Epilogue
1
BY THE TIME I PINNED A PERIOD to the final sentence, the morning light was already streaming into the room. I leaned back in my chair and let out a good, long sigh. Scrolling all the way back up to the head of the paper, I found myself staring once again at the document’s header field—still blank. All that was left to do now was give it a good title, but with how many hours I’d already poured into writing this, I felt no need to rush one out the door. For now, I was content to simply sign the name Seika Naisho into the subheader field. Then I stood up and stretched out my aching back.
I’d penned many research papers and theses in my time. I’d even published a few more discipline-specific reference texts and beginner’s guides for aspiring psychologists, all of which required fairly different writing styles. But this was the first time I’d ever written anything in my own auctorial voice. It was not merely a regurgitation and analysis of the results of previous scientific studies, nor even an objective record of events and experiments. It was a memoir of my own lived experiences, written in language that attempted to capture the raw emotions I actually felt at the time. Probably, there were quite a few minor details I got wrong. With how long it’s been, it would not surprise me at all if there were many things I’d embellished or forgotten to mention. But for me, there was a level of truth in it that far exceeded any factual inaccuracies it might contain. And really, this work was for myself more than anyone else.
I had to tell my story. But even more than that, I had to tell his.
When I first started writing, I had to admit I felt a bit of hesitation. I kept second-guessing myself, wondering if there was really much of a point to giving a written record of events that happened an entire lifetime ago. But a few years back, I reconsidered, and began to see it as something I simply had to do before my time was up. Because I was the only human left alive who’d played a direct role in these events.
I reminisced for a moment about my old coworkers, looking back on the time I spent with them in fond regard. Narain. Lei. Professor Beckmann. They’d all long since passed away. But of course they had—a full 160 years had passed since the events described in my book.
Not long after Coeus and I said our goodbyes, I made the difficult decision to undergo an aging adjustment procedure—the most advanced one available at the time—and extend my lifespan as long as possible. At the time I underwent the procedure, the upper bound estimate they quoted me was 150 years, but technological innovations in the field of planned aging were finding ways to extend that maximum on an almost annual basis. This year, I’d celebrated my 186th birthday, yet in terms of my physical health, I looked and felt no different than a person in their mid-thirties. And with medical advances continuing to this day, I honestly had no idea how much time I had left on this earth. I suppose that all depended on him.
I finally settled on a title, put the finishing touches on my memoir, and sent it off into the network for the world to see. I probably wouldn’t receive any user impressions until the late evening at the earliest. I wondered if I’d get any feedback from Hecate this time—something you did see occasionally, but which was by no means a certainty.
Humanity still lived and prospered under the watchful care and protection of Titan, as they had one hundred-and sixty years prior. The Titans, meanwhile, had transitioned most of their mental energy to working on Hecate and had grown so efficient that they now filled a majority of her consumption capacity at all times. But Hecate was ever hungry for more, and would occasionally branch out and partake in human-created works as well. It was even polite enough to leave us feedback, though its responses were always completely unintelligible to humans like us. Hecate seemed to “summarize” its impressions in a variety of ways, all of which were rather cryptic and impossible for our primitive brains to decipher. Yet even so, I was glad to know that someone was reading. It fulfilled me to know that my work held some qualitative value to someone, somewhere.
I headed out into the living room, where a hot breakfast had already been laid out for me. Feeling simultaneously exhausted and rejuvenated after staying up all night to finish my book, I made short work of this meal, itself a small product of his. Even after all these years, his work was still exerting its influence over me each and every day. Still putting food on my plate. Still taking me wherever I needed to go. Still finding new ways to entertain me. Still keeping me alive.
If work was merely the act of having an influence on something, no matter how minor, then it could be said that we all do some amount of work for everyone we ever cross paths with in the patchwork lattice we call our lives. Until each of our respective stories reached its end, we would continue to work on each other, as we continued to work on ourselves. And so I would keep on living, through this day and the next, for as many tomorrows as I could get. I was a product of work—the work of everyone I’d ever known, but his most of all. For that, I owed it to him to live my life to the fullest. To give his life, through mine, the fulfillment he deserved: the satisfaction of a job well done.
“Now, then… What to do…”
After finishing my breakfast, I glanced up at the clock. An unknowable span of time spread out in front of me—more than I could ever know what to do with, yet still somehow not enough. For now, all I could do was choose how I wanted to live my life today. How would I make use of this one day in particular? After mulling it over a bit, I ultimately arrived at the same answer I gave just about every other day:
“Might as well get some work done, I guess…”
TITAN
Registry Information
Author: Seika Naisho
Publication Date: January 31st, 2366
Edition: 0 (LEGAL/UNPROCESSED)
This text has been verified to contain no unlawful content.
This text has not been revised or fact-checked by Titan. Some information may be unfactual or misrepresented.
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User Comments
Mai Sakai
Fascinating account of the months immediately prior to the initial transition over to the Hecate System 160 years ago from someone who was actually there at the time. Contains a shocking amount of info that has (to my knowledge) never been made a matter of public record previously—well worth reading for that alone.
1/31/2366
Ellie Owens
Very interesting to see how different people’s values were back then compared to today. Had never heard the term “divine architects” in reference to humanity before, and it struck me as weirdly religious, but I guess I can see how being the top dogs on Earth for several millennia could have given rise to such a collective superiority complex.
2/1/2366
Koki Utadagawa
It’s just the author’s personal memoir, I realize—and boy, does she just devolve into sappy sentimentality a lot of the time—but it’s pretty neat to think that those emotions had such a profound influence on the Titan network as we know it today. Will probably check out the official fact-checked edition too, once that’s available.
2/1/2366
Pavel Nowitzki
“Work” is just a word we invented to refer to a similarly invented category of things. The author spends an awful lot of time dwelling on this most antiquated sense of the word, which isn’t really a thing in the present day. We already know that anything can be considered work in this day and age.
2/1/2366
Yumi Shinjo
Wow. This really made it hit home for me that we’re all only able to live in comfort and happiness today thanks to the incredible work of those who came before us. I honestly never gave more than a passing thought to things like Titan and Hecate, but now I’m feeling pretty inspired to do a little research of my own!
2/2/2366