by S. J. Ryan
Then he was clothed in a white robe and standing in a featureless room with walls and ceiling and floor of dazzling white. There seemed to be no specific source of light, just light everywhere and no shadow.
Another man was in the room, standing about two meters away. He was shorter than Matt, and a little older. He had dark short well-combed hair. He had very dark irises. His shirt was white while his pants, shoes, and narrow tie were black.
The man was facing Matt attentively. His expression was concerned. Matt felt himself being washed with waves of unconditional loyalty.
"Greetings, Matt," the man said.
Matt slowly smiled. The voice sounded very familiar. The name tag over the shirt pocket also helped.
"I get it. You're Ivan and I'm dead."
"I am the default avatar for your neural implant matrix and you are in a state of clinical death. This generic virtual reality environment has been designed to assist hosts with critical brain injuries to more easily comprehend the nature of their life-threatening situation."
Matt felt at one with the universe, which is another way of saying he was having trouble focusing.
"Okay . . . yeah . . . so what's up?"
"Your natural brain activity has ceased and I am sustaining your current state of limited consciousness through artificial electrochemical stimulation. We have approximately one minute until I will no longer be able to support your life functions without the initiation of massively invasive procedures. Before I can commence those procedures, I am required to ask the host the following question: Do you wish to continue living?"
Matt tried to think but he was having difficulty doing so just then. He wondered why.
"So what are my options?"
"You can either say no or yes. If you say no or fail to make a response in time, I will cease all efforts to sustain your life functions and you will immediately die beyond my powers to revive."
"Then what?"
"I lack sufficient data to satisfactorily answer that question. As for your other choice, if you say yes, I will commence actions to save your life and you will resume living as before."
"I forget, what was I living as before?"
"At present, you are a slave at a silver mine."
That didn't sound too fun, but instinctively Matt knew that as long as he was alive, he would have options. If he chose life now, perhaps he could choose better options later. He wasn't sure death worked the same way.
"How much . . . . "
"Are you asking how much time do we have before I can no longer sustain your neural activity?"
"Yeah."
"Approximately five seconds."
"Okay, for now, let's go with . . . Yes."
"I understand that you wish to continue living. Commencing cardiac restart procedure."
Matt's body arched with the electric shock. His eyes fluttered open. He vision cleared. He was in a prisoner's tent at the mining camp. The last thing he remembered for sure was being at the Shaft Four entrance. Then he'd had a strange dream, but the details were hazy.
With difficulty, he propped himself up on his elbows. The other men in the tent were clinging to the sides and staring at him with wide eyes over open mouths.
"What happened?" he asked Ivan aloud.
"You were severely beaten," Ivan replied. "You received blunt force trauma to your body, which resulted in bone fractures, spinal paralysis, and internal bleeding. You lost consciousness and were brought to this place. I have revived you from clinical death and am currently repairing damage sustained from the attack."
Ivan popped a window which showed a slowly-rotating wire-mesh model of Matt's body. Arrows pointed to symbols on Matt's skull and within his brain.
Ivan continued, "The most serious injuries were fractures to your spine and head, here, here, and here, which induced cerebral hemorrhage. Please be advised this damage may impair your judgment and other high-level thought processes until neuro-structural repairs can be accomplished. Do you wish further explanation?"
"Not right now."
Matt delicately probed his head. It felt all right, but Ivan was undoubtedly blocking the pain. When Matt pulled his fingers away, he found powdered blood on their tips. He hair felt . . . congealed.
He added, "When will . . . what's that word again . . . repairs . . . be done?"
"Estimated time for completion of restoration of full mental and physical functions is six to eight days."
"Days! Just to recover from a brain injury?"
"Please note that I will not have any external medical assistance during the recuperation process. Also note, standard medical procedure in cases of severe brain injury is to euthanize the injury victim and replace by a clone with host memories downloaded from most-recent archive. That option is currently not available on Delta Pavonis III."
"I'm not sorry for that."
For Matt was almost certain that when he had failed to arrive on Tian centuries earlier, his archival clone had been printed and taken over his life there. Matt wouldn't have wanted another version of himself wandering this world even if it were technologically possible.
Ivan continued, "Meanwhile, prior to your full recovery, I am re-routing some of your neural activity through my matrix. You are therefore now capable of consciousness, mobility, and verbalization, although not at peak efficiency."
While Matt and Ivan conversed, the prisoners whispered among themselves, but none came closer. Matt had almost half the floor space in the tent to himself.
At last the guards arrived with the dinner slop. They wordlessly distributed the bowls, never taking their eyes from Matt. Guards who were not detailed to the tent came and peeked in. Matt heard murmuring outside, but mainly he concentrated on eating. Doing more seemed to hurt his head just then.
The prisoners ate in silence. Dinner ended. The guards collected the bowls and hurried away. The prisoners continued staring.
"I'm okay," Matt said. "If anybody cares."
"You were dead and now you're alive," a prisoner said, spreading his arms and raising his chin. "Praise to Pandora!"
Matt ignored him and tried to think. Thinking was a little easier now. And he could remember. Mostly, he remembered being thrashed.
"Why did they do that to me?" he asked.
“You stepped out of line,” a senior prisoner replied.
“That's it?”
“The way they think is, if they let one prisoner step out of line, the rest will try too. Then you've got a riot, and then a revolt.”
“That's ridiculous!”
“It's how they think. And you must agree, the system works.”
“Believe me, there are easier ways to mine silver.”
Matt noticed that his chest was bare. A corner of his shirt was sticking out from behind where a man sat.
"Give it back," he said. Vultures, he thought.
Another man blurted, "You're the Wizard of the Westlands, are you not?"
If Matt's IQ had been above one hundred just then, he might have hesitated to answer. Instead he said, "I was."
The man trembled with hysterical anger as he jabbed at finger at Matt's nose. "Then you're the one who brought us here! You summoned a fireball to stop Boudica from leading us to victory! You are one of the mentors, the evil wizard-demons warned of in the prophecies of Pandora!"
Matt concluded that the speaker was clearly deranged from the harsh conditions of the camp, but other faces were registering confusion as well. The torment and stress of their living conditions had brought them to rage, and they needed an object to vent their rage upon. The guilt of the object didn't matter, its accessibility and vulnerability did.
Just then, due to Ivan's ongoing diligence, Matt's IQ popped into the normal range, and he calmly replied, ever so slowly:
"Do you want to mess . . . with a person . . . who calls fire from the sky . . . and rises from the dead?"
Even the crazy person dropped the subject.
Eventually the men spread out and wen
t to sleep on the dirt. Matt lay on his back and gazed at the tent roof. He observed the discoloration of the fabric, the unevenness of the threaded seams. Such evidence of organic origin and handcrafting would have made the tent an exhibition piece on Earth in the twenty-second century.
His ability to process abstract thought gradually returned, and he realized even if he did not yet know for sure what he wanted to do with his life, it wasn't to be a slave in a mine. When he fully healed, he would try escaping without regard for the physical dangers. After his synthetic Near Death Experience, tedium seemed a harsher sentence than death.
The following morning, Matt woke early with his head clear. He had time to think.
"Dad always said that if you work hard and do a good job, someone will notice," he subvocaled idly. "So I'm going to work hard and do a good job of driving them crazy."
The rest of the prisoners were awakened at dawn. They were all forced into lines and marched to their assigned shafts. The Shaft Four foreman behaved as brutishly to the other prisoners, but he froze speechless when he saw Matt standing straight and strong without bruises or wounds. He steadfastly avoided Matt's gaze, which was Matt's first objective confirmation that the psychological balance of power had shifted.
Matt halted in front of the foreman, bringing the whole line to a halt as well. The foreman couldn't ignore him then.
"What are you wanting?" the foreman mumbled.
"Nothing," Matt said.
In fact, he was wanting to smash a rock into the foreman's skull. Once, he would have been shocked at such intense negative emotion. That was in another life.
He resumed walking, stooping to enter the shaft. Inside the gallery, he stopped to re-align a lamp that the tumult of bodies had knocked askew. An overseer approached, whip drawn. Matt calmly raised his arm and opened his hand as if he intended to snatch the whip in mid-snap. The overseer backed away. Seeing the overseer's confused expression, a twisted smile grew on Matt's lips.
Exiting from the mouth of the shaft that afternoon, Matt stepped out of line and walked up to the foreman and jabbed his thumb at the pump.
"The way that's squeaking, it's going to break down unless you lubricate it now."
The foreman touched his club, but Matt didn't flinch. Instead, the Wizard from Earth merely tilted his head and raised an eyebrow.
The foreman sputtered, "You – you – mind to your shovel, Britanian, or I'll have you thrashed again!"
Matt shrugged. "If the pump fails, it will be your own beating. I'll try to heal your injuries, but be aware I can only do so much."
The foreman growled, but when Matt returned from the tailings pit, the pump was throbbing squeaklessly.
Matt knew he was technically helping the hated Empire by making the mining operation more efficient. But now he understood that Rome wasn't built on economic efficiency, it was built on fear of authority. By undermining the authority of the guards, he was gnawing at the foundation of the authority of the Empire itself.
Moreover, so long as he was being 'constructive,' there was nothing they could do in retaliation without acknowledging the sham of the Empire's pretense of necessity. Nothing they could do, that is, except beat him again, but failing to make a lasting impression the first time had already put question to their power, and they feared to risk doing so again.
Still, he wasn't going to depend just on bluff.
As he scraped the shovel behind the men chipping their picks at the wall of the gallery, he subvocaled, "Ivan, let's review what you've got on martial arts and physical enhancement. I especially want to cover training and conditioning for – what's it called – 'hypermax.'"
Ivan replied, "I believe you mean, the physical agility enhancement technique known as 'hypermode.'"
"Right. I want to be able to use hypermode."
Ivan admonished, "Be aware, Matt, improper or excessive usage of hypermode can result in potentially fatal damage to the host. As there are apparently no advanced medical facilities available on this planet, 'fatal damage' could mean under these circumstances that you would die beyond my power to resuscitate."
“But you'll still help me do hypermode, right?”
“Yes, Matt.”
"Ivan, we will be living on the edge now."
And he took care to scrape the shovel as loudly as he could.
23.
Several days later, a sleek sloop approached Palras with five small flags fluttering from its mast. The flags bore symbols that stood for letters, and the letters stood for a code word. The bay tower's telescope focused on the flags, then flashed its signal mirrors at the patrol ships. The sloop was admitted through the cordon and escorted to the dock.
The warden, making washing motions with his hands and wearing a fixed smile on his face, waddled to greet Archimedes on shore, bowed deeply, and said, "And what brings the Chief Scientist of the Imperium to Palras?"
"I'd call it a boat."
The washing motions stopped and the warden looked aside. From past experience, Archimedes knew it would take time for the warden's mental gears to whir enough to recognize even the mildest trace of humor.
So he continued, "What do you think, I'm here for another blasted surprise inspection." He banged his walking staff. "I don't want to be here and you don't want me here. Let's get this over, shall we?"
Calm down, Archie, he told himself. A few more years, you'll have enough to retire. Just think of changing out the filters.
They were encircled by a contingent of bodyguards larger than what Hadron brought when he walked the streets of Rome. They trekked the slope to the walled enclosure of the Administration Center. They entered, leaving the heaps of dirt and rock that was Palras for an interior courtyard of gardens with fountains and elaborate statuary.
The office had a spacious vista of the garden and the open sea, a view which might have been idyllic save for the profusion of guards and naval vessels.
The warden beckoned to a shelf brimming with bottles and glasses. "Would you like a refreshment?"
"I would not. Show me the ledger."
The warden went to a shelf and presented an ornate book on prominent display.
"The real one."
The warden put the book back on the shelf and retrieved a less ornate one from a cabinet.
Archimedes flipped the book open and made a show of waving about his abacus and slide rule. But his practiced eye could see from the consistency of the handwriting that the entries had been written in batches rather than piecemeal over the course of time.
"The real real one."
The warden's smile, which had been draining all the while, flickered away entirely. He went into another room and returned with a small, tattered, non-descript book.
Putting on his eyeglasses, Archimedes sat, scanned, and scribbled columns of figures into his notebook. The warden blurted inane remarks, and Archimedes ignored.
Finally, Archimedes put away his glasses and faced the warden and said, "Production has increased significantly. Why is that?"
The smile and hand-washing were back in force. "My new management techniques have proven quite efficient. You see – "
"Production has increased significantly. Why is that?"
"I've been able to economize – "
"Production has increased significantly. Why is that?"
This time it seemed the mental gears had jammed. Archimedes waited appropriately and said in a voice soft yet resonant:
"The Emperor would like to know."
Being only a distant cousin of Hadron by marriage, the warden cringed and murmured, "The miners in Shaft Four have been successful in locating new veins of ore."
"Well now, they should receive a reward for that. But that's not how it works around here, is it?" Archimedes slammed the book shut. "Lead us to the mines, if you can recall where they are."
"Of course I know where the mines are. I visit there at least several times a week!"
"I'll inform the Emperor that you venture out of your gar
den of delights to perform your duties, at least several times a week."
The warden tried to summon a litter, but Archimedes gave a stern gaze, and they trooped on foot up the trail that led to the ridge overlooking the valley of the mines. At the top, Archimedes propped himself on his staff and took a deep breath, and then he looked.
He always tried to brace himself for the scene below, and he always failed. Lines of broken men, wordlessly bearing loads past endurance under the whips of heartless overseers. Hadron might hesitate to stamp his profile on coins if he saw how much cruelty went into fifty grams of Palrasian silver!
Then again, Archimedes thought, Hadron is Patrician by birth. If the Emperor were here watching this, he might only inquire as to why the workers were 'dawdling.'
Today, however, the workers seemed a little faster than usual. Archimedes inquired as to why.
"These are fresh prisoners of war captured in battle from our recent victory in Britain," the warden replied. "They're strong but an unruly lot."
"So you've been told," Archimedes said.
Having lived both on a farm and among legions, he knew the patterns of calluses that came from steering a plow and those that came from drill with sword and spear. Observing the hands on these poor yokels, he doubted many of these prisoners 'captured in battle' had ever held a weapon.
Archimedes, the warden, and their bodyguard descended into the valley. Archimedes inspected Shafts One and Two, and found nothing different from last time. Same shabby working conditions, same poorly maintained equipment despite his lectures to the foremen on the need to care for the machinery. What was the old Kresidalian saying? 'In one ear and out the other.'
Onto Shaft Three, which was inactive due to being flooded up to the mouth. Filled with dread, Archimedes asked the shaft foreman, "How many casualties?"
"None, sir," the foreman replied.
“They all escaped in time?”
"There was a boy who was trapped in the cave-in and flood, but he was rescued."
Archimedes knew how far the gallery stretched and found the story preposterous. Rescuers could not have reached the child without running short of breath, let alone have had time to free the victim.
