Arrival: Chapter 31

  Sadhika lay flat on her back looking up into the early morning sky, and pondering her many failures in life.  Not even the other sims who were her closest friends in the universe, or anyone close to the original Sadhika back on Earth, really had any idea whatsoever just how hard she could really be on herself.  She readily acknowledged that her harshness with herself was part of what had made her so successful back on Earth, but it also had a bad way of incapacitating her in moments of truly profound failure, moments like this.  

  It was quite remarkable she reflected, that she had been simulated so completely.  To fully simulate and capture the true essence of a person, the best simulators back on Earth exhaustively investigated three primary axes of personality.  They studied the person the subjects thought themselves to be, the person those who knew them best knew them to be, and the person who their behaviour revealed them to actually be.  

  This last axis was best revealed by detailed mapping and study of their brain activity patterns in conjunction with their virtual identity which included the things they searched and the media they consumed.  By painstakingly analyzing their Brainchip and PAN records, the researchers could ascertain who somebody was in the privacy of their own mind and when nobody was watching in a way that self-reporting could never capture.   People after all, habitually and routinely lie to themselves as much as they do to others about the kind of person they are.

  If one were to simulate a person based on any one of these axes in isolation, the simulation would inevitably be a failure, or at best incomplete.  Oh it would certainly mechanically function as it was built to, and in all the most superficial ways it could fool many people, but it would not truly be the person it was meant to replicate in any real sense.  It could never fool those with any more than a passing familiarity with the original person, and stood up to very little close scrutiny.  Persons after all, are not any of these axes of identity alone.  People are not just the person others think them to be or who they perceive themselves to be any more than they are just the person who their intimate behaviour reveals them to be.  People are all of these; people are none of these.

  People keep secrets, wittingly or not, from those whom they are closest too.   Weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and darknesses which they never want anyone else in the world to know; this is what one’s virtual identity and presence reveals them to be.  Assessing other's views of who a person is reveals how they behave in the world, but this is usually remarkably different still from how that same person perceives their own behaviour.  Those who observe us closely usually have a different explanation for our behaviour and way of being than the ways in which we would explain away our own behaviour.  Both explanations in isolation are always incomplete at best, but when taken as complementary they can reveal surprisingly accurate assessments of what the true essence of a person really is on a more fundamental level.

  Sadhika was despondent; utterly paralyzed by her sense that she was responsible for all of this, if not directly then certainly indirectly.  She kept thinking about how she created the conditions for this to happen, she had personally failed to project the problems that had arisen en route and to accommodate for them.  The way she saw it, she couldn't even offload much of the responsibility onto the other sims.  Sure the original idea for the mission in the first place had been Neil’s, but she'd been the money behind it, she was the real facilitator.  Granted she certainly couldn't have pulled off the mission just by herself, after all it took far more than money alone.  

  She wasn’t even sure if she’d have been particularly inclined to try to put the mission together if she hadn’t met the others though, and been infected by their passion.  It was all four of them who had come together to do something which none of them could have ever done on their own, something they all had considered truly extraordinary.  That’s why she’d gotten involved in the first place… for the extraordinary.  She’d already accomplished so much in life; she was starved for exciting new challenges.  The New Horizon mission seemed to her the potential for an ultimate crowning achievement on top of her already legendary career.  Once upon a time she’d been very proud to know that the mission never could have happened if it weren’t for her contributions.  Now she was left to surmise that at this point it might have been for the best if it hadn’t happened at all, given how it all seemed to be turning out now.  

  Which all left her here, a bitter failure lying profoundly depressed on the surface of an alien planet, possibly condemned to be alone on it forever, or until her machinery finally broke down, whichever came first.  If both shuttles were damaged in the conflict currently taking place in orbit, with all the landers already down, there would be no way for anyone else to ever come down to join her or for her to ever return to the ship.  That was only a problem though, given the assumption of anyone left alive onboard for her to commiserate with over the grim reality of their situation when it was all said and done.  For the moment she’d forgotten about the people left at the primary site half a world away, and even if she’d remembered, left alone to fend for themselves on an alien planet after living their whole lives on a ship, she wouldn’t have given them much chance of surviving anyways.

  Failure.   All this bitter sound and fury... for nothing.  Even if the other sims succeeded in retaking control of the ship and the mission... she was left to wonder at what cost.  They’d already lost too much, too many had already died and too much of the mission had already gone off plan.  Too much equipment was likely in the middle of being destroyed at this very moment.   With regards to the last wish left to her by her progenitor, to be extraordinary and to outshine her star… she had to conclude that she’d failed.  Even if the others were successful at this point... too much was already lost for the mission to ever be properly put back on track.

  She heard a moan, and her attention and focus snapped back to reality.  Was that faint hope she heard calling out to her?  She bolted up into a sitting position, supporting her torso with her hands on the ground behind her.  Where had it come from?  Somewhere to her right she thought… but nothing was moving.  She heard another stirring, but this time to her left.  Sitting up and focusing, she was immediately able to localize the rustling of a body just a few meters to her left.  It was Søren.

  She leapt to her feet and rushed over to his body and knelt down beside it.  She could tell he was breathing, and now quite obviously so.  "I thought you were dead!" she exclaimed.  He was still unconscious and incapable of responding, but she was incredibly relieved to have someone to speak to regardless of whether or not he was conscious enough to hear and understand her.  "Why aren't you dead…" she asked him, though obviously more to herself than of the unconscious man.

  She got up to check on the other bodies around her.  Many were still all too clearly as dead as dead could be, and some too obviously so with very gruesome physical injuries, but some of them were alive.   As far as she could tell none of the squiddies were showing any signs of life, but some of the humans were alive!!

  She ran over to the makeshift shelter the rebel group had created after their landing; it was off to the side of the clearing they’d made for the landing strip.   After frantically rifling through the haphazardly piled heap of supplies they’d brought with them, she found their medical kit and took it with her back to Søren.  Among many other things Sadhika was a trained paramedic, and like Wiremu with his piloting, her simulated actual training and know-how were subtly augmented by software from the android doctors on Earth and the coffin shaped automated medical units on the ship.  

  In these devices one would lay down to be scanned and after being assessed, treated with anything from topical application of an ointment to open heart or brain surgery if deemed necessary.  Medical technology had progressed to the point where it was quite unusual indeed for so dramatic and invasive measures to be required though.   Medical intervention was always much less invasive the earlier any problems were detected, and complete understanding of human biochemical physiology meant that the body could usually be compelled to perform for itself most of the corrective measures which used to require dangerously invasive procedures.  Several of these drone medical chambers were permanently installed on the ship, as well as two single unit drone landers, which were presumably still waiting patiently in their launch tubes up on the New Horizon.

  Although she'd never really thought about it, if called upon in a moment of need, she would discover that not only was she a perfectly qualified paramedic, but a fully qualified surgeon and general practitioner as well.  Once back on the ground beside Søren, she opened the medical kit and popped a vial of liquid mild stimulant into an adjustable transdermal.   

  After adjusting the dose, she firmly held the device’s round applicator ring to the skin of his neck, and pressed the button.  A small amount of the standard dilating vapour filled the sealed void between his skin and the main bulk of the device.  This vapor greatly increased the permeability of his skin, and after a moment the calibrated amount of stimulant was released into the void and with some gently applied positive pressure, was all absorbed through his skin and into his bloodstream.  It was quickly taken up by the main vein and artery in his neck which took the chemical up into his brain, down to his heart, and through the rest of his body. 

  After only a few seconds, his eyes shot wide open and began frantically darting about before calming down, composing themselves, and then quickly surveying their entire field of view before settling on Sadhika’s face.  She’d given him a modest dose of a mild stimulant, one known to be difficult to have any significant complications with.  The dose she’d given him was essentially the equivalent of him drinking an entire pot of coffee all at once.  She was glad to see that it worked, and that so far there didn't appear to be any ill effects as a result of giving it to him.

  Søren sat up alertly much as Sadhika herself had when she’d heard him stirring, and set himself to work trying to newly orient himself in space and time after being unconscious.  She watched as his brain cued up all of the information he needed to understand his situation, how he'd arrived where he was, and what it meant for him to be there.   "What happened?" he asked.

  "You tell me," Sadhika replied.  "By the time I made it here, you were all... well I thought you were all dead."  She looked around and then added, "most of you still are."

  "I wasn't shot..." he said as he started feeling all over his body for possible points of injury.  

  “No,” she agreed, “but when I checked on you earlier I couldn’t detect a pulse, and… and you didn’t seem to be breathing either.  I was sure that you were dead.  I thought you all were," she repeated as she looked around and was pleased to see several more bodies stirring to life.

  “The squiddies…” Søren said, still groggy.

  “I know.   They almost ran me over on their way to the battle.”

  “The last thing I remember… is several of them coming right at me.  They’d leapt on top of me before I could shoot them… I don’t remember anything after they hit me.  Sadhika, we were losing… we were about to be totally overrun, but then this whole area became flooded with those squiddies…  Now I remember, I saw them leaping and dog piling onto others too before they got to me.”

  “You’re saying you lost consciousness as soon as they touched you?  You don’t remember any bites or stings or anything?”

  “That’s how I remember it, yeah.”

  Sadhika pondered the possibilities for a few moments.  “Maybe they secreted something through their skin… some kind of toxin they can selectively cover their skin with as a defence, or in this case… offence.   It would make sense for them to have some kind of defence like that; it would serve them well against those panda dinosaur things… which we really need a name for by this point now that I think about it.”

  “Well… it sounds strange, but yeah, that would explain what I saw and… what I experienced.”

  “Maybe it’s supposed to be lethal but is only nearly so for you humans.   Maybe it really did nearly kill you.   Like I said, you sure seemed dead when I examined you.”

  “I feel like I was dead…”

  “Right after I heard the guns stop, they left the scene right away again and I had to hide to avoid them a second time…  I wonder what provoked them..." she wondered out loud.  “Maybe it was something about the sound of the weapons fire itself… maybe they already associate it with their fellow creatures getting killed.  It could be a lot of things,” she remarked.  Clear across the airstrip, she was comforted to see another person cautiously and gradually get up onto their feet and look around.  “Now that I think about it… the nights are eerily quiet here.   Maybe that’s why…  Maybe for whatever reason the squiddies attack anything making a lot of noise.”

  "Well if you're right," Søren said, now looking around for himself as well and seeing the others stirring, "it certainly wouldn't be the strangest thing about this planet so far.”