Arrival: Chapter 38

  “Ello, what’s this then?” Sadhika asked herself as she slowly and carefully extracted a parasite from the squiddy brain she was studying.

  “What is it?” Neil asked.  “It looks like a giant neuron…”  He was right.   It had a primary central body, with multiple projections which significantly branched out into smaller and smaller projections.  The central body was only a couple centimeters wide, but end to end the tendrils which seemed to project into multiple brain areas were easily six centimeters across.

  Sadhika carefully placed it into a specimen dish and turned to Neil.  “It’s a brain parasite…” she answered with incredulity.   “And it might explain a lot about what happened to the squiddies… I mean if we’re right that they were once capable of building those catacombs.”

  “How so?” Neil asked.

  “Well, I’d have to examine many more to be sure, but if all the squiddies have a similar parasite… well, it could explain a regression.  While their brains are very different from ours or even any cephalopods back on Earth, we can assume that they developed in a similar way, in that from more primordial and basic brain structures, progressively more complex brain systems were built on top of older ones.  From what I can tell this parasite was embedded in the most recently evolved part of their brain, which for humans is the frontal lobe, the higher reasoning part that that makes us so different from the other great apes.”

  “I’m still not getting what you’re driving at.”  Neil had apparently finally given up on correcting the other sims about not being human.  

  “If it disrupts function in the most sophisticated brain region it would make them dumber than they otherwise would be.”

  “Ahhh… so they were once capable of sophisticated engineering, but then they get infected with this parasite and whammo!  Suddenly they’re much dumber.”

  “Basically, yeah.”  She wasn’t thrilled with how he put it but it was accurate enough.  “It’s a theory anyways…”

  The two were in a clean and brightly lit auxiliary laboratory on the New Horizon with the specimens they’d collected from the planet’s surface.  After repairing the shuttle hatch, Wiremu had sent down one of the shuttles to Sadhika so she could return and join them on the ship.  

  First she had to wait for the shuttle to refuel its hanging auxiliary fuel tanks so she could transport all of the people left alive after the Battle of the Airstrip (as it would come to be known), over to the primary site to join up with the personnel the sims had brought down.  While waiting for the shuttle tanks to fill, Søren helped her load one of the bodies of the squiddies into the flight deck so she could take it back up to the ship for study after dropping off the crew. 

  Soon after they’d done so though, a mass of squiddies returned to the battle field and retrieved all of their other dead bodies.  So far they had no idea where they’d taken them or what they’d done with them, but it seemed fair to assume that they had some kind of ritual grieving process.  A few people thought that maybe they’d only retrieved the bodies so that they could eat them, but for now there was really no way to know for sure, and as a result there were general misgivings in retrospect about having taken for study the one corpse they did.  But it was already in the shuttle, and the squiddies didn’t give any indication that they felt they were missing anything.  They decided to keep the one they already had, but to acknowledge that going forward it would be inappropriate to ever do the same again.

  Once Sadhika had dropped off the crew she was transporting, Søren was again kind enough to help her awkwardly stuff the corpse of the ‘pandino’ which had killed Blaire (as the panda patterned dinosaur looking animals had come to be referred to) into the flight deck beside the squiddy while she was waiting for the supercharger to fuel up the shuttle for her return to orbit. 

  Now back on the ship, Sadhika finally had the chance to conduct the detailed analysis of the specimens they’d collected, of which there were many.  This was the work she’d been most anxious to do since she’d woken up in the first place; biological analysis and comparison was her wheelhouse and the real reason why she was here.  Despite all of the chaos which wound up erupting, before and after it, she and her team had managed to collect dozens of small creatures from the rich and lively jungle, as well as some of the larger animals such as the squiddy, quatropus, and pandino.  Although she hadn’t yet gotten around to studying the latter two, she was also already anxious to have a good look at both the reptilian looking birds they’d seen and the tree dwelling reptilian looking creature they’d observed chasing the quatropus’ through the jungle.  So far, her preliminary genetic analysis of all the samples they’d collected had revealed that they all had the same different Haven specific DNA base pair elements, meaning that like on Earth all local life shared the same genetic alphabet, but was different between the two planet’s biospheres.

  She suspected that this may have been the reason why the toxin secreted by the squiddies was less effective on humans than it was on the indigenous life.   Sadhika had found a network of glands under the skin of the squiddy body she was studying which contained a chemical which could be secreted through their skin as she and Søren had suspected.   Chemical analysis of the toxin and tissue experiments with the other animal bodies she had to work with revealed that it was indeed most likely quite lethal to the pandino as well as the quatropus.

  “If I were to wildly speculate… based on my years of experience with genetics and evolution…” Sadhika thought as she looked up towards the ceiling and rubbed the back of her neck.  “I would guess that all of them were infected with these parasites a long time ago, and that they were all at once compromised before they were able to figure out what was happening or what to do about it.  By the time they realized they were in trouble it was probably too late already.  If it’s in their environment, then their young would’ve all picked it up too, and probably before the bulk of their brain development occurred.”

  “What’s the significance of that?” Neil asked.

  “Well, if that were indeed the case then it could fundamentally affect how their brains developed.  It could have dumbed them down structurally in such a way that just removing the parasite from an adult probably wouldn’t magically increase their intelligence or anything.”

  “Oh, I see…” Neil said.  “What about their young though?  What if a new generation was raised without the parasite?”

  “I don’t know…” Sadhika admitted.  “They might bounce right back… or there might be irreparable damage after tens of thousands of years of aggressive co-evolution.  There’s no way to know without running the experiment.”

  “If they co-evolved… maybe it took the parasite a long time to figure out how to make them dumber?  Neil asked.   “Maybe until it was able to do that the squiddies were smart enough to be able to treat themselves or figure out how to avoid becoming infected in the first place.”

  “I also wonder,” Sadhika said, “if maybe the parasite is what makes them attack loud noises at night too… there’s no reason to positively think it’s the case, but imagine if something which made loud sounds at night preyed on the organism back in its history before it ever became a parasite in the first place?   And then once they figured out how to affect the brain of another creature they compelled it to attack anything loud at night out of preternatural spite or something?”

  Neil nodded and Sadhika chuckled to herself.  “It’s like Søren said, if true it certainly wouldn’t be the strangest thing about this planet.”

   “Speaking of the humans, do you think this parasite poses a threat to them?” Neil asked.

  “Could be,” Sadhika answered with a shrug.  “If they are susceptible to it though, it’d be easy to come up with a treatment protocol for it.  We’ll have to run regular scans on everybody on the surface for a while.  Like I was alluding to, we could probably treat the squiddies too; we could eradicate it from their entire population if we really wanted to.”

  “Would that be ethical?” 

  “Not my department.” Sadhika laughed, which made Neil laugh along with her.  “I don’t know Neil.  We certainly could help them regain some of their former glory.  Personally I’m certainly inclined to try, in fact I could see that being In-Su’s new project as well!” she said with another laugh.  “I’m sure he’ll stop at nothing to develop effective communication with them; I have no doubt he’ll find some way.”

  “There’s always the playing god issue though… as you know many people think that however things naturally are without human intervention, is the way they should stay.”

  “Or sim,” Sadhika corrected him.

  “What?”

  “You said without human intervention, you should have said without human or simulant intervention.”

  Neil laughed out loud.  “Aw fuck it.   I’ve finally given up on trying to maintain that distinction.”

  “Good for you,” she said with a smile.  “Anyways, I think we should help them if we can.  I mean, it’s not like we’re trying to artificially turn them into something they’re not, it’s more like we’d be trying to help them become again what they once were; we’d just be helping them to reclaim what was once theirs.”

  “I’m inclined to agree.” Neil admitted.  “Of course there’s always the risk that they’ll turn out to be incredibly violent and xenophobic, and that they’ll wind up killing and enslaving all the humans…” he casually mentioned with an entirely deadpan delivery.  Sadhika gave him a smile which indicated that she recognized the humour in what he was saying, but also that she understood it was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility and that perhaps this was why it was funny at all.  The dread of humanity creating its own destroyer was a fear in the human psyche as old as human storytelling itself, and yet it‘d never happened.  For anything that ever does happen though, there does always have to be a first time…

  “It’s the least we can do… after all it’s their planet and I still feel rather guilty about dropping in on them the way we did.  We specifically meant to avoid any chance of landing on a planet that already had beings with anything resembling intelligence as we understand it.”

  “Yeah but here we are, and we still haven’t even explored the catacombs any further.   There’s a whole lot more to discover about these guys; there’s still so much to learn about them.”

  “There’s so much to learn in general… that’s what makes this all so exciting, that it’s a brand new data point to explore, a whole new world waiting to be discovered and understood.  We have to start from square one with everything!”

  “Indeed…” Neil agreed with a profound reverence for all which they had yet to learn about this planet and the star system it resided in.  “The unknown can be very scary Sadhika, but… damn is it ever exciting to turn it into the known, piece by piece by piece…”  Sadhika nodded her head in agreement with the comment.  “So, now that I think about it I’ve got all kinds of questions about the possibility of curing the squiddies,” Neil stated.

  “Shoot.”

  “Well what if there are squiddies all over the planet, but we’ve only just met the one population?”

  “If we cure these guys, then… we’ll just commit to curing any populations we eventually come across.”

  “Okay… but what if a population we cure gets to an uncured population before we do, and now the smarter ones we’ve created enslave or annihilate the dumber ones?”

  Sadhika laughed.  “I don’t know Neil.  There’s no reason to think they’ll necessarily act the way humans tend to.”

  “An even better point,” Neil realized.  “What if we cure the squiddies and they wind up just smart enough to become the perfect slaves for future humans and are then kept from becoming any smarter so that they remain contented as slaves?”

  The simulated woman shook her head.  “I don’t know Neil… you’re right.  There’s a chance it could all go down that way.  I guess we just have to have faith that our descendants will know better.”   Sadhika chewed on the thought for a few moments.  “It could go the other way too though, you know.  In a couple thousand years after they’ve all recovered and been amply educated, maybe even genetically modified to be even smarter, there could be a beautiful future of peaceful collaboration between human and squiddy.  Maybe someday there will be a new New Horizon mission, jointly orchestrated and peopled by human and squiddy kind alike in a collaborative effort.”

  Neil shrugged his shoulders.  “There are people who never thought that humans on Earth could ever get their act together enough to collaborate that thoroughly and effectively… but eventually they did.”

  “Yes.   Eventually they did…”