VI. WORK
1
EVER FURTHER WE DESCENDED into the briny deep—a bottomless abyss, darker even than the darkest of nights, yet night I knew it was not. We drifted down to deepest fathoms, where no ray of sunlight could ever reach.
Coeus’s head was still only at a depth of about half a kilometer from the surface, so as of now we were still technically in the “twilight zone”—a term the network’s dictionary kindly educated me on—where a tiny amount of incidental light could still reach. But as far as my eyes were concerned, as I looked out from my balcony through the new pressure-resistant dome that encased it, there was nothing but darkness all around.
I did occasionally catch a fleeting glimpse of life drifting by—creatures of the deep that Titan named for me one by one as they passed. Sladen’s hatchetfish, the tapertail, the helmet jellyfish. But these sightings were few and far between, and the tranquil passersby faded back into the abyss just as quickly as they emerged. After enjoying this surreal, otherworldly view for a time, I headed back into the living room, where I found Coeus waiting for me.
He was seated on his usual spot, the sofa designated to him from the first day we met. When I walked over to join him, his recent growth spurt became all the more apparent. Yet despite his dramatic height increase, I felt there was still an immutable hint of boyish youth in his facial features, though perhaps this was only wishful thinking on my part. Was this how a parent felt, watching their child go off to join the world? I’d watched this fragile boy mature into a man, and now he was ready to stand on his own two feet—but maybe I wasn’t ready for him to be done growing up just yet.
I took my seat on the other sofa, sitting adjacent to him at a ninety degree angle. My usual spot. I could plainly see the gills that now adorned his neck—the final parting gift from his mermaid bride. Phoebe had given him one last guidepost to lead him on his way, a tattered map to tell him where he should go from here. And now he and I were following her directions, delving deep toward the bottom of the sea.
Shortly after the meeting concluded, Coeus set about reinforcing his exoskeleton to withstand even the immense pressure levels felt on the ocean floor, and redesigned the rest of his body for nautical applications. This was no trouble for him as he was now. All that remained was to make our way down, to the coordinates Phoebe had shared with him in her dying breath.
The place where we would discover the answer she had found.
But before we got there, we still had to find an answer of our own.
I looked diagonally over to Coeus where he sat. He looked back at me. This familiar setting and rapport felt like coming home to a memory that felt both recent and a lifetime ago. We couldn’t help but smile at one another; no one could disturb us here. Not Narain, nor Lei, nor the professor, nor Phoebe, rest her soul. There wasn’t a Titan or human on Earth who could reach us. Just me and him, and him and me. Here in this room, we were all that mattered. No distractions or external stressors. Just pure and unadulterated comfort.
“Well, then…” I said, letting myself settle into the cushions. Somehow, we both knew that this would be the last time. There was no reason for it; I couldn’t even call it an inkling. But I knew for a certainty that this would be our final conversation like this.
Our final counseling session.
“Let’s get started, shall we?”
Ready when you are.
There in the silence at the bottom of the sea,
We spoke of work, and all that may be.
2
“We’ve seen so much together,” I said. “So many things.”
Photographs were spread all across the table. More than two thousand of the things—each a freeze frame in time and space, a memento of our three months together at the Second Intelligence Base and our subsequent fifty-day journey across the sea. Far more than could fit neatly on the table at once; we had to switch them out in rotation as we moved from topic to topic.
So many different types of work.
I nodded. This veritable mountain of pictures would be our guide, piloting our conversation forward as we talked things through. Though glancing at all of them mixed together from above, my first thought was actually rather mundane.
“God, why are there so many food pictures in here?” I said.
We did a significant amount of cooking, he said.
We flipped through all of the food pictures together. Most of them were simple shots of the things we had made, with a few photos of us actually eating thrown in intermittently. We’d cooked together each and every day starting from early on in our journey.
“Oh, right. And here’s that first collection mall we went to,” I said, moving on to the next set. “Though most of our onshore excursions were in less developed areas.”
In parts of the world that had already been fully developed by the network, we had access to all the food and amenities we could possibly want; everything was just a quick trip to the collection mall away. But we also met people in less developed regions who managed to live much more self-sufficiently, and only counted on Titan for a few basic necessities. There were far more people who fell into this category than I ever would have imagined. We ate their reindeer meat and partook of their salmon. These were people who still hunted, fished, and kept herds of animals in order to acquire food for themselves. That was their daily work—a task inextricable from their chosen lifestyle, as sustenance was a concern that all forms of life had to concern themselves with.
“So does that mean simply being alive counts as work, then?” I murmured, repeating the same overarching question that occurred to me back then. I sifted through the mound of photographs in search of an answer, and Coeus quickly pointed to one in particular: the foundation stake. A lifeline that provided water and electricity to those living out on the furthest frontiers. That solitary machine.
“I remember wondering back then,” I said, “whether work was truly work if it never benefits anyone, or is never put to use.”
But there were people using it. We saw firsthand the fruits of its labor.
“This one’s crucial, I think.”
I picked up the photo and set it aside, then went right back to sifting. It wasn’t long before I found a picture of an erupting volcano. Klyuchevskaya Sopka.
“God, that lava flow was incredible… Would love to see that again someday.”
I went searching for another photo to contrast with this one. One that I’d taken a few days after we crossed over to North America, of a massive wall of ice off the coast of Alaska. Finding it, I plucked it out and laid it next to the volcano picture.
“And here we see two very different works of Mother Nature,” I said.
Heat and displacement.
“Ah, yes, physics. We spoke of that.”
I scoured my memories, recalling the crude diagram I’d drawn up at the time. By the physics definition, work was simply a measure of how much energy you’ve exerted to move a given mass across a distance. Displacement was the key. Heat, or work. This was probably our second key point; I pulled out the volcano picture and set it aside as well.
We were slowly but surely whittling down the pile of photos. I picked out one photograph from the final leg of our journey: a clear and beautiful picture taken in a dimly lit room.
Ah, from when we watched that movie!
“Yep,” I said. “Took it on the sly while you weren’t paying attention.”
Coeus made an awkward facial expression; I couldn’t tell if he was embarrassed or appalled. It was, specifically, a photo of his face in profile, taken as he gazed in wonder at the movie playing out on the holofield screen. He was watching with such pure, rapt attention then that he didn’t even hear the shutter snap.
“Another major question we had was whether creative works like movies, or that poem the professor showed me, also qualify as ‘work’ in the same sense,” I went on, and Coeus nodded. This was one of the bigger conundrums we’d struggled with in our previous discussions. “Because obviously, there’s no physical change taking place, at least not directly. And since arts and entertainment aren’t strictly necessary to sustain life, I was kind of on the fence about this one for a long time. But no, I think it does qualify as work at the end of the day. You’re transferring information into a person’s mind that will invoke some sort of change, or displacement in their heart. It’s a completely different medium compared to the exertion of physical force, but I think the basic idea is still the same. All the critical aspects are present. So I think this is our third and final point to consider.”