The Explorer

by James Smythe

  50%. Cormac has decided to press the button again. He does it almost nonchalantly, throwing his whole weight into his arm in exasperation. The ship whirs as the reverse boosters kick in, and then we drift to the ground, and the engines fall silent. He stomps around the cabin and hits the computer screen, and shouts for Ground Control to answer. He either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that it won’t work; I can’t remember which. I watch him call up Elena’s picture, standing on my tiptoes to see through the right grate at an angle that’ll let me see her as well.

  We took that picture in Cromer, on the seafront. It was blustery, and that’s why she liked it; the wind behind her, her hair loose, her skirt puffed up, and she’s laughing.

  After a few minutes Cormac darkens the screen and paces around the room. He eats a meal bar, even though he only had one a few hours ago. He breathes deeply. He stares at the dead faces of his crewmates, and he listens to the creaks of the ship as it gives him air, as it slows down, as I shift inside the lining trying to make myself comfortable. We’ve got a few days of this coming, because he – I – thought that somehow, through miracle or coincidence or something, somehow I might be rescued.

  I won’t be, obviously. I just want to tell him to get on with it.

  He stares at the computer because he doesn’t understand it. I understand it slightly more now, I think – all this time watching Quinn and Guy from the outside, being able to actually see what buttons they press, as opposed to the frantic guessing that Cormac is doing, pressing them to see what they do. He shouts at the screen as it dribbles to 49%, screams that it has to go back now or he won’t make it all the way.

  ‘This isn’t fair,’ he says. He sounds brattish, petulant. I pop another tablet into my mouth and wait, because soon he’ll get tired – by my estimates he’s on a 36-hour stretch of fake daytime, and night’ll happen fairly soon. I need more of the pills (for the addiction, and the shiny new ache running through the small of my back), and more food, and a replenishment of my water. I can remember when I wrecked my leg in that first run – when Cormac will hurt his, soon, all too soon – and I can remember looking through the medicine cabinet, thinking how empty it was. There were painkillers left, but not many, so I know I can’t take them all. Just some. That’s okay: some is all I need.

  He gets tired, starts pressing the buttons with less gusto. I’m tired too – you give me gravity and there’s only so long I can stand here for. Every part of me shakes as I think about food and the pills and clean water and sleep, so I lie down, listen as he presses the buttons and mutters to himself. Eventually there’s the hiss of his bed – the air being let out, the oxygen flow starting, the second hiss as it seals after he gets in. I look for him but can’t see him, so I run to the hatch and open it, watching until the lights click off, one by one. It’s night: I’m allowed out.

  I take food bars – we’re out of the popular brands now, because we ate them first, there being something comforting about them – and we’re down to the curry bars, the pie bars, the goulash bars that Guy insisted we bring, all labelled by supermarkets or bad television chefs. I carry handfuls of them from the storeroom to the lining, dropping them to the floor, and I take water, extra flasks – the ones that would have belonged to Arlen and Quinn, I think – and fill them with clean water, along with filling my own. I don’t know when I’ll next get out.

  Cormac starts the engines again, because he knows that it’s pointless to not: his life support relies on them. (This is before he will do the maths that will change this, that will tell him he can stay still for longer: right now he’s running on Guy’s rules, where he had two days at most before charging the batteries; and it’s before he finds the button on the computer to display the amount of battery charge remaining.) He wonders if, actually, the ship isn’t going the right way: maybe he’s got everything wrong. We drift up and float again as he scours through the maps on the systems, calling screens up in the Bubble, getting courses plotted and matched. It takes him most of the day to work out how to use the systems, because they weren’t a part of his training, but when he does he’s quite nimble with them. He rotates the map to see if the overlays fit – it’s not an exact science, because stars go dark, he knows, and because nothing is as pixel-perfect as the computer suggests – but if he can find Orion he can find almost everything else. He sighs as he does everything, because this feels futile, even at this point. All of his friends are dead. There’s nobody waiting for him back home. He’s Ground Control’s perfect candidate: he’s alone, and he no longer cares if he lives or dies, not really.

  He hasn’t told himself that, yet. He’s got a while to go before he reaches that decision. Tonight, as he sleeps – forcing himself to, knowing that he has to or he’ll lose it totally, and that it relies on him to get himself home, and Emmy, don’t forget her, she’s still alive – tonight, I decide that I’m going to watch the launch. We watched it when we first got up into space, after dealing with Arlen’s body, but I didn’t really see it. I told myself I would get to it another time. For some reason I never did. My plan was to address it when I got home, maybe edit it into something, splice some interviews and soundbytes into it . . . That will never happen. I find the file on the hard drive and boot it up, and I make the screen as big as I can. I want sound, I decide, so I need to keep the earlier version of me asleep. I open his bed as quietly as I can and then take the same sedation kit that I watched him use on Emmy, and I draw a shot into a fresh needle and slide it into his arm. He shoots awake as I press the button, and his eyes are only open for a second, not even long enough that he’ll remember this, the dose strong enough to keep him down for hours and hours. I make the screen large and turn the volume up, and I watch the video. There’s no commentary; it’s the footage taken from the cameras fixed to the side of the ship, rigidly pressed against the body of the craft. The countdown is on there: it was played loudly to the crowd below over huge speakers, like New Year’s Eve celebrations, and it counts from twenty, waiting for the ball to drop. As it hits one the noise of the crowd cheering swells, and is replaced by a rumble of the engines. They’re unnatural, the most unnatural noise ever made, the loudest grind and churn of technology, designed to do things that have never been possible before. The flame spits from them, and then the smoke. It looks for a second like it’s billowing underneath the craft, like the craft isn’t going anywhere, and then it does. It pushes away from the ground, and everything – the launch-pad, the crowds and crowds of people, thousands of them, like at a festival or something – everything disappears as quickly as it can, spiralling into miniature. The smoke continues until I can see the coastline as a crack, and then the coast itself. The launch was designed to be faster than man had ever travelled, to get past the gravitational pull of the Earth with the minimum of fuss. It manages it. The East Coast of the US is a smirk for a second, then a grin, then every detail is there, and it’s like those pictures they showed us in school, or on those old BBC identification cards, the Earth as a perfect sphere of green and sand-colour and blue and then clouds, and then space behind like a black halo. I watch as it pushes further and further away, until it’s a marble, and then it’s only the size of the Moon from my back garden, and then it’s almost nothing. I watch this all, and I write down exactly what I can see, and then when it stops – as we’re in the darkness of space, filming nothing but the hull, the occasional sputter of the engines – I start again from the beginning.

  When I’ve finished writing, I press Send on the entry. The earlier version of me will never know.

  It’s the most intense déjà vu, watching yourself doing what you’ve already done; less like seeing a recording, and more like catching a glimpse of yourself in a mirror that you didn’t know was there, seeing that flash of your limbs, instantly recognizable, but you still wonder if it’s a ghost, an intruder, somebody spying on you. With all the other versions of me, it’s worse still: like a mirror in front of a mirror, hundreds of your hands flashing around, even though
you can only see the ones in the here and now with any clarity, only your body itself and the initial reflection. Everything else is background, mountains beyond mountains stretching into the distance. Watching Cormac doing what he’s doing puts everything that I am into context. He calls up that damn picture of Elena so often, stares at it, weeps – those early days, when he was weeping for himself, not actually for her, but because he felt so guilty, and I just want to say, You should see how I feel, because I was here when it all went, I made this what it is. You want to talk about guilt? Try aiding in the deaths of at least a few of your crew.

  When I try to work out why I had to do that my head hurts. When Cormac sleeps I read entries on the ship’s computers, in the encyclopedias and textbooks, looking up entries on time travel, reading about it in fiction – books, movies – and trying to equate the examples to my own situation. Everything points to this being a paradox: I was on the ship when these things all happened, and they happened because I was here, which means I was always here twice. When I break the paradox, it resets: like, when you have a cut and you pull the scab off, you reset the wound, put it back to zero, because you need that scab to stop from being infected. Every other version of me is the scab being knocked off by something or other, and the body resets itself. You need to heal, it says, so it makes a new scab. I’m older, I know that: if I was a betting man I might say years. Two years. Maybe three. So, for three years, this body – which is time, in this example – has been trying to heal itself, and I’ve been the shitty, flawed little scab that keeps catching on kitchen surfaces and shirt sleeves. Time fixes itself, but my body is staying the same. You stick your hand into a fire once, you learn not to do it again. My body – or my mind, or whatever bridges the two – has been learning, I think. Every time I do something over and over I learn not to do it again. I can’t remember it, but that doesn’t matter. Maybe part of the key to time fixing itself is that the me that’s here can’t remember being here. Maybe my journey – ha! – is part of what has to happen.

  I still don’t know how I get out of the other side. I know that I can’t go on like this. I’d go mad, if I could remember the other times. Or maybe I already am?

  I lose another tooth as I’m eating: I pull the bar away, the taste of coronation chicken in my mouth still, mixed with blood, and the tooth is embedded in the soft paste. I swear quietly, pull the tooth out. It’s black and sore, like bruised fruit around the root, and I feel the hole it’s left – front and centre, top row right – running my tongue into it, poking around. I put the tooth in my pocket and strap myself to the floor, to try and sleep, because I’m so tired constantly now, trying to match Cormac’s hours. He’s been doing this for far, far less time than I have, and his stamina is enviable. As I drift off I think about how much the body can fall apart before it dies. I worry every single tooth in my mouth, and most of them seem to shift as I poke them. How long can you go without cleaning your teeth, without seeing a dentist? How did they used to survive in the days before toothpaste and dentists? I wake up and feel another tooth loose in my mouth, swirling in blood and saliva, and keep my mouth shut. I pull it out gently, slide it into my pocket and close it, trapping it with its friend.

  I spend the rest of the night reading about famous explorers: every single explorer who did anything worth their salt, who found something or went somewhere just for the sake of it. I read about their exploits and their adventures – even those who we know next to nothing about – and they’re still remembered, still written about. What they did is sometimes lost – they tried to reach somewhere; they disappeared, searching the seas and were never found; they went into jungles looking for lost cities of gold and never came back – but they’re remembered. They fought trials and tribulations, fought nature and chaos, and diseases – scurvy, insanity, malaria, frostbite. They fought all of those things, and they persevered.

  Guy always said that we only did this because we wanted to see something that nobody else had ever seen, and because we wanted our names to go down in history. We’ll get that, even if it’s as the long-disappeared crew of the Ishiguro: the Marie Celeste of the mid-21st century.

  He can’t surprise me: not with the things he does, because I remember them. Every moment is a recollection, a brief, tiny memory slipping in. The way he does things, though. They’re nothing like I remember. He seems angry, hitting the buttons on the computer, thudding away as if it’s the thing that has wronged him. He swears under his breath, and he keeps talking about everything that’s happened. They say that, in quiet solitude, people are inclined to talk to themselves, to work things out that way. I have been alone – surrounded by others, but still – for so long now, and I haven’t lost it. If you count all the times that I’ve done this, my loneliness can be measured in years. Compared to Cormac, my loneliness is extravagant.

  I don’t even feel like we’re the same person. We have the same face, sure: his is somehow more defined, having more clarity to it, his stubble manicured, his hair kempt. From here, he almost looks like he could have been the leading man, not Quinn; compared to me, he’s an Adonis. We have the same face, but his is all gritted teeth, hard and firm and determined. Mine has become loose and tired. Where it used to have definition, mine has dropped at the jowls even through the weight that I’ve lost. His teeth are perfect, or as perfect as a childhood without orthodontics can give him; neat slides of blunt white knives. Mine . . . I look punched. I look wrecked. He is tense and angry, and when he talks to Elena – which he does, calling her picture up, chatting to her, telling her how sorry he is – he sounds weak. He queues up the videos that we sent home, copies them to a playlist and sets it going, and watches as we get onto the craft in the first video, and then get knocked off, one by one. Each subsequent loss makes him wrench at his hair – which is fuller than mine, closer to the front, his widow’s peak less strict – and he runs his hand through it, pulling it into shapes. His has grown since he stepped onto the ship, but mine is somehow static, or shorter, or delayed. We’re brothers, not twins, a year or two between us; the same parents, but different genes.

  And he’s dull. Watching him do the same things over and over is mind-numbing. I have spent so long watching other people, struggling to get past the fact that I can’t speak to them – that I can’t go and hold them or shout at them or argue with them – that now, as he does nothing, and I have no desire to interact with him at all, it’s more frustrating. It’s brutal.

  I send another message home as Cormac sleeps. I spill it all. I tell them what’s happened, in case they ever come to get us, open the door and find us stuck here in some crazy perpetual loop, enacting the same thing over and over. I tell them what happened to me, and I write to them about Cormac.

  He’s so boring. Maybe worse? Maybe even worse than nothing? He’s moping and tired, and the way that he looks at those pictures, over and over? I remember watching videos of the crew from the first time around: I can’t wait until he gets onto that. He will do it out of boredom, and I want to grab him and tell him that the boredom he feels is nothing. Try watching it, I want to say. Try watching boredom.

  I feel angry at him, at the pictures he stares at, the constant mourning he’s undertaking. I think I’m not mourning Elena any more. Like, maybe mourning is a chemical reaction, and I’m past it, time having done its job. I think about her and she’s like a ghost, you know? Like a reflection. She can be erased, because she seems like somebody who’s barely real. When I picture her in my mind, she seems different to how she looks in his picture. In that picture she looks happy.

  I don’t know what happens at the end of this. I don’t know if this resets, or it ends and then it’s actually over, or what. I don’t know. I can’t possibly know. I’ve been here before, and I keep thinking of this as being like a circuit. Like, maybe I haven’t been able to close the circuit? You think about a current: it needs to reach point b from point a. What if all the other times I’ve been here, I’ve failed? Maybe this time I have to comple
te the circuit. That makes sense, right? You land on the snake and get sent back, and you desperately try to roll a six to get to a ladder and claw your way out? Maybe this is the time I roll double sixes, snake eyes.

  I send the file, and then regret it. Because, if they are still receiving these, they’ll think that I’ve got Space Madness, and that’ll be my legacy. The thought of that alone makes me laugh, and I have to bite my lip to stop from waking the sleeping Cormac.

  He bangs the dials at the front of the ship and swears at them again, and then he sees it, on that screen: I had almost forgotten. 250480, it reads, that chain of numbers and nothing more, and the beep from the systems, and the little red light.

  ‘What?’ he asks the air, and doesn’t get an answer. He sits in the chair and finger-taps the screen, using his nail to make a thin sound that I can’t hear from here, but I remember. He reads the number aloud and then presses buttons to try and make sense of it. Within minutes, the screens are covered in PDFs of the manual, everything you could possibly want to know about the operating functions of the ship laid out for you, exposed. He searches the indices but nothing, then does a full text search, but nothing; so he looks for warning messages, and spends the next few hours of his life comparing the few hundred plausible warning messages that the system can throw up with the one on the screen. They’re nothing alike. A real warning message will have a key, and will darken the screen, and will beep, this constant tinny recurrence that sticks until the problem is fixed. This time, when the beeping starts – an hour after the message appears – it’s a drone, a thin whine like a dog feeling sorry for itself. ‘What the hell?’ Cormac asks, hitting the speakers to see if the noise will stop. He sits back and looks at the screen, at his depleting fuel gauge, and he knows that they can’t be entirely coincidental. Coincidence doesn’t exist. When your body is ill – symptoms – they’re related, because everything in a body is related. Everything in this ship is related, tied together with wires instead of muscles, but still. You pull a wire, something else is going to stop working. We didn’t turn around, even though that’s what we were programmed to do, and then this message and this noise . . . Well, they must be related. It’s a fault.