of my own personal experience has been shown to be incorrect, not because I am dissembling.”

“Did you wonder if there were other human systems out there? Besides Earth?”

“In a casual or idle way, yes. Given what I knew about Flow streams while I was alive, it seemed possible that new ones could open up and then people from Earth would visit them. One of the most popular entertainments of my reign had that as its plot. It was called The Wizard of Oz. But it was never something I gave much concern to. We were busy enough at the time.”

Cardenia thought for a moment. “Are you the earliest person in the Memory Room? I mean, are there the memories and thoughts of anyone else in here besides emperoxs?”

“No,” Rachela I said. “The Memory Room was specifically meant for emperoxs. The technology that operates this was banned by me for the use of anyone who is not an emperox. Not only this specific implementation of it, but any technological implementation that replicates its intent or effect.”

“But the technology existed before you used it.”

“Yes. It was very old technology dating back to Earth. I was looking to create a technology for this purpose, and one of the researchers checking various archives discovered it. It hadn’t been used, as far as I can tell, because the implementation cost is prohibitive for anyone who is not a state, or does not have access to the wealth of a state.”

“How much does it cost to run this room?” Cardenia asked.

“At this point very little, because the majority of the cost is in the past. The power and infrastructure for it are part of the carrying costs for the Xi’an habitat in general, which exists specifically for the purposes of the emperoxs. When extraordinary costs are incurred in its maintenance or upgrading, the imperial treasury simply creates the amount needed, increasing the money supply.”

“That can’t be legal.”

“It’s legal because I made it legal,” Rachela I said. “And in a larger sense governments print money for their own purposes. This is one of them.”

“So there are no other examples of this technology being used, prior to this room.”

“Not that I am aware of, no.”

“Did it bother you that so much of our past is unknown?” Cardenia asked.

“It’s not unknown,” Rachela said. “But it’s possible that large areas have been lost.”

“How does that happen? We’ve been a highly technological, space-faring civilization from our beginning. It’s not like the Interdependency is like Earth, where humans had to invent fire, and wheels, and rockets.”

“Those are all technologies,” Rachela I said. “History is not technology.”

“You say that in the Memory Room,” Cardenia said, disbelieving.

“The Memory Room is not memory,” Rachela said. “It is a means of preserving memory. A library is not information; it is a means of preserving information. In every case before memory or information can be stored, someone has to decide what must be stored. Someone must choose. Someone must curate.”

“Your thoughts haven’t been curated in here,” Cardenia pointed out. “Every memory and thought and emotion you had, and that your successors had, is in here. That’s how it works.”

“Yes,” Rachela I said. “All the memories and thoughts and emotions of only eighty-seven people to date, over the course of a thousand years, during which time countless billions have lived, each with memories and thoughts and emotions that no longer exist anywhere. They’re gone. We’re here. That’s the curation.”

“So someone curated away an entire era of our history.”

“It doesn’t have to have been intentional or malicious. As I mentioned before in reference to teaching, different eras have different priorities. They pick and choose and things fall to the wayside. When they fall away, whoever is next might not know how to find them to pick them up again.”

“Or someone could have done it intentionally.”

“Yes,” Rachela said. “Although hiding the past never works as well as simply neglecting it.”

“What do you mean?”

“When things are hidden, there will always be people who object, and who will then go out of their way to preserve and store what is being hidden, so that someone can find it later, either intentionally or by simply stumbling over it. This is why I never tried to hide alternative takes of history. It makes them more attractive to future historians when you do. I smothered them under strata of official history instead.”

“Never hide, just overwhelm,” Cardenia joked.

“It worked for me,” Rachela I said.

Cardenia nodded at this and excused Rachela I, who winked out of existence. She sat there in the room, which was spare and unfurnished as always, and tried to think of where and how she might get the actual history of the time before the Interdependency. Of the time where the “Free Systems,” through their apparent stupidity and stubbornness, condemned their descendants to a terrifying free fall into chaos. Cardenia had to admit that if those people had been her immediate predecessors, she might want to bury their history too.