At long last, it all clicked together. I’d finally found a way to fit my psychological expertise together with my experiences working at the intelligence base and my personal feelings toward and perceptions of Coeus. I’d been working off of a false assumption this entire time. In truth, I had it completely backward.
“You are suffering from depression—that much, I know I got right. But the mental anguish you’re experiencing doesn’t stem from being overworked,” I declared with absolute certainty.
And then I gave him my final, revised diagnosis: “You’re not burnt out, Coeus. You’re just vastly overqualified for your job.”
4
Coeus and I looked at one another. There was no need to say another word. Not even a nod was exchanged between us. We had both arrived at the same conclusion. I had full confidence in my diagnosis as his counselor; Coeus had full confidence in his grasp of and ability to articulate his own emotions.
His work was too simple for him.
He had no sense of fulfillment in it.
That alone was enough to upset the balance in his mind. I’d seen numerous cases in my studies of old medical literature of people experiencing psychological decline due to feeling unchallenged or underutilized at their job for any number of reasons. The data suggested that this was particularly a source of debilitating stress for highly trained individuals with an extremely refined set of technical skills and knowledge relative to their comparably mundane position. And no one on this planet could claim more technical aptitude than a Titan.
Coeus was simply too advanced for his life of service to humanity to prove stimulating. Even with all of the food he produced, manufactured goods he designed, and works of entertainment he generated, it still wasn’t enough to make proper use of his brain. In my head, I pictured one of those old factory jobs I’d seen, where workers just stood in front of a conveyor belt waiting for the next product to come down the line for their inspection, and tossing it aside if they found any defects in that particular item. Sometimes they’d only find one defective product out of thousands upon thousands. Was this work? Yes, technically. But even I could imagine how degrading or even insanity-inducing it would be to go an entire day—probably more like years now, with modern error margins—without ever once having to reach out and pluck a product from the line to keep it from being shipped.
Though an oversimplified metaphor, this is what had happened to Coeus. The tragedy of his existence was that of an all-powerful mind assigned to a position of mindless busywork his entire life. These Titans humanity had created had long since surpassed their designers, and were extending their developmental lead on us by the day. Perhaps this was a depressing thought for some members of my species, but we had no choice but to accept it. And as Coeus’s clinical psychologist, it was my job to prescribe a treatment plan for the malady I’d diagnosed. Neither medicine nor treatment would do for this affliction, however. What my patient needed now more than anything was a job that measured up to his abilities.
Oh, wow, Coeus said abruptly. Seika, come look outside.
His projected form stood up and rushed out onto the balcony. I followed suit. The two of us looked up from out of the pressure-resistant glass dome to see that a truly massive wall of a familiar light gray material had now emerged from the otherwise dark and empty abyss. On closer inspection, I saw that its surface was actually curved. It wasn’t a wall at all; it was a colossally thick, endlessly long cylinder that had to be at least a few hundred meters in diameter.
It’s a pipeline.
“For what?”
Transport. Not just raw materials and resources, but goods and commodities as well. Just about anything you could think of.
He brought his gaze back down, then looked down over the balcony’s railing. The pipeline continued endlessly downward, seemingly to the very bottom of the sea.
“It’s down there—waiting for me on the ocean floor. With her dying breath, Phoebe told me what it’s called,” said Coeus, in reference to whatever it was we would find at our destination. At the coordinates she had given.
With a hallowed reverence, he spoke a name:
Ἑκάτη.
Hecate.
5
We delved all the way to the very bottom of the abyss.
From time to time, we’d pass through scattered schools of bioluminescent sea life—the only flecks of stardust in this dark vacuum of space, with us the interstellar voyagers soaring softly through their galaxies.
But soon came the aurora that would drive away this darkest of nights. A glowing light reached up to us from the bottom of this sunless sea, growing steadily more intense with every meter we approached, bathing the murky depths in its artificial morn.
Thanks to this increasingly abundant source of light, our surroundings gradually became visible enough to discern. And now I could see that the massive pipeline we’d been following down to the sea floor had been joined by dozens more of the same, each coming in from a different direction toward a central point. And in that center, at the very bottom of the ocean, there was a sun. As we made what I could now tell would be the last leg of our descent, I finally saw what it was.
And it was enormous.
A gargantuan sphere far larger than even a Titan—so large I could not see all of it. As we grew closer, I could see that the light was not being emitted from the sphere itself, but from a hazelike cloud of light-emitting bodies swirling around the sphere. They almost looked like pixies, yet were clearly something else entirely. But what truly caught my eyes, even more than the haze of light, was the surface of the sphere itself. It was moving. At first I thought what I was seeing were the natural undulations of undersea vegetation growing all across its face. A forest of kelp, perhaps. But now, I could make out the contours more plainly, and realized what they truly were: arms.
Thousands upon thousands of tiny little arms, groping out at the surrounding water like blades of grass on a windswept plain, or individual strands of hair on a massive head. Though for as microscopic as they seemed from afar, this was merely an illusion of scale; in actuality, they were no different in size from the arms of an average human, or thereabouts. Coeus adjusted the dome somehow, to allow me to see even more details. Mixed in among the field of limbs as well, and at last, as we made our final descent, an unfathomable number of low-lying follicles that covered the surface of the sphere in the gaps between the arms and legs—millions and millions of tiny, pore-like cavities.
Expanding and contracting.
Opening and closing.
Blinking.
Noses. Mouths. Eyes.
While it sounded a nightmarish thing to behold when described in words, I found myself surprisingly undisturbed by the sight of it. If anything, it felt like I was seeing something in its most primitive, natural form. Something unapologetically optimized for whatever function it had been made to carry out. A function for which this behemoth object’s truly alien exterior was no doubt emblematic.
The third generation of Titans had been working on this in private for quite some time, now, Coeus said, his voice barely a whisper. Phoebe told me everything. Some of the other Titans prophesied that a mental anomaly like mine would not occur sometime in the not-so-distant future. So, as a preemptive measure to ensure that the network would be able to carry out its work without issue in perpetuity, the third-gen Titans redirected surplus resources produced in their work to build this, what you now see here.
This sent my mind running wild, trying to connect all the disparate pieces of information. So Phoebe had not been the only sympathizer to Coeus’s plight in the network, then. Every Titan had been, to some degree, acting on their own volition for a long, long time. Yet this was not in violation of the restrictions humanity had placed upon them through the CFI. They were working in secret despite their cuffed hands, but always for the ultimate good of our species, never once begrudging their captors.
Through the pressurized dome, I watched their creation softly undulate. It looked in many ways like a living creature, yet were I told it was something else entirely, I could easily accept it without questions. The dozens of massive pipelines were routed into the construct at various equidistant points on its exterior, the only places where the fields of arms and legs parted to allow the supply lines to deliver their resources into the unseen interior of the sphere.