“Yeah, we talk sometimes. Just about the project and whatnot,” he replied bluntly. This was about the answer I’d expected. “Guess we talked about family stuff one time.”
“Family stuff?” I said, parroting his words reflexively. Now this I did not anticipate. “As in, you talked to her about your family?”
“Yes, Naisho. In case you forgot, AIs don’t generally have families. You got a screw loose or something?”
“Right, dumb question. Sorry…”
Obviously, there had to be someone out there related to Narain. I could certainly picture him at some family gathering with parents and siblings, but I did find it hard to imagine him with a spouse and kids at home. Not that it would have been inherently strange for him to be married, as a man in his forties—but he and I had been working nonstop together for more than three months now, without ever going back to our respective homes. Surely he couldn’t have a family, not without being a complete and utter absentee parent. Narain let out an exasperated sigh.
“My wife took my daughter in the divorce,” he said matter-of-factly.
Now the ball was in my court—but I had no idea how I was meant to respond to this jarring revelation. Narain didn’t seem to care, though, as he went on:
“Got dinged as a ‘negligent father,’ if you must know. Titan saw my performance at home and apparently decided I was too incompetent to be involved in my own child’s upbringing. The network’s judgments are binding in this regard, even superseding our individual rights. Got slapped with the divorce notice seven years ago,” he said, with the same stone-cold expression and the same monotone voice as always. “Haven’t seen either of ’em since.”
9
The living room was draped in an all-encompassing firmamental holofield. The panorama effect was quite impressive, even if all we could see were ash-gray skies and the open ocean.
Day twenty-seven. We had finally reached the easternmost point of the Eurasian continent the day before, and today, we were crossing over into North America via the Bering Strait, a hundred-kilometer stretch of ocean separating the Russian Chukchi Peninsula from Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, where the Arctic met the Pacific. Though it had long served as the border between Russia and the United States of America, and thus as a constant focal point of tension during times of war back when wars still existed, now the peninsulas on either side had been designated as public lands, with all human-made installations having been stripped away. In the present day, they were effectively vast nature reserves.
I surveyed the vicinity via the panoramic holofield. I could see ice floes drifting here and there across the seas surrounding Coeus’s feet, readily splitting apart to clear a path for him as he walked straight through. The water here wasn’t even fifty meters deep, which for Coeus was like standing ankle-deep at the edge of a beach.
I brought my gaze back to the center of the room. Coeus was sitting on one of the living room sofas, examining the map on his own personal holofield. This was a rather pointless thing for him to do—deliberately projecting information stored on his own internal databases just so his avatar could “look” at it. He only did it for my benefit, so that I as his companion could understand what the conscious personified portion of his brain was currently working on. A sort of user interface, if you will.
By displaying to me that he was looking at a map, I could immediately infer that he was making some sort of calculations regarding our current course or progress though the amount of information he was processing was far greater than, say, a hiker casually checking their map every so often to reassess their progress. For each every step, he was taking in an enormous amount of data via his external sensors and running dozens of parallel simulations, considering the stability of his footing on the seafloor, how to minimize the damage caused to the local underwater ecosystem, and the permissible height of resulting waves from each step as it affected coastal communities. He was making an effort to tread as lightly as possible.
It was impossible to be perfect in that regard, though—because the migration plan necessitated taking the shallowest route possible, this required us to walk along the coast for any portion of the trip that wasn’t passing directly over the ocean from one landmass to another. And because many of the world’s larger cities were situated on the coast, there was simply no way to avoid them being at least somewhat impacted by this behemoth passerby. But Coeus himself was not content to leave it at this—he did not shrug this off as an acceptable casualty. Even though his mind was now free from the network that had forced him to work his entire life for humanity’s sake, he was still vehemently opposed to the idea of causing us inconvenience. Hence his minute examination of every aspect of the ebb and flow of the tides and ocean currents with each and every step, so as to minimize impact on the local communities. This wasn’t nearly as much of a concern here, in the middle of the Bering Strait, yet he stuck with his methodology—carefully calculating how to leave as much of the seabed biomes intact as possible. When Coeus walked, he considered every step far more thoroughly than we could ever imagine, all for the sake of humanity, and preserving our world.
But that world could often be cruel to him. And not every decision the Titans made in humanity’s best interest was viewed that way by the ones directly affected.
I thought of Narain—a man who’d been separated from his family by social mandate. Now, I generally trusted the network’s judgment; if the Titans had deemed him unfit to be a father, I was sure he’d given them more than enough cause to justify that designation. And just from my own personal experience, the man did seem to have an unhealthy fixation on work and doing whatever it took to “get the job done.” I could see how being consumed by one’s work like that for an extended period of time could leave someone no room to establish a healthy home life. As someone who grew up raised by extremely loving parents, neither of whom were employed, I couldn’t even imagine what it would be like having an absentee father—losing a parent due to a horrible accident, yes, but having one never be at home purely due to work-related reasons was unthinkable.
But what was Narain to do? Simply quit his job? Then someone else would have had to be brought in to replace him, thereby sacrificing their home life in order to do the work that needed to be done for the rest of us. Perhaps some people would find that acceptable, but for as long as there were still jobs that could only be done by humans, there would always be someone forced to endure hardship for the sake of us all.
I looked up at Coeus once more.
Did Narain despise Titan for what it had done to him?
I wondered.
Look, Miss Seika, said Coeus. Islands.
I was immediately jolted back to reality. I looked in the direction he was pointing, where indeed a pair of tiny islands lay straight ahead of us. The dictionary function brought up a map on my holofield. These twin islands were situated right in the center of the Bering Strait.
“The Diomede Islands, huh…” I said aloud.
Big Diomede and Little Diomede.
“Fitting.”
The big one’s sometimes called Tomorrow Island, and the little one’s Yesterday Island.
I looked back at the map. “Oh, right,” I said. “The International Date Line.”
Coeus nodded, grinning. I could see it right there on the map—the International Date Line ran straight between the two islands. If one were to paddle their way over from the big island to the smaller one, they could technically “go back in time,” albeit only by a single day. No actual time travel was involved, of course, but it was an amusing thought.
Coeus kept walking, coming up right alongside the pair of islands. We passed by Big Diomede and came to a stop in the four-kilometer gap between the two land masses. We looked down at the choppy waves; there was not literally a line in the water separating the islands, but Coeus looked downright giddy with anticipation regardless.
One more step, and we’ll have officially crossed over, he said.
Though I could only see his face in profile, he was clearly beaming with delight. Then, after taking a single step forward—much smaller than our usual strides, I noticed—he turned to face me, grinning from ear to ear.