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Simon Illyan died at his desk.
He had achieved his every professional goal. The Imperium was safe, free, strong and prosperous. Emperor Gregor was alive, in command, and sane, with sons to follow him. Mutantkind was mostly accepted as just another strand of superhumans and Genosha stood as a proud beacon for those who were denied that and a challenge to those who would deny it.
And he had failed at almost every personal goal. He had found some happiness with Alys, who was a frequent visitor and occasional resident of the trading outpost. But everything the young Simon had wanted, a wife, children, a true home, had all eluded him. And the goals of the older Simon, to finally be able to put down his burdens and do something else, had likewise eluded him. The chip he had never been able to have removed shorted out moments after his death, deleting all the terrible secrets, joyful moments, tears and laughter, melted to slag as his brain died...
At least it was quick. He’d been leaning back in his chair, considering how to respond to Latveria testing their defenses, again, when his heart stopped. He was too tired to even make it out of his chair. His aide found him in the morning, by which time his body was cold and he was past any saving.
There was some dispute amongst the powers of the universe regarding the fate of Simon’s soul. Its final destination was resolved by the simple expedient that none of them actually had any control over it. It was bound by other law, by other powers, of other places, beyond both their reach and their sight.
Simon’s death was somehow both inevitable and unexpected. Ironically, the impact on Barrayar was minimal. ImpSec was ably run by those he’d trained. His chain of command was clear on both the military and civilian side. His second-in-command slid into command with no difficulty and the lieutenant governor took over with equal ease. And Barrayar itself had long since adapted to his death.
Though, admittedly, conspiracy theories that he is still alive somewhere, watching over the Imperium, or watching the Imperium, depending on who you talk to, persisted for centuries thereafter.
It was on Earth that things were less stable. Simon had been a major player in the game of nations and a major nexus between the MRD, Genosha and the broader mutant population. As a neutral party, few could replace him. The other Barrayarans didn’t have that history, even if they had been introduced to all the players while at his side.
The structure he had built shuddered at his death as things hung in the balance, waiting for the atrocity that would spark the return of the silent war. But it didn’t come. Not before things found their balance. There would be atrocities of course, there couldn’t not. An MRD agent would murder some innocent mutant. A guilty one would murder a bunch of baselines. But the moment had passed by then and they were just part of the daily news, nothing that would spark true war.
In accordance with his will, his body was burnt and the ashes scattered. He’d seen what Alys had done to herself over her late husband’s death and declined to be an object of either veneration or mourning. Well, he declined as best he could, everyone else got a vote too. His name was spoken in private remembrances across two galaxies, Alys established the Simon Illyan scholarship for students who wanted to attend the Imperial Service Academy and more than one child ended up with the name Simon (or Simone). But it was the thought that counted and the request was enough that the Imperium did not establish any more formal memorials.
Simon had told Gregor that he was a, perhaps necessary, bloody-handed monument to the barbaric past and that any such memorial risked suggesting a return to such times. Gregor did not agree, but also did not establish any memorials against Simon’s wishes. And if some people chose to take that as a sign the man wasn’t really dead and be fearful of his wrath if they acted against the Imperium...well, Simon’s service hadn’t ended with death.
Those he’d saved went on with their lives, mostly unbothered. Many didn’t even know they owed him their lives and Simon had never bothered to keep in touch with most of them. Those few who did know mourned in their own way. Diana lit a candle for him, an odd admixture of her own Catholic faith and the strange customs of the world she had adopted as her own. At a half-way house in Seattle, a man who’d been freed because his body had committed terrible crimes while a mutant was riding it put the finishing touches on a mural that covered the entire side of the building. It was hard to make Simon cut a heroic figure, but he’d come close.
The building which was once the Kiln had been converted to be an MRD training facility, with most of its prisoners sent to Barrayar. Its renaming to the Illyan Training Center was, perhaps, inevitable.
In Avengers Tower, in the private section, closed to guests and the press, a plaque was added to a wall no one admitted existed. In Genosha, there was a more formal funeral, even if there was nothing to bury. They had their own Hall of Heroes for those who had fallen in defense of Genosha, which had an empty tomb for Illyan. There had been some dispute about that, but the leadership felt it was an important gesture, even if it did cause some bad feelings with the Barrayarans themselves, who objected for some unclear reason.
After enough time (which varied from decades for some academics to minutes for some reporters), Illyan would be a topic of discussion only amongst historians, philosophers and political scientists as the pressures of new events pushed him from the minds of most and the pressures of the academic, political and reporting job markets pushed out revisions to the standard interpretations.
Had he truly needed to kill that first mutant, or had it been a calculated ploy to project the strength which the quasi-fascist MRD idolized? Or had it simply been the instinctive reaction of a member of a colonial/imperial state’s secret police?
Hadn’t the executions of Stryker and Trask been barbaric exemplars of everything wrong with Barrayaran society and its influence on Earth? Surely there’d been better options than that. A trial on Genosha, or before the UN should have decided their fates, not the autocratic whim of one man.
Wasn’t the expanded emigration from Tanzania and the surrounding nations just a new Middle Passage, but one that ironically forced its victims to pay for their own transit? Only by truly defeating capitalism and feudalism could people truly be free of the Illyans of the world who would otherwise crush any revolution.
Wasn’t Barrayar proof that the true, inevitable path of humanity was back to the ancient traditions of our ancestors, proving monarchy and faith were not mere anachronisms, but foundational truths of what it means to be human?
Indeed, such reconsiderations were being pushed as soon as some of his obituaries, many of which urged remembering the victims of his actions, both here and in the Nexus.
But, on a more personal level, he was somewhat successful in acting as a cautionary tale for those who he had never quite realized were the children he’d never had with Alys. After his death, Shilpa created her own career plan, which included retirement and a future which did not involve the MRD. She stuck to it rigorously, retiring after a decade as Chief of Operations for the MRD and instantly began to move on to the second career she’d decided on, cleaning up the Ganges River and preventing future pollution.
Between her ties to various governments, her individual power and her connections to the MRD and superscience communities, this was not a massive challenge for her, but it did keep her busy, when her children and grandchildren weren’t annoying her.
Miles was happily married and slowly limiting his foreign travel, though he and Ekatarin did admittedly replace quite a bit of it for the far easier journeys to Earth. Gregor did not even have that escape, but his life was happy and he’d long planned a slow, easy transition between himself and his eldest son which would ensure a smooth transfer of power and allow him some time with his family and friends without having to be the Emperor all the time. Ivan had already retired from Imperial Service by that point and was instead happily an ambassador to a backwater world where he and his wife could live out their lives quietly and contentedly.
In the end, he died as he lived, a man who sacrificed his personal goals in order to best live up to the ImpSec motto, ‘We Live To Serve.’ But he also shaped that and those he served through his fealty, morality and ambition. Whether his tale is tragic, noble, both, or neither is a question for the reader to decide.