Launch: Chapter 15

  As the door slid open to the genetics lab, Markus was not immediately encouraged by what he saw.   Coming from a university research background, he was used to seeing state of the art equipment which was much larger, more comfortable and yes, yellow workspaces, with all the possible materials and equipment which any genetics researcher could hope for.  Back in academia it seemed as though he couldn’t go a whole month without stumbling upon some instrument or piece of equipment which he had never used before and couldn’t recognize.

  But here in front of him was a space no larger than the main living area of his quarters on board.   One wall was entirely covered with drawer fronts arranged in a grid, each about a quarter meter squared.  There were two men in the room, one of whom was observing a monitor displaying the optical output from a microscope.  On the display were several small clusters of circles; they appeared to be zygotes after only a couple rounds of division.  At the far end of the room the other man was sitting reclined in a chair, intently engaged with his medium scroll and tapping at it with a stylus.  They both looked up inquisitively as the door opened.

  “Kirsten,” the man watching the screen said warmly as he got up to greet her.  “What can I do for you?”  The other man had returned to his scroll without a word.

  “It’s actually what you can do for him,” she answered as she gestured towards Markus.  “This is Markus Bowland.  He’s a wildcard crew member, but he has an extensive resume with all things micro and bio.   The captain has offered him the head of genetics position, and before making his final decision he wanted to come down here to meet you two and poke around the lab.”   Startled, and suddenly realizing that this was potentially their new boss, the man in the chair quickly leapt up and came to join the conversation.  “This is Jetal,” she said as she gestured towards the one who had greeted them as they entered, then towards the man who had been sitting, “and this is Herman.”

  Jetal appeared to be West Asian, with brown skin, brown eyes, and black hair that came down to his chin.  He had a wiry frame and appeared to have no fat on his body at all, which when combined with how tall he was, made him appear almost cartoonish.  Both men were wearing the powder blue coveralls typically used by those working in biomedical fields.  Herman on the other hand was clearly African, with incredibly dark skin which made the whites of his eyes stand out very dramatically against his dark brown iris’ and short black hair.  He was rotund; he didn’t appear to be of an unhealthy weight, but he definitely appeared… well fed.

  “Hello Markus, nice to meet you.  Call me Herm,” he said as he raised his hand and gave a little wave.  People didn’t shake hands much anymore.  No one really knew why, it had simply fallen out of fashion.   “Nice to meet you Herm; you too Jetal,” Markus responded, feeling just a little forced and strained with the effort that such required pleasantries always drew from him.

  Kirsten touched Markus’ arm to get his attention again and warmly asked, “you good?”  He told her that he was, and she promptly exited through the door again after saying goodbye to Herm and Jetal, presumably heading once again for the engineering section.  There was an awkward silence after the door slid closed as the three men looked at each other, all unsure what to say next.   Markus finally broke the silence.

  “So, why don’t we start with what your primary mandate is here?”  He knew that they were academics, and that he just had to get them started talking about their field.  After he got them started, the hard part would be getting them to stop talking.  It was Jetal who answered first.

  “Well, our first job after we launch is to screen the crew for discrete genetic anomalies.   Primary testing was to screen out people with existing anomalies, but it will be our job to project potential problems between genomes, and to direct breeding away from those potential problems.   Our second responsibility is to keep living gametes from every individual we launch with through our eventual arrival, so we can match an original launcher’s gametes with someone several generations down the line if we want or need to.  Our third responsibility is to do just that, the selective genetic combination, incubation, and implantation.  May I ask what your background is more specifically?”

  “Well, my last related position was the head of cloning research at the University of British Columbia.  Um, I’m afraid I have quite a lot to do today, why don’t you show me the equipment you’ve got here.”

  Herm responded this time, which led Markus to guess that his talents probably fell more on the technical end of things.  “Well, along this wall,” he motioned to the wall with the grid of drawers, “we have storage capacity for 2500 live gamete samples.   One of the drawers along the wall opened, presumably in response to a thought from Herm, and condensation mist rushed out from the refrigerated chamber.  Markus could now see that the drawer front was just a cover, and that attached to the inside was a cylindrical central beam running far back into the wall, but for exactly how far he had no way to tell.  Opaque spheres were arranged around the central beam in a circle, and rows of those circles were lined up one after another, extending as far as he could see into the wall.  A pale blue light emanated from the inside chamber, the light that was ideal for this kind of preservation.  It may have simply been a result of what he had come to associate with that colour light, but for whatever reason it was one of Markus’s favourite colours.

  “2500, wow…”   Markus was becoming genuinely impressed.   He was starting to realize that this cramped space was not devoid of advanced technologies at all, but rather that it was a pinnacle of their miniaturization and integration.  It occurred to him that Sadhika Sengupta herself probably had a major hand in developing this lab, and that she probably had a large research and development department at Brahma Biotech working for years on fitting all the technology they needed into as small a space as possible.   “You’ve got some pretty amazing miniaturization here, don’t you?”

  “Absolutely!” Herm replied proudly, “only the best!  Master Sengupta wouldn’t have it any other way!  Besides, we can’t exactly order replacements, you know?  We have all the equipment we would need here to do some pretty cutting edge research.”

  “Sure,” Markus replied, “but pretty soon there’ll be no practical way to communicate it to the rest of the existing body of scientific knowledge.”

  “Well then… we’ll just have to create our own independent and continuing body of knowledge,” Herm offered.

  “I like the sound of that,” Markus admitted, “that’s never really happened before in the history of science has it, a sort of segregation into two different bodies of science…”  The three stood in silence for a few moments contemplating the thought.

  Markus broke the silence again by asking, “so all this tech, but no transcriber?” 

  “No need” replied Jetal, “we won’t be doing any transcription of our own… only coding and combining.”

  “I understand that, and maybe it’s just because of my background, but it seems to me that it’s just one of those things you never know you’ll need until you do, and that it would be better to have one and never need it, than to ever need one and not have it.  What if we encounter a new disease on Haven that we have to transcribe a retrovirus to go after?  What if you have a failure in your storage units?  No replacements after all, right?  At least with personnel’s gametes on file you can manually transcribe it with a sequencer if you lose the original.”

  “Well, we really don’t ever plan on having such a failure,” Jetal reassured him.

  “No one ever does-” replied Herm and Markus in unison.  At this they looked at each other, then both looked at Jetal, then back at each other, at which point all three burst out laughing.  They were going to finish: ‘-plan on having such failures,’ but had interrupted each other.

  Eventually Jetal managed: “Well you may have a point there.”  While they regained their composure, Markus felt his wrist scroll vibrate and was reminded of all the things he wanted to get done today.  He was satisfied that this lab would more than do, and that Herm and Jetal would as well.

  “Well, it was nice to meet you two, but I have lots to get done today as I’m sure you do, so… I’m going to get going.  It was nice to meet you fellows though; I’ll see you both later.”  The two men politely reciprocated the farewell, and Markus left to go meet with the captain.  After meeting the two he would be working with, he was definitely leaning towards accepting the position.

  Before he could make it out the door though, Herm called out, “Markus, have you seen the sims yet?”

  “Do I need to?”

  “Well it’s just… they came in today but they haven’t been put into long term storage yet.  They did a truly amazing job on them… you should probably check em out while you still can.  We were just about to go there ourselves when you got here… you want to join us?”

  

  Fifteen minutes later the three were standing outside the Secure Storage Bay more commonly known as the sim-bay, a room only accessible to department heads.  It was here where things you wouldn’t want children getting into were stored, namely the limited small arms carried onboard, certain hazardous materials, and the sims.  As the acting head of the genetics department it was Jetal who was able to access the room and get them in.  The door slid open after Jetal thought his credentials at the security nodule beside the door.  Markus noticed that when he activated the door with his Brainchip, he’d had done a single hard blink.  He presumed that this was just his own quirky way of operating his Brainchip.  There was no ‘right way’ to use the Brainchip; each user developed their own system of communicating with it.

  “This room also serves as our humble armory,” he said as he opened the door, “we also have some shotguns and laser rifles for use on Haven once we get there.  But the real thing to see here is these guys.”  After leading them into the room, he gestured towards the four coffin shaped plastic crates standing upright with their lids stacked against an adjacent wall, revealing the vacantly expressioned automatons in the crates.   They were simulants of the four principle mission founders, including the now deceased Neil Sagan.

  “Oh wow…” Markus uttered despite himself as he approached the Sagan simulant.  “They’re deactivated?” he asked.  Markus had never seen a deactivated sim in person before and he found it pretty creepy.  Once they were activated they usually never went offline except when they were damaged.   They certainly looked real enough, but they eerily seemed to be something neither alive nor dead.

  “Technically,” Jetal answered, “they’ve just never been activated in the first place.  They were constructed based on the way their likenesses were when the order was taken and they were only delivered yesterday.  It’s a strict mission protocol that under no circumstances whatsoever are they to be activated before we get to Haven, so tomorrow they’ll be permanently sealed into these enclosures.”  He blinked hard, and four person sized holes appeared in the wall after their coverings had slid up and away.

  “I never really did understand,” Markus admitted, “why they had themselves simulated.  Why them and… well, why have any sims at all?”

  “Well, the legitimate reason,” Herm answered, clearly implying that there was also a less than completely legitimate reason, “is that they’ll be the first to land on Haven.  It’s a way to minimize risk to the human crew.   They won’t be vulnerable to any potential biological hazards on the surface that we wouldn’t be able to detect from orbit.  Plus we don’t know what aspects of our biology may be infectious to life on Haven.   We’ll want to do every conceivable test as safely as possible, and we can only do that by sending the sims down first to do all of the initial testing.  They can be completely sterilized.   Humans can’t be.”

  Markus moved over to inspect the Kim simulant very carefully.  He got right up close, and nose to nose he looked it right in his eyes.  “It’s creepy…” he remarked.  “They’re such precise replicas, so lifelike… it would be so hard to tell the difference except… them being inactive makes them so obviously artificial…”

  “I get a similar feeling when looking at them.” Herm admitted, apparently a little uncomfortable.

  Markus moved over and stood in front of the Sengupta sim and inspected the strange automaton.  “And the illegitimate reason?” he asked.

  “Well… it’s hardly illegitimate,” Jetal admitted, “obviously this is in large part their mission and they have every right…”  Markus rolled his hand around as if to say ‘yes of course, go on.’  “But in reality,” Jetal continued, “a quality off the shelf hive of good multi-purpose droids would have sufficed.  So… I think I’d say there’s a degree of vanity in what they’ve done here.”

  “Vanity?  Hmm, they really don’t strike me as the type,” Markus stated as he moved over to inspect the Tynes sim closely.  Somehow he was much more intimidating in this state, like a sentinel which could wake up and strike him down at any moment.  He had a strange feeling that the sim might somehow attack him.   Markus shook off the thought.

  “I think I’d do it if I was them… wouldn’t you?  I mean they’ve devoted every material and psychological resource they have to this project, just to die in deep space and never see how it all turns out.  This is a way for them to be around when the ship finally gets there.  Sure these aren’t actually them, and they won’t actually still be around to see it, but in a way… in a way they will be.  It’s certainly the closest to being there that they can hope for.”

  He turned back to Herm and Jetal.   “I think it’s also an important way for them to still be able to influence the crew’s behaviour and decisions when they finally get there.  It’ll certainly be much more effective than just leaving instructions for them.  These sims will allow them to exercise some control over the mission long after their deaths and after all is it not their mission, and their prerogative to exercise as much control over it as they wish, and in as many ways as possible?  Don’t they have the right?”