Launch: Chapter 7

  The next morning Markus and Hugh made their way down one of the lifts towards the shuttle launch area at the centre of the station.  Not much was said between them as they went; they were both somewhat glum, but each for their own reason.  On Markus’ mind was all that he was about to leave behind while on Hugh’s mind he imagined, was all the adventure he was about to miss out on.  On both of their minds though, was losing their best friend.   They came to the Peacekeeper security gate where they would have to part ways.  Only those who were booked on a flight were allowed past the security checkpoint, beyond which were the airlocks to the awaiting shuttles.  The two of them floated in silence together for a few moments while other passengers passed by them either on their way through security, or going the other way up to the habitat ring from a recently arrived shuttle.

  “Well… this is it,” Hugh declared, attempting but failing to feign enthusiasm.

  “Yeah…”  Markus replied.  Neither knew quite what to say.  They had been the closest of friends for over forty years, and now they were supposed to find a way to say goodbye to each other forever.

  Hugh shook his head, apparently giving up on finding the words, and instead just pulled his friend into a big, lingering hug.  “Godspeed Markus,” he whispered into his ear before pulling away.  There was nothing else to say.  Markus simply nodded his acknowledgement, and turned around to make his way towards the security gate.

  

  Hugh Nye wasn’t religious today, but he’d been raised that way.  Well into his teens he had been a faithfully observing Mormon along with his mother and father, and when his parents had signed up for the Mormon G.S.S. mission in Hugh’s early teens, it had just been assumed that he would go with them.  Somehow though, at that age Hugh already had the wherewithal and conscientiousness to go against his family and choose for himself not to go.  Already he had begun to discover deep cracks in the worldview he had been raised with and the more he learned about the Mormon G.S.S. project, the more serious his reservations about going along became.

  For Hugh’s parents, there were never any doubts about the truth of their religion; it was for them as obvious a truth as the truth of water being wet.  Hugh grew up listening to his parents complaining about what a tragedy it was that society had become so godless, so irreverent, so hedonistic and decadent.  Fortunately for Hugh, he met Markus a few years before the Mormon G.S.S. launched and the two became fast friends.  It was Markus who introduced him to the secular world view shared by most of the rest of the world.

  The greater the penetration of the secular world into their lives, the harder it became for Hugh’s parents to insulate their children from it.  This sense of their world-view being suffocated led a great many religiously minded parents to consider joining a religious G.S.S. project.  Year by year the whole world grew more and more secular and rational, and as a result their communities had to become ever more insular to maintain their beliefs.  As the march of science and liberalism drove ever forward, they ceaselessly demonstrated the ever increasing improbability of their metaphysics and the incongruence of their moral beliefs.  In response, religiously inclined people like Hugh’s parents were required to become ever more radical about their beliefs and ever more fervent in their denials, to prevent their children from being exposed to the real world.  The impossibility of this task is what ultimately made escape on the Mormon G.S.S. so appealing; it was the last possible remaining alternative, to evolution.

  Try with Hugh as his parents might, their world-view for some reason never entirely took hold with him.   Long before he had the capacity to critique different pieces of information against each other, he very naturally believed everything he was told.  But once he did have that capacity, he always preferred to pursue the truth instead of pursuing reaffirmation of what he had been taught to believe.  This set him apart from the rest of his family in that when exposed to conflicting views of the world, he had a sense that the world could only be one way or the other.  Throughout his childhood there was a voice whispering in his ear, telling him that it really mattered which way the world really was.

  Over time, and with Markus’ help, Hugh achieved greater and greater evolutions in his understanding of the cosmos and his place within it.  When and only when he was finally ready, he came to accept, by coming to understand, the profound truths which all religions are at their essence a bitter and fundamental denial of; that there is no life after death, and that the inverse has no agency.  At least that is, he admitted that there was no reason to find either premise plausible, let alone probable.  He grudgingly came to accept for better or worse, that there is no guiding hand dictating how things turn out in life, no intelligence cruelly (and seemingly arbitrarily) determining who lives and who dies, or who prospers and who suffers.

  At the time he’d described to Markus that he felt very alone and scared, as if the ground beneath him had fallen away and that he had nothing to anchor himself to. It was so significant a moment for him that he still tended to think of his life as being divided into the times before and after.  As time went by, he came to appreciate the elegance of the universe as it was.  Hugh found that these revelations made his life not less special but more, and he ever after found a quirky enthusiasm for life out of a sense of the sheer serendipity and seemingly ridiculous impossibility of his existence.  His fascination with the mindboggling contingencies of his improbable existence is what ultimately led him to his deep love of cosmic and human history.   It was to him a very personal story of how all eternity could lead to a phenomenon so singular and distinctive as his own life and consciousness.  

  This more personal fascination with history gave way to a more sophisticated appreciation of the complexity of forces which shape human history.  The more he learned about the past the more he wished he could glean of the future.  He studied war because he loved peace.  He wanted to understand what led to such horrors in our history so that the early trends could be identified in the present, and the ugly consequences of the future possibly avoided.

  One of the reasons why he loved to study and teach utopianism and totalitarianism in the twentieth century, was because throughout most of human history prior to it, war often involved religion.  In the twentieth century though, wars were fought by totalitarian regimes which while not religious per se, certainly used a lot of the same strategies for social control as religious institutions historically employed.  Most obvious was the singular official national policy and narrative from states like Soviet Russia, Mao’s China, Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s Italy; heretics and blasphemers became dissidents and seditionists.   Another totalitarian tactic he found reminiscent of religious tradition was the policy that anyone who dissented was by default an enemy of the state to be eliminated without compromise or hesitation.

  Markus believed that this was the ultimate source of his friend’s passion for the New Horizon mission.   Early in his life he had rejected everything he had known at great personal cost, both in terms of what he thought he knew, as well as with the people he knew.  Years after the first two G.S.S. missions had launched he had come to see them as cowardly in retrospect.  He regarded them as unprecedented efforts of denial, of escape from reality and ultimately, escape simply from the truth.  The New Horizon struck him as the very antithesis of this, as the positive act of harnessing passion for truth, for discovery, and for humanity’s potential.  He romantically perceived it as an attempt to launch out into the universe, in concentrated form, the very best which humanity had to offer, in the hopes that it would thrive and spread while staying true to that centre.

  

  As Markus went through the airlock and started looking for his assigned seat amongst all the empty ones, he found that the only other person was a woman floating over towards the other end of the cabin, talking sternly to a face on the screen in front of her.   Her shoulder length jet black hair which could be seen wandering aimlessly about her head in the microgravity made him realize that this was one of the people who had been on the first shuttle with him, but he had yet to see her from the front.  He’d figured by her green engineering coveralls that she was a maintenance monkey for the station, but the authority of her voice immediately broke him of this impression.

  “I don’t care Frasier, I need it here in two days.  I need a definitive answer, can you do it or not?”  Something about that voice… it had a subdued Indian accent to it and he swore he should recognize it.

  “Er… yes sir, you’ll have it in two days.”

  “Thank you.”  She barked and then thought the call closed.  “Damned drone…” she muttered irritatedly, condescendingly implying he was easily confused or inflexible in his behaviour like drones could be.  Markus found his seat, and politely made enough noise to be noticed by her without startling her, but carefully not enough to be bothersome.  As he pulled his seat belt and shoulder straps around him, he looked up at the woman who had now turned around and headed towards him, presumably to her own seat.  As soon as he saw her somewhat round face full on, with its light brown skin and dark brown eyes, he instantly recognized her and mentally kicked himself for not recognizing her earlier.  It was Master Sadhika Sengupta, a legend in the biotech field, and a principal founder of the New Horizon mission, one of its four principle founders.

  Her eyes narrowed as she scrutinized him.  “I don’t recognize you.  Are you New Horizon crew?”

  “Yes sir, wildcard,” he answered, a little hesitantly.  He was intimidated by her.  Years ago he had met her at a Synthetic Genetics conference, but he doubted she remembered.  It was brief, and he had been just one of many of her fans there.

  “Ah, well that would explain it.  I take it you know who I am?” she asked expectantly.

  “Yes, of course.  I’m in the biotech field myself, well er… I mean I was.”   He muddled with a touch of confusion.   At his small betrayal of vulnerability her expression softened a bit as her managerial mask lifted, and she floated her way over to the seat across the central aisle from him.

  “Nervous?  Don’t be.  It’ll take a while for your language to adjust.  When we first started talking about this mission I constantly had to correct myself too, I had to remember that we wouldn’t have anything to do with the arrival procedures, but that they would…”  She mused to herself over that briefly, then asked, “what’s your name?”

  “Markus Bowland.”

  “Bowland?  As in… Bowland Power Systems? “

  “Yes, well… I mean my grandfather originally started that company yes, but my mother and brother run it now.  I’ve um… I’ve never had much sense for business.”

  “I see.  So what kind of sense do you have?  You said you were in the field?”

  “I was, yes.  For a while I headed the Synthetic Genetics department at the University of British Columbia.”

  “Oh that Bowland, yes I’m familiar with the work you did there.”  A flight attendant drone emerged from the forward flight deck, and warned them that they were about to leave, and that they needed to secure themselves into their seats.  Sadhika started securing her seat straps, and Markus watched her while trying not to stare, deflecting his gaze out the windows beside her, and back and forth.   He was still sharply intimidated by her.   “If memory serves, you developed the procedure that stabilizes the genomes of cloned organisms, correct?” she asked.

  Markus beamed.  The innovation was on his short list of proudest achievements in his professional research career, and he was doubly pleased that she recognized him as being involved with it.  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Well nice to meet you Markus Bowland, I’m sure you’ll make a solid addition to the team.”

  “Thank you very much.”  She simply nodded in response.  He was honoured; this was high praise from a woman whom he’d admired and been inspired by for decades.

  “We’ve had a lot of dealings with Bowland Power Systems and I don’t think we’ve ever had any complaints.  I was impressed with how well the company was organized, owning themselves all of the base resources they needed to build their power cells and fusion cores.  They cut out as many middle men below them as possible to keep the costs down and stay competitive… I respect that,” she remarked.  Sadhika was not only a giant in the scientific field but Brahma Biotech was a legend in the commercial sector as well.

  “Yes sir, I’m also very proud of what my mother and brother have been able to do with the company over the years.”

  “Aren’t they in the thirties in the global transnat ratings?”

  “Yes sir.  Thirty third in the world last I heard, and twenty-first in the Commonwealth.   But if I am not mistaken… isn’t Brahma Biotech sixth?”

  Sadhika smirked.  “Yes it is, and closing in on the top five thank you very much.”

  The shuttle softly jetted away from its mooring on the central hub of Orbital One, and then they both felt the familiar soft accelerations in multiple directions as ship’s autonomous piloting programs orientated the ship for a short main engine burn towards the New Horizon.

  “Have you been onboard yet?” Sadhika asked.

  “The New Horizon?  No…” he admitted.

  “Well whatever expectations you have… prepare for them to be shattered.  There has never been a ship quite like the New Horizon,” she declared, beaming with pride.  She had personally been involved with, and overseen the development and construction of, virtually every aspect of the ship and she was clearly very proud of what they had all accomplished together.

  “Master Sengupta… may I ask you a personal question?” he asked self-consciously.  “Well, you might find it more an odd question than a personal one…”  She nodded her ascent, seemingly without much of a thought.  “I know my own motivations of course… but they’re very much my own, and I’m curious about what’s made other people want to join a mission like this, people like you.”

  “So… why.  Is that all?” she laughed.

  Markus nodded sheepishly.  “Yes sir… if it’s not too personal”

  “Oh no…” she took a moment to consider her answer, looking out at the apparently growing New Horizon in the window as she did so.  She shrugged her shoulders and while still looking out the window stated simply, “somebody had to do it… it just had to be done, and I didn’t want anyone else to do it before we did.  I suppose I really just wanted to be the first.”

  He nodded again, but this time countered.   “But the Catholics and Mor-”             

  “They don’t count,” she stated defiantly, cutting him off and momentarily flashing her managerial mask.  Then in response to Markus’ confused look she continued more gently, “they don’t count, Bowland.  They did what they did to hide from progress.  They were just escaping, we are exploring.”