The Explorer (26 page)

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 complete 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.

Only I know that it isn’t a fault, that we were never meant to turn around. I know everything, because here, in the lining, I am almost omnipotent. I have seen things I shouldn’t have seen, and I
know
. The ship wasn’t meant to turn around: we were meant to carry on into nothingness, drifting into space, going – yes – further than any man had ever gone before, but with no chance of return or reprieve. You follow coincidence to its natural conclusion, that message isn’t a fault, or a chance warning. We were meant to see it. It was meant for us. I look at the string of numbers, straining to see them with my eyesight how it is, but able to read them because I can remember them so clearly, so indelibly printed onto the back of my eyelids, or somewhere deep inside my brain as they are. I can remember them, and I laugh at their purpose, and I slip off and fantasize – not dream – because this is the lining, and I am still alone, and nothing can change that.

When he’s asleep I go and look at what he has looked at; and I look further. I look past the computers and the screens at out there, at space. The stars are gone. It’s pitch black out there, total darkness. Nothingness.

Whatever the number is, it is this. This is it. It is nothing.

2

Here is what might have been.

The first bed to hiss open stays shut until it’s meant to open, because there is no hand of a stray Cormac to open it, to yank it wide in a desperate act of self-preservation. Arlen steps out, dripping wet, groggy, sweat all over him, running down his beard. He dries himself and turns the ship on, lighting the rooms, and then starts running diagnostic programs. He sings to himself, because that’s the sort of person that Arlen was: he sang a lot. He makes sure that the ship is safe for the rest of us, and then greets us as our beds open and we all drift out. He steadies us until we get to the shower, and then he leaves us as we say hello to each other, laugh at the fact we’re all in our underwear, all soaking wet. I stand next to Emmy and we don’t really look at each other, because there’s bad blood there, still – and because she knows about Elena. She knows how much I loved her, how much I wanted to make it work with her. She’ll say something at some point, but now is not the time.

When we’re showered and dressed – in our identical jumpsuits, slightly different colours on the badges like some prototypical sci-fi TV show – we each start our jobs, checking we’ve got everything we need. Guy runs more diagnostics; Quinn sits in the cockpit, reads all the readouts and checks they’re fine; Wanda resets the beds, setting the water to drain, starting their cleaning cycle; Emmy feels our pulses, one by one, and takes our blood pressures; and I sit at the computer and boot it up, and start writing something, my first entry.
We’ve just woken up
, I type,
and it feels amazing.
I decide to leave Elena out of this, because I’ve got a job to do, and it’s important that I do it. Elena will always be a part of me, but she’s gone, and this is now. It’s important – and that’s not to demean her, God no, but this is important for humanity. I have to carry on. I have to be strong.

We gather for the broadcast and greet home, and tell them what it’s like. It’s televised, beamed to hundreds of countries. Arlen does most of the talking, because he’s the elder statesman, with his beard and his vitality and his healthy heart. He jokes about the rest of us, says that we’re still finding our feet, and then he drifts upwards, out of shot. It’s a gag, but we all think it works, that it’ll play well back home. Who are the audience? It’s the kids. It’s the children, cross-legged on the floor in front of their TV sets, smiling at us, putting our faces on their walls. When the broadcast is done we all gather and chat, and eat our first meal on the ship, processed bars still, Big Macs and Quarter Pounders and McRibs, but we revel in how they taste, because they’re an experience that we’re having independent of everybody else in the world. I say that, and Quinn asks if we can even say that up here. Can we even say in the whole world when we’re no longer there? he asks, and we ponder it, because he has a point. In the universe? I ask, tentatively, as we agree that it’s better, for the best. We’re part of something bigger.

We do our jobs. Wanda goes on a walk with some of the friends she’s made amongst her crewmates, and she never feels guilt. She’s constantly happy, so awed at being in space when she’s still so young. Who gets this opportunity? she asks, and we say, Well, you do. You deserve it. She blushes. She walks outside the ship and finds the rush of it incredible, and we all want our turn. Next time we stop, Guy says, the rest of you can try. Guy is hard and quiet, but we trust him, because he knows more about how this all works than the rest of us. We listen to him when he tells us what to do, and we do our jobs. We write and speak to home, and they send messages back, and everything is amazing. One day, Emmy sits me down. We should talk, she says, and she asks me about Elena, lets me know that she’s aware what happened. You can talk to me, she says; just because of what happened between us doesn’t mean we’re not friends. So I tell her everything: about how it happened, why it happened. I tell her about my guilt and she listens to me, and I weep into her shoulder and watch as my tears, which are droplets on my cheek, thick and salty, drift away from my face and into the air to be sucked up by the vacuum pumps in the air filtration system.

We gather around to watch the fuel tick from 52% to 51%, and when it does the ship hums and grinds, and we watch as we turn and start heading back home. We cheer when it does it, because we’ve reached the peak, the furthest point ever. We’ve seen space. We shoot a pod from the ship, a collection of flags of all the countries united in this project, and it unfurls, and there’s the money shot: one giant, unified flag, not fluttering apart from in our wake, square and blunt against the nothingness of space, and it flits off as we move, there for eternity, to drift.

We land in the sea, the Atlantic, the coast of Ireland. It wasn’t expected, but was nearly impossible to predict. We knew it would be a water landing; that was part of Arlen’s training. We would be coming in so hot we had no other choice. The camera crews sprint to catch us as we disembark, the craft steaming in the water as the door hisses open and we wave, one by one. They cheer our names. Quinn and Emmy are together, and we all know about it, but we’re happy for them. Quinn asks if I care; he didn’t want it to upset me, because of Elena. I have been open with them all. I’m fine, I told him. They do articles and interviews in glossy magazines, holding hands, talking about the future, about kids, a wedding. I do interviews that are more serious. I write my final article, then get a book deal, high six figures, and it’s an easy write. There’s a chapter on Elena, on the circumstances heading into the trip, because I argued blind that she was key to my mindset, that she was totally important. Without her in there, there was no book. The publisher liked it. Human tragedy sells. It gave the book a personal touch. I don’t win the Pulitzer, but who cares, right? Instead I keep writing, and I write a novel, a pulpy, sci-fi thing about a man who is trapped in a perpetual loop, a time loop, like so many other sci-fi stories wrenched from the back of magazines – there are no original ideas, not any more – but this one is more human, or trying to be. I write that and it sells pretty well, and they turn it into a movie and they cast it, and the Cormac isn’t the star and it makes a bit of money and I’m set, because I invest, and I meet a woman, but she looks just like Elena sometimes, and in the light she looks like Emmy, and I sometimes confuse her with them, because her name is Emily, and it’s so easy to get these things confused.

When I die, my obituary calls me a writer and an explorer. That’s all I ever wanted, I think.

My fantasies always involve other women; never Elena. I can’t picture her there when I really think about getting home, because she’s gone, and I killed her – or, near as – and nothing I can dream of can change that, not really.

3

The beeping stops in the cabin, and that’s enough to wake me, just the cessation of that noise. He’s asleep, so I sneak out. How quickly you collapse: he’s stopped shaving, stopped caring. I don’t remember showering this little. When there were people on the ship, I had one a day. He hasn’t, not since Emmy was put away. I’ll bet he stinks. I know I do.

I shower myself, and shit, and shave. I decide that, even though I’m falling apart, I can do it with dignity. He doesn’t know how good he’s got it. I eat, and take the pills, which I barely notice now, and I sit at the computer and know what’s going to be there, because I’m already thinking it. He’s still writing the blog entries, Cormac; he’s charting what he’s done that day, his thoughts. They’re not worth reading, because he’s so naive, so clueless.

Instead, I try to work out how this ends. I shut my eyes and try to picture that final scene of my life, as I drifted into space. I remember feeling like somebody was holding me: maybe that was me? Maybe the me now saves the me then? Maybe I tried but failed? I should be more diligent. Maybe I’m meant to save him, and maybe there’ll be a DARPA-funded craft only a few hundred klicks back, and maybe they’ll grab him and take him home and patch him up and maybe give him his life back.

I know that they won’t. Which means, the best I can hope for is to stop me coming back here again. Because this – reliving these memories, this pain, this confusion – it’s not something that I would wish on my worst enemy.

I watch Cormac open a bottle of champagne, and I watch as the froth dances around the cabin, and he floats with a straw and hoovers it up, giggling, the bubbles and alcohol going to his head. He’s drunk within seconds. I remember this. He goes to the computer and starts hammering the buttons, and he messages home, even though all he gets is static.

‘I miss her,’ he says into the microphone, ‘and I want to come home, because I’m so alone and this is so unfair, and this is no way to die. It’s going to take so long, still. I can’t take this long.’ I remember this. He tells the computer that he’s going to end it, and he takes a thin shard of plastic from the medicine box and holds it against his wrists. He’s still broadcasting to the static. ‘You can all see it,’ he says. ‘You can all see how much pain I’m in, right? Because they’re all dead, every single one of them. Elena!’ It’s a cry. From here, if it didn’t sting, I’d almost think it was pathetic. He can’t go through with it, because he’s too weak. There’s nothing there: the ability to kill himself is wholly absent from him. He cries instead, and drops everything, and cleans up after himself, and then he drunkenly tries to sort out the ship’s course, hammering the keys, opening software he doesn’t understand. I remember all of this. When he finally gives up it’s to go to bed: he slides into the open-front coffin and shuts his eyes, and I watch until he stops murmuring, then sneak out of the lining. At the computer I can see that his hammering has been useless, ineffectual. He doesn’t know that. Tomorrow, he’ll see that the fuel is rapidly burning itself out, and he’ll think it’s because of something that he did.