The Explorer

by James Smythe

  Is he? Am I?

  I listen as the crew wake up, pulling themselves from their beds. I am crouched, hiding under the box, terrified, sobbing, biting my lip to keep from making noise. I can hear my own voice: it carries down the corridors more than any of the others, it seems. That’s probably just my mind playing tricks on me; I never thought that I spoke so loudly. Quinn was first up, and he found Arlen, woke Emmy, and they got his body out, tried to bring him back. As they were strapping him to the table – the medical table, the same place we ate our meals, everything with multiple purposes, wiped down after single tasks to prepare for the next emergency/meal – the rest of us woke up. I listen as Wanda cries, as Guy offers to examine his bed, as Emmy closes his eyes for him.

  ‘What a way to wake up,’ Quinn says, talking about Arlen but meaning himself.

  ‘Something must have happened to the air supply,’ I hear myself say, my voice like when you hear it on a recording: more nasal, not quite right, but definitely mine. ‘Or maybe there’s a crack?’

  ‘No cracks,’ Guy replies. ‘If they’ve got a crack, the door won’t lock. It’s a closed system: needs to make a circuit to shut properly.’

  ‘Maybe the seal itself?’

  ‘If the seal is torn, the door won’t lock either. It’ll be something else. These things can happen, fucking errors in the code or the wiring or the chips shorted out. Extremes of temperature, you know. These things can happen.’ We used to joke about his stereotype, about how he was German and so fucking efficient. It started before, when we were in training, but this was the first time we really noticed it. I remember it all. If I tried, I think I could exactly predict what I’m about to say: I mouth the words as they leave the other me’s mouth.

  ‘They can, but they shouldn’t.’ I can’t see it, but I remember what happened then: I hugged Wanda, told her that it would all be all right, even though I barely knew her. It was consoling. When Guy couldn’t hear us, we spoke about how he was too cold, too clinical. Quinn told us that he had to be, said that, if he wasn’t, who would be? And Wanda wouldn’t stop crying: I totally forgot that she had to be sedated that day, that Emmy had to take her to her bed, put her back. When we slept in them we just used the straps, closed the doors, but they weren’t locked or anything. I forgot that, for a while, it was like Wanda was dead as well.

  I listen to the crew arguing as they try to revive Arlen, but they give up so quickly, because Emmy says that there’s no coming back when the body is in the state his is. She’s the one who tells them to stop, finally, and she calls the time of death as if this is a hospital. When she does it they all sigh, and Quinn shouts something in anger, and Guy doesn’t even pay attention, it seems, because there are things that need doing. This ship, he would have said if he had been asked, won’t run itself.

  ‘We should tell Ground Control,’ Quinn says. Nobody disagrees with him. The wait time at that point was only a few minutes, because of how close we still were to home, but I remember that it felt like forever, having to deliver that news. ‘This is the crew of the Ishiguro,’ Quinn says into the computer microphone, ‘and we’ve just come out of the pods, just checking in. Ship is stable, fuel reserves at 93%, which is in line with expectations. Captain Arlen Bester didn’t wake up after stasis, however; attempts to resuscitate him have been unsuccessful. Time of death was called at oh-seven-forty hours.’ He left out all of the details – about his blue skin, his chalky eyes – because there was no need to pass them on. We were warned, when we signed all of our disclaimers and NDAs, hundreds of pages of the things, that the beds could malfunction. It was one of the multitudinous ways that we could die, and DARPA couldn’t – wouldn’t – be held responsible. When Quinn’s finished, he suggests that we say something. We’re already standing around Arlen’s body as if it’s a proper funeral; all that’s missing are the clods of dirt to throw onto the coffin, the priest, the black suits. He turns to the other me, the original me, tells me that I should do it. ‘You’re good with words,’ he says. I remember my speech; I remember how it fell out of my mouth, like I was being sick in fits and bursts.

  As the other me talks about Arlen’s beard, about what a cool guy he was, tells stories about stuff that happened in training, I hang onto the wall and wonder once again if I’m completely insane, and if any of this is real at all. I notice my leg, where I hurt it – where I remember the blood, the bone sticking through, so painful – and realize that, even though it still hurts, the wound isn’t sensitive. I wind up my trouser leg, expecting blood, a scab, a gash, but it’s healed. Along the line of my knee is a scar, like a sideways grimace, but it’s healed. I ball my hand to a fist and hit it, trying to see if it flinches with pain, and it does, but it’s only dull, like an echo, a memory of how sharp the pain used to be. As I keep listening to the crew it hurts more and more, until it’s aching again, creasing along the line where it feels slightly healed, where the scar is; until the pain starts creeping up my whole body.

  I must have remembered it wrong. I must have. Despite how it looks, after a while it hurts so badly that I’m shaking slightly. The pain gets worse with each passing second. I have no idea how I’ll make it go away, and I shake and moan, because none of this makes any sense.

  The crew are running diagnostics, sweeping the ship for anything that might not have been spotted. At the time – and again, now, as I listen to it for the second time in my life, word for word the same – Guy told us it was to make sure that we were safe.

  ‘Think of this thing as a rubber boat,’ he says. ‘You go for hours along a river that’s calm; it’s great, nothing wrong. You hit some rapids all of a sudden, and it gets a puncture, something tiny, barely even visible; you might not realize. But, you know, you made it through the rapids safe, and you’re alive, so you relax. When you’re then in the huge river, or the sea, in this instance, it doesn’t matter how still it is, how calm and relaxing: if you don’t find that puncture, that could be the thing that kills you.’ We had to search for the puncture, in case it existed. ‘This is nothing to do with Arlen’s death: it’s standard protocol. There’s nothing to worry about, it’s just something we have to do. Back to work, you know? Better to be safe than sorry,’ Guy said. Each member of the crew was assigned a room; each member scoured that room to check its integrity. I put myself behind the boxes, in between them; they’re curved, like a U in the room, a perfect human-sized space for me, and there’s space under them where they’ve been strapped down, where I can hide, like a criminal clinging to the undercarriage of a vehicle, praying he isn’t caught. I hide in there and wait as the door opens and somebody walks around the room. I don’t know who it is, because I don’t look, in case they hear me move. I know that it wasn’t me, because I was checking the main room: it was all I could be trusted with, because what else did I know? I wasn’t like the rest of them.

  I first met Emmy months and months before the flight, along with the rest of the crew. There was a bank of seventeen astronauts and pilots that they were going to draw from, all of whom had been training, and all of whom were at various stages of that training; six doctors; four scientists. There were three of us journalists, and we had all done the physical checks, all the psychological profiling: days worth of questions about our lives, our hopes, our fears, our families. We had a week-long camp where we did physical exercises, pushed our bodies and our minds to the absolute limits; and then, at night, we socialized, but not too much. They let us out of our rooms every day for a few hours, kept us moving around the groups to see who we worked best with. There were no phone calls home, and they – a subdivision of DARPA, a government-sponsored conglomeration of com-panies that was privately funding the space trip – watched everything. It was like a television show, a reality one, where we waited for the viewers to vote us off. They had to make sure that we got along, or that we could work together. I told Elena afterwards that I think they wanted to check that there wasn’t any sexual tension amongst us all, or anything that might breed into agg
ression. Any emotion that wasn’t just friendly camaraderie was discouraged. They put us in training rooms in our underwear and made us work out; no secrets, no hiding our superficial scars or those slightly saggy love handles.

  We would all watch Emmy from across the room, all of us men. I remember meeting Quinn early on – we bonded in that superficial way that men can when they’re slightly embarrassed, in social situations that they don’t know how to deal with. He was less nervous than I, less self-conscious – his body, his manner, they afforded him that privilege, because he was chiselled – and he bolstered me, gave me an extra shot of confidence. He was better looking than I was, but he was one of the cool kids, and my association alone lifted me up. He had the looks, the charm; and I could talk for myself. I was the perfect wingman. I pulled myself together so that, when I stood next to him, I didn’t feel quite as inadequate. We spoke about Arlen’s moustache – it was just that back then, a handlebar, like a stereotypical brigadier in a World War I film – and we spoke about Emmy, about the way that she carried herself.

  ‘Oh, she’s out of my league,’ I remember Quinn saying, which was a lie, and we both knew it. But he maintained it, I think, for the sake of staying amiable with me. Nobody likes a show-off. I didn’t speak to Emmy that entire week, apart from when we were put in exercises together. It wasn’t until the second week, when they whittled some of the group down, that we got to have a proper conversation.

  Most of the crew sit down in the main room and eat. Wanda is showering, because she’s so upset after the death of Arlen that Emmy recommended she try to relax, try to calm down; and the rest are cooking, warming meal bars. I listen as they drink wine – we left with a few bottles, only enough to commemorate a few different occasions, and the champagne for the halfway point, of course – and then they make a film for back home, all crowded around. Ground Control, when they replied, asked us not to mention Arlen; they told us to look happy, to smile, to say cheers, to wish the world the best. We fought about it for a few minutes, but then Guy spoke up, trying to be a voice of reason.

  ‘It’s no good starting this off with tragedy,’ he said. ‘Think about what we’re meant to represent, okay? Fuck’s sake, think about something other than ourselves.’

  ‘This is a new age of discovery,’ Quinn said to everybody watching at home, to the millions – billions, if we were lucky – that would be crowded around their TV sets just to see how far we could get, what we could find out here. It was so cheesy, but that helped us believe it, I think. When the recording had stopped and been sent, we spent the evening talking about what we thought everybody at home would think about. I listen as they all talk about their families. We had all lost loved ones, near and dear to us.

  ‘Wonder if that’s what made us all want to be space cadets,’ Quinn jokes. I remember Emmy laughing especially fake-hard at the joke: she doesn’t let my memory down, and I hear her voice carry down the corridors, through the lining of the ship’s walls, a big laugh, as if barely a care in the world at that point. They talk more about Arlen. I don’t remember it being this miserable; but mourning always looks worse from the outside. Me? I barely remember Arlen now. The other me tells the story of Elena, leaving out key details – why she actually left me, what we said to each other, what happened before I left for the trip – because I don’t want anything to change the way that I’m painted. Guy laughs at me.

  ‘Everybody says that they’re innocent after a divorce,’ he snorts. ‘Nobody ever says, Sure, it was my fault we broke up. The other party is always to blame, and we try to tell it any way we can that isn’t true.’ The others don’t agree with him; they defend me, and I sit quietly, letting them. Quinn tells him to be more considerate, that it’s not fair. Emmy nearly shouts her defence of me.

  ‘We’ve all been hurt,’ she says to Guy, ‘stop being such an ass.’ He laughs it off, slaps my arm, tells me that he’s only joking.

  ‘You know that, right?’ He turns to the rest. ‘He knows that.’ I listen as they move on, tiptoeing around topics, avoiding anything that might spill secrets. Within the hour, it’s like we’ve forgotten that Arlen was with us at all. It isn’t until we’re getting into bed that Emmy brings him up again – a casual mention, that she’s sad he didn’t get to see this with us, that he would have been so proud, that she hopes he’s honoured when we get home – and Wanda starts to cry.

  ‘We have to sleep with him there, looking out like that?’

  ‘I’ll shut them,’ Quinn says. He tells the crew to look away, and he opens Arlen’s bed and does it. Such a heroic gesture. ‘It’s done,’ he says, as if that’s enough.

  Wanda doesn’t stop crying; the rest of us – Quinn, Guy, the real Emmy, the other – real? – me – go to sleep. Eventually Wanda falls silent as well. I don’t remember that first night, whether I actually slept or not. Now, I listen, but I can’t hear anything that suggests either way.

  2

  In the main body of the ship – the cockpit, the living areas – the noise of the ship is almost comforting, or was. It became a constant thrum, a neat humming that you knew had purpose behind it. As long as that slight vibration existed, so too did our life support, and when it bugged you, that thought reassured. After a while it became something you were used to, as well; we stopped talking about it completely after a couple of days. Here, however, in the storeroom, the walls seem to shake. I take straps and fasten them to the floor behind crates, hooking them to the standard fixtures using their carabiner hooks, strapping myself down. I lie down and strap myself in, holding myself in place; the vibrations through the thick straps rattle every part of me, my teeth, my bones. My leg aches, and my back aches, and I shiver, and I’m in pain.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ I say aloud. It feels like I’ve been doing this for so long; before this, on my own, as they died, one by one; and here, now, a second time, to watch them, or claim responsibility.

  I can’t sleep. I lie on the floor – or, slightly above, most of me touching the hard metal panelling, the rest of my body seemingly floating underneath the crates, like an upside-down bed but with none of the rest that a traditional mattress might bring with it. When I don’t move for extended periods, it feels like those parts of me that pressed against the crate above me have become loose, detached. It was never like this before, the first time. In the main cabin, they are in their beds, strapped in. They don’t have gravity for them, but they have bumpers, holding their bodies in. Part of our training was – can you believe this? – practising sleeping when in confined and constrained spaces. We slept in normal beds with rubber frames around our bodies at first, then they tilted the beds, like we were patients in a hospital, the bed-frames controlled by the specialists. They explained that they had to save space: the beds on the ship were to be at an angle, not unlike that found when sitting up in bed.

  ‘It’ll help blood flow as well,’ they said, though Emmy always said that they were lying about that.

  ‘A lot of what they tell us about the medical stuff they’re doing is a lie,’ she told me one day. ‘They just want to cover themselves, and if you don’t ask questions it’s a lot easier.’ I asked her about the bone loss, because that was another warning. ‘It’s an issue, sure, but not for us,’ she said. ‘You’d have to be out in space for years for it to really cause you issues. That’s space station health worries, for the guys who are up there on six-month or year rotations. We’re not up here for long enough. You eat your meals, drink lots of water, exercise, you’ll be fine.’ She was so sure, and that reassured me. I trusted her, because that’s what we do. It’s who we are, as people: we’re intrinsically built to trust.

  As I lie there, shaking with something, I don’t know what, like I’m ill, actually sick, I wonder what’s happening. I’m so scared, because I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t know what it means, and all I can do is pray that I have actually gone insane, because the alternative – I can’t even say it – is far, far more terrifying.

  I u
nstrap myself, no concept of what time it is. The rest of the ship is completely dead, however (that word, like a prediction, a crystal ball); one of the benefits of the crew sleeping in their pods is that they’re pretty much prevented from hearing noise from the rest of the ship, by design, blocking out voices. We were meant to sleep in shifts but never did: there was always to be somebody watching the ship, making sure that everything was fine, but with no need. Everything was so automated we might as well have been at home, were it not for the purpose, for our being the eyes and ears of the people who might want to be in our position. Guy said it best as we waited for the lift to take us up to the ship, the day we launched.

  ‘We’re the new explorers,’ he said. ‘This is like Columbus, or those guys who first went across the Antarctic. We’re adventurers, right? We’re inspiring people.’ That was the only thing that he ever seemed passionate about: what we were doing, that it was important. To me, specifically, he spoke about how important my role was. ‘You have to tell it like it is: tell the world that we’re not heroes, we’re just people seeing what can be done. That’s crucial, right?’

  I open the door to the storeroom, sliding it back. The lights in the rest of the ship are still on, and they make me blink, blinding me slightly again. I drift down the quiet hallway towards the main room, the cockpit.

  ‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ I say, aloud, quietly, into the nothing. I cross the threshold, and there’s the other me: looking so much younger, clean-shaven, peaceful. I stare at the sleeping crew for a while, taking them in. My eyes keep flitting to myself, to the scowl that I sleep with. Elena always told me that, that I looked angry when I slept. (‘Like you’re planning vengeance,’ she would joke.) I wonder what it is that I’m so angry about at that moment; what my dreams are of.