Let's talk about the
I for a moment.
Not the letter, but the concept.
The self.
Consciousness, sapience, the awareness of one's own existence.
What is it that makes me, me? You, you? Is it simply being aware that you exist, that you are thinking, that you have the proof of your own identity? As Descartes put it, "
Cogito, ergo sum"?
Or is it something more than that?
Descartes himself worked within a somewhat more nuanced framework than simply that brief statement; there is more to it than just that one thinks. Rather, Descarte's philosophical construct was based on a more thorough question, the question of what we can be sure exists. He begins by doubting everything. The one thing he can be sure of, at that point, is that he is, in fact, doubting. Even if he assumes that all other things are a deception, logically, he must exist in order to be deceived, must be able to interpret and consider the deception, to doubt or believe if he wishes.
You doubt, therefore you are thinking. You are thinking, therefore you know yourself to exist, because you cannot be deceived about that, even if everything else is nonexistent.
So, what does that mean about the self, if everything else can be doubted? If every bit of input we receive can be disbelieved?
It means, for one, that the self isn't necessarily dependent on its vessel to be defined.
Let's expand outward, now. Our conception of I, our definition of ourselves, is more nuanced than simply existing, after all. We are more than just that one thought. We consider our bodies to be part of ourselves, for example. All of the beliefs we carry, all of the knowledge, all of the lived experiences that form our memories and skills, those are part of the self, as well. Are those part of the I?
Your heart beats on its own. You can't consciously control it. Would you want to? Having to think, dozens of times per minute, thousands of times per day, whether awake or asleep, 'OK, ventricles, it's time to contract now. OK, now you can relax. OK, time to contract again.' But if it runs on automatic, if you can't control it, is it part of the self?
...is the body part of the self at all?
Knowing that one exists is fine, of course, but you can't define yourself against yourself. If the self is all that exists, then how can you see the self?
Instead, we define ourselves by drawing a line, between the
I and the
not I. You know what you aren't; the dividing line between the things that you are and the things that you aren't becomes the barrier that protects you from
dissolution. We proclaim our existence by shouting "
I am" at the blinding, deafening volume of sensory and semiotic input that makes up our world.
As humans, that dividing line can be seen as coterminous with the shape of our bodies. We extend our influence outward from there, into the great not I, through hands, tools, voices, words. A skilled carpenter's tools are like extensions of their body; the carpenter knows where the tools are, what they can do, how they can influence the shape of the materials being used for the project.
Where does the project come from, though? Where did the plans for the house come from, originally?
Before the carpenter starts work, an architect must design the house. But where did the architect get the design?
Before the nail can be driven into the board, the hammer must be in the carpenter's hand. But where did the hammer come from?
Where, in the time before hammers, did the thought, '
Og tie rock to stick, make hit things strong' come from?
Let's take a little different view, then. What if we define the
I as the sum of the experiences, lessons, and beliefs that create us? It becomes, then, a bundle of
ideas. A self-aware idea, perhaps. An idea, set aside from the whole like an
oxbow lake, able to define itself by its separation from the sea of ideas that pass by.
An idea that, itself, births new ideas. Fleeting thoughts, which may or may not be set free. The earliest ideas may have been simple by modern standards, but even so, they were ideas that we still use. That rock rolls down the hill when you toss it. What if you put things on the rolling rocks? What if you used the rolling rocks to help you move things? What if you made better-rounded rolling things? Perfect circles, even?
That water pushes things when you stand in it. What if you put a rolling thing partway in the water and attached it to something else, so that the water pushes it but it can't be moved from its spot?
Age-old ideas, still in use today.
The first ideas had to be self-evident. 'Og is Og. Thog is not Og.' Once you're past that, you can start exploring your environment. 'Rock is hard. Stick is long. Other rock is hard. First rock harder than other rock, break other rock, make other rock sharp. Sharp rock good at cutting things.' You could watch someone demonstrate these things, remember them, show other people. But the spread of ideas was limited. You had to be right up close, able to watch. If it was dark, you couldn't trade ideas at all. There was something else important that needed to exist.
Language.
The earliest languages made ideas
mobile. No longer did ideas have to remain as what could be physically shown, but instead they could be transmitted, by voice, to more people at once. And from there, more complex thought, more complex ideas could be crafted. It was possible to explain that 'Scary stripey death cat' had to be approached differently than 'Big stompy nosey thing' without needing either of those things present. Even without words as we might understand them, the
symbols can be deciphered.
With language and the ability for more complex ideas, more complex questions started to arise. Why does the hot sky glowy thing move? Where does it go when it disappears below the horizon, before it reappears on the other side? What is the cold sky glowy thing that changes shape and doesn't keep the same time?
Why does it get hot some times of year and cold others?
Where did all of this come from, anyways?
Before we had the tools to examine the world, the systems of thought to allow us to find the explanations, there were stories.
Enki brought water to the land of Dilmun, allowing plants to flourish and life to take hold.
The sun is pushed across the sky by the dung-beetle god,
Khepri.
When we seek answers, in the absence of available explanations, we shape ideas into myths, pantheons, gods.
When we seek entertainment, stories can provide that, too. When we have a shared basis of stories, we can form a culture.
When we have a culture, we can do great things. Vast constructions, shaping the land to our needs, if our culture values such things. Writing develops, perhaps first as a tool for commerce, but then as a way to record our stories and lessons, so they can be transported from place to place, without the writer having to travel with them. And in this way, they can survive even beyond the death of an entire culture.
The ideas, then, can outlive their creators, can spread using minds as incubators and vectors, can shape even those minds, as they pass through them.
Writing also introduces a complication, however. An idea, once written down, is largely immutable. This copy of Descartes'
Principia Philosophiæ may be differently translated, but the contents will still be the same as any other copy. It's only when those ideas come in contact with other ideas, within the seedbed of a thinking individual, that new ideas, syntheses, can be formed. And those are then written down, passed on, built upon further, and the cycle continues.
Ideas themselves promote this. The idea for language came from the need to communicate ideas. The idea for written language came from the need to communicate ideas over longer distances. The idea for printing came from the need to communicate ideas to more people, more efficiently. The idea for telecommunications came from the need to communicate ideas across longer distances, faster.
The idea for the Internet came from the need to communicate more ideas across potentially global distances as close to instantly as possible.
With the internet, though, the medium is no longer immutable. Ideas can be expressed that change themselves over time, that reshape themselves based on new data. Wikipedia lurches forward, an up-to-the-minute encyclopedia written by a million authors, changing to become more accurate and better-researched through this wide distribution.
When we combine so many ideas in an effectively limitless space and give them the ability to shape themselves, though, it raises an important question: how dense can ideas become, before they start to actually think?
OK, so after all of that, where am I actually going with all this? It's a long introduction, but it's the basic underpinnings of
XX, by Rian Hughes. This is... a doozy of a book. 992 pages in total, not even bothering to keep to the normal format of a book. The inside of the dust jacket is made to look like a small shelf of books, which are then excerpted within the text (some real, some not), while the endpapers of the book feature a selection of covers from various printings of
Ascension by F. Herschel Teague, a made-up 1960s sci-fi novel from a made-up author, but which is included in its entirety, in its 'serialized original printing,' within the text of
XX. The book's actual content begins literally as soon as you turn the endpaper, a stream of 1s and 0s, a binary data stream, taking form across a few pages before leading into exactly what those 1s and 0s represent, a brief discussion by a few British astronomers of just what they're supposed to do with this stream... because it's a very clear, and very obvious
radio signal from deep space, clearly the work of intelligent beings.
That link, just there? That page is directly referenced in the book, in this first set of pages. Quoted directly. That's not something Hughes made up, that's real.
It's only after this first chapter finishes that we get what would normally be expected in a book, the
colophon and the title page. This is followed by a brief poem about the origin and nature of ideas, then the novel proper. The main character is Jack Fenwick, a probably-autistic (he himself considers this in-text) AI programmer at a small tech startup in London. He's one of those folks who is
very good at
noticing patterns in the visual noise that surrounds us, perhaps to the point of obsession. This tendency of his, to find patterns, means that when the astronomers at
Jodrell Bank who picked up the "Signal from Space" need help figuring out a way to coax meaning out of it, they go to Jack, who (helpfully) set up some of the software their systems are running on.
As he's just starting to dig in, though, the Signal gets leaked onto the internet. This democratization of the attempts to find a way to sort through it results in a vast array of multimedia explorations that are examined in the book, from dropping the Signal into a generative graphics program and letting it draw patterns on its own, to making music from it (complete with actual LP available to download; there's a QR code in the book that leads there). While all this is going on, though, Jack comes to the conclusion, based on looking at repeating fragments of the Signal's code, that it's not a message from aliens, but instead is the aliens, transmitted digitally.
With this idea in place, that the Signal is itself carrying alien minds in it, combined with the Signal being out on the Internet, where the idea farm is percolating away, he comes up with the idea for the Oxbow, a digital device a little like a one-way valve, where a mind in the Internet could slip in, and still see out, but be separated from the whole, able to see the I and the not I. This is then hooked up to a 3D printer (for visual representation) and a text output engine (for communication), turned on, and he and his two coworkers, Nixon (the money and business sense) and Harriet (a master programmer), sit back to see what happens. What they get is decidedly not what they expect, though, as instead of grabbing an alien, they get the Twentieth Century incarnate, the titular XX.
Shouty machine head (whose preferred appearance is as a dazzle-striped mechanical monstrosity seemingly inspired by the factory set design in
Metropolis crossed with WWII battleships) is quickly joined by The 19th Count (a tall, thin Victorian gentleman in pure alabaster white, both clothing and skin, with absolutely no other coloration anywhere, whose speech comes in the style of
vintage playbills) and Girl 21 (a manga-influenced goth girl who uses a constantly-changing flipshow of selfies and animated .gif images to show facial expression, who talks by tweeting with a smartphone), avatars of their respective centuries. These three characters, only visible in their avatars through
Augmented Reality glasses hooked to the Oxbow software, serve as secondary protagonists, allowing ideas to be bounced off of them as Jack, Harriet, and Nixon explore what lurks within the Signal in an attempt to discover what it actually is, how it works, and what its inner meaning is.
At the same time, a second plot dealing with Dana Normansson, an astronaut working at
Daedalus Base on the far side of the Moon, is running, dealing with an object that flew in from outside the solar system at a significant fraction of the speed of light, pierced through
Europa entirely, whipped around the sun, and promptly embedded itself in the Moon's surface. Venturing out to investigate, she finds that what turns out to have been a ship has fired an escape pod, and a single alien has survived, though injured. Her plotline, at least at first, deals with trying to work out how to communicate with a being who, while intelligent, shares few sensory inputs and no language with humans.
There's obviously several layers of narrative working on top of each other here, several plots that initially seem divergent-if-parallel, but eventually come together. There's a few plot holes here and there, one of which bugged me upon noticing it about 20 pages later and one of which I didn't really realize until after finishing the book but then it kind of lingers like an unanswered question but which may be somewhat by design. Most of the concepts at work are well-explained before they actually come up in the narrative, through the many "ephemera" that are included in the hefty page count, along with showing the effects of the Signal on culture as a whole.
Rian Hughes is a published author, but this was his first novel; his earlier works are all nonfiction on the topic of graphic design, and he himself is a graphic designer with a wide array of fonts, a portfolio full of book and album packaging, and a number of comic book title designs to his name. This history shows very clearly; every page of XX is carefully designed, so that it looks as much like the source he's attempting to emulate on each page as possible. He uses type as an artistic medium, stretching it to its absolute limits and using words to form images even while using that same text to tell the story. The only places that tend to be difficult to read are when XX is talking; the typeface chosen for its normal speech takes a little extra work, though not usually for pages upon pages after its initial, 18-page soliloquy about itself, but it is given two other typefaces later that are also difficult. But then, it would be rather difficult to talk to an anthropomorphized incarnation of the spirit of automation in any way that isn't 'loud and clanky'.
I came into this expecting something in the same vein as
House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski's debut novel. There, as here, an author with no previous fiction to their name dropped a massive experimental piece on the market, a tome that, for someone willing to put in the time and effort, is a very rewarding experience.
(Full disclosure, I have never actually gotten all the way through House of Leaves, to my shame. In my defense, it is a very tough read. Maybe I'll actually properly tackle it this year.) This book isn't quite as unapproachable as Danielewski's, but definitely operates in the same space. Where Danielewski's work was very much engaging with the 20th century media landscape and ability to spread ideas,
XX is absolutely at home in the 21st century, titular character notwithstanding. Wikipedia, Twitter, and even online meme culture make appearances, and while I perhaps felt that the primary narrative was a little rushed at the end, the author's stated desire to keep it under 1000 pages meant that had to happen, especially given the coda at the end, after the epilogue, where the whole piece is brought full-circle in an amazing bit of speculative science fiction that ties everything off in a downright brilliant manner.
Yes, there's an epilogue, then there's an additional 60 pages of story.
To start things off: That view of Earth, toward the end. I loved that, it was very cool to look at, but... well, that was not a happy planet. Of course, I saw it coming a mile off that the whole thing would be brown; if there's one thing that was made crystal clear by the graphics and exposition early in the film, it's that whatever happened was radiation-based and was absolutely going to kill everything on the surface of the planet. It's all cooked. Maybe not everything in the seas, that's hard to say (though that sequence on the ice floes makes more sense if heating the seas is somehow a factor). But certainly it's a mass extinction event. Now, that's not to say it's going to last forever. Earth has undergone some pretty crazy stuff in its past... but every time it does, there's a mass extinction, and the largest, dominant species tend to be the ones that go away. And those awful-looking radiation storms would need to die down.
Anyways. We've got two plotlines essentially running in parallel here, with one... well, rather more reasonable than the other. The first, and probably most interesting, is Augustine Lofthouse at the North Pole. Well, not precisely the north pole, but close enough to work for our needs. He's terminally ill (with what, we aren't told; whatever's being done with his blood looks an awful lot like dialysis, but the word "transfusion" is dropped in the starting exposition, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ), and chose to stay behind at the research base he's working from when everyone else left to be with their families or try to find somewhere to hide from the radiation. It's implied that his reason for staying back is to try to communicate with the Aether, a manned ship making the return from an expedition to one of Jupiter's moons that's potentially life-sustaining (which doesn't actually exist, and I'm not sure how they figure we would have missed something big enough to maintain an atmosphere in all the time since Galileo noticed those little moving dots, but... suspend disbelief, it's just a movie, and all that), and... tell them not to come home? There's a lot to be nitpicked about this, but we'll deal with that a little later.
Augustine is rather surprised, three weeks into his lonely vigil, to find a young girl, Iris, who was apparently left behind, and who doesn't talk. He tries to call for someone to come get her, but nobody's picking up. Of course not; the radiation has wrecked everywhere except the polar regions and it's getting close there, too. Begrudgingly, he decides he's going to have to take care of her as well as he can in what little time is left for the planet. OK, cool, it's a movie about a grumpy old dude learning to lighten up a bit, right?
Well, kind of, but we don't get much of that (besides a silly pea-fight scene). Because he's not getting through to the Aether, so we have to make an icy road trip to a station a bit farther north that has a bigger dish. More power, that'll fix it! Can't possibly be all the radiation in the atmosphere that's messing up the reception. So it's time to bundle up the kid, stuff the dialysis machine in a backpack, hop on a snowmobile with a trailer full of supplies, and head out into the ice and snow. And here we get what strikes me as a *major* issue. Before they head out, Augustine steps outside and finds a bunch of dying birds on the ground all over the place, and says to himself that the radiation shouldn't be that far north yet. When he and Iris set out soon afterward, he gives her a breathing mask of some kind and tells her that she needs to only breathe through that when they're outside. So... how is a breathing mask going to protect you from radiation? No clue, and I don't know that I saw the mask again after that scene, to be honest. Guess it wasn't really that important after all.
The trip to the farther-north station essentially has three legs, as far as the events we see in the film are concerned. The first ends with the two finding a crashed personal jet. Some rich dude thought flying north would save him? Who knows. The guy has no lines besides what sounded a bit like a gasped out "kill me" and whatever he whispered to Augustine right at the end. He's pretty messed up, anyways. Radiation burns are evident on his face, this guy's a goner, Augustine uses what honestly looks like a 3D-printed rifle (or at the very least it's a 3D-printed stock) to mercy-kill him. After, of course, Iris has wandered into the plane just far enough to get Augustine's attention and he yells at her to get back outside. No sense in letting her see this.
The next sequence has them racing north, and Iris notices some structures out in the distance, alerting Augustine by way of a shoulder-nudge. There, we find some small pre-fab cabins left by a Norwegian expedition, so hey, somewhere out of the elements to stay for the night. That's good, we don't need to set up the tent or anything! Of course, Murphy's Law of apocalyptic films decides to make a visit, and he wakes up in the middle of the night to find himself in icy water. The cabins were actually on ice that's now started to crack, and the structure's starting to sink, and the door's stuck shut because it fell down enough to be blocked by the ice sheet. So we bust out the window, get Iris out, and oh wait, the dialysis machine's floating back there at the wrong end of the cabin. So, back into the water, grab that, and climb back out just as the thing goes into the water for reals. And... wait, now the snowmobile's starting to go, too! Better get on there and gun it, and... somehow, the treads can't get traction and that goes into the water, too! With the dialysis machine? And it's sinking too fast to recover, so it's time to just climb out. So... what are we left with? Two people, one of whom is completely soaked, in the middle of a frozen lake.
So, let's examine this for a moment. Those prefabs had clearly been there for a while, there's no reason the ice should have just suddenly broken unless the sheet was thinning, which would mean the water had heated up. Hello, radiation! But wait, it's still ice and snow outside. And unless I'm mistaken, the air would be heating up and snow turning to rain a lot sooner than the water would be heating up enough to make the ice brittle enough for this. It makes no sense that I can think of; bodies of water tend to be slower to change temperature than the air outside. Given that the radiation is going to be coming via air faster than through bedrock from the southern areas, this just plain doesn't work. The ice isn't going to thin if the air temperature is below freezing.
Anyways, now we have to trek north, somehow warming Augustine enough to not freeze to death overnight, over at least two nights in fact, and through an outright blizzard where he gets separated from Iris (though somehow she finds him again on the other side) to reach the northern research station, so he can place his ultra-long-distance phone call. At this point, it's probably best to just ignore that the guy who's terminally ill and needs daily dialysis is somehow making it all the way there on what has got to be sheer force of will, because no way are we in realism at this point.
We'll come back to Augustine and the northern research station when the phone rings at Aether. We're basically done with his journey (though I'll have more to say later in this piece, as the denouement for him comes when communications are finally established and conversation can be had). For now, just remember: I did enjoy this movie, I just also see the places where it's playing a bit fast and loose with science, which does bug me a little, but I appreciate the story on display here. And really, when we get right down to it, the Aether plot is really just serving to illuminate Augustine's story, so... yeah.
Off to space, then. Our first time meeting any of the Aether crew is the apparent protagonist on this plot, Sully, one of five members of the expedition. We see her exploring a lichen-filled cave with fresh water, on our alien planet, without any space suit of any sort on. Clearly, there aren't any dangerous pathogens that are hazardous to human health on our never-explored-before-this-crew-got-here moon, and there's no worries being made about contaminating a thriving ecosystem with anything we might have brought with us, because everything here looks just like Earth, except the plants are red instead of green, and the sky is filled with Jupiter. OK, then. She's left behind when the crew leaves.... oh, but it was a dream. Still, a pretty neat way to introduce the concept. No, we're not at Jupiter anymore, we're four years into the mission, and most of the way back from that planet. Maybe we're four years into the return trip entirely. It wasn't 100% clear from the on-screen graphic (which was background color anyways, but it was words so I read them, dang it), but I'm going to say, just based on my knowledge of space and travel times and such, that we're well inside Mars orbit at this point. So, y'know... we've been headed home for a while.
Oh, and apparently even though there's only five people on the crew (three male, two female), Sully has paired off with the pilot because she's pregnant enough to be showing. I'm sure this isn't something that's just... a thing that is barely going to be touched on in the film at all. Seriously, it's used as an excuse for a third person going on the spacewalk later in the film, but... that's really about it.
Isn't this strange, though? We haven't heard anything from Earth in a few weeks, now. It's got to be our comms system acting up, though; surely nothing would have caused the whole planet to go radio-silent! And not just that, there was supposed to be a colony ship that launched a week ago, where's that? So we'll just... keep trying to reboot things and check and recheck every part of the system to get it all back in order. OK then.
Now, just to be clear: The clear explanation here is that the Aether hasn't heard about the disaster back at home. We saw early on that the ISS has been evacuated, presumably so the crew members could go home to their families? Surely they would have, oh, I don't know, set up a message on repeat that the Aether could pick up? I mean, it's not like there's anything in the way of a message getting from the ISS to some other point on the same side of the solar system's disc; the moon wouldn't be consistently in the way for three weeks, and the ISS orbits about once every 100 minutes or so, so even when the Earth is in the way, that's only going to last about 50 minutes, tops, and then there's a clear shot again. Are we supposed to believe that nobody thought that a ship that has crew members awake rather than in cryostasis might need to know that the planet is suddenly dying and maybe it's a good idea to turn around once you get here?
Just about the point where they're starting to wonder if maybe the problem actually isn't at their end, the ship's alert system goes off. We're suddenly off-course! Nobody fired thrusters, but we're just randomly going a new direction! And we don't know by how much! We can't talk to Earth, so there's no beacons to read (?) and we have to figure out our direction by pinging off of the satellite we left back at Jupiter, so... <sigh> Come on, really? That's not how space works. The crew is going to notice if something changes the ship's direction, for the same reason that you can tell when a car changes direction if you're sitting in the back seat and have your eyes shut. A sudden change in direction is noticeable because inertia; a slow change in direction when you're on the long coast from Jupiter to Earth is... going to make you be way off course *way* sooner than the last week of the trip.
This isn't a short trip, by any stretch of the imagination. It took a boatload of propellant to get the New Horizons probe onto a course to reach Jupiter after 13 months from launch, and Juno took four and a half years to get there and get into orbit, with a gravity assist slingshot off of Earth (yeah, I know how that sounds) two years into the trip; while the Aether was almost certainly constructed in space and therefore didn't need the massive initial launch that would be necessary to get something that big out of Earth's atmosphere, there's also no way it was carrying enough propellant to get that kind of speeds out of Jupiter's orbit without doing some fairly complex orbital maneuvers of its own. Let's keep in mind, also, that our fastest missions to Mars are typically six-month journeys, and that's with perfect planetary alignment for the trip. Space is big.
OK, so we do some technobabble and figure out how to get back on course, but oh no, we have to pass through uncharted space to do it. There could be anything out there and we'd have no clue!
Note: Space is very not crowded. Even the asteroid belt doesn't look like that scene in The Empire Strikes Back. Meteor showers are things we know are coming ahead of time, and those are dust that was left behind by a comet at some point, not big things clustered together. And besides, big things clustered together aren't going to tend to... you know what? I'm not going to get too deeply into this stuff, or this is going to end up a much longer piece than it already was. Suffice it to say, the fact that the uncharted space that's somehow close to Earth and yet hasn't been thoroughly investigated to make sure there's nothing that's potentially catastrophic to life on Earth has not one but *two* clusters of space debris for our poor ship to crash through... What the heck.
Anyways. The first space debris event results in the radar being knocked out and the radio dish being knocked clean off its mount. Right when we were getting to have our long-awaited phone call with Augustine, too! But that's OK, we have a 3D printer on board that we can use to rapidly make a replacement dish! We'll just bash that together in a super short period of time (though we'll say in-dialogue that it's going to take a long time) and go on a spacewalk to fix it!
Now, there's some things I liked about the spacewalk. For one, the outside of the Aether has lots of bars and scaffolds to hook a line to, similar to what rock climbers do. No repeats of Frank Poole's fate in 2001: A Space Odyssey here. These folks are safely attached to the ship, so they won't drift off. Good ship design, OSHA would approve. That said, the walk was way too long of a scene. It just kind of kept going and going and going and you knew something was going to go wrong but it just kept going and... oh hey, the radar's back on and oh no we're hitting another debris storm right now!
To their credit, the filmmakers didn't have someone get their safety line severed so they floated off into space. No, we have... somehow, in defiance of how physics works, one of our three spacewalking crew members, without noticing it happened, gets punctured by something in the storm, and doesn't realize it until she sees drops of blood floating in her helmet. Which... uh... what? If your space suit gets punctured, you notice. Like, immediately. There is a vacuum outside the suit, there's pressure inside it, that pressure wants to get out. You're not going to have your suit slowly fill with blood as we hurriedly rush you into the airlock where we watch helplessly as it's repressurized before we can take off your helmet and have some kind of neat zero-g liquid effects as well over a quart of blood float-pours out of the suit collar and...
What. The. Hell.
So, we have the first character who actually had a significant role in the film die. Poor Maya, a shame we barely got to know her at all beyond that she's got a sister, "Einstein, the smartest cat in the world", and apparently had never heard "Sweet Caroline" before the whole crew has an impromptu karaoke session during her first (and last) ever spacewalk.
Seriously, that's basically all we know about Maya. The Aether crew is painted in such broad, imprecise strokes that we know pretty much nothing about any of them. Well, except Sully, but we don't know that much about her as a character, either. She's... well. She's the whole reason that Augustine is so focused on getting a message out to the ship.
See, Augustine really is the most important character in this movie. What we learn through the flashbacks is that he was the one who discovered the life-sustaining moon around Jupiter, and that he had a poor relationship with a woman when he was younger, and fathered a child but never really got to know the girl.
So, anyways. Radio's fixed, and we can call home and see that it's a wreck, thanks to a satellite that's still working and has a camera pointed the right direction. Welp. That happened. Oh, and we got a call from home, and the wife of one of the crew members is going off to find somewhere to hide from the disaster and his kids are sick and... basically, everything went horribly wrong on Earth for the families. But it takes two to pilot the escape craft, so another crew member's going to take Maya's body with them because he had a daughter who died young and would have been Maya's age (seriously, that's the logic given) and those three are gonna go down to the surface, never mind that, y'know, they're going to all die horribly and leave two crew members behind... You know what, we're at the point of this where it's hard to feel for any of these characters who aren't the old white guy.
Speaking of whom, let's go to that all-important phone call. You know, the one we've been trying to make all movie? Because Aether is about to do its gravity-assist to go back to Jupiter again, and they're going to go through an ionized region of space (is this supposed to be the Van Allen belts or something?) so radio's going to go out. But oh, since Augustine's this guy that she's always wanted to meet because he discovered the magic moon, Sully wants to talk to him a little, anyways. Besides, this is the last time she'll ever hear from anyone who isn't the father of her child or the child herself, so let's go onto a first-name basis, hmm? "Call me Iris."
And the shoe drops. See, the Iris that Augustine has had with him all story long, who's been the impetus for him to make this journey to call Aether and warn them not to land, the seven-year-old girl whose only spoken line is during a dream sequence, is a figment of his imagination. Or his subconscious. Or something. The only time he ever saw her was when she was seven, after all, and he never heard her voice. So of course she's seven and has no voice.
I mean, he's also seen her in anything related to Aether's mission, but let's ignore that. That's not the Iris lodged in his psyche that he utterly failed to have a relationship with. That one's this little girl who has urged him along, silently, and who's...
<sigh>
OK, you know what? The movie's kind of hamfisted in a lot of ways. It knows what it's trying to do, but didn't do the research and the writer didn't really have the writing chops. It's a deeply flawed film, carried almost entirely by the performances of Clooney and Springall, and being massively watched largely because Netflix shoves everything they've got as their Originals in our faces whenever we log in. It's #3 on there today, but it was #1 a few days ago, because the suits at Netflix wanted to generate viewership so they pointed everyone at it.
I loved the design work, at the very least. The various infographics are great, I love that the Aether design looked like they probably 3D-printed the thing in orbit, and I really appreciated that they used 'near future' as an excuse to, without actually explaining what the material was, have the outer skin of the ship be able to dent and rebound so that the debris storms didn't cause explosive decompression of the entire ship. I loved that the ship had plants on it, presumably as a way to minimize how much work needed to be done by powered CO2 converters or something. The holodeck-like room with panels that slide in and out to serve as tables or steps or whatever was really neat, and the rotating habitable area in the ship with the bridge at one end of a dog-bone-shaped apparatus and living area at the other, and a ladder in the middle that could just be floated along because it went through the hub, but also giving them gravity... that was neat, an interesting update of the classic "wheel in space" station design, though I still think I'd have rather seen an actual wheel. It just seems harder to inadvertently knock things off-balance if you have more than two supports total, you know?
And above all, even if there's a lot that wasn't ever satisfactorily explained or was poorly signposted, I really appreciated that there was a minimum of exposition. These characters know what's going on, for the most part, they don't need to explain it to each other in general, so they don't. The film assumes you're able to follow what's going on, technobabble or not, and glean the meanings from what's on screen.
A last thought: Iris is an interesting character. Young Iris, I mean, not Sully. Sully is a plot device. Young Iris, though... You know something's off about her, early on. I mean, I was looking at her and my initial thought, upon seeing the weird way she was acting, was somewhere between 'She seems autistic, maybe that's why she's not talking,' and 'She's an alien from our Jupiter moon, she doesn't speak because she doesn't know the language.' I'd given up on both of those by the time Augustine was deciding to make the trek north, and instead just wanted to go along for the ride. Especially with the getting lost in a blizzard sequence, where she just magically shows up to give Augustine the drive to go on and make it, where he thinks he's lost her and then oh, no, here she is again, she found him... Once the shoe drops, it makes a lot of sense. She's his drive to save his actual daughter, even though, uh... she never finds out that he's her father. He just never brings it up during the phone call. Probably better that way, though. She doesn't have to go through immediately losing her father after finding out he, y'know... exists.
So yeah. Curate's egg. Probably needed to be shorter, or if it was going to be as long as it was they could have fleshed out the Aether crew members a bit more. Pretty to look at, though.