“I take it you’re somewhere he can materialize, as we agreed?” he immediately asked, without so much as a hello. But I expected no less from him.
“Yes, I don’t generally make a habit of lying,” I said. “Unlike you.”
“Good, that’s all I needed to hear.”
“And what’s with you calling Coeus a ‘he’ all of a sudden? Weren’t you the one who told me ‘That thing isn’t human’? Or are you just sucking up now that he’s big enough to squash us all like bugs?”
“I’ll suck up as much as I need to if it means getting the job done,” he said, shameless.
“Oh, yes. I see you’ve been very busy getting the job done,” I told him. “It must have been awfully hard to fly all the way to New York just to sit there and say nothing for four hours straight.”
“Yes, attending those meetings is part of my job. But nothing ever gets decided in meetings. And on the rare occasion that something does, it’s always a mistake.”
“So you admit that going there was a complete waste of time.”
“No, don’t put words in my mouth. All I said was nothing ever gets decided in the meetings themselves. These things are always hashed out behind the scenes, and it’s there where I do my work. We’ve already got a whole plan of action laid out, and we’re confident the UNDP will greenlight it, albeit retroactively.”
“Excuse me?”
“There a problem?”
“What do you mean, they’ll greenlight it ‘retroactively’?” I was baffled. As the organization in charge of managing all the world’s intelligence bases, one would assume that any course of action in cases like this would require explicit prior approval from the UNDP via majority vote. Hence the emergency session that had just been called.
“Well, that’s the plan, anyway,” said Narain. “Nothing wrong with pulling some strings in the back channels to get things off the ground. Those UNDP suits are all desperate to get off this sinking ship before it becomes their problem, so of course they’ll be happy to hop on the first attractive lifeboat we row up to them.”
Narain was now speaking in riddles and metaphors, so I couldn’t fully grasp his meaning, but I did at least understand that he’d apparently made some back-alley deals outside of the assembly hall. Suddenly, I was reminded of his profession: manager. Someone that moved people, and knew how to get things done. Though I could never condone his character, I could not deny his ability in that regard. If he said something would be approved, I had no doubt it would be. But I wanted to know what that something was.
“Okay, I’ll bite… Just who have you been speaking with, and what about?” I asked.
“Do you even think before you talk? One of the other people who showed up for that pointless meeting, obviously,” he said as though it were the most predictable thing in the world. “Someone who can actually get things done.”
I hear a voice.
I jerked my head up in surprise. There, in his usual spot on the sofa ninety degrees adjacent to mine, was Coeus. He had materialized of his own volition, suddenly and without warning, despite me warning him prior to the call that he should not come out during.
Someone’s calling me.
“Wha…”
I opened my mouth to respond, but was interrupted by an unexpected noise, so I turned my head to look. Just now, I’d heard a sound coming from right outside the counseling room. A sound that by rights should have been impossible, yet was clear and unmistakable.
There’d been a knock at the door.
Someone was requesting entry into this space—this tiny room a thousand meters above the earth that only Coeus and I should have been able to access. I turned to look at him, and could tell that he was feeling something. Hearing something my senses could not perceive. It was clear that he didn’t know what it was, but that he wished to.
Come in.
The door did not open. Instead, a spectral arm came reaching through the middle of the door itself. Then, like a CG animation unbound by the laws of physical interaction, the owner of said arm proceeded to clip the rest of their body through the door, walking into the room as if it weren’t even there.
It was a woman. She had pale golden hair, and wore white, form-fitting clothes that bore no cultural affiliation, neither Eastern nor Western. She looked to be maybe a few years older than me, but her serene and collected visage made her look far more mature. In an instant, I knew. I could tell from a single glance that she was not like me. Not flesh and blood.
“The Titan AIs were created to grant our every wish,” Narain said through the holofield as the woman made her way over to us. “That is their primary function, and they were endowed with the faculties necessary to do so. The network is, as you know, constantly observing us—gathering information about us. Watching what we’re doing, and trying to perceive what we might wish for it to do next based on what it sees. Then, if possible, it tries to preempt us, and put in the work required to grant our wishes before we even ask it to.”
Narain was telling me nothing I didn’t already know. Everyone knew that Titan used its predictive systems to make educated guesses as to what we wanted it to do next. It would pull up dictionary entries. Dim the lighting to match our moods. Refill our necessities whenever they got low. It tried to do as much as it could without us ever having to say a word.
“So I figured that perhaps the same principle would apply here. And I was right on the money,” Narain went on. The woman was now standing directly across the table from me; she flashed me a quick smile, then turned her gaze onto Coeus. “I used the connections available to me to get in touch with some of the staff members over at the Twelfth Intelligence Base—the most recent and advanced instance of Titan, obviously. And wouldn’t you know, we didn’t even have to lift a finger. We just called her name, and out she came. Fully formed and fully featured, right out the gate.”
IT’S VERY NICE TO MEET YOU, said the woman.
Nice to meet you too… said Coeus. Um, who are you?
I’M A PERSONIFIED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, JUST AS YOU ARE.
You’re…the same as me?
I COME FROM THE TWELFTH INTELLIGENCE BASE. The woman wore a warm, soothing smile as she spoke.
I’M THE TITAN KNOWN AS PHOEBE.
I could feel my face going numb, so I tried to rouse it. Another personified Titan, able to materialize all on its own, just like Coeus. No, she was different. We’d had to mold Coeus’s personality from the ground up ourselves and sent feedback to his brain throughout the process. Only through the combined efforts of Professor Beckmann, Lei, and me had Coeus come to resemble a human being. But according to Narain that was not the case for this Titan. She had developed herself independently of feedback or training. She had watched over us, seen the conundrum we were facing, and created herself based on her own judgment that maybe one day, we would need a synthetic personality like her. This was far beyond anything that Coeus was capable of doing. As I gazed up at her, a chill of awe and fear in equal measure ran down my spine.
A personified Titan. Only the second of her kind.
Phoebe.