The apparition noticed. “Are you not happy to see me?” it asked.

“I saw you just a few hours ago,” Cardenia said, standing up from the bench, and looking over the apparition of her father. It was perfect. Almost touchable. Cardenia did not touch it. “You were dead then.”

“I still am,” Attavio VI said. “The consciousness that was me is gone. Everything else was stored.”

“So you’re not conscious now?”

“I’m not, but I can respond to you as if I were. You may ask me anything. I will tell you.”

“What do you think of me?” Cardenia asked, blurting it out.

“I always thought you were a nice young lady,” Attavio VI said. “Smart. Attentive to me. I don’t think you’ll make a very good emperox.”

“Why not?”

“Because right now the Interdependency has no need of a nice emperox. It never does, but it can tolerate one when nothing consequential is going on. This is not one of those times.”

“I wasn’t particularly nice to the executive committee today,” Cardenia said, hearing how defensive the words sounded coming out of her mouth.

“I’m sure that in the wake of my death, for your very first meeting with them, the executive committee made a fine show of being restrained and deferential. Also, they are seeing at what length of chain you’re most comfortable, in order for them to get every single thing they want from you. They’ll yank on that chain presently.”

“I’m not sure I like this entirely honest you,” Cardenia said, after a moment.

“If you like we can adjust my conversational model to be more like I was in life.”

“You’re telling me you lied to me in life.”

“No more than to anyone else.”

“That’s comforting.”

“In life I was human, with an ego, just like anyone else. I had my own desires and intentions. Here I am nothing but memory, here for the purpose of assisting you, the current emperox. I have no ego to flatter, and will flatter yours only if ordered to. I would not suggest it. It makes me less useful.”

“Did you love me?”

“It depends on what you mean by love.”

“That sounds like an evasive, ego-filled answer.”

“I was fond of you. You were also inconvenient until the moment you were needed for succession. When you became the crown princess I was relieved you didn’t hate me. You couldn’t have been blamed if you had.”

“When you died you said you wished you had had time to love me better.”

Attavio VI nodded. “That sounds like something I would say. I imagine I meant it in the moment.”

“You don’t remember it.”

“Not yet. My final moments have not yet been uploaded.”

Cardenia dropped the subject. “I chose the imperial name of Grayland II, as you suggested.”

“Yes. That information, at least, is in our database. And, good.”

“I read up on her.”