7
I stood at the edge of the Titan’s ear canal, basking in the morning sunlight pouring in through the gaps in the exoskeleton. As I stretched myself out, I could feel the rush of blood flowing to each of my tired extremities. I must have slept a good ten hours or more—by far the best sleep I’d gotten in a long, long while.
As I ate my meager breakfast, I pondered what a Titan’s equivalent of “eating” might be. I couldn’t even begin to imagine the type of diet it would take to sustain a body of Coeus’s size. But I had no idea if that was even necessary. I recalled the professor’s explanation: the organic combined with the synthetic, somewhere between a robot and a living organism.
A purely technological robot shouldn’t have biological needs or anything resembling metabolic processes—but a Titan was not a traditional robot. And assuming it had a metabolism, then surely it would need food or some other sort of nutritional fuel supply. I wondered how exactly they kept it “fed” while it was buried underground—perhaps the system used something similar to an IV drip, since the Titans were effectively bedridden anyway. It would certainly be more efficient than making it eat and digest the nutrients, though I wondered if a creature raised as the Titans had been would even know what a full stomach felt like.
Since the professor had also mentioned that a Titan needed a gestalt with senses and nerve endings and whatnot, it stood to reason that it could have a mouth and taste buds, given that taste was one of the five senses. But even if it had been physically “spoon fed” while in its underground tank, I couldn’t imagine it would have been given anything more than the bare minimum, flavorless nutrient slurry it needed to function. The staff had been expressly trying to ensure it didn’t have enough energy to get up and walk away on them, after all. All anyone wanted from Coeus was his cognitive ability—why give him the power to do more?
“Bet you’ve never eaten real food in your life, huh…” I mumbled, trying to imagine what a life of nothing but mere subsistence would be like. “Sounds utterly miserable. I guess if you were raised that way from birth, you wouldn’t think twice about what you’ve never known. And really, all that matters is how you perceive the hand you’ve been dealt, so if it doesn’t bother you, then it’s not my place to judge or pity you for it.”
I paused, searching my thoughts for the right words to express what I was really trying to say.
“I guess I’m different, since I was raised on food my entire life. I’ve had decades to develop my taste buds. I’ve had meals that are to die for, and meals I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. You probably haven’t had either experience. But again, that doesn’t make one of us better or worse than the other—we were just raised differently, that’s all. So I guess all I’m trying to say here is, well…”
I racked my brain, until eventually I found the conclusion I was looking for.
“When you’re next free, you should let me treat you to lunch sometime. Okay?”
8
In the tranquil stillness, time passed slowly. The Titan’s ear canal was far warmer than its skull had been, whether due to metabolic processes or the insulating nature of the cave, I had no idea. I checked the time on my otherwise useless holofield and saw it was already two in the afternoon—about twenty hours since I’d arrived at the ear, and thirty-one hours since the Titan first stood up. I was still making idle chit-chat with Coeus intermittently, despite it still being a completely one-sided conversation. I didn’t mind; there was no way to know if he was actually hearing me, so I couldn’t expect a response. As long as he didn’t stick his pinky in here and crush me like the earwig I was, he could be as taciturn as he liked.
“Come to think of it, I’m surprised you don’t have a ton of earwax built up in here…” I mused as I wandered around the massive orifice. I was by no means an expert, but I was fairly certain I’d heard that earwax was a natural secretion that built up regardless of how often or seldom one cleaned one’s ears—yet I could see nothing here that fit the bill. In fact, I couldn’t see even a single speck of dust. The closest thing to dirt I managed to find, after much rigorous inspection, was a strand of my own hair. After kneeling down sheepishly to collect this lone piece of waste I myself had introduced into this otherwise pristine ecosystem, I looked down at it and smiled in reminiscence.
“Why don’t we try giving you a different hairstyle?” I’d asked him during one of our sessions.
Sitting at a right angle to me on his cushioned seat, Coeus’s initial reaction to my suggestion was fairly subdued. Not long had passed since we had successfully solidified his personality and begun these dialogues; in appearance, he was perhaps seven or eight years old. Coeus reacted to my offhand remark with utter seriousness, staring at me as if waiting for me to make my case.
I proceeded to explain to him as best I could the significance one’s hairstyle had as a part of their identity—being both an integral part of one’s physical appearance and, for many, a fashion statement. You could cut it and style it however you liked, and even dye it any color you wished. This explanation earned Coeus’s nod of approval—he would give it a shot.
But since he was merely a projection and could adjust these aspects of his appearance at will, and there are an infinite number of potential hairstyles to choose from, it was much harder for us to narrow down his options. In the end, we settled on a happy medium somewhere between high-tech and low-tech, in which I would stand behind him and use an actual pair of scissors to “trim” his virtual hair, and he would update his projection in real time to match my cuts. With neither experience nor technical knowledge, I made my first hesitant snips straight across his bangs. By the time I was done, he had a classic bowl cut—but one that rather suited a child of his age.
“Hey, not bad. That looks good on you,” I said—but this praise was met with a skeptical stare. “Really! I’m not just saying that,” I insisted.
I was not doubting you, said Coeus, straight-faced. I was watching your reaction. It is my understanding that changing one’s hairstyle can change one’s entire visual presentation, so I must see if it has changed the way in which you perceive me.
I nodded to suggest agreement, though in truth, he was only half right. I opened up a holofield, orienting it vertically before placing it directly in front of Coeus’s face.
“Can you see yourself?” I asked, and he nodded. Coeus looked into the eyes of his mirror image. “Your outward appearance affects more than just other people’s impressions of you, it affects your self-perception as well. So why don’t you tell me how you feel about your new bangs compared to your old ones?”
His eyes went wide, and I couldn’t blame him. This was a difficult thing to expect any child to wrap their head around, much less articulate. Fashion was a concept as complex and multi-faceted as the interpersonal dynamics it helped define. Some people didn’t care one lick about how others perceived them, and that was fine—they could present themselves however they liked. Others cared almost exclusively about being attractive to a specific subset of society, and put an exorbitant amount of effort into their appearance—and that was fine too. Most people were somewhere in the middle, and tried to find a healthy balance between being true to themselves and measuring up to some real or imagined societal standard to connect to those with similar aesthetic sensibilities. Slowly narrowing down where exactly one fell on that spectrum was, in my opinion, a major part of growing up.
As Coeus sat there looking at himself, virtually unmoving, I recalled my own youth. Obviously, I was a grown adult who recognized my hair as a growing, regenerating part of me; I could try out any number of different hairstyles, and if I screwed up and gave myself an utterly atrocious one, I could simply laugh it off as my hair grew back again. But when I was a girl, one bad haircut really did feel like the end of the world. The horror of having to live with an ugly hairstyle for at least the next couple months had been enough to make me want to crawl in a hole and never be seen by another human being again.
But Coeus wasn’t even at that stage in his development yet. He was still a blank slate, more undefined than any normal child would be by the age of eight. So that split second in which he recognized himself in the mirror was probably more profound to him than an entire year’s worth of life experiences was to me at my present age.
It was my second night in the giant’s ear. I sat in my small folding chair outside my tent in the pale lamplight, trying to examine my own feelings.
“Hey, so, remember how we talked about food yesterday?” I asked the silence. “And how I said neither of us is better or worse than the other, we were just raised differently? Well, I still stand by that—but I was thinking about it some more, and I realized I’m actually pretty fond of the world I grew up in. Which is why I feel so strongly about wanting to share it with you. Teach you all about it. Let you see for yourself just how delicious, and how awful, different foods can be. Try out different hairstyles, and screw a few up in the process. Go somewhere far away, and see things you’ve never seen before. And maybe then start thinking about coming back home—once you’re completely and utterly spent from seeing and doing enough new things to make up for one hundred fifty years of solitude.”
The experiences didn’t even have to be anything special. Literally anything at all would still be more valuable than a century and a half trapped in a cage, doing the same exact thing every single day—the same meaningless routine that awaited him should he ever return to the intelligence base, voluntarily or otherwise. Compared to a life like that, these days of freedom were precious, regardless of what we chose to spend them doing.
“But for now, I’d say you’ve earned yourself a little vacation time,” I said, trying to reassure this dear friend—hoping one of these days, he’d let me in. “So let’s kick back and enjoy ourselves for a while, shall we?”