I sipped some of the broth, savoring the slightly painful sensation of the hot liquid cascading down my throat. I had it good; the food was warm, and so was the cab. Yet just on the other side of the window pane, the temperature was below freezing, and howling winds swept across the dark and desolate tundra. In this harsh winter storm, the stillness of the starry sky overhead felt entirely out of place—it looked like the dome of a planetarium. I finished my bowl and set it aside. With dinner out of the way, I settled in for the quiet, empty hours of the night.
“So I was thinking,” I said.
Yes?
“About that foundation stake we saw earlier… When I first laid eyes on it, and you explained to me what it was, I couldn’t help but feel almost sorry for the thing. Just churning out electricity and water in perpetuity, even with the distinct possibility that no one will ever make use of it. And I guess that made me start having second thoughts as to whether we could still call something ‘work’ if it served no purpose.”
Coeus’s gaze told me he was listening intently. I tried to explain it as best I could.
“But then we met Yakov and his family,” I went on, “and learned that his son actually was making regular use of the foundation stake. And I just remember thinking ‘Ugh, what a relief. It wasn’t just doing all that work for nothing.’ I know it doesn’t make much sense for me to feel so comforted by that knowledge.”
I know what you mean, Coeus said adamantly. I felt the same, honestly. I was glad to learn that the stake did not labor in vain.
“Yeah, exactly. And then it just kind of hit me after the fact, like some sort of epiphany,” I said, trying as hard as I could to convert my internal logic into words. “And I know this’ll probably sound a bit silly and abstract, especially considering it’s an arbitrary condition I thought up based purely on me feeling sorry for an inanimate object, but what if we were to conclude, at least tentatively, that work which provides something to someone else is more ‘valid,’ for lack of a better word, than work which does not?
“What if we were to assume,” I continued, following this train of logic to a conclusion I couldn’t nearly justify yet, “that work is something that can never truly be done in isolation?”
Coeus thought on this suggestion for a moment.
We went on to have a bit of a freeform debate on the subject for a while. Partway through, I reclined my seat to make myself comfortable, but we continued conversing until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. Time felt slow and placid out here, compared to my hectic life in Tokyo or at the intelligence base. And though only a single pane of glass separated me from the unforgiving forces of nature, I found myself strangely at ease—overcome by an inexplicable sense of contentment that wrapped me up like a warm blanket as I drifted effortlessly off to sleep.
The next morning, we returned to where Coeus had idled the day before. The required maintenance now concluded, we resumed our titanic trek. We cooked up the rest of the reindeer meat for dinner that evening, and Coeus seemed to like it—but for me, it didn’t taste nearly as satisfying as it had the night before, out there surrounded by the elements. I kept this thought to myself.
8
“Down with Titan!”
Such was the rallying cry that rang out through the urban streets. A massive crowd had formed, spilling off the sidewalks and filling the entire roadway. They shook the iron fencing as if attempting to tear it down, for behind it stood the target of their ire: a monumental skyscraper flanked by dozens of high-flying national flags. The United Nations Headquarters was under siege by anti-Titan protestors, who had flocked to New York City’s First Avenue en masse in order to give the powers that be a piece of their minds. Their demands were chanted, ranted, and held aloft on banners and picket signs.
Teach that Second Titan who’s boss!
UNDP: Clean Up Your Mess!
Abolish the Titan network! Children are the future!
Titan will crush humanity!
Nearby, traffic control phalanges were attempting to guide cars through the congestion caused by the protest, further angering the protestors. Some took the opportunity to start vandalizing the phalanges in whatever ways they could. I watched them kick one over and bash it with a metal trash can until it could no longer move. Then, when a maintenance phalange showed up to assist, the protestors destroyed that one in a similar fashion. Just when I thought I couldn’t stand to watch any more, the video ended. The window closed, and I was greeted by Narain’s sour countenance one again.
“So as you can see,” he said, “negative reactions among the general populace have been relatively minor.”
“You call that minor?” I said.
“That last clip was of a fringe radical faction. Not at all representative of the public opinion, and that level of backlash could never affect the project as a whole.”
“They were talking about wanting to abolish the network entirely… Is that even possible? Like, theoretically?”
“Sure, you could pull the plug if you wanted to. If you were prepared to let a few hundred million people die in the process, while simultaneously setting our entire society back a couple centuries or more.”
So the answer was no, then. No one would allow that to happen, because no sane person would be ready to accept such repercussions. Why, most of them wouldn’t even be okay with the most mundane of the resulting consequences; those protestors who destroyed those phalanges had no intention of cleaning up the scrap heap they’d just created. If Titan were abolished completely, there’d be no one to pick up after them. They were just letting their emotions run wild in the heat of the moment, incapable of thinking even two seconds ahead into the future. I couldn’t let Coeus see this video; this repulsive display from the people he’d spent his entire life working to benefit was not for his eyes to see.
“How’s Phoebe?” I asked. This was a sitrep transmission—the goal of which was to give each other updates on our respective Titans.
“Still in the process of building her exterior,” said Narain, tapping away at his holofield. “Also working on a gradual evacuation plan to clear out the area surrounding the Twelfth Intelligence Base in preparation for the meeting.”
“You really think that’ll be necessary?”
“Better safe than sorry. Never had a Titan go autonomous before, so there’s no precedent for what might happen when two autonomous Titans directly interface with one another. Can’t even run a simulation in advance. Phoebe herself said we need to evacuate them to a temporary buffer zone just in case… Not that there’s any guarantee the buffer zone will be much safer for ’em, I guess,” Narain said with a derisive laugh.
This was a morbid joke, to be sure, but for once Narain’s black humor didn’t rub me the wrong way, mainly because I knew he’d been running himself ragged to make sure that the worst-case scenarios didn’t become worst-case realities. Dark circles ringed his eyes.
“You guys understaffed over there?” I asked, and Narain snorted.
“Exact opposite,” he said. “Too many cooks in the kitchen, and it’s making it a hell of a lot harder to get any work done. None of us would have to lift a finger if we could all just agree to trust Phoebe’s judgment, but here we are, I suppose. Can’t rely upon the all-knowing brain, so now we’ve got to do everything ourselves. Those UNDP suits can’t stand the thought of anyone but them getting the final say, which means we’ve now got to make all sorts of useless reports and whatnot to them at every turn. And right now, my job is to make sure none of their bureaucratic bullshit reaches Phoebe’s ears. She’s got more important things to worry about.”
“Wow, that sounds like a royal pain…”
“Eh. It’s fine, really. Just how work goes sometimes.”
He shrugged it off as though he genuinely couldn’t care less, annoyed though he was. I still couldn’t get a solid read on Narain—this same man who’d expressly ordered us to traumatize Coeus to force him into doing work was now going out of his way to protect Phoebe. These two sides of him seemed completely at odds with one another. I could only wonder what his idea of work was.
“Do you and Phoebe ever talk at all?” I asked, genuinely curious if he’d made any attempt to establish a kind of rapport with her like I had with Coeus. And if so, what on earth did they talk about?