Arrival: Chapter 1

  “Hello?   Do you know who you are?  Where you are?  …What you are?” He was asked after opening his eyes.

  “Give me a second…” Wiremu asked as he looked up to the ceiling for a few moments as he tried to remember.  “Yes.   My name is Wiremu Tynes… this is supposed to be the New Horizon.”

  “It is.” his interrogator confirmed.  “Do you remember what you are?”

  “…What I am?”   It struck him as such an absurd question, but then he remembered.  “Oh right, uh… I’m a simulant.”

  “Yes.   Does everything feel right to you?   Were all of your memories properly integrated?  There was an… incident along the way which involved you; we were worried you may have been adversely affected.”

  “I think I’m all here… I seem to have all of the memories I should expect to have…. everything that was available up until a few weeks before the launch anyways…”  He was now remembering that the original Wiremu Tynes, of whom he was a simulation, must be long dead now.  He was a sophisticated mechanoid, who was running a sophisticated personality simulation program on the quantum computer brain in his head.  The intended effect, was to create the illusion both to himself and to others, that he was in fact the person he was a replication of.  “We’ve made it to the Sigma Draconis system then?  We really… we really actually made it?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised.” the human said with an edge which bordered on a snarl.   “We’re in orbit around Haven right now.”

  “Hot damn!!” Wiremu excitedly exclaimed, but then his heart sank (or whatever the equivalent feeling should be characterized as, for a being such as himself).  “Wait, why didn’t you wake us up earlier?  We wanted to see the approach and everything; we were supposed to help you navigate into the system!”  Wiremu was the ship’s original captain, and he was disappointed that he’d missed the most interesting space flight aspect of their mission.  From his decades with the Peacekeepers and the Trade Corps, he’d been so intimately familiar with the Sol System.  Part of the whole point of him participating in this ultimate Hail Mary pass was to get the chance to navigate through an entirely new and alien star system.  He’d been so looking forward to it… or more accurately the original him had been so looking forward to it.  But if he wasn’t Wiremu, then why should their arrival matter to him at all?  It was already confusing him.

  “To be honest, we… just forgot.  We were too busy with all of the work required for the most critical part of our journey.  I suppose it just didn’t seem important enough to remember.”

  That didn’t sit well with Wiremu.  He didn’t like the idea that the expressed wishes of he and the other mission founders could be so easily and remorselessly ‘forgotten.’  He could only wonder what other explicit instructions they’d left which had also been ignored.  He scrutinized this other person in the room who appeared to be so carelessly masking his disdain.  He had black hair which came down to the bottom of his ears, a brown Arab complexion, angular nose, and beady black eyes which had yet to look away.

  “So who are you then?”  Wiremu asked.

  “My name is Asari.  I am the current patriarch.”

   

***   ***    ***

   

  Sadhika awoke sitting in a chair with an unfamiliar individual sitting across a table from her in an unfamiliar room.

  “Hello.   My name is Halley Bowland.  What’s yours?”  The tone was friendly enough, if cautious.

  “Sadhika,” she answered reflexively without having to think about it, “Sadhika Sengupta”

  “Good!   And… you know where you are?” Halley gently asked.

  “Well, I’m not familiar with this room in particular but… I should be somewhere on the New Horizon generational starship, and on close approach to Haven if our instructions were correctly followed.”

  “They weren’t… I’m sorry.  I protested, but… they waited until we’d already achieved orbit around Haven to wake you up.”

  “Oh.”   Sadhika didn’t quite know what to make of that.  “Wait, so we actually made it?  That’s incredible!  You mean to tell me that we’re actually in orbit around Haven right now?  I want to see!” she declared as she energetically stood up.

  “Soon, I promise.” Her new friend told her.  He was a tall man of physical substance, but he was remarkably pale with freckles and medium length auburn hair which framed his oval face and appeared to have begun receding.  “Last question I have to ask you Sadhika.  Do you know… what you are?”  He scrutinized her response with intense blue-green eyes.

  It was only after he asked that she remembered.  Now she immediately recalled helping Neil come up with the waking protocol in the first place, and the need to specifically remind them of what they were for them to remember.  “Yes of course.  I do now… I’m a simulant; a simulation of the original Sadhika Sengupta.  I understand this on an… intellectual level, but somehow it’s… it’s somehow hard to believe.  Nothing about my… my experience suggests that I’m anything other than myself.  I mean… her.”

  “I sympathize with your confusion, believe me… but that’ll come later.”

  “So this is… this is the first time that I’ve been conscious.  Me, the simulant… and not her?”

  “That’s right.   You didn’t leave specific instructions as to who should wake who.  We thought it best to wake you all individually in one on one interviews with the senior staff.  I’m the current captain.”

   

***   ***    ***

   

  In-Su opened his eyes suddenly, and with instantaneous alertness.  He was in a barren room with grey walls.  The entire ceiling emitted the light which brightened his surroundings, and he figured it must be an opaque surface uniformly backlit from behind.  He was sitting across from a woman of about thirty who had long straight black hair.   She looked at him as though she were studying him with her big black eyes.  Like himself, she had a touch of yellow to her skin tone, but her face was flatter and more angular than his, which was much rounder with narrower eyes and unlike hers his black hair was cut short.

  “Greetings,” he offered.

  “Hello,” she answered back a little sheepishly at first, and then with her fog of reservation burning away in the light of intense curiosity, she softly asked: “what’s your name?”

  “Kim In-Su.   What’s yours?” He asked reflexively.

  “Aset,” she replied.  “I’m the Matriarch.”  After a pause she asked, “do you know where you are?”

  After considering it for a few moments, In-Su replied: “I should be on the New Horizon, which should be in the Sigma Draconis star system if I’ve been awoken.”

  “Correct.   So you know… what you are.”

  “I’m a… simulant.”  It wasn’t a revelation per se; it was not a truth for which he had initially believed something false in its place.  It simply… hadn’t crossed his mind since he’d woken up which was, now that he thought about it, the first time he’d ever been conscious at all since he’d been… well born, and just a few minutes ago.

  “How does that make you feel?” she asked, as though she’d followed along with him in his internal train of thought.

  “I don’t know.   In a way it means that I’m dead.   The person who I think I am, the real me… is long dead.  And yet here I am.  It’s… it’s quite a thought.”

  “I bet…” Aset seemed entranced by his predicament.  “I can only imagine what that must feel like.”

   

***   ***    ***

   

  “Hello, my name is Søren, this is Ishtar… may I ask what your name is?”  The speaker had white skin, but the woman beside him had a shade of skin which was even darker than Neil’s own.  True to his name the man who’d called himself Søren had a decidedly Nordic appearance with his tall frame, blond hair, blue eyes, and narrow nose.  The woman beside him on the other hand had short cut curly black hair over top of her round face, flat nose, and prominent cheekbones.

  “Neil… Neil Sagan.”  He tilted his head to the side in reflection for a moment.  “We’re in the Haven star system aren’t we?”

  “Actually, we’re in orbit around Haven already,” Ishtar answered.

  Neil stood up and looked around.  He then started moving his body about as though he were checking to see that everything worked as it was supposed to and as he remembered.  “Orbit hunh?  Well you’ve already gotten that part wrong… not very encouraging I have to say.”  He looked at Søren and Ishtar expectantly for several moments.  “Yes I know I’m a sim by the way,” he finally said with a bit of a chuckle.

  “I’m sorry um, Neil,” Ishtar offered with a smile.  She seemed amused by him and his attitude.  “I’m head of flight operations and I oversaw our orbital insertion.  The truth is… we just forgot.  It just didn’t seem that important or necessary.  I mean, we’d been training for it our whole lives.”   Neil started jumping up and down as high as he could, and getting some good vertical distance too.  “We were so busy plotting and analyzing our braking manoeuvers that we just never got around to it; before we realized it we’d already forgotten about you.”

  “Truth is we… we just didn’t think of you that often at all,” Søren added.  “I mean we think about the um, originals of you four, but… not so much about you simulants.”

  “Well,” Neil said as he came up behind them and put his hands on their shoulders, “now we’re all that’s left of either.”