Arrival: Chapter 23

  In-Su and Neil stepped out of the simulant’s habitat module and into the early morning light.  The sun was just promising to rise over the horizon above the jungle, and the soft gold, yellow, and red light was slowly but persistently getting lighter by the minute.   They found something ugly about the beauty of the pre-dawn environment.  It seemed to be lying to them.  This new world seemed so peaceful and so beautiful, as though it didn’t know what danger was afoot, and what malice hung in the air.  The bomb was set; the fuse was primed and lit.  What was the worst though, was that none of the sims could see any way out of it, none had any good ideas about how to extinguish the fuse altogether and prevent the bomb from detonating in the first place.

  Ostensibly Neil and In-Su had come out to head towards the airstrip and secure the unpiloted shuttle when it arrived, but at the moment they both felt like they just needed some air, as though getting out of the hab could get them away from the danger that now hung over all of them.  Neither one spoke; they were both thinking about what was happening, and how they could potentially avert the coming disaster.  Unfortunately no good ideas came to mind for either of them though.   They both knew that two forces determined to fight each other eventually usually found a way to.

  “Heavy…” Neil said softly to In-Su, as they mulled around outside the habitat module, looking down with their hand in their pockets and kicking the dust on the ground.

  “That is certainly one word for it,” the linguist offered in agreement.

  “This could be the end, In-Su.  Can’t you feel it?  There’s enough going on here, enough volatility in the air already, so much in play, so many forces coming to a head which were building for decades before we even woke up and got here…  It’s like, it’s like we’re stuck in somebody else’s conflict.  It’s like we just woke up in the middle of it, and just as we start to get our heads around it and start making progress in our own mission, bam!” He snapped his fingers to accentuate the word, “the whole mission could explode because of a conflict decades in the making…  All of our hard work, all of that careful and detailed planning…”

  “I know…” In-Su somberly agreed.

  “I didn’t think we missed anything, I still can’t really see what they think we missed!   I think they’re just trying to blame their petty and myopic blood feud on us to take the blame off of themselves.   I mean if they’re right, how could we possibly have gotten so much wrong when we spent so much time planning every detail to such a fine degree, and trying to account for every possible eventuality?  What could we really have possibly missed In-Su?”

  “We missed the human part of the equation Neil…” In-Su somberly answered upon careful reflection.  “We were too fixated on all of the technical aspects of the mission, on all of the engineering problems.  We worried exclusively about taking as much technology, information, and culture with us as we possibly could, and as we needed to don’t get me wrong, but… but we never really thought about the fact that there would be real people living on our blueprints, and in our dreams… complicated people, sensitive people… damaged people.  We instrumentalized living, breathing… vital people, Neil.  They were people who had to live their entire lives under conditions which we chose for them without adequately thinking about how they could aversely react to that lot in life, and without leaving them behind any of the tools they required to adequately confront what was done to them or what to do when things didn’t go exactly according to plan.  I’m ashamed to say I’m guilty of it myself…  I was so preoccupied with the education system and with preserving and bringing with us as much human culture as possible, that I was too fixated on future crew as people without adequately considering them… as persons.”

  Neil just sighed heavily.  “You’re right of course…  In retrospect, what a nightmare it must have been for them.  I mean I really can’t imagine myself being one of the, what did they call it?  Children of the void?  It’s certainly apt…  I don’t know why I couldn’t look forward to see that problem for myself…  I mean now that I really think about it, I shudder to think of how I would have reacted to being born into that situation… why couldn’t I see that before?  Why couldn’t the original Neil and In-Su see that before we launched this… this mother of all Hail Mary passes?  Now that I really think about it, being born into the void and being condemned to die in it with no hope of any other fate being available to me… that’s like, the worst thing I can possibly imagine!”

  “Maybe we are superior to our progenitors,” In-Su uncharacteristically suggested.   “Or maybe it’s just being here, actually seeing the consequences of our oversights and having personal experiences with the people who are ostensibly our victims, perhaps this has sensitized us to the gravity of what we’ve done.”

  “Or worse,” Neil gravely uttered, to which In-Su looked at him inquisitively.

  “Maybe we did think about it,” Neil continued.  “Maybe we understood all too well that there was no fix to the problem, so instead we just worried about the things we could control and plan for.”

  “Hmmm…” In-Su uttered in agreement while nodding his head.  He had to admit that as unsettling as the prospect was, it was indeed a possibility.  “I have an even scarier proposition for you,” the sim further offered.  “What if they did know, exactly what they were doing, but deliberately left that awareness out of our programming so that we wouldn’t feel any responsibility for it when we woke up?  What if there were a lot of things which were consciously and deliberately left out of our programming for a myriad of intended effects of the omissions?”

  Neil shuddered at the prospect.  Merely the attempt to faithfully recreate his progenitor itself would have been hard enough without any of that kind of manipulation.  But In-Su was right, if they wanted to, they could have subtracted or for that matter added any knowledge or quality at all to their simulations, and for whatever reasons suited them whether justified or whimsical.   

  How was Neil really to know just how faithful a simulation he was of his progenitor.  Whether or not there was any kind of formal conspiracy as In-Su suggested, the original Neil Sagan could have either consciously or unconsciously misled the simulation team about his memories and innermost thoughts and feelings.   For all he knew now, he could be some kind of idealized fiction of the original Neil Sagan.  For as well as he did know himself in his existential condition, he’d have to admit it was something he couldn’t altogether put past himself doing.

  It made him wonder about the human condition too.  He didn’t imagine that this particular dilemma was all that different from the one real organic humans faced in their own lives.  How were any of them to confidently know the truth about the world and themselves?  How were they to tell the difference between the things they’d actually learned for themselves and the things they’d just been programmed to believe by parents and teachers and the media?  How were they to know when their mind was faithfully representing the world to them or when their subconscious was altering how they perceived it with no rational regard for whether it helped or hindered them in the living of their lives?

  The two simulated men watched as the shuttle silently glided over their heads in the rapidly brightening sky.  They watched as it once again receded over the horizon, which was quite high from their perspective since it was well obscured by the jungle’s high canopy.

  “We’d better get moving,” Neil said, trying to shake his disturbing musings from his mind.   “It’s still a bit of walk to get to the airstrip.”

  “There’s something that’s been bothering me Neil,” In-Su said.  “Won’t Aset and Asari be able to tell that their son is dead?   I mean they wouldn’t be able to tell that it was Halley pulling the trigger unless there happened to be a satellite overhead at just that moment, but won’t they be monitoring his Brainchip and won’t it register and reveal to them that he died?”

  “Well, yes and no,” Neil explained.  “They’ll certainly have lost contact, but as far as they know it could just mean that his scroll was destroyed.  The Brainchips themselves don’t have the range to be directly accessed from orbit, they just have enough range to access things like the scrolls within a few meters around them.”

  “He’s dead!??” Huli shrieked in shocked agony.  “He killed him??”  He was standing in the doorway of one of the habitats that Neil and In-Su had previously had their backs to.

  “Huli…” Neil pleaded in mortified panic.  “Ho- hold on now, just… just calm down for a minute.” Neil said with his hand outstretched as if the saying ‘stop’ with a hand gesture might accentuate his plea.

  “Oh no-” he cried as he closed and sealed the door to the habitat behind him.

  “WII!!!” Neil yelled as he and In-Su ran over to the hab Huli had locked himself into.

  In-Su pleaded from outside.  “Wait, please!  Don’t tell them, you can’t tell them yet, not without context, not without an explanation!!”

  “To hell with you!  You’re not even people!!   And you would keep something like this from the real mission crew!?  How dare you!!” Huli yelled feverishly from inside the structure.

  As Wiremu emerged from the simulant’s hab and began running towards them, Neil and In-Su could hear from inside Huli’s hab that he was on the comm with Aset and Asari, telling them that their son was dead and that Halley had killed them.   From what they could make out Huli was a close friend of Nekheny and was likewise quite close to his parents, especially with being a department head.  The two sims continued to plead with him through the wall but they had ceased to be listened to.  

  As Wiremu arrived and stood alongside Neil and In-Su, all three of their wrist scrolls began chiming in unison with an incoming comm request.  It was Asari, and all three exchanged worried looks with each other as the chirping scrolls seemed to ring out deafeningly in the silence of the otherwise tranquil and peaceful morning.

  “I think we have to answer,” Neil flatly stated with a note of defeat.

  “Of course we have to answer…” Wiremu snapped, momentarily and errantly lashing out at Neil in frustration.  He immediately felt bad about it but instead of apologizing, he opened his scroll.

  “How… dare you.”  Asari’s face demanded from the small screen.  Despite the small display size, there was no mistaking his state.   His eyes seemed on the verge of burning through the screen, and his voice was slow and even, despite the way he was visibly shaking.

  “Now Aset you’ve gotta listen to me-”

  “No you listen to ME!!!” Aset screamed, incensed.  “He was my son!” he uttered through tears of rage.

  Wiremu, did not like his tone.  He didn’t care who he was, he didn’t care what had happened.  He was Wiremu fucking Tynes.  He was a principal mission founder.  He and his friends, were the living embodiments of the mission itself and he was not about to just stand there and allow himself to be accused of betraying his own mission.  He was the mission!

  “How dare we?  Just who the fuck do you think you are??  What the hell was he doing spying on the other camp in the first place!?  This is as much your fault, as it is Halley’s!  All of this, every part of this clusterfuck is as much your fault as it is his!!  Yes the clones should never have been made in the first place but as far as I can tell since they were, they only ever sought to be accepted so they could peacefully contribute to the mission!  It’s you and your kind who have always refused those offers of peace and kept the conflict going, it’s always been you who have escalated things and then refused to back down!”

  “You’re defending him?  You are defending all of them?”  His voice was suddenly cold and distant as though he were now completely removed.  He seemed a man who had just had his carefully constructed world view overturned, and was now recalibrating to see where all the pieces fit.  He looked down as his eyes darted back and forth.  Then, he looked back straight ahead at Wiremu and ominously stated in a cold and eerily even voice: “You’re a traitor.”  He knew exactly what he was saying, and what saying it meant.  “You must be defective.  You are clearly no longer capable of leading this mission.   You don’t deserve to lead this mission anymore.”

  Wiremu, quite simply, appeared as though he was about to explode.  He softened just slightly though, and just barely enough, when In-Su delicately placed his hand on his shoulder.  He gently ran his hand down Wiremu’s arm, and softly but deliberately removed his wrist scroll.  He walked away, cradling the device in his hands as though it was an explosive which might go off in his face if he jarred it too much.  Without a word he left the other two simulants and the small crowd of humans who had gathered around to see what all the commotion was about.   In-Su traversed the short distance to the edge of the jungle and entered just enough to be out of earshot of the crowd he had just left.

  “Asari,” he said softly, “this is an incredibly severe moment.  I have… infinite sympathy for your loss.  It is… one more senseless and unnecessary tragedy on a list of senseless unnecessary tragedies which is already far too long.   I can’t even… imagine how much you’re hurting right now.”  In-Su certainly could imagine, but he was a sensitive enough person to know that no person in the throes of such suffering ever thinks that anybody could ever possibly understand what it was like to be suffering as they were suffering.  The simulation of an aged Korean man was already beginning to cry himself in simple empathy as he was very much sympathizing with how Asari must be feeling in this moment.  “But I know for a fact, that Halley and his team did not want any of this either.  Of course they were wrong to launch a parallel landing, but it’s already done, and they did everything they could to minimize the risk to the rest of us.

  “I know it doesn’t lessen your loss in any way Asari, but Halley did not act maliciously.   He had discovered that there is an indigenous life form here for which we have found evidence of their intelligence.   Your son… panicked; he had already killed two and was turning his weapon on a third when Halley fired upon him to defend the indigenous.  He did not know that it was Nekheny he was shooting at.  Asari, for all he knew when he shot it could have been one of his own people who he was firing at.”

  Asari said nothing; he was still looking through the small screen with intense eyes which were at once distant and burning with rage.  Something in his face made In-Su believe that maybe, just maybe he was in some small way getting through to him.

  “I know what you want to do Asari… I can see it in your eyes, believe me.  But I’m telling you that if you choose this path, if you make that choice… many more will die.  Other people’s sons, other people’s daughters, many more people you personally care deeply about will be hurt and die, and you’ll be putting their loved ones, their parents, siblings, and friends, all through exactly the same misery that you’re feeling right now.  Even worse, it’ll mean the end of the mission itself, and you know as well as anyone that mission failure… means death for everyone in time.”  In-Su swallowed hard.

  “Please…” he begged, “please don’t do this.”

  Without a word, Asari cut the comm line and the scroll’s screen went blank.  The great communicator, had failed to get through to him.