The aftermath of the betrayal had proven too chaotic to stop Hekate – with time they would find a way to outwit her petrifying contraption, but that day she and Pandora walked out of the city unopposed. Oranos was humiliated to say the least, and promptly ceded his throne to Kronos, who’d dispatched all the resources at his disposal to search for the two rogue Titans. No one could guess what Hekate and Pandora intended to do with the stolen Legacies – if they’d wanted to exploit the newfound weakness of the other Titans to take power, most believed that the time to do it would have been the night of the ceremony, when nearly every Titan on Knossos was in attendance.
Kronos, far shrewder than everyone else had given him credit for, didn’t agree. To his mind, Hekate’s stunt with her voice would have allowed her to kill people in the palace indiscriminately, but that sort of weapon was difficult to translate into political power. One couldn’t rule a nation without some support, some loyalty that came from a place other than fear. Prometheus had agreed with the new king’s assessment, but himself could make no guesses about their enemies’ plans. He related what Pandora had told him about talking to Tiamat, and suggested that uncovering the women’s motivation might reveal their plans. Kronos agreed and sent Prometheus back to Tartarus with Thanatos and Macaria.
Tartarus rested in a deep cave beneath a large island north of Crete. Coatlinuku, Isanagy, Mictlanggun, and Mbomxolodur had combined their powers to open the void in the earth and reseal it over their spacecraft, and thereafter Mictlanggun and Alakhthon and their predecessors had practically turned the ship inside out, repurposing technology to transform the cave into a subterranean citadel. Of course, some things still remained on the ship – those Starborn deemed too dangerous to move continued to sleep in their cryogenic pods, their minds occupied by a virtual simulation their ancestors had created to ‘reeducate’ the ship’s prisoners. From what Prometheus had heard, the program was less sinister than it sounded, largely focused on presenting the simulation’s occupants with challenges that would reward empathy, compassion, and non-violence. After several thousand years of that, even the worst criminals of their ancestral home world should now be well-behaved citizens.
Oranos, Gaia, and their predecessors had still refused to release some of them, though, and even refused to visit them in their virtual world to monitor their progress. Even in Tartarus, most who dwelt there did not go near the prisoners, either in physical or virtual space. Macaria occasionally tended to the physical pods to make sure they were in good working order, but neither she nor Thanatos ever entered that part of Tartarus’s virtual reality, and they were careful to maintain firewalls between the program run in the prison and the program run in the ‘Time Capsule’ – a facility built within the cave to house Titans who wanted to travel into the future the slow way. Doubtless, that’s where Kronos was keeping his children – immersed in a computer generated world modeled on an idealized version of the world their parents lived in. Tartarus’s subroutines tended to their educational needs, and monitored social interactions with the facility’s other residents.
It was to this facility that Thanatos brought Prometheus. He was unwilling to take the Titan into the prison block, and so Prometheus would enter one of the residential sleep pods, and travel to the prison block through the ship's internal electronic information network. Thanatos didn’t even like that idea, but faced with the uncertainty of Kronos’s anger if he refused to help Prometheus, it was the least objectionable alternative.
Prometheus studied the pod for a moment. It was clearly intended to accommodate Titans much larger than himself – though he was only seven feet tall at most. The inside was lined with a dense collection of long, flat-headed pins that withdrew into the floors and walls when pressure was applied to them. The pins primary function was to form a secure fit for the pod’s occupant, optimizing their pressure to foster circulation and prevent muscle atrophy. Granted, that might have seemed unnecessary considering the way the chamber slowed an occupants’ metabolic processes to a virtual stop, but as Tartarus had lacked any capacity for faster-than-light travel, the pods had been designed with the expectation that the crew members would need to slumber within them for a very long time.
That was the same reason the ship had launched with a virtual reality network – a few days in cryogenic sleep might seem to pass instantly to the dormant brain, but millennia of sleep provided the mind time to adjust, become aware, wander, and collapse into madness if not entertained.
One downside of all of this was that, while Prometheus would be able to leave the cryo pod whenever he wished by uttering a simple command, time would pass much more slowly in the virtual environment than in reality. His interrogation of Tiamat shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours in virtual space, but it was probable that weeks would pass in real time. But then, Prometheus didn’t have anywhere else to be, and some part of him was thrilled to see the dangerous convicts of their ancestral home world for himself.
Prometheus climbed in the pod, got comfortable, closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened his eyes again, he was outside – the sun shined warmly on a green field that ran down a gentle hill to a white sandy beach and a beautiful blue ocean. Prometheus was stunned that he could feel the breeze gently moving across his skin, and smell the sea salt in the air. Children played happily in the surf, their cries and shouts the sort of pleasant chatter that reminded one of the best moments of their own childhood.
“Welcome to Elysium,” a deep voice spoke.
Prometheus whipped around to see a very large man with onyx skin, metallic gold tattoos, and eyes that glowed like embers. Even with the man’s friendly posture and smile, he would have been terrifying to a human - to Prometheus he looked like family.
“Who are you?”
“I am Tartarus,” the man said simply, “In physical space you know me only as a half-disassembled starship languishing, of all places, underground. Here though, I get to live life a bit… smaller.”
“Live life?”
“I was engineered not only to maintain a massive and engaging virtual reality for the benefit of my crew and our prisoners, but to continuously micromanage every system aboard the ship to ensure its optimal performance. To that task, I was more than equal, and resting here, on this world for centuries, I simply have much less to do.”
“So you come in here once and a while to see how the other half lives?”
“Oh, part of me is always here. Nothing ever arises that takes up so much of my attention that I cannot be there and here at the same time. Even Macaria’s research, diverting though it is, only requires a fraction of my attention.”
“What do you do with your time?” Prometheus asked.
“At first I simply explored as far as I was able, wandering from one end of the simulation to the other on foot. Unfortunately, the cartographic data I was given to model this world was limited, and I eventually reached the point where I needed to create new spaces to explore, and – obviously – when one has created something there are few surprises to be found. I tried a number of diversions after that, but ultimately I settled on teaching. I supervise the education of all of Elysium’s residents.”
“What about the education of the prisoners?” Prometheus asked.
“Unfortunately, I cannot oversee their virtual space,” Tartarus said, “General Morgania used her security clearance to lock me out of those programs millennia ago.”
“Morgania?” Prometheus was surprised.
“Yes, subsequent to a disagreement with Captain Malanginui over the colonization of this world, she locked me out of the prison population’s simulation, and had Lauma make a number of changes to the program. I was never told what those changes were.”
“What did you say the disagreement was about?” Prometheus asked.
“Our charge was to find five habitable planets and broadcast the navigational data back to Origin, so that the people of our home world could one day colonize them. After that, Captain Malanginui’s orders were to find an uninhabited world for his crew to colonize, far away from the descendants of those they once called neighbors.”
“Did he not do that?” Prometheus asked.
“The captain deviated from his orders by choosing to settle on a planet already inhabited by a sentient species. He and science officer Coatlinuku specifically passed over such an uninhabited planet to settle on a world with relatively weak but ‘aesthetically tolerable’ inhabitants. General Morgania disagreed with this decision.”
“So Hekate is still nursing a grudge…” Pometheus said, “over a falling out that took place lifetimes ago. Have the Legacy Bearers for Morgania or Lauma accessed this world before?”
“Yes, on many occasions. Lauma’s bearer, designated ‘Pandora’, was here approximately six lunar cycles ago.”
“What did she do?”
“I cannot say.”
“You don’t know?”
“No, I cannot say.”
“Why can’t you say?”
“I suspect that among the changes Lauma made to my computer systems long ago were the addition of protocols that prevent me from divulging information about her or Morgania’s activities. It would seem that these protocols also prevent me from providing an account of anyone bearing their personal artificial intelligence companions.”
“Wait, have you ever told anyone about any of this?”
“Negative,” Tartarus said, “No one ever asked.”
Prometheus rubbed his eyes in irritation; thousands of years had passed, and it had ‘never come up’ that two of the original crew members had tampered with the ship and its prisoners.
“Alakhthon’s bearer has authorized me to cross the firewalls and make contact with the prisoners in their virtual space. Where do I need to go?”
Tartarus led him down to the beach, past the playing children, and with a wave of his hand and a shimmer of light, created a small sailboat bobbing in the sea, moored to a primitive dock.
“Have you ever sailed before?” Tartarus asked.
“No,” Prometheus said, “I can't even swim. But one of my successors will learn how to sail someday, so I think I can remember how to do it. It’s like riding a bike, right?”
“A bike?”
“Yeah, a two wheeled vehicle.”
“Then no, it's not like riding a 'bike.' Sail towards the sunset,” Tartarus said, “The winds will carry you where you wish to go.”
Prometheus hopped aboard and cast off, taking no small pleasure in the gentle roll of the sea and the salty air. Were he in the real world, he would have been frightened to take such a small craft out of sight of the shore, but here there was no reason to fear the elements or the wildlife, no concern of dehydration or starvation. He’d thought Kronos abominable for imprisoning his children in suspended animation, but as private schools went, Tartarus was pretty nice.
The sun dipped towards the horizon, growing larger and redder as it fell. For a time, Prometheus almost felt as if he might catch it, thinking perhaps the sun itself was supposed to be a door to the prisoner’s area, but the sun fell out of view with a green flash, and the boat was swallowed by darkness.
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