Launch: Chapter 26

  “I have a surprise for you…” Hugh revealed as he opened the door to his apartment for Markus.   When the door opened, he understood.   Sitting in the living room waiting for them was Lavinia Ungureanu, the most memorable professor either of them had ever had at UBC.  Today she was a long retired professor emeritus, but she still wrote position pieces from time to time on issues of contemporary importance.  If he hadn’t been able to see her, the smell of cigarette smoke when Hugh opened the door would have informed him of her presence all the same.

  When Markus was young, he could remember having seen (and smelt) more people smoking cigarettes, but by his teens and early twenties hardly anyone still did, certainly nobody he went to university with.  Lavinia was the exception.  She had been a voracious smoker since long before he’d first met her over twenty years ago.  She was as surprised as anyone else that she was still alive at a hundred and two after eighty-five years of smoking though.  But that was just her way, she was a contradiction.  She seemed too powerful to die, despite her frail and worn body.   Her sunken eyes betrayed her sharpness and intensity; here was a woman simply too defiant to die.

  Lavinia had had a strong influence on both Markus and Hugh.  She was an existentialist, a living paradox.  She was someone who had the courage to stare down the emptiness and meaninglessness of life, and in doing so find a reason to live.  She was at once humanity’s worst critic and its greatest cheerleader, as she had been for the two men as well.  She was never afraid to be brutally and uncompromisingly honest with either of them, but she was never too embittered to be unsympathetic.   She was a force of nature, one who had helped shape the both of them.

  “Markus,” she croaked.  “You miserable bastard, you were really going to leave without saying goodbye!?”

  “Oh you’re right too, Lavinia,” Markus uttered as he went over to hug her in her chair.  It would have been too much work for her to get up to hug him.  “You’re right, I’m so sorry, I don’t know why I did that.  But it’s not like I’m going out of contact though, I mean we’ll still be able to talk by laser.”

  “Yeah, and what?  A few months before real time conversation is impossible and then it’s just cosmic pen pals?  Anyways you’re here now,” she stated matter of factly, “and I hear you have a problem.”  She pulled a fresh cigarette out of the pack and eagerly lit it.  “You’ve got to be more interesting than Alfie here,” she asserted.  As though on cue, Alfie entered the room and asked if anyone would like a drink.

  “Sirs, madam, may I offer you a refreshment?”  He had the voice of a tired old man no younger than Lavinia.  He was an Alfred6 model; one which was beloved by many, but not by most.  It was a mass produced house servant model and was the sixth generation in the Alfred line.   He wore a spotless full dress tuxedo beneath the long snouted, floppy eared head of a dog.  Somewhat cartoonishly stylized, it was very hound looking, with big floppy brown ears, and a long thick brown snout tipped with a large black rhinarium.  There was a patch of white on the left side of his face, and filling out his distinguished look were his thin wire frame glasses.

  “Beers all around please Alfie,” Hugh kindly asked.  Alfie bowed and disappeared into the kitchen.

    “Go ahead,” Lavinia mumbled as she lit the tip of her cigarette, “spill” she strained as she held in her first drag.  It was her way; she could be insensitive in being so direct.

  

  Markus had stumbled into Lavinia’s class only six months after his father’s death.  It was first year philosophy, and Markus’ newly discovered love of the discipline recharged his passion for discovery and understanding, a passion which had been temporarily muted by the devastating loss of his father.   Most people were well served by widely available mental health professionals when they run into problems such as these; when they need help to confront the untidy corners of their psyche, or to learn how to resolve hurt or unconfronted feelings.  Clinical psychology really took off once practitioners were able to stop placating religiosity and confront it directly as oftentimes a contributing factor to one’s mental health problems.

  But for an introvert like Markus, who was already a keen student of psychology, he was much better served by being helped to delve deeper into the metaphysics of life and death, of meaning and ethics and personhood.  He later understood these as the antecedents of psychology, as the untidy philosophical mess from which the science of psychology was crystalized out of, and on which its least stable support floated.  It was during these explorations that he had confided in Lavinia during those hard times, and matured some of the finer foundational philosophies of his world-view.

  Hugh and Markus discovered philosophy together, and as much as Lavinia helped Markus, she helped Hugh as well.   Under her guidance he was able to finally tear down the sturdier psychological foundations of his religious upbringing, and reconstruct his world-view entirely from scratch and from first principles.  It was this highly and explicitly rational and procedural view of the world that allowed him such insight into its history.

  Markus was definitely pleased to see Lavinia again.  It was good that he would get to see her in person one last time.  It was much more satisfying than saying goodbye over a video link would have been.  Genuine communication between two people is hard enough under the most ideal settings, and so much more is lost in any kind of communication at a distance.  After all, there is so much communication between humans which is beyond just the words.

  

  “My winning a spot on the New Horizon is just the backstory I’m afraid…” Markus continued.  “A couple days ago there was an accident at my family’s energy research facility.  My… mother was exposed to a lethal dose of radiation in the accident and… she only has a few weeks to live, maybe months.”

  “Oh Markus… I’m sorry to hear that.  I only met your mother that one time… she seemed like a fine woman.”  This was high praise from Lavinia.

  Alfie emerged from the kitchen again with three open bottles of the local beer Hugh had in the fridge.   He carefully laid down a napkin for each of them on the rectangular coffee table.  On one long side of the table was the couch which Hugh and Lavinia sat on.  Markus was sitting in the chair on the short side of the table, beside Lavinia.  Alfie placed a beer on each napkin and then put down a bowl of barbecue flavoured peanuts.

  “Right… well now I’ve come back to say goodbye, because when I said goodbye before I figured we’d still be in laser contact for decades more, but… well now I have to say goodbye goodbye…” he was tearing up a bit, thinking it through more clearly now than he had at any point since hearing the news.  He steadied himself, and then continued “I’m afraid they will try to convince me to stay and… and now I really want to go.”   He paused and seemed to think about what he’d just said.

  “You know, I was hesitant at first but now…” he continued, “well now, now I’ve been there!  And it’s amazing!  Not just the ship, but… but the people I met there too, they’re all so impressive, so accomplished and… so interesting, each and every one of them as far as I can tell.  The miserable truth though… is that my family needs me right now, and now more than ever I think.  Besides being with my mother… to the end, with her not able to work anymore my brother will need my help keeping the business running while he hires and trains up the… the several people it’ll take to replace her at the company.”

  “And you feel guilty, as though… you don’t have a right to abandon them in their time of need to selfishly pursue a once in a lifetime opportunity?” Lavinia asked.

  “It’s got to be said though,” Markus reflected as he sat forward and grabbed his drink.  “I don’t think they’re entirely wrong.  Family is very important, and in a very real way I’m abandoning people here who really need me, and just when they need me the most!”   He took a substantial first drink.

  “I get that Markus, I really do,” Hugh offered, “I’ve always admired how close you and your family are and… and how open you seem to be with each other, at least by comparison.”

  “You want him to go, I take it?” Lavinia asked Hugh.  She butted out her cigarette and took a generous drink of her own beer.  She smiled to herself and looked at the label as Hugh answered her.

  “Well… I wanted to go myself more than anything, but I wasn’t given the chance.  Somehow… Markus going seems like the next best thing at this point.   At the same time though, I understand the situation with his family, and I’m trying not to push and just be supporti-”

  “BRRAAAPP!!”  Lavinia burped loudly, and seemingly as unexpectedly to herself as to Markus and Hugh.   Apparently pleased with herself, she grinning as she rolled her hand at Hugh to indicate that he should continue.

  “Um…” Hugh said smiling, “I mean, it’s up to him, obviously.”

  Markus chuckled, “you once told me you’d never forgive me if I didn’t go!”

  Hugh rolled his head to the side in acknowledgement that yes he had, and then defended himself by pointing out, “that was a lifetime ago.”

  “So Markus,” Lavinia announced after finishing his first glass of beer, and pulling out a fresh cigarette.   She lit it and took her first drag before continuing, “you want to go, you have every intention of going, but you feel guilty about leaving your family in their time of need and you’re dreading the inevitable confrontation with them about it?”

  “Basically yeah… I guess that pretty much sums it up.”

  “Why?” she asked.  Markus shot an inquisitive look at his former professor.  “What I mean is,” she paused to draw on her cigarette again and exhale after a moment.   “I mean why is it that we feel guilt at all Markus, in general?” she asked, “from first principles.”

  Markus thought about this for a moment.  He had to load certain large nodules of knowledge into his active memory and cross reference them in order to provide a satisfying answer.  “Well, at the most fundamental level, we feel guilt because we are self-interested individuals who live in a community of self-interested individuals.  The survival of any individual within a co-operative species such as ours is… dependent on our ability to maintain our status as a member of the group.”  Without needing to be asked, Alfie emerged from the kitchen again with another three bottles of beer since they had all finished their first already.

  “Any human who finds themselves alone in the wild without any technology,” Markus continued, “well… in that case we’re basically prey animals.  In a group we’re powerful though.  As a group we’ve conquered the whole world, and the space around it too…” he added thoughtfully.  He hadn’t thought about human expansion in quite that way before, and the idea made him smile.  “Since our survival as individuals is so dependent on remaining a part of the group, we evolved a variety of biopsychosocial mechanisms to allow and motivate us to maintain our good standing within the group.

  “Positive emotional experiences are how we know we’re engaging in group conducive behaviour,” he continued, “things like happiness, love, passion, satisfaction… a sense of connectedness.  Negative emotional experiences likewise help us identify counter group behaviours, like guilt, anger, and fear… depression.”  Markus was stopped short by a sharp awareness of his own experience with all of the negative emotions he listed, and his utter alienation from the positive ones.

  “Depression?” Hugh asked.

  “Sure,” Markus answered, “one of the most common manifestations of depression is the feeling that one is alone, and somehow on the outside of every possible group.  In the early stages it can motivate us to appropriate steps to correct the situation that led to us feeling that way in the first place, but it can easily become a runaway clinical case…”

  Markus had had a history with depression.  Everyone afflicted with it has their own reasons and their own sources.  For Markus it involved a very deep seated feeling that he was worthless, that he was in some fundamental way unimportant and unloved.  It wasn’t something that he consciously believed or that he told himself, instead it was more like a soft voice in the back of his mind whispering to him his whole life that he wasn’t good enough, that his accomplishments were meaningless, and that nobody did, could, or ever would love him.  Most days he was able to ignore it and almost forget it was there, but in moments of weakness or vulnerability, that voice grew louder and louder.

  This was in contrast with the struggles which from time to time Hugh had described to Markus.  Being someone who emerged out of a religious world-view into a reality based one, he had a deep seated resentment about the absence of any ultimate purpose or meaning to his existence, something which he’d felt when he was still a believer.  He once tried to explain to Markus how much it had hurt for his place in the universe to fall from something rather like a God, to something rather like a bacteria.  Markus didn’t really understand what he was describing, but it sounded bad enough.   Hugh said that it left him with a deep and nagging existential sadness which he could never escape, though over time and with the help of friends like Markus and Lavinia, he’d learned better and better how to live with it.  Since his fall from the kingdom of heaven, Hugh had been struggling to find something more terrestrially worthy of his total commitment.  The closest thing he’d found to date, was the New Horizons project.

  Hugh had fallen in love with the idea of the New Horizon mission.  Here was finally a truly worthy purpose, something enduring and larger than himself which he could become an immortal part of.  At length he’d described to Markus his imaginings of the legend and myth which would evolve over the centuries in the future of the mission, about those brave adventurers who first cast off their terrestrial shackles, and dared to fly boldly into the abyss.

  “What makes humans unique though,” Markus paused to sip his beer, “is the frontal cortex, and our ability to second guess ourselves by imagining the future results of our choices in the present.  We make choices based on both this rational analysis and based on our emotional experience, which helps us to recognize how much certain ideas or individuals mean to us.”

  “Could you say,” Hugh asked, “that love is a category of that which we value the most and most want to preserve in our decision making?”

  “Absolutely, and guilt is the experience of being acutely aware that our actions have, or will, or might, harm somebody we care about in some way.   Seeing someone we care about suffer… especially if we are the cause of that suffering, causes us to have a deep psychic pain which we call guilt.  It serves to motivate us to correct these behaviors and avoid such consequences in the future so as to remain part of the group.”

  “It sounds like you are suggesting that there is some deep and fundamental connection between love and guilt,” Lavinia suggested leadingly.

  “Absolutely there is!” Markus snorted.  “Without love there would be no guilt at all, not even over wronging strangers.  That’s what people like psychopaths lack, that diluted sense of love for all human beings as the in group that we’re all ultimately a part of.  It’s a feeling almost all people have.  That diluted love becomes concentrated into smaller in groups and particular people as particular instances and examples of that greater love…  Guilt is just an acute sense that one has in some way wronged that which they love.”

  “You could say,” Lavinia suggested as she drank the last of her second beer and dropped her lit cigarette butt into it, “that the problem you are facing now is a conflict between your rational brain understanding the lack of consequential difference between you staying and going, and your emotional brain telling you your family needs you.”

  “Yeah… I guess that’s exactly it…”   Markus let out a long, slow, and laboured sigh.  “All it knows is that my mother and brother need me, and that as her son and his brother I have a duty to respond.  That part of me simply can’t have any more complex thoughts than that.” 

  “But you can…” Hugh offered, a little meekly.

  “Indeed,” Lavinia added, firmly.

  “Right…”

  There was quiet for a few moments before Lavinia broke the silence.  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Lavinia declared.  “If we’re going to have such a depressing conversation, let’s at least have some fun while doing it.”