Arrival: Chapter 11

  After In-Su got out of the way, Wiremu opened the hatch behind his seat which provided direct access between the flight deck and the outside world.  The gullwing door swung from the floor up to sit parallel to the ground above the height of their heads.  He took a deep breath in through his nose to smell the air.  It was deeply satisfying, as though the scent itself was a trophy for all of their hard work.

  “Good, there’s oxygen on this planet…” Wiremu stated as the interesting smelling air swept up his nose and past him to fill the shuttle’s flight deck.

  “What?” Sadhika asked, confused.

  Wiremu laughed to himself, and then left the shuttle without an explanation.  The other three looked at each other a little bewildered, and then unstrapped themselves from their seats and followed him out.

  Somewhat anticlimactically, they stepped down the stairs which extended out when the door opened, and onto the dark greenish brown tarmac the drone had created for them.   Only a few meters beyond the wing though, was a tall forbidding wall of dark greenery.  It had an upper canopy that varied between twenty and thirty meters in height, with what appeared to be broad green leaves all competing to get over each other and into the sun of the perpetual temperate summer.

  With the noises of the shuttle winding and settling down, the simulants stood in silence.   The sounds of the jungle became audible once they listened, just a whisper at first but then as they attuned their ears to it, it became a complex cacophony.  It was the sound of an alien jungle with as of yet unexplored native insects and animals, and maybe more.  There was a shrill whistle at regular intervals of about twenty seconds, and a low grunt sound which cycled every second or so from various directions, and apparently amplified by hundreds of thousands of whatever was emitting the sound.   These were the only discernible and individually distinguishable sounds; the rest was a mad roaring jumble.

  “Would you listen to that…” In-Su said in wonderment, “even during the day.”  The density of the canopy declined the nearer one looked to the floor of the jungle, where there was sparse shrubbery and endless trunks of the trees which fought for light far above, some seeming to be strangled by a brown vine which appeared to be producing large bluish-purple fruit.

  Sadhika put on her PANE glasses and with a thought fed the camera’s ultraviolet scanner through the main optics.  “Wow, those fruit are really bright in UV… like flowers to bees on Earth…”

  “I’d hate to see the bees.” Neil said dryly and the other three laughed cathartically.

  “Okay,” Wiremu said in an officious voice, “we have to stay the night to give the shuttle enough time to separate out of the atmosphere all the fuel we’ll need to get back to orbit.  I suggest we just set up camp right here on this runway… I don’t know about the rest of you, but I certainly don’t want to spend the night in the middle of the totally unexplored alien jungle, simulant or not.”  The other three nodded, still smiling.  

  The captain tilted his head to one side, and slowly breathed in through his nose.   “You smell that?” he asked the others.   “Like… sweet cinnamon.”

  While the other three were looking around and trying to zero in on the smell he was talking about, Wiremu was instantly transported back to his childhood or at least, to the childhood he was programmed to be able to remember.  It was a cold winter’s day, and his mother had made cinnamon buns for breakfast.  The resolution of the memory was so crisp that he was taken aback for a moment.  He wasn’t expecting such a thing.

  Sensing something wrong, Neil placed his hand on the man’s shoulder and asked: “you alright?”

  “I just had a memory… a flashback to something from Wiremu’s childhood… triggered by that scent.  Cinnamon buns…”

  “Oh yeah, sure, now I know what you mean,” Neil offered with further sniffs.  “Just part of the programming, my friend,” he said with a smile.  “A deep relationship between scent and memory is very important to humans, so like everything else they incorporated it into us as much as they could.”

  “Was it a happy memory?” In-Su asked.

  “Oh yes…” Wiremu said distantly, “warmth, family, comfort food…” he added with a grin.   “Except now I have a serious craving for cinnamon buns!”  The other three laughed and allowed their focus to wander back to various curiosities about their new environment.

  Getting back to business, Wiremu put his own PANEs on and put a communication request through to the ship above, and Ishtar answered.  As directed by his thoughts, her image appeared on the top left hand quadrant of both lenses.

  “We’re standing on the surface Ishtar, and everything looks good.”  Wiremu could hear some cheers in the background.   Certainly they were watching them very closely from orbit but a silent bird’s eye view could only tell them so much.   “Please launch the First Descent Module,” he requested.  “Uh… right over there please,” he said as he pointed to the near end of the new runway, ahead of where the shuttle had come to a stop.  “As snugly against the end of the runway as the program will allow, please.”

  “Yes sir, anything else we can do for you?” Ishtar asked, hoping to be able to help further.

  “Not at the moment.  Try to be patient,” he offered sympathetically, “we know you’d all rather be here instead of us,” he added, looking up at them as he did and giving them a wave.

  “Yes sir, have fun.”

  “Acknowledged.”

   

  The First Descent Module raced out of its launch tube with the tunnel’s magnetic accelerators.  There were many of these descent modules, each of them able to immediately provide different capabilities down on the surface.  Most were designed with very specific purposes such as refining and smelting platforms or other industrial capacities, and there were even ones which unfurled into air, land, and water vehicles.  The First Descent Module served multiple functions, but was primarily designed just for this first night when the simulants had to spend the night on the alien planet’s surface before being able to return to the ship the next day.   It contained an inflatable habitat with four beds and some food, along with instruments and storage vessels which would allow them to analyze the planet from the surface in addition to taking samples back to the New Horizon.  

  Later on, once a settlement was up and running and the FDM’s primary function was no longer needed, it would become the runway’s flight control station for incoming shuttles and aircraft.  It had scanners which could confirm that the runway was clear, it housed emergency supplies, and could serve as an emergency shelter for whatever situations might call for one.

  The module’s heat shield descended and formed a protective ablative umbrella which burned through the atmosphere in a similar way to that of the shuttle, with wisps of plasma beneath it early on, and later a raging fireball entirely engulfing the module during its most volatile phase.  Sufficiently slowed by the burning, it reached the bulk of the atmosphere and began to tumble in free fall at its terminal velocity.  A series of control jet bursts righted the module so that it fell straight up and down, and then tilted itself to glide in the direction of the simulant team instead of straight down. 

  When in the vicinity and at the appropriate height, the module launched the ‘halo’ from which it suspended itself after a set of three parachutes deployed out of the halo and pulled the whole apparatus up to a slower descent speed.  A hundred meters from the ground, the parachutes were released and a set of rocket nozzles fired downward from the halo, slowing its descent until the module was gently set down at the end of the runway exactly where Wiremu had intended.

  “Perfect,” Wiremu stated with satisfaction, and then led the other three over to it.

   

  When he came within a few meters of the module it came into range of his Brainchip and Wiremu ordered the initial start up to its full landed configuration.  Out of one side the habitat began to inflate.   It was windowless but the material it was made of could resist anything from a sharp knife to the vacuum of space.   It was a non-transparent predecessor material to that with which the crew built the ship’s zero gravity bubble.   Along the other side of the module was a bank of sensors, cameras, and instrument surfaces for them to exploit from inside the habitat or elsewhere from their scrolls.

  “First things first.” Sadhika stated decidedly as she walked over to the wall cut out of the jungle by the runway drone, and touched the trunk of a tree which had its large leaves far above her head.  She held her hand to it for several moments as though she were trying to determine something about it by feel.  She then reached down and grabbed a dark green leaf off of one of the sparse plants on the floor of the jungle just beyond the runway.  Returning to the module, she pulled out a tray and lifted its lid.  She laid the leaf down onto the tray and pressed the lid firmly back down on the leaf, and then pushed the shelf back into the body of the module.  She opened the main tall narrow door and pulled out a large scroll, then closed it again.  Turning around and sitting down, she leaned back against the inflated outside wall to run the analysis on her scroll.

  “What are you looking at?” Neil asked.

  “Oh, just the first ever analysis of life on an alien world…”

  “Careful with that first ever talk… you know as well as I do that the other two missions have probably themselves landed at this point.”

  “Fuck that!” Wiremu exclaimed, despite himself.  “We ain’t come this far,” he declared, “they were far less prepared and we can’t point to any evidence at all that they actually made it to their planets, that their planets were appropriate, or that they successfully landed.  We had far better odds of success than them from the outset, and we’ve been lucky at every step we’ve needed to be so far, so… let’s just stow all that ‘are we or aren’t we first’ talk.”  In-Su and Neil chuckled.  He was absolutely right, but his sudden and excited irritation amused them.

  Sadhika leaned her head back and looked up into the sky.  Looking distant, and seemingly more just to herself than to the other three, she said: “I just made… the most important human discovery… that has ever been made since we first discovered that there was life anywhere in the universe other than Earth.”

  “What have you found?” In-Su asked.

  “It’s the same as Earth, the… the DNA system is the same, can you believe it!?  That means that there is either a… a common panspermic source or… or a natural convergence!  Either thought is, well…” she seemed too excited to be able to finish her own thought.

  “…unimaginable.” In-Su thoughtfully answered for her.

  “Right!” she exclaimed.  “It’s the most important… most exciting human discovery in a quarter millennium!!”

  “And you’re not even human…” In-Su remarked.  Sadhika calmed a bit and thought about this.  He was right.  It was humans who made this discovery possible, but it was her, a simulation of a once living human, who had made the actual discovery.  The issue had its roots in the very beginning of the space age, the question of whether cheaper robotic probes should explore space or whether fragile and expensive human missions should be prioritized.

  “What does that mean?”  Sadhika was left to wonder if this moment was some sort of handing of a torch over from life to its simulated creation, or if she was herself only an incredibly sophisticated instrument, and her role no different than the genetic scanner which had informed her of the experimental results.  Or was she a ghost of one of the original mission founders, a vain echo or impression left on the mission so that the original Sadhika Sengupta could in some remote way be a part of the big moment?  She was the focal point of one of the most pivotal moments in all of human history.  Was she truly a part of the moment as a person?  Or was she just fortunate enough to be some kind of witness or spectator to it?   Could she really just be an instrument, only created to make this moment possible for other beings, the true architects of the mission and her existence?

  “I don’t know.” In-Su replied, as though he were answering all of the questions in her head.  In reality he was only answering her first spoken question.  Internally though, he was asking himself all of the same questions Sadhika was asking herself.

  “It means…” Neil offered, “that nobody can tell the story of humans anymore, without telling our story too.  That’s what it means.”