http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/men-sitting-fire-beach/

Dispatches from Titan Beach
By C. Cibo
11^th Tayes 1343 A.A.

Three years and one day ago, this was a normal beach. One of a number of normal beaches. A popular summer retreat for people from any of the three major cities within a three-hour drive. Three years and one day ago, it was a town with no stories to share beyond summer flings and noteworthy sunburns.

When the Titan walked out of the water three years ago, it was at this beach. On that day, we were certain it would change the whole world. It seemed like everything would be different. The implications of the ancient’s engineering abilities, confirmation of their use of magic and machine together, the sheer scale of their ambition were mind-boggling.  The science of repelling the corrosive power of salt water alone was worth billions.

Given the many and varied thoughts that flitted through the media in those first hours, it seemed like everything must be different. Somewhere, inside most of us, we probably felt that it should be different.

We couldn’t know, then, just how fleeting our brush with history/future would be. At least, most of us could not.

It’s a Friday night at the dawn of summer. The crowds have returned to the other beach towns up and down the coast. On a sunny afternoon the following Sunday, life appears almost normal along the coast. Except for the small stretch of beach between two fishing jetties.

It is here that the Titan’s Watchers keep a vigil. Though they don’t call themselves that. They don’t call themselves anything. When pressed, none would give me direct quotes. But I was allowed to spend a night with them on the beach, provided I took no notes.

Three years and one day ago, the only people shouting about the ancients’ blended use of magic and machinery were the group we now call the Titan’s Watchers. They read between the lines of any number of crumbling old texts, classic lyrical poems and the drudgery of civic record-keeping of cities long-since lost to the changing of the world. They saw what no one else could see, what no one else allowed themselves to see. This small, dedicated group of scholar-vagrants saw proof.

Iyashah has been on the beach longer than any of the others. To him, the others are a revolving door. Some are curious observers participating in an oddity. Some are weekend warriors who come and go regularly but maintain otherwise normal lives. Iyashah doesn’t mind them. It’s the truly dedicated, the ones who show up claiming they’re in it for the duration that he can’t stand.

“They leave,” he told me in his leveled, patient tone. “Sometimes it’s a few weeks, sometimes months. But none stay. We’re lucky though, for God or Ra or whoever, did give them some sense. Because they come for the wrong reasons, but they leave for the right ones.”

The standard misunderstanding about these people is that they are praying for the Titan to come back. The Titan’s Watchers were, in former or current lives, educated men of science and physics, of theology and magical miscellany. It is not a cult born by sociopaths and praying on the confused and the desperate. Some hippies have found their way in, but they quickly find their way back out. It’s not an organization using a beach vigil as an excuse to use drugs and sleep with girls.

In practice, it’s a lot like a university study group. But instead of studying engineering in a poorly lit auditorium-cum-classroom, they’re studying at the site of the biggest experiment in magical engineering the world has ever seen.

They eschew, strongly, the idea of having leaders. Or organization. They have no website. No hierarchy. No written set of beliefs or rituals or processes that members must follow. They have no name.

In the end, they have two things; their memories of those 96 hours from three years ago and Iyashah. In an inconstant world among a group that prides itself on fluidity, only he remains an anchor set deep into the sand of this beach.

Months after the Titan vanished back into the sea leaving behind only questions, many in the world thought the people on this beach had answers. Crowds a quarter-mile thick packed this beach. Monetary donations were made to a variety of charitable organizations supposedly linked to the Watchers. Where that money went is anyone’s guess; Iyashah only ever saw the dregs when he arrived shortly before the bulk of the hoopla died out.

Those who came here to seek answers with their toes in the sand left frustrated. The Watchers believed the ancients were capable of something like the Titan. Some even predicted we’d have an encounter, though in those eupeptic versions something more came out of it. Something other than a few footprints in the sand and photographs that look good in art installations but offer no real scientific value. By the time the Titan’s wake went out with the tide, the Watchers knew just as much as the rest of us.

But unlike the rest of the scientific community, which turned its attention to replicating a machine with no information on its mechanical workings and no real hope of success, the Watchers came to the beach. They set up camp, and they resumed their studies. Iyashah, through dint of experience and demeanor, is the most respective voice. He’s the closest thing to a leader they have ever had.

The Watchers don’t think the answer is in copying the technology of the ancients. They believe the answer is finding a way to prove we understand it. To succeed where we failed three years ago. They believe that something happened, somewhere in the world, in the days, or weeks, or months, leading up to the appearance of the Titan.

They think we called it, unknowingly, and bid it rise from its oceanic coma. And they intend to prove this point by discovering what happened to bring the Titan out from hiding.

“It’s down there, waiting, with the proverbial blinking cursor,” Iyashah told me at some point during the night. “Out of sight and out of reach. And its screen, if it has one, gives that age-old prompt any computer tech knows so well. ‘Enter Command.’ We need only to find the language it speaks so we can send down to it the only command that really matters.

‘Rise.'”