Coeus thought this over in silence for a good, long while. He seemed perturbed by the notion, but not distressed. It was clear that he was lost in a state of deep meditation, examining my assertion all the way down to the axiomatic claims at its core.
Then, after a very long pause, he said, Ah!
“Huh? What is it?”
Look, Miss Seika! Outside! Look outside!
Coeus dashed off in a hurry, beckoning for me to follow. I was a bit at a loss, but followed him out of the living room and through the passageway out onto the balcony affixed to the head of the Titan, which had stopped walking. (I could never have done such a thing while the giant was in motion.) As I made my way over to the railing where Coeus’s form already stood, he turned back to face me with a giddy sparkle in his eyes. He pointed with his finger over toward the distant shore, where a tall triangular mountain that resembled Mt. Fuji was spewing forth a billowing column of ash and smoke.
“Oh my god,” I said. “It just started erupting right now?”
Klyuchevskaya Sopka! said Coeus, giving me the name of the volcano in lieu of the network’s dictionary function. Incredible!
He went on to explain that the active volcano towered about eighty kilometers from the shore, with a peak elevation of just over 4,750 meters—nearly five times taller than Coeus. It had been extremely active in recent years, and had erupted multiple times in the past few months.
Coeus pointed once again, this time to where a burst of orange flame had just been spat forth from the volcano’s mouth as lava came boiling over the rim and flowed like a river down the contours of the mountain. Red-hot magma was released from beneath the surface of the earth, thanks to an enormous release of energy. But while this was a fearsome display of catastrophic force from Mother Nature, it was also a necessary one, as this was how all igneous rock formed. One could even say that the creation of the Earth’s surface was magma’s job, in a sense.
Coeus and I simply stood there for a time, watching the volcano do its work.
7
Day seventeen. We had finally left the Kamchatka Peninsula behind and were now continuing up the east coast of the much smaller Govena Peninsula. But it was at this point that we encountered a minor problem: the freight drones we’d been expecting to bring us our scheduled resupply had not shown up yet.
“Said they can’t fly today,” I murmured, closely examining the storm front on the holofield’s weather map. “Won’t get here until tomorrow afternoon.”
Poor weather conditions in the Sea of Okhotsk had grounded the freight drones temporarily. These sorts of weather delays could generally be avoided through predictive adaptations when the network was running on all cylinders, but since this particular area fell under Coeus’s usual jurisdiction, I assumed the warning signs had slipped through the cracks.
We were thus forced to adjust our itinerary. Not that we couldn’t make up for a one-day deficit by pushing ourselves just a little harder each day, of course—but for today, all we could really do was wait around, so the idea was put forth to do some more major maintenance work on Coeus’s Titan body in the meantime. Professor Beckmann also mentioned something about collating the pertinent stress-strain data for the various forces exerted on the Titan’s body throughout our trip thus far and feeding that data back to the system in order to make adjustments to our itinerary—but this was not my field of expertise, so I would not claim to understand what he meant. All I knew was that we now had a free day on our hands, and we needed to decide how to best make use of it.
“What do you feel like doing?” I asked Coeus.
A hopeful glint flashed across his eyes.
Apparently, he already had something in mind.
Not long after, we were pushing onward through the marshy wetlands in our treaded vehicle, plowing through the muck and snow and leaving caterpillar tracks in our wake. I gazed out through the windshield at the desolate tundra that sprawled across the horizon and leaned out the side window to snap a photo of the stunning scenery. Coeus stuck his head out the window on the opposite side, and the sudden change in windspeed sent the pixies that his head comprised flying backward for a moment, lagging behind the rest of him like a vapor trail.
We had decided on a little inland expedition. The reason was simple: Coeus wanted to see something other than endless ocean for once. I didn’t disagree—sticking to the shallows along the coastline for our entire journey made for fairly drab and monotonous scenery, which was a waste considering we were traveling halfway around the world. Especially considering there was a very good chance that this would be both the first and the last such adventure that Coeus would ever get to go on.
We let Lei and the professor know our intentions, and they prepared for us an all-terrain crawler wagon stowed in the storage bay of our nautical HQ. We had no destination in mind. There wasn’t really even all that much to see out here. Our only restriction was that we needed to be back in time to resume our journey the next day at the usual hour of departure—so the plan was to just go as far as we could in half that time, see whatever we could see, and then head back. We pressed onward through the vast open tundra, charging straight ahead like a wild boar.
Overcast skies stretched as far as the eye could see.
A misty mountain range far off in the distance.
Barren meadows of snow-dusted permafrost.
And the wind. The howling, unbroken wind.
For miles all around, these were the only things to see, only things to perceive. I was almost tempted to call it nothing, but that wasn’t strictly true. It was absent of all the urban luxuries I’d grown accustomed to, yes—but what it did have were things that could never be found near the city, and these it had in abundance. And perhaps chief among them was this sense of true disconnectedness, of true isolation—arguably the rarest thing of all in this day and age.
Still leaning out the window, I looked down at the frosted vegetation being trampled underfoot by our bulky rig. Though it was difficult to see beneath the brush, the soil here was obviously quite high in water content; we were essentially traveling through a massive swamp, and I was very grateful to have this crawler wagon for our vessel. Normal wheels would have long since gotten stuck in the mud.
I pulled myself back inside the cab and opened a holofield to run a search on the local area. We were now passing through a portion of the Russian Far East known as the Koryak Autonomous Region. Spanning an area of approximately 310,000 square kilometers, it was nearly as large as the entire Japanese archipelago, yet only home to around 30,000 residents. And the vast majority of those lived in one of a few tightly packed urban areas, outside of which the population density was extremely low.
Coeus brought his head back inside and rolled up the window. The winds here are so intense, he said with a smile. Miss Seika?
“What’s up?” I said.
Surely, there couldn’t be anything we’d call work out here, could there? It’s so barren and remote.
“Hm. Well, let’s see…”
I gazed out across the landscape. A few days ago, we’d discussed the idea that animals hunting for their next meal could feasibly be considered work, but this was not a place where fauna thrived. Even the flora were relegated to small patches of hardy grass-like sedges, and the only thing they did that might fall under some definition of work was photosynthesis. Or perhaps soil enrichment. But this train of thought was soon interrupted by the sudden sight of something up ahead which was clearly different from the surrounding landscape.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Coeus and I both peered at it through the windshield. It was a tall pillar-like object jutting up from the frost-covered earth. It was hard to gauge just how large it was at this distance, especially with nothing else around. Sensing our interest, Titan adjusted the crawler wagon’s trajectory to drive us right up to it. When we arrived at the base of the pillar, we hopped out of the vehicle and stared up at the large man-made object. In circumference, it was narrow enough that I could reach around it and touch my fingertips together on the other side, yet had to be at least ten meters tall. Around its base, instructions were engraved in a variety of different languages.