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User Name/Nick: Isabelle
User DW: vibishan
AIM/IM: vibishantheshiny
E-mail: preferjournal PMs
Other Characters: Anya Lehnsherr
Character Name: the Emperor of the Eighty Worlds, the Risen Father, the Risen One, His Majesty
Series: The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds by Scott Westerfeld
Age: Physically 33, chronologically about 1700, subjectively about 500 after accounting for stasis and relativistic travel.
From When?: Post-series. The Empire has begun to descend into civil war.
Inmate/Warden: INMATE. Despite ultimately good intentions, the Emperor has become quite corrupted with power and the scale of his empire has lead him to embrace a complete ends-justifies-the-means mentality to preserve it from enemies within and without. He runs an Apparatus of brainwashed secret police and has them assassinate his own little sister to prevent politically catastrophic information from being made public, and reaps a political windfall by conveniently blaming it on the enemy. His prejudice and paranoia regarding Compound Mind artificial intelligences – among other desperate reasons - makes him willing to raze one of his own planets entirely with nuclear weapons in order to destroy an enemy Mind with an irreversible foothold there. He is no doubt responsible in no small part for other atrocities that empires are prone to, the best-known of which from canon is the long-term unwanted imperial occupation of planet called Dhantu.
Item: n/a
Abilities/Powers: The Emperor is technically dead and physically entwined with a creature called the Lazarus symbiant, which keeps him functioning in good health, aging infinitesimally slowly, and grants him a rapid healing factor. However he remains cool/room temperature to the touch, and rapid healing requires intense calm of body and mind, which the symbiant physiologically encourages.
The Emperor is also equipped with synesthetic implants which allows the parts of his brain which normally process other senses to access data in secondary and tertiary visual and audio fields, simultaneously with normal vision, and allows him to conduct electronic missives and commands mentally. Even at full access to his powers, this will be quite curtailed simply because the barge lacks the sci-fi infrastructure of his home time.
Personality: The first thing to remember about the Emperor is that although he is actually Lawful Evil, he absolutely believes he is in the right. The second thing is that he is incredibly smart, and these two things are highly intertwined. He was originally a scientist, and he fundamentally believes in the value of civilization to enable science, math, culture, exploration and creation. He believes further in the value of those things to enrich and ennoble and expand human lives. If the Emperor were alive today, he would be a staunch globalist, in favor of ever increasing communication, collaboration, and progress as conceived of in a linear and loftily neocolonial sort of way, progress at price, progress worth whatever price might be necessary to sustain the systems on which it depends. In his own era, the Emperor considers his empire, pax galacticus and quantum entangled instant communications, to be those vital structures which must be preserved at any cost.
And because he himself is the linchpin who built the empire planet by planet, who oversees and directs their affairs, who is worshipped throughout as the Risen Deity, his interests and political position are equally elevated, equally critical. His interests are inherently and by definition sacrosanct; what he does to benefit himself inevitably benefits humanity as a whole, once all the accounts are balanced. While he doesn’t quite believe that he is a god in the traditional sense – he knows he doesn’t hear the prayers and toasts his trillions of subjects send to him, knows that he actively plays the political game, rather than waving a truly omnipotent hand – he has bought somewhat into his own rhetoric. He sees himself as a father and protector of his people, one who must do certain unsavory things. But gods are above such petty reproach. Those he considers a threat to his reign are by extension a threat to the integrity of the empire. His willingness to do anything to defeat such threats combines a deftly subtle tactical genius, capable of achieving a myriad of both strategic and political aims with well-chosen and devastating sacrifices, with an utterly ruthless streak and the unshakable convictions to commit them.
Part of him will always be a thwarted academician, the brilliant young scientist who put his entire life on hold to spend years desperately researching a way to save his little sister’s life from a wasting disease. He has drive, the kind which he eventually parlayed in absolute power, but which was already apparent in his solo pursuit of the impossible, especially considering the highly collaborative atmosphere of traditional scientific research. He must have been a bit of a cautionary tale, before his discovery: the student with so much potential, what a shame he walked away from a reputable career to torture test animals in search of fairytales. But the Emperor, not one to be deterred from his aims even then, ignored any such censure. But he still maintains a bit of a scholastic mindset: he likes to lecture, and likes even more leading people into realizing on their own what he wanted to teach them in the first place. He has a tendency to make his point via what first appear to be tangential and eccentric historical anecdotes, only to circuitously arrive at precisely the conclusions he intended. He is clever and philosophical and intellectually engaged, drawing on a wealth of centuries of scientific, historical, and cultural knowledge.
Although he is certainly conniving and rationalizing, he is not merely a cool calculator in the shadows. He is very charming when he chooses to be and fervently passionate about everything he believes. Most Risen Dead are impassive, self-involved with meditation, long since succumbed to the imposition of the Zen state preferred by the symbiant. It would have been impossible for him to live so very long and remain utterly engaged with the operations of his empire if he not only loved power and political games but also cared very deeply about those whose fates he decides.
On the flip side of this passion, the Emperor is prone to obsession, fixating on certain themes, goals, or enemies with a relentless and literally immortal tenacity. In response to the Compound Minds, this overwhelming focus crystallizes into a profound paranoia, underlain with a broad-scale sentimentality. Individual lives, even thousands or millions of individual lives, are essentially expendable to someone who presides over millennia and across the span of lightyears, who balances the rising and falling of generations for the greater good, but the Emperor adores the sum of humanity, their hopes and dreams and struggles. He utterly despises the Rix, for whom such ideas and activity are simply subsumed, a necessary substrate of data upon which to scaffold their own digital superegos. The Emperor is deeply afraid of them, not merely for their brilliance and power, but because he believes they are antithetical to the free propagation of human individuality and enterprise, curbed from within according to the needs of the superorganism. The specter of such a possibility haunts him and renders him incapable of being truly rational about them or AIs in general, even though hobbled AIs are a fundamental part of his own technological society.
“A Note on Imperial Measurements” prefaces each book, clarifying a metric system of time and distance in relation to the revolutions of the capital planet and the speed of light. It concludes, “The Emperor has decreed that the speed of light shall remain as nature has provided.” It reflects in a simple and fundamental way both an admirably thorough, completely successful ploy to establish the Emperor as divine in the minds of his subjects, regardless of their political feelings, and the extent of the Emperor’s sheer arrogance. He is a scientist and a politician; he knows he has no control over universal constants, but he is completely comfortable making such a declaration approving them.
The Emperor is accustomed to casually and constantly wielding truly vast amounts of power. He is familiar with obeisance, but if he enjoys it, his conversations with Nara (an opposition senator) and the way he conducts politics among the divided voices of his war council suggest that he also appreciates the challenges of more egalitarian interaction. He lives permanently ensconced by scintillating luxury and astounding technology, but he can present an almost rustic personable façade. He doesn’t meet private audiences in a grandiose throne room but in a garden – albeit a garden filled with lovely and intricate marvels to display his power, wealth, and grace, but one in which he walks on foot over stone paths and sits on an equal level with his guests. He seamlessly blends the awesomely impressive and an intimate, amiable approachability. And lastly, but certainly not least, the Emperor is inordinately fond of cats, whom he considers instrumental to the history of human advancement.
Barge Reactions: This is a man who has been championed over thirty star systems through several galactic wars; he is not easily phased. He is, however, a scientist, and he will not accept the proposition of the barge easily. Mental manipulation will seem far more likely: if there were other universes, he would have discovered them by now, but there are those with the means and the motive to strand him in such a delusion.
The Emperor will without question believe that Alexander – a compound mind in his own realm with whom he will inexorably be at war after the series ends – has somehow found a way to exploit the Emperor’s synesthesia implants and immerse him in this intricate and yet bizarre setting. He will assume the AI is playing mindgames with him, a monster calling him a monster, demanding that he redeem himself, and laughing all the while. Much of the setting, from the incredibly low technology level (from his perspective) to the way the layout of the library does not even pretend to be physical possible, will read to him as an elaborate joke Alexander is having at his expense.
This won’t actually render him unplayable. Although he’ll be furious at his powerlessness, on some particularly paranoid level he will be relieved and vindicated. Alexander can trap him in whatever scenario he likes, but he cannot control the Emperor’s personal will. He will simply react very strangely, from the perspective of the rest of the barge, investigating everything in hopes of determining a way to glitch himself out and learning more about Alexander’s bizarre psychology. He won’t consider anyone else on the barge real, merely a subroutine in Alexander’s game, but he’ll want to interact with them, investigating and interpreting Alexander’s supposed commentary, and he’ll play along with the premise of the barge for the sake of illusory comfort.
Floods and breaches that warp his memories and sense of self will be most worrisome to him; he will feel both threatened and violated. However, the fact that changing him in such ways is possible but not kept permanently will be one of the ways he eventually concludes that the barge is not a contrivance of Alexander’s after all.
Path to Redemption: Firstly, being on the barge is going to mean adjusting to not being the single most powerful person in the coreward reaches of the Milky Way. Since he’s going to assume the whole thing is a virtual reality imposed by Alexander, he won’t get too offended at people not calling Your Majesty and hanging on his whims – he wouldn’t expect it from the machinations of his enemy – but simply dealing with people on such a different level will have a preliminary affect, chipping away at the corrupting influence of his power.
Secondly, the Emperor needs to stop caring about his own power as a stand-in for the fate of trillions and start caring about actual people. It’s going to take a long, long time for it to make headway against centuries of ingrained rationalization. Even his beloved sister, the original impetus for everything, was not safe from his machinations when she threatened the empire. But part of him is still the person who dedicated his life and his death to saving her; he’s not a fundamentally selfish person at all, and he’s capable of great love. Part of him also wants very keenly to do great things, to benefit the universe; he would never have accomplished as much as he did without a driving ambition to build something worthwhile. Rescuing those impulses from the damning web of politics that he has allowed to make him into a monster will be the key to redeeming him. He needs a warden who will respect him and understand why he’s done the things he has, but willing and able to challenge him intellectually and force him to grapple with the implications of these issues.
History: The Emperor’s personal history is not given in detail, but the broad strokes of it compose the background of the story. Some 3,400 years in the future, humanity has populated large swathes of the galaxy, and the Emperor was a brilliant medical student. He spent years desperately experimenting, trying to discover a way to save his little sister, who was dying of a wasting disease. Finally, he succeeded, with one caveat: the symbiant capable of repairing her deterioration could only work on dead flesh. With time running out, he took the greatest risk, killing himself to allow for a human test before hurting her. It was successful. He was reanimated at the height of his mental abilities and physical vigor, and he saved his sister as well.
In subsequent years, he brokered his discovery into nearly absolute power over dozens of star systems, initially (though not always) without conquest. Instead, he did it via complicated diplomatic, economic, and religious maneuvering. He framed himself as the Risen One, who had defeated the Old Enemy Death through Holy Suicide and transcendence, liberally and deliberately drawing on the remnants of Christianity and its cultural/mythical legacy to psychological reinforce his stature. He traded eternal life for loyal service, with the converse punishment of death (true death, the cheating death, which brought oblivion instead of elevation) for failure. As his power grew, he made a foundational agreement called the Compact in which the earliest imperial planets accepted his authority.
We don’t know the proportions of planets that were persuaded to join the empire for economic/political reasons, strongarmed into it, and outright conquered, but all three happened. The empire twelve wars major enough to require the convocation of a war council, including the last and most difficult with the Rix, a defensive war the Rix began (although this might easily be more complicated; we don’t have details). The empire he created was hyper-capitalist and ran along a quasi-Roman model, with a balance of powers between the Emperor himself and a Senate.
Eventually, the emperor discovered something terrifying: the symbiant did not grant true eternal life, merely a very, very prolonged one. It was a secret that would destroy everything he had built, the source of his power, the image of his omnipotence, and tear the empire – the vast, mostly-internally-peaceful, driving capitalist civilization that he considered the ultimate good – into pieces. The Emperor dedicated entire segments of his personal Cult to keeping the secret, every member the Apparatus heavily psychologically conditioned so that the mere thought of revealing the secret was repulsive to them, rising to the level of torture. The highly tractable dead were encouraged to make elaborate pilgrimages, unknowingly extending their already extended lifespans via relativistic time dilation, delaying the inevitable revelation. It’s uncertain exactly how long the Emperor knew, but it was long enough ago that the pilgrimages were an entrenched and unquestioned ancient tradition by the time the books begin.
After seventeen hundred years chronological absolute and nearly five hundred relative years, his sister the Child Empress was dying in slow motion, her symbiant no longer entirely sustainable, just like all the other Risen Dead. Bored and nihilistic, the Empress informed her brother that she would no longer actively delay her true, final death, but would allow herself to deteriorate. Although it was a matter of supreme contention, and she allowed him to design unfathomably confidential medical devices to aid and preserve her as long as possible, she ceased making pointless relativistic trips, retiring to her own Imperial Palace on the spinward planet of Legis XV.
A small force of cyborg Rix commandos infiltrated the Palace, took the Empress hostage. All resistance was paralyzed in concern for her safety, and while the imperial navy on hand desperately attempted a rescue, the Rix seeded a Compound Mind through the planet’s datasphere. In hours, it was entirely ensconced and irremovable, short of destroying the entire planet’s technology and returning it to a pre-industrial state. The Emperor sent members of the Apparatus along with the rescue attempt. In utter secrecy amid the confusion, his agents murdered the Empress, allowing the Rix to take the blame, and setting the Empire inexorably at war with the Rix faction.
Captain Zai, already a war hero of an internal occupation, having ‘failed’ to rescue her, was thus condemned to death by the old agreements, but Senator Nara Oxham, his lover, persuaded him to reject the ritual suicide. Furious at the insubordination as well as the loss of an excellent martyr, the Emperor nevertheless converted Zai’s disobedience into both punishment and propaganda. He pardoned Zai before the refusal was made public, taking up his sister’s mantel as the usual mouthpiece of imperial mercy, only to send Zai into battle with an oncoming Rix battlecruiser, with the absolutely necessary mission to destroy the large receiver array it could use to communicate with the Compound Mind (which had, by this point, named itself Alexander). It was also a battle Zai would almost certainly not survive.
Meanwhile, the empire had another secret weakness, this one pertaining not to the dead but to the living. In the early era of stellar exploration and anarchic meddling with human genetics (pre-imperial) humanity foolishly erased a great deal of its own genetic diversity in pursuit of physical, mental, and aesthetic perfection, with potentially disastrous results. This much was common knowledge, and in all regions populated by humans, there existed Plague Axes: planets where genetic modification was forbidden, where disease ran rampant, where superficially sub-optimal germ lines with hidden benefits could flourish and eventually be cultivated and introduced into the wider human gene pool.
Unfortunately (this is the secret part), the Plague Axis of the Eighty Worlds was insufficient to generate enough diversity to keep the empire’s massive population ecologically and genetically sustainable, and all other factions of humanity, due to political pressure from the Rix, refused the usual agreements for trading and crossing germlines from their own Plague Axes. In order to survive, the empire would need a new source of mutations, the raw grist for the mill of evolution. The Emperor, always one to accomplish multiple goals with one strike, covering the intolerable with the heroic, set his sights on Legis XV.
If Zai’s starship failed to stop the Rix battlecruiser (an order of magnitude more powerful vessel), the Compound Mind would have to be destroyed before it could transmit its knowledge of the complete sum of Legis XV, and thus of imperial life broadly, to the Rix array. To prevent this, the Emperor proposed carpet-bombing the entire surface of Legis XV with low-radiation high-EMP yield nuclear weapons in mid-atmo, especially over population clusters, to destroy every distributed device giving Alexander life. With proper precautions beforehand, the casualty estimate was approximately 100 million. The measure passed by a single vote. Unknown to the War Council, however, the Emperor intended a ‘mistake’ – the nuclear bombs would be high radiation after all, turning a planet of two billion people into a living laboratory. The primitive conditions would serve to detect the one-in-a-thousand useful mutations from the hideous mutagenic affects of the deluge of radiation.
To Legis’s fortune and the Emperor’s deep displeasure, Zai successfully destroyed the communications array, rendering the destruction of Legis’s infostructure supposedly unnecessary. But Alexander was not so easily foiled: using a single surviving Rix commando from the rescue attempt, it gained access to the offline quantum entanglement facilities and countermanded their shutdown, transmitting all of itself instantly, without the need of the receiver array, to a massive sphere the Rix had brought that was capable of near-infinite calculations and, under Alexander’s auspices, transmutation of its own matter via quantum electron tunneling. Even worse for the Emperor, Alexander had learned of the Empress’s condition – and therefore the flaw of Lazarus symbiant and all that derived from it – from the Empress’s own subdermal medical devices. After some careful negotiation, Alexander communicated the secret to Zai.
At the same time, Zai’s lover Nara had become the Emperor’s primary opponent on the War Council. The Emperor set a trap for her, informing her of a plan to destroy Zai’s ship on the grounds that Alexander may have suborned its captain and crew. Nara fell for the trap, warning Zai of the plan to kill him, and convincing him to resist the Emperor’s decree yet again by informing him of the Emperor’s failed plan for genocide. All of that information fell under the most stringent rules of state secrets, making Nara guilty of high treason.
The Senate convened a trial to expel her from its ranks and strip her of her senatorial privilege and immunity, after which she could be tried and executed as a civilian. But Zai had replied to her after realizing the Emperor’s betrayal (for the very first Compact forbade the destruction of worlds), informing her of the terrible secret, that the Risen Dead were dying. At her trial, with the entire empire watching, Nara revealed the truth about the symbiant and about the Empress’s death, neither of which were covered by the War Council’s confidentiality, so the Senate did not silence her. Although the broadcast was interrupted as quickly as possible once the Apparatus realized what she knew, Nara had prepared means of her own to propagate the information concurrently as widely as possible. As the book ended, the empire was thrown into turmoil, on the brink of a convulsive civil war, complete with Alexander, as ambitious as its namesake, waiting in the wings.
Sample Journal Entry:
[The name attached to the account reads simply "The Risen Emperor"]
What an odd little fishbowl you’ve built for us, Alexander. A positive matryoshka of paleolithic absurdity.
[He tosses something in the air, catches it again. It’s a button, one he pulled out of the disassembled communicator. He smiles, sharply amused, and it’s a cornered predator’s smile. He’s furious and trapped, but he won’t give Alexander the satisfaction of laughing at him, prevents it by forcing himself to be in on the joke.]
The party line, apparently, is that this place is for our own ethical and psychological improvement. If you wish to maintain the farce that all of this is in the interests of our best self, then we will require a cat. Perhaps several. Whatever subroutine is posing as the person responsible for such things, see to it.
[He smiles for a moment, commanding and calm, then shakes his head with a low puff of laughter, mutters to himself,]
Video. On a screen, really. No one told us you had a sense of humor.
Sample RP: The dead man wakes up in a space the size of a coffin, the luminescent lining of the capsule bed’s smartplastic walls gently brightening in response to the waking cadence of his breaths. He stares for a moment, stunned. Despite the similarly compact space, this is not his stasis chamber. His ship must have been intercepted somehow, attacked and boarded. Someone with the technical skill to extract him without waking him, seal him a perverse historical replica of his old student accommodations.
His mind goes momentarily shrill with fear; he cannot fall, he is the only one with even a chance of binding the shards of the empire back together. His symbiant, alert to the physiological disturbances of adrenaline, doesn’t even stir – the Emperor has long practice at maintaining the physical elements of calm even in difficult moments. Then he cuts off his own panic even internally, magnanimously allowing only an appropriate wariness to remain.
They haven’t killed him yet; he can only hope whomever has caught him is smart enough not to. It’s not a terribly high bar. He is an extraordinarily useful prisoner. The capsule bed is incredibly deliberate, particularly considering that the original was demolished over a thousand years before. Even the simple nanofibers of the blankets feel right, smooth and warmly insulating, lightweight with the feathery-slick texture of basic hydrophobic weave. Why? It has to be some sort of psychological warfare, a reminder of the man he was before he became a God, a man who had not yet bested death itself. He smiles coldly. This is game he knows how to win.
He presses a hand against the wall above him, and the light resolves into the very same default interface he used centuries ago. The Emperor gives his captors points for thoroughness. When he lived here, he would usually crawl out the side-hatch, but he isn’t going to start by crawling anywhere. It takes him a few seconds to remember the old navigation methods, his hands automatically reaching for synesthesia command gestures, but after a minute he’s hacked the emergency auxiliary hinges and sent the top flying open with a loud clatter. The bed doubles as a low desk from the outside. He rises from the capsule and steps smoothly out of it, surveying his surroundings.
He is alone, though of course he must be monitored. He prowls around the room, increasingly shocked. The room is perfect. All his old medical equipment lies tumbled over the floor, but more than that, the personal touches are the same, things no one ever bothered to record in any database, personal items that he destroyed in a fit of hopeless temper after another stretch of failed simian tests when he was developing the symbiant procedure. It was like staring right into the eyes of the boy he had been centuries ago, so young, so provincial, so eager and desperate at once.
The Risen Emperor was…discomfited. It dawned on him suddenly that his synesthesia hadn’t alerted him to a single datum since he awoke, as if it were simply, entirely absent. Or – or more likely, already in use. If Alexander somehow came close enough to access the hardware in his brain, who knew what the abomination could have accomplished? Even this, perhaps, raiding his very memories. The Emperor willed himself to stern stillness, and did not gnash his teeth. Then spotted something, one thing that did not belong. On the floor, mixed in with surgical tools, was some kind of bulky interface. He picked it up, determined to discover the AI’s purpose. And when he had divined it, he would find its weakness, and he would rip Alexander apart, line by line of code if he had to. The invader was just data, after all, ones and zeroes stolen from human hearts just like the lie of the room. The Emperor, for all his recent losses, was still a God.
Special Notes: The Emperor has no given name in canon. I have a headcanon name for him, but it will probably be a long time before he reveals it to anyone in game. Even his sister hasn’t thought of him by it in literally centuries; for all intents and purposes, “The Emperor” is his name just as much as his title. In keeping with this, he typically speaks using the imperial first person plural.
User DW: vibishan
AIM/IM: vibishantheshiny
E-mail: preferjournal PMs
Other Characters: Anya Lehnsherr
Character Name: the Emperor of the Eighty Worlds, the Risen Father, the Risen One, His Majesty
Series: The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds by Scott Westerfeld
Age: Physically 33, chronologically about 1700, subjectively about 500 after accounting for stasis and relativistic travel.
From When?: Post-series. The Empire has begun to descend into civil war.
Inmate/Warden: INMATE. Despite ultimately good intentions, the Emperor has become quite corrupted with power and the scale of his empire has lead him to embrace a complete ends-justifies-the-means mentality to preserve it from enemies within and without. He runs an Apparatus of brainwashed secret police and has them assassinate his own little sister to prevent politically catastrophic information from being made public, and reaps a political windfall by conveniently blaming it on the enemy. His prejudice and paranoia regarding Compound Mind artificial intelligences – among other desperate reasons - makes him willing to raze one of his own planets entirely with nuclear weapons in order to destroy an enemy Mind with an irreversible foothold there. He is no doubt responsible in no small part for other atrocities that empires are prone to, the best-known of which from canon is the long-term unwanted imperial occupation of planet called Dhantu.
Item: n/a
Abilities/Powers: The Emperor is technically dead and physically entwined with a creature called the Lazarus symbiant, which keeps him functioning in good health, aging infinitesimally slowly, and grants him a rapid healing factor. However he remains cool/room temperature to the touch, and rapid healing requires intense calm of body and mind, which the symbiant physiologically encourages.
The Emperor is also equipped with synesthetic implants which allows the parts of his brain which normally process other senses to access data in secondary and tertiary visual and audio fields, simultaneously with normal vision, and allows him to conduct electronic missives and commands mentally. Even at full access to his powers, this will be quite curtailed simply because the barge lacks the sci-fi infrastructure of his home time.
Personality: The first thing to remember about the Emperor is that although he is actually Lawful Evil, he absolutely believes he is in the right. The second thing is that he is incredibly smart, and these two things are highly intertwined. He was originally a scientist, and he fundamentally believes in the value of civilization to enable science, math, culture, exploration and creation. He believes further in the value of those things to enrich and ennoble and expand human lives. If the Emperor were alive today, he would be a staunch globalist, in favor of ever increasing communication, collaboration, and progress as conceived of in a linear and loftily neocolonial sort of way, progress at price, progress worth whatever price might be necessary to sustain the systems on which it depends. In his own era, the Emperor considers his empire, pax galacticus and quantum entangled instant communications, to be those vital structures which must be preserved at any cost.
And because he himself is the linchpin who built the empire planet by planet, who oversees and directs their affairs, who is worshipped throughout as the Risen Deity, his interests and political position are equally elevated, equally critical. His interests are inherently and by definition sacrosanct; what he does to benefit himself inevitably benefits humanity as a whole, once all the accounts are balanced. While he doesn’t quite believe that he is a god in the traditional sense – he knows he doesn’t hear the prayers and toasts his trillions of subjects send to him, knows that he actively plays the political game, rather than waving a truly omnipotent hand – he has bought somewhat into his own rhetoric. He sees himself as a father and protector of his people, one who must do certain unsavory things. But gods are above such petty reproach. Those he considers a threat to his reign are by extension a threat to the integrity of the empire. His willingness to do anything to defeat such threats combines a deftly subtle tactical genius, capable of achieving a myriad of both strategic and political aims with well-chosen and devastating sacrifices, with an utterly ruthless streak and the unshakable convictions to commit them.
Part of him will always be a thwarted academician, the brilliant young scientist who put his entire life on hold to spend years desperately researching a way to save his little sister’s life from a wasting disease. He has drive, the kind which he eventually parlayed in absolute power, but which was already apparent in his solo pursuit of the impossible, especially considering the highly collaborative atmosphere of traditional scientific research. He must have been a bit of a cautionary tale, before his discovery: the student with so much potential, what a shame he walked away from a reputable career to torture test animals in search of fairytales. But the Emperor, not one to be deterred from his aims even then, ignored any such censure. But he still maintains a bit of a scholastic mindset: he likes to lecture, and likes even more leading people into realizing on their own what he wanted to teach them in the first place. He has a tendency to make his point via what first appear to be tangential and eccentric historical anecdotes, only to circuitously arrive at precisely the conclusions he intended. He is clever and philosophical and intellectually engaged, drawing on a wealth of centuries of scientific, historical, and cultural knowledge.
Although he is certainly conniving and rationalizing, he is not merely a cool calculator in the shadows. He is very charming when he chooses to be and fervently passionate about everything he believes. Most Risen Dead are impassive, self-involved with meditation, long since succumbed to the imposition of the Zen state preferred by the symbiant. It would have been impossible for him to live so very long and remain utterly engaged with the operations of his empire if he not only loved power and political games but also cared very deeply about those whose fates he decides.
On the flip side of this passion, the Emperor is prone to obsession, fixating on certain themes, goals, or enemies with a relentless and literally immortal tenacity. In response to the Compound Minds, this overwhelming focus crystallizes into a profound paranoia, underlain with a broad-scale sentimentality. Individual lives, even thousands or millions of individual lives, are essentially expendable to someone who presides over millennia and across the span of lightyears, who balances the rising and falling of generations for the greater good, but the Emperor adores the sum of humanity, their hopes and dreams and struggles. He utterly despises the Rix, for whom such ideas and activity are simply subsumed, a necessary substrate of data upon which to scaffold their own digital superegos. The Emperor is deeply afraid of them, not merely for their brilliance and power, but because he believes they are antithetical to the free propagation of human individuality and enterprise, curbed from within according to the needs of the superorganism. The specter of such a possibility haunts him and renders him incapable of being truly rational about them or AIs in general, even though hobbled AIs are a fundamental part of his own technological society.
“A Note on Imperial Measurements” prefaces each book, clarifying a metric system of time and distance in relation to the revolutions of the capital planet and the speed of light. It concludes, “The Emperor has decreed that the speed of light shall remain as nature has provided.” It reflects in a simple and fundamental way both an admirably thorough, completely successful ploy to establish the Emperor as divine in the minds of his subjects, regardless of their political feelings, and the extent of the Emperor’s sheer arrogance. He is a scientist and a politician; he knows he has no control over universal constants, but he is completely comfortable making such a declaration approving them.
The Emperor is accustomed to casually and constantly wielding truly vast amounts of power. He is familiar with obeisance, but if he enjoys it, his conversations with Nara (an opposition senator) and the way he conducts politics among the divided voices of his war council suggest that he also appreciates the challenges of more egalitarian interaction. He lives permanently ensconced by scintillating luxury and astounding technology, but he can present an almost rustic personable façade. He doesn’t meet private audiences in a grandiose throne room but in a garden – albeit a garden filled with lovely and intricate marvels to display his power, wealth, and grace, but one in which he walks on foot over stone paths and sits on an equal level with his guests. He seamlessly blends the awesomely impressive and an intimate, amiable approachability. And lastly, but certainly not least, the Emperor is inordinately fond of cats, whom he considers instrumental to the history of human advancement.
Barge Reactions: This is a man who has been championed over thirty star systems through several galactic wars; he is not easily phased. He is, however, a scientist, and he will not accept the proposition of the barge easily. Mental manipulation will seem far more likely: if there were other universes, he would have discovered them by now, but there are those with the means and the motive to strand him in such a delusion.
The Emperor will without question believe that Alexander – a compound mind in his own realm with whom he will inexorably be at war after the series ends – has somehow found a way to exploit the Emperor’s synesthesia implants and immerse him in this intricate and yet bizarre setting. He will assume the AI is playing mindgames with him, a monster calling him a monster, demanding that he redeem himself, and laughing all the while. Much of the setting, from the incredibly low technology level (from his perspective) to the way the layout of the library does not even pretend to be physical possible, will read to him as an elaborate joke Alexander is having at his expense.
This won’t actually render him unplayable. Although he’ll be furious at his powerlessness, on some particularly paranoid level he will be relieved and vindicated. Alexander can trap him in whatever scenario he likes, but he cannot control the Emperor’s personal will. He will simply react very strangely, from the perspective of the rest of the barge, investigating everything in hopes of determining a way to glitch himself out and learning more about Alexander’s bizarre psychology. He won’t consider anyone else on the barge real, merely a subroutine in Alexander’s game, but he’ll want to interact with them, investigating and interpreting Alexander’s supposed commentary, and he’ll play along with the premise of the barge for the sake of illusory comfort.
Floods and breaches that warp his memories and sense of self will be most worrisome to him; he will feel both threatened and violated. However, the fact that changing him in such ways is possible but not kept permanently will be one of the ways he eventually concludes that the barge is not a contrivance of Alexander’s after all.
Path to Redemption: Firstly, being on the barge is going to mean adjusting to not being the single most powerful person in the coreward reaches of the Milky Way. Since he’s going to assume the whole thing is a virtual reality imposed by Alexander, he won’t get too offended at people not calling Your Majesty and hanging on his whims – he wouldn’t expect it from the machinations of his enemy – but simply dealing with people on such a different level will have a preliminary affect, chipping away at the corrupting influence of his power.
Secondly, the Emperor needs to stop caring about his own power as a stand-in for the fate of trillions and start caring about actual people. It’s going to take a long, long time for it to make headway against centuries of ingrained rationalization. Even his beloved sister, the original impetus for everything, was not safe from his machinations when she threatened the empire. But part of him is still the person who dedicated his life and his death to saving her; he’s not a fundamentally selfish person at all, and he’s capable of great love. Part of him also wants very keenly to do great things, to benefit the universe; he would never have accomplished as much as he did without a driving ambition to build something worthwhile. Rescuing those impulses from the damning web of politics that he has allowed to make him into a monster will be the key to redeeming him. He needs a warden who will respect him and understand why he’s done the things he has, but willing and able to challenge him intellectually and force him to grapple with the implications of these issues.
History: The Emperor’s personal history is not given in detail, but the broad strokes of it compose the background of the story. Some 3,400 years in the future, humanity has populated large swathes of the galaxy, and the Emperor was a brilliant medical student. He spent years desperately experimenting, trying to discover a way to save his little sister, who was dying of a wasting disease. Finally, he succeeded, with one caveat: the symbiant capable of repairing her deterioration could only work on dead flesh. With time running out, he took the greatest risk, killing himself to allow for a human test before hurting her. It was successful. He was reanimated at the height of his mental abilities and physical vigor, and he saved his sister as well.
In subsequent years, he brokered his discovery into nearly absolute power over dozens of star systems, initially (though not always) without conquest. Instead, he did it via complicated diplomatic, economic, and religious maneuvering. He framed himself as the Risen One, who had defeated the Old Enemy Death through Holy Suicide and transcendence, liberally and deliberately drawing on the remnants of Christianity and its cultural/mythical legacy to psychological reinforce his stature. He traded eternal life for loyal service, with the converse punishment of death (true death, the cheating death, which brought oblivion instead of elevation) for failure. As his power grew, he made a foundational agreement called the Compact in which the earliest imperial planets accepted his authority.
We don’t know the proportions of planets that were persuaded to join the empire for economic/political reasons, strongarmed into it, and outright conquered, but all three happened. The empire twelve wars major enough to require the convocation of a war council, including the last and most difficult with the Rix, a defensive war the Rix began (although this might easily be more complicated; we don’t have details). The empire he created was hyper-capitalist and ran along a quasi-Roman model, with a balance of powers between the Emperor himself and a Senate.
Eventually, the emperor discovered something terrifying: the symbiant did not grant true eternal life, merely a very, very prolonged one. It was a secret that would destroy everything he had built, the source of his power, the image of his omnipotence, and tear the empire – the vast, mostly-internally-peaceful, driving capitalist civilization that he considered the ultimate good – into pieces. The Emperor dedicated entire segments of his personal Cult to keeping the secret, every member the Apparatus heavily psychologically conditioned so that the mere thought of revealing the secret was repulsive to them, rising to the level of torture. The highly tractable dead were encouraged to make elaborate pilgrimages, unknowingly extending their already extended lifespans via relativistic time dilation, delaying the inevitable revelation. It’s uncertain exactly how long the Emperor knew, but it was long enough ago that the pilgrimages were an entrenched and unquestioned ancient tradition by the time the books begin.
After seventeen hundred years chronological absolute and nearly five hundred relative years, his sister the Child Empress was dying in slow motion, her symbiant no longer entirely sustainable, just like all the other Risen Dead. Bored and nihilistic, the Empress informed her brother that she would no longer actively delay her true, final death, but would allow herself to deteriorate. Although it was a matter of supreme contention, and she allowed him to design unfathomably confidential medical devices to aid and preserve her as long as possible, she ceased making pointless relativistic trips, retiring to her own Imperial Palace on the spinward planet of Legis XV.
A small force of cyborg Rix commandos infiltrated the Palace, took the Empress hostage. All resistance was paralyzed in concern for her safety, and while the imperial navy on hand desperately attempted a rescue, the Rix seeded a Compound Mind through the planet’s datasphere. In hours, it was entirely ensconced and irremovable, short of destroying the entire planet’s technology and returning it to a pre-industrial state. The Emperor sent members of the Apparatus along with the rescue attempt. In utter secrecy amid the confusion, his agents murdered the Empress, allowing the Rix to take the blame, and setting the Empire inexorably at war with the Rix faction.
Captain Zai, already a war hero of an internal occupation, having ‘failed’ to rescue her, was thus condemned to death by the old agreements, but Senator Nara Oxham, his lover, persuaded him to reject the ritual suicide. Furious at the insubordination as well as the loss of an excellent martyr, the Emperor nevertheless converted Zai’s disobedience into both punishment and propaganda. He pardoned Zai before the refusal was made public, taking up his sister’s mantel as the usual mouthpiece of imperial mercy, only to send Zai into battle with an oncoming Rix battlecruiser, with the absolutely necessary mission to destroy the large receiver array it could use to communicate with the Compound Mind (which had, by this point, named itself Alexander). It was also a battle Zai would almost certainly not survive.
Meanwhile, the empire had another secret weakness, this one pertaining not to the dead but to the living. In the early era of stellar exploration and anarchic meddling with human genetics (pre-imperial) humanity foolishly erased a great deal of its own genetic diversity in pursuit of physical, mental, and aesthetic perfection, with potentially disastrous results. This much was common knowledge, and in all regions populated by humans, there existed Plague Axes: planets where genetic modification was forbidden, where disease ran rampant, where superficially sub-optimal germ lines with hidden benefits could flourish and eventually be cultivated and introduced into the wider human gene pool.
Unfortunately (this is the secret part), the Plague Axis of the Eighty Worlds was insufficient to generate enough diversity to keep the empire’s massive population ecologically and genetically sustainable, and all other factions of humanity, due to political pressure from the Rix, refused the usual agreements for trading and crossing germlines from their own Plague Axes. In order to survive, the empire would need a new source of mutations, the raw grist for the mill of evolution. The Emperor, always one to accomplish multiple goals with one strike, covering the intolerable with the heroic, set his sights on Legis XV.
If Zai’s starship failed to stop the Rix battlecruiser (an order of magnitude more powerful vessel), the Compound Mind would have to be destroyed before it could transmit its knowledge of the complete sum of Legis XV, and thus of imperial life broadly, to the Rix array. To prevent this, the Emperor proposed carpet-bombing the entire surface of Legis XV with low-radiation high-EMP yield nuclear weapons in mid-atmo, especially over population clusters, to destroy every distributed device giving Alexander life. With proper precautions beforehand, the casualty estimate was approximately 100 million. The measure passed by a single vote. Unknown to the War Council, however, the Emperor intended a ‘mistake’ – the nuclear bombs would be high radiation after all, turning a planet of two billion people into a living laboratory. The primitive conditions would serve to detect the one-in-a-thousand useful mutations from the hideous mutagenic affects of the deluge of radiation.
To Legis’s fortune and the Emperor’s deep displeasure, Zai successfully destroyed the communications array, rendering the destruction of Legis’s infostructure supposedly unnecessary. But Alexander was not so easily foiled: using a single surviving Rix commando from the rescue attempt, it gained access to the offline quantum entanglement facilities and countermanded their shutdown, transmitting all of itself instantly, without the need of the receiver array, to a massive sphere the Rix had brought that was capable of near-infinite calculations and, under Alexander’s auspices, transmutation of its own matter via quantum electron tunneling. Even worse for the Emperor, Alexander had learned of the Empress’s condition – and therefore the flaw of Lazarus symbiant and all that derived from it – from the Empress’s own subdermal medical devices. After some careful negotiation, Alexander communicated the secret to Zai.
At the same time, Zai’s lover Nara had become the Emperor’s primary opponent on the War Council. The Emperor set a trap for her, informing her of a plan to destroy Zai’s ship on the grounds that Alexander may have suborned its captain and crew. Nara fell for the trap, warning Zai of the plan to kill him, and convincing him to resist the Emperor’s decree yet again by informing him of the Emperor’s failed plan for genocide. All of that information fell under the most stringent rules of state secrets, making Nara guilty of high treason.
The Senate convened a trial to expel her from its ranks and strip her of her senatorial privilege and immunity, after which she could be tried and executed as a civilian. But Zai had replied to her after realizing the Emperor’s betrayal (for the very first Compact forbade the destruction of worlds), informing her of the terrible secret, that the Risen Dead were dying. At her trial, with the entire empire watching, Nara revealed the truth about the symbiant and about the Empress’s death, neither of which were covered by the War Council’s confidentiality, so the Senate did not silence her. Although the broadcast was interrupted as quickly as possible once the Apparatus realized what she knew, Nara had prepared means of her own to propagate the information concurrently as widely as possible. As the book ended, the empire was thrown into turmoil, on the brink of a convulsive civil war, complete with Alexander, as ambitious as its namesake, waiting in the wings.
Sample Journal Entry:
[The name attached to the account reads simply "The Risen Emperor"]
What an odd little fishbowl you’ve built for us, Alexander. A positive matryoshka of paleolithic absurdity.
[He tosses something in the air, catches it again. It’s a button, one he pulled out of the disassembled communicator. He smiles, sharply amused, and it’s a cornered predator’s smile. He’s furious and trapped, but he won’t give Alexander the satisfaction of laughing at him, prevents it by forcing himself to be in on the joke.]
The party line, apparently, is that this place is for our own ethical and psychological improvement. If you wish to maintain the farce that all of this is in the interests of our best self, then we will require a cat. Perhaps several. Whatever subroutine is posing as the person responsible for such things, see to it.
[He smiles for a moment, commanding and calm, then shakes his head with a low puff of laughter, mutters to himself,]
Video. On a screen, really. No one told us you had a sense of humor.
Sample RP: The dead man wakes up in a space the size of a coffin, the luminescent lining of the capsule bed’s smartplastic walls gently brightening in response to the waking cadence of his breaths. He stares for a moment, stunned. Despite the similarly compact space, this is not his stasis chamber. His ship must have been intercepted somehow, attacked and boarded. Someone with the technical skill to extract him without waking him, seal him a perverse historical replica of his old student accommodations.
His mind goes momentarily shrill with fear; he cannot fall, he is the only one with even a chance of binding the shards of the empire back together. His symbiant, alert to the physiological disturbances of adrenaline, doesn’t even stir – the Emperor has long practice at maintaining the physical elements of calm even in difficult moments. Then he cuts off his own panic even internally, magnanimously allowing only an appropriate wariness to remain.
They haven’t killed him yet; he can only hope whomever has caught him is smart enough not to. It’s not a terribly high bar. He is an extraordinarily useful prisoner. The capsule bed is incredibly deliberate, particularly considering that the original was demolished over a thousand years before. Even the simple nanofibers of the blankets feel right, smooth and warmly insulating, lightweight with the feathery-slick texture of basic hydrophobic weave. Why? It has to be some sort of psychological warfare, a reminder of the man he was before he became a God, a man who had not yet bested death itself. He smiles coldly. This is game he knows how to win.
He presses a hand against the wall above him, and the light resolves into the very same default interface he used centuries ago. The Emperor gives his captors points for thoroughness. When he lived here, he would usually crawl out the side-hatch, but he isn’t going to start by crawling anywhere. It takes him a few seconds to remember the old navigation methods, his hands automatically reaching for synesthesia command gestures, but after a minute he’s hacked the emergency auxiliary hinges and sent the top flying open with a loud clatter. The bed doubles as a low desk from the outside. He rises from the capsule and steps smoothly out of it, surveying his surroundings.
He is alone, though of course he must be monitored. He prowls around the room, increasingly shocked. The room is perfect. All his old medical equipment lies tumbled over the floor, but more than that, the personal touches are the same, things no one ever bothered to record in any database, personal items that he destroyed in a fit of hopeless temper after another stretch of failed simian tests when he was developing the symbiant procedure. It was like staring right into the eyes of the boy he had been centuries ago, so young, so provincial, so eager and desperate at once.
The Risen Emperor was…discomfited. It dawned on him suddenly that his synesthesia hadn’t alerted him to a single datum since he awoke, as if it were simply, entirely absent. Or – or more likely, already in use. If Alexander somehow came close enough to access the hardware in his brain, who knew what the abomination could have accomplished? Even this, perhaps, raiding his very memories. The Emperor willed himself to stern stillness, and did not gnash his teeth. Then spotted something, one thing that did not belong. On the floor, mixed in with surgical tools, was some kind of bulky interface. He picked it up, determined to discover the AI’s purpose. And when he had divined it, he would find its weakness, and he would rip Alexander apart, line by line of code if he had to. The invader was just data, after all, ones and zeroes stolen from human hearts just like the lie of the room. The Emperor, for all his recent losses, was still a God.
Special Notes: The Emperor has no given name in canon. I have a headcanon name for him, but it will probably be a long time before he reveals it to anyone in game. Even his sister hasn’t thought of him by it in literally centuries; for all intents and purposes, “The Emperor” is his name just as much as his title. In keeping with this, he typically speaks using the imperial first person plural.