The Time of the Titans

Chapter 4: Subcreators

"I said - Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seeds of dragons - 'twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed;
we make still by the law in which we're made."

J. R. R. Tolkien: Mythopoeia

*   *   *

I was staring at my books - Tolkien, Schiller, Golding, and the others - and something in my brain was reluctant to process what the interpreter, Moom Lala, had told.

"What do you mean I'm one of the Great Old Ones?" I asked. Lala's humid eyes shone with surprise as they tilted their large head to a side. I no longer considered their appearance frightening but rather sympathetic. The titans were childlike in their expressions and gestures, even though they may have been intellectually and technologically superior to men. "You said you're our children. What does that mean?"

"I shall elaborate", Lala hummed.

So I came to know the secret that entirely changed my understanding of this new world where I had been resurrected. I would spend much of my remaining days in Lemuria studying the subject in the encyclopaedia, since this uninvited knowledge would haunt me to the last of my days.

The desolate core of the matter was that mankind had destroyed their planet. It had all been in sight at the time when I lived on Earth, although there had still been a way to go before the ecology of the planet finally collapsed. There would still be many world wars where Russia, China, India, Pakistan and the country we once knew as the United States each played their parts in the symphony of doom. First, they fought their neighbours, later each other. In her decadent lack of resolution, my beloved Europe was among the earliest to become a stage of desolation, after which the world would never be the same.

But it was not the wars that really destroyed the world. Deserts would spread, heralded by floods of migration. People, like locusts, multiplied the more the less the land could bear them. The atmosphere became increasingly depressing after the loss of the last forests. Towards the end, people lived in their artificial enclosures of clean air and water, relying on ever more complex and vulnerable technology. A toxic world surrounded their artificial bubbles. The attempts to colonize the seas did not carry through as there was no more fish in the ocean as there had once been.

It was amidst this destruction that the ancestors of the titans had left Earth, escaping to the space. They would first live in spaceships, which by that time had developed enough to carry them with ease to the nearest other planets in our solar system. Harsh planetary life, however, no longer pleased the bubble-grown ancestors, whose virtual realities collapsed under the weight of planetary realities. Gravity, like death and violence, became a despised burden for the space-born generations to come.

"One thing that the space made easy for us", said Lala, "was hiding. Disappearing. For our ancestors, it meant peace at last. Privacy."

That had been another scene of devastation in the last centuries of human history. Even in this respect, all the signs had been there during my earthly life. An abyss growing in the depths kept being filled and fed with information gathered on people by omnipresent cameras and microphones that people carried on themselves. Gog, Magog and others took over the construction of what was to become a virtual copy of the physical world - a matrix where all the information could be attached and where it would be forever electronically preserved, monitored, and manipulated.