Arrival: Chapter 4

  The next day, Neil was sparring with Armina Shostack in an exercise room.  He was anxious to fully feel out his shiny new body, and wanted to push some of its limits to see what it really felt like.   He was curious to know if there would be anything which would betray the reality of his new mechanoid incarnation as opposed to the biological one he so clearly remembered being so intimate with.   It was a natural effort for him, he was the simulation of a man who had always enjoyed testing limits and exploring boundaries both physical and intellectual, but most of all theoretical.

  Without holding back, he attempted a five strike hand and foot combination, but the woman easily deflected it.  He felt safe to try as hard as he could both because his body was limited to human capability, but more importantly because Armina Shostak was the ship’s ‘keeper of combat.’  In one sense it was just another educational specialty among the crew, and no different than a specialty in astrophysics or ecology.  On the other hand, it was distinctly unlike any other vocation on the ship.  It was mandatory education for the ship’s head of security and while she was not the only one so trained, she was a natural, and she excelled far beyond the rest as a superior fighter and tactician.

  Exactly like his old biological one, his new simulant body was bulkier and more muscular than the thinner woman he was sparring with, though she herself had a powerfully firm and toned athletic musculature.  She was about as tall as he was too; they were both almost two meters tall.   Unlike his own short and curly black hair, hers was long and bright red, matching her pale freckled skin and intense, piercing blue eyes.  He’d noticed when he first met her that her own hair had a natural curl to it as well, but it was now obscured since she’d tightly wound it up to spar with him.

  The educational curriculum for a keeper of combat specialty was both academic and practical.  She’d been required to study military history and battle tactics throughout all recorded history, from small localized battles to international total war.  She was also trained in personal hand to hand combat, with a complete mastery of a wide variety of weapons and martial arts schools and techniques.  The small exercise gymnasium they were in was much as Neil remembered it.  The pale blue mats on the ground had significantly faded, but so too had the brown and green floor to ceiling panels which encircled them. 

  “Not bad,” Neil offered.  He himself was not only a brilliant astrophysicist, but he was also similarly skilled in personal combat, and had studied a variety of martial arts.   Having a position known as the ‘keeper of combat’ was in fact his idea in the first place so many years ago.   The military history and tactical element was not something he himself was expert in, but he’d always imagined it would be a great compliment to the personal and physical aspects of martial arts training.

  “So you’re the legendary Neil Sagan, hunh?” the woman said with a smirk, getting more comfortable being around him now that they’d exchanged a few blows.  Neil grinned, feigned a few hand strikes, and then went in for a leg sweep.  Armina leapt over his long sweeping leg and while he was still off balance, reached out with her foot and pulled in the knee he was still carrying his weight on.   He collapsed backwards and fell flat on his back.  His arms and legs went out spread eagle and he laughed out loud as he lay there without trying to get up.

  “You’re very good!” he exclaimed. 

  She was standing over him and looking down with an amused look on her face.  Let alone fighting him, she’d been apprehensive about even meeting him, but she was pleasantly surprised about how funny and good natured he seemed to be.  She backed away as he nimbly climbed to his feet.  He was grinning as he wiped the corner of his mouth and bushy black moustache with his right fist, and then got into his standard go-to boxing stance before starting to bounce about in anticipation of the next strikes.

  “How does it feel?” Armina asked.  “Does it feel like you remember your human body feeling?  Like you’d expect it to?”

  “Oh yeah, it’s amazing!  I know this body is physically capable of more…  I know its real capacities are limited for the sake of an accurate simulation, but I could swear I feel better than ever, stronger and healthier than I ever did before; right now I feel like I could take on the whole world!   Ha!  Take on this world, I guess that’s the whole point isn’t it!”

  “Hasn’t seemed to let you get the better of me yet,” Armina said with a taunting wink.  Neil attempted a triple combination but the woman ducked and bobbed all three of the strikes.

  “You are fast…” he remarked in marvel, “I’ll give you that.”

  Armina attempted a similar brief combination on Neil.  He was able to avoid all three, but it took a great deal of attention and concentration.  When she soon after attempted a series of kicks and punches, Neil was able to grab her right leg in his left arm, and land a hard blow to her midsection with his right knee.  He then in one swift motion kicked her remaining left knee up and pushed her over with his right hand on her chest, swinging her body back and over.  She hit her back hard on the mat they were exercising on, and it knocked the wind out of her.

  He got on top of her and held her wrists down with her arms spread out.  He was smiling with a wild kind of excitement.  For a moment she thought he might try to kiss her, and she had no idea how she was supposed to react to that.  She found him attractive enough, but it was completely unexpected.  Not only was he technically her superior, he technically wasn’t even human!  The moment passed though, and she didn’t have to find out.  His grin turned to a knowing smile and he got up and released her.

  “Tell me…” she said as she sat up on the mat and caught her breath.  Neil made his way over to the weapons rack and pulled down a long staff.  He held it behind his back and started repeatedly swinging his torso back and forth from left to right.  “Are you really Neil Sagan?”

  He erupted with a full throated laugh.  “What exactly do you mean?  You’ll need to ask a more specific question I’m afraid, if you’re hoping for an answer that actually means anything.”

  “Well… in introductory philosophy, I remember being presented with something they called the transporter dilemma.  One part of it was the idea of walking into a transportation chamber back on Earth, and then walking out of a similar chamber on Haven.”

  “Go on…”

  “The question was, would it really matter if instead of a transportation system, the first chamber was instead an annihilator, and the second chamber really some kind of perfect duplicator?  That way the you that walks out of the second chamber, as far as it knows, is the real you.  You feel like you, you have all of your memories…”

  “And what did you think when you were posed the question?” He’d heard of the thought experiment, but philosophy wasn’t an area of expertise for him.

  “Some people in my class thought it wouldn’t matter, but I had a deep sense that whatever walked out of that second chamber… it wouldn’t be me.  Whatever came out the other side, the real me that went into that first chamber… was still dead.”

  “Yes,” Neil offered, “but there would be a new you that came out the other end right?  And that new you might not be the original, but it would still be a you.”

  “I suppose…”

  “No Armina… in the sense that you’re getting at, in the numerical sense, I am definitely not Neil Sagan.  I am definitely not the physically original being of that designation who actually lived all of those experiences I have memories of.”

  Neil came over and sat on the mat beside her, still holding the staff.  “Let me ask you something though.  Given that whatever walked out of the second chamber wouldn’t be whatever walked into the first, what would it be?  I mean, if it was so perfect a replica that even itself couldn’t tell the difference?   What if, say… the two chambers were right beside each other, the first one failed to annihilate you, and you were both knocked out in the duplication process?  What if you were both then later woken up together and were never told which one of you had been the original?  How could you tell?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Maybe more importantly Armina, would it even really matter at that point which was which?”

  “It would seem to.”

  “Yes, it would seem to… but it wouldn’t.  It might bother both of you to not know for sure, but you’d get over it, and then you’d go off and live your own respective lives, and gradually differentiate into different people over time as you lived different lives and had different experiences.

  “For all intents and purposes Armina, I am Neil Sagan, but no I am not the Neil Sagan of a few weeks before the actual launch of the New Horizon.  He had a whole other life once the ship was underway… a life that will forever be just his and his alone, a life that I have no memory or experience of.  That part, is all his and his alone.  Just like all this,” he waved his hand around to gesture the totality of his new existence, “is all me, not the man I was a simulation of, but me me.  At one point, and for a brief moment in time, we may have been basically and essentially the same person, and me just a duplication of him, but ever since that moment we’ve certainly diverged.  As I was left in storage, he lived out the rest of his life and became a person that I will never know and never become.   Likewise from the moment I was woken up, I started becoming a person he never was and could never be.”

  Neil pushed himself up off the ground with the staff he was still holding, and then held his hand out to Armina.  She took it and was helped up to her feet.  Neil handed her the staff weapon and then headed back over to the weapons rack to grab a blunt wooden broadsword for himself.

  “The way I see it… for one brief moment, I was as close as possible to being a full duplication of Neil Sagan; at one point in time we were effectively the same person.   Going forward from that point though, we both evolve on our own time into different unique beings; he into whatever man he became on this ship, and me into whatever man I will become down on that planet.”

  The wooden sword and staff repeatedly made sharp clacking sounds as Neil and Armina traded attacks and parries.

  “Kind of like the clones...” Armina offered as she lobbed a few jabs with the tip of her staff, probing his defence style.

  “How so?   And what clones?”  The woman struck and made him defend, and then swung the other end of the staff around and landed a strike on his thigh.   “Nice…” he commented as the pain made him wince a little.

  “They didn’t tell you?  Halley is a clone of one of the original crew who left Earth.  Unbeknownst to anyone else his son and grandson were actually his clones…  Later on after everyone found out and they were both dead, Halley’s father Herschel was created and then later on Halley was also created as Herschel’s son.   They’re all clones of the same man though.”

  “I see… and how is that like my situation?” he asked.  He was disturbed to hear all of this but it was something he’d have to investigate once he was done here.

  “Well it’s not, not really, except for the concept of having the same starting point as another being, and then becoming different from each other over time as you have different lived experiences.  The distinction being that their identical starting point was as identical embryos.”  

  “Sure, I guess from a certain point of view it could be seen as analogous to that.”   They continued through a series of strikes and parries as they probed each other’s styles with their respective weapons.  

  “Why just a simulation?” she asked.  “Why not make something… better than a human?”  

  “What do you mean by better?” Neil asked, amused by the question.

  “I don’t know… smarter I guess.” 

  “I don’t think you’d like the answer very much” he said as they continued to fight without either landing any significant blows.

  “Try me.”

  “Because humans only know how to define intelligence in terms of human intelligence, and in terms of the kinds of intelligence displayed by the humans who impress them.  They can only break it down into different specific capabilities and then build machines which can do those individual things far better than a human can.  They can build machines that can think faster and complete tasks more efficiently than a human can, but humans can’t create anything more intelligent than a human because they can’t conceive of what that notion even means.  

  “I am personally the height of human engineering and artificial intelligence; a reasonable approximation of a human being.  Humanity’s greatest possible accomplishment of all time, is just to create something equal to themselves; me.”  He winked as he said it.  He revelled referring to himself, personally, as the apex of all creation.  

  “But there’s nowhere else to go.  I believe it to be a metaphysical impossibility for any being to create something superior to themselves, nor anything which could itself create anything superior to them.  Humans can create machines that can do specific things better than they themselves can do, but they cannot create something superior to a human being because to a human, a human being is the height of all creation, the be all and end all.   It’s a nonsense proposition to create a ‘better than human human’.  Being human is an intersection of a lot of different factors, and anything which exceeds humanity on any of those factors is no longer thought of as human.”

  “You’re right, I don’t like that answer.”  She was distracted and he hit her, harder than he’d meant to, and right across the side of her face.  She went down on her right knee and fist, cradling her jaw with her other hand.

  “Oh shit I’m sorry, it got away from me… you alright?”

  “I’m fine” she said as she swung the staff around and pulled both of his legs out from under him, causing him to fall flat on his back.  This time she clamoured on top of him and held his hands out at arms lengths by his wrists.  He smiled up at her and she smiled back.  

  She couldn’t remember ever having this much fun sparring with anyone else on the ship.   Not only did nobody else seem to get it, but nobody else ever trained as hard as she did so there was never any real competition for her.  Without knowing why, she kissed him.  For the moment she’d forgotten that he wasn’t human and when she did remember, she found that she really didn’t care.  He was funny, charming, and attractive.  She liked him, and that seemed reason enough.

  Neil kissed her back and felt her body up and down.  She wasn’t really his usual type, but she had an attractiveness that transcended that sort of thing.  Despite himself he started laughing, disrupting the kiss and bringing an end to it.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked, almost offended.

  “Nothing, nothing, I’m sorry, I just had the thought of it having been a hundred and sixty year dry spell for me,” he said with a chuckle.

  She looked at him sideways and then sat up with a smile on her face.  “Dry spell, aren’t you a one day old virgin?”  They both had a good laugh together over the idea as Neil nodded up and down since he had to admit that she was right about that.

  “You said you’d change as a person over time…” Armina reflected once their laughter had died down, “but you won’t ever age, will you?”

  “No…” Neil answered thoughtfully.  “Someday I’ll just stop working and effectively die, but… no, I won’t ever physically appear to age the way a person would… the way you will.  It’s the kind of thing that sounds like a blessing but might actually turn out to be more like a curse.  It is after all… the ultimate proof of my inhumanity.  I’ll never get to live out a natural human life, and the longer I survive the more obviously inhuman it’ll make me.  So I’ll let you decide which of us is better off in that respect.”