TITAN is a name with many faces. Some of them are related to the Gods and some to technology. In the short story THE MESHIAN or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Quantum we see not only these two sides.
Here is a part of the draft:
[ …] Time to go back to good old computing, times where actual virtuality was the main goal of OLCF-3, a computer manufactured by Cray Research in 2012, called TITAN.
TITAN I love. I have a simulator in a box of TITAN I always carry with me. This way I can have a look on the stunning surface of this design and I can focus my thoughts on art and culture which I offer you right now by words from the long gone Encyclopaedia Britannica. At this time some humans had extensive knowledge of the past. The editors of this encyclopaedia had it:
“Titan, in Greek mythology, any of the children of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth) and their descendants. According to Hesiod’s Theogony, there were 12 original Titans: the brothers Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, and Cronus and the sisters Thea, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, and Tethys. At the instigation of Gaea the Titans rebelled against their father, who had shut them up in the underworld (Tartarus). Under the leadership of Cronus they deposed Uranus and set up Cronus as their ruler. But one of Cronus’ sons, Zeus, rebelled against his father, and a struggle then ensued between them in which most of the Titans sided with Cronus. Zeus and his brothers and sisters finally defeated the Titans after 10 years of fierce battles (the Titanomachia). The Titans were then hurled down by Zeus and imprisoned in a cavity beneath Tartarus.” Tartarus is the deepest region of the world, the lower of the two parts of the underworld, where the Gods locked up their enemies. That’s why I keep myself off from any conspirator theories, not because of risking of my pension as I said before to give my text an easy read. Fact is, I don’t want to be thrown into Tartarus. I also don’t want to stay in Elysium. TITAN was the first step. It took just 60 Million Dollar to get the first shot of an actual virtual reality, which was at this time laid out as a room. The room, called EVEREST, stood for Exploratory Visualization Environment for Research and Technology. The purpose for its creation was to get a better understanding of the data that TITAN outputs. EVEREST is a visualization room with a 10 by 3 meter screen and a smaller, secondary screen. The screens are 37 and 33 megapixels and have stereoscopic 3D capability. TITAN was dismantled in 2019. The Gods must have been in tears. Right in the moment when Chimera was sent to help in calculating the Non-Equilibrium Radiation Diffusion (NRDF) the humans stopped the simulation. I know it and some readers of rez Magazine may remember the story of Sand meets Water where the Bing Man goes to the therapist, a TESLA K850 CUDA. It’s long ago, you might have forgotten who the Bing Man was. [ … ]
Enjoy the gift of WAHTYE.
The story THE MESHIAN is published in rez Magazine, January 2021.