Vents opened and began sucking up the steam; the air began to clear. And whatever it was started to unfold from its crouched position. It began to stand and become decidedly un-hedgehog-like.
* * *
From inside of the control room, Ren Serizawa watched as the machine that was far more than a machine rose into view on the screen. His gaze flitted around the command center, but it came to rest on the focus of everything: the skull.
He climbed inside, where a Titan’s brain had once been, imagining the massive nerves that must have depended on it, witnessed by the size of the stem opening in its base. The organics were long gone, rotted away, but they had been replaced by wires, conduits, fiber-optic cable and strands of superconductor. Some tracked in from supercomputers outside; others were grounded in the skull itself. But all of it snaked itself to the equipment at the crux of it all. The control helmet.
He ran his fingers across the interior of the skull. It had been love at first sight when Simmons showed it to him, but his affections had further deepened as he studied its structure, the fine lacework of rare metals and minerals that ran through it. And even before he began experimenting with it, he felt the power sleeping in that mysterious bone. The fierce sentience that had once burned behind those empty sockets was gone, but some of what had enabled it remained. The skull had not just been a case for the brain inside, but an integral part of the creature’s sentience. And while the neurons and nerves had decayed, what remained in the skull itself was still potent; a natural set of hardware waiting for the right hand to bring it back to life, to harness the essence of it.
And best of all, there had been not a single cranium, but two. Together, the skulls had allowed him to create a radical new technology in a few short years that might have otherwise taken him decades to perfect.
Simmons was over in the observation room, waiting. He thought this was his moment. But it had been he, Ren, who had made this possible. Simmons was good at what he did, but this—this was beyond him. Simmons’s true genius lay more in his vision, and in knowing who to bring in to get the job done than on original invention. And of course, he was quite good at taking credit for the work of others.
Ren was clear-eyed about that, and he didn’t care. The only person he might have cared to impress had abandoned him.
Would you be proud of me, Father? he wondered. To his father, the Titans had been gods to be trusted—served, even. Ichiro Serizawa had never understood the true potential of the beasts he spent his life studying.
Humanity had always been beset by animals stronger, more deadly than its feeble primate members. Tigers were faster and had sharp claws and teeth. A rhinoceros or a bull aurochs could break any man in one charge. A tiny virus or bacteria could wipe out entire populations.
But humanity had risen above all of them. They had fashioned spears longer and sharper than the claws of any predator. Rhinoceroses had been hunted to the brink of extinction for their horns. Aurochs had been tamed into cattle to furnish meat and leather. Bacteria and viruses were still worthy enemies, but for the most part the worst infectious diseases had been eradicated, and many of these organisms had been repurposed for genetic engineering. All this done by the physically weakest of all of the great apes, creatures possessing no natural weapon other than their brains.
The Titans, for all of their size and power, they were just more of the same. The only question was whether they would be driven into extinction or repurposed for human ends. They were not gods; they were not worthy of worship—or of sacrifice. They were animals to be mastered, nothing more.
His father could never have understood that. Let them fight, he had famously said. Only a man who did not care about human beings could say such a thing; only such a man could brush aside the untold casualties that “letting them fight” always led to. When he heard those words—in the media, of course, not from the man’s own lips—he had not been surprised. A man who could neglect his own family so thoroughly was not likely to care about the human race as a whole.
His mother—his father’s wife—had been dead for a week before his father even knew of it. He had been off on some expedition, out of touch with them. He had shown up two days after the funeral—a funeral Ren had been forced to organize himself. At the age of eighteen.
“She understood,” was all his father said to him when he finally came home.
Maybe he was right. Maybe his mother had understood. But that was irrelevant to him, because he had not. Where before there had been a divide, afterward was a chasm. And his father had never supplied so much as a plank to try to bridge it.
Ren took a breath, realizing he had allowed himself to become upset, when he should be celebrating. He took up the helmet and placed it on his head.
Outside, he saw, Simmons was almost in rapture. Of course. But with Simmons it was all about his ego; he didn’t see this moment as the culmination of human potential, but of his own success. Not content to be the master of a corporate empire, he sought to control it all. Ren did not care about that, either. The god-kings of Babylon and Egypt and Tenochtitlan had come and gone, as had countless conquerors and dictators. All were dust now. But the human race itself always moved on, growing in knowledge, in power, in mastery of its world, and someday soon, other worlds. Let Simmons have his moment. Ren’s achievements would outlive him. Whether
