IV. JOURNEY
1
I SET MY LUGGAGE DOWN IN A CORNER of the newly constructed living room, which looked almost like an open-concept communal studio space. With its alabaster walls and lack of amenities, aside from a standalone kitchen island with built-in appliances in one corner, the room of roughly one hundred square meters was spartan. It was a blank canvas of a room that could be used for anything by anyone, because its design catered to nothing and no one. The only other standout feature was the cumbersome, clunky-looking chair that looked ripped straight out of a rocket ship’s cockpit, complete with rigid stabilizing crossbars designed to hold the occupant’s body in place. I furrowed my brow, wondering what kind of bumpy ride I’d signed myself up for.
It’s just in case of emergency, Coeus hastily explained in response to my skeptical expression. You won’t be sitting in it ordinarily, don’t worry.
“But there will be shaking, won’t there?”
An average vertical displacement of 11.76 meters up and down with each step, yes.
“Excellent, sounds fatal.” Twelve meters was about two to three storeys on a skyscraper—being forced to endure that kind of shaking for an extended period of time would be absolutely brutal on anyone.
It’ll be fine. Coeus looked up at the ceiling. The room’s shock absorbers should cancel out any shift in momentum incurred during travel, and its gyroscopic stabilizers will keep it level at a fixed orientation. Our trip will not be fatal, I promise.
I could only offer a sheepish smile, because this very dry and Titanesque explanation as to why I shouldn’t fear for my life did little to dispel my fears. He picked up on this, though, and was determined to set my mind at ease—I could almost see his processors going into overdrive to string together some words of reassurance from all the vocabulary in his massive lexicon.
Look, I’ll tread very lightly! Okay?
✦ ✦ ✦
Five days after our encounter with Phoebe, we were finally ready to put our ambitious plan into action. A plan that involved a kilometer-high Titan ambulating on two legs from its home at the Second Intelligence Base on Lake Mashu to the Twelfth Intelligence Base on the west coast of North America. A veritable tall tale.
The specific roadmap for the trip was conceived by Phoebe. Though the UNDP took credit for it on paper, it was easy to see that it had all been drafted up by an AI. I was reminded of Narain’s warning that humanity should never be allowed to get in the way of a job that needs doing. AIs had been far better than humans at determining the most efficient roadmap for any given journey even well before Titan came online, so it was simply irresponsible to give people the opportunity to muck with it. The route Phoebe had outlined was an elegantly simple one.
First, we would head east from Lake Mashu toward the Nemuro Strait. From there, we would cross over to Kunashir Island and then proceed northeast along the Kuril Islands toward the Kamchatka Peninsula. We would then head due north up the eastern coast of Russia, all the way to the Bering Strait, at which point we would cross over to Alaska. Once there, we would head south from Alaska along the North American western coast, until arriving at our final destination in San Francisco. We were taking a straight path along continental coastlines, sticking to the shoals and shallows as much as possible. This was the optimal route.
An inland route was not remotely realistic. A gigantic lug like Coeus could not travel overland without causing massive damage—not just to any urban areas that might fall in his path, but to undeveloped lands and nature preserves as well. Taking the straightest route across the Pacific was also too logistically difficult. There were no shipping vessels on earth large enough to carry Coeus over the ocean, and though he did propose the option of “swimming” to North America, the additional energy costs that would be incurred were too immense to be considered. Titans had not been designed with locomotion in mind—their typical “caloric intake” was only high enough to keep their brains functioning sufficiently to complete their designated tasks. This could be easily sustained with a combination of electricity produced by the Electrode and their bodies’ more “natural” energy, produced via the catabolic reactions of their artificial metabolism. This was hardly enough energy to sustain a full-body exercise such as swimming, and could prove deadly for Coeus should he reach the point of system failure in the open ocean.
With Coeus being a full kilometer tall, his legs were around four hundred meters long, and thus could easily reach the ocean floor of any coastal region along our path. It also offered the auxiliary benefit of utilizing buoyancy to lower the effective energy cost of each individual step, as was the ability to easily correspond with other project-affiliated staff members for support or resupplies from the shore at any time. It would also allow for a swift response in case of emergency. A segmented roadmap for the journey was quickly drafted, which would also serve as a daily travel itinerary for me and Coeus.
The total distance of the route from Lake Mashu to San Francisco was around eleven thousand kilometers. Meanwhile, Coeus could cover a distance of about four hundred and fifty meters per stride. Assuming he maintained this stride length the entire way, our destination was twenty-five thousand steps away. To a human, this number might not seem so large—walking several thousand steps a day was easily doable, even for someone with a sedentary lifestyle. But there were a few more considerations for a colossus like Coeus that made taking even a simple stroll into a Herculean effort.
First, there was the aspect of scale to consider, and how that affected the speed at which one could move. Elephants must take slow and lumbering steps, and ants take dozens of frenetic, fast-paced steps for every one the elephant could. If Coeus attempted to walk at the same speed humans do, it would be a disaster—assuming it wasn’t physically impossible to begin with. Even if we traveled at whatever walking speed was ideal for a creature his size, there were still major environmental issues to consider. We had to proceed with extreme caution when making our way along the coastline so as not to cause waves and tremors that could batter coastal communities.
Add to that the massive energy cost required to make the trip, and the idea became even more complicated. While obviously not nearly as costly as swimming would be, long-distance ambulation still required expending an enormous amount of energy. Even using all of the power the Electrode could produce in a given day, along with some additional refueling help from outside sources, we would still need to spend the better part of each day recharging the energy we’d consumed in preparation for the next—which meant we could only spend so much time in motion regardless of speed. Phoebe, having taken all of these various factors into consideration, determined that Coeus’s maximum distance traveled in a given day should be around two hundred and twenty kilometers. At a normal stride, this would only be about four hundred and eighty-eight steps, but after taking the additional environmental considerations into account, it would likely be closer to a thousand in order to proceed with the necessary level of caution.
In the end, it was decided that we would use eight hours for travel time each day, with the remaining sixteen spent at rest. In order to take a thousand steps over the course of eight hours, we’d have to move at a rate of about two per minute. While this would be a ludicrously sluggish pace for a human, it seemed pretty reasonable to me for one of Coeus’s gargantuan size. Our average walking speed would therefore be about twenty-seven kilometers per hour—about as fast as a road bike, which I thought pretty impressive for a supermassive skyscraper. The very fact that a Titan could move at all was extraordinary.
And so we would make our way around the Ring of Fire, aiming to arrive at our destination in exactly fifty days. There, Phoebe would be ready and waiting for us. She was currently preparing herself for the rendezvous, with the help of the staff at the Twelfth Intelligence Base, and Narain, who was currently on site, and no doubt taking every precaution to avoid the same catastrophe that happened with Coeus when he first rose from his cradle. This would be the first purposeful Titan “awakening,” done with prior consent and cooperation of both the network and humanity. There was no telling how successful this unprecedented procedure would be, but I could only have faith in Phoebe and Narain’s collective ability to get the job done in time—which was about the only thing the latter was good for, at any rate. I genuinely believed they would be ready for us when we arrived, so I was not going to let myself worry about it; I had my own work to do.