Arrival: Chapter 35

  Confusion and chaos erupted as Neil and Armina emerged from their hiding spot around the corner and began shouting loudly at Halley and his people.  To be sure their seriousness was relayed, they did indeed find it necessary to fire a few warning shots around them.  Halley and company began to turn around with their laser rifle and shotguns, but both Neil and Armina were already standing square with their weapons trained on them.  While Neil covered the other two with his shotgun, Armina had the handgun she’d taken from Aset’s body pointed at Halley’s head, and he knew as well as anyone that there was no way she’d ever miss.

  “Don’t.” Neil demanded in a voice that was more pleading than anything else.  “Please don’t make us kill you.  We just want to talk, but we will fire if you make us.” He stated with increasing conviction and authority.  There was a tense moment when all five people were pointing their weapons at each other with conviction in Armina’s eyes and pleading in Neil’s, but still only burning hatred in Halley’s.  In his companions’ eyes all that was to be found was panicked darting glances as they sought cues from their captain as to how they should respond.

  “It’s too late now.” Halley said in a cold, flat, and even voice.

  “No Halley… that’s where you’re wrong.”  Neil was trying to sound as soothing as possible while simultaneously being mortally threatening, and mortally threatened.  “It’s never too late to do the right thing… never too late to stop killing.  It’s never too late for peace…  It may already be too late for the mission, but if we start shooting at each other, it’ll definitely be.  Either way though… it’s never too late to stop fighting, never too late to stop destroying.  It’s never too late to start building instead.”

   

  “Alright, we’re up.” Wiremu said to In-Su.  “Remember, we can’t let anyone get to the captain’s chair.  We have to shoot down anyone who makes a move towards it or we’re done for.  If one of them gets to the kill switch and activates it, then… well as you know, all is lost.  When the flash bang goes off, press your hands against your ears and close your eyes tightly.  Your simulant body will otherwise simulate the shock whether the blast actually affects you or not.”

  Wiremu bent down and gently rolled the cylinder shaped grenade down the hallway towards the bridge door.  The air was noticeably smoky, and occasional sparks would fly off of the walls from the systems embedded within them, damaged as they were by all of the weapons fire.  There was an eerie silence after the weapons fire halted altogether.  When Halley and his people were distracted by Neil and Armina, they’d stopped firing and in response Asari and his people had likewise stopped firing out of cautious curiosity as to what was going on.

  The grenade’s detonator was thought controlled, and silently with his fingers, Wiremu counted down to In-Su, three… two… one…

  Brilliant light and concussive sound erupted from the grenade just inside the bridge and immediately after the detonation while everyone there was presumably horribly disoriented, Wiremu and In-Su sprinted past a merely confused Halley who had not suffered the full effects of the grenade.  He seemed to understand that they were making for the bridge and not for him and accordingly, he kept their weapons pointed at Neil and Armina.

  Once they were inside the bridge, they took cover behind a work station and popped their weapons over top of it to have a clear shot at all four people on the bridge.   Realizing what was happening as the disorientation was beginning to wear off, one of Asari’s people immediately lunged for the kill switch, and Wiremu shot him dead before he could make it.

  Before any of the others could bring their weapons on Wiremu or In-Su, or make a similarly foolish attempt for the kill switch, Wiremu yelled: “Don’t!!   Don’t even mess around, just don’t even think about it.  Any of you shoot or move and you all die; I’m not fucking around!”

  Asari’s eyes were opened wide, as though his body were trying to extract as much information as possible to process his newfound situation.

  “Asari?   Neil and Armina are out there trying to talk Halley down,” In-Su cautiously offered.  “We’re only here to try to do the same with you.  We just want to bring an end to all of this.”

  “You have a funny way of making peace,” Asari coldly stated, gesturing to the body of his fallen comrade.

  “You’re really not one to talk,” Wiremu replied, equally as coldly.

  “He… cannot win.  I… I cannot allow it.  He… doesn’t deserve to.” Asari asserted in a thin and steady voice which chilled In-Su.

  “Asari…” Wiremu said with a shaking head.  “Take a good look around.  Take a step back and reassess, man!  We’re way, way past the point of anybody winning here.  Winning left the table and went home a long time ago.  Now it’s just a question of how grim the prospects of survival are for the poor bastards left around to pick up the pieces when this is all over.  Now, in these few minutes, this is the time when we’re all going to find out if any of us deserve to survive… not win.  We’re already all huge losers here Asari, he can’t win any more than you could at this point.  We’re all losers already.”

  “My son…” Aset despondent uttered.

  “His wife.”  In-Su reminded him.

  “MY wife!!” Asari roared in an explosion of rage.

  “His wife too now, Asari!  Everybody’s wife, everybody’s son!!” Wiremu yelled, reflexively matching his tone and intensity.  “Don’t you get it?  At this point everybody’s already lost several somebodies as dear to them, as your wife and son were to you!   Dammit man, there’s a whole dining hall of children out there who’ve all already lost their parents!   You really want to suffer them having to figure out how to get on alone and what to do without any adults left??”

  “Hey, I didn’t start this Wiremu!!”

  “Neither did he!!” Wiremu yelled, gesturing to the door and down the hallways towards Halley.  “Not alone, anyway.  You both helped each other create this colossal fucking catastrophe!  We even played our part too in setting the stage for you, we acknowledge that ourselves too, and without any reservation at all!  Don’t you see?  Nobody’s innocent here Asari, nobody!  Everybody’s guilty, everybody!  We’re all to blame in our own way… and we’re all gonna die together right now, or we’re all going to find a way to be brave enough to live… brave enough to face what we’ve all done together, and the horror that we’ve all created… together.”

   

  “It’s never too late to start building, Halley.” Neil told him.

  “Building what!?” Halley roared.  “What’s left to build with!?  Everybody’s already dead!  All I have left is my revenge!”

  “That’s where you’re wrong Halley,” Neil answered.

  “What do you mean?” he asked angrily with narrowing eyes.

  “Call Søren.” Neil gently suggested.

  “Søren is dead!!” Halley snarled.

  “Call him.” Neil implored.  Halley studied Neil’s eyes suspiciously, but he could detect no subterfuge.  With a though command, Halley’s wrist pad processed a comm request to Søren down on the surface.  Holding his shotgun as he was, his left wrist was already right in front of his face so that when his scroll deployed Halley didn’t have to look away from Neil or move his weapon in any way to be able to see the screen.  Much to his surprise, Søren did indeed answer, and over his shoulder he could see Sadhika’s face.

  “Søren!  Wha… I thought you were dead!” Halley’s demeanor, his whole way of being somehow collapsed in relief, he seemed completely overwhelmed to find that at the very least, his dear friend was still alive.

  “So did I,” he answered with a chuckle. 

  “What… what happened then?” he asked.

  “The squiddies, after they jumped me I just blacked out.”  He looked back at Sadhika.  “We think that maybe they secrete a neurotoxin through their skin that knocked us out.  After a while though… we just woke up!” Søren answered with a shrug of his shoulders.

  Halley paused.   He was afraid to ask.  “Ishtar?” he asked timidly, afraid of the answer.   Søren looked down and to the right, and then shook his head.  Neil could see the anger and hatred growing in Halley again, but so could Søren.

  “But there are thirty-one other survivors here besides myself, Halley,” Søren informed him.   “Thirty-one.”

  “Thirty-one of ours?” Halley asked with a renewed brightness in his eyes.  He obviously wasn’t thinking straight; otherwise he’d have understood immediately that thirty-one was much more than his own twenty people who he previously believed he’d gotten killed.

  “No… no, Halley” Søren answered.  “Just… just thirty-one people.  There is no ours and theirs anymore.  Not down here… not now.”  Halley looked down thoughtfully.

  “Halley,” Sadhika said, taking the wrist scroll from Søren, and gently shaking her head.   “I know the history of the clones.   I know that from the same fundamental genome, you have expressed those genes in wildly different ways based on wildly different life experiences.  From what I understand that was the whole point of your first progenitor initiating the cloning program in the first place.

  “From what I understand, Markus Bowland wanted to see how differently he could have turned out if he’d lived different lives, how he himself might have turned out if he’d instead been raised as he’d wished he had.  And you know what?  He was right, we are as much the world we’re brought into as we are our inherent nature, and we’re ultimately much better informed… for what we can ultimately learn from the cloning program he initiated.

  “But we’ve also learned something else too though, haven’t we Halley?  We’ve learned the limits of that variability, haven’t we?”  Halley was quiet, and looking off into space.  He wasn’t just listening; he was really hearing her.

  “As wildly different characters as you and all your progenitors may have been from each other, in some ways you’re really not all that different from each other at all, are you?  You all have the same flaw… don’t you Halley?”

  “What’s that?” he asked.  He really didn’t have any idea, but she seemed confident in having gleaned some insight which might be of value to him.

  “I think deep down you really know already… but I’ll tell you anyways.  You’re impulsive… you have trouble changing your mind.   Once you get an idea in your head… whether it be boarding New Horizon in the first place or breaking protocol to create clones… murdering your abuser and redirecting the ship to another colony planet… Johannes killing Tycho and deciding to resume the cloning program once it had been exposed and condemned, both Johannes and your… your father.  And you… you committing to putting everything at risk to create a second colony instead of working out your differences with Asari and Aset.  You all always stuck to your bad ideas and bad decisions no matter how bad the consequences got.

  “You, and all of your kind, always refuse to change your course once your decisions have been revealed as bad ones.  You’re all terrible at coming back from that place where you are now, consumed by toxic emotions.  You stay there too long, you make too many bad choices in that place and then stick to them… don’t you see?”

  “Yes.” he answered.  “I see.”   He closed his eyes and repeated it.   “I see.”

  “But it’s not too late, Halley… you still have a choice.  You have it in you to learn from this, to learn that last hard lesson.   You right now can still take this understanding of your own experience and the experience of your previous incarnations, and allow yourself to make a change in the present, to make a different choice in this moment, for the first time.  You are only a slave to your nature if you allow yourself to be.  Do you understand?”

  Halley turned to Neil, who had long since stopped pointing his shotgun at him.   Looking at him now, he let out a little laugh which Neil didn’t understand.  “We’ve been here before you and I, haven’t we… though, neither of us were quite ourselves then, were we?”

  Neil didn’t say anything.  He really didn’t have any idea at all what Halley was referring to or what he was getting at, but whatever the reason he was greatly pleased to sense a de-escalation in the man’s heart.

  “Maybe it doesn’t have to go down the same way this time…”

   

  “Why couldn’t you let him go?” In-Su asked Aset.  “Halley I mean, why couldn’t you just let it be when he broke away and went on his own.  Sure it was stupid and irresponsible, but you had to know that anything other than just letting him go was going to be riskier than doing nothing.  Why send your son to spy on him in the first place?   Why launch the incursion later on?”

  “Because what he did was wrong,” Asari emphatically answered.  “It was wrong to let him get away with it.”

  “And you think that responding to his bad behaviour with further bad behaviour was appropriate?”

  “It wasn’t about what was appropriate,” Asari said through gritted teeth.  “It was about what was right; it was about justice.”  

  His eyes betrayed only a small touch of it, but deeper within himself Wiremu unleashed the most colossal eye roll of either his own or his progenitor’s existence.  In his time he’d found that justice was one of those buzz words like freedom, which nobody ever meant except to vapidly justify their own hypocritical behaviour.  They were words which everybody feigned reverent respect for but never genuinely honoured in their beliefs, opinions, or behaviour, as evidenced by Asari’s invocation of the notion of justice to justify his actions.

  “Is it right, or just, to allow the mission to be a failure?”  In-Su asked.  The human didn’t answer.  “Tell me Asari… why do you hate him so much?”

  “Because of what he’s done.” he answered.

  “But you hated him long before that, didn’t you?  You hated him long before the arrival, long before waking us up… why?”

  “Because he never should have existed in the first place,” Asari answered quickly and angrily.

  “Is that his fault?” In-Su asked.

  “That’s not the point.” Asari snapped.

  “I think it is…  Can’t you see it from his perspective?  He had to grow up watching your parents never accept his father-“

  “Clone,” Asari angrily corrected him.

  “Clone-father, then.  Your parents took every opportunity to marginalize him… despite his doing everything he possibly could to justify himself and to establish the essential goodness of his existence.  No matter what he did though, he could only ever be in their eyes… something that never should have existed in the first place.  Does that sound familiar to you?”  Asari said nothing.  He appeared to be considering what In-Su had just said.

  “And what came of it Asari?” In-Su pressed.  “Halley did.  Halley came of it.  Halley and all of his contempt and anger over how he saw his clone-father treated no matter how hard he worked to be accepted.  He learned that hatred awaited him no matter how he behaved, so he learned to hate back.  Hatred… always begets hatred, Asari.”

  “That’s…” Asari sighed as he shook his head, and then whispered: “an oversimplification.”

  “I don’t think it is.  But I also don’t think that’s all there is to it.  You have a particular hatred for Halley.   Why?”  Asari just shook his head.

  “Could it be, because you are yourself a descendent of a clone?”  The man shot an angry and hurt look at In-Su.  “Asari, by being taught to hate the clones, you were subtly taught by proxy to hate yourself in kind, and from day one.   Everything you were taught about how bad the clones were, about how unjust and intolerable their existence was… a part of you had to know that it reflected back onto you as well.  Maybe your hatred of Halley is so fervent because you deflect and impart on him, in addition to all that he is rightly due, all of the hatred some part of you feels that you deserve as well, if he deserves any at all.”  Asari again, said nothing and just listened.  He was looking at the ground, lost in deep reflection of the words he was hearing.

  “You had the luxury of knowing from the very beginning what your origins were,” In-Su continued.  “Imagine what your grandmother Bianca and her children had to go through, to have it thrust upon them all at once that their origins were anything other than what was ordinary for the ship, as they’d always believed.  They had to find out by surprise that their father and grandfather were both clones, and what’s worse publicly and in front of everyone else.   

   “They must have developed a biting hatred of the subsequent clones as a way of overcompensating for how much this unsettled them, and to as definitively as possible draw a clear and unambiguous division between the clones and themselves when in all the ways that really mattered, none really existed at all.  

  “They must have felt that the best way they could distance themselves from any association with the cloning program, was to become the most vocal opponents of it.   Their shock and… and existential disruption at the revelation, was turned into hate propagated through time, getting magnified and focused onto each new generation… and finally onto you and your wife.  You were both condemned from the day you were born, taught to carry a burden that was never your own.  You were taught to hate yourself, but to project that hate onto them.  How unfair that was…”

  Asari completely slumped and dissolved.  He collapsed into the station chair behind him and began sobbing.  In-Su instinctively moved towards him to console and comfort him.

  “In-Su!” Wiremu called out in a moderate panic, still firmly aware of the danger of their situation, but In-Su waved him off.  In response to their leader collapsing, and In-Su’s fearless gesture, Asari’s two remaining loyalist on the bridge lowered their weapons as well and aimed them at the floor.  Cautiously, reservedly, Wiremu likewise lowered his own weapon and pointed it at the ground, but also likewise he didn’t completely let go of it either. 

  In-Su reached Asari, and held him in his arms.  He stroked his dark black hair as tears welled up in his own eyes as well.   “It’s not your fault Asari…  It’s not your fault,” he whispered as they rocked back and forth, crying together.