by James Smythe
‘We haven’t finished the mission,’ Emmy says.
‘And we won’t. We’ll get home, and we’ll be safe.’
‘Ground Control could have us up for insubordination.’ She says the word like she doesn’t even know if it’s applicable, more of a question, really, than a statement.
‘They won’t dare,’ Quinn tells her, ‘because we can go to the papers and say that it wasn’t safe up here, that we had two deaths and they were fucked up and we wanted to get home.’ His accent goes to British for swearing, which I never noticed, and the words cut through the air harder than if they were in his usual sloping speech.
‘What about Guy?’
‘What about him?’ Quinn leaves her at the table, almost gasping, and goes to the console, types something. ‘We’re on 73% of our fuel, which means we’ve got another week out here at least, with two dead bodies, Guy, and Cormac.’ I don’t know what he means by that; why I’m such a problem to be up here with. ‘We mutiny, and we go home.’
‘I can’t,’ Emmy says. ‘Come on, this will be all right.’ She doesn’t sound like she believes it.
‘They’re dead,’ Quinn says, not even whispering any more. ‘Of course it won’t be all right.’
They sleep, all four of them, but I don’t. It’s what passes for night-time here, and the ship is dark, and two of the beds have been filled even though I did everything I could bar leaping out and grabbing the blade from Wanda’s hand, a superhero swooping in to save the day. I take another pain pill, because I haven’t felt my leg in hours and hours, not properly, and more antibiotics, dry swallowing them, calling up spit into my mouth to swallow them down, gulping like a turkey because they’re formidable tablets.
‘I have to sleep,’ I say, but all I’ve done is watch them, and all I can think about is watching them more. I fasten myself to the floor and shut my eyes, and think about nothing but waves, but drifting, trying to lose any sort of focus on anything else. I picture myself on an airbed, on the waves, bobbing on waves, tranquil and calm and the sun is beating down on me, and I’m so far from this place, and I understand everything. I leave the lining and float down the hallway, to the cabin. I take more pills, and then I sit at the computer and punch my password in, and I call up Elena’s picture and talk to it, telling her that I miss her, that I’m sorry I ever decided to leave. ‘I wish I knew how I got here,’ I say. ‘Every theory I have, they’re all insane.’ As she stares at me, I wonder why I’m here: if it’s to stop the ship, to stop the deaths; or to help them happen. I’m doing this the second time, and I’ve already had an effect; there are already things that have happened that I had to be here to enact. Maybe I’m meant to see this through to the end. Maybe I’m part of the problem, and the solution.
The Cormac in the cabin asks everybody for more interviews as they eat breakfast together. Quinn is quiet; Emmy nods, tells him that she’ll grab him later; Guy questions it.
‘Jesus Christ, that’s all you do, eh? Talk to us about ourselves, about who we are?’ He prods his breakfast bar at me. ‘No. How about that? No more interviews, you can start to make yourself more fucking useful here. We’ve got so much that needs to be done, okay?’
‘He’s not trained,’ Quinn says.
‘Not trained!’ Guy laughs. ‘I’m not going to be asking him to fucking drive or anything. I have to run maintenance on the panels outside, because Wanda didn’t get to do it, so he can help me with that. How many hours did you log in the walking simulators?’
‘Seven,’ I say. He looks incredulous.
‘What the hell were you doing?’ He looks at Emmy. ‘That’s even less than you, right?’
‘Shut up, Guy,’ she says. She’s become so quiet since Wanda died.
‘I’m just saying. You must have had your thumb up your ass or something,’ he says to me. ‘Seven is okay, seven’s fine. We can work with seven. At least you know how to cling to the fucking hull, right?’
‘I’ll do it,’ Quinn says, but Guy tuts, shakes his head.
‘You have to stay in here, in case.’ He sells it like he might need Quinn to run equipment, but I know what he really means: in case something goes wrong. I was always the most expendable in terms of the mission itself, on a practical level. My blog, my video updates, my final story, at the end of it all; they would all work regardless of my presence. If I were to have died instead of Arlen, the final story would have been written by one of my colleagues, and my colleagues would have been quoted, and it would have been tinged with sadness and dedicated to me; but the story would have survived. The Cormac in the cabin barely says a word, doesn’t defend himself: he stays quiet. ‘This afternoon we full-stop, and we’ll go on a walk. You’ll be fine, get yourself another hour logged, right?’ Guy finishes his breakfast bar. I watch as the me puts his down, half-eaten, and doesn’t go back to it. It drifts.
I don’t remember being nervous, but the me is vomiting, holding a plastic sack to his face, emptying his guts. He stands in the darkness of the storeroom, only minutes after Guy switches the gravity on and turns the engines off. The engines have smaller engines facing the opposite direction that fire for a single burst to slow the craft down, otherwise the momentum would be tremendous and we’d never get to leave the ship. After they’ve fired, there’s a fifteen-minute wait for the ship’s hull to cool, and then we’re allowed to go. I remember being sick, but I thought it was because of something that I ate, or because of the change between gravity and not – something that we had been warned could happen, the bracing effect that it could have upon tender stomachs – but now, watching myself from my vantage point I can see the shake in my arms and legs; the breathing that I do when I think that the vomiting has stopped; the quiver that runs through my body when I find more, somehow, and crease myself over. I look so weak, I realize. What was I even doing coming on this trip?
Guy appears in the doorway, tells me to get a move on. ‘We have to get changed,’ he says, ‘we’re going to be behind schedule.’ I follow myself towards the changing room and watch as I pull my pale body into one of the suits, testing it over and over for tears and rips. There’s nothing, so I get a helmet, seal it, check the seal over and over, and then finally join Guy in the airlock. ‘Ready?’ he asks, but he doesn’t care what my answer is, because he hits the button to open the door as I’m still clipping my safety cables on, and then we’re floating again, and outside the ship.
This is what it was like. From my vantage I can’t see a thing, but I remember how it was cold for a second, then utterly warm, heat still coming from the body of the ship, and then we were floating alongside it, and I was able to recognize what that meant; to be weightless, to be able to see nothing but the expanse of space, the vague murmurs of shapes and colours so far in the distance that we called them stars, whatever they were, planets or anything else; from here, some were so far away that maybe they had never been seen before, that maybe we were seeing their light for the first time, before it even hit Earth’s telescopes. We were there at the start. I remember swimming for the first time, moving my arms and legs as if that would work but finding no resistance, then seeing Guy laughing at me. He indicated a button on my arm, the button that controlled the expulsion of CO2 from the backs of our helmets, a tiny burst of which was enough to push across the expanse. He spoke to me over the headset, telling me to go to him, that he’ll show me what we had to do, so I did, I pressed the button and I moved, like a tank with no means of stopping. That first time, I remember, I pressed it too much, for too long, and I overshot, drifting too close to the hull, having to use my hands to stop myself, to keep control. He pulled me backwards, moved me over towards a panel that he then exposed, asked me to hold it open. I did, because it was spring-loaded – for safety, in case somebody forgot to close it, as it was the most important panel, the one that gave access to all the major functions: the engines, the computers, the life support, the communications relay – and he put his hands in, slow-motion tapping at the gigantic buttons, reading nu
mbers off the small LED and nodding in satisfaction as they came up one by one, as he kept saying that everything was okay, everything was fine. I became distracted, because holding a panel open wasn’t fun, and looked at everything around me; at the craft we were clinging to, at how its metal body was like a blimp, like one of those old-school zeppelins you see in propaganda films, only new, shiny; yet bruised and dented, a necessary part of the journey. I looked towards where I thought that the Earth was, but couldn’t see it – I don’t know what I expected, if I wanted to see it, or actually, if I didn’t. If it was better being alone, without it. I looked at the Sun, in the distance, the largest thing but even smaller than from Earth, from a garden or from a street. I could stand in my bedroom and watch it rise and it would be closer, warmer, brighter, but so much less impressive, because here I can see it all. It isn’t blinding: it’s golden. It’s the golden disc that people used to write about, before they knew what it was, before they broke it down into science and composite parts, writing it off as a ball of explosive gas. When they thought it was a God, that’s how it looks from space, made for worship, for something more special than a casual reliance. Guy told me that he had all the readings he needed from that part; next, we had to check the integrity. He shows me how to grab the ship, shows me the minute handholds all around the hull, indentations and grooves, and then he pulls himself along like a lizard, flying across the metal. He has logged over two hundred hours on the simulations, he told me, and he did walks on low-altitude ships years before. He looks it; everything is easy, fluid. I follow him, stumbling, grasping at holds that aren’t there, but eventually finding them and righting myself, and keeping myself pinned down as we revolve around this thing. Then I’m on the other side of the ship and it’s an entirely different part of space, and there’s Earth: tiny and green. I remember that I barely used to use the Bubble, for some reason. I never went in there to watch, because the overlays were intrusive, as impressive as they were technically; because you were still behind glass. It might as well have been a video. Here, I can see it all. It’s too far for me to tell what’s what, just a speck, really, green and blue, and it might not even be Earth; it might be me imagining it, seeing ghosts. But it looked like it, even though Guy didn’t react. He told me to get up as high as him and unscrewed another panel, this time exposing wires. He told me that they were the core parts for the controls, that they were what kept us on course, and could receive orders from Ground Control to turn us, to change where we were heading, in case of emergency. I asked him if Quinn couldn’t just deal with it, and he said that it wasn’t that easy. They didn’t trust pilots completely; they were only there as watchmen for the project, really. And they didn’t trust AIs, because there were so many instances of them going wrong, or being too rigid in their understanding of orders. No, Guy told me, the only true way to ensure that the course is rigid is if Ground Control stays in command, literally and metaphorically. They programmed the course, set the controls, and we just rode with them. Arlen and Quinn were there for landings, there in the case of emergencies, but we were at the mercy of Ground Control. Guy asked me to hold the tool he’d used to unscrew the panel, checked all the wires, all the connections – he pulled on them, to see if they were taut, and then shone his light into the hole to check the ones at the back. When he was done he took the tool back off me, sealed the panel and then seemed to slump.
‘Ready?’ he asked me, and I asked him what for, and he grabbed me, hurled me backwards. I spun, spiralled away from the ship, slow but fast at the same time. I might have screamed, but I can’t remember, as everything turned so quickly, over and over, became like a tunnel of light, of those stars leaving trails in my vision, imprints. Guy’s voice rang through the headset then, asking me if I had fun, and then my safety cable went tight and I was being pulled backwards, towards the ship; suddenly stable, righted, in control again. I pressed my button, moved faster backwards. I followed Guy around the ship again towards the airlock, and he disappeared inside, slid over the lip and was gone. I waited a few more seconds, to look at what I was out there with, to take it all in, and then followed, and we drifted in the airlock until Guy hit the button, and we fell to the floor, both of us. The door sealed, oxygen was blasted in, and gravity appeared, and we stood up and took our helmets off. ‘Your first time outside the Ishiguro,’ Guy said. ‘How was it?’ He didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘Fucking amazing, right?’
I see my face, gasping for real air again, but not nervous any more, and I see Guy clap me on the shoulder, then turn and stride down the corridor. He doesn’t wait for me or Quinn or Emmy to brace ourselves; he hits the button to make us go again, and we drift upwards. I watch as the me undresses in the changing room, puts his clothes back on, and heads into the main cabin again, where Quinn and Emmy are sitting at the table opposite each other, and stop talking as soon as I enter the room.
I wait for the crew to go to bed, to get tired. I hold the empty pill packet in my hand as I wait, rattling the nothing inside it. Guy is the first to sleep, and then the me, having stayed up with Quinn and Emmy, talking about Wanda, about what we think will happen when we get home. (Emmy is convinced that the governments will give some sort of army-style medal to our dead, a Purple Heart or its equivalent. Quinn tells her that she’s insane, that we’re private sector. ‘Nobody gives a shit about what happens when you’re working for money. Nobody,’ he says.) When the me goes to bed, Quinn and Emmy stay up. They whisper at the table about what it would take to get Guy to change the computers, to turn the ship around. I want to tell them that they’re going to fail; that, whatever they do, the ship will continue unabated. The ship survives to the bitter, bitter end.
‘What if we don’t get to turn around?’ Emmy asks. She seems nervous. I remember the confident Emmy, the Emmy from our training. This one is different. I didn’t notice the change; but then, it seems, I didn’t notice very much.
‘Then we ride this out. There’s not long to go.’
‘Right, sure. We just stay here, pretend that nothing’s happened.’
‘It’s not like there are lifeboats.’ He takes her hand. ‘Listen, it’ll be fine. Guy’s just intense, and Cormac . . .’
‘Don’t.’ She leaves her hand in his as he moves his thumb, stroking her skin softly, slowly, tenderly.
‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Fine. But we’ll persuade Guy. He’s not as hard as he seems.’ He moves his hand from hers, up to her arm, then her shoulder; and then he pulls her closer, not to kiss her, but to put his head against hers, like they’re kids, bashing skulls. ‘We’ll get you home safe and sound,’ he says. They stay there like that for minutes, far longer than they should, than makes sense; and when they’re done they go to their separate beds, and I sneak out of my hole and drift to the table, the seat, and I sit myself down, strap myself in, and I look at them all asleep, and still needing my pills, feeling that familiar tug of pain all across my body; through my leg, into my head, my brain.
‘I wish I could be out there with you,’ I say out loud. I think I’m willing them to hear me.
Emmy called me, hotel room to hotel room. It was the night before we were due to leave Florida, return to New York and to – in theory – our families. Emmy didn’t have a family, something that never seemed to bother her, but marked her out as different. There wasn’t anybody waiting to speak to her on the other side, to tell her that they were glad she was safe. She was bored in downtime. I had been on the phone to Elena, trying to persuade her to come to New York again, but it wasn’t going anywhere: she was bored with our conversation, she said, bored of me trying to convince her.
‘When you come home, we can talk about this. But I’m not discussing it like this.’ She was quiet and patient in her tone, but she looked tired; angry, even. When we said goodbye she didn’t keep eye contact. She looked down, at her hands, ready to switch the screen off, and said that she loved me, which I still believed, even without being able to see it in her eyes. I lay on the bed and thought about
her, and had the television on – they were showing footage of the London floods from years before, and that made me think about my father, who probably still lived in the city, even though it was barely there any more, and I thought about whether I missed him or not, and how hard it was to decide what was emotion and what was just reaction – and then Emmy called.
‘We’re drinking,’ she said. ‘You should absolutely join us.’ I met them in the bar, where they – six or seven of them, most of whom I knew well enough from the training (with Guy and Quinn among them) – poured drinks straight from bottles that they had taken from the bar, put on their room tabs (paid for by our private investors, no less), and lined up glasses that we downed, one by one. It was eleven by the time that I got down there, and we paid the barman to keep from locking up, to keep the tabs rolling. We didn’t have to pay for our room bills, and we never abused it, not until that night. Emmy was the ringleader, we joked, the instigator: she kept asking for different bottles, and kept nudging glasses across the soaking wet bar towards anybody who wasn’t drinking. ‘What’s the point of having a last night if you’re not going to make it a last night?’ she asked. She was like a teenager, just gone to university, suddenly free of everything and able to do whatever they liked; only she had so many letters after her name already, and must have done that stuff in her past. Quinn was first to bed; he took himself away, quietly, sometime after one.
