He looked like an absolute ruler, even though he wasn't; he shared his power with the twelve representatives of the Consistory. They were his advisers, or better, his board; he was managing director. He controlled the physical realm of the structure through the other clans, the personal loyalty he commanded from the masses, and the Security services (now including the newly formed Army), while the men and women of the Consistory spoke for the crypt itself and the elite body of Cryptographers who formed the interface between the data corpus and humanity. It was a nicely balanced arrangement, as was proven by the fact it had existed for multi-generations of monarchs. Nothing had disturbed the calm face of old Earth for millennia until that Nessian cloak of darkness had started to stain the heavens.
Adijine watched as the guard commander's gaze curved above his King, then around him, then resumed its slow sweep.
Adijine had hoped to find the man day-dreaming, but the guard commander wasn't thinking of anything at all; he was on automatic pilot, watching, listening, being professional. He did day-dream, very occasionally (it would have been suspicious in the extreme had he never done so) but he wasn't at the moment. Adijine switched again.
The colonel-in-chief of the Security services was herself remoting into another mind, watching a meeting of clan Cryptography chief programmers through the mind of one who was trying to suppress thoughts of republicanism and revolution. Utterly boring. The colonel-in-chief had a robust, healthy and inventive sex-life and Adijine had spent many a happy hour with her and her partners, but everything seemed to be strictly business right now.
His private secretary was receiving details of a conversation his construct had just had with the shade of the late Count Sessine. Oh yes, thought the King; poor Count Sessine. He'd always felt a certain empathy with Sessine. The private secretary was eating lunch at the same time; anchovy salad. The King detested anchovies rather more than his private secretary adored them, and so switched again.
His seneschal was surveying the zeteticist team monitoring the Chapel usurper party for stray noetic radiations. Boring and incomprehensible.
His current favourite courtesan was remoting into the mind of a mathematician contemplating an elegant proof — the court retained many mathematicians, philosophers and aesthetes to provide this sort of vicarious epiphany — but Adijine found the third-hand experience less than absorbing.
How frustrating to attempt to pry on people only to discover they were in turn spying on others.
He checked that the ursine ambassadorial emissary was still talking (he was, and the King allowed himself a pre-emptive gloat at how the emissary was going to feel when the bomb workings in the fifth-level south-western solar came on line and he realised that this entire negotiation was just a materielly inexpensive exercise in time-wasting), then the King dipped into minds elsewhere in Serehfa; a peruker in a tower-roof terrace-town, crouched over her latest extravagant creation; a cliometrician carrelled half-asleep in a bartizan high on the east fifth level; a moirologist petitioning in the sacristy of the northern upper chapel; a funambulist reaping babilia on the pyramid spur of a shell-wall tower.
Prosaic.
He checked on his spyers, clinging to ledges and lintels, shivering on shingles and cinquefoils, hooked and netted under hoardings and machicolations or just crawling like half-frozen fleas through the gilled vertical forest of high altitude babilia while they watched the lofty, cold, snowy slopes and plains of the high castle for enemy movement, or just something interesting… Another one dead on the tenth-level northern pentice; the spyer-master Yastle insisted acclimatised men could survive at ten thousand metres, but the poor devils kept proving him wrong… A faller from the seventh level butry gable … One watching the black smoke drift inside the white, a tiny snow-scene within the cold cauldron of the Southern Volcano Room… One on the south side of the octal tower, snow-blinded and raving… Another in a mullion of the seventh-level western clerestory, holding his black, frostbitten fingers up in front of his face, crying, knowing that he would never get down now. Little wonder people thought spyers must be mad. Less dangerous to be a spy.
He examined the view from a few ordinary static cameras and avians; they'd been losing a few of those recently to real birds. Some blip in the crypt's faunastatus, possibly caused by the workings in the L5 SW solar, the Cryptographers said; they were sorting it out.
He looked in on the Palace Astronomical Observatory; they had instruments watching the sun. Radiation was ninety-one per cent of normal; still falling slowly and still decreasing more steeply in the IR-end of the spectrum. Boring and depressing.
He cast his regard further afield, and was briefly in the mind of a scrape-scrounge haunting the quiet ruins of Manhattan, then looked through the eyes of a wild chimeric condor, high above the southern Andes, then in the mind of a young woman surfing at dawn off New Sealand, before becoming part of a chimeric triple-mind within a sounding hump-back in mid-Pacific, then joining a chanting priestess in some midnight temple in Singapore, followed by a drunken night-guard at an ovitronics plant in Tashkent, an insomniac agronometricist in Arabic, a spanceled Resiler preaching unheeded in the smoky chaos of a traumkeller in old Prag, and finally a sleepy balloonist descending through the dusk above Tammanrusset.
All very mind-broadening, but still… ah; the Army colonel-to-the-court was thinking about his new mistress. This was more like it.
… Sessine's wife!
Now, wasn't that a coincidence?
You must have thought seven, in the context of having used up seven out of your eight incrypted lives. Unless you are here for the trivial reason that you have been very careless with those lives, I assume you're in trouble and under direct — and directed — threat.
So you're here, in the place you prepared for yourself a long time ago, in case. You're safest staying in the room, where everything works the way it would in reality. Using the screen may be risky, leaving certainly is. You're in the crypt's crustal basement, the last sane level before the chaos.
If you know of anybody who remains loyal to you back in the mortal world, you can try to contact them on the screen; it's a brand new address, never been format-collapsed, so the first call is safe. The rest can't be guaranteed.
If you think it's safe to sit and wait to be rescued, look inside the bedside cabinet; there's a book, a phial and a pistol. The book contains a general library, the phial will make you sleep until somebody comes to get you and the pistol will work on others within the confines of the room.
If you're going to leave, head west from here — that's away from the ocean tunnel, which is the direction the room's window faces — until you reach the walls and then turn left and walk until you reach the spill-sluice; take the steps up. There's a smoking-tavern called the Half-way House. The hopfgeist is friendly. I hope you never did tell anybody your most-secret code, or forget it. Or change it.
Remember that if you do leave this room, or transmit more than once from it, you are vulnerable, and that if you communicate openly with the crypt you will betray both your identity and location. You can ask information of other constructs you can trust, and you can move within the crypt. That is all.