The Explorer taq-1

by James Smythe

  All that I’ve got up here is tranquillity now, I suppose.

  2

  I eat meals by myself; or, rather, I eat them in the room with all the sleep pods and my dead colleagues, because it’s either that or the cockpit, or one of the other parts of the ship. We’ve got expansive engine rooms; massive chambers full of tech that I don’t understand, all to process the air and the water, keep us going; and storerooms, spaces that would be empty if they weren’t filled with crates of supplies we’ll never use. The power supply is cutting edge; until a year ago, it was touch and go as to whether they’d get it down small enough to actually even launch. They did. I don’t know how we ever doubted them.

  It’s amazing how fast you can get bored. Emmy’s been dead for two days – I keep using that word, because in an ordinary situation we would get home and she would be brought out of sleep and somebody would be able to help her, with drugs or surgery, something to balance her. But here, she’s dead. I know that we’re not going backwards, and no pods have returned to the ship to tell me their rescue plan. I mean, not that they could have one in the first place. It would take them so long to reach me that I’d be dead by the time that they did. There is no Plan B.

  I’ve become like a vampire, sitting here in the dark on my own, lusting for something – anything – other than this, other than here. I’ve turned the lights off – I flicked the switch when the computer shouted that we were crossing paths with an asteroid (Nereus, the on-screen prompt told me), just to look at it, really. Couldn’t see it though, the real version. There’s technology on the screens that shows you images, composites of what’s really out there with CG stuff, to give you information. It painted in the path of the asteroid for me; I see its tail in the distance, as it runs towards Earth, where it’ll swing around, passing close enough for bedroom-astronomers to get excited. From here, Earth is a speck, a twinkle, a flash of light. We were in space for two reasons. Guy was running tests on anomalies, things that probes and satellites and telescopes couldn’t even begin to fathom, all to further our knowledge of space. That was only the secondary reason, though: science taking a back seat to something less tangible. Our primary remit was to inspire people, to be explorers. To show the people of Earth that we – as a race – were able to take ourselves further, to push our limits, our scope. Nobody explored any more, so we were the new vanguard. It was so exciting, so important. We were going to be heroes.

  The lights are off now all over the ship, and I have decided to not switch them back on again. I don’t need to, not yet. There’s very little to see here, and the lights inside the sleep pods and from the panels keep me going. Nobody’s been here before, and it’ll be years, maybe more, before people come here again. Why would they risk it? I like that nobody will know what happened. An assumption: the contactcapsules never made it back to the Moon, never made it back to Ground Control and DARPA, and they will think something happened to us. There are so many possibilities, each of them worthy of a movie. We made first contact, and now are in another galaxy, being tortured, or prepping an invasion force. We exploded, and now orbit the Earth as chunks of what we were. Somebody in the crew got Space Madness and killed everyone else. We had a hull breach. We crashed into a moon, an asteroid field, a spatial anomaly that nobody had factored in, or seen before – we made a discovery! We popped a fuel cell, ran out, we’re adrift. We never left Earth, and it was all a cover-up, our launch filmed on a sound-stage. There are different scenarios that they’ll run because they just want to know what happened to us, and this will set them back fifteen years of research. Next time, it’ll be safety first; minimize the risks. They’ll take years deliberating about whether it’s worth it; they’ll only go out with a real purpose, a reason to do it (colonization, or fuel, maybe). It’ll be decades before they think it’s safe, and the ship won’t be a prototype: it’ll be tested to near-death before it’s sent up. They’ll try to save energy by launching from the Moon, maybe, and the ship will be bigger, and it will have more fuel, and a crew of pilots and engineers. No useless straggler of a journalist. It’ll be packed to the gills with the fail-safes we went without, like an AI pilot. Whatever happens, that ship will go up and then come back down, having done what it was meant to do, even if the crew all suffer a fate that couldn’t ever be predicted. It might not even have a crew to begin with: keep it less fallible.

  The ship is clean, absolutely clinical. It’s like an operating theatre, not a doctor’s surgery: there isn’t much around to tinker with. There are no lines on the floor to give us directions, no screens and beeps. There are panels that run computers, and there’s a table with a transparent lid that shows what we keep inside it – food bars, books, medical equipment. On one wall of the main cabin run plastic chairs that fold down from the wall like a cinema, all with clips on the sides that click onto the pins on the sides of our trousers to keep us sitting down if we don’t want to float. On the other wall is a table, a booth, built in, enough seating for all of us, same principle with the clips. We were meant to sit together once a day for meals. There was a list of rules that some psychologists thought up, to help us deal with being out here for so long on our own.

  ‘It brings about a sense of camaraderie,’ they said, ‘to remind you of the comfort and security of being together: not alone, but part of a unit, working together towards a single goal. Subconsciously, it will remind you of eating home-cooked meals with your family.’

  ‘That’s a great idea,’ I remember Quinn saying, ‘but my mother never cooked shitty meal bars from cellophane packets.’ There are no knives and forks, clearly, just hundreds of sachets of meal bars. They’re all sponsored by fast-food companies, and they taste just like the real burgers and chips and puddings, only in these reformed bars, hard and crispy when they’ve been heated, soft and damp when not. We have exercise machines, all designed to provide physical stress, resistance, and we’re meant to use them for half an hour a day to prevent bone loss. Then there are the beds, designed for comfort and stasis, used every night. They sit at a 45-degree angle, and we sleep with buffers around us to stop us slipping in any direction. There are padded straps to hold us in. We all, at one point or another, floated whilst sleeping. It seemed silly not to. They all have doors. Their glass is frosted, but you can still see the bodies through it. We have everything we could ever need up here, in the front, in what passes as a cockpit, a lounge, a bedroom, a cabin. It’s almost upper-class.

  I’ve thought of killing myself, but something stops me. Just think, it says, you’ll go further than anyone else has ever been. You’ll see deeper into space than anybody else has ever seen. You’ll make history.

  ‘But nobody will ever know,’ I reply, and the something doesn’t say anything back to me, just sits there in the dark. I take my place in the chair at the front of the ship and decide to ride it out.

  I take sleeping pills. I don’t know what I’m trying to achieve by this. Sleeping pills are a cry for help, right? I take a handful, because I don’t know how many I’m meant to take. They’re not even kept in the medicine cabinet: we were given our own supply, because we were told we might have trouble with sleeping. I vomit them up into a white paper bag, then dispose of it in the refuse. It makes me feel awful. I don’t know why I did it. I’ve never been that sort of person. I’ve never had that sort of strength.

  When things beep on technology you don’t know how to operate it’s the worst thing in the world. There’s a flat panel covered in switches, next to the big Go/Pause button, and there’s a screen covered in jargon that means nothing. It’s fine knowing about the placements of stars: why they build this thing for only engineers to understand I cannot fathom. I understand the fuel readings, and I understand the energy cell readings – we are running at 42% fuel, 93% piezoelectricefficiency, six hours of reserve energy in the cells – and I understand how to tell that Life Support is working. On the screen, a tiny number flashes: 250480. I don’t recognize it, or know what it means. It’s in a small box, the
kind that pops up when the computer crashes or when you open a program or when you’ve got a meeting scheduled. It starts to beep as well, and there’s a tiny red light, the size of a pinhead, that starts flashing, a solitary LED that I wouldn’t even notice if I wasn’t floating directly over it. There’s a Help system on the computer so I boot another screen and type it in, to search through the thousands of documents about how this shuttle works, but nothing comes up. 250480. Nothing at all. It doesn’t seem to reference anything; it doesn’t seem to have any meaning.

  ‘I have to ignore it,’ I say to myself.

  Something that might be of interest: we could have travelled faster than we have been. The engines that we’re fitted with are two-year-old tech, and the advancements that have been made since then are incredible. We could have been doing this almost three times as fast, but the rate of fuel consumption meant that we would have been lucky to reach the Moon. Signals through space, though, they’re different; they’re waves. They travel faster than we can, because they don’t weigh anything. We give them a distance and a direction and fire them off, and Bang! We hope that they hit their targets. We haven’t had a long-distance message since we left our orbit – or, technically, the magnetosphere, so the scientists told me. Maybe this is what happens when a message arrives. Maybe there’s some sort of subspace signal, and this is the information. 250480. This is their way of telling me I’m going to be getting home.

  The light stops shining just as I am getting excited, and the beeping stops a second, maybe two, after it. The 250480 is still there on the screen after the prompt, but it rapidly gets shunted down the list as the fuel readings – 41% fuel, 93% energy, six hours’ life support – tick by and replace it.

  Outside, the sky is beautiful. We – that is, those of us in space, travelling here where nobody has been before – we don’t think of it in terms of sky, or even as space. We think in terms of an actual space, of blackness, of The Dark, that which we don’t understand. We over-word it, write about it in terms that we think people will find attractive, beautiful, moving, meaningful. We mystify it: It’s what we don’t know, something else entirely, something abnormal and terrifying and still and completely other-worldly, in the most literal sense of the phrase. Here, where you’re close enough to touch it, it is just space; there’s nothing to touch even if you want to. And there’s no definition of a horizon, no way to tell where we actually are, not really. We can say, ‘Well, we’ve travelled this far’ – I can say, ‘Well, I’ve travelled this far, I know how much fuel the ship has used, there’s no resistance, the readings must be right’ – but the relationship I have to what’s out here is nothing. It’s a number. This deep into space, there’s nothing. It’s dark, like oil or tar. I can’t see stars. If this wasn’t already fucked up enough, I’d worry there was something wrong. As it is, I revel in the nothing. I drink it in.

  The ship has this thing that we call the Bubble, built into the ceiling of the main room, a raised dome of impenetrable plastic where we can get a 360-degree view of everything around us – and when they were all still alive I could see it, and they told me what it was we were seeing, what was Earth, when the light was right. From that distance it looked white, almost. Shiny, like a tiny coin.

  When we first woke up it was all I wanted to stare at, even when we were dealing with Arlen’s body. Using the telescope computers’ highest zoom. We left in August, and the clouds were thin. Those first couple of days I would just catch myself watching Earth behind us, marvelling when the planet was half in darkness, a nearly perfect line jutting across the land, scraping along as the planet turned, a duvet being slowly pulled back, waking people as it went. At any given moment you could see how much of any country was still asleep, their cities lit up like embers, and how much was awake, lights off, going about their business. Through the digital telescopes we could see ships in the sea, the path they were cutting, tiny dots with white trails like slugs. We could see planes hitting the atmosphere, commercial flights. We could see the shape of cities, and make faces out of them; we could see faces in the clouds, only from the other side of them.

  Being in space gives you a sense of philosophy, a sense of something other than yourself. You look out at the sky – because we’re used to that thing above us being sky – but when you’re part of it, what is it then? It’s nothing, or it’s everything. It’s just where you are. Here, in the middle of space, or at the end, or the start, I have no idea – here is just where I currently am.

  The beeping starts again. It’s been hours, days maybe, and I’ve barely thought about it. I’ve been sleeping. Being in constant total darkness makes you far more tired than you realize. I wonder how they do it in the Arctic, in Iceland. And we have clocks here, but they’re hidden, on computers, so you forget when day starts and night ends, or vice versa. It’s easy to sleep when you ought not. I might be on a tenhour cycle of days now, for all I know.

  The beeping cuts through the hum of engines, and the light, even as tiny as it is, can be seen all the way across the main room. The screen has that same message, that same chain of numbers, and, again, the search box on the Help software doesn’t offer anything. 39% fuel now; it seems to be going down faster than I predicted, and faster than I would like. Faster than it should, actually, and by some way. I try typing the numbers into the computer back at itself, like it’s a line of code, an instruction – maybe this is its way of giving me help, offering me a sort of sentient way to turn this thing around? – but nothing happens. I’m sure that the pilots would have known what to do with it. Arlen would have flicked a switch, one of the hundreds labelled with numbers and abbreviated codes, and that would have stopped it. Quinn would have tapped the screen, smiled at the number.

  ‘They’ve found us!’ he would have said. ‘All the way out here! And they’ve brought our favourite food and drink with them!’ And we’d have had a meal at our table with the gravity switched on, not worried about how much of the energy it would waste, and not worried about whether we’d make it home because we would already be there.

  A few hours later the beeping finally stops. The ship is now on 38%.

  It drops around a percentage point every few hours. I’ve taken to watching it properly. There’s a diagnostic control you can input that I read about in the Help files – I’ve read them all now, digital-cover to digital-cover – that shows you exact values, so you can watch the fuel tick down in millilitres, but that takes the fun away from it. This has become a game, seeing if I can predict when it will next click over. I can get it down to an art: the engines have a remarkably constant rate of consumption, and there’s no resistance out here to bog us down, slow us, change the maths. My first guess is three hours off; my third just twenty minutes. By 33% I nearly have it at a countdown.

  This is the moment in the film where that word repeats – countdown, countdown, countdown – and we fade to the beginning of the mission, as we’re all being strapped into our stasis beds. We were only allowed to stay in them for two days – a number that didn’t rely so much on science as the few tests that had gone before (which we assumed were on monkeys, but didn’t ask) – because they were depriving us of oxygen, to keep us under, to keep us stable. We asked what could happen if something went wrong and we had too much or too little oxygen, and the doctors told us that we could get cramps, that sort of thing. As a journalist, you notice tells. It’s like gamblers: there’s a fine art to seeing when people are lying, when they’re holding aces. What you develop in my line is something else, though, a stage past that. It tells you when the giveaway signs are something you shouldn’t push. Leave it alone, it’ll be better that way. The doctors knew something, or suspected something, and we signed documents that agreed that they had no legal control over us; that we chose this trip, and the inherent risks therein. You don’t want to know. The launch itself was automated, and we were all asleep before we even heard the countdown voice over the loudspeaker (which I assume that they did, though I have no proof). Stasis
is odd: it’s not cold, but you’re frozen. Really, you’re just asleep, but whatever drugs they give you shut down as much of your body as they can without causing any damage, and, as you sleep, they lower the temperature. When you come out you are soaking – the sci-fi films of the 1970s got that much right – but from your own sweat. But there’s no shivering, no hang-over, no feeling of sickness. You come out, you shower. (We have a pod in the back, in the changing room next to the airlock, that you climb into. You press on the ceiling – which stops you floating upwards – and the pod fills with soapy water, which is sucked out, and then fills with recycled water, which gets sucked out again. I haven’t used it in days. I keep forgetting.) We did the stasis because of the G-forces – the acceleration, Quinn explained to me as we were strapped in, was so great that we could all be damaged from the initial launch to break from the Earth’s atmosphere, and we were going to pass so close to the Moon that we would maintain the speed until we were clear of it, and we were going to be going so fast that there would be an atmospheric change, a drop in temperature that we couldn’t even hope to survive. Stasis kept us whole and kept us alive. We only needed to be there for a few days, but then, why not miss as much of the trip as possible? We woke up when we were well past the Moon, and we found Arlen, dealt with that, then we took turns in the shower, and then opened the vents for a few seconds to suck out all the water that was floating around. We were awake then, and we went about our business: checking the systems, checking we were all healthy, making notes, recording interviews, watching the Earth become a dot through the Bubble.