Arrival: Chapter 7

  Kim In-Su was walking through the arboretum which his progenitor had created.  The man had originally modelled it on the temperate coastal rainforests of his native Korean homeland, but he’d also drawn heavily on the rainforests of the north-western coast of North America.  A lot of work had gone into making the artificial oasis feel natural and wild, but to those who came from Earth its artificiality was always quite apparent.  In-Su imagined that to people born on the ship, people for whom this was their one and only remnant of actual nature, it must seem quite wild.

  He observed that it did seem to be a more mature forest than it had been when it was originally constructed all those years ago.  The original plants and trees had matured, and were now competing for the light coming from the sky with their later generations of offspring.  He smiled to himself as he considered the similarity of his own position as one of the originals, now in a sort of competition with the later generations.

  It was his way; he was always looking for connections and threads through things which others couldn’t see or didn’t care to.  Though his training was in linguistics and he spoke many languages, his true love was poetry and his own collections had been as world renowned as his novels were when the New Horizon had left Earth.  Of the four sims and the four humans they were based on, In-Su was the soul of their quartet, their conscience.  The others had big vision; they saw the sweep of history, the epic scope of the mission, and the majestic infinitudes of the universe, but In-Su saw the small.  He saw the fine grain of existence, the space between the atoms, and the fine threads that connected everything around him.  He saw poetry everywhere.

  He looked up at the sky and warmed his face in the sun’s rays.  It was a massive and powerful photon emitting array which slowly moved across the digitally projected blue sky, but it felt good.   When deactivated or in night mode, the surface of the artificial sky was transparent, and through it one could see the non-rotating central section of the ship, at the front of which was the zero gravity bubble he’d enjoyed so much.  Beyond that one saw the interior surface of the opposite side of the habitat ring.  Beyond that still, now that they were in orbit around Haven, one could also occasionally see the planet below them slowly pass in and out of view.

  But at the moment it was late afternoon, and the sun was shining.  In-Su strolled down the winding path through the trees and dense underbrush which all served the ancient reciprocal relationship between plants and animals, each providing air for the other and each greedily consuming the other’s waste products.

  “In-Su?”

  He turned around to see an old East Asian woman sitting at a picnic table in a small clearing off of the main path beside one of the small streams which served to irrigate the simulated forest.  It was a woman he hadn’t met before, and he noticed that she wasn’t wearing the usual coveralls.  Instead she was wearing a comfortable looking purple sun dress with yellow flower prints on it, and what appeared to be a faded yellow straw hat with a wide brim.

  “You are Kim In-Su, right?” she asked in a clear and confident voice.

  “Effectively,” he said.  At that point he really hadn’t given much thought as to what relationship he had with the original being of that designation.  It didn’t seem that important to him.  He tended to live in the moment, and nothing of his experience betrayed that he was anything other than what he felt like – Kim In-Su.

  “Would you like to join me for a sit-down on this fine afternoon?” she asked.

  He remarked on what an odd thing it was to say in a place where every afternoon, while pleasant, was always exactly as fine as the last one or the next.  While he didn’t know who she was, she appeared to have been waiting for him and she’d peaked his curiosity as to what she might have to say or ask.

  “Certainly, and you are?” he asked as he sat himself down on the bench facing her.  He noticed that she’d removed her sandals and her feet were on the grass.  He followed suit and took his own socks and shoes off.  The cool green grass felt wonderful on the soles of his feet and between his toes.  He took a moment to notice how sweetly the grass smelled after narrowing his senses down on it from the myriad of other scents around him.

  “Kim Bao,” she answered with a smile.  “I’m your great granddaughter,” she said with a further widening smile through the shadow cast on her face by her hat.

  “Is that so?” In-Su asked with a reciprocating smile.

  “Mm humh,” she confirmed.  “And by blood too,” she added, “not just by marriage.”  The clarification was necessary because children born on the ship were usually only genetically related to one of the people they knew as their parents.  They were the product of one of their parent’s gametes being blended with those of another of the same ethnicity out of the ship’s five.  It meant that for every member of the original crew, today there was only a single parent child thread which constituted their genetic descendance.

  “Well, I’m very happy to meet you Bao.”

  “And I you… I was hoping to run into you and meet you before planetary operations got under way.  I didn’t want to go through the bother of trying to find you though; I figured it was only a matter of time before you found your way here.  You did design it, didn’t you?”

  “Indeed, but this is just a garden!  Are you as excited as I am to see our wild new planet?” he asked.

  The woman let out a hearty laugh.  “I’m ninety-two years old In-Su!  It scares me half to death to think of something that open and wild!  I’ve lived my whole life on this ship, with every comfort and every aspect of my life completely managed and controlled, with limits to my physical world that I can reach out and touch at all times… I’m in no hurry at all to leave my comfort and security for some great unknown, certainly not at my age.  I’m not ashamed to admit that the idea is actually pretty scary…  There are others though, even some who are much younger than me for whom it elicits a real paralyzing fear….  Mine is nowhere near as severe, but… I do feel it to some degree in my own way.”

  “I see,” In-Su remarked.  He didn’t know what to say.  “I don’t understand though, you’ve come this far, and now you don’t want to see what it was all for?”

  “You misunderstand,” she answered.  “To you the ship is just a vehicle, only a means to an end.  You boarded it on Earth, and now you wake up after the long journey ready to take on what is for you, the whole point of the trip: the planet below.  Try to see it from my perspective though.  I was born on this ship.  I’ve lived twice as many years on it as you had years on  before you left.  To me it’s more than just a vehicle; it isn’t just a means to an end.   To me this ship is… it’s my home.   More than that though, it’s my whole world.  From my perspective the interior of this ship may as well be the entire universe.”

  “Right,” In-Su acknowledged.  That he could understand.

  “Being born when I was… for me the possibility of living long enough to see the arrival was a fifty fifty proposition.  I figured I was as likely to die before we got here as I was to live to see it.  I made peace long ago with the reality that the planet so far off in the distance was never to be my home; it was never my destination.  This ship is.   I’m not like the young ones born more recently who’ve been itching their whole lives to escape our humble home.   They’ve had to live their whole lives with the heavy weight of their destiny, anxious to begin the ultimate struggle of their lives.  I’m too old for any of that now.  No, I’ll be one of the ones to stay on the ship with the good medical facilities, and I’ll help maintain its systems as long as my body will allow.”

  In-Su smiled; he understood.  The ship was her existence, and she hungered for no other.

  “Maybe someday… years from now, if I’m still around and kicking I’ll make the trip.   Maybe when the colony is fully established and up and running, and they can assure me it’s safe and secure, maybe then I’ll make the pilgrimage down… if only to honour the memory of all those poor souls who never even had the chance, the ones who never really had any choice about anything whatsoever.”

  “What do you mean?”  He was immediately curious about those she was referring to who she claimed had no choices at all.

  “We call them the children of the void, it’s… an expression that’s come into common usage to refer to those who were born after the launch, but never had any hope of ever seeing Haven.” Bao answered.  “They were the people who lived their entire existence in the empty void between the stars… and who knew their whole lives that this was their inescapable fate.  It wasn’t a fate they could ever have chosen for themselves, nor could they ever have the ability to choose any other kind of life.

  “The clone who they say went crazy and hijacked the ship all those years ago?  I knew him… he was my primary school teacher.   He was the ultimate child of the void.  His madness didn’t come out of nowhere In-Su… and it wasn’t his fault.”

  “Go on…”

  “Your people… the original crew who originally boarded the ship?  Sure they had to live the rest of their lives here, but for them it was a completely informed choice.  They all had their own reasons to come aboard in the first place, informed by ideals and principles they believed in.  They had a chance to see the ship first, to meet a lot of the other original crew and meet with you founders!  They had a choice… and they could hope that it would amount to something someday when they were long dead and gone.

  “Even the current crew didn’t have it as bad as the children of the void though… no we might not’ve had any choice in the situation we were born into, and no we weren’t able to make any meaningful choices about what we do with our lives or what kind of life we wanted for ourselves, but at least we had hope.  At least for us there was the hope that someday our lot in life could change, at least for us there was hope of someday getting off of the ship if we wanted to.  For us there’s always been the promise of something more.  We always knew that at the end of our imposed existence there would be a new kind of freedom waiting for us, and a whole world for us to explore and tame.”

  “I think I understand,” In-Su offered.  He believed that he was now beginning to see what human element Aset had so chastised him for neglecting when he’d first woken up.  He was beginning to understand the cruel existential nightmare to which he and the others had subjected the people Bao described as the ‘children of the void.’  It made sense to him how it might drive some mad, or at least be a contributing factor for someone who suffered additional injustices.

  “We… had hope,” she explained, “and they… had choice.  But the children of the void had neither, and it broke the spirits of many of the generations who raised me.  Please don’t misunderstand me, most people it didn’t bother at all since humans generally adapt pretty readily to whatever life they’re born into.  Some people it only made deeply unhappy, but others it devastated so much that it made them lash out.  Of those who did, some only became self-destructive… but others wound up taking it out on the ship and crew.”