The Explorer taq-1

by James Smythe

  Guy’s videos. Fuck. I don’t think that I can watch them. Cormac laps them up, because he thinks that they will contain the secrets of the universe. He trusted Guy implicitly, and these videos – these brief, utterly vacuous interviews – are probably nothing but lies. Guy smiles, and jokes, and tells Cormac not to touch anything. He’s lying about everything, and Cormac doesn’t have a clue. He tells the me in the video about what it means to be an explorer, proselytizing about how good the feeling will be to have done what we will do. When he’s done, Cormac writes a new blog post, about how Guy would have known what to do.

  He could have fixed it all , he writes. He wouldn’t have been in this mess, and he would have made it home, and it – this – would all have been worth it, for him.

  When Cormac has finally gone to sleep I rush out and alter his post.

  Guy was a real fucking traitor, I write, and if you’re reading this, Ground Control, the rest of you are too. I hope you hate yourselves for what you did. I hope you feel guilty.

  It feels good to write it, to put it down, to actually speak it. I send it.

  When he wakes up, Cormac puts the Guy videos on again, as background noise. Guy talks about famous explorers.

  ‘They’ll remember you forever!’ he says.

  ‘Fuck you,’ I say out loud. Cormac doesn’t hear me.

  The next day he reads the numbers, over and over, and he sees the numbers and he tries to work out what it means again, as if the systems encyclopedias might somehow have updated, and might magically give him the answers he desires. He types it into the computer and I watch him as he spends the day reading stuff he’s already read. He gets into a thread about aliens – we’re back here again, that thinking that something internal might be something, that something – a flight of fancy – can spiral into thoughts of invaders, of extraterrestrial life, of so much more than being stuck in a tin can until you die. He knows they don’t exist. He knows that, here, so close to the Earth, really, not even a tenth as far as some of our deep-space satellites and probes have travelled, there’s no chance of finding anything. He knows, but he hopes. I don’t. Not that I’ve given up: I just don’t know where we go from here.

  ‘Save me,’ he whimpers.

  ‘I would if I could,’ I say. I wait all day for him to sleep, but he doesn’t, and we’ve totally lost track of time again, because it’s like the Arctic here, no lack of daylight from the strip lighting. I take the painkillers in the lining and sleep, so lightly, barely even sleeping. I can’t remember when I last had a full night; what it’s like to put my head to a pillow, to feel that stillness of a bed, of drifting into proper sleep. I can’t remember what it’s like to actually dream: the things that I had before, the echoes of previous versions of me, they weren’t anything to do with me letting go. If anything, they were me clinging on. I wait for Cormac to sleep so that I can go out there, but he doesn’t, so I watch him.

  I realize that I won’t get to sleep again before I die: at least, not in a bed, with a duvet, pillows, a mattress, the warmth of another person next to me, sharing my space.

  ‘I just want to get to say goodbye to Elena,’ he says. He’s looking at her photograph as the ship is full of the noise of the crew cheering, that first video home, where we lied and didn’t say anything about Arlen. The cheers seem to cling to everything Cormac says, rising and falling with a strange serendipity.‘I miss her so, so much.’ He strokes her photograph on the screen, and then clutches himself, pulls himself tight, winces at whatever it is that he’s thinking. ‘This is so unfair.’

  He reaches over and puts on the videos of Emmy again, to punish himself: because she’s as close to an admission of guilt as he can offer. He watches her talk about her training, smiling in her casual, semi-professional way, and he hammers the keyboard, writing letters to Elena, to his parents. He knows that they’ll never read them – that there’s no possible way that they ever could – but that doesn’t stop him. He cries as he writes them, finding it cathartic and powerful at first, because there’s real meaning there: and then he realizes that he’s done, that the people he’s writing to are even more dead than he is, and that there’s no going back from here. All he’s got left is to join them, and he’s always been an atheist, never believed in a higher power, especially not out here, where it’s so cold and dark and so absolutely full of nothingness.

  Tomorrow he’ll break his leg. We’re nearly there, Cormac. We’ve nearly made it.

  5

  As the other Cormac gives us gravity, I brace myself against the lining, pushing back to stop from falling, and I don’t get to see him fall because of that: but I hear the crack of his leg as he lands oddly, such a small fall, but so vital. It makes me wince, and I take a painkiller like a gut reaction, a reflex. He howls, and by the time I’m on tiptoes back at the vent all I can see is the blood, soaking through his white uniform, the bend in the trouser leg like a right-angled pipe, where the bone is jutting through. My own leg starts hurting just to look at it, and I rub at the scar, ill-formed and only barely healed. In the cabin, he pulls out Emmy’s medicine cabinet, yanks the drawers to the floor, growling like a chained dog as he does it. He’s remarkably resilient, holding himself together through the pain far better than I thought he would: there aren’t tears, just howls of agony. He paws at the anaesthetic needles, jabs them into his own neck and presses the button, and I watch as he gets that glossy look in his eyes and the drugs run through him, taking the edge off. It’s not enough: he immediately sticks himself with another, and he tries to ignore the angle that his jutting bone is making, and the blood. If he concentrates on the blood, he’s likely to lose it. Antiseptic injections, to prevent infection, are next: he sticks himself like an old pro, desperate to save himself on some battlefield, and then he laughs, as he remembers that he’s going to die, that antiseptic won’t help that, that none of this – the pain, the bone, the risk of infection – will make the slightest bit of difference when he’s dead. He decides to bind and tie off his leg, because he needs his mobility. He isn’t just going to lie on the floor of the craft and wait to die.

  I can’t remember exactly, but I think that that was the moment that I decided to end it for myself, rather than ride it out. I watch as he passes out, just as I did, as he keeps coming to, his mind rolling around from consciousness to not. He splints his leg, because he thinks that he should. He keeps sleeping, and if I didn’t know better I would be worrying that he was dead, but he isn’t. I do know better. I’m tempted to head out there, see what I can do, but there’s nothing. This is sewn-in, hewed. I could change something, but then only a few seconds – half a minute? A minute? – later I would be right back at the start. I’ve made it this far: let’s see what it’s like to die.

  He puts gravity back on when he wakes up again, starts the engines, watches as the 9% on the screen shouts at him, as the beeping of the 250480 tells him something he cannot understand. After a while he sleeps, in his bed, strapped in but with the door open so that his leg can drift. He leaves that part free and it swings around as he twitches in his sleep, like a cat’s tail. I manage to leave the lining for a few minutes, and I write a blog entry myself.

  Acceptance: the final stage of grief, right? Is this all I’ve been working towards?

  He coughs in his sleep, and I put myself back into the space between the walls. He doesn’t wake up, but I decide not to risk it. My daredevil days are over.

  My first interview, after I got past the paper stage, the form sent in and stamped and approved, my name written down somewhere by somebody as a potential candidate. We were sent to a building in New York, unlabelled from the outside, like a secret. We waited in a nondescript waiting room, the magazines on the table reflecting nothing but the secretary’s tastes, and we leafed through them and tried to not make eye contact with each other. We didn’t know why the others were there – we didn’t know what field they were from, or even if they were here for the same thing. The building had so many offices, and any
one of them might have been for a different DARPA project, and it wasn’t right to probe, so I didn’t. Nobody else did either. There was a part of me that wondered if it was a silent first test: can you make it through the first stage without getting excited, without spilling the beans? I passed, with flying colours.

  When they finally called me through to the room, I sat in a comfortable chair, one of those expensive ones they fill fancy office spaces with, and faced a panel of three, two women and a man, all older. They told me their names and shook my hand, and asked me why I had applied.

  ‘Because I want to explore something,’ I said. ‘It’s all that I’ve ever wanted to do.’ They wrote that down. ‘May I ask why you want to know?’ It was cocky, bolshy, but that was who I was, who I used to be, as a journalist. Before Elena died, and my world fell apart.

  ‘It’s crucial,’ they said, ‘because some people do this for the glory, for the rewards, and that’s not something that we necessarily want to encourage.’

  ‘So my answer was the right one?’ I asked, and they smiled, but didn’t reply. They asked me other questions – about my health, about Elena, my parents – and then told me that they would be in touch. They stood and shook my hand, and they each shook it harder than the last, and I thanked them for the opportunity and left. When I got out, the same people were in the waiting room, and they were all biting their nails or checking their emails, and I wondered about every single one of them: about whether they wanted onto the trip because they were excited about the opportunity, or because it was something to put on their CV. I looked at every single one of them and hoped that it was the latter, that they didn’t get the job and I did, because, I thought, my intentions were pure. I deserved it.

  Wanda’s videos fill the screens. She feigns excitement, and then leans in and whispers to me that the controls are fake, and then makes out that she’s joking. She’s not. She knows what’s going to happen. She knows everything, and she can’t deal with it, and she knows we’re all going to die. It’s just a matter of when.

  The me sits at the computers and reads everything again, and then stumbles upon the bit about the Crash Assist, where the craft jettisons the cargo to lose weight, then fires the stasis pods towards Earth with their own parachutes, and the rest of the hull collapses and falls apart, to harmlessly tumble towards the ground, the people, the sea, whatever. It’s a eureka moment. He’s in agony, still, dumb and blinkered by the drugs he’s taken – aren’t we all? I think – and he reads how to do it, over and over, and then starts typing into the computer, commands that he doesn’t understand but that he’s been instructed to use. Only now do I wonder why it was there, that fail-safe we would never use, and I realize that it was only ever intended to be used if something happened during take-off, the cargo being jettisoned from the rear to allow it to safely hit the sea we launched over, allowing for recovery of the ship’s guts, and maybe us, if there were even parachutes in the first place. He presses the Enter key, and the main hull door seals, and I realize that I’m locked out – my entrance to him is through that door, back past the lining, past the cargo rooms.

  He presses the button again, and the noise is awful, grinding and churning of doors that have never been opened before, and then the cold rushes to me – not actual cold, just the pull of the outside. There’s barely anything between me and space, nothing sealed, nothing airtight. I’ve got seconds, I reckon, until all the doors are open. I plough myself to the vent overlooking the changing room, kick at the vent as hard as I can, shoulder it, and it starts to give way, and then it does, and I’m into the room, pulling on a helmet as fast as I can manage, yanking my head into it as the air rushes out, slamming the visor down, breathing, fiddling with the dials to give myself some time, to get me breathing, and then the door to the changing room flies away from me, and I’ve got no time. I fix the bungee, because I’m suddenly afraid to die. This isn’t what I want.

  The ship is suddenly still, all the air gone. Everything from the cargo rooms, the changing room, all the loose bits and bobs are suddenly floating. They drift, and I go with them, knowing that Cormac is about to initiate the countdown, and I float to the doorway between us, stare through the transparent window set into it. I have to stop him doing this. If I have a reason for being here, it has to be that, surely? It has to be to save him. I hammer on it, but I know he won’t hear me, so I hammer harder, because there’s nothing else to do. He presses the button, and the lights dim, and the numbers on the computer screens wipe away, replaced by that countdown.

  30. He just sits in Arlen’s chair and watches it, 29, 28, 27. I in turn watch him, and then I can see it, out of the front window: that blackness, totally stark against the rest of the stars, like a puddle of oil; but slick, floating in front of us. I didn’t see it first time around: my eyes were too full of tears. 26. I get to the Bubble, 23, and look at it, and it gives me a reading straight away: ANOMALY, it says, ANOMALY 250480. I didn’t do this last time – the first time – because I didn’t see it, not until it was too late. What could a computer tell me about what was happening to me, or what was going to happen to me? Now it tells me everything: there’s something out here with us. With me.

  This something was our secondary objective; or, maybe, our primary objective, and we just didn’t know it; the thing that Guy yammed on about and we ignored, because he was a scientist doing science. It was the thing that he was going to measure, that he acted off-hand about, off-the-cuff, almost. He was lying. He knew about this – about how vast it is, how massive, how it must mean something. Where it was: that it was further than we could reach. He knew how we could reach it, though. This was his life’s work, and he knew that it would kill him. That’s why it was throwing up the message on screen so much: it was a warning. We were meant to fly into the storm, but we were never going to tell home how strong it was, or tell them how to combat it, or what it was going to do. We were just meant to tell them where it was. Anyway, maybe it would turn out to be harmless, just a smudge on a window. Or, maybe it’s something more important, deadly to the human race, sliding across space to swallow us whole. I suppose I’ve been inside it for awhile: I suppose it’s why this is so dark. Why I’m doing this over and over. I’ll never really know, not now. Now, it doesn’t actually matter.

  14 seconds left, and I read something on the screen about how much it’s grown, and then, based on that, projected growth, and I don’t know how big it’s going to get, or what that means, but I like to think that it means Guy was actually trying to save us all – like, maybe it’s going to get big enough to envelope the Earth, and maybe he was there all along, not the bad guy he ended his life as, but the one I made friends with, who seemed reasonable, who seemed penitent for what he had done. There’s a greater good.

  3, 2, 1, and the ship cracks up, and the pods jettison, because I hear them roar past, and then everything is silent. This is how it should be. The front wall of the Bubble splinters and I’m suddenly floating, attached to a large lump of hull that looks like an airlock, still, a metal box, dragging backwards. Cormac is in front of me, twisting forwards, still strapped to his chair, heading towards the blackness of the anomaly. He’s going to hit it, and that’s what sends him back to the start, makes him do this again: I have to stop it, save him.

  I push off the Bubble as fast as I can, blast CO2 for a boost, knowing that he’s only got seconds before this is pointless, before he’s done, and then I’m at his chair and pull him out of it, and the bungee goes taut but he’s still ahead of me. It’s attached to the helmet, so I yank it off, because I have to do something. The pressure makes me blind, and we were told to shut our eyes but I don’t, because this only ends one way. I have seconds, seconds, and then it hits me: this is what happened. I was here the very first time, because I have to have been for this all to happen, and I felt hands on me, because I was heading towards what is almost a wall of blackness, cloying and tangible, like thick ink, and I felt somebody – myself, this future version of me, the
me from now – save me, pull me away from the blackness, and towards the nothingness behind us. It’s a paradox, a closed loop: I was here so this could all happen as it did. You can’t change time, because my gut tells me I can’t. I parse it: I can do exactly what happened the first time, grab him, push him into the blackness, because that’s what I’m meant to do. Every thought I have that doesn’t involve it makes me hurt. But, then, here and now, that pain means very little to me. Cormac is the definitive version; I’m just a later version of him, a version that never has to exist. I have seconds to change everything, seconds when this might become something different, and I have to let us both go. The blackness – whatever it is – will cause him (or me) to go back to the start, prolong our lives for however long, cursing us. Now, I have to have the courage to do what he couldn’t. I make the decision, and my gut screams at me, aches, burns, and it feels wrong, but I have to do it, because this might be the only chance I get. What if every other time I’ve been here I’ve thought I’m meant to make it happen as it did? What if I thought I was meant to make the circuit closed, make it perfect, complete? Save Cormac by pushing him into the anomaly, because that way leads to life?

  Maybe this time I should try something different. Before, I spun around and I was saved. Now: I open my fingers and he opens his eyes, and he sees me, and I tell him that it will be all right, but this time I’m lying. I clutch onto him and fire the CO2 again. I look back and see it push apart the blackness, like throwing a stone onto the surface of a lake, once so still, now broken and disturbed, and I clutch Cormac as we push away from the anomaly, going away from the still-exploding ship, away from the blackness, away from everything. All we’ve got is each other, he and I, I and he, and I did what I had to do. He coughs and chokes in my arms, and I don’t look as all those things they warned us about start happening to him. I can feel him going in my arms, and then I can feel it happening to me, because now my eyes have been open, and you can never survive this, no matter what you do, who you are. I opened my eyes to look at the blackness as it swallows the wreckage of the ship, the hungriest thing I’ve ever seen: the darkest part of space, swallowing everything in its path. I let go of Cormac, because he’s done, and so am I.