Midway: Chapter 39

  “You’re gonna have to kill me.”

  Tycho was sitting cross legged with his palms on his knees and looking down; he appeared to be meditating.  In a flash of anger Johannes squinted beads of tears out of his eyes which rolled down his cheeks.  He stood up, whirled around, and pointed the shotgun at Tycho’s head.  He then quickly lost his anger and lowered the weapon at the sight of his poor clone-son.  Despite himself, and all that Tycho had done, Johannes still just couldn’t bring himself to see his beloved son as a monster.  He could only see a victim; his sad, broken, and lonely son who literally could have been Johannes himself, if he’d lived the life Tycho had.  

  It was a difficult concept to integrate into his understanding of his life and his place in the universe.  For one, as much as Markus Bowland had raised a clone of himself in Johannes, so too had Johannes raised a clone of himself in Tycho.  He’d raised himself, and for better or worse, this was the product before him.  It was hard for him to process the fact that if they’d lived each other’s lives exactly, their roles would be exactly swapped in exactly the same situation.   It brought to mind all kinds of questions about what really made him Johannes, and what really made anybody who they thought they were.  It all hinged of course, on Tycho’s story having been truthful, but what could it’ve possibly served him to make it all up whether in part or in full?  It was in reality, all too painfully plausible to be a lie.

  “Shut up, Tycho.”   Kill him, what a ridiculous thing to say.  He looked over at the still unconscious bridge crew.  He figured that they must still be knocked out from the gas while Dhika, Uzodimma, and himself had only been more temporarily knocked out by the flashing scroll.

  “I won’t stop.  I can’t… I can’t stop.”  Tycho stated thinly yet defiantly as he pulled himself back up the captain’s chair and plopped himself down in the seat, exhausted and defeated.  “You’ll lock me into a cell the way you did Uzodimma, you’ll make me live the rest of my natural life like that and no… no, no I can’t have that.  I’d spend every waking moment of every day trying to find a way to escape.  I’ll never stop trying; I’ll find a way to try this all over again.”  He looked up at Johannes and for the first time since the excitement their eyes solidly met.  

  “I will never stop, Johannes.  I will not give up, I simply will not accept my bitter and futile fate, I will not accept this imposed existence without fighting back!  I would rather die fighting to be free of it.  If you lock me up I will only grow angrier,” he growled, “more removed, more resolved, and more determined… I’ll do everything I can to sow dissent on this ship and to factionalize it, and I will no longer be so careful to spare life either!   This time only Alissa and Uzodimma were killed.  Next time the stakes will be higher, next time I will have no reservations about killing anyone I have to, I’d rather kill everyone on this ship than go back in my cage!”

  “Tycho… be quiet.”  What Johannes couldn’t admit to himself or to Tycho is that what he said made sense.   For one thing, it seemed cruel simply to lock Tycho away for the next sixty years of his life, his whole last two thirds, only for their eventual arrival to happen only a decade or two after his death.   It had seemed different with Uzodimma somehow… he didn’t seem to mind so much.  He was more mature somehow as if for him, one life was as good as any other.   It was as if for him, being alive at all was all that really mattered, whatever the circumstances he had to live in were.

  He in some ways seemed to welcome the peace that his time locked in his suite afforded him.  Sure it’d only been less than a month, but he seemed to be taking to it well.  He almost seemed to find a sort of stoic peace in his acceptance of the situation.  Maybe it was easier for him because it was a choice he’d made, but Tycho… with Tycho it seemed as though existence on board the New Horizon itself was a sort of claustrophobic existential torture.  Even free on the ship he’d felt like a trapped prisoner.  To further reduce his space to only his quarters, to deny him even his time in the bubble and the arboretum… for him that would be something far beyond torturous.

  It had long been understood on Earth that vengeance in response to criminal activity was archaic, and rooted in primitive impulses.  Modern society’s sensibilities towards criminal activity allowed them to understand that most criminal behaviour of the past had been the product of one or both of poverty and inadequate mental health services.  Their more mature and nuanced attitude towards crime evolved to be ‘early intervention if possible, rehabilitation where not, and quarantine when all else fails.’  This is what Johannes had been taught, but he’d been taught a lot of things which now seemed quaint at best.

  He did not believe that Tycho could ever be rehabilitated in the kind of way required for him to be allowed to roam free on the ship again.  He could spend his time learning and pursuing higher and higher education in order to better himself, but he had no philosophy or politics to passionately argue for from behind his imprisonment.  He would be completely and utterly without purpose, other than escape.  For someone like Tycho, this might very well be a punishment worse than death.

  And yet, Johannes could not shake himself of the impression that any life, even a tortured life, had to be better than not being alive at all.  It’s not like there was anywhere else one went after death, there was only the absence of life, only forever the absence of any conscious experience.   While alive, no matter what the situation, there was always hope, there was always a chance!  Didn’t one just have to accept the absurdity of their lives, whatever that life turned out to be?  He could see it now; he was no longer veiled in the dogma left to them by their founders.  He could see in horrifying precision the utter absurdity of their lives out here in the void, the utter absurdity of the whole damn mission!  

  This whole ship was just one colossal attempt to mute the futility of all human existence.  Their founders had no meaning in their lives back on Earth, so they concocted a mission and built this ship just to manufacture a meaning out of nothing, to build scaffolding around an existential black hole; the ultimate absurd truth that there can never be any genuine meaning to any human life ever!  And here they were, absurdity built upon absurdity, completely trapped inside other people’s ill-conceived attempts to generate meaning and purpose in a universe that will forever and inevitably deny either to any.  A billion light-years away, and a trillion years hence, nothing any humans ever did or do, would ever matter.  So many lives, so many hopes and dreams, so many nightmares and defeats, so much sound and fury… signifying nothing.

   

  “I can tell you’re considering it.”

  “No, of course I’m not,” Johannes countered half-heartedly.

  “Don’t lie to me; I know how you think…  On some level I am you.   I know the moral philosophy that you adhere to; I know what kind of bind it’s putting you in.  I always knew it would come to this, that I would either succeed, or that you would have to kill me.  You’re the only one who has it in you to do it.  I know you can because I could.”

  “You’re wrong about me Tycho.  We may share genomes, you may know everything there is to know about me, but that doesn’t make you me or me you.  Our life experience filters through our genetics to make each of us unique and different from each other.  The genes don’t make the person Tycho; at least they don’t have to…”

  “No… but our genes do set the behavioural table, don’t they.  Come on Johannes don’t fight it.  Especially if what you say is true and you really can see through all the bullshit that’s been spoon fed to you your whole life.  Sometimes just being alive isn’t enough… sometimes it’s not enough just to breathe.   Come on, this choice has already been made for you.  It should be easy, don’t fight it!”

  At that moment, a soft tone began sounding on Tycho’s wrist scroll.   Dhika must have restored the ship’s communication system.  “Tycho?   Hello?” a voice called out from the device.  It was Bao.   “Tycho are you there?  I don’t know what everyone’s all worked up about, but while I’ve been stuck in my home suite I’ve been working on this week’s assigned problems and I just cannot figure out number fifty-seven… can you help me?”  Johannes watched his clone-son take on a look that was sadness, hurt, shame, and rage all rolled into one.

  “You should answer her,” his patriarch suggested.  “That’s your life trying to call you back.”  Instead Tycho ripped the scroll off of his Velcro wrist band while locking eyes with his clone-father.  He grabbed the posts with both hands, and snapped them in half and then threw the broken pieces at Johannes, who ducked to avoid them.

  Tycho kept his icy gaze on his clone-father.  “Kill me… please.  I don’t want to hurt her, but I will if you don’t.  I’ll have to.”

  “Dammit Tycho, stop talking like that!  I am not going to kill you!!  We’ll figure out another way!”

  Tycho simply looked down with deep disappointment.  “Then you condemn me to a fate far worse than death.  Defeat and death I can accept, but that… that I can never forgive!”  Tycho was beginning to worry he’d underestimated his clone-father.

  And so the two of them just existed there together for a few moments, Tycho looking down at the ground sadly, wondering if he’d been wrong about Johannes, and Johannes frustratedly shaking his head over the utter impossibility of the situation.

  “Do it,” Tycho pleaded softly without looking up.

  “No,” Johannes responded, also in a whisper and shaking his head, but also not looking up.

  “Do it.”  Tycho said again, a little more forcefully but still not looking up.

  “No.”  Johannes matched his tone and force in response, but himself still refused to look up.  A few moments of silence passed between them.

  Tycho leapt to his feet, “DO IT!!!” he yelled in an agonized blend of pain, begging, desperation, and misery as he started to lunge towards Johannes.

  “NOOOOO!!!!” Johannes yelled as he raised the shotgun and shot him in the heart.  Tycho fell forward, landing dead at his feet.  Johannes dropped the gun, put his face in his hands and started sobbing as he slumped down to the ground on his knees.  He then frantically pulled Tycho’s body up onto his lap, wrapped his arms around him, and held him tightly while rocking back and forth as the last drops of life left his son’s body and saturated his clothes.  This was the scene upon which Dhika and the emergency personnel came across when they returned, only moments afterward.