Arrival: Chapter 2

   “So…” Wiremu asked leadingly, “you said there was an incident.  Did we miss anything?”

  “I’d say you have,” Asari answered.  “There’s been a… sort of schism on the ship.”  He ineffectively tried to demonstrate the schism with hand gestures.

  “Schism?” Wiremu stood; it was instinct.  He was informed of a threat and he was instantly on alert.

  “Oh no, it’s not any kind of… immediate threat of the moment or anything, but it is something you need to be aware of.  One of the original wildcard crew members violated mission protocols and instead of creating naturally blended children, he instead created two successive clones of himself and passed them off as his son and grandson.  It is… suggested, that he created the original clones as some sort of vanity project, to create differentiated incarnations of himself.   Since his death there have been two more successive clones created, one knowingly raised as the son of the other.   Together they are collectively known as the Bowland experiments.  The last living one is Halley Bowland, and today he is the captain.”  There was obvious but checked venom in his voice as he stated that particular fact.

  “There was an incident involving the original clones.  The younger one tried to hijack the ship using you sims as his muscle.   He wanted to take the ship to a nearer planet where a different colony ship was already headed so that we would arrive within his own lifetime.  Before he could succeed though, he was killed by his older clone-father.  It was then that everyone in general found out about the clandestine cloning program.  There was a… disagreement over the circumstances of that death, and the… appropriateness of creating any further clones.  There has since grown over time a sort of… political factioning on the ship.”

   

***   ***    ***

   

  “All of your best laid plans… and yet you somehow missed so much,” Halley informed Sadhika.  

  “What are you talking about?” Sadhika asked.  She leaned forward in concern.  They were sure they’d thought of everything, what could he possibly mean?   What could have happened?

  “You really thought that you could just package the parts of humanity you liked and excise the rest… but it turned out that humanity doesn’t work that way.   Everything you tried to leave behind on Earth re-emerged in the crew.  The natural human behavioural spectrum re-expressed itself en-route, and the worst part is that because you tried to shield us from all of humanity’s darkness, we were completely unprepared to deal with it, totally ill-equipped to see what was happening right in front of our eyes…

  “I don’t understand…”

  “One of the original crewmembers was a man named Markus Bowland, and if you’d had adequate psychological screening, he probably wouldn’t have made it onboard in the first place.  As evidence, me.  I am the fourth clone incarnation of Markus Bowland.  Johannes was the first and Markus raised him as his son, and when the time came he created his second clone Tycho, and raised him as his grandson.   All he changed were their appearances, and just enough to avoid raising any suspicions.  He wanted to explore different ways he himself might have turned out if he’d been raised with different… emphases.”  

  Sadhika’s jaw dropped.  She knew it was possible to create such clones; she had after all founded the largest biotechnology company back on Earth before they’d left, but it was a flagrant violation of some very fundamental principles of the mission.

  “Another thing you failed to account for was deviance, antisocial compulsions which seemingly came out of nowhere.  Of the first ship born generation, one turned out to be a pedophile.  The story goes that he resisted his urges for a long time, but when he couldn’t anymore he indulged himself with enthusiasm.  One of his victims was the Tyco clone, and it led him down a very dark path.  He wound up brutally murdering the man who tortured him, and then tried to redirect the ship to a nearer planet where another colony mission was already headed, all so he could have an outside chance of getting off of the ship in his seventies…  You have to understand, his was a tragic story with a tragic end.  He was killed by Johannes, the man who’d raised him as his son, before he could permanently derail the mission.  Tycho reprogrammed you and the other sims in his hijacking effort, and that’s why we’re interviewing you individually now to check and see if you’re all working as you’re supposed to, if you’ve been properly restored.

  “Everything came out publicly in a truth and reconciliation process which followed,” the man explained.  “Johannes was convinced that he, his progenitor, and his clone-son all deserved another chance to get it right, and to prove that there was not something fundamentally wrong with their genome and who they were on a fundamental level.  He asked Dhika Sengupta, the granddaughter of your own progenitor and the woman I call my grandmother, to impregnate herself with a new third clone.  She agreed, and he soon after killed himself to avoid any contamination of the new clone with any vestiges of previous incarnations.

  “My father… was a saint.  He and I had no changes made whatsoever and are effectively identical twins of the original Markus Bowland.  My father Herschel did everything right, he followed all of the rules, and did everything he could to ingratiate himself to those who felt he should never have been born in the first place, but they would never accept him.  His efforts made him a celebrated hero to half of the ship, and forever an unforgivable pariah to the rest, through no fault or action of his own.  His very existence was a lightning rod which drove a wedge between the two ever crystallizing opposing sides.  He wanted to be captain or patriarch when the opportunities came up but they always found a way to block him.  

  “I still wonder sometimes why he created me… amidst all that.  All I know is that I had to watch him do everything right, and never get any credit or respect for it.  I had to watch him bend over backwards to make them happy and end up with nothing to show for it.  I myself was just barely able to squeak out a victory when my time came, and they still suggest that I am somehow illegitimate to sit as captain.”

  “That’s um… quite a story,” Sadhika offered, not really sure what else to say.  “We were expecting all the excitement of the journey to start at this point.  Here we were feeling guilty for subjecting you to all of the boredom…”

  “Well most of the time there was most certainly that, and since it was your progenitors who planned the mission and not you… I’ll try not to hold any of it against you personally.”

   

***   ***    ***

   

  “I’m curious about what the journey has done to the crew… problems on extremely long duration space flights have been known to happen.  We tried to do everything we could to mitigate any problems we could foresee though,” In-Su offered.

  “Such hubris… to think you could anticipate so much.” Aset answered.

  “Well,” In-Su uttered in a rare display of defensiveness, “I think we did pretty well considering!  You are finally here are you not?” 

  “We are… a divided crew.  What you didn’t account for, was a re-expression of the natural human dichotomy.”

  In-Su appeared confused.  “What do you mean?”

  “There is a... natural balance in the human psyche, between conservatism and progressivism, between socialism and libertarianism, between the part of us urging us to aggress, to dare, to risk, to change… and the urge to do none of those things and to stick with what has worked since before anyone can remember.”   Aset offered thoughtfully.  “I’ve heard it described as being comparable in an evolutionary sense, to the urge to venture out among the stars, and the urge to retreat back into the jungle.  You loaded up a ship with assertive and progressive forward thinking people, I can only assume in the belief that you could indeed take just that part of humanity with you.

  “The truth is though… left alone for any length of time, any human population will inevitably reach a behavioural equilibrium of sorts, with progressivism and conservatism back in balance.”

  “Why?” In-Su asked.  It was after all his favourite question.

  Aset sighed.   “Because they are both effective strategies, which speak to a very deep dichotomy in the human heart, and thus it’s a tale as old as humanity itself.  One strategy is based on what is best for the group as a whole, and the other is based on what is best for the individual.  It is an eternal conflict because humans are fundamentally social animals, with both social and individual priorities.  Each serves the other, but each is also limited by the other.”

  “I think I understand.” In-Su offered.

  “You loaded up this ship with ambitious and independent minded people.  It is my belief that all of the conflict that has happened since has been a result of that natural dichotomy re-expressing itself and the more conservative group loyalty element re-establishing itself.”

  “And what side do you identify with?” he asked.

  She looked away and considered the question for a few moments.  “Like everyone, I incorporate elements of both.”

  “Tell me, is there… open conflict on the ship, or just harmless malcontent and political dissatisfaction?”

  “Well, it’s not a… shooting war or anything if that’s what you mean.  It’s more like… open and unabashed contempt.  The patriarch and I… my husband and I, find the cloning program an abomination which should never have been allowed to continue after Midway.” 

  “I’m sorry, Midway?”

  “It’s what we call the events of about eighty years ago when one of the clones went crazy and tried to change the course of the ship after killing a couple people.   It was Asari and I’s parents and predecessors who were able to successfully block a later clone Herschel from becoming captain through politics alone… but Asari and I were unable to block his clone-son Halley.  He’s much worse, so much more… aggressive and willful than his predecessor.”

  “I see.”   There was much that he didn’t understand.  What clones was she talking about?  And of what significance were these Herschel and Halley she spoke of?

  “I must admit I’m curious about you too.  Not just you, but all of you simulants.  I’ve read all about the real you, all of you.  They were very impressive human beings, how do you feel about being just a copy of them, yet so perfect a copy?”

  “Well that’s just it… I don’t feel like a copy.  I woke up believing that I am Kim In-Su.  I never considered that I was anything else until you mentioned it.   However differently I’m constituted… I don’t perceive any difference in my constitution.”

   

***   ***    ***

   

  “Ok well this is boring now, I want to see the rest of the ship; I want to see Haven out of a window!  We worked so hard to get here!  Hell I chose this planet in the first place!  Did you know that?” Neil asked proudly and with excitement.

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Neil.” Søren somberly informed him.

  “Why not?” Neil asked in frustration.  

  “We have to wait until we get the signal that all four of you are ready.”

  “Says who?”

  “The captain, the matriarch, and the patriarch.”

  “Now you listen to me.  I am one of the original founders of this mission.  We instituted the very system by which you govern yourself today.  I am ordering you to let me see out of a fucking window right now!”   He wasn’t really angry; he was just anxious and generally excitable.  He was also testing them to see how they’d react to a direct order.

  “Again, I’m sorry but I can’t do that.”

  Deeply frustrated, Neil asked again: “Why not?”

  Seemingly with equal frustration Søren declared: “because you are not Neil Sagan!”

  Neil whirled around from facing the door with daggers in his eyes.  Now he really was angry, and quite contemptuous of the reasoning.  He sat back down in his chair and declared in an even, almost threatening voice, “No, but I’m all that’s left.  And there is a lot left.”

  “I know,” Ishtar said as she put her hand on his to comfort him.  “We all know that.  This is just a protocol we wrote, okay?  It’s part of why we didn’t wake you when your progenitors dictated.   They left us instructions as though you were them but only frozen and in need of waking up.  They came from a world with many simulants, but we on the other hand… well, none of us has ever met one.”

  “We just wanted to check you out first is all,” Søren offered.  “There was an incident with you sims eighty or so years ago, and we’re interviewing you one on one just to make sure that your programming was properly restored.  And besides, we just… well, we wanted to at least meet you before handing complete control of our entire world over to you mechanoids, even if you are modelled on our founders.”