The phantom message on the laptop screen became an obsession. Alex spent hours that night trying to replicate the effect, tapping the casing, gently shaking it, pressing the power button in complex sequences. Nothing. The machine remained dead, a frustratingly inert piece of future-tech. But the single line of text had planted a seed of desperate, near-impossible hope. Diagnostic Only. It implied a deep, failsafe power reserve, a tiny spark of life preserved for system-critical functions. If he could just feed it a minuscule amount of power, a trickle, he might be able to wake that diagnostic mode. But how?
The solar charger remained an unacceptable risk. With Lucilla now actively hostile and surely watching his every move through her own network of spies, unfurling a sheet of shimmering, alien photovoltaic cells on a palace balcony was tantamount to signing his own death warrant. He needed another way, something that could be explained within the context of his world.
His mind, conditioned by a lifetime of 21st-century education, dredged up fragmented memories of high school physics classes. He thought of static electricity, of rubbing a balloon on a sweater. He thought of basic principles of energy conversion. The ideas were crude, half-formed, but they were a starting point. He would have to reinvent the battery, or at least a primitive form of charger, from scratch.
The next day, he launched a new, seemingly eccentric imperial project. He summoned a handful of the most respected Greek natural philosophers and engineers in Rome to the palace. Among them was a brilliant artisan from Alexandria named Hero, known for his clever mechanical toys and his work with pneumatics. Alex, careful to frame his requests as intellectual curiosity, explained that he wished to honor his father's legacy by personally investigating the "natural philosophies" the late emperor had been so fond of.
"My father believed the world was filled with unseen energies," Alex explained to the baffled but intrigued scholars. "He wrote of the 'static ether' that crackles in the air on a dry day, and the 'elemental heat' that flows through metals. I wish to conduct experiments to better understand these divine forces."
Under this guise of pious, philosophical inquiry, he set them to work on a series of bizarre tasks. To the Romans, it was harmless, if baffling, imperial eccentricity. To Alex, it was a desperate, long-shot attempt to generate a few life-saving millivolts of electricity.
He tasked one group with constructing large, rotating cylinders of amber, rigged with cranks and massive pads of wool cloth. Their official purpose was to "gather the static ether for study." Their real purpose was to create a massive, inefficient static electricity generator. Day after day, slaves would turn the cranks, the friction building a tiny, crackling charge that Alex, in private, would attempt to ground through a thin copper wire connected to the laptop's charging port.
He tasked Hero of Alexandria with a different project. "The elemental heat," Alex explained, showing the engineer a crude drawing he had made. "My father theorized that when two different metals are joined and one end is heated, a flow of energy is created." He commissioned Hero to construct strange devices made of dozens of small iron and copper plates, soldered together in a series. One end of the series was to be placed in a bath of hot coals, the other in cool water. It was a primitive thermoelectric generator, attempting to exploit the Seebeck effect.
The progress was slow, frustrating, and often yielded nothing. The static charge was difficult to capture and would dissipate in the humid air. The thermoelectric generators produced a current so vanishingly small it was barely detectable. The Greek scholars whispered that their new emperor was brilliant but mad. Alex didn't care. The slow, methodical work of his secret "Philosopher's Stone" project was the only thing that kept the sliver of hope alive.
While this secret project sputtered along in the palace workshops, Alex waged his public, silent war against his sister. He couldn't attack her directly, so he attacked her foundations, using the very men she had once counted as allies or enemies.
Tigidius Perennis, now fully embracing his role as the Emperor's shadow, was the primary weapon. The prefect, with his intimate knowledge of the city's corrupt underbelly, went to work with a chilling efficiency. He didn't need to threaten or blackmail anymore; he simply needed to whisper. He let slip a rumor in the banking forums that Lucilla's primary financier, a man who held much of her liquid wealth, was dangerously over-leveraged, having made poor investments in Spanish tin mines. It wasn't true, but in the world of high finance, perception is reality. Within a week, several other wealthy Romans, fearing a collapse, quietly withdrew their funds, starting a slow-motion run on the bank that began to choke Lucilla's access to ready cash.
Next, Perennis turned his attention to her income. Lucilla derived a significant portion of her wealth from the trade of luxury goods from the East—silk, spices, and exotic woods. Perennis, using deniable intermediaries, dispatched a message to a band of Cilician pirates he had once employed for his own dirty work. He didn't order them to attack her ships, an act that could be traced. He simply paid them to be a visible, menacing presence along the shipping lanes leading from Antioch. The mere "rumor of an unavoidable pirate threat" was enough. Insurance rates skyrocketed. Captains refused to sail. Lucilla's supply chain was effectively paralyzed.
While Perennis handled the dirty work, Senator Servius Rufus provided the legal and public justification. In his capacity as head of the Annona Reform Commission, he launched a full, public inquiry into the management of the vast agricultural estates in Egypt that Lucilla had inherited from her late husband, the co-emperor Lucius Verus. He framed it as a routine audit to ensure all major landowners were contributing their fair share of grain to the state during the current crisis. His methods were impeccably legal and widely praised by the populace. But the true purpose was to tie up Lucilla's primary source of agricultural income in a mountain of bureaucratic red tape, endless legal challenges, and public scrutiny.
The effects were not immediate, but over the course of a few weeks, they were undeniable. Lucilla was being slowly, methodically strangled. Her access to cash was drying up. Her income from trade and land was being choked off. Her high-society allies, men and women who could smell financial weakness like sharks smell blood in the water, became less eager to attend her lavish parties. The invitations she sent out were met with polite, flimsy excuses. She was being isolated, her power base dismantled piece by piece, and Alex had not left a single fingerprint. His actions were all conducted through his proxies, each with their own plausible, deniable motivations.
He was winning. His strategy was working.
The news came from Perennis during a late-night report. The prefect seemed almost gleeful, a man reveling in his own dark talents.
"Caesar, our campaign has been an unqualified success," he reported, his voice a low hiss of satisfaction. "The Augusta's finances are in turmoil. She has become… desperate. We have forced her hand."
"How so?" Alex asked.
"She has just sold off a massive portfolio of assets to raise immediate cash. Silver mining shares in Hispania, some of the most profitable in the empire."
"Good," Alex said, a grim satisfaction settling over him. "That's what we wanted. To force her to liquidate."
"No, Caesar, you don't understand who she sold them to," Perennis said, his expression shifting from glee to concern. "The sale was private, conducted through a series of intermediaries. But my agents are certain. The buyer who acquired the controlling interest was a consortium fronted by the actress, Aurelia Sabina."
The name hit Alex like a physical blow. Sabina. The witty, beautiful woman from the temple dedication.
Perennis leaned forward, his voice dropping. "Sabina is more than just an actress, Caesar. She is a client of the very bank we spread rumors about. She knew they were false, saw an opportunity, and bought Lucilla's shares at a steep discount. She is one of the shrewdest and most independent businesswomen in Rome. And now, with this single transaction, she has become your sister's primary financial backer and business partner."
Alex stared at his prefect, the victory turning to ash in his mouth.
"Lucilla has found a new, powerful, and very clever ally," Perennis concluded, his voice grim. "The one person in this city you showed a moment of weakness to has just entered the game on the opposing side."