I’d known a Titan child for some time now. But she was an adult.
Now planted firmly atop her vessel, Phoebe’s fingertips began to glow once more. She gripped the handle of this new object she was creating as it came into being in midair, the layers of photopolymer building on top of one another as it stretched into a long staff nearly as tall as she was. But then I saw it widen to the width of a paddle on one end, and realized that Phoebe had created for herself a massive oar. With a soft and dainty elegance, she dipped the wide end down into the bay, but the speed with which she propelled herself forward when she actually began to row was anything but dainty.
“Holy shit,” I murmured, genuinely in disbelief. This seemed to defy all the laws of physics that had been instilled in me since birth, both in the classroom and through my own lived experiences. Surely there was an explanation for it that made sense regardless of a system’s scale, which Phoebe no doubt understood even though I most certainly didn’t. But that didn’t make it seem any less like witchcraft from where I sat.
“Let’s follow her, shall we?” said the professor, stepping on the gas. Flustered, I rolled up my window as fast as I could and gripped the interior grab handles for dear life once more. We raced after the Titan gondolier, heading straight toward the heart of downtown San Francisco.
12
Up ahead on the highway, we saw an emergency inspection checkpoint where a wall of examination phalanges had been dispatched to check every oncoming car. But the professor was undeterred, and even sped up so that we could plow right through. I let out a girlish squeal in fright as he rammed straight into one of the security phalanges, letting it roll up the hood and over the roof of the car before falling onto the pavement behind us. The impact made a huge crack across the windshield; I couldn’t believe there’d ever been an era when glass was so brittle, even if this was a car from a good 200 years ago. You might as well entrust your life to a sheet of paper.
“Don’t think we’ll be able to pull off another maneuver like that,” the professor murmured. He was right. Knowing the network’s responsive capabilities, it was unlikely that they’d make the mistake of using phalanges that could be easily plowed through twice. It would learn from our illegal and unusual means and prepare the perfect countermeasure for next time. “Let’s head down below.”
The professor jerked the wheel to one side, taking the next off-ramp.
“Wait, but won’t that take us directly into downtown?” I asked both the professor and Lei. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Either end of the spectrum works to our advantage, honestly,” said Lei, still tapping away at his holofield. “We’re about as safe in heavily congested areas as we’d be in totally abandoned ones. There’ll be more agents downtown, sure, but a whole lot more people, too. And you know how the network feels about hurting other humans. We can just blend into the crowds and use ’em like meat shields if we gotta.”
“Meat shields? You can’t be serious…” I groaned. I knew he was only being hyperbolic, of course, and the idea of using the crowd density to our advantage was a pretty good one. But I’d prefer to avoid dragging innocent bystanders into the crossfire if at all possible.
“I mean, unless you can think of somewhere else we can go where there won’t be agents or humans. ‘Cause that’s the only other way we can really feel safe.”
“What, so like an undeveloped region? Near San Francisco? Fat chance…”
About the only places I could think of where there’d be no agent titans to speak of were nature reserves and parts of the world that had yet to be developed by the network. But considering that pioneering phalanges slowly worked outward from major urban areas in a concentric manner, one would have to get pretty far from the city to reach a sufficiently secluded location that met that description. And this was downtown San Francisco—one of the most prominent cities in the entire world, and home of the Twelfth Intelligence Base, no less. We were not going to find an unpopulated area anywhere close.
We sped down the offramp and onto a five-lane street, weaving our way recklessly through the other cars on the roadway, all of which were traveling at much more reasonable speeds. I gripped the grab handles once again. Less than two minutes later, we were driving down Powell Street through downtown proper, past jam-packed blocks of clustered high-rises. But just as we were approaching the edge of Union Square, Professor Beckmann slammed on the brakes.
“Looks like this is as far as we go,” he said. “You’ll be faster on foot from this point onward.”
I climbed out of the vehicle, pleased simply to be alive, and Narain and Lei were soon to follow. But the professor remained static in the driver’s seat.
“I think I’ll go drive around town a bit longer,” he said.
“Professor?” I said.
“Haven’t had a drive this enjoyable in quite some time, and I’m quite content to keep doing so. Though I assume it’ll get trickier the longer I manage to elude their security measures.”
It took me longer than I cared to admit to realize what the plan here was. We were to split up so that the professor could create a diversion and draw away some of the network’s attention—and since a reckless driver speeding down pedestrian streets posed far more of a threat to human lives than we did, there was a good chance we’d be seen as lower priority by comparison, and we needed every advantage we could get.
“But you’ll be arrested,” I said, stating the obvious.
“Yes, and?” the professor said with a smile. “I’ll be apprehended and given a lawful hearing, but that’s about it. Luckily for us, the network respects our human rights, even when we don’t give its agents the same courtesy. You can rest assured that they will do me no harm. For an omnipotent ruling body, they’re quite gentle, really. We could do a hell of a lot worse.”
He was absolutely right. I knew better than most how much the Titans truly and unconditionally loved humanity, even if that love had been hard-coded into them by our predecessors.
“Though I would like to avoid a long prison sentence, if at all possible,” he added. “I hope Coeus will be happy to assist in that regard once all is said and done.”
“He will,” I said. “I promise.”
“Good. Then let me just offer you one final bit of wisdom, Dr. Naisho. Because it’s something most people go their entire lives without ever knowing,” said the professor, placing his hands back on the steering wheel and holding it tight. “There’s not a sensation in the world quite as exhilarating as the rush of adrenaline from putting the pedal to the metal. I highly recommend it.”
And with that, the professor took off like a speeding bullet, rebounding like a pinball against several other cars on the street to deliberately cause a commotion as he drove away. The shrieks of nearby pedestrians rose and then fell gradually like a doppler effect, the wavefront of outrage and horror becoming less and less audible the further away the red car went.
“We’ve got to run. Follow me,” said Narain, taking off at a sprint. Lei and I chased after him as best we could through a sea of criss-crossing zoomboards.