I was baffled by this non sequitur, especially given the situation, but thought it over regardless. Canine anatomy was totally different—their eyes couldn’t see the same range of colors, they lacked opposable thumbs or prehensile fingers, et cetera. A human brain in such a body would develop to resemble that of a canine, albeit one with much more processing power.
“No, I can’t imagine it would,” I answered.
“Quite right. And it’s the same basic principle here.”
“Sorry, I don’t follow…”
“We needed more than just a replica brain to make a truly ‘human’ AI. We needed a fully featured gestalt with nerve endings sending signals to it each and every millisecond, or else its mind wouldn’t be convinced it existed as a human. Do you get the picture now, Dr. Naisho? What I’m saying is this: every instance of Titan has its very own human body.”
“I beg your pardon?”
But now I understood what the “giant mess” Narain had referred to was.
The room shook violently once more, and I let out a shriek. These were no longer mere tremors—it was far beyond the level of a major earthquake, and the rumbling grew louder to match. I clung to my safety belts for dear life as I was jostled like a ragdoll back and forth, side to side. My holofield automatically stabilized to remain at a fixed point in my field of view despite the shaking, and it displayed for me a real-time visual of what was happening—a side-view map of the entire facility drawn with simple lines and figures. Every single floor was in a state of disrepair, and many had already begun to collapse. And in the very center of the deepest underground layer was a massive human figure, its hands braced against the floor of its containment tank.
“Make it stop, Lei!” Narain shouted furiously. “Mobilize all the systems and hardware we’ve got! I don’t care if you have to trash the whole goddamned base!”
“C’mon, boss. You’re killin’ me here…” said Lei, his voice mousy and weak. “Look, I’m a damn good engineer. Probably one of the best in the whole wide world, if I do say so myself. Pick a subject and pit me against any other engineer out there, and I guarantee I could go toe-to-toe. But I’m only human—and there ain’t no human on earth who can outsmart a Titan brain once it’s off the leash.”
Another massive quake, and the thunderous boom of structures being torn asunder. On the side-view map, I could see that Coeus had extended its massive arms up over its head a ten full storeys. A live feed from one of the facility’s surveillance cameras popped up, showing its colossal arms—two massive trunks of exposed gunmetal muscle—bursting upward through floor after floor. And then came a low, metallic roar so deafeningly loud that I was too shocked to even cover my ears.
Coeus was screaming.
“No! It’s extremely dangerous for it to leave its tank!” said the professor, frantic. “It’s been submerged in that gel for so long that its skin has completely dissolved—it’s nothing but exposed muscle and nerves. If it tries to leave, its pain receptors will completely overload its brain. And once the pain crosses a certain threshold, it’ll be driven completely mad!”
But just then, something peculiar appeared on the camera feed—an effervescent stream of light. It looked so magical juxtaposed with the sheer destruction happening in the background that I honestly thought I was seeing things at first—but then I realized they were, in fact, tiny individual beads of light.
“Pixies… But why?”
The counseling room shook yet again. On the side-view map, dozens of camera feeds popped up to show me in vivid detail exactly what was happening across the facility. The giant humanoid pulled its arms back out of the massive holes it had just bored through the facility, dunked them back into the tank full of gel, then slowly lifted them out once more. Only this time, a veritable army of maintenance phalanges waited at the surface. As the giant’s hands breached the surface of the pool, the phalanges worked at lightning speed to lay a thick perimeter of photopolymer around the fingers, palms, wrists and upper arms—with pixies whirling about to instantaneously harden the dispensed resin. By the time its elbows had risen out of the tank, it looked as if the giant was sporting a gargantuan pair of gauntlets—both large enough to comfortably enclose its massive arms with room to spare, yet highly polished and meticulously constructed down to the tiniest of details.
“Wait a minute.” The professor gasped. “Is it trying to make a sort of…simplified, portable tank of its own in which to keep itself in the gel?”
“Sure don’t look that simple to me, prof,” said Lei, quickly switching the camera feeds to get some better close-up angles. “Look how intricate this shit is—and it’s literally building the damn thing as it’s drafting the blueprints for it. And that’s not all—this thing can move. It’s got working joints and everything; it’s a goddamn suit of armor, or… Right, that’s the word—an exoskeleton.”
It lifted its arms ever higher, and the phalanges continued to enrobe them in photopolymer armor—this bizarre blend of hard science with dazzling lights and magic. Humanity had synthesized this photopolymer. Humanity had invented these pixies. Humanity had created the AI known as Titan. But this, we had nothing to do with this. This was pure sorcery.
Once its pauldrons were completed and its arms covered, the giant grabbed hold of the load-bearing elements of one of the sturdier floors up above, and began to pull itself up and out of the tank—a ten-storey chin-up. This motion shook the room wildly for a moment, and it was only then that I realized something crucial: this room I was in was situated right on top of the thing’s brain. On my holofield, I could see a camera feed of the room’s exterior as the giant lifted its brain up out of the tank and immediately covered both it and the counseling room in a thick but hollow photopolymer shell.
I could only watch helplessly from the feed’s aerial view as I was completely enclosed within the behemoth’s cavernous skull. I was, quite literally, trapped inside its head. Then, for a good while, all I felt were the g-forces of my body being pulled rapidly upward, as if I were strapped to a wall in a giant elevator. I could still hear the sounds of rampant destruction outside. Occasionally, I’d feel the intense jolt of the giant crashing through ceilings, but it pushed its way through each of these obstacles with no trouble at all, clawing its way ever upward toward the surface.
Then, the transmission window on my holofield shut off.
“Lei?! Narain!”
The holofield unit tried and failed to reconnect several times, spitting out error message after error message before finally informing me that it had been cut off from the network. And so I could only continue my skyward ride in solitude.
After about a minute, the reverberations stopped, as did the feeling of upward motion. The room had leveled out, and there wasn’t even a hint of shaking any more. An eerie calm fell over my exfiltrated office space—and I could only assume we’d reached the surface. Praying that this spelled the end of the turbulence, I hesitantly unfastened my safety belts and stepped down from the emergency chair. I looked over at the room’s only window—or rather, the window-shaped screen that had been designed to display a pleasant ocean scene. Yet right now, it looked as though actual sunlight was streaming through its panes—not the dim artificial mood lighting I was used to. I walked closer and peered out the window.
Through the glass, and a small gap in the thick photopolymer walls beyond, I could see the first light of daybreak creeping in over the horizon. When I looked down, I could see Lake Mashu directly below us, though for a moment, I honestly mistook it for a mere puddle. This momentary confusion was understandable, given that my brain had tried to rationalize it to scale with the massive pair of photopolymer shoes that now stood on its bank. And it was only as I stood there, with the early morning sunlight cascading down my face, that I realized the true magnitude of what I had just done.
I’d awakened a sleeping giant.
A deity that towered over the earth from a thousand meters above.
A Titan.