V. RENDEZVOUS
1
THE CAR BARRELED DOWN the straightaway at over 150 kilometers per hour. Out the window, the flat urban blocks rushed past beneath overcast skies. The buildings here were all five storeys tall at most, but sprawled horizontally. I found myself thinking that it did not seem like a very convenient place to get around in, even by car—but then recalled belatedly that this part of the city had fallen almost completely out of use anyway.
Silicon Valley, on the south side of the San Francisco Bay.
From the latter half of the 20th century through the first part of the 21st, as computer and network systems technologies saw rapid growth, so too did the semiconductor and IT industries, many of whom gathered here to lay down their roots, in this valley named for the most critical element in any electronic circuit: silicon. The region reached its peak in prosperity toward the midpoint of the 21st century, when a team of world-class scientists first conceived the original technical design documents for the Titan AI network somewhere among these hallowed city blocks. This was, at the time, the single greatest achievement of humanity’s cumulative work here on Earth, and as such garnered a new honorary name for the region: The Land Where Gods Toil.
Now, about a century and a half later, Titan’s broad arms had stretched across the globe, rendering the old working economy obsolete. And with the abolition of industry came a diaspora of humans from Silicon Valley, as their hands and minds were no longer needed. The area now stood as a city-sized monument to the great works of yesteryear. A ghost town of facilities and corporations that were once teeming with people, yet were now little more than abandoned historical castles—preserved in their original form only to give us a basic idea of the trying times that once were.
I gazed out at the passing scenery, and my holofield followed along with my line of sight, highlighting individual buildings and displaying archival information about the companies that once used them in the region’s heyday. I hadn’t heard of “Facebook” but I did recognize the name “Googleplex.” I vaguely recalled the facility playing some sort of role in the development of the Titan format in collaboration with the UNDP. I saw the names of several other defunct corporate entities fly by that I was fairly certain were somehow involved with Titan at the time of its introduction. Thanks to their long years’ toil, humanity had now been freed from the shackles of work altogether. I wondered how the people who hadn’t lived to see the dawn of the modern era might feel to see their old workplaces being maintained purely as a tourist attraction.
We took a left turn just past a large building labeled “Yahoo!” and took a small downhill ramp into a tunnel that brought us right up to a large gate leading deeper underground. The double doors of the gate each had a number upon them, and together they read 12.
2
The zoomboard carried me silently down the empty corridor. The interior of the Twelfth Intelligence Base was virtually identical to that of the Second. Most facilities designed for human use were decorated with regional flairs and ornamentation that the average local might enjoy, but apparently the network saw such variations as needless luxuries in places that were only used by a small handful of employed individuals.
After continuing down the light gray corridor for quite some time, I came to a more open central area, seemingly designed as a gathering space for meetings and the like. In the middle of the room, I spied a dark silhouette that stood out like an ink blot from its surroundings. And as the zoomboard brought me closer, it only grew darker still—until I saw that it was Narain, wearing the same all-black suit he’d worn the first day I met him.
“Sit down,” he said sourly.
“The operation will begin at 11:30 sharp,” Narain explained in a synthetic tone of voice. “From there, Phoebe will take five minutes thirty seconds to emerge from her shell, after which she’ll immediately proceed to the offshore rendezvous point where Coeus will be ready and waiting.”
The briefing for the big event tomorrow was moving right along. It was just me and Narain. Professor Beckmann and Lei had already gone off to take care of more pressing advance preparations, so they would be given the briefing at a later time.
“The meeting will take place on the seaward side of the Golden Gate strait, at a point twelve kilometers out from the mouth of the bay. This will make it fifty-five kilometers from Phoebe’s point of departure, and we’ve allocated twenty minutes into the schedule for her to make her way there.”
“You really think that’ll be enough?” I asked—perhaps a bit presumptuously, since they’d surely done their calculations right, but given that I had more firsthand experience than anyone when it came to how long it took for a Titan to move from point A to point B, I felt the need to double check. For Coeus, I would want at least a full hour allotted to travel the one hundred and twenty steps that would cover a distance of fifty-five kilometers.
“She’ll be traveling through the bay for the most part, not the open ocean. Shouldn’t be a problem,” he said bluntly, signaling that he would not be accepting further questions.
I checked the map on my holofield again. The entire perimeter of the San Francisco Bay was densely packed with residential and collection areas. It would require an extremely cautious gait for the waves produced by a Titan’s footfalls to not wreak havoc on all that coastline.
“That logic seems totally backward, but okay,” I said. “Something tells me you don’t plan to elaborate any further.”
“The details are being shared on a need-to-know basis, and you don’t need to know,” he said.
“Yeah, great. Some briefing this turned out to be…”
“You’re being briefed on information that’s pertinent to you. You will not be briefed on anything that isn’t. We’ve now advanced to the stage of the project where everything will be taken care of on our end. The main purpose of this briefing was to convey that objective fact to you, and make sure you knew your place as things currently stand.”
“I beg your pardon?” I spat back.
Narain was utterly unfazed. “Just so we’re crystal clear: you will not be permitted to accompany Coeus to the rendezvous tomorrow in any capacity.”
“Yes, I get that. You don’t have to remind me.”
This had already been decided well before our arrival in San Francisco via negotiations between the migration team and the team here at the Twelfth Intelligence Base—and I was fine with that. Coeus and I had come to the same decision ourselves well before that. There was no telling what might happen during this meeting between Coeus and Phoebe. It was uncharted territory for the Titans themselves just as much as it was for humanity. There was a decent chance it might be both the first and last such experiment to ever be conducted, depending on the outcome. It was imperative that we removed as many unknown variables as we could.
Coeus and Phoebe needed to be able to freely use the full extent of their mental capacity on this meeting of the minds, without any restraints whatsoever. If I were riding along with Coeus in the living room when the meeting began, he’d effectively be doing all of whatever was going to transpire while also balancing a plate atop his head the entire time. And because Titans were programmed to always put humanity’s comfort and safety first and foremost, it was entirely possible that he wouldn’t be able to participate in the meeting as well as he could for fear of causing me harm. It only made sense for me to stay behind and watch the rendezvous from the shore. I believed I already “knew my place” quite well in that respect.