Launch: Chapter 13

  Markus awoke the next morning feeling less rested than he usually did.  After lying in bed reflecting for a while, he finally came to feel his head sufficiently cleared.  He thought lights up at his suite, and the room obediently lit up.  He yawned and stretched as the words now make coffee scrawled across his mind while he rubbed his eyes.  Off in the kitchen he could hear the whirring of coffee beans being ground before dropping into the coffee maker.  After getting out of bed naked with the stagger of a newly birthed fawn, he started sifting through his clothes.  He thought open a daily checklist for himself, to which the large screen at his bedroom workstation displayed an inviting checklist creation wizard.

  While getting dressed into a casual button up red shirt and a pair of blue jeans, he thought see Kirsten, and the words came up with a check box beside it near the top of the screen.   Check out the genetics lab, then meet with captain, check out the engine room, and then check out the medical bay, all obediently appeared one by one on the screen as he thought them.  After he paused for several seconds, a soft neutral voice asked him if he wished to make an appointment with the captain.  The system contextualized his list and anticipated this need.

  He agreed, and a list of available times appeared on the screen.  He chose one a few hours from now at half to noon.  That would allow him the chance to get a couple of other things done first.  Heading for the kitchen, the smell of coffee increased in magnitude as he approached the machine.  On his way he thought large, two cream two sugars.   He then added remember that so that his first cup would be prepared to these specifications automatically next time.  Removing the cup from its dock embedded in the wall of the kitchen, he turned and leaned against the wall, pausing to drink in the aroma.  He slowly took his first sip while emptying his mind of all but focus on the sensation of enjoying the morning’s first cup of fresh coffee.   After a moment he allowed his thoughts to mature into more complex forms again.

  Time until launch?  The monitor in the kitchen displayed ‘8 DAYS’ in large red characters against a black background.

  Ever since Kirsten had shown him to his suite yesterday, he had been trying to come up with some plausible excuse to speak with her again.  Despite being stuck together on a ship for the rest of their lives, he felt a strong eagerness to approach her soon and if possible, to arouse her attention in him the way his attention had been aroused by her.

  The silliness of his apparent urgency was not lost on him, so he wasn’t that concerned with his apparent lack of ability to come up with such an excuse.  He’d do this sometimes; he’d make a big deal in his head about being attracted to a woman way too soon.  He’d quickly fall in love with the idea of her in his head, with an ideal to which she could never live up to in reality, and which was usually wildly inaccurate.   He earnestly wanted to avoid this pattern with Kirsten, but when a reason to talk to her did finally reveal itself he smiled at the thought over his coffee as it steamed up around his face.  

  He put his coffee down onto the kitchen counter and headed back to his room to retrieve his wrist scroll which was standing up out of its docking port embedded in the surface of the desk.   He opened the drawer and pulled out the complementary Velcro wrist band and securely pressed one of the scroll bars onto it.  With a flick the scroll extended and revealed its screen.  He brought it up to his face and asked it, direct me to Kirsten Jackson’s office.  A map of the entire ship appeared on the screen, and then zoomed in to show his location, hers, and a suggested route.

  

  Since he’d woken up that morning, Markus’ thoughts had been preoccupied with considering the prospects of his working in genetics again.  It really hadn’t appealed to him much at first though.  The truth was that he had rather resigned himself to being done with the field altogether, but the captain made it sound like a pretty hands off job.  As far as Markus was concerned, if that was indeed the case and he could burn off some brain and body hours in a field he was already totally at home with while he was at it, well that didn’t seem so bad.  It was after all just the grunt work that he’d grown tired of, much more so than the more interesting and higher order theoretical aspects, and it sounded like he would have loyal lab minions to do the things he didn’t care to do anymore.

  He used to love the grunt work, back in the days when every aspect of the discipline was still new and exciting; he got a charge just from being in the lab.  He still had a much more global passion then, when he was still learning about it on the kind of steep uptake curve a child faces when first learning a language.

  What he loved most was the feeling of concepts expanding and blooming in his mind, of connections being made between new and existing information and resulting in a whole new inference, or when seeing something gives you a fresh new perspective on what you thought you knew already.  When that kind of passion goes, when one really has to start digging down deep to bring themselves to do the boring grunt work, when research becomes more about debating the finer points of more and more obscure details, Markus found he lost interest pretty consistently, in whatever field.  This in many ways explained his success; it also however helped to explain his general restlessness, academically, professionally, and personally.

  It’s also why he had so many advanced degrees, though multiple higher degrees were not uncommon these days.   Once the information revolution happened, it made the millennia old physical campus universities less necessary.   The older and better established universities proudly maintained beautifully manicured campuses where physical research was conducted and where the administration databases and library archives were based.  Tele-presence was ubiquitous and was often the only available option, like for those who lived in the more remote places on Earth or elsewhere in the Solar System.  

  Some students still preferred to go to the physical space itself to communicate directly and personally with the esteemed professors, and to be physically present when the lectures were recorded and live class discussions were hosted by video conference.   Alternatively, it was some student’s preference to only actually go to the physical institution as a sort of pilgrimage at the very end of their studies to participate in their convocation.   There were some students who had never actually visited their Alma Mater campus in person.

  A related change in the nature of education as a result of the information revolution was that the emphasis on being able to recall fine details on command was reduced.  In the modern information era, any information was widely and readily available to anyone, at any time.  As a result, comprehension, understanding, seeing how all the conceptual pieces fit together and being able manipulate them, had become the emphasis of higher education.  There were still some students who chose the traditional route of mastering some particular domain of factual knowledge though, and enjoyed the constructivist approach to analysis and synthesis of information.

  For Markus, once he found himself essentially an expert in some area he soon found himself losing interest in the work.  Although he still had passion for the knowledge and understanding, his excitement at discovery gradually died away until the required grunt work became barely tolerable.  Early in his career he took this as a cue that he had simply chosen the wrong field to specialize in, and promptly found something new to discover.  This happened repeatedly throughout his professional career and while he spent most of it in genetics and adjacent fields, he also held advanced degrees in neighboring fields like cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, neurophilosophy, biochemistry, and molecular biology.

  At this point in his life he had at least become better able to articulate his deeper interest though; he was curious about the notion of self, personhood, and personal identity.  He was intensely curious about what made people the way they were, what made him the way he was, and more generally what made people different from each other.   He had a need to understand why he felt himself to be so different from everybody around him when he was growing up, and even now as an adult.  He never doubted that there was some reason though, some underlying factor which ultimately explained his uniqueness, some key to his existence which he would sone day stumble across.

  He was also driven by a wish to see the world from an ever larger and broader perspective.  Although he was often pleased with what he saw, he also found that when he drew back the veil on the reality of human existence, he sometimes found things which disturbed him and which he wished he could forget.   He was raised in a typical humanist tradition, with the belief that humanity has a special status in the world by virtue of its conscious experience and its ability to understand the consequences of choices.  It was thought that it was humanity’s capacity for joy and sorrow with regards to concepts alone, instead of the simple satisfaction and frustration of animals, which made humanity special somehow and placed it in a position of moral significance above and beyond any other form of life on Earth.

  He had been taught that other life was always to be considered valuable in its own right, and that animal life of any kind deserved basic respect.  He had been taught that all life was valuable in and of itself, but that it reflected a hierarchy of moral concern and value, with complex and conscious human beings at the apex of concern.  The view was thought to be the height of social and biological ethics, and in stark contrast to ancient times when one human being could dehumanize another, thinking them somehow a ‘lower’ form of life.  Now only lower forms of life were considered lower forms of life, and this was believed much better.

  Although he had been taught all of this, he’d never really understood it.  He often used to wonder if anybody really did understand, but now he was convinced that nobody really did, that it was one of those things which people tended to believe that they understood, but never could.  The woeful inadequacy of the philosophy was accentuated for him when he’d sit in on Hugh’s history classes and hear about what humans used to routinely do to each other, murder, war, human sacrifice, genocide, torture, rape, necrophilia… all things which only we superior beings used to do with such relish.  He sometimes wondered how different they really were from their jungle dwelling forbearers.

  Today Markus found this philosophy a useful moral guideline, but in no way a ‘fact’ written into the fabric of the universe like the relationship between mass and gravity, or the half-life decay rates of different radioactive materials.  Markus remained unconvinced that human rationality was as unique or precious as many others self-congratulatingly made it out to be.   He found it ridiculously arbitrary, convenient, and self-serving for humans to develop a moral hierarchy which just happened to place themselves at the top, and all of creation beneath them.

  

  Markus shook his head as if to clear the slate of his mind and return to the present, after becoming lost somewhere in his more distant thoughts and memories.  He’d been down that intellectual path many times before, about largeness, smallness, significance… he realized long ago that no answers could ever be found down that road, only more questions.  It was a wonderful topic for esoteric philosophical debate, not so wonderful for getting a checklist done.  He was just about ready to leave; he made one last mental check that he had with him what he would need, and then headed out to find Kirsten.