Arrival: Chapter 18

  “WOAH!   WHOOOAAAAHH!!!”

  “IN-SU!!!” Sadhika cried out as he vanished.  He appeared to have somehow fallen into the earth without any warning.   “Everyone slowly back away from that area!” she barked at the human crew with them as she got down on her stomach and began inching her way towards the spot where In-Su had vanished.
 “In-Su?” she called out again.  It was more of a question this time.

  “I’m here!” he cried out, sounding a little panicked.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I… I think so.  I don’t think anything’s broken, or well… damaged.”

  It was at this point that Sadhika reached the hole in the ground through which In-Su had fallen.  She could see him lying flat on his face some ten meters down.  ‘I know we’re supposed to be perfect simulations,’ she thought to herself, ‘but I can’t help thinking that that fall would’ve had to have seriously injured if not killed an actual human…’ 

  “Can you get up?” she asked.

  “Is he okay?” Blair called out from the group of humans standing safely away.

  “Looks like it,” she called out in answer.  “He’s gonna to try to stand.”

  “He shouldn’t!   He could have a spinal…” Blair began to caution, and then remembered.  “Never mind!”

  Simulant or no, In-Su very gingerly pushed himself up off the floor and onto all fours.   He then brought his legs under his torso and stood up fully.  He arched his back in a stretch with his arms on his waist and then shuddered a little as he finished.

  “What do you see down there?” Sadhika asked.  “What did you fall into?”

  “I, I don’t know I, I can’t see anything down here!”

  “Scroll,” she reminded him.

  In-Su pulled his bag off of his back and pulled out the large scroll which he’d brought with him.  The wrist scroll had the same function, but could provide far less light.  He fully unravelled the large scroll and the material went rigid.  With a thought command, both sides of the now stiff material lit up brilliantly with white light.  Holding it over his head, it illuminated the space around him.

  “What do you see?”

  “I see… I see that you’re going to want to call the others over for this Sadhika.” In-Su said as he looked around in wonder.

   

  “This place is old…” Wiremu commented, “I mean like really, really old, like… long before human modernity kind of old…”

  They had discovered that what In-Su had fallen down into was a narrow meter wide tube constructed of some kind of bricks which were offset in and out at each brick layer, providing foot and hand hold for them to relatively safely climb themselves up and down as though they were rodents in a vertical hamster cage tube.   Some of the bricks slipped out and fell down when they tried to put their weight on them, but remarkably most held their place.  They were precisely cut and fitted closely together instead of using mortar between the bricks which by now surely would have crumbled to dust and left none of the bricks in place.

  When they got to the bottom, they found a space just under two meters high and several meters wide and long.  Even in the relative dark it was unmistakably brick lined like the tube which had brought them down.  Shining their lights around, they could see hallways going off in three direction but from where they stood the tunnels remained ominously dark to their lights.

  As well preserved as the place appeared to be, it was very obviously quite ancient, and there was a strong sense of danger just being in the room.  They all had the strong impression that they shouldn’t stay down there any longer than they had to.  As remarkably well constructed as the brick work was, it was in an obvious state of extreme decay and the bricks themselves were cracking and flaking.  It appeared though, that the further they looked away from the access shaft they’d come down, the better preserved the construction seemed to be.  The elements are the enemy of any structures’ longevity, and the further away from the outside world they looked, the less light there was for plants to grow in between the bricks and break them apart, much like how the less water and temperature fluctuation there was, the less heating and cooling of the ambient moisture could warp and damage the bricks. 

  “What makes you say that?” Neil asked in regard to Wiremu’s comment about the age of the place.

  “The piles of dust everywhere…” Wiremu answered.  “I think they were all objects a long time ago, now they’ve all just turned to dust…  I mean on Earth we get excited about things from a few thousand years ago… and those are mostly just stone or hardened clay… maybe inert metals… stuff like the brick itself here, or the Egyptian pyramids back on Earth.”  He shone his light up the tube through which they’d come down.

  “But see all the piles of dust and unidentifiable bits of decayed stuff in piles of varying sizes against the walls here… for all we know once upon a time those could have been beds, bookshelves… maybe even something like those ancient furniture sized radios made of wood.”  He almost made himself laugh at the prospect.

  “Yeah, or… just dust piled up,” In-Su skeptically pointed out.

  “Well if they were something like that we’d be able to tell by sifting through the dust,” Neil noted, “any technology we’d be able to recognize or understand would leave bits of metal behind, even after this long.”

  “Quite right,” Wiremu affirmed.

  “So what do think we can surmise from this discovery?” In-Su asked. 

  “Well,” Wiremu answered, “we don’t know who made this place… we don’t know the extent of it, and we don’t know if they’re still around.”

  “Don’t you think those are questions we need to answer now?”

  “In time, sure.  But for now we have our timetable In-Su.  Sure this is a curiosity, but-”

  “I’d say it’s a hell of a lot more than a curiosity Wii!” Sadhika exclaimed.  “Are you totally missing this?”

  “What?”

  “Intelligence!!  It was one thing to find that there was a fully independent DNA system here, but right now we’re standing in the evidence that there is intelligent life of alien origin!”

  “Or at least used to be,” Wiremu observed with remarkably less enthusiasm, “but I take your point.”

  “I’m sorry Wii, but this is, this is the single most important discovery since… well since ever!  Humanity is not alone in the universe!  That is the biggest discovery ever made in the history of humanity!  It doesn’t matter if they’re not around anymore!  Like the DNA, if it can happen completely independently on two completely separate planets so close together, then that means it can happen anywhere!  And easily!”

  “I share your excitement Sadhika, believe me,” Neil offered, “but I’m also deeply concerned that this means we’ve violated a fundamental mission protocol.  We were not to colonize a planet with existing intelligent life and you said it yourself, we are standing in the evidence of that intelligence right now!”

  “Well, frankly I have to agree with Wiremu that they’re long gone now.  Any sophisticated civilization currently in existence, even if mostly underground, would have revealed itself in our detailed studying of the planet so far, especially since we’ve had all of our planet facing telescopes in orbit.”

  “But still…” In-Su said tentatively.  “For all the fear that humans have had for so long about aliens from deep space invading Earth… and now to be those invading aliens.”

  “Maybe,” Wiremu offered thoughtfully, “it was always just a part of our own nature which we were afraid of, and projected out into the blackness of space.  I’m sure some part of us has always understood that the same drive which makes us want to go exploring over the horizon, is the dame drive which can bring doom and misery to whoever already lives over that horizon when someone new shows up…”

  “Them…” Neil reflexively corrected without thinking.  Nobody objected or agreed.  Nobody seemed to acknowledge his comment one way or the other.  

  Sadhika laughed a little to herself.

  “What?” Neil asked.

  “Just… another biggest human discovery of all time made by a non-human,” she said with a smile.

  “I wonder... if in a thousand years the human’s egos will force them to forget that we were simulants at all,” In-Su mused out loud.  “Maybe in history we will become human descendants of our progenitors, or maybe our progenitors themselves will be erased from time and will only be remembered as us.”

  The four ruminated on this for a few moments until, almost on cue, Blair called down to them.  “How’s it going on there?  What do you see?  What did you find?”

  “Nothing,” Wiremu called up to her.

  Sadhika assumed a look on her face which was a cross between horror and bewilderment.   “Everything!” she called up in correction.  “It’s a room lined with the same brick work as the tunnel.  There’s piles of dust against the wall which we think used to be objects which have now long turned to dust.  We think the place is beyond ancient, but it clearly indicates the existence of intelligence here in the past at least!”

  “Yeah, I figured the same thing just from the brick work we can see up here!” Blair excitedly agreed.  “Ancient you say though?”

  “Yeah… and there’s three tunnels leading out of this room, I don’t know if we’re going to explore them though, hold on.”  Sadhika turned to the three male sims.  “What do you think?”

  “Look guys,” Wiremu said, “I definitely agree with you that this is all very interesting and worthy of further investigation.  But I’ m not as driven by my curiosity as you three all are and frankly that’s why I’m here and why I’m your captain.  My role is to keep us clear about what our priorities are.  Our priority is still, and still has to be, the mission and the establishment of the colony.  If everything had gone to plan so far we could be much more loose with the rules about researching this site, but Halley has put pressures on us that we can’t ignore.  You all know that this could all still go sideways at any moment, and the more progress we make towards setting up our colony site, the less it will matter if things do blow up, and the less potential there will be for complete mission failure.  You get me?”

  The other three nodded that they at least understood where he was coming from.   Wiremu was right though that he was dealing with three academics who at the moment wanted nothing more than to drop everything else and start studying these ruins, to go down those dark tunnels and see what they could find.  Their fundamental curiosity was one of the primary things which had brought them to this point and all the way out here in the first place.

  “I suggest,” Wiremu stated, knowing full well that these were the three people he didn’t have any right to outright order around, “that we keep working at establishing the ability of our crew to survive long term on the surface without any extra help, and being able to bring a lot more people to settle in here.   Once we’re securely in that phase of the mission I’ll be right here with you to explore what’s down there,” he said, shining his light down one of the mysterious tunnel.  “I mean, it’s not like I’m not at all curious myself…”

  The other three nodded their agreement, and then Sadhika called up to Blair: “We’re coming up!  We’ll fully explore down here once our colony is at least minimally established.”

  “Understood,” the woman on the surface replied, sounding quite disappointed.

  One by one, Wiremu laced his hands and gave the other three boosts up into the tube by their boots.  Once they were all on their way up, he let out a “Hyup!” as he jumped up to grab the lowest rung of bricks, and then pulled himself up into the tube with just the strength of his arms and followed the others up to the surface.