Well, Miss Seika, welcome to yesterday.
I smiled, nodding in emotional agreement.
A fond memory floated up into my mind. I was a child staying up until midnight for the very first time, eagerly watching the clock for the exact moment that today became tomorrow. The delight upon seeing the numbers actually switch over was indescribable; it felt like I’d just taken a whole adventure in a single instant, and all from the comfort of my bedroom.
Now that I was an adult, I had of course stayed up past midnight countless times, to the point that it didn’t faze me anymore, but Coeus had just undergone a similar experience for the very first time. I was extremely glad to be here and share that adventure with him.
We took a picture there in the living room, using the panoramic projection of the two islands as a backdrop. I had Coeus stand in front of Tomorrow Island, while I stood in front of Yesterday Island. Though I hadn’t originally meant anything symbolic by it, I did find this placement rather fitting after the fact. Humanity had enjoyed a pretty good run—but the future was for him.
10
Once we’d cleaned up after dinner, we sat and paged through some books on Greek mythology together. It wasn’t long before we found one that told tales of the twelve deities after whom the Titans had been named.
“The Golden Age,” I said, reading out the title of the chapter to Coeus with the intonation of a schoolteacher reading a storybook. “In the first age of mankind, under the rule of the Titan Cronus, men and gods lived in harmony with nature and each other. The world existed in a state of everlasting spring, and it was a time of peace—free of both sin and strife. The gods gave their blessings unto the earth, their fruits by nature ripened, without any need for the labor of man. Men’s lives were long, yet they never grew infirm, and found themselves content in death, with neither sorrow nor regret…”
As I continued reading aloud, I began to make some interesting connections in my head. This Golden Age sounded, in many ways, like the era of unprecedented prosperity we currently lived in. It was a dream world where humanity could enjoy the fruits of the Titans’ labor without ever lifting a finger. I assumed this was at least partially what the designers had in mind when they chose these names for the AIs, as the Titans had now lived up to their namesake, freeing humanity from virtually all forms of labor and bestowing upon us a Golden Age of our very own. A world in which we ate the ripened fruits of the AI-manufactured blessings, and could live long and retain our youth thanks to incredible developments in Planned Aging technology.
But as legend had it, this age of prosperity did not last for long. I stopped reading aloud and continued reading through the text in silence. Once the Golden Age had ended, the Silver Age began. The eternal spring had ended, and the world experienced the brutal heat of summer and harsh cold of winter for the very first time. Humanity had to learn how to farm in order to compensate for weak crops that now withered with the passing of seasons, and the changing climate forced them to build shelters to protect themselves from the elements. From then on, humanity had to work to eat, and to have a safe place to sleep at night.
This was mere mythology, of course, and the reverse of the way history had actually played out. We went from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural one and went from living in caves to building our own houses. But while the Golden Age of Greek mythology preceded the Silver Age of toil, our Golden Age had only come to pass after the conclusion of our Silver Age, as marked by the introduction of Titan. History had played out exactly backward, but as for what kind of era awaited us next, we could only sit and wonder.
Hey, what does it say about me? asked Coeus, leaning forward in his seat.
“About you? Oh, you mean the mythological Coeus?” I said.
He nodded. The network heard this request, and the holofield quickly scrolled ahead to the desired section of the book. I could tell from a single glance, though, that the section was quite short. This was something you saw fairly often in my personal field of research—generally it meant that there was not much information on the subject to begin with. We read through the passage together, with me tracing my finger back and forth along the lines as I read them aloud.
“The Titan known as Coeus was one of the twelve children of Uranus and Gaia. His name can be read as meaning either ‘intelligence’ or ‘inquisitiveness,’ depending on interpretation,” I said, cracking a little smile as I read. It seemed a fitting name for the boy sitting next to me, even if it was purely coincidental. “Like most of the Titans, there are few mentions of him throughout Greek mythology. He appears only in name on genealogical lists of major deities.”
The aforementioned genealogy then appeared on the holofield. It was a family tree of all the major deities in Greek mythology, from Uranus and Gaia on down. I was by no means an expert on Greek mythology, but I did recognize the names of a few gods, such as Zeus and Poseidon. According to the chart, Zeus even had children with a daughter of Coeus’s named Leto. I traced the line back further and found the name of the mother with whom Coeus had fathered Leto.
Phoebe.
Coeus and I looked at each other, then back at the holofield, which had already brought up the information we sought. Phoebe was another of the twelve Titans, her name meaning either “shining” or “prophetic wisdom.” She was Coeus’s sister, and also his consort.
“Looks like they gave birth to two goddesses, actually,” I said. “Leto and Asteria. Who, according to some sources, went on to have children of their own, apparently. Apollo, Hecate…”
Coeus and I looked at each other again, neither of us wanting to say what was on both of our minds. According to Narain, the Titan AIs had been assigned these nicknames simply as a means of differentiating them from one another. The fact that the second and twelfth AIs just so happened to be given the names Coeus and Phoebe respectively did not mean they were now obligated to marry and have children like the Titans of Greek mythology—obviously. Not that I had any idea how Titan marriage would even work, let alone reproduction. And even if it were possible, for the sake of argument, Coeus was still mentally and visually only about as mature as a boy in junior high—far too young to be thinking about marriage, and certainly not with a woman who looked even older than I was. It felt almost criminal to suggest, and the mere thought of someone my age being with someone so much younger nauseated me. While it was true that some people chose to undergo aging adjustment procedures in order to keep their youthful appearances in perpetuity, there was a hard line between that and a literal child. Not that Coeus is a literal child, but still. I looked over at him—his wordless expression had changed into one of vague anxiety.
Um, he said, furrowing his brow. Am I going to have to marry her?
“No, of course not,” I said. “Marriage isn’t the sort of thing anyone can force on you, I wouldn’t think. And it’s just a silly societal construct anyway. Not everyone wants to get hitched, and that’s totally fine..”
Okay, good.
I could understand his fear and nervousness, irrational though it was—if someone had told me I had to get married when I was in junior high, I would have reacted similarly. Personally, I’d always been far more put off by the additional constraints and the thought of being “tied down” to another person and their needs than I was enticed by the idea of lifelong companionship. I hated the idea of committing to something and not being able to change my mind without serious repercussions. Still to this day, I felt no desire to settle down and start a family—and perhaps in the eyes of some traditionalists, that meant I was still just as much of a child as Coeus was from a maturity standpoint.
“Besides, you and Phoebe aren’t even from the same generation,” I said in an attempt to reassure him, reading the data that had been pulled up on the holofield. Being only the second AI in the network, Coeus had been in operation for over a century now. And since the other intelligence bases were only constructed gradually, it wasn’t for another thirty-five years that Phoebe was brought on to the network. “So I’m pretty sure that her eventually becoming your wife wasn’t in the original plan… At least, I hope not.”