From more than 2,000 photos, we’d found just three.
The foundation stake.
The volcano.
The movie.
Coeus and I looked at one another, no doubt rapidly approaching the same conclusion. It was almost like a pop quiz—what do these three things all have in common? I pointed to the pictures one by one, letting Coeus give me his interpretation of each before I gave my own overall deduction. Like we were students comparing notes to make sure we’d both arrived at our answer using the same methodology.
What did we know from the foundation stake?
There must be another party involved.
The volcano?
There must be some form of movement, or a shift.
The movie?
There must be some sort of resultant change.
Satisfied, I nodded. Finally, we’d found our answer. At long last, we’d arrived at our destination. With pen and paper in hand, I drew out a simple diagram that incorporated all three of these criteria. It was identical to the one we’d already known, yet we hadn’t been looking at it from the proper perspective then. But this time, we understood, and so my crude little drawing took on a whole new meaning.
“To work…” I began.
It was crystal clear to me now.
“…is to exert influence over something.”
3
That was it. That was all there was to it.
It was so simple—about as elegant a summation as one could possibly hope for. It really did boil down to that one critical thing: influence. Nothing more or less than that.
To push on something, and make it move.
To exert an influence on something, and thereby enact a change.
This was what it meant to work.
“It can be literally anything,” I said. “You don’t even really have to overanalyze it to see how. It is omniapplicable. When you do work around the house, you’re providing benefits for yourself and your family. Everything that goes into raising a child has an influence on them, too. When lava flows down a mountainside, it exerts its influence over the natural habitats in its way. When our internal organs process vitamins and minerals, that exerts an influence over our entire bodies.”
Coeus listened closely as I strung one word into the next, his understanding growing deeper as I deepened my own. This, too, was a form of work. Indeed, just about anything that “happened” in this world was the work of someone or something in one way or another. Agriculture was a way for humans to exert their influence over plants and animals, and the products of that work were then used to the benefit of people around the world, influencing their lives by providing them with the sustenance necessary to go on living. Manufacturing was a means of exerting influence over raw materials to create finished products that then influenced us in our daily lives. Tertiary industries such as the distribution and service sectors also covered a wide range of necessary tasks, all of which had a great influence on the lives of the people who depended on them.
The foundation stake was a worker, and our internal organs were too. Even destructive forces of nature like lava were both workers and the products of work as well. This entire world was made up of and molded by all different types of work. And there was no hierarchy therein, no form of work more valid or laudable than any other. Work held no meaning in and of itself, for work had been a universal constant since long before we humans came around to invent the concept of meaning.
But wait, what about… Coeus began, as though he’d noticed an inconsistency here. I nodded, knowing full well what it was he had to say. I knew because he and I had seen and discussed all of the same things and had been searching for the answer to one question in particular.
“Yes, we’re thinking the same exact thing,” I said. “For you and me, there’s a bit more to it than that. For humans and Titans, the concept of work is ever so slightly different.”
I took up my pen and drew two new diagrams.
“This alone does not constitute work. Or I suppose to be more strictly accurate, it does not effectively qualify as work under our current definition. Because you’re exerting an enormous amount of force on something, but enacting an infinitesimal amount of change upon it. And it’s extremely hard to claim you’ve done work on something when the object of said work exhibits no visible change or influence from your having done it.”
“And this doesn’t constitute work either. Here we have a displacement, but no exerted force. Obviously this object has been subject to some sort of influence, as we can see that a change has occurred, but since we’ve exerted no force upon it, we cannot say that this was our work. Or alternatively, it was our work, but the amount of effort we put in was so microscopic relative to the change observed that it doesn’t really feel like we’ve accomplished anything at all. But see, neither of these scenarios really matter when it comes to things like magma or our internal organs. They don’t care whether or not they did the work, or even whether or not work was done at all.”
Because they’re insentient, said Coeus, taking the words right out of my mouth. Molten rocks and digestive organs have no egos or personalities. They have no faculties with which to observe the results of their own work, let alone to measure whether or not they’ve done their work to an adequate degree.
“Right. So we can say that for sentient beings like us, there’s one additional criterion that needs to be met in order for us to truly feel that we’ve accomplished work.”
I wrote this new caveat down on paper, just below our previous deduction:
Work = exerting an influence*
(*while also being aware of said influence)
As I finished penning in this addendum, I let out a deep and heavy sigh.
What a nuisance. What an absolute pain it was, that the mere act of being sentient turned such a simple and elegant concept into such a convoluted and subjective one.
Simply doing work was not enough for us.
We had to feel as though we’d accomplished something as well.
We wanted to see the fruits of our labor for ourselves, and to see what influence they had on the world around us. Whether our efforts were successful or not, we wanted to know—we needed that feedback, or we would never feel that the job was truly done. And as if that weren’t annoying enough, we also felt compelled to judge our own work in terms of the amount of effort we’d put in relative to the amount of benefit and feedback it produced. Those last two diagrams I’d drawn were emblematic of that; when we were congratulated on a job well done despite only putting in a modicum of effort to achieve the end result, it felt like hollow praise. But when we struggled to achieve even the tiniest of observable results despite putting in our very best efforts, that didn’t very much feel like we’d accomplished anything either. It was only when a given amount of work produced an equivalent amount of results in kind that we humans and Titans could truly believe, in our sentient minds, that good work had been done.
“You know, Coeus—there’s a phrase commonly used to describe this feeling,” I said. “Do you know what it is?”
Of course he knew. He absolutely had the power to put this implacable feeling that had plagued him into words now that he was a grown man. He looked straight at me, his eyes resolute and unwavering, and said with total confidence:
A sense of fulfillment.
I gently clapped my hands together.
“I always felt like something wasn’t quite adding up here,” I said. Now it was my turn to put my own vague emotions into words. “At first, I thought it might just be because you were a Titan, so some amount of error was to be expected when using psychotherapeutic methods designed specifically for humans. But after our journey together, and especially after bearing witness to your meeting with Phoebe, I realized that I must have gotten something wrong. I’d experienced firsthand the incredible feats of ingenuity your kind are capable of. You have so much creativity, to the point that you can revolutionize entire technological sectors with bold new innovations on a whim, and have the logic and processing power necessary to design, build, and rebuild massive complex structures down to the tiniest of details in a fraction of a second. I watched you regenerate entire sections of your body like it was nothing at all. I watched you easily overpower Phoebe, the most refined artificial intelligence in the world. And yet still somehow I didn’t realize that my initial perception of you, as a mentally fragile boy whose depression stemmed from being overworked by selfish and unsympathetic humans, was fundamentally flawed.”