My holofield alarm went off, blaring in my ear. I was on vacation, so I could technically sleep in as long as I wanted—but I always felt scummy whenever I wasted the whole day away in bed. Though perhaps the fact that I was spending the night in someone else’s ear had something to do with my desire to not seem like a total lazybones. I got up and out of my sleeping bag, and massaged a gnarly kink in my neck as I stepped out of the tent—whereupon I was immediately shocked wide awake.
Just a few meters from the front of the tent, right at the entrance to the ear canal, there was now a room. I did a double take. It was a square, box-like room about five meters tall, made entirely from that unmistakable gray photopolymer. On the side facing me, there was a single door. Of course it had not been there last night, and it looked an awful lot like a room I’d grown very familiar with.
I walked up to the door. Standing before it, I couldn’t help but laugh. How in the world had I not heard the construction sounds in the night? Surely my flimsy tent wasn’t soundproof. But then I remembered that this was what these little elves were designed to do—work swiftly and silently while the shoemaker slept.
There was one difference between this room and the one I knew—the automatic door had been replaced with a standard door with a lever-style handle. When I reached out and let myself inside, however, everything else was exactly how I remembered it. The white wallpaper. The parquet floors. The pair of sofas and the desk. The artificial light pouring in through lace curtains. The tiny aerial projection lenses lining the walls and ceiling. It was my office—the counseling room, recreated to a T. And in the center of it all stood a familiar face.
Miss Seika… he whimpered. He looked exactly the same as he had when last I saw him: a scared, twelve year-old boy with tears in his eyes. But me—I couldn’t help but smile.
“Hey, kiddo. Why the long face?” I asked teasingly.
Because, I… I… he stammered, sniffling. Then, with a loud hic, came the waterworks. He stifled his voice as the tears came streaming down his cheeks, and all I could think was how utterly human this boy, this child, had become. I crouched and peered deep into those inquisitive eyes I knew so well.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You haven’t done anything wrong. I promise.”
Coeus’s eyes went wide, then scrunched up again as the dam finished bursting. He began bawling inconsolably. I would have given anything, in that moment, to be able to wrap the poor thing in my arms and reassure him that everything would be all right. But all I could do was lean in close.
9
“Feeling a little better now?” I asked.
His nod was so slight that I nearly missed it, but it relieved me nonetheless. The entire time he was crying, I wanted to say something to him, but I couldn’t find the words. With another client, I would have just reached out and held his hand throughout, but that was impossible with a projection. That sort of warmth, the exchange of body heat, was one of the most reassuring feelings there was—and one that Coeus would simply never experience. I still wanted to do some sort of body language communication with him, though. And so now, I was trying to maintain eye contact with him, but he quickly got skittish and lowered his gaze.
“Hm? What’s up?” I asked, leaning down to look up at him. Only this time, he turned away to the side. It took me a moment to realize why, but then it clicked. He was embarrassed. On closer inspection, his cheeks were slightly flushed. He was embarrassed to have had an emotional breakdown like that, presumably because I was watching. And to think this kid didn’t even have a form two months ago…
Coeus had started off as nothing more than a swirling orb of water, and couldn’t even discern the boundaries between himself and the mountainous terrain around us, but now he was already showing signs of shame regarding his own uncontrollable emotions. How in the world had he come so far in such a short period of time? As I gazed up at his wavering eyes, I started to feel something akin to bashfulness myself, but did my best to maintain my composure. Some professional I was, getting secondhand embarrassment from a twelve-year-old. Realizing belatedly that I’d been crouching for quite some time now, I stood up and urged Coeus to move over to the sofas with me.
Wait! he exclaimed as we took our usual seats.
“Hm?”
I’m sorry… I forgot the side table.
“Oh, right.”
I hadn’t even noticed until he mentioned it, but I’d ordered the table for myself after we’d already begun, so obviously it wouldn’t have been included in the original template.
I’ll make one right now.
“What? No, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. I can live without it, I promise.”
I knew he could make it right here and now—most static furniture was just finely layered photopolymer with a nicer finish—but that would take time. Even for an all-powerful Titan, there was a limit to how fast the machinery at his disposal could operate. But despite my protest, one of the room’s walls opened up in a way I’d never seen it do before, and in came a printing phalange. I sat back to wait patiently for him to do his thing, but before my back even hit the cushions, a spray of pixies was ejected from the titan like a lawn sprinkler, instantly hardening large squirts of photopolymer into complex shapes in midair. Before I could even process what I was seeing, the side table was done, and the printing phalange exited the room the same way it came in.
There you go, said Coeus. Meanwhile, I was still trying to lift my jaw up off the floor. I knew how Titan’s object-printing processes were supposed to work: layer by layer, from bottom to top, and left to right. With few exceptions, all objects were built by slowly following a blueprint like this. Houses, roads, random trinkets, you name it, chances were it was created by gradually hardening each layer as they were dispensed from the ground up.
But just now, I’d watched the printing titan spray out photopolymer and pixies like a geyser in such a way that the liquid material hardened in the exact desired shape before it even hit the ground, practically painting the furniture in 3D with a massive airbrush in a few seconds. And then I recalled how the Titan had created a full suit of armor for its massive, thousand-meter body in a comparable span of time yesterday. This was no sorcery, it was calculating speed beyond what I could imagine. The Titan was determining the volume and spray velocity of the liquid material in accordance with gravity and the wind in real time, and creating rigid structures in midair at blinding speeds.
Had he always had this ability, or had his true capacity only been unlocked now that his processing power wasn’t taxed from the demands of managing human society? I gulped nervously at the reminder of what the boy sitting adjacent to me truly was—the embodiment of a superior artificial intellect. A Titan.