Arrival: Chapter 8

  “What the hell??” Neil exclaimed incredulously.  He and the other three sims were in one of the two suites they’d been assigned while still on the ship.  Like in the dining hall, this and the other suite had large round windows in the floor through which the planet occasionally migrated past.

  “What?” In-Su asked.

  “I died!”

  “Of course you did; we all died.”

  “No,” Neil sighed in frustration, “I mean… I died early like, way before we even launched, before my simulation was even complete!”  They were conferring together about what they’d learned on their own over the last day or two, and reviewing the ship’s records on medium and large scrolls.   

  Scrolls were the standard video display devices used on the ship and on Earth when they’d left.  They consisted of two long and narrow posts which when pulled apart, unrolled a flexible screen which went rigid once extended out to the desired length.  It displayed whatever one wished on the side facing the user, and the same image or another altogether on the opposite side.

  “It says here… that it happened when the ship’s fusion core was originally fired up and they were testing the core, engines and artificial magnetosphere.   There was a problem and the core went into an over-regeneration cycle and it was gonna detonate.  Apparently I went over to the ship to manually disconnect the power relays and got irradiated in the process…”

  “Hot damn!   You’re heroic!” Wiremu exaggeratingly exclaimed with a laugh.  Neil widened his eyes as if to say ‘apparently!”

  “But that means that… there’s nothing missing.  He had no experience of his own, no life that I don’t have any memory of…   He never had a long life on the ship after we were all put on ice the way all of yours did.  I’m more like a… resurrection than whatever it is all of you are.”

  “And what are we?” Wiremu asked.  

  “It’s almost like we are them getting a second chance… at a second life,” Sadhika offered.   “It’s almost like, with the exception of Neil of course, we… I mean they had their life on the ship, but now they’re getting a second chance at an entirely different life after the point at which we were simulated.  I mean they, after the point at which they were simulated.”

  “Okay,” Neil dropped his fully deployed half meters diameter large scroll down onto his lap in frustration.  “So how long are we going to let that confuse us?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “We all know that we’re not the same… beings as those we were modeled on,” Neil answered.   “They certainly all know, and they generally don’t seem too keen on letting us forget it either.”

  “We were programmed to think of ourselves as the continuation of them…” In-Su offered, “it would be kind of silly to keep trying to force ourselves to continually clarify the distinction.”

  “It’s also not entirely appropriate to claim that we are them,” Wiremu warned.   “There are obvious ways in which we are clearly not them.”

  “No,” Neil countered, “but it would be equally inappropriate, I think, to pretend that we’re totally unrelated, or… totally disassociated!”

  “We are one identity… with two incarnations.”  In-Su offered thoughtfully.  “From this point forward, to refer to the identity of Kim In-Su, one must necessarily refer to two different incarnations of that identity.  However, one must also necessarily refer to us collectively as a unified… incorporated identity.  I belong as much to the identity of Kim In-Su, as does the long dead human who also shares that identity, and as much as I myself am not that dead human.”

  “Damn right…” Neil stated, almost satisfied.  “So… we?” he said with a chortle and the others chuckled a bit.   “I’ll tell you what, from now on I’m just going to say ‘I’ to refer to both of us, but you are all free to understand that I implicitly mean ‘we.’”

  “Understood.” Sadhika said with a playfully feigned seriousness and gently puckered lips as she nodded her head in agreement along with the others.
 Satisfied for now, Neil picked up his scroll again and resumed reviewing the biographical material.  Having discovered that there was little of himself which he couldn’t remember and didn’t already know, he shifted his focus to reports of what had happened on the ship to the other sim’s progenitors, as well as to all of the other factors which had led to the current mess they’d woken up into.

  He could operate the scroll and all of the other technology on the ship by thought control as effectively as the human crew could, but for him and the other sims, the transmitting technology was simply built into their mechanoid physiology.   This was in contrast with the Brainchip system which the human crew had implanted into their brains when they were around thirteen years old.  What were referred to collectively as the Brainchip were in fact three transmitters each about the size of a grain of rice, embedded into different key sections of the cerebral cortex.  They analyzed the activity of the user’s brain, interpreted the signals, and broadcasted demands to technological devices around them.

  For the rare oddity when the Brainchip system went down, or for children too young to have had them implanted yet, everything could also be operated by touch and voice commands.  Most of the people on the ship were so comfortable with the Brainchips and so used to using them though, that reaching out with their mind to control the technological world around them was entirely as natural and unremarkable as physically reaching out with their hands to operate anything.  In fact, actually having to physically manipulate technology was for them something unusual, something quaint, and something which usually only the children had to muddle through.

  The Brainchip in humans, and the analogous technology in the sims, allowed them to open doors, navigate computer interfaces, dictate text, and send messages all with only a thought.  It was exclusively a brain out system though, meaning that information could only travel from the brain to a computer, but not from a computer directly into the brain.   This limitation in the technology necessitated the use of devices such as the EAR (Enhanced Auditory Rebroadcaster), and the PANE (Personal Area Network Eyes).  

  The EARs were tiny devices implanted into the auditory canals around the same time as the Brainchip.  They could record sounds as well as play them in such a way that only the user could hear them.  There were also two kinds of PANE devices; there were the more useful glasses with screens similar in functionality to the scrolls, going from transparent to any display configuration with a thought.  The PANE glasses were typically used for things like filmmaking and documenting, and had embedded within them high resolution multi-spectral cameras and better microphones than the EARs.  Also available though, were the PANE lenses; contact lenses which could display things discretely to just the user, but which had no microphone and only a basic lower resolution camera to facilitate a heads up display.  The PANE lenses were for more discrete personal use. 

  While the sims in principle could have had all of this technology built into them, the purpose of their creation was to recreate as faithfully as possible the original beings upon which they were based, not to improve upon them.  While it would have been quite easy technologically to just adjust their visual system to be able to view whatever they wished without the aid of such devices, or to turn their head itself into a sophisticated audio/video capture device far superior to the PANEs, this would have defeated the true purpose of their being.  As a result they needed to use the various audio and video devices as much as any of the human crew did and for the same reasons.

  “Well this is disturbing…” In-Su remarked.

  “What?”

  “Someone, some… child of the void, describes the mission as a ‘worst case scenario religion,” In-Su explained.

  “Children of the void?” Sadhika asked.

  “Something one of the… well my great granddaughter actually, something she told me…” the simulated man answered.  “That’s what they call the people born after we launched, but soon enough after that they had no hope whatsoever of ever seeing Haven.  She said that those who launched had a choice, and that those born more recently had hope, but those in the middle had neither and they call them the children of the void.

  “One of them here suggests that the religions of Earth were miserable because they were false, but that their redeeming quality, at least more recently in a historical context, was that one was free to leave them if they were able to realize that they were false.”

  “And how is the New Horizon mission supposed to be a worst case scenario of that?” Neil asked.

  “According to this person, because the mission was true… because it really was worthwhile and it wasn’t possible to discover the error of it.  It had an undeniable merit and reality to it, and even worse they say… one could never leave it, one could never escape it.  It imposed a technically worthwhile existence, while leaving one neither free to renounce it nor choose any other.  The injustice they say, was the absence of injustice, in an unjust situation.  It totally forbade any of them from having any possible sense of control over their own lives…”

  “Boy we really did some damage here didn’t we…” Wiremu lamented.  “How did this happen?  How did we get so much so wrong?  This place feels like a powder keg…” he observed.  “I’m left hoping that from here on out everyone will just be too busy to be so much at each other’s throats anymore, but I’m still very concerned.”

  They had already conferred with each other about what they’d learned from the members of the crew they’d spoken with.  They were all aware of the fundamental dichotomy on the ship and what the real problem with it was; that neither side of the conflict was clearly in the wrong.   Certainly neither side had all of the virtue, but likewise neither side could be fairly said to have a monopoly on all of the blame either.

  “Okay,” Neil exclaimed half in frustration and half in irritation, “let me see if I’ve got this, I want to make sure I’ve got all of this straight.”  The other three nodded.  They too wanted to make sure that they had a firm grasp on what the narrative at this point.

  “So, this Markus Bowland character, who none of us ever met, was a wildcard member of the crew who got a last minute promotion to be the head of Genetics.   Then, because he has issues I can’t even fathom, when they go to him to create what is supposed to be his son and later his grandson, he instead creates clones of himself as some kind of bizarre vanity project.  He gets into his head the idea of raising them differently from himself to see how they turn out, and by extension how he himself could have turned out if he’d lived a different life.”

  “Correct.” Sadhika confirmed.

  “And while all of this is going on, another member of the first ship born generation anomalously turns out to be a pedophile and out of nowhere starts raping boys on the ship, including this Markus’ clone-grandson Tycho.”

  “Right.”

  “Then,” Neil continued, “between finding out that he’s a clone, Earth mysteriously going dark, and the whole ‘children of the void’ thing, this Tycho character goes all wonko.  He brutally murders his rapist and soon after, hijacks the ship using us in a kind of… hack ‘slave mode’ as his muscle.   He tries to redirect the ship to a planet where a different generational colony ship was already headed, but one which the ship could theoretically arrive at in his lifetime.  Tycho then winds up getting killed by his clone-father Johannes before he can fully carry out his plan.”

  “Correct.”
“Then,” Neil chuckled angrily, “and this is the part I really can’t understand, this Johannes, for some reason, decides that he can’t just let it all end with that, and makes yet another clone before killing himself.”

  “That’s right,” Sadhika responded.  “That clone was the one they call Herschel, and he later created Halley as his own son.   Their creation is what really created the rift that we see on the ship now…  Aset and Asari’s people think they have no right to exist and that none of them should have ever been created in the first place.  Halley thinks that his father’s inherent goodness should have been enough for everyone to accept him, and now he’s super bitter that so many never did.”

  “Boy we really did do some damage here didn’t we…” Wiremu remarked despondently.  “What a mess…”