The Thousand Emperors

Nausea gripped him as he finished. Trying to push himself up from the stool, he saw the cabin tumble around him.

‘Easy,’ said Zelia, grabbing hold of him.

He let her guide him towards a wall-recess by the sink that contained a thin plastic mattress, which she pushed him down onto.

‘Your nervous system must have suffered one hell of a shock,’ she said, looking down at him.

‘It’s not safe here,’ he mumbled.

‘If anyone’s on the way to this station,’ she assured him, ‘I’ll know a long time before they arrive, don’t you worry. Right now this is probably safer than a lot of places on Vanaheim.’

He lay back against the mattress, pulling an elbow over his face. ‘The data-cache hidden on this station. Have you accessed it yet?’

‘Not yet, no. You?’

‘Yes, just in the last moments before the seizure hit.’

‘Where is it?’

He told her where she could find the access terminal. She disappeared, her mechant trailing after her, then came back several minutes later, her expression troubled.

‘I don’t know just what happened after you got here,’ she said, ‘but if there was ever any data there, it’s gone.’

‘Gone?’ he asked, looking up at her. ‘How is that possible?’

‘The backups were probably set to self-delete if they were accessed by anyone the systems didn’t recognize. Anything else would have been deleted right along with them.’

‘And that’s why it didn’t wipe itself when Vasili was here?’

She nodded. ‘He had all the access privileges of an Eighty-Fiver, and you didn’t, protocols or not.’

Luc nodded, and realized he was feeling better than he had just moments before. Moving cautiously, he pulled himself upright, and found that most of the dizziness and nausea had now been replaced by a deep thirst and hunger.

Zelia watched as he pulled himself out of the alcove, hunting through several drawers until he found some protein bars that were probably long, long past the point where they were still edible. He ate them anyway.

‘So tell me then,’ Zelia asked as he tore the bars apart and shovelled them into his mouth, ‘did you manage to get anything at all from the cache?’

He nodded wearily. ‘I did. Why, what’s the plan? I tell you everything I know, and then you kill me?’

To his surprise, she looked hurt. ‘You talk about me like I’m a monster. Part of a man I once loved is still alive inside you.’

He stared at her. ‘You and Antonov? But you were never . . .’

But then he realized how wrong he was. She was there, in Antonov’s memories, rising to the surface of his own thoughts as if he had always known. It felt like walking into a house he’d always lived in, and finding a room he never knew existed.

She stared at him, her eyes becoming round. ‘But you must have known,’ she said. ‘You have his memories. You must . . .’ her voice trailed off.

He remembered he had dreamt of making love to her, that night she had data-ghosted into his home. Everything about it had felt real, far more like an actual memory than a mere dream, and now the reason was obvious: it was a memory - but Antonov’s, rather than his own.

‘I think maybe I suspected,’ he said.

‘It was a long time ago,’ she said, close enough to him in the cramped quarters that he could smell her skin. ‘A very long time ago, even before he met Ariadna. But we . . . saw things differently. There were things we left unsaid, things I wanted to say to him but never could.’

‘I had no idea.’

She drew back slightly, peering at him with curiosity. ‘How much is there left of him inside you, would you say?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m not sure. Maybe just a little.’

‘But I saw the way you looked just now, when I told you we had once been lovers. You looked like you remembered something.’

‘I did,’ he admitted. ‘Just not my own memories.’

‘And he still . . . speaks to you?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘But does he hear things?’ she asked haltingly. ‘Does he understand what’s going on around you – around him?’

Luc thought about it. ‘I think he does, yeah.’

Just for a second the mask slipped, and Luc saw a part of de Almeida he never had before, vulnerable and soft and yielding. Despite his fear of her, the sight and smell of her commingled with Antonov’s own memories until they were very nearly impossible to distinguish.