“I don’t feel anything about it. I’m a computer simulation of a person. That said, given what I know about it, I imagine the actual Emperox Grayland I was exceptionally pissed about it.”

This made Cardenia smile. Then she got back on track. “You knew the Flow stream for Dalasýsla was collapsing.”

“I was given models by scientists that suggested that the stream was in danger of collapsing, yes. Given the data and my understanding of it, I thought it was possible, and likely.”

“But you didn’t evacuate the Dalasýsla system.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Politics,” Grayland said. “Evacuating the twenty million people who lived in the Dalasýsla system would have required immense planning and capital on the part of the Interdependency. There was no will for it.”

“The parliament didn’t want to save the lives of twenty million people?”

“They didn’t see it as a matter of saving those lives. They considered it a matter of someone they saw as a weak emperox trying to manufacture a crisis, as a way of shifting the balance of power away from the parliament. They also saw it as a threat to trade and the economy, since a large number of ships would need to be committed to an evacuation, at a huge cost.”

“What about the data showing the possibility of a collapse?”

“They held a commission which featured other Flow physicists poking holes in the findings, introducing enough doubt to undermine any political drive to do anything. Even the representatives from Dalasýsla voted down my recommendation to begin an evacuation. What eventually passed was a recommendation for further study. But money wasn’t appropriated in the imperial budget for that further study, so nothing came of it.”

“So—” So you did nothing, Cardenia was going to say, but then stopped because it would be rude and would make Grayland almost instantly defensive. Then she remembered she was talking to a computer who didn’t have feelings. “So you did nothing.”

“I sent the local duchess an advisory, and told the military and local imperial bureaucrats to assist, on an expedited basis, any Dalasýslans who wanted to leave.”

“And did they?”

“We don’t know. The Flow stream collapsed almost immediately after I sent the advisory.”

“So twenty million people died because of politics and bureaucracy.”