The Time of the Titans

Chapter 3: Lemuria

"Whether you more strongly feel the monumental significance of tiny things or the massive void between them depends on who you are, and how your brain chemistry is balanced at a particular moment. We walk around with miniature, emotional versions of the universe inside of us."

A wise man of the past named Josh Worth had written it ages ago. Back when I lived for the first time. I read it again, pondered upon it. My eyes were tired from hours of intensive use after the million years of misuse in dreamless sleep.

Titans. It was a name the interpreter had, in childlike excitement, derived from the ancient human mythology, in order to explain to me who they were. Our ancient cultures had believed that titans lived upon Earth before us. They were demigods or giants - something between the gods and the mortals. Now, a million years after, the titans were here, and we had existed before them, but their space-drifting race had existed before the first human generation woken up from death.

To me, all the titans looked the same, but the interpreter insisted on great individuality and distinction among their kind. The titans who had woken me up called themselves Mooms, which reminded me of something in our past world's mythology. I had a distant feeling that Helena had once had a book on her bed-side table, which told about large pale creatures holding garden parties and finding a magician's hat on the top of a mountain. The book, however, was in a language I didn't read, so I had just looked at its images at times when Helena was not at my side and when I missed her.

Like I missed her now. Loneliness in the new world was about to devastate me each time I thought about it, so I delved back into the past world through the encyclopaedia.

I did not know what had originally divided the titans into moral sects with many mutually differing opinions setting the Mooms apart from their spiritual rivals, but somehow they still tolerated each other. Everything the interpreter told me painted in my mind an image of a wonderfully pacifistic civilization. Perhaps they dealt with their differences in a civilized manner.

"One of the advantages of space", the interpreter told me in one of our lengthy philosophical discussions, the kind of which had become my regular pastime in solitude, "was that there is no shortage of it. We have space." Their bluish grey face beamed in a way that made me think of chuckle. "You humans always suffered from scarcity of space, trapped on your tiny, crowded planet. It made you fierce, aggressive, and cunning. Like most of the advanced life-forms in your world. Just you humans were so much more like that. That's why you won. That's why you perished."

That's how we won. That's how we perished.

The funny thing about my Lemurian days was that I did not dive into the ocean of information available about the new world I had been awoken to. For the time being, I shunned from it. It was too much. Instead, I spent hours in the interactive multimedia encyclopaedia the titans had compiled, to study the Earth era I was from. The interpreter had provided me with the encyclopaedia on my second awaken day. I spent the time reading about my own world. A world that didn't exist anymore except in my memories. Yet I found some consolation in the fact that the titans had so meticulously documented and compiled human history. It made me feel we existed in a certain time-space, even though it was now past.

I did not know if they had just accessed and copied man-made databases, or if they had made all this effort to make the information available for me, in such a form and in such a language that I could comprehend. I appreciated the abundance of information, and it kept me interested.

*   *   *

Lemuria was a flying city in the vast emptiness that is the space. It was a world made of matter and powered by the energy of distant suns, or so I assumed. This city in the emptiness was constantly on the move. Gravity was considerably lower than on Earth, so I felt like floating around the living quarters given to me.