Arrival: Chapter 6

  “Aset?   Am I interrupting?” Wiremu asked after the door opened onto the aeroponics bay.  When it did, his nose had been delightfully confronted by the myriad scents.

  “Not at all Wiremu, come on in,” she replied invitingly before returning her primary attention back to her work.  Everyone onboard was required to sign up for all the different duties required on the ship, and Aset opted as often as she could for tending to their gardens.  Her formal education hadn’t been in ecology or any related field, but she seemed to have a natural aptitude for nursing the plants, and she found the work relaxing.  On a ship where everything else could seem so sterile, she enjoyed being able to watch things grow and develop organically.

  She enjoyed the arboretum too, but didn’t have any interest in working there.  To her the ship’s living forest all seemed like so much… managed chaos.  All those plants and trees all fighting each other over finite resources and competing for a greater share of the artificial sun’s good graces…  It was all too reminiscent of the political situation on the ship for her liking, too much like the psychology and political science she had studied in her tertiary and quaternary education.  

  The aeroponics bay was different though; it was all so neatly ordered and controlled.   Row after row of engineered plants growing out of long planters filled with nothing but air and dispersed nutrient water.  It seemed to her about as organized and orderly as any organic system could be, very unlike the political situation on the ship.

  The aeroponics bay was an essential supplement to the arboretum in their food production.   Many things were grown in the arboretum, but usually things which required more room to grow and things which grew on trees or in bushes.  Anything smaller which could be grown individually was for the most part grown here instead, and without any of the arboretum’s limitations due to the efforts of trying to preserve the simulation of a natural space.

  “Quite the array of smells in here isn’t it?  It’s wonderful!” Wiremu admired as he came over.  Most odorous were the herbs and spices, but also evident were the small number of flowers grown for research projects and in private gardens.

  “Mmmm…” Aset agreed, and then almost as an afterthought and without looking away from her work she asked, “can you really even smell it?”

  “What do you mean?”  Wiremu asked probingly.  He thought he had a general idea of what she’d meant, but he wanted a more explicit question before offering an explicit answer.

  Now she turned away from her work to face him fully.  “I mean, if you’re only a simulation, isn’t some machinery in you just registering particular aerosols, and then informing your brain of their presence?  Or can you actually smell?  Do you actually have the sensation of smelling?”

  “What’s the difference?” Wiremu further questioned.

  “The difference?” Aset balked incredulously.  “I’d say there’s a big difference!  I’m a real person, with thoughts and dreams and a vivid experience of the world around me!  I see you in front of me, there‘s a visceral phenomenon to my vision, I don’t just register the fact that you’re there!”

  “I see the world vividly too Aset, the smells in here bring up different things for me, they elicit… emotional reactions.”  As far as he could tell of his own experience, he was telling the truth.

  “Un hunh…” Aset replied skeptically.  “Can you prove it?”

  Wiremu laughed, “can you?”  Aset seemed taken aback.  “I’ll tell you what,” Wiremu continued, “you figure out how to prove to me, that you have an internal phenomenological experience, and I’ll take the same test, alright?  At the end of the day your body and systems work the same way mine do, you detect a particular aerosol, that detection is registered in your brain, and then your brain constructs an experience of that detection.  As far as I know it does anyways.”  He was trying to tease her in a playful way; he certainly didn’t want to incite an actual confrontation about any of this.

  Aset didn’t seem bothered, but her interest did seem to be carried.  “But it could easily be the case that you’re just programmed to claim that you have the internal experiences I’m talking about.”

  “Again, the same thing could just as easily be said about you!” Wiremu countered.

  “You could just be programmed to believe that you have that phenomenological experience even though you don’t,” she argued further, “how would you even know the difference!?”

  “Ditto!!   How would you know the difference if your brain were orchestrated the same way!?  You’d be just as fooled as I’d be!”

  Aset sighed heavily with exasperation, and although being a good sport about it, she gave up.  “Stalemate I guess,” she concluded as she threw some trimmings into the bucket at her feet.  One way or another they would be recycled like everything else on the ship inevitably was.

  “So what can I do for you Wiremu?”

  “Well first of all, you can call me Wii.”

  “Noted,” she remarked as she continued to pick at the plants in front of her.

  “And I… was hoping you could tell me about your side of what’s going on on the ship.”

  Aset let out a long and heavy sigh.  “You and the others wrote the mission protocols right?”  Another soft rustle as she threw more plant material into the bucket.

  “That’s right.”

  “Well at its core, that’s what it’s really all about.  We, think that the mission protocols were and are there for a reason.  We, think that they should have been observed, and should still be observed.   They, openly and remorselessly flout the rules, and do whatever the fuck they want.”

  “I see.”   It hadn’t been framed in quite that way for him before.  When stated that bluntly, he found himself quite sympathetic to their perspective.

  “The original clones were understandable, if not condonable.  One lone nut took it upon himself to violate some of the most fundamental mission protocols.  Well sure, we recognize that sometimes… sometimes disturbed people do unexpected things.  You might even say that on a ship like this, in the situation we’re in, some anomalous things like that were bound to happen.  Head of genetics goes rogue and creates clones of himself, one man out of nowhere anomalously turns out to be a pedophile… hell we can even understand how the two factors in conjunction with each other could lead to murder and hijacking.   The point is, that none of these things were conspiratory or colluding in nature, just… bad apples acting badly.”  She moved over to the next row, opened the seal on the aerosolizing chamber, and lifted up the lid.  She began methodically plucking matured potatoes off of the hanging roots which were now exposed.

  “Some blamed you, er… I mean the original yous, for all that happened… but I didn’t.   They claimed it was your hubris and lack of planning for the human community part of the mission that led to it, but I don’t think so.  I think it was just some stuff that happened, a few items that did happen on a long list of things that could have happened despite anyone’s best efforts or best laid plans.”

  “But?” Wiremu asked, he knew she was headed somewhere with this.

  “But everything changed at Midway,” she stated purposefully as she dropped one potato after another into a different and larger bucket.  “After Midway it became a conspiracy.  Multiple people began conspiring to openly violate the mission protocols.  They made another clone in full view of everyone, and in open defiance of the rules.”   She turned to face Wiremu and pointed an accusatory potato at him.  “Were we supposed to just let them get away with it??  Were we supposed to just be okay with the rules not mattering anymore?   If they could so easily get away with breaking those rules then how were we supposed to decide which rules we were still supposed to follow?  If they could break those rules without consequence, then why bother having any rules at all!!?”   She was yelling at Wiremu; she was angry.

  Wiremu didn’t answer, and she calmed down somewhat.  She dropped the potato in question into the bucket with the others and turned back to pluck some more.

  “They’ll tell you all sorts of lies Wii… they’ll make up all kinds of justifications for what they did.  They’ll hide behind concepts like intellectual curiosity and vague notions of freedom, but it’s all just a screen.  It’s all just a way for them to justify breaking the rules they wish to break, and making us out to be the bad guys for trying to enforce those rules, the rules you instituted and left for us to follow.  We’re the loyalists.  We’re the ones who tried to make sure the ship followed your designs.  We never lost our faith in the founders.  They did.”