The Explorer taq-1

by James Smythe

  The computer tells me that there’s an ALERT, and that the battery is down to 10%. It must be the gravity field. I had no idea it took that much power. I’ve just managed to lose a week of my life, all so that I could shatter my leg apart. Fuck it. I switch the engines back on. I start drifting upwards as the battery power percentage disappears to a corner where it displays a recharging symbol, and the 9% moves back to the centre of the screen. 9% of fuel, and the life support ticks down on cue, matching that number. 9%. My life, in single digits.

  I sleep, but I don’t remember actually dropping off. I remember lying against the bed, the straps tugging slightly at my side, my leg hanging limp. The lack of gravity makes this wonderful, my leg floating free and easy behind me, swinging like a cat’s tail. I remember wondering why I couldn’t sleep, getting annoyed at the hum of the engines, the light from the monitors. I remember thinking about Elena, and then the computer beeped to 8%, and I decided to wake up. I’m not even tired any more.

  I put on Wanda’s videos, and in them she is cleaning the front console. ‘This is the fun part of the job,’ she says, ‘this is where the action is.’ She seems so sad, like she doesn’t want to be here.

  ‘Do you have to be careful when cleaning this stuff?’ Video-me asks. She shakes her head and leans in towards the camera conspiratorially.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘None of this actually does anything; it’s all smoke and mirrors.’

  As the computer ticks down to the 7% mark I am sitting at the backup terminal, reading about the propulsion systems. There is a schematic showing me the sequence and code to enter into the computer to accelerate the engines, to take us to maximum power. We are using most of the power of the ship, apparently. The piezoelectric batteries have barely charged, certainly not enough to make it worth my while to use them. I don’t want to wait, not any more. I’m going to end this. There’s a self-destruct, like how all the best old films and stories had one, built in to stop American technology falling into the hands of our enemies. I don’t know why it’s here; all I know is that it is. It’s called something else; it’s labelled as a ‘Crash Assist’, in case we were headed back to Earth too quickly, and we needed to shed the craft and let the stasis pods float back to Earth on their own, with their own in-built parachutes. It makes the hull break up into pieces, like Lego, and leaves everything else to fall of its own accord. Everything shatters. It feels appropriate. It makes the engines accelerate briefly, just for a few seconds, far beyond their natural ability, to short them out; and then the ship opens itself, and here’s all the people. I have just enough energy to do it, according to the computer. Just enough.

  The guidelines tell me that, in case of emergency, I am to jettison all unnecessary cargo. I seal the main hull off from the back of the ship and open the external rear doors and the food stockpiles, the external suits, the oxygen tanks, everything gets sucked out. It’s much faster than I imagined, a real ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moment. I shut the doors and read the next guideline. First, ensure the rest of the crew are safely in stasis. (Ha! Emmy looks at me through the glass, safe and sound, tucked in.) Next, prepare your stasis bed for yourself, and enter these instructions.

  I type the complicated string of numbers into the computer. Ensure that everything is secure – hatches, doors, the stasis beds – and then press the Enter key. Caution! Upon pressing the key a countdown will initiate, and when finished, the engines will reach Maximum Efficiency. The countdown will last 30 seconds. I take one last look around the ship. There’s nothing here for me. I pull myself to Arlen’s chair again, stare out of the view screen: It’s so peaceful. There’s nothing but blackness for as far as I can see. I strap myself in, and lean over to switch the gravity on again. If I’m going to do this, I want to feel it: I don’t want to be floating, airlessly. I want the stress. I want to know what it feels like. I want to see it, and I don’t want to have battery backup left to keep me here, all broken bones and torn limbs, lying in pain, waiting to die, before finally choking to death, suffocating without air. I think I am saying all of this aloud, to nobody. I think.

  Gravity kicks in immediately, and the pain clambers back up my broken leg with the weight I’m suddenly putting on it. I hit Enter, and the countdown starts. 30, 29, 28. My life, the last few weeks, has been dictated by numbers. 27, 26. I go years without thinking about them, thinking instead about words. 25, 24, 23. Suddenly I find them the most important things in the world. 22, 21. Countdowns, percentages, time: they all matter. 20, 19. And the message, the numbers on the screen. 18, 17, 16. I’ll die, never knowing what they mean. 15, 14. They’ll be a MacGuffin, always eluding me. 13, 12, 11. Like everything else, they’ll just fade, I suppose, 10, as I move on, wherever it is that I’m going, 9, and nobody will ever know that I didn’t know what it was, 8, just another batch of trophies and 7 commiserations on somebody’s 6 shelf, and I hope she 5 misses me as much as I 4 want her to, because oh, God, Elen3a, I miss you so 2 much, so much 1 it hurts.

  I can’t move. I can barely see. There’s water everywhere, it feels like, and I try to gulp in breaths through my mouth, but I can feel it twist and move, and never actually get the air that I want from it. I can make out the shapes of the numbers on the screen, but they aren’t important, not any more. This is it. I stare at the window in front of me, at the cracks that are starting to form in the plastic (another me would have asked why they don’t test this!) and at the space; there’s suddenly something in the distance, blacker than the rest of it, somehow. It’s more tranquil than everything else I can see, with no stars, just an expanse of pure, absolute night, so black that it almost looks solid, like I could just reach out and touch it. I’m focused on it when the crack directly in front of me splits like my leg, and it pulls the window out almost wholly. All the sound dulls away, and I feel the clasps attaching me to the chair being pulled at, tugged, yanked. As we reach the blackness of space I come free and I can suddenly hear that blackness, that somehow, here in the vacuum, it has noise, a roar, a filthy, gasping roar, like a whirlpool, a maelstrom, but I’m spinning out of the ship, and out of myself, and out here, in the deepest part of space that man has ever been, it feels like somebody is holding me, telling me that it will all be all right as I take one last breath of air, of actual air, the last one left on the ship, and I swallow it down and let it wash all over me, knowing that it will be the one that I take as I die, and then I regret this, because maybe I gave up too soon, and Elena wouldn’t be proud of me, giving up like this, because she always told me that I was the strong one, and I see the blackness, worse than space, worse than anything, utterly black, and it swallows me whole.

  PART TWO

  We live, as we dream – Alone.

  – Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  1

  Elena’s voice; soft, eager. She asks me to wake up, so I do. I lean over to her, tell her that I’ve heard her say this before. She laughs.

  ‘Cormac,’ she says, ‘you have to save yourself. You have to wake up.’

  I open my eyes, and it’s the same blackness for a second, so dark I can’t think, even, and I can feel it in my eyes, in every part of me; and then the roar of the ship’s engines, but with that noise behind them, like an echo, like a microphone that distorts your voice into the timbre of some horror-movie villain. Then the noise stops, but it’s still so cold I can barely see anything, and it suddenly hits me; the temperature, the noise. The ship tore itself apart; or I thought that it did. I try to pull myself to my feet, but then I realize that I’m not on the floor at all; the gravity is gone still. These are the rules of space travel. I can barely see anything, because the cold is making my eyes hurt, and I can’t hear anything, even myself when I try to shout, because the sound from the engines – it must still be the engines, although they should be gone, destroyed, sucked into the void – is like a howl, totally decimating the air, filling it with itself and nothing else, like white noise. I feel my way around, hitting every surface I brush against in slow
motion, trying to work out where I am. It’s freezing cold, so cold that it hurts, that when I gulp for breath it almost burns my lungs to take it in. I am back on the Ishiguro, or I never left. Either way, this is my ship. I feel the rounded screen-door of one of the beds, find the handle, wrench it open. They’re all dead, and I’m not, but if I don’t get inside I will be. All of a sudden, here and now, I want to save myself. I wonder how much of what I felt before – what I saw, my drift into the darkness, the ship exploding – how much of it was real. Did I even do the self-destruct? Did I somehow imagine it all? The door hisses open, and I see his face, suddenly clear: Arlen. His alreadydead body is worth far less than my survival; even though my bed is only feet away, I can feel the pull inside the ship’s atmosphere, threatening to tear me apart.

  I unclip him, push him to one side and slide in in his place. I remember sleeping in these things from the first time I did it. It’s hazy, distant, but still there. You don’t forget something this important. There’s thirty seconds before you sleep, thirty defined seconds and then there’s nothing. I stare out of the glass of the pod and then I remember my leg, which now is healed, the blood only a tired stain on the clothes, faded almost completely, and I can move it, flex it, and I know that something – either the end, before, or this now – cannot be real.

  The door to the bed opens and spits me out. This is how it was the first time, still totally familiar; the weirdest sensation, leaving you soaking wet, gasping for air, as if, almost, you’ve forgotten how to breathe. For that first second it’s so alien, so complicated, and there’s so much water dripping off you that it feels like you’re drowning, maybe. The water drips off me, and the ship sucks it into its vents, ready for reprocessing, for turning into drinking water, shower water. I’m dry in seconds.

  My eyesight is still screwed up, so I rub at my eyes, blink wildly. I jam my foot against the corner of the room, steady myself. The whir of the ship – engines on, moving quickly, but nothing like the noise I heard before, when I woke – is nearly distracting, because it’s so quiet again, that same hum as it always was, engines working fine, ticking along. Then I see Arlen. I had forgotten. I’d forgotten what he looked like when we opened the bed, found him there. He looks the same; almost blue, flaking like an old wall.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say to him, ‘I had to get into the bed.’ I pick him up – he weighs nothing, like an over-full sack of dust – and put him back, strapping him down, tying him in. I hate to touch him, but I have to, so I’m careful. The ship is so dark still, and I’m suddenly not used to it. ‘Lights,’ I say, and they flick on one by one. Everything here is like it was. I look to the cockpit: I remember it being pulled off, cracks spreading across the view screen, then being torn out. It’s all so clean. I look around to see if Emmy is okay in her bed: she’s still strapped in, as if nothing ever happened. She looks utterly tranquil, peaceful. Her eyes are shut. I look at the rest of them: Arlen, so blue and chalky; Quinn, handsome and sharp-jawed, stony-faced; Guy, his face in a smirk, almost; Wanda, Dogsbody, but her eyes aren’t red any more, and her face is clean, which is odd. Then I get to the last bed, my bed, which should be empty; but there’s a body in there already, like all the others, and I take a second before I focus on the face, recounting, wondering if I’ve fucked up, and then I really look at him. It’s me, my face. He’s clean-shaven and pure and his cheeks are glossy and his hair parted and neat. He looks as I did weeks ago, when we left on this mission. He is in my bed, and he is breathing softly, the gentle rise of his chest, the puff of his cheeks, sleeping as I sleep, the exact same way.

  ‘Fuck,’ I say. I hit the glass front with my hand, wanting to stay where I am, let me focus on the face; I try to breathe, but it clogs in my throat, so I cough it out, force it out. I pull myself up, until we’re face to face, look through the glass. ‘This is a trick,’ I shout, ‘who’s fucking with me?’ but I know that it isn’t a trick, that I’m not being fucked with. I feel my guts roar, faster than I can control, and I taste it in my mouth, vomit, awful and bitter. I swallow it down on instinct, because I don’t want it floating around. Every part of me wants to open the bed, but I don’t. I can’t explain it. I don’t.

  Shaking – quivering – I hurl myself across the room towards the computers in the cockpit, look at the date on the computers, at the updates from Ground Control. The screen is emblazoned with the message that we had waiting for us when we woke up – Dear crew, it reads, Welcome to your new home for the foreseeable future! – and it’s time-stamped, marked as unread. I check the monitors, the gauges and dials and numbers that I know how to read. We’re on 93% fuel, which means we’re only hours out of warp, and that’s what it was when we woke up, one by one, popping out of the beds ready to be the explorers we were destined to be. Arlen was meant to be first up, first out of bed. When we got out of the sleeping pods, Arlen didn’t. He was meant to have been up hours before us, preparing the ship, turning the lights and heat on, checking that the life support systems were working. He died, and we assumed that the system malfunctioned. It was unexplainable, no matter how hard we tried: the diagnostic tests showed everything working perfectly. It hits me again: the system didn’t malfunction; I did. I opened his bed during warp, and I dragged him out and I squirrelled myself away in his place. I pull myself across to him and examine his body through the glass. This is what the scientists warned us could happen if we weren’t in stasis: rapid dehydration, massive decomposition of the flesh, incredible bone loss. I wish I had closed his eyes before I put him back in, because they look like they’re fake, like they’re made of paper, the pupils drawn on in dusty black pen.

  I killed Arlen. It’s all I can think, and all I can see, and I’m so confused that I start crying, and I have no idea how I can stop.

  Arlen had an hour before the rest of the crew were woken up, and now I have that hour, somehow. I swear into the space around me, and I cry so much and watch as the tears peel away from my face before they drip off, and I stare at Arlen, who watches me, letting me know how guilty I am. This is my fault.

  I have to hide, I think. They can’t see me like this. The ship is just a huge fucking coffin, rigged to explode, dragging its crew into the furnace as it goes, and we exploded because I was there, and this – all of this, seeing myself, like a mirror, like a trick of the light, like a magician’s finest hour – all of this is wrong and unreal, because it has to be.

  Only: it feels real. I gasp and feel the floor, and it feels real enough, and everything is how it was. I don’t know how, but I’m back on the Ishiguro, and it’s the start of the trip, and I’m not the me that I was.

  I panic, because I don’t understand what’s happening, how I can be here, and pull myself through the rest of the ship, turning the lights on all the way down to the engine room, past the airlock and the changing room. There are rooms back here. We barely ever had cause to go into them, because they didn’t have anything that we needed. Two rooms near the back – the base – of the ship were exclusively for fuel cells and engine access panels, another exclusively for the battery; they had routine checks, mostly by Guy or Wanda, but the rest of us didn’t touch them. We weren’t trained to, and we didn’t want to. One of the storerooms was where most of the food supplies were kept, but that was too frequently used; and then the storage room for walk supplies, emergency power tools, that sort of thing. This is the one: I don’t remember ever going in here, because we so rarely needed anything from here. If you needed to hide somewhere, this would be the place. From where I’m floating, the ship is actually enormous, cavernous, far bigger than six people needed; so much space filled with nothing but fuel cells or enormous batteries or storage crates. This is where I’ll hide. I find a crate, full of spare parts for the ship, piping hose and sheet metal. It’s fastened to the grated floor with clips and carabiners, to keep it rigid in no-gravity. I loosen the straps, only slightly, just enough to leave a gap about a foot deep underneath it, and I slide under it. This will be fine as a hiding pl
ace, unless they put on the gravity and the box falls down to crush me. That won’t happen. Assuming that what I think has happened has actually happened – I am back here, at the start, and everything is going to happen the way that it originally did – the gravity won’t be put on for a short while yet.

  I think about what I’ll do when the crew wake up. I’ll go to them, and tell them what’s happened, surprising them as they do their routine checks on the systems, as they run their diagnostics. When they find Arlen’s body, I’ll explain: they all died, and I was alone, and then I died as well, blowing up the ship because I didn’t want to die slowly and ingloriously, and now I’m here, and I killed Arlen, dragged his body out of sleep before I should have, left him in the coldness of the ship to choke to death, to freeze. Hello, I’ll say, take pity on me; even though I know that they won’t. They’ll hear my words as the ranting and raving of a madman, of an identikit stowaway. They’ll brandish their pitchforks and storm the castle, and demand that I’m killed for what I’ve done: or, at the very least, held accountable. They won’t listen. I know that the me that’ll be out there won’t listen, that’s for sure. He’ll stare at his hitherto-unknown twin as if he’s insane. He’ll want to know what’s happening, and he’ll be overly aggressive, to prove he’s not a part of the conspiracy, and they’ll want answers, proof that I’m me, that he’s me, or that one of us isn’t me.