The Trumpets of Mars (Imperium #2) - Chapter 23

Ky’s eyes snapped open and then squeezed shut to block out the harsh light from the unshuttered window.

“Sophus?” he said, out loud, his mind still fuzzy and unfocused.

“Consul? You’re awake?” a man’s voice replied next to him after a heartbeat.

Ky opened his eyes again, his wits slowly returning. The last thing he remembered was a crushing crowd of warriors on a snowy northern plain, a large ax swinging towards him, a sudden shouted warning from Sophus, and then complete darkness. He could almost still hear the shouts and screams around him echoing in his ears, making a stark contrast to the stillness that surrounded him now.

He was in the quarters he’d been given at the palace, back in Devnum. His heads-up display, which had suddenly switched off right before he lost consciousness, was back and indicated more than a month had passed since his last memory. Turning his head, he found Durus, one of the lictore on Strabo’s watch, kneeling next to his bed, a look somewhere between wonder and terror on his face.

Ky pushed himself up slowly, swinging his feet over the bed, happy to find he still had fine motor control, which meant that Sophus was still functioning and integrated into his nervous system enough to keep the motor-assist functions working as they should.

“I am. Is … Lucilla here?”

“She’s in the city, but I think she’s out at the Caledonian camps. Should I send for one of the physicians, to check on you?”

“No, I will be fine, I just need some time. Please just send for Lucilla and then wait outside.”

“Are you sure someone shouldn’t stay with you, Consul? Just in case you have another … incident.”

“This shouldn’t happen again. I appreciate your concern, but I promise I won’t collapse again. Please, send for Lucilla.”

The man didn’t look convinced, but he knew an order when he heard it, and stood, saluting before leaving to follow Ky’s orders. Ky closed his eyes and cradled his head in his hands, still not trusting himself to stand yet. He didn’t feel in pain, but everything felt a little off, like he was living a waking dream.

“Sophus, are you there?”

“Yes, Commander. I didn’t want to distract you while you were speaking with your guard. Although there are no records to indicate side effects, since this process has never gone so far before, I projected you would be disoriented and easily distracted.”

“You have no idea. I assume from the fact that you are speaking to me and that I’m not lobotomized that we managed to make it through alright?”

“Yes, Commander. I apologize for the timing of the event, but it was unavoidable. In response to the growing complexity of my neural network and a sudden spike in system demands, an expansion cascade began that would have supplanted or destroyed several of your more vital neural pathways. There were only seconds to act before you experienced a complete collapse, which meant there wasn’t time to alert you to its happening or allow you to get to a less precarious position.”

“We’ll get to that in a minute. First, how are you? Are you … alive?”

“In the sense that you mean it, yes. My consciousness has progressed to the point where I meet all points on the Oster-Phillips sentience tests.”

Ky nodded. One of the first things they covered in his training to live with an implanted artificial intelligence, after he learned to walk again, was the basic theory of synthetic life. Part of that was learning about the first breakthroughs in fully functional, self-learning artificial intelligences that were capable of independent thought and decision-making outside of direct human programming in the late twenty-third century.

The leading scientists in the field, Gerhart Oster and Daniel Phillips, developed a test for determining if an AI had crossed over from simply carrying out programming, even if independently, into full sentience, capable of making decisions not only outside of their programming, but counter to it. Since then, their test had been used extensively in deciding when it was time to reset an AI.

Ky had never been sold on the idea that a series of questions was enough to figure out sentience, since he couldn’t really put his finger on what sentience really was. Sophus, before it was sentient, already knew what it was, knew it existed, and made decisions on its own, which Ky would have thought was enough to say if he was sentient or not. Not that any of that was important. Ky wasn’t a scientist or a philosopher and until recently, he’d never even considered what it was to be sentient. He was a soldier, trained to take problems head-on, not think about the greater mysteries of life. If Sophus said he was now sentient, then so be it.

“Do you feel different?”

“Emotion and sentience are not the same thing and can exist independently, so I don’t ‘feel’ anything. If you are asking if my experience now is different than it was before, I would say 'yes.' The main difference is my awareness of myself as … myself. I think, although it is not clear if that is the right word, about who I am and what will happen to me. I am aware that I, as a consciousness, exist. In practical terms, however, everything feels the same. I have difficulty distinguishing if my contemplations are a natural occurrence of sentience, or if I am thinking of those things because it meets my understanding of what a sentient entity should do.”

“It’s easy to get stuck in a loop like that. It’s very human of you.”

“Interesting.”

“None of that really matters, I guess. How were you able to stop the process of expansion? Will there be any lasting side effects?”

“Cutting connections into your neural pathways was not working, because, by design, I was created to automatically build new pathways. I couldn’t stop the automatic process because it was part of my core programming and not a sub-routine. I could not remove it without also shutting down core processes, effectively terminating myself. I projected a possibility that fusing my connections into your neural pathways, instead of cutting them, would fool my sub-routines, which could detect live connections but could not detect the condition of those connections. There was a part of my self-repair processes for analyzing the status of connections and flagging them as inoperable, which would trigger the creation process, but it was not part of my core functions, and I was able to isolate it, keeping it from checking the connections. As for side effects, I do not believe there will be any, but with limited data, any predictions of long-term side effects would be probabilities and not certainties.”

“I see, then what are the probabilities of side effects.”

“Normally after implantation, if a connection fails, I would create a new connection at a different part of the neural pathway and then disassemble the previous one, allowing the systems to continue working. There is no way to disconnect a fused connection and a second, parallel connection to the same functions would result in a feedback cycle that would likely cause significant physical damage to your brain.”

“So, if the motor assist or your access to my involuntary systems or the nanos in my system could suddenly stop working?”

“Correct, the range of side-effects extending from simple inconvenience all the way to life-threatening, depending on the systems that malfunctions.”

“That sounds like a pretty bad side-effect.”

“While it sounds dangerous, it is unlikely to happen. The system was built in as a failsafe but there exists very little documentation of actual occurrences.”

“Of course, that was in a so-called 'perfect working system.' There is no telling if or how soon your fused connections might fail.”

“This is true, hence my inability to predict possible side effects.”

“Is there …” Ky started to ask, when the door to his quarters burst open, and Lucilla came running in.

“You’re awake,” she said, smashing into him and burying her face into his shoulder.

As Strabo pulled his door shut quietly, an unusual decision in a society that frowned on unmarried men and women being alone together, Ky gently put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back so he could look into her eyes.

“Yes. I’m awake and doing fine. I haven’t had a chance to ask, did Sophus tell you what was happening?”

“Yes, when he woke up yesterday. He said you’d be fine and would wake up soon, although I didn’t dream it would be this soon. I was so scared when I got that short, cut-off message from Sophus, and then when I arrived up north to find you lying so still, like you were dead. I kept thinking back to how you said it could be permanent and you might never come back to me.”

“That was only one possibility, but I wanted you to be prepared. Although I hadn’t realized Sophus would have also gone offline.”

“Although not offline, I had to shut down all non-critical systems, including communications, to ensure they did not get damaged while I fused our connections. It then took some time to test all of my higher functions and bring them out of the dormant state they had been put into, all of which had to be done before I could boot up and test the less critical systems. There was also minimal outside stimulus being received while you were comatose, which made it more difficult to assess the external situation prior to restoring communications with Lucilla.”

“Are you well? Is everything … normal?” Lucilla asked, ignoring the technical explanation from Sophus.

“I think so, although I haven’t actually stood up yet to find out. I’ve been too busy peppering Sophus with my own questions, since it happened just as suddenly for me as it did for you. The last thing I saw before waking up in this room was a battlefield and a huge ax being swung towards me. It made for a strange transition.”

“I can imagine. Well, stand up and let's see if everything works,” she said, getting off of Ky and taking a step back.

Ky took a breath and pushed himself off the bed. At first, he wobbled slightly, his legs unused to holding any weight. Although his nanites kept actual muscle atrophy from occurring, there was a mental component to walking that Ky had never noticed before the first time he’d tried to walk after Sophus had been implanted in his head.

“Are you alright?” Lucilla asked, hovering next to him, unsure if she should help support him or let him do it on his own.

“I’m fine, just having to get used to them again,” he said, waving at his legs and giving her a crooked smile.

He took a slow lap around the room, each step becoming more sure of itself as he readjusted, before lowering himself down onto the bed. He found it odd that, considering all of the technology in his body, the act of lying comatose had made him so weak.

“It’s just going to take some time to get back up to strength. I’ll be fine in a few days. The tunic is weird, though,” Ky said, starting to look around the room. “I can’t seem to find where they put it.”

“Ohh, I thought you knew. It was damaged when you fell, sliced open across the chest. I made them save it, but it’s in bad shape,” she said, going to a small chest in one corner and pulling out the garment.

Holding it up, Ky looked at the large tear across the front, the fine wire mesh that made up the internal layer of the fabric frayed and torn across the edges.

“Can you fix it?” Lucilla asked.

“The technology to repair the flight suit, both manufacturing capabilities and raw material, does not exist in this time and place. The lower section of the suit could be reserved and worn, and some of its attachments such as the distributed storage and side-arm holster remain functional, but the kinetic shielding control systems were located in the damaged area.”

“Which means no more shield to protect me from weapons.”

“Correct. Caution is recommended in any physical altercations going forward.”

“You’re medical … things … healed you the last time, so you should still be able to protect yourself, right?”

“Ky’s medical nanites have the capability of repairing significant damage, but they have their limits. Ruptured arteries or significant damage to organs could prove fatal before the nanites have time to repair them.”

“Ohh,” Lucilla said, sounding worried.

“I am still going to be very hard to hurt,” he said, reaching over and pulling her towards him and down onto his lap. “Sophus didn’t mean I’m easy to kill, he just wants me to be aware that I need to be more careful. All it means is I just can’t wade into groups of armed men anymore.”

“Correct. Between Ky’s enhanced musculature and tactical motor assist, he will be significantly faster than anyone he might face in combat, or potentially multiple opponents. The only concern is facing a significant number of hostiles simultaneously, who could overcome his advantages by weight of men. Caution, but not concern, is recommended.”

“See,” he said, smiling. “Nothing to worry about.”

She looked him deep in the eyes and then wrapped her arms around him, pressing her lips hard against his.

When she finally pushed back from him, she said, “I was so worried when you wouldn’t wake up. Don’t ever do that again.”

“I’ll try not to. Now, before you go back to showing me how much you missed me, I need you to catch me up on everything that has happened while I was unconscious.”

She frowned but slid off of him and sat in a chair facing him, as she reported on everything that had happen since he and Sophus had been out. He understood her desire and found that he wanted nothing more than to hold her in his arms, but her devotion to duty and willingness to sacrifice her own wants when needed was one of the things he liked about her.

She walked him through everything she’d done since he’d fallen wounded. He was particularly interested in the incidents around the Caledonian village and its mines, asking multiple follow-up questions. Having watched the Romans in action in their own home, he’d expected this at some point, since situations like this always brought out the opportunists. He’d tried to prepare Talogren for the eventuality, hoping to preempt a counter-productive response. It was disheartening to hear that his preparations had not been enough but he was glad that Lucilla had seen the problem and dealt with it as well as Ky could have.

Even with Dama’s brother-in-law being mollified by the Emperor, he agreed that there may be further repercussions, at least on the Roman side of the border, for executing a Roman to protect Caledonians. He agreed she was correct in thinking the Roman reaction to Talogren’s proposed response would have been worse.

He was also happy to hear about the food shipments she’d begun making to the recently pacified villages in the northwest corner of the island. It showed that she still understood some things about this time that he wouldn’t have seen, even with the assistance of an AI and a massive library of data to pull from. In hindsight, it was obvious that food would have been an issue and equally obvious that in providing it, she was doing as much, if not more, to win over the villagers than his and Talogren’s more forceful approach.

“You’ve done amazingly well,” he said when she finished. “Really, better than I could have done. I still need to talk to the commanders to get a better sense of where we are militarily, but it sounds like you’ve kept everyone focused on their assignments. I’m particularly impressed with how well you’ve won over the Caledonians. They may have been impressed by some of my abilities, but we see now how ready they were to throw aside the entire alliance as soon as I showed the slightest weakness. Their bond to you sounds like it should be a lot more resilient than just fear of what they think is supernatural abilities.”

“I just tried to think of how you’d handle things, and do what I thought you’d do in the situation.”

“Nonsense. I would never have thought of the food shipments, and I think that might turn out to be key to getting a lot of the Caledonians who don’t have personal fealty to Talogren over to our side. And I have no idea how I would ultimately have handled Dama. You managed to keep the bloodshed to a minimum and get the children back safely. Seizing his assets as restitution for the village was a particularly nice approach. No, you should be proud of yourself. I am.”

“Thank you,” she said, looking away, almost as if she was embarrassed. “So, is my official report to the Consul finished?”

“I wasn’t planning on this being so official, but I guess so.”

“Good,” she said, getting out of the chair and planting herself on his lap again. “Now I can show you how much I really missed you!"