Octavia

  Octavia Vibianus was the smartest woman alive. She had spent twenty-eight years in the soft and distant light of Sol Indiges, He Who Brings Life, and from the age of eight she had cracked open the universe and plunged her hands into its viscera to discover its secrets. Not since Augustus, Light in the Darkness, had a single person so shaped history, so directed humanity towards something more than itself. At age twelve, she developed an algorithm to double the output of stable reactors. At age twelve, she developed a method of matter conversion that could rival the fields of Etrus in taste and feed a legion for a hundred years. Nineteen, she invented the coveted cyniscan engines that gave the Freeholds an edge over the corporate states that stood between them and the Imperium of Novo Roma. These feats— and many others— made her a Demigod, whether she believed it or not.

  And right at that moment, she was very te.

  Bright antiseptic light bounced off the white bulkhead, turning the pin tunnel into an imitation of a medical bay. Octavia had always appreciated the aesthetic of Basilis station, her small unique jewel buried in the Underworld. Most of the freeholds this far out fill their common areas with cozy, natural things; imposing human warmth in the cold and alien extents of Sol’s reach. Not that Octavia believed in his dominion over this region of space or even that the Gods existed. This is one reason that I loved her.

  The tall and lithe specter of a woman walked briskly, her eyes fshing with a dozen feeds as she deftly dodged through the lively foot traffic of her home. If Basilis had tourists, her would have been unnerving, a wild and fme haired apparition who neither acknowledged nor interacted with anything in her path. Despite seemingly failing to even perceive her surroundings, she was remarkably sure footed, as if controlled by a pilot’s algorithms. She had all the grace and precision of my drones, with twice their deadly fire burning in her heart. The nearest thing to a human quirk was her cybernetic hand slipping into the pocket of her b coat as she walked, fiddling with its contents for a moment before retaking its pce behind her back.

  She entered a wide hangar and passed by crew stripping, refurbishing the fleet fleet of ships that called Basilis their home. Freehold fleets were unique amongst the various human states, utilizing a system of colborative liberty to encourage customization and design sharing. The result was as many models as there were warships, each designed for a unique purpose, every one made from modur and universally compatible components. Nearly every ship she passed had been improved by one or another of her theoretical breakthroughs. She did not revel in this fact, rarely considering that she is the lynch pin, a shining product of that same colborative liberty feeding back into the system, sustaining and growing it. She was singurly focused on the project at hand with the resolve of some winged raptor hunting its next meal. It was another reason that I loved her.

  As she entered the lift in the center of the cavernous hangar, a small technician snickers and shakes xer head. “She’s going to unch you into the void for being this te.” Xe tapped on a tablet as she spoke; xe preferred the simple tablets to Octavia’s data streams, a quirk from the Great Republic xe was born in. A pce where cybernetics were politely taboo and genetic manipution is commonpce.

  Octavia’s face revealed nothing— her eyes still peering into their void of data— as she responded, “Not today. Today she will jump up and kiss me hard on my lips in front of the entire council. There will be tongue.” Xe quirked xer eyebrow at her. After a suitably dramatic pause, she put her hand into her pocket and pulled out a single pin white gold ball. Xer eyes grew wide as she lifted the end of her mouth into a nearly imperceptible smirk.

  “Is that…?” Xe instinctively reached a hand out; she snapped it away and dropped it back into her pocket. Xer face cycled through fifteen exaggerated expressions, trying to process the information she had just dropped in xer p.

  The feeds in her eyes shut off, leaving her to look directly at xem. “Yes, Ailbe. It is. Control your face; you will not rob me of my moment by letting her read it on you.” Xe busied xirself with xer tablet, looking almost nonchant; xer eyes still burned with intense curiosity and wonder. Every member of the research staff would recognize the significance of the little souvenir. I loved her for this, too: a fir for the theatrical snapping out of the most controlled woman in the sor system.

  They rode the rest of the way up in silence.

  ***

  Octavia stalked into an empty chair around the massive circur table dominating the council chamber of Basilis Station as a scientist whose name she has never asked drones on about structural support design. áine focused intently on the man’s words, nodding her head occasionally and jotting a shorthand not in a small red notebook. It was a bizarre sentimental object, the purpose of which was beyond Octavia’s understanding, as if the tactile sensation somehow outweighed enhanced neurology. áine chose to live as a human but Octavia was a demigod— the Demigod of the Freeholds, daughter of an exile and the smartest, least mature woman in the universe.

  Bo— an ancient boything, a century old with the features of a teenager— began to read a report of the Legion’s victories against the corporate city-stations. Their troops had razed one of the stations and killed every living thing; One billion human beings, either executed or tossed into work pits that no one returned from. Octavia wondered if the young emperor Constantius Trajan would parade the CEO’s in triumph before their minds are used as human circuitry, their neurology sved into the enormous network that organized the Imperium. A rather inefficient form of computation, by Octavia’s standards, but it served as brutal propaganda to rebellious plebes and neighboring leaders alike.

  As Bo finished eir report, ey pointed at Octavia. Eir eyes remained locked on the top of áine’s head as she scribbles in her notebook. “We can no longer waste our time with boondoggles. We must throw everything into a defense fleet and unch the Saoirse. The Romans will be able to unch fleets into Kuiper within the next five years. Even sooner if they get the right supplies from the corpos. All of whom have capituted.” The veins on eir scalp pulsed through nearly translucent, pocked skin. Childthings become far more unsettling as they age, their teenager visage crafted out of hundred year old parts.

  To the left of áine, one of the xenobiologists— an equally ancient woman named Helen— spoke up, “That would condemn billions to svery and death. That ‘boondoggle’— she actually used finger quotes— is the only way to get from…” She ducked her head to read a printout in front of her, eliciting an eye roll from Octavia, “X1952-LN5-721c back here for the rest of us. We are the second furthest Freehold, there is no reason for the Romans to head straight here.” She wasn’t wrong. It would take us half a century to conquer each of the Freeholds that lies closer than the Lovers— as the dancing dwarf pnets of Plouton and Proserpina are called by those who call them home— nearly every one of them richer and more poorly defended than Basilis.

  Bo struck back dryly, “…other than the exile’s daughter with more cybernetics in her head than the Emperor, whose equations are worth more to our survival than the rest of this station combined?” Ey was also not wrong. Designs and theorems were technically anonymous, so no one outside of Basilis knew that she represented most of the recent advancements that had kept the Freeholds free. If the Imperium knew of her, kidnapping or killing her would cripple any parity they had.

  Both specialists looked at her quietly and intensely as áine finished scribbling notes. She slipped a cap onto the pen, closed the notebook and looked up at Octavia with deep blue eyes, folding her arms across her chest. “Well, what is your report for this council, O Glorious One?” The sobriquet was sarcastic.

  Octavia rose from her chair, pulling her favorite fidget from the same pocket as her little prop. She clicked it with every step as she slowly paced back and forth. “Did you all know that when he founded the Imperium, Tiberius modeled his vil after the Doge’s Pace?”

  Nearly every person in the room was stunned in silence. Only Ailbe (amused), Bo (enraged), and áine (impassively focused) continued to watch her as she continued. “True Romans used mostly Corinthian columns, as in the Pantheon of Old. They loved round arches, would build a whole fucking building out of them. The Domum Augustus—” the st sylble is spit out, “—however, has composite columns of neocssical and Gothic influence, and the arches are just entirely Gothic.”

  Bo looked angrier and more confused every passing moment as Octavia stood behind her chair, her hand clicking at the same consistent speed. She looked from face to face as if she expected a question until ey finally snaps, “Is this going somewhere? What does ancient architecture have to do with the gate project that you have yet to report a single detail on for months? The Gate?”

  Octavia imagined steam rising from eir ears and smiled innocently at him, batting her eyeshes. “This isn’t architectural history 301?”

  Bo burst from eir chair with a growl and opened eir mouth, likely to spit a long string of venom at her, when áine stepped in with a steady hand and a slightly amused voice. “Please, Octavia, it’s bad enough that you don’t come to these meetings often. The least you could do is tell us whether you have made progress.”

  “There isn’t progress to be had, I have expined this to the council over and over again. It is a binary proposition.” Octavia sighed heavily as she realized that this expnation wasn’t enough. “The resonance matrix within the gate must be precisely tuned. A deviance in the billionths on hundreds of different variables and any wormhole would be lethal to travel through. It would take more than a century for As our esteemed colleague has so aptly pointed out, we will all be dead or ensved by then. So it is left to me to determine the equation that will always produce the proper resonance. There are no half-proofs, I do not make progress. It is binary: is it solved or not?”

  Octavia’s eyes twinkled as she dunked her clicking hand back into her pocket. “Tiberius was obsessed with the events of Old Rome, but he was also supremely self-confident. Everyone knows that the Romans of Old loved columns, but he thought the composites were superior.” She started to circle the table in the direction of Bo and áine. “He leveraged his inventions and his intellect and his unparalleled talent for strategy into reshaping the entirety of our sor system. He rewrote history by solving the pressing need of his day.” Augustus had invented the first converter, ending the hunger of anyone on Terra with access to power, another need he ter solved. It was his invented nguage, a mockery of Old Rome’s tongue, that half the sor system spoke exclusively and the rest had to know out of necessity.

  “Octavia— before Bo passes of old age, if you don’t mind.” áine shook her head slowly and smirks, clearly aware that Octavia was building toward something with all of this.

  Octavia struck and exaggerated post as she reached áine. “I was te today— no matter what our sweet elder pilot thinks of me— for good reason. I needed to fetch a keepsake before I could deliver my report.” She produced the golf ball and held it up for the room to see. Bo regarded it with suspicious wonder as she set it in from of em. “I guess I left it behind when my team moved to Basilis from the Annex.”

  áine stood to her feet, her eyes locked on the taller woman.

  Earlier that day, Octavia Vibianus— the smartest woman in the universe, Demigod of the Freeholds and Humanity’s Future— had walked through a hole projected into her wall created only moments before and crossed twenty thousand kilometers in less than a heartbeat. She picked up the golf ball from her abandoned desk, mostly empty from when they had left the Annex station five years prior. The gate remained in her office still, continuously active by some energy she has yet to determine the bounds of.

  áine kissed her on the mouth— far to chastely for Octavia’s taste— and hung around her shoulders. Octavia smiled down at her then turned to face the rest of the council. “Now then, I have progress to report.”