Arrival: Chapter 3

  “We’ve made some… modifications and adjustments to the ship,” Søren explained, as he and Ishtar led the Neil Sagan simulant down one of the four struts between the habitat ring and the non-rotating engineering section.  The gravity effect of the rotating outer ring decreased steadily as they climbed down the access tube running along the interior of the strut.  “You all said that you wanted to be brought to a window so you could see the planet, but if you really want the best possible view, nothing really compares to the bubble.”

  “The bubble?” Neil asked as he pushed himself out of the access tube and floated into the forward section of the long corridor.  The far end of it where the mighty ion engines were located was so distant that he couldn’t see all the way to the end; the corridor seemed to go on forever.

  “Yeah, when it was originally built they did it just for the novelty of a large zero gravity gymnasium and a great place to look out at the stars,” Søren continued as he, and then Ishtar, also emerged into the larger central corridor.  “But when we entered the system and started doing our fly-bys and braking manoeuvers, it sure didn’t take us long to realize what a great place it was to see those planets up close.  The field of view it grants is truly amazing, really unlike anything possible anywhere else on the ship.”

  “Again, really wish you’d have woken us up when you were supposed to, we all would have really loved to have seen that, bubble or no bubble,” Neil chastised them resentfully.

  “Right.   Again… sorry about that.” Søren offered.   “In any case, now that you’re awake it’s by far the best possible place for you to look down on the planet from the ship.”

  “You know, beyond just the view it allows, it’s a pretty impressive engineering achievement too,” Ishtar suggested as Søren pushed off against the foot and hand holds embedded in the walls, and then made his way towards the access hatch.

  “Oh?” Neil asked with a raised eyebrow, now more interested.

  “Oh yes, it’s a transparent synthetic material which we can inflate or deflate on command,” Ishtar explained. “We were always worried about interstellar debris out in the void, but here in orbit it’s relatively safe so we’ve been leaving it inflated all of the time since so many people want to come in and have a good look at the planet.  At the moment we’ve cleared it out so you four can have it all to yourselves though.”

  “If this doesn’t wow you, well…” Søren predicted as he opened the hatch for Neil, “nothing will.”   Using his hands and feet Søren thrust himself through the portal off of the edges of the hatch, inviting the other two to follow.

  Within the void of the zero gravity bubble, there were two ways one could move about.   One way, was to deploy the filament network which consisted of thin cables strung up in such a way that within the bubble there was a geometric grid of three meter wire mesh cubes.   When deployed, one could push and pull themselves around these fibers while still having reasonable mobility about the space.  If this filament network was retracted, one could also grab from behind the entry hatch before entering, a compressed air canister with which one could puff themselves about the space freely and without any obstruction.

  Neil enthusiastically thrust himself into the large void, but had not been warned about the filament network being deployed.  He unexpectedly clipped his shoulder on one of the threads and the encounter threw his body into a moderate spin, which was only made worse by his initial attempts to mitigate the rotation.  After flailing through a few more encounters with the filaments, he finally reached the far end of the sphere, and was caught and pulled to a stop by Wiremu and Sadhika.  Although the three of them were old friends, their simulant incarnations were only now meeting for the first time.

  “Easy there big guy,” Sadhika cooed as she and Wiremu steadied his body, “and look…”

  Neil followed her hand to see the massive expanse of the planet hanging in space beneath them.  All three were speechless as they took in the unbelievable natural beauty laid out before them.  The colours were so forceful, and the resolution so infinitely sharp, that it seemed to them like they could almost reach out and touch the green, yellow, and brown continents, or run their fingers through the deep blue ocean’s surface as they flew past.  

  As they began to fly into the current night side of the planet, Sadhika turned to her handler and asked: “How thin is the material of this bubble again Halley?”   The original Sadhika Sengupta had been a born engineer who always wanted to understand everything and to know how everything worked.  In her pre New Horizon life, she had applied those natural capacities to biotechnology, and had founded the largest and most successful biotech company Earth had ever known at the time of their launch. 

  “Only two centimeters,” Halley answered, “with an overall diameter of about fifty meters.”   It was pretty impressive considering that the vacuum of space was trying to suck the ship’s entire atmosphere out through just that thin layer of transparent material.  Søren and Ishtar made their way over to Halley who was floating several meters to the left of the three simulants, while Asari minded Wiremu from several meters to their right.

  It was then that In-Su appeared with Aset in tow, carefully making his way into the bubble.   He was methodically pulling himself along one filament at a time, instinctively trying to avoid the same kind of embarrassing entrance which Neil’s enthusiasm had preceded him with.   

  “This is really it isn’t it?” he asked the three people who he perceived as his old friends.

  “It’s too bad you missed the dayside In-Su…” Neil lamented.  “Oh well, just give it some time.  We’ll wait until we swing back around again”

  “So that’s really Haven down there?”  In-Su seemed mesmerized as he looked down on the planet’s dark night.  “There’s something eerie about how dark it is, the great emptiness of it…”  

  “There’s no lights of civilization…” Wiremu remarked.  He remembered how much evidence one could see of Earth’s civilization while looking down on its night side from orbit.  “It really is a totally virgin world isn’t it…  It’s one thing to talk about it-”

  “But another thing to see it with your own eyes,” Sadhika finished his thought for him.

  “There… also isn’t any light from any moon,” Ishtar added.  “Earth had a large and highly reflective moon did it not?  That would have often added a lot of ambient light to the night side too.”

  “No moons at all?” Neil the astronomer and astrophysicist asked.

  “No large planetary moons, no,” Søren answered; he had a similar scientific background.  “There are plenty around the outer planets, but Haven only has the two small moons which seem to just be captured asteroids.”

  “Hmm, like Mars…” Neil replied, seemingly lost in thought.  “Any risk of them coming down anytime soon?” he asked.

  “We ran an analysis a while ago and no, not really.  One is in a high enough orbit that it’ll essentially stay there forever, and although the other one will come down, it won’t be for another six or seven thousand years or so.  We’ve already drawn up plans to build a large ion engine onto its side and boost it up to a higher and safer orbit, but… at the moment it’s pretty low on our to-do list given how far into the future the danger is.”

  “How much damage would it do if it came down?” Wiremu asked.

  “Damage?” Halley asked.  “Total.   It may only be a captured asteroid but it’s pretty massive all the same.”

  “Understood.”

  “That utter darkness must make for some amazing stargazing from the surface…” Neil remarked as he gazed down at the planet.  He imagined lying on his back in a field at night, looking up at the stars as he’d been so fond of doing back on Earth.  “So, what is this system’s overall planetary configuration?”

  “Rather interesting actually,” Søren said, getting interested in the astronomical conversation.  “In the outer reaches there’s a binary system between a large but ordinary class I gas giant and an unexpectedly massive ice giant.  There’s also another more typically massed ice giant in a slowly decaying orbit in close around the star.  Maybe most interesting of all though, is a sort of… super-massive Venus roughly where the Sol System’s asteroid belt was.”

  “Crazy…” Neil answered in absorbed contemplation.  It was exactly as they’d predicted based on the observations they’d made of the system from Earth, and it was greatly satisfying to be able to test their predictions and know for sure how precisely they’d nailed it.  “And did we get all of the atmospheric compositions right?” he asked.

  “Looks that way from what we’ve been able to tell so far, I mean all of our spectroscopic readings are still the same as they were when you left Earth.”

  “I still wonder where all of the ices came from…” Neil wondered out loud.

  “I was wondering the same thing myself!” Søren exclaimed with a touch of pride.  He was obviously warming to the mechanoid.

  “How is Earth?” Sadhika asked.  “When did you receive your last transmission from them?  Have you transmitted your arrival yet?”

  “We have, but-” Aset tried to answer, and then looked over at her husband Asari.

  “Wait,” Sadhika interrupted her, “I’m sorry, but who are you?  In fact could you introduce everyone?  We’ve each only met one or two of you at this point.”

  “Of course, my apologies.  I’m Matriarch Aset, this is my husband Patriarch Asari, over there is Captain Halley, his wife Ishtar, and his first officer Søren.”

  “Thank you,” Sadhika said while she and the other simulants put faces to the names they’d heard about after waking up.  “Now what were you going to say about Earth?”

  “I was going to say, that yes we’ve transmitted our arrival, but… well, Earth went dark a long time ago.  The last laser transmission we received from them was ninety two years ago… and we don’t know why.  We were expecting one eighty years ago, right in the middle of the Midway incident, but it never came.  We’ve left at least one telescope pointed at Earth continuously ever since, but… no message has ever come.”

  “I see…” she answered.  She looked around at the other three simulants and none of them seemed to know what to make of it.  It was an eerie mystery.  “Well in that case, we should probably send messages to the other two colony planets.   They probably won’t be receptive, but… we should at least try and give them the option of opening a dialogue with us if they want to, especially with Earth having gone dark.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Halley stated officiously.

  “Have you studied the spectrum of Earth and the Sol System?” Neil asked Søren, “did you see any clues as to what might have happened to them?”

  “I’m afraid not…” he answered to his new friend, “the planet was studied as closely as possible after the missing transmission but nothing came up.  Now we’re out of range to study the planet specifically and… the spectrum of Sol itself doesn’t offer any insights either I’m afraid.”

  Meanwhile, In-Su had resumed looking down on the planet.  “That’s really Haven down there…” he repeated in wonderment.  They were here, what did Earth matter now?  Let the earthlings worry about the Earth he thought, now they had their own planet to worry about. 

  “All that work…” Wiremu said as he joined In-Su in looking back down on the planet.

  “All that planning…” Neil added.

  “All that money…” Sadhika joked with a bit of a laugh.  An incredibly wealthy woman, the original Sadhika Sengupta had been the mission’s primary financier.

  “All that faith…” In-Su finally added after a few moments of sombre silence.  The other three nodded in understanding.

  Aset, now having gone over to float beside her husband, stated: “Mission protocol dictates, that the matriarch, patriarch, and captain, retain primary authority over the ship, while you four assume command of all planetary operations.  I assume this is still acceptable to all parties involved?”

  Being perfectly acquainted with all of the mission protocols and in most cases being programmed with the memory of having personally written them in the first place, all four simulants nodded along with Asari.

   “Look everyone, um…” Neil interjected, “can we just have a minute to ourselves before we get down to business?  We haven’t had any chance just to talk amongst ourselves since we woke up.”

  “Oh.   Oh, sure.” Halley answered.  “Come on everyone, let’s give them the room.   We’ll be right outside.”  With that, all five of their chaperones made their way through the hatch and Søren closed it behind them.  The four simulants floated in silence for several moments, looking down at the dark side of the planet.

  “So um… hi,” Neil said with a bit of an ironic droll, “nice to meet you?”  The other three chuckled a little awkwardly.

  “It’s a weird feeling,” Sadhika offered, “to be me and yet so clearly not me, to be something else… anyone else getting that?”  The other three nodded.

  “It’s like, existential déjà vu or something.” Neil offered with a chuckle.

  “You joke,” Wiremu observed, “but you’re probably not too far off.  I remember being Wiremu Tynes… but I’m not him.   I have his memories, but…”

  “But what little you’ve already experienced around here in just this brief time,” In-Su offered in explanation, “is coloured in such a way that makes our programmed memories feel somehow in black and white.”

  “Exactly…” Wiremu confirmed.

  “Well you’d better not let them hear you say that,” Sadhika suggested with a gesture to the airlock.  “They already seem a little reticent to hand any authority over to us.  They’re following protocol for now but I don’t like how reluctantly they seem to be doing it.”

  “It’s probably too late,” Wiremu speculated.  “You really think they haven’t been listening to everything we’ve been saying in here?” he asked.  All four suddenly felt very exposed and vulnerable, floating in this thin transparent bubble hundreds of kilometers above an alien planet on the first day of their lives.

  They remained alone in the bubble for the next two hours.  They watched mesmerised as they flew more than a full orbit around the planet, allowing them to see the entire side which was currently lit up by the sun.  Sometimes they’d just watch in awe, but often they’d be pointing features out to each other.   All along though, they never lost the excitement of little children captivated by a new toy.