The Explorer (2 page)

‘I only push the occasional button,’ he told me in his first interview. I am a journalist. That’s why I’m here, that’s my motivation, to document this, to take film clips, to write about this. We live in a time of interest, of being able to remember this stuff forever: it’s not like when it was paper, which faded and peeled and tore. Data lives forever, and we’re in a new age of journalism: the age of permanence. I could win a Pulitzer for this, everybody said before we left. I was writing up the adventures of those who go further than anybody ever has before. This is the stuff of sci-fi movies and books, of dreams: it’s humanity exploring again, crossing the deserts, reaching the poles, scouring the depths.
We’re doing it because we can
, is the first line in my article. In the film of this, I am the fourth actor’s name to appear on the screen. I’m the everyman. The stars are Arlen – it’s a shock twist when he dies so early, so his part is almost a cameo – and Quinn, but Quinn’s face is biggest on the poster. Quinn was handsome, charming, roguish. All those things. He looked like a prince, or some sort of Arabian herald; dark hair, sharp jaw, blurry blue eyes that were at odds with his heritage. Quinn was British-Sri Lankan, but had spent most of his youth in California. He had a curious English drawl, slipping into it when he asked for stereotypes, for tea, for a sandwich, to wear some trousers, but the rest of the time it was pure West Coast, smooth and swift. Quinn died when I was outside the ship, working on some wiring to try and get control of the computers. We shouldn’t have been out alone, but we were down in our numbers. We had lost all contact with Ground Control, so we panicked; he was trying to turn the ship around, which meant overriding the systems, which meant working on something outside the ship as well as the computer system inside the ship at the same time. When I came back Emmy was crying, absolutely hysterical. Irreconcilable. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but she was gone, inconsolable, and Quinn was on the floor, his eyes rolled right back, blood around his head because he’d fallen down – the engines were off, and we were still, and gravity, being what it is, had taken its toll – and he had hit his head on the wall at the wrong angle, a cruel accident, the sort of thing that could have happened to any of us, and I couldn’t even get Emmy to try to save him because she wouldn’t stop screaming. I looked in her eyes, and she was just petrified. It was terrifying, really. There was blood on her hands, and it looked like – or, it
could
have looked like – she was responsible, but she didn’t say anything about it when I asked her, and I had to have faith. I had to. When I had cleaned up the mess and turned the engines back on, I bundled his body into the stasis beds – have you ever tried to move a body in microgravity? It floats and wobbles and hits you, inadvertently, and you almost forget that it’s a body, because it’s suddenly all physical mass and form, but with no weight behind it – and sealed it up, all the bodies there, peering out until we got home. They all looked like they were asleep, apart from Wanda, with the blood around her eyes. I don’t know why we didn’t wipe it before we put her to sleep. And then there were two. Last – apart from me, if I’m going to die – was Emmy.

Emmy died – I use that word, but, really, maybe it’s not that bad, maybe there’s something can be done, I don’t know – only hours after Quinn, really. We were barely speaking, because something had gone wrong with her, I think, in her mind. That was the other thing they warned us about: snapping. She seemed to blame me for the deaths of the others, and she wouldn’t look at me, not properly. She screamed at me that it was my fault, that I was somehow responsible for everything. She called me a murderer. We didn’t speak, and she refused to sleep. Eventually I worried about what would happen to me when
I
slept – because she seemed, suddenly, like she could do
something
– so I had to keep her sedated most of the time, strapped into her bed. They had warned us, when we did all the training, that this would be psychologically tough. I seemed to be fine, but Emmy bore the brunt of their warning. They bandied around words in training, in a joking way, but you never knew if they were actually joking. And then after our journey, and all the deaths! How could you stay sane? Even I don’t know how I’ve held up;
if
I’ve held up. We powered down and I sent another message back, not knowing if it would reach home, but praying, and praying that, somehow, they could reply, and we let the time tick as the life support system whirred. With only the two of us we knew we had enough life support to stay there for a day or so – a full complement of 6 had 6 hours, so we did shaky maths based on the sizes of our lungs, and the backup tanks that we could wrench from the now-spare suits and fit to the system. So we sat, and she was silent until she finally decided to speak to me. She sounded so threatening, like some villain from a movie, telling me that she was fine, trying to psychoanalyse me, getting nowhere. When I was scared enough – for my life, for what she might try and do when I slept or when my guard was down – I was forced to put her to sleep. I had to. I had to sedate her, and then I put her in stasis until we could get home, when they would wake her up and fix her. I had to.

That was a couple of days ago. She missed the best part of the trip, when we – I – hit our fuel limit, the 51% mark, when the ship was meant to turn itself back, send us all home. It didn’t. I watched it creep to 52%, and then tick over, and I waited for something to happen. I assumed
deus ex machina
: there would be clanking, something mechanical, and the ship’s engines would kick in, boosters taking us into that beautiful curve, and then I’d suddenly see Earth in the distance, a pinprick of light. I would get to watch this all on the monitors, trying to remember the star formations that we had passed, laughing as a formation that was on our left was now on the right, as I tripped past it and gaily waved. I watched it creep to 50 from 51, and then I stopped the ship. That much I knew how to do: there is a pause button, big and green, like you would find in a cartoon. All systems are frozen before they shut down automatically. They are kept on a hyper low-energy standby to preserve them, like a TV set or a computer. They Ding! when you bring them back online. When there’s a problem, a red light flashes and there’s a beep, a long, solid, irritating beep from the system speakers. The designers must have loved sci-fi films. I froze the systems so that, when they came back on, they would kick-start. I imagined the computer’s AI as being like a late student, realizing that the alarm hasn’t gone off, and then running to compensate. It wasn’t, and when I rebooted all I got was more forward movement. I spent 2% percent of the fuel wondering if we had already turned, and were heading in the right direction, heading home, but we hadn’t and we weren’t. That was that: I travel forward until I run out of fuel, and then I use the life support – a week, maybe, given that it’s just me, if I breathe in shallow breaths and then rely on the spare O2 tanks in the external suits – until I run out of air, and then I die. In many ways, it’s calming, knowing that it will probably happen: I remember reading something in the papers years ago, an article about a journalist who knew that he had cancer, knew that he was going to die, and said that it eased him. He moved on, and he had his family move on as well. There were rumours that his wife started dating before he was even dead, because that’s what he wanted. Not everybody reacts that way, but he did: he found a tranquillity in it.

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 contact-capsules 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.