Midway: Chapter 37

  Johannes woke up slowly, groggily, and with a not insignificant headache.  When he opened his eyes and his vision cleared, he saw his son sitting in a chair about six meters in front of him.  He himself was sitting against the wall, with three unconscious people to his left who were the bridge crew they’d lost contact with, and on his right, Uzodimma and Dhika sat unconscious beside him.  He had not yet sufficiently regained his faculties to wonder what had happened to Alissa.  They were on the bridge, and Tycho was sitting in the captain’s chair in the middle of the room.  Behind him were the four simulants standing perfectly still with vacant expressions on their face.  They might just as well have been pieces of furniture for all the humanity they betrayed in this state, and yet they were otherwise perfect replicas of the famous individuals on which they were based.

  “Hello Johannes,” Tycho stated coldly.

  “Ty…Tycho?   What… what are you doing, what’s going…” and then he stopped talking.  His eyes widened as the answers to his most pressing questions began revealing themselves all on their own.  It was Tycho.  It had always been Tycho.

  His son could read his expression.  “Yup, there you go.  Now you’re getting it.”

  “But what?  How… I mean-” Tycho raised his hand to stop him.

  “I know you have a lot of questions, and… I promise you they’ll all be answered.  To that end, I’d like to tell you a story.”  Johannes didn’t know what to think or feel, so he thought nothing in his stunned state, and felt only the throbbing fear and sense of danger that always accompanies an acute awareness of one’s utter helplessness and lack of control in an unfamiliar and unpredictable situation.  

  Tycho had a shotgun lying in his lap and the other two in the room were in the hands of the Sengupta and Tynes simulants, while the laser rifle was in the hands of the Sagan sim.   He also noticed that they’d brought the plasma torch into the room so that there was no way for anyone else to try to cut their way into the bridge.  If he’d been in a state to consider it, he would have realized that this effectively left the rest of the crew without any other options.  He would have wondered how they were dealing with their apparent helplessness.  Tycho took his father’s silence as an indication to get on with telling his story.

  “Well… as you know,” Tycho began as he came to sit closer on one of the swivel chairs nearer Johannes, “my grandfather died soon after my thirteenth birthday.  I read his journals as you know, and… I know you did yourself.  But what you don’t know, was that there were whole sections of it which had been erased before we got to read them.  He created a computer program which would, upon his death, delete specific sections which he’d flagged.  It was information which he wanted to preserve in his journals for himself, but didn’t want anyone else to know about after he died.   I noticed when reading his journals that there were dates conspicuously absent.  He wrote regularly and there seemed to be unexplained holes, lines of thought which were left incomplete…

  “I became increasingly interested in what he may have written in these sections, so I taught myself everything I could about computer program engineering so that I could find out for myself.  I considered it a private matter, and I didn’t want to ask someone else for help until I knew what was there, and what he had so badly wanted to keep hidden from everyone, even after his death.  I was eventually able to recover the deleted parts of his journal from the deep redundant backups.  It turns out that your father was a far better geneticist than he was a computer programming engineer.  

  “What I found was something that changed my life forever, and which bonds you and I in a way that you’d never have imagined.  You are not my father Johannes, nor is the man who I called Grandpa yours.  Neither of us are the natural products of blended gametes which New Horizon’s mission protocols require.   We are both clones Johannes.  When he created each of us he just cloned himself!  He modified our appearances enough to make us appear to be only related, but we’re both otherwise just exact genetic copies of Markus Bowland.  That is the first piece of your puzzle.”

  Tycho let this sink in for his clone-father before moving on.  It took some time for Johannes to really even understand the mechanics of what Tycho was saying, let alone all of the implications.  What he was claiming was absolute absurdity!   …Wasn’t it?  The more he processed it as a real possibility though, the more it seemed to somehow make undeniable sense.  He opened his mouth to comment or protest, but was stopped once again by his clone-son raising his hand.

  “Question time later, I promise.  First let me finish.  You of course, were the first, and for a time things were good.   He adored you as he would a natural son, maybe even more so in a… narcissistic kind of way.   You see, growing up on Earth, he always thought that he could have been a person he would have liked much better if his life had gone differently.  You might remember from the parts of his journal which he didn’t delete that he’d had a little sister who’d died when he was a toddler, and he always blamed his social aversions on the emotional climate in his family during this most impressionable part of his life and development.  That’s where you came in.  It was his goal to raise you, the way he wished that he’d been raised.  

  “You were his ultimate experiment, and the more he tried to craft you into the best possible expression of himself, the more he seemed to succeed.  He was pleased to see you grow up to be a bright, sociable, emotionally intelligent and sensitive human being.  You were everything he always thought he wanted to be himself… everything he believed that he had the potential to be.  In the process though, he discovered that in becoming all of that instead, you failed to become him.  Being those other things meant that you didn’t develop qualities which he valued about himself as he already existed.  There were unexpected trade-offs.”  

  Tycho tilted his head to the side, trying to gauge Johannes’ reaction.   “I don’t think he was disappointed in you…  I never got that impression.  I think he was proud of what you were and of what he’d created, but you were always something different from him.  Apparently you were more like his mother and brother whom he’d left back on Earth.  It was difficult for him to not be able to share with his ‘son’ the things which he so valued, first among them his unyieldingly questioning spirit.   You were never curious the way he was and I am, Johannes.  You never shared his love for the hard sciences and deep existential philosophy, for example.

  “So, when you’d grown up, and it was time for you to have a ‘son’ of your own, you came to him since he was still the Department Head of Genetics.  Instead of creating a new son for you according to mission protocols, he instead just created a new clone of himself again with just the appropriate changes in appearance; he created me.”

  At this point Johannes was desperate to get a word in, to respond in some way and to ask specific questions.  “Tycho… Ty-“ he attempted.

  “QUIET!” Tycho yelled, in something that was somewhere between a roar and a squeal, “I told you, you will have your chance to respond, but I must finish my story before you do.”  Tycho sighed heavily and calmed himself by rubbing the corners of his eyes.  “Yes Johannes, we are both just clones of Markus.”

  “As you remember, he spent a lot of time with me… he took a very active interest in my upbringing.  While he was still alive he did everything he could to actively foster in me, those elements which he so valued in himself, but were absent in you.  He did everything he could to plant the psychic seeds for me to become an experimental scientist and an existential philosopher… a deep thinker and perpetual questioner.  He taught me to question everything, and to never be satisfied with any answer, to look deeper and deeper for the truth of everything.   He taught me to hold a magnifying glass to those elements of myself which, unbeknownst to him, were the elements resulting from his deep sense of loneliness and isolation from the world around him back on Earth, and the very things which brought him to the New Horizon in the first place…  These are the things which you never felt, and why you turned out so differently from him.

  “And then… he was gone.  But he’d succeeded, I was a questioner.  The more questions I asked, the less satisfying the answers became, and the more I came to see the utter and absolute absurdity of life aboard this ship.   I realized I was destined to live my entire existence in deep space, trapped in a purpose that was never my own, that I’d never chosen for myself, and with no opportunities to ever choose any other fate.  The bitter reality I came to understand was that my life could never really be mine; it could never really be my own, not in any meaningful way.  Instead I am the perpetual victim of circumstances which are chaotically far beyond my control.  I did not choose to be a part of this mission, and yet there are zero alternatives to it for me.  My purpose in life has been imposed on me from above, and this is no sort of purpose at all if one can’t internalize it for themselves.  My existence is completely absent of any meaningful choice or autonomy.”  

  “Johannes… I think I’ve learned from the Legacy Recordings that the common thread between all the original crew, was a longing for a sense of purpose, and that Earth was an existential nightmare for them where struggle was a thing of the past, and along with struggle had gone any strong sense of purpose.  They have burdened us with a worst case scenario of that which they sought to escape.  We are trapped on this ship, in the cosmic middle of nowhere, without any option of leaving to seek our fortunes elsewhere as our founders did when they embarked on this mission.  We are simply, and completely, trapped in our existence.”

  There was silence between the clone-son and his clone-father.  Tycho seemed despondent; he was lost in the telling of a story he had been waiting so long to tell.  Johannes found himself torn between his continuing sympathy for Tycho having to have known all of this and to bear it in silence for so long, and his own shock at the revelations he was hearing.  He’d had no idea at all that either of them were clones, and he had yet to fully grasp the gravity of this revelation, and what the full implications might be.

   “And then on top of all that… he happened.”  Tycho glared at the floor with deep hatred and contempt.  This was a part of the story he wished he could skip over but obviously he could not, given how pivotal it was, how central it was to the narrative he was recounting.

  “Yes I was his victim… and yes I murdered him.  He took everything from me, I know I could have been fully what Markus had wanted, I know I would have been able to just swallow the absurdity of my existence and take my rightful place on this ship if it weren’t just for him.”  There was particular venom in his uttering of the word ‘him.’  “After a time though he came to leave me alone, no doubt on to some other helpless victim.  He told me from the beginning that if I ever told anyone he would kill my whole family before they captured him… and I believed him… for a long time.”

  “He stopped when I became too old for him, coincidentally around the time Markus died… but my pain did not go away so easily.  He was still there, living for almost fifteen years only hundreds of meters away from me, no doubt repeating the cycle of abuse over again with some new victim.  And then Mom killed herself… and I’d had enough.  I could not accept, that she was gone, yet he persisted.  It was an absolutely intolerable, and unacceptable situation.  I could not… just allow the world… to continue to exist in that way.  The ultimate injustice of it… was just so insufferable!

  “I had to do something.  I made plans, I figured out how to do it without getting caught, to forever keep my crime and… and shame, a secret.  I told myself it was for all of the hurt he would perpetrate in the future, that I was doing a good thing for others, that I was somehow avenging my mother… but in reality it was just simple revenge.   I know that now.  For so many years I stored up all that hurt and anger until one glorious afternoon I was able to pay back as much of it as possible before he died.  He died so quickly though…  I was disappointed with that…” his voice was cold and distant.  He seemed to be talking mostly to himself at this point.

  “For a few days I felt excellent.  A weight had been lifted off of my shoulders and although I knew that you and… and Anaru were investigating, I was confident that I had hidden any clues sufficiently well.   I was even more certain of my success when you pinned it on Uzodimma here, although I was very surprised that he was willing to accept the blame without protest…  I had to contact him and ask him why.  It turns out that he was his victim before I was, and that he felt guilty about not stopping him before he got to me, but that he would expose me if I did anything else.

  “What else might I do, I wondered…  I was satisfied, at least, for a time I was.  So much of my life had been consumed with the hatred and the planning of my masterpiece that when it was all over, I felt… empty all of a sudden, rudderless.  Purposeless.   I thought about trying to couple with Dhika here… but I couldn’t bear the thought of getting close to someone like that, of suffering the indignity and vulnerability of that kind of intimacy.   I was worried that Uzodimma had been right, that killing him wouldn’t be enough, that I’d need a new target, a new mission… a new reason to live.  And then Anaru died.  Worse still he died saving me, the murderer, the very criminal he’d been looking for.  He’d sacrificed his powerful and virtuous life for mine… for mine,” he exclaimed.  “For me, after what I did!”

  “Where is the ship being redirected Tycho?” Johannes asked in a low even voice.

  “And you know what?   Even that I may have been able to live with.  Even that… with enough time, I maybe could have gotten over that…  But then she told me about her and Anaru, and I snapped like a twig.”

  “Where are you redirecting the ship, Tycho?”

  “I can’t be here anymore Johannes, I can’t live one more day than I have to on this ship, and I’ll be damned if I’ll just kill myself like my mother.  I will not die in space Johannes, I will not live my life meaninglessly in the empty void between the stars.  I will set foot on ground clone-father, I will breathe natural air!  I am so sick of this ship, of its oh so artificial environment!  I was born into this claustrophobic existential nightmare of a ship, but I will not die on it!!”  He was screaming.

  “Tycho… where are you taking the ship?”

  Tycho calmed right down all of a sudden.  He hesitated, then eventually stated calmly but defiantly, “Eta Cassiopeiae.”

  “You… you can’t.   You can’t!” Johannes exclaimed.

  “I can,” Tycho corrected him, “and I am.  And in a few short weeks no redirection to any other destination will be possible other than to a cold death in space for everyone.”  It was only then that Johannes noticed the heap of stockpiled food off to the side of the room.  Apparently the plan was for him to wait out that critical interval here on the bridge, protected by the sims.

  “But the Mormons’ll be there!”  Johannes was panicked, this wasn’t only a violation of one of the foundational precepts of the mission; it was potentially catastrophic.  Worst of all, he may actually be able to get away with it!  Going to a planet where a religion had already arrived and likely taken hold negated the whole point of the New Horizon mission, of creating a secular extra-solar colony in opposition to the Catholic and Mormon ones.  More to the point, there were already missions heading there!   Their mission was challenging enough without having to compete with another colony when they finally arrived!

  “Yes, in fact they should be there within the next year or two.  And you know what?  I will happily join them.  I will happily swallow every bit of their nonsense if it means that I can just once freely run through a field or a forest, if just once I can feel the wind or rain on my face in my entire fucking existence, or go anywhere and not know what I’ll find just once.  If I can find mystery, and wonder, then what is having to accept some childish dogma in comparison to all that?  How different is it really from having to swallow all the bullshit dogma about the alleged virtues of this mission?  At best I can only expect to live another seventy years or so Johannes, and we wouldn’t arrive on Haven for another eighty.  But I can be at Eta Cassiopeiae in forty years.”