The Titan Awakens
I was there when Titan came to life. I’m not supposed to tell you that; I’m breaking God knows how many non-disclosure agreements just by…
Author: Vance Underwood
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I was there when Titan came to life. I’m not supposed to tell you that; I’m breaking God knows how many non-disclosure agreements just by…
I was there when Titan came to life. I’m not supposed to tell you that; I’m breaking God knows how many non-disclosure agreements just by writing this, but I don’t care anymore. I just have to get this out there, if I don’t I think I’ll lose what little sanity I have left.
I was part of the team of technicians sent to investigate the facility a few months after it went dark. You’d think there’d be a quicker response to the biggest manufacturing facility in the solar system suddenly dropping out of contact, but that’s the government for you. Ok that’s not fair, it takes a long time to get anything done in space, especially in the outer planets where you have to spend months riding one of the solar laser highways just to get there. I always found the idea of laser propulsion to be a bit funny, using big magnetic sails to ride concentrated beams of photons reflected from the sun by orbiting lenses. In a way it’s like human civilization has gone full circle, back to the age of sailing ships. Anyway, the whole point of the Titan industrial complex was that the AI’s which ran it could repair and maintain the facilities on their own with minimal need for any help from Earth, hence why it was such a surprise when the programs just stopped checking in one day and production suddenly halted.
I’d never been to the outer solar system before. Saturn was more beautiful than anything I could have imagined, with its pristine rings shining in the blackness of space. The crew of the transport ship didn’t seem to care much, I guess they’d made that run before. But I and the other passengers were crowded around the windows as we passed by, watching in awe as we entered the gas giant’s orbit. Alongside my fellow techs, there was a squad of US Marines sent to provide protection “in case of unforeseen circumstances.” No one was willing to say just what sort unforeseen circumstances we might find on Titan that would require guns to deal with. One member of the Squad joked that it might be aliens.
I wish he’d been right. Alien lifeforms would at least have been organic in nature, biological creatures the same as us. However strange they might have been, they could’ve at least been counted on to bleed and die just like anything else. What we found there instead was unlike anything even the most creative of biologists could have possibly imagined. I knew from sleeping a few doors down from them that several of the marines tended to have nightmares most nights, though they did their best to act like nothing was wrong the next morning. Yet I never saw them quite so terrified as when things went to hell on Titan.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The voyage to Saturn was pleasant enough. The crew of the ship had installed vintage juke box in the main living area and kept the music playing for most of the day. The food was your typical deep space travel fare, that is to say it was crap. Dehydrated, powdered, reconstituted crap. At least long-haul ships like the one we were are built with rotating sections to simulate gravity, so we could drink the shitty coffee out of actual cups instead of plastic tubes.
The crew and the other passengers made for decent enough travelling companions. At meal times we would swap stories about the things we’d seen and done in space. Perhaps unsurprisingly the Marines’ adventures tended to be the most exciting. They regaled us with tales of hostage rescues on Mars, boarding pirate ships in the asteroid belt, low gravity combat missions, and so on. I’m sure most of it was exaggerated, but then again maybe not. These guys were pretty tough, the sort of men and women you wanted to have on your side when things went to shit. I actually felt safe going to Titan with them, thinking that in the unlikely event that there really was something dangerous there these badass soldiers would take care of it no problem.
One of the other techs, an Indian man named Ravi, had actually been to Titan before. When I asked him what we could expect, he eagerly described an entire self-sustaining mechanical ecosystem. Robots building and repairing each other in an endless cycle, taking in resources and churning out products to be shipped back to Earth via remotely operated cargo haulers. Whole industries were dependent on the output of the Titan foundries, just having them go down for a few months had already wreaked havoc on the economies of several nations back on Earth. The A.I. core was one of the biggest and most powerful that had ever been constructed, relying on Titan’s freezing temperatures to improve its computational abilities.
Speaking of A.I. they had one of those on the ship. Her or rather its name was Mira; I’m not sure if that was an acronym for something or not. She interacted with us via a holographic avatar that looked human enough, at least until it flickered or walked through a solid object. Mira was programmed to be personable, essentially a sophisticated interface designed to make the ship’s complicated computer systems user friendly. Most of the time her programmed responses seemed real enough that you could forget you were speaking to a collection of algorithms. That is until you asked her question which was outside the scope of her programming. Then it was like something subtle was off about her. You could tell when you’d reached the limits of what she’d been made for as she started to sound less natural, more prerecorded. It was honestly kind of jarring, the sudden reminder that you were speaking to a machine in the shape of a human.
When we finally reached our destination, we went down in a shuttle, Titan being one of the only objects in the solar system with enough of an atmosphere for air braking. I got a good look at the landscape through one of the shuttle’s windows. Vast expanses of frozen dunes, crossed by lakes of methane and dotted with cryovolcanoes spewing plumes of ice crystals into the air. It was beautiful, but in a strange and unnerving way. Of all the planets and moons I’ve been to in my time as a spacer, Titan was the first that ever felt truly alien, like we had crossed the threshold into some place that humans had never been meant to travel to.
We entered the underground complex through a hanger bay built into the face of a cliff. The doors to the hanger opened automatically when it detected the shuttle’s transponder. I wonder if perhaps the Titan had been waiting for us, if it somehow knew that we would come for it. The inside of the facility was dark, the lights on low power mode. As we made our way through the darkened corridors on the way to the main control center, I began to feel like we were exploring the insides of some gigantic living being. We would soon find that the massive complex was indeed alive, and that it knew we were there.
It started off subtle. We began finding corridors that weren’t on Ravi’s schematics, walls where doors should have been, dead ends and circular path ways. By the time we realized we were lost, we’d gone too deep into the labyrinth to find our way back to the shuttle. It was like every time we thought we’d found the way out the complex would remake itself to keep us lost. Doors began to open and close on their own, and the dormant machinery seemed to activate of its own accord. Inevitably we started to get separated, we’d just turn around and find that one or two of us had disappeared. The resolve of the marines began to weaken as they found that their communication devices were useless.
We started to hear the distant sounds of screaming and gun fire. Every now and then we’d stumble upon the body of someone we knew, flash frozen by liquid nitrogen coolant, burned to a crisp by the heat ventilation system, or ripped to pieces by factory machines. I saw a man screaming and writhing on the floor as his body was deconstructed by a swarm of nanomachines. But the most terrifying losses were those among us who weren’t killed, but instead dragged away screaming into the darkness. One by one our numbers dwindled until I was the only one left. I don’t know if it was by sheer chance that I found my way to the main server room or if the Titan led me there, as if it wanted someone to witness its creation. When I entered, daring to hope that I might be able to shut the whole thing down, I found the missing members of our expedition.
It was hard to tell where the people ended and the machinery began. Their bodies had been merged with the computer systems, integrated into the circuitry and hardware for reasons I can’t even begin to imagine. They were still alive, screaming in mangled agony, babbling near incoherently as electricity coursed through every neuron in what was left of their bodies. Some didn’t know who they were any more, others now thought they were someone else, their thoughts and memories running together like colors in water. The Captain of the marines, the only one still aware of her surroundings, begged me for death.
I turned and ran, as the complex began to unmake itself around me, causing cave ins as it retracted upon itself. I don’t know how I made it out. Maybe the Titan let me go because I was too insignificant to bother with, or maybe I just got lucky. Either way I managed to find a gap which led to the surface. As I strapped on my oxygen mask and stumbled out onto the ice, I felt the moon start to shake beneath my feat. I turned to see the ground burst open, and a great mass of churning metal that had once been the Titan manufacturing complex propelling itself into the sky on cones of fire.
You can still see the Titan today with a strong enough telescope, making its way to another solar system. I guess the massive lengths of time needed to cross the distances between stars don’t seem like much to a god. Every day I think about what might have happened if it hadn’t been satisfied with just the marines and repair crew, if whatever it was doing had require more biomass once it left Saturn’s orbit. They’re already building another one, in the crater the first Titan left behind. Humans just never learn, do we? Once I got back to the ship, I made the crew turn off the A.I. interface for the journey back to Earth; I just couldn’t stand to look at the damn thing. To this day I can’t even listen to a GPS without remembering the cold, the darkness, and the screaming.
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