This reassurance seemed to lift Coeus’s spirits a bit, and I was glad I could help set his mind at ease. I could understand the temptation to see the parallels between the Titan AIs and the Titans of Greek mythology and try to find some correlation or causality between the two groups, but it was ultimately a pointless exercise. The vast majority of such coincidences in this world had little rhyme or reason to them, so I tried not to think too hard about it as I read the final line of the Coeus and Phoebe section of the mythology book we’d originally been looking at.
“The gods and goddesses born of these two Titans and their children would go on to grant untold wisdom and prosperity unto mankind.”
11
We had crossed the Bering Strait to arrive in North America, and were now perambulating south down the coast of Alaska. With the mouth of the winding Yukon River at our side, we passed quietly by a number of vast, pristine nature reserves, which neither human hands nor pioneering titans were permitted to touch.
Day thirty-three. When we arrived at the small port of Goodnews Bay for our next scheduled stop, we found a giant tanker waiting for us. I donned my overcoast and headed out onto the deck of the ship. Over the edge of the frigid, windswept foredeck, I could see only an endless expanse of the deepest blue, with Coeus standing like a towering sentinel off to one side. Though the massive tanker was over five hundred meters long, it still paled in comparison to Coeus—though at over half his height in length, it could have made for a very extravagant radio-controlled bathtub toy for him, I suppose. If it were a regular-sized vessel, though, it probably would have looked more like a little leaf that happened to float by his ankles.
Scores of workforce phalanges were scurrying busily around the deck. The uncrewed tanker had been navigated all the way up to meet us in Alaska by Titan itself. I could see some patches of rust on the bodies of the phalanges out on the deck, their outdoor duties having exposed them to the briny breeze for years without repair. In the inner city, such phalanges would be immediately replaced with new models simply as a matter of keeping up appearances, but I assumed the network found some amount of visual imperfection permissible in industries or parts of the world that mortal eyes would rarely see.
Scanning the deck, I spotted a single human being standing amidst the mechanized workforce. Lei was working away on something or other, a series of different holofields opened all around him. When he noticed me approaching him, he pointed one finger down at the floor of the deck.
“Got a delivery for you from Silicon Valley,” he said.
“Yay,” I said unenthusiastically. “What is it?”
“Whole tanker full of photopolymer, apparently.”
“Surely they wouldn’t call me down here just for that.”
We already received scheduled resupply shipments of photopolymer, just as we got fresh food deliveries. We needed it to combat the regular wear and tear Coeus’s exoskeleton accumulated while traveling, and many of the phalanges tagging along for the journey on our nautical HQ needed it to perform their basic functions too. We would be in deep trouble should our supply ever run dry—which was why we had more delivered every day.
“Well, yeah. It ain’t the usual stuff,” said Lei, opening yet another holofield to show me some sort of document littered with chemical formulas. “Seems to have a totally different molecular composition than the goop used for basic construction. Like, for instance, it doesn’t just have light-sensitive particles inside it—it’s also got some extra goodies mixed in that allow for electron beam reactivity and even induction plasma technology. Got a lot of compound-containing substances in there too… It’s like a friggin’ hodgepodge of all sorts of raw materials.”
“So what are you telling me?” I asked.
“Well, uh… I guess in theory you could use it to make much more complex things than you could make with standard photopolymer. Even super specialized technologies with all sorts of different parts. But that’s only if you could figure out how to use it.”
“You don’t think we could?”
“Not sure, honestly,” he said, scratching head with a confused look on his face. “Like, you’d usually want a separate tank for each of these different materials to keep ’em separated, right? Then you’d just squirt ’em out and mix ’em together as necessary for whatever application. Kinda like how you need different tubes for each basic color of paint, y’know? Gotta dispense the right amount of each color, then mix ’em together on your palette—but if you just dumped out every color into a bucket and then stirred it around, you’d just have a giant waste of paint. But that’s exactly what we’re looking at here—all the individual components are mixed together from the start in one undifferentiated gray slurry.”
“Yeah, how would you even hypothetically use something like that?”
“Well, if you wanted to paint with blue, I guess you’d have to learn how to extract just the blue from the gray.”
“Sounds pretty absurd…”
“Definitely not the kind of art supplies us humans could ever work with,” said Lei. But we both knew somebody that could. “Speaking of which, it came with a message for you to give to Coeus.”
Lei pulled up another new holofield featuring a single line of text addressed to Coeus, with Phoebe’s signature attached: PLEASE TEACH YOURSELF HOW TO USE THIS.
12
The air in the living room was completely still. It had always been rather tranquil, but right now, there was nary a sound. It was an almost oppressive silence, like I was sitting underwater at the bottom of a deep pool—and only the steam from the teacup on the counter in front of me daring to rise toward the surface.
Twisting my neck slowly to preserve the silence, I looked over to the center of the room, where Coeus sat with his legs crossed on the ground and a printing phalange by his side—his loom, his paintbrush for making anything with photopolymer. He stared intently at the tip of the dispensing nozzle, as he had been for over an hour now.
He was practicing.
Earlier, before he became too focused to even respond when I called out to him, he’d explained to me that although it didn’t appear that anything was being dispensed from the nozzle, it was in fact releasing a tiny amount of material on the molecular level. He was attempting to work with the new material that Phoebe had provided—the amalgamated slurry of different specialized ingredients. The mixture of every paint color under the sun. I asked him early on what he was going to try to make with it, and after thinking it over a moment, he simply said I don’t know. Maybe a semiconductor or something. He then went on to try to explain to me something about nanoribbons and whatnot, but that all went straight over my head. However, I did obviously know that semiconductors were a type of miniature electrical component, and if one could be made with the same ease and rapidity as other photopolymer creations, that would be an impressive feat indeed.
Not that Titan didn’t already manufacture all of the world’s electronics, of course. But those could only be made by highly specialized phalanges designed for assembling such components, in highly specialized facilities using highly specialized materials. You needed a very controlled work environment with a vast array of precision equipment to even begin to create something so complex. It was far more than your average printing phalange could do with only a single material and a dispensing nozzle—yet that was precisely what Coeus was currently trying to do.
I tried to imagine a future in which this new technology became widespread, implemented all around the world. A future in which even the tiniest, most complicated systems could be printed right there on the spot with the same level of ease as printing a house or a road in the present day. If printing phalanges could be used to produce even technologies that had required specialized factories in the past, we would hardly even have to worry about the logistics of shipping non-perishable goods from one place to another anymore. We could print out all the latest technologies for ourselves right in our own homes. It was a future that sounded almost too good to be true—yet it was one Titan seemed prepared to bring about.