The Centurion's Empire (29 page)

"Well, patch it back in, it may be useful. Anything else? Anything ... interesting?"

"No bio-implants, but nearly two dozen have been removed within the past twenty-four hours. We have also mapped
evidence of a good facial rebuild some years ago, about 2022."

"How are his imprints?"

"He is nearly
all
implants! The last brain I saw with even a thousandth as much layering belonged to a banker from
Kiev. He had been imprinted all to hell and beyond to learn Japanese etiquette, language, and culture in a hurry. He's
still in therapy, as far as I know."

"But Clint is fine?"

"Fine is . . . optimistic. Functional, perhaps. Beyond that I would be wasting words."

"What about stability? Are the imprints stable?"

"Yes, amazingly so. He would have had to be under continuous imprint therapy for at least six years to get that sort
of imprint bonding, though. This is the strangest profile that I have ever seen, it must have cost millions." The imprint
analyst folded his arms and sat down in his chair. "I'll be honest. In my opinion he has been in some crazy experiment
and you are trying to get some of the damage undone before the compensation hearing begins. Is there big money
involved? We do quality work here, and are very discrete. Need I remind you in which country imprint technology was
pioneered?"

Lucel took a deep breath and raised her eyes to the ceiling, as if tempted.

"Just do a stabilizing booster for those three little Microsoft imprints that he got a couple of days ago, then layer this
full cyclopedia." She handed a card to him across the desk.

The analyst put the card into a reader and brought the index up on the wallscreen. "Yes, no problem at all. Remember,
though, if he wants to retain the cyclopedia for more than a fortnight he will have to take a course of stabilizing boosters
from a portable unit every day for at least three months."

"Not a worry. I'm very methodical about that sort of thing."

"There is a risk from such haste," said the analyst, spreading his hands wide as if to give all the responsibility to Lucel.

"Just do it, now. We'll stay the night here." She was staring at the wallscreen, scanning it with the sensors in her
dataspex.

Lucel slept in the clinic but left early the next morning while Vitellan was still in imprint treatment. He was un-wired
by the time she returned in the afternoon with a hired van, paid for with a black market credit key. She drove him to a
supermarket parking station only a few blocks away. Hidden in the back of the van she peeled their faces away, swabbed
the skin with solvent, then bonded on new faces.

"You are about to go flying," she said as they stepped out of the van.

"Fly, as in an aircraft?"

She nodded as she pulsed the doors locked. 'To Japan?"

"Not this time, that was to throw off the Luministe agents. I decided to pick a Moscow clinic at random from a register
and have some imprint work done here instead. Details of your therapy visit will leak out to the data brokers in a day or
two, but we'll be long gone by then. You're safe, and I've bounced a message saying just that off a geosat to where we are
going."

"Geosat, artificial moon—"

"Stop it! For now, just access the cyclopedia imprint when you need to. Okay? Later I'll teach you imprint embedding
techniques."

They left the van and took the elevator to street level. After meandering through a number of streets like late-season
tourists they had lunch at a cafe. Thermal plastic film in a sunflower print pattern was peeling from the wall in places,
and the menu seemed to be confined to bread rolls, Coca-Cola, and black coffee. A holoposter above the Cafe-matic
advertised the Australian Gold Coast. The place felt lived-in and smelled stale, but it offered Vitellan something
comforting that he could not identify. He wanted to stay longer, but Lucel would not allow it.
She pulsed for an autocab using the black market American Express credit key, bought only an hour earlier from a snow
bear. After two minutes a red, driverless wedge caked in grime pulled over to where they were standing and opened its
door. They stepped in, and the autocab began driving itself with inhuman precision and alarming speed while
Lucel'calmly scanned the cabin for bugs.

"How's your English?" she said as she powered off the scanner. "Do you still have that echo effect when listening to
what I say?"

Vitellan shook his head. "Not as badly as before. It's not even noticeable unless I concentrate on it."

"The imprinter is an .amazing machine. It ran through some basic grammatical rules and a few thousand words while
you slept, using Latin as base reference."

"It seems alive and magical, like a sprite."

"No, it's a machine, a machine like a book. You don't read it, but it puts memories into your head."
He considered that for some time, wrestling with concepts alien to all three cultures that he had lived in until now.

"Memories? Perhaps memories of what did not happen?"

Lucel whistled. "That's smart thinking, Vitellan. Yes, it can be used for that."

"Then it could make me into someone I am not."

"Yes, although there's more than that involved. The process is illegal and expensive, and nobody has ever tried
it—officially, at any rate."

"Most of what has been going on around me seems to be illegal."

"True." She glanced at the expression of apprehension on the mask over his face. He was holding together in spite of an
enormous overload of new concepts and sensations, but there was no sense in pushing him harder than was necessary.

"Personality distortion is possible in a limited sense, but it can be reversed by the right therapies," she said
reassuringly. "Don't worry about it for now."

Vitellan looked out of the window of the autocab. The drab cityscape was unending, and the sunlight was far less
flattering than the streetlights had painted it as they arrived on the maglev. He estimated that they had traveled several
times the length of ancient Rome in a matter of minutes.

"For the whole of my life a man could not move across the land as fast as this, not even the Emperor himself with all his
wealth. Now it seems commonplace."

"You're in for quite a few more shocks, Vitellan, but most are like your new face: just a cosmetic trick that's harmless
and reversible—but unsettling if you look in a mirror without being warned."

"A new face. If you can do all this, is anything left of me? Are my own memories real? They seem so clear, yet they have
nothing of this world."

"I'll be honest," she said, looking him in the eyes. "Your mind
has
been tampered with, but I can't explain everything to
you for now."

Vitellan looked out of the window again. The buildings, cranes, and leafless trees continued to drift past, interspersed
with chaotic jumbles of shanty-towns. Brightly glowing signs exhorted him to buy Microsoft Traveler, the

>Jew Buran Electric, McDonald's Healthburgers, Sony, /olkov AP Vectors, and Dyushin. There was a strange uni-brmity
about the cityscape, as if they were traveling in a rreat circle and passing the same places over and over.

"I wanted to see Japan."

"Why Japan?"

"Just an odd infatuation. Before the cyclopedia imprint was put on me I thought it was a city of India. Now I know hat
Japan is a group of islands, similar to Britain—but is it ike Britain?"

"The clinic where you were to be scanned is in SCagoshima, a city in the south." "Kah-gow-shima?"

"Yes. It's called the Naples of the East, and is something
yf
a health resort. People lie on the beach covered in black
volcanic sand for therapy, that sort of thing. There's a volcano there too."

"Naples, a pretty place. As a teenager I lived near there for five years at Boscoreale, on the slopes of a volcano. My father
had left me there with my grandparents after my mother died. When he left the army he lived there tiimself."
Lucel blinked and sat up, suddenly interested.

"Do you know what happened to Boscoreale, Hercula-neum, and Pompeii in the Christian year 79?"

"The terrible eruption? Yes, I saw it from Naples. I had just been visiting my father, and was on my way back to my
garrison in Britain. He had inherited the family farm and was settling down to eat, drink, and be comfortably prosperous
for the rest of his life."

"So he died in the eruption?"

"Yes, poor man. All those long, dangerous years in the legions, yet he enjoyed mere months as lord of his own little
estate. The entire farm was buried under the ash. It seems so recent, to me it was only fifteen years ago."

"Have you read the account of the eruption by Pliny the Younger?"

"No. Is it well known?"

"Very."

"I don't recall it, I'm sorry. There was a Pliny who was

admiral of the Mediterranean Fleet. The ash and fumes killed him too. I knew his nephew. A few years later we
exchanged letters comparing our memories of what happened that day."

The classics scholar Lucel came to life, eager and hungry.

"I don't believe it!
You
exchanged letters with Pliny the Younger
himself?",

"If you say so, yes, I suppose that was he. He was a friend of the Emperor."

"Yes! Yes, but what did—do you, I mean, what happened to the letters?"

"My servants kept them for a time. The tradition in my village of Durvas has it that parchments and gold were buried
when the law and order of Rome started to break down. I visited the site of my old villa once. The walls were gone. The
locals had used them to build a church. It was all grassy mounds, nothing more."

"So you could easily find it again."

"Perhaps, but not easily. It depends on how much the south of Britain has changed since the ninth century."

"The ninth—that's when you were last there? Next you'll say you knew King Arthur."

"Arthur? I've met a Wessex swineherd named Arthur, but no king. Perhaps Artor? Artorius? There was Artorius, a sea
chief from, ah, Scotland as you would say. He lived and died while I was sleeping in the ice, so I never knew him."
The autocab turned onto a freeway feeder and began to accelerate through a great paved canyon between drab, uniform
buildings. Lucel took a pair of dataspex from her jacket pocket and slipped them over her eyes. Soon she was partly away
somewhere, although the dataspex allowed her to see the cab clearly while she was connected to distant databases and
infomarts. The lenses were transparent yellow, with a spiral bus cable leading down from one thick arm to a netnode
clipped to her belt. It had a dull brdwn case, and was flecked with gold highlights. The arms of the dataspex passed over
induction cell arrays just below the skin behind her ears, and the control came from within her head. The unit at her
waist linked into the cab's cordless pickup.

"Are you busy?" Vitellan asked.

"Busy but interruptible. When I do deep surfing the lenses turn black."

"Deep surfing: scanning information networks. So that's what you are doing?"

"Yes. I have a little pet research project to learn a few sensitive things about the Luministes. It's professional. I'm an
assassin."

"You move like a trained fighter, but not a soldier. More like a gladiator."

"So I'm a gladiator? Tell me more."

"Your attitude is never far from violence. It is black and white, no colors at all."

"That's all?"

"Perhaps with better language imprints I could say more. Can your memory machines teach me more than they have
done already?"

"They can, and will. History imprints are easy. Language is much harder because it imposes a bigger load on the brain.
The brain tissue literally heats up, and too much heat will cook it like mince in an oven. You should not have become so
fluent with English so quickly, but. .. I'll tell you later, I'm not sure I understand it myself as yet."

"Were you ever given false memories?"

Lucel's lips curled up at the edges. "Once. I had parts of my mind gated."

"Gated?"

"Partitioned off while I was taught skills and memories, taught to be someone else. It was voluntary, and it took three
years. I was being taught to be like I am now: competently dangerous."

"What were you like before the imprinting?"

"I was a scholar turned junior tutor. I had a good reputation in my field, and I got laid occasionally by some very pleasant
men. I liked my food and my figure was built for comfort. There are vids of me from around 2020. Switch the windows
and watch."

Tiny holograms of Lucel in a bikini at some sort of fancy dress party with a 1950s theme appeared in midair between
them. She had been not fat so much as well proportioned

and healthy. A prime example of the post-AIDS, post-drac, goodlife look popular with young professionals of the time.

"So someone changed and controlled your mind?"

"Not quite. Total mind control is still one of the holy grails of modern brain research. The preferred—and
illegal—method is to imprint another personality into redundant areas of the brain with a control gate to let it take over.
The imprints don't last forever, unless used continually or renewed and boosted for years. The more renewals you get,
the better they stick. Mine were renewed quite a lot, and they weren't from Microsoft, Tensai, Durvas, or any of the
other legal companies."