The Explorer taq-1

by James Smythe

  ‘We drank a lot, right?’ she asked, even though she knew the answer. ‘I woke up feeling ragged this morning.’ She smiled constantly at me; the other passengers laughed gently, because they weren’t involved in the drinking, weren’t even invited. ‘I’m shattered.’ She kept letting her knee drift and bounce slightly from side to side against mine, brushing against me. ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I told her. ‘Headache, but, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. I had spent the rest of the night deciding that it was going to be the last time anything happened. Emmy was beautiful and strong and funny, but I loved Elena. I knew that, and I knew it wouldn’t change. I decided that I was going to tell Emmy on the plane, where she couldn’t make a scene, but I was sure that she wouldn’t actually care. It was all so casual, I was sure she wouldn’t mind.

  We had seats next to each other, because of the order in which we checked in. Guy sat on the other side of me, and I was in the middle, and as soon as we took off Guy went to sleep, his head lolling onto my arm. Emmy found it hilarious and mimicked him, and then her arm slid around mine, her hand on the crook of my elbow, and she shut her eyes. I left her for a few minutes, until the stewardess offered us drinks, and then I shook her gently. She didn’t want anything.

  ‘Last night,’ I said, ‘was really special.’ She knew where this was going straight away. Guy stayed asleep – or pretended – and we whispered our conversation to each other. She barely said anything, but left her hand wrapped around my arm for longer than she needed to, until well after it was clear that we weren’t going anywhere.

  And I kicked myself when she took it away, because of what I did. Because we were close before, and that would ruin it. Because part of me still wanted her – the part that was younger, that had more of his hair, less of a paunch, that still remembered what it was like to stay out until whenever, that wasn’t trying for a baby with his wife, that hadn’t already lost their first successful attempt, that didn’t want to keep her, to struggle with her through whatever it was that was going to come to us.

  When we landed at JFK, Elena was waiting on the other side of the gate, suitcase in hand. She had only just arrived, but hadn’t told me she was coming. Emmy walked slowly and spoke to Quinn, who darted around saying goodbye to everybody, shaking their hands, and she didn’t watch as I kissed Elena hello, and put my arms across her shoulders, folded them around her back, and promised her that we would make everything work.

  Three pills left, and I think I can sleep. I hope I can sleep. I shut my eyes but get nowhere, so I sneak out into the expanse of the ship again, pull myself along the corridors to the cabin. I check the cabinet – as if I didn’t see Emmy locking it, like, maybe she left the lock open – and I decide that I have to take risks. I open the main food cupboards, take Big Mac bars, dessert bars, Coca-Cola sachets. I sit at the computer and scroll through my photographs up close, and I look at Elena and myself, at my parents. I look at the folders of my writing, the blog entries I’ve been making ever since I got onto the ship. They detail everything in painstaking fashion, even down to conversations, time stamped, dated.

  ‘I don’t need these,’ I say, because I’ve seen it all before, like a director watching the rushes, seeing exactly how it actually looks when taken away from the script. I check the computers and sit in the cockpit seat, the main pilot’s seat, and I spin, because that’s what I did before, when I was all alone, after all of these people died. I move down through the ship towards the changing room, pull my clothes off, stuff them into the locker with my name on it. I still remember the combination – Elena’s birthday, my birthday – and I shower in the pod. The water is amazing, even though it’s cold and makes me flinch away from it at first, eventually settling in, and when I’m done I put the vacuum on, put the excess water back into the system. I shave in front of the mirror, and when I’m done – when the vague beard is gone, when my face is clean of all the dirt and grime I’ve picked up in the lining – I examine myself, pulling my skin, which seems loose. I’ve lost weight – a couple of stone, maybe two and a half, I’d guess, but maybe more – and the skin seems to have bunched around my eyes. I can pull the skin below them down, see the sting-red of my tired eyeballs. I clean my teeth, swilling water around my mouth, using my finger with toothpaste, feeling the sting where they’re sensitive. I’ll need fillings, I think. I look at my body in the mirror: my ribs.

  I sit in Quinn’s seat in the cockpit, flick switches that I know don’t do anything, and I call up the computer screen to tell me how to turn the ship. The instructions must be in here, but there are thousands of files, manuals packed into PDFs, all of them interactive and searchable, but the search results turn up nothing. The ship seems to have failsafes, but we weren’t meant to know them – or, we weren’t meant to read about them on badly formatted online manuals. I think about sending a message back home, to ask them what we can do – to pretend that it’s on behalf of the ship itself, say that we have to turn around, that we’re all ill or something, that there’s an issue with, what, an engine? – but I won’t be awake by the time they reply, and it’ll be the crew that will get the message, and then they’ll know there’s an intruder. It might save their lives, but it won’t save mine. And which is more important?

  I go back to the lining and take another pill, because I can’t deal with it. I can’t deal with knowing that I’m here with no purpose, and whatever purpose I can give myself – to save this ship, save this crew (or what’s left of them), to save myself (other version), to return the crew home… I don’t know if any of it’s right. In TV shows and movies and books, when somebody time travels – those words, like a death knell, a resounding echo in a box I’ll never climb out of – they’re given a mission, or they work it out, and they know what they have to do. They either have to get back to their time; or they have to change something (put it right or put it wrong, or fix what’s been broken by somebody else); or they have to learn to live with what’s happened. I have no markers, no clues. All I can do is what feels right: ride out my gut instinct. My instinct has told me not to speak to the rest of the crew, not to let them know that I’m here. My instinct has told me how to save myself, how to ride this out, to do everything I’m meant to have done. Because that’s another rule of time travel: it’s fixed, and if it’s not, it’s meant to be. It’s like a circuit, a closed circuit: in order to get electricity running, it needs to work at both ends. If it doesn’t, it won’t even start. It needs to be a closed circuit.

  ‘I think I’m going insane,’ I say to the darkness. I told Elena that once, when I had writer’s block, when I was struggling to get anything down on paper, to make sense of any of the words I was writing.

  ‘You’re just slightly broken,’ she had told me, ‘you’re broken, and you’ll have to work out how to fix yourself.’ I open my eyes and she’s there, for a second, smiling at me. She disappears as I blink away tears, and I remember where I am, where I’m going. Soon Guy will die, and then Quinn, and then Emmy, and then it will be me and him, I and me, and we’ll be alone, and I’ll have to do something drastic: save the day, become the hero. Bump my name up the credits list.

  I spend the next day running through every aspect of my first time: going over every detail. I go through all the details, everything that’s happened to me this time, how it jibes with what happened my first time around. I woke up alone in the chamber just after we hit warp and I dragged myself around, and I killed Arlen and then I slept, but I woke up first and I tried to find somewhere to hide, and then I made a tent but it was a stupid idea, totally flawed, and then I found the lining and I slid myself in and I tried to keep it all together, and I took pills for my pain because I’m addicted to them – but how can I be addicted, I’ve barely taken them for days, only a couple of days before I blew the ship up, but maybe that’s enough time, maybe they’re just that strong, that potent – and I don’t have actual physical pain any more, just the pain left beh
ind when I’m not taking one of the pills, and then I watched as Wanda killed herself, and then I started to work out what’s going on, because that’s the only way this can go, the only way it can, ultimately, end.

  The first time we – that is, the trainees, the final few (or as near as for the others to barely matter, because they would soon be sent back to their homes and left unable to speak about what happened thanks to NDAs that could cause them to lose everything they owned if broken) – caught wind that something might have been happening between Emmy and Quinn was during the final stretch of our training. We were spending full days in a to-scale simulation of the ship, putting ourselves to work as we would on the real thing. It was a week, solid and intense, and the DARPA people controlled everything – our light, engine noise, the amount of gravity we had to play with, our level of oxygen (which they fluctuated at whim, to see how we coped with the stress that a lack of the stuff brought on). We obeyed orders, but the whole thing was harmless. One thing that DARPA couldn’t stop was us recognizing how fake it all was: because outside the windows it was a grey box, a featureless space of corridors and different-sized basic rooms; and because there was nothing that could really go wrong. When DARPA triggered an alarm, and the sensors threw up that there was a crisis with one of the engines, Guy slowly led Quinn outside the fake ship and they drifted along and fake-fixed the fake problem. Upon their return we tried to clap them, but it seemed stupid to actually do it; like, the idea was nice, but the execution failed. It never felt real enough.

  ‘We get it,’ Quinn said, ‘I’m going to be the world’s biggest hero.’

  ‘Nope,’ Emmy said, ‘just ours.’ And that was it. That was all it took. The comment was totally innocuous, harmless. But she let the words linger in the air longer than they needed to, and Quinn didn’t joke after it. He soaked the praise up, even though we knew that it meant nothing at all, but he lingered on it. They didn’t hug or holds hands, and there wasn’t anything else to give it away, but that set us talking.

  ‘Oh, they’re smitten,’ Arlen said, ‘even if they don’t know it yet.’ When it had been me, nobody had even suspected. Now, with Quinn, only weeks after Emmy and I spent our night together, Emmy was suddenly gossip. We rode out the rest of the week being ourselves in that fake ship, trying not to laugh when something from the real world intruded – a pipe fell, or a computer booted to Windows, because the real OS we were going to be using wasn’t yet ready, so we were on a facsimile, a beaten-up version of Windows, skinned to be what we nearly needed. Quinn joked about eating all the food we had, every part of our supply.

  ‘If I just gorge myself, you reckon they’ll bring us a proper meal? I’d kill for a steak and fries.’

  ‘Pepper sauce,’ Emmy said.

  ‘Oh shit, yes,’ Quinn replied. We watched them riff off each other, and we all suspected, but they knew.

  When the week was over we all went back to the hotel to sleep. We had a few days before the next round, and Elena had flown out again to meet me. She was already in the room when I got there: she had ordered dinner, room service, and a bottle of wine, and we sat at that funny little table that wasn’t quite large enough and ate from those plates that didn’t seem quite large enough.

  ‘Tell me all about it,’ she said, so I did, but I almost singularly left out Quinn and Emmy’s names, because I wasn’t sure what I would tell her if I even began to think about them too much.

  In the ship, the original version of me writes almost constantly, or at least sits at the computer and thinks about writing. He puts his fingers on the home keys and nearly starts so often, over and over again. I remember that it became hard at this point: hard to constantly send something worth reading, hard to maintain that daily rapport with a readership that you didn’t know and couldn’t predict. Did they want to know more about the ship? About the passengers? About me? I wrote extended eulogies for those who died, and I fed some of Quinn’s measurements into the paragraphs of text – here’s where we are, here’s what we’ve seen. Sometimes I included pictures of things that we passed, looking totally different on that screen than they did with the naked eye. Photographs of objects so far away that they were barely perceptible are suddenly clear to the readers, close up and distinct. This isn’t what we saw, I remember writing one day, because out here it’s just black with specks and sparks, like it is from your gardens in the middle of the night. It’s no different, really, but here you don’t have the mugs of hot chocolate and the blanket wrapped around you and the home-made telescope. Here, you’ve got the white of the ship and the cold of the outside, and we’re not in control of when we stop watching because it’s all that there is.

  I get to watch the back of the me as he hunches and doesn’t type, or occasionally does, and then clicks to send the work, first draft always, no chance to change anything once that button is pushed. I was never a first draft writer, but the occasion, the circumstances dictated that I adapt. The signal is bitten apart and spat out, across hundreds of thousands of miles, further than any information has ever been sent, and I don’t know when it will arrive – because of the lag, so it’ll get there in two days? Three days? – but that’s the nature of technology. I wonder if they’re sent before another version of me gets to rewrite them, alter them for my benefit. I hope so, or the stuff that’s published back on Earth will be a depressing insight into the mind of a complete madman.

  I spend another night roaming the body of the ship. I clean my teeth first, feeling another one wiggle in its socket when I push it with the brush, so I use my tongue to hold it steady as I do them. When I spit out blood into the tube it’s not the thin bright red of gum disease; it’s thick and dark, and the tooth follows it, clattering into the reedy vacuum before disappearing forever. It was a canine, and the home is wide and sweet to the taste. I shit and I wash, because I feel like that’s what I need to do. In the mirror I stare at the scars across my back, like whip-marks, and I find another scar that I’ve never noticed before at the back of my head, just under my hairline. When I’m finished I dress in a clean uniform, and I shave again, using my own razor, and I cut my fingernails. I rifle through the cupboards for food, taking a Big Mac bar and eating it in the corridor, and I take my last painkiller with it, that single tablet being my starter and dessert rolled into one, changing everything after it hits me. The pain had been back; my leg had been numbing, but now I know that that pain isn’t even real. The pain is actually somewhere else entirely. I don’t need the pills: my wounds are completely healed. God knows how many I’ve had since I started this loop – or this pattern, maybe it makes more sense to call it a pattern, because it sounds less insane, more like something mathematical than fantastical – but it’s a lot. The scars speak to that. I’m not in pain: I’m addicted. The two feel so similar. I shake and shiver and think about how I’m not taking another pill. I can, I know, survive this.

  I sit at the computer and look at how long is left of the trip, how much we’ve got to go. My estimations tell me that Guy’s going to die the day after tomorrow, which means we’re heading towards me being all alone, and then the point of no return. It’s so dark in the ship, and with the people here – still alive – it feels creepier than it did, as if I’m in a haunted house, waiting for something to jump out at me. From the beds, it feels as if their eyes are watching me, even though they’re closed. Back before, when I finished it, I felt totally alone. Now, I feel anything but.

  I open files, trying to find any information that might not be in the ship’s database. I try to get into Guy’s folder, to see if there are any documents in there, but it’s got a password for some reason, so I try Quinn’s, and I read the titles of hundreds of banal files, bits of nothing. I see a file titled Emmy, and I think about opening it, reading, but I don’t, because I already know that it’ll be a letter or a picture of the two of them together, or something. Something that I’m not meant to see. I respect privacy. I have to.

  Then, from behind me, a hiss, the noise of a b
ed opening in the darkness, and the thump in my gut that I should move as fast as possible. I hurl myself backwards, scrabbling down the corridor towards the storage rooms just in time to see Guy drift across the doorway.

  ‘Hello?’ he whisper-shouts, but I’m inside the storage room already, pulling myself into the lining. The door’s shut before he’s even halfway down the hallway, and I watch through the vents as he looks in every room. ‘Hello?’ he whispers again, and he shines a torch, but it only catches the corners of the rooms. There’s no trace of me, I realize – except for the files on the computer. I was in Quinn’s directory. I rush to the cabin and wait for Guy to return. He counts the bodies in the beds, making sure they’re all asleep, and then sits at the desk, straps himself in. He doesn’t even notice what files are up on screen: he backs out of the system, to the entrance screen. He’s focused, single-minded. He logs in as himself, opens a picture – an old man, an old woman, a very young boy that’s unmistakably Guy, only here he’s still Gerhardt, dressed in this ridiculous outfit, and I suppose these people must be his grandparents, or maybe his parents, but they’re very old – and he says something, very quietly, so quietly I can’t hear. I’ll never know what he said. He loads something onto one of the handhelds and then closes the screen, drifting from the console and down the corridor. I chase him until he’s in the changing room, where he latches himself to the bench and loads an app on the handheld. The program starts establishing contact with home base. Out here, this far, the bandwidth is next-to-nil. The quality is atrocious, the faces of the people in Ground Control little more than grey shapes against a background of static. He pulls an earphone from the device and I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I can hear his side of the conversation, whispered and calm, but still audible.