Arrival: Chapter 21

  Much later that night Sadhika was fast asleep.  As she lay in one of the four beds which the simulants’ private habitat module was equipped with, her wrist scroll began vibrating from under her pillow.   Keeping it there was an old habit she’d picked up from back in the days when she ran a multi-billion dollar transnational corporation.  She hated the idea of ever being out of contact; she hated the idea of ever being unreachable if she was ever needed for any kind of an emergency.   Reflexively she woke and took the device out from under her pillow.  Pulling the scroll apart to see who was trying to reach her, she saw that it was a private communication request from Halley.  She was at once surprised, excited, and concerned, so she held the glowing screen to her chest as she left the hab in order to be able to respond without waking up the other Sims.

  Once outside and walking away from the habitat module, she thought an acceptance of the comm request towards the device and Halley’s face appeared.  “Halley, what-“

  “Sadhika, listen.” He stopped her.  “I have your shuttle.”

  “What?” she asked, incredulous.  “That’s ridicul-” this time she stopped herself.  There’s no way he would contact her out of the blue just to make up a story and lie to her about something like that.  “How?” she asked instead.

  “I… I don’t want to talk over the comm line, but… I have an offer for you.  If you’ll meet me at your airstrip, I’ll pick you up in the shuttle and take you back to our camp.  When we’re done talking, you have my word that you’ll be allowed to safely return back to your own settlement, and with the shuttle back in your possession.”

  “What’s going on Halley?” she asked with growing concern.  She had a thousand questions, and there were a thousand ways that this situation could have arisen, and while most of them were bad some were positively catastrophic.  She didn’t doubt the sincerity of his offer on its face though, again if he already had the shuttle there seemed little to gain from capturing her as well.  She was in fact encouraged that he seemed rather stressed about finding himself in possession of both shuttles.

  “Death…” Halley answered somberly.  “And there will be many more deaths if we don’t meet to resolve the situation before it escalates.”

  Reason enough, Sadhika figured.  Whatever he was talking about it sure sounded ominous.  “Okay,” she agreed.

  “Meet me at the airstrip in forty-five minutes.”

  “Understood.   I’ll see you there.”  The line went dead and the small screen on the scroll went dark.

  ‘That should be enough time,’ she thought to herself.  She’d have to get moving pretty quickly but it was a reasonable amount of time, especially since the paving drone had already created a good reliable road between their infant town and the landing strip.

  Sadhika walked back over to the simulants’ hab and opened her personal exterior storage locker.  She took her coat and her PANEs, and then quietly opened the hab’s door and silently removed the shotgun from beside Wiremu’s bed.  She then exited again and quietly closed the door behind her.  As she walked off, she thought dictated a text message for the other sims when they woke up, explaining where she’d gone and why.  The simulation of a middle aged Indian woman then disappeared alone into the alien darkness on the road to the airstrip.

   

  Wearing her PANE, the darkness wasn’t a problem.  The cameras in the glasses were equipped with low light and infra-red cameras, which were then projected onto the interior of the lenses.  This allowed her quite fair visibility, thought it was in red and black and absent of any colour vision.  Using red light instead of white in the display reasonably preserved the user’s dark adapted vision so that if they had to take the PANEs off for some reason, their eyes wouldn’t take twenty or so minutes to newly adapt to the darkness about them, but would instead already be so adapted.  Holding the shotgun out in front of her, she scanned from side to side as she carefully made her way down the road.  Although the path she was walking was evenly paved, it was a new and unsecured road which meant that there could be any kind of obstruction newly lying in her path, as well as anything waiting to attack her from the jungle wall only a couple meters away on either side.

  As she made her way towards the landing strip, she periodically heard a blood curdling shriek.   It came out in a long call which was then followed by two shorter bursts.  Sadhika comforted herself with the thought that as frightening as it sounded, it probably came from a creature which looked far less scary than it sounded.   Her ever elaborating mind then considered that even if it didn’t look particularly scary to her that certainly wouldn’t exclude it from being extremely dangerous.  On Earth some of the most vicious or toxic creatures could look tragically and deceptively benign to human eyes or even worse, cute.   

  The scary intermittent sound though, was made all the more eerie and disturbing by the fact that it was the only sound she could ever hear.  It was punctuation to the oppressing absolute silence of the night which she found intensely curious given how the daytime sounds of the jungle were an endless cacophony of strange alien animal noises.  She knew that there must be a very good reason for everything to get so quiet at night, but for the life of her she couldn’t imagine what that reason might be.  Her inability to conjure even a single plausible explanation was what scared her the most about the phenomenon.

  She tripped over something and almost fell, but she caught herself.  When she looked behind her there was no evidence of what she may have tripped over and she found this somewhat unsettling.  Either she had tripped over nothing, or she had tripped over something which had then scampered off.  Both possibilities were equally unsettling for her, and either way she resolved herself to stepping more carefully.  She was making decent enough time after all, and it was no longer necessary to be in such a hurry.  

  As she got moving again she figured that she was only fifteen or so minutes away from the landing strip where she’d agreed to meet Halley.  At this point she received another communication request from him, and was again notified of it by the feeling of her small scroll vibrating in her pocket.  Instead of taking the device out and opening it, she instead issued a thought command which put Halley’s image up on the top left quadrant of both of her PANE lenses, and enabled the microphone and speaker system in her EAR.

  “I’ve landed,” he informed her.  “Are you near?”

  “I’m about twenty minutes away,” she answered.  “So are you going to tell me how you came to be in possession of both shuttles?”

  “I’d… I’d still rather not talk about it over a comm line.”

  “Fine.”   Sadhika was irritated, but it was a reasonable precaution since their communications system wasn’t especially secure.   It wasn’t designed to be; it was never foreseen that it would ever need to be.  It was hoped, that it would never need to be.  “Like I said I’m almost there.  I’ll see you soon.”

   

  When Halley could begin to make out the figure of Sadhika emerging from the darkness out the shuttle’s front window, he went to the side door and opened it.  He stood in the doorway with his arms folded and leaned up against the doorway.  “Fancy meeting you here,” he said, and immediately regretted it.  The statement came off as glib and playful, which was well outside the bounds of the gravity of the situation he was about to drop on her.

  “What to happen?” she asked very seriously.  “Who died?”

  “It wasn’t my doing…” he started to plead.  “I never wanted any of this to happen.”  Sadhika only widened her eyes at him expectantly.

  “Well I guess I should start from the beginning…  We were woken in the middle of the night to a shotgun blast near our camp in the jungle.  We could tell that it was coming from somewhere between our airstrip and our settlement, which as I’m sure you know are much closer together than yours are.”

  “Okay,” Sadhika prodded as she followed him into the shuttle’s flight deck.  “Go on…”

  “So, we… went to investigate.  When we arrived a minute or two later, we saw Nekheny firing a shotgun at one of the indigenous… wait, have you even met them yet?”

  “Giant… jungle squid things?” she asked, to which Halley nodded.  “Yeah, we’ve been calling them squiddies.  In-Su and my teams briefly encountered a pair after we discovered what we later figured to be ruins somehow associated with them.   In-Su swore up and down that he detected some kind of limited complexity in the sounds he heard them making.”

  “Really…” he seemed particularly curious about that.

  “That’s right, and if you hadn’t entirely cut off communications we could have told you about them, we could have shared information and learned about everything much quicker,” she scolded him with an obvious anger which she hardly even bothered trying to keep in check.  “Then what happened?” she asked as she entered the shuttle and the two stood talking to each other.

  “What kind of ruins did you find?”

  “Does it really matter at this point?” she asked in obvious impatience.  She was here to find out what happened with the shuttle and apparently Nekheny, whom she really didn’t know much about.

  “I’m sorry, but yes it does if you’ll indulge me,” Halley cryptically responded.

  “Well it was tight unmortared brick work, some kind of vertical tunnel In-Su fell into and when we went down to investigate, we found a room several meters wide and long of similar construction and a few tunnels leading away from the room.  We were planning on investigating the tunnels further in the morning.”

  “Fascinating…”

  “What?”

  “We had a similar experience,” Halley answered.  “One of my own people fell into a similar tube and almost broke her neck but was able to stop her fall some ways down the shaft.  We found a similar room initially, but we did investigate right then and there.”

  “…and?”   Sadhika found that she couldn’t help herself.  Despite whatever else may be going on, she was dying to know what they found, and what she and her people would have found if they had instead chosen to investigate right away.

  “They’re sentient Sadhika!  In-Su was right, they’re sentient!” Halley excitedly exclaimed.  “At least… at least they certainly used to be.  I don’t know what happened, but we found ruins that we think were definitely built by them, but a long, long time ago.”

  “How do you know that for sure?” Sadhika asked.  Her people had already suspected as much, but she was excited at the prospect of there being positive evidence for it.  Being a trained scientist she was appropriately skeptical; such an extraordinary claim especially, required equally extraordinary evidence.

  “Because in an adjacent room we found writing scratched into the brick walls, and some crude drawings which included depictions of the… I’m sorry, what did you call them?  Squiddies?”

  “Really!?   That’s amazing!!” Sadhika exclaimed.   “And yet… well really a little strange.   I mean that brick work suggests far more sophistication than mere scratches on a wall, although not if it’s actually coherent written language…”

  “It actually gets even stranger, and… well frankly, more ominous.  We sifted through some of the piles of dust we found, and we identified metal and glass bits, like… like electronic bits, Sadhika.  It didn’t seem like particularly sophisticated electronic technology, but-”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said with a clear understanding.  “Any understanding and technological utilization of electromagnetism is an undeniable dead ringer for industrial level intelligence…”

  “You seem saddened by that,” Halley observed.  “I would’ve thought you’d be more excited.”

  “Well,” she said with a heavy heart, “the scientist in me is ecstatic of course… but as a mission founder I’m deeply disturbed.  This is something we specifically wanted to avoid.  Signs of industry were supposed to strike a planet from our candidate list.  Of course… more importantly at the time, such signs of industry on another planet might have been the most important scientific discovery of all time and a much bigger deal than the mission itself altogether, but… still.  It also would have excluded this planet as a candidate for the mission.”

  “Which raises the question though, why didn’t you see it?  I mean, whatever they may have been and been capable of in the past, they are clearly no longer that sophisticated.  Today the atmosphere would show no more indications of industry than it would have on the day you left.”

  “Right… Wiremu figured that the debris we found in the underground room had to be tens of thousands of years old at least…”

  “We figured about the same thing.”

  “So what happened to them?  What could possibly cause a species to regress like that?”

  “That’s where we draw a blank,” Halley admitted.  “Anyways earlier today we ran into a couple of them in the jungle and had a brief exchange with them before they ran off.  Of course we couldn’t understand each other in any way shape or form, and we couldn’t even be sure that the sounds they were making were any kind of language the way In-Su seems to have been able to, but it seemed like they were trying to communicate… we certainly got that impression.”

  “What happened with Nekheny?” Sadhika asked, only now being able to rip herself away from the fascinating conversation about the squiddies.

  “Well, that’s just it…” Halley said as he gestured an invitation with his hand for Sadhika to take the co-pilot seat.  She obliged and he followed her to the front to take the captain’s seat beside her.  “When we arrived… well, he’d run into a group of three squiddies.  The first was already down and he was firing on the second as we arrived.  We… then saw him turning his weapon on the third, and…” he seemed reluctant to finish the sentence.

  “And?” Sadhika prodded, almost afraid because she was already pretty sure of the answer.

  “And I shot him.  I shot him dead.”  

  “Oh no…” Sadhika was mortified.  

  “He… had already killed two,” Halley explained.  “I was thinking about the family we met earlier… at least what we thought was a family… I think I was imagining that he was about to kill a younger one after killing its parents…

  “Halley…”

  “I know Sadhika, I know…  We investigated his PAN and found instructions given to him by his parents to spy on us.  After that it didn’t take long to realize that we had both shuttles and… where we would find the second one.”

  “Wait, what?   His parents?”

  “Of fuck… you didn’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  Halley sighed heavily.  “Nekheny is… Aset and Asari’s son.”

  Sadhika’s jaw dropped and her eyes opened wide.

  “Now Sadhika, you’ve gotta believe me.  I couldn’t see who it was specifically when I shot.   I had no idea who it was, I just… reacted instinctively to protect the… the squiddies.”

  “Halley…”

  “I know.   I mean, I don’t know if I’d have acted any differently in the moment if I’d have known who it was ahead of time, but… it’s important to me that you know that I didn’t know, and that there’s no way that I shot because of who he was… if anything it would have made me hesitate.  Believe me, I know how on a razor’s edge I am already.”

  “And that’s when you contacted me?” she asked.

  “That’s right,” he answered as he informed the shuttle by thought command that he wished to take off and what his intended destination was.  Like road pods back on Earth, automatic piloting programs had proven themselves time and time again to be superior to and more reliable than human pilots, and with the exception of Wiremu, most everyone else just left the actual flying to the shuttle’s onboard systems.  

  In earlier days autopilot systems had still made humans uncomfortable with the idea of relying on the technology completely.  By the time the New Horizon had left the Earth though, people in general trusted autopilot systems so completely, that they had instead become reluctant to trust human pilots.  More common now was their frustration with those who still wished to pilot land, sea, air, and space vehicles personally, since they were the only ones who ever had any incidents with piloting error anymore.  

  After receiving and processing Halley’s commands, the shuttle swung around and aimed itself back down range of the runway.  After deploying its auxiliary atmospheric wings, the shuttle’s liquid rocket engines lit and fully engaged, and it was quickly in the air and climbing on a direct parabolic trajectory a third of the way around the planet to Halley’s colony site.   “I’m not afraid to say Sadhika… that I don’t know what to do.  I planned our defection very carefully, I imagined every scenario I could and worked out every detail I could imagine.  I… I didn’t plan for this and I don’t know what to do.  I’m scared.”

  Sadhika laughed out loud, and much to Halley’s surprise.  “What?” he asked.

  “Really?” she asked.  “You really don’t get what’s so funny about that?”  He shook his head.  “How you feel right now, is exactly the position you put us in when you decided you were gonna to fuck us over.  It serves you right… at least now you know what you did to us, and I hope you appreciate that everything that comes afterwards now is your fault.”  He declined to respond to that assertion directly.  

  “Regardless… I didn’t want this Sadhika.  I did everything I could to avoid my actions leading to an escalation or any kind of open conflict, but when Aset and Asari find out about this… I’m pretty sure I’m going to need your help if there’s any hope of averting a catastrophe.  They’ll… they’ll never understand.  You need to make them understand, you need to tell them the story that I just told you, for there to be any hope at all.”

  “I can’t say I entirely disagree.  Speaking of which, why don’t they know already?  Wouldn’t they have been monitoring Nekheny’s progress?  Can’t they tell that he’s dead by his beacon having gone dark?”

  “Well,” Halley answered a little sheepishly, “I immediately set up a false broadcast of his beacon to prevent them from being able to know that until I figured out what to do…”

  “Of course you did,” Sadhika replied with a total absence of surprise.  

  “As for why they haven’t been watching with the satellites or wondering why the shuttle has come to you and is now heading back… well, either they’re sleeping since it’s the middle of the night and they were going to check on his progress in the morning, or they are in comm blackout so as not to put him at risk by tipping anyone off that they sent him out.  As for satellite imaging, cover is intermittent at best as you know.  They may be up there dying to know what’s going on but afraid to say or do anything, or they may still be completely oblivious.   It’s hard to know.”

  “Halley…” she sighed, mentally exhausted, “what the hell were you thinking?  Why do any of this at all?  Why break up and endanger the mission in the first place?   How could you possibly think it was really worth all the risks?”

  “Well,” he said with self-conscious reflection, “do you want the real reason or my principled justification?” he asked.

  “Both,” she answered, not amused.  “Start with the real reason.”

  “I simply couldn’t bear to collaborate with Aset and Asari anymore…  I wanted the chance to really lead, to create something different and to… to create a different kind of colony from the one you planned.”

  “Different how?” Sadhika asked.

  Halley sighed heavily.  “I’ve studied you a great deal, all of the progenitors of you sims.  You thought of so much… and yet there was so much you missed.   That problem has been magnified over the course of the whole mission and was part of why the Midway schism happened at all in the first place.”

  “What?” Sadhika asked pointedly, now frustrated at his evading the real question.   She was also a little insulted at his impugning of how they had prepared and planned for the mission.

  “You thought of everything, absolutely everything… except the human part.  “You failed to adequately psychologically vet the people who launched, you were so concerned with their professional qualifications that you… that you didn’t give enough thought to the fact that you were creating a society, not a crew but a society!”

  Sadhika didn’t answer; instead she just listened.

  “I don’t… I don’t blame you, or any of the other mission founders.  It’s truly miraculous what they did achieve in getting us here at all, in any condition.  But I do believe that that original oversight is the root of all of the problems which came after, even my own original progenitor I have to admit is somebody who never should have made it onboard in the first place.  Everything that’s happened since is just… ripples from that original error.”

  “But everything you’ve done since our arrival here has only added further ripples, only aggravated the problems you’re describing, can’t you see that?” Sadhika chastised him.

  “Of course I can… but I think you underestimate just how politically factionalized the ship already was before you woke up.  There is a profound ideological divide which most of the crew falls decidedly on one side or the other of.  “They consider my very existence an affront to them.  I consider them being married as patriarch and matriarch an affront to the mission and I renounce their open discrimination of me.  They, think the group comes first, while we think the individual does.  They want to adhere to mission protocols as strictly and dogmatically as humanly possible, while we are comfortable improvising, and considering the original intent with which the protocols were written in order to act accordingly.

  “I founded the second colony to provide a relief valve, so that we could live apart in peace, while we tackle our mutual larger problem of human colonization of Haven.   I thought that space between us could cool tensions and eventually allow an equal and balanced dialogue.  Well, that’s my ‘principled justification,’ anyways.    I never wanted it to turn into any kind of war though… I specifically did everything I could to avoid it coming to that.  I was hoping to just get away with taking a shuttle and leaving the rest to you and them, I knew we were capable of figuring everything else out for ourselves.   In part we wanted to build and discover a more natural life which was relatively free from the technology we’ve been bathed in our whole lives.  We also hoped that based on our taking only a minimal amount of equipment, that you’d be able to convince Aset and Asari to let us go.”  

  “We had Halley,” Sadhika affirmed, “but that was before you gunned down their son.”