James Smythe: The Echo

The engines accelerate to a point where we break a faster speed than any man-made machine before. In the glory days of space travel, when we were still trying, the shuttles hit speeds of nearly twenty thousand miles per hour, when they were in orbit. We’re doubling that; more, even, when we reach maximum acceleration. Tripling it. And then we will coast, using that momentum, slowing to maintain that speed only, holding it as long and as far as we can. That’s the rumble. Every part of this ship is made from materials built to withstand that pressure, joists and fixtures made with composite materials that didn’t even exist a decade ago. The metal of the hull is our own: we bought the man who designed it, all of his patents, all of his designs. I think of this, of the blueprints now: flashing through my mind. His metal shakes like everything else, though. No amount of stress testing can prevent it feeling as if it is falling apart. We didn’t tell the crew that. We told them that every possibility had been accounted for. We lied, because how else do you get people to agree to something like this?

‘One,’ Tomas says, or I think it’s Tomas. Maybe I’ve been counting down with him, speaking at the same time, my voice along with his. The launch happens, and the craft shakes and lurches, and I hit my head, over and over, on the hard plastic part of the bed that is moulded to me instead of being a pillow, practicality not comfort, and I think that that’s yet another oversight. We should have had a pillow; then, maybe my head wouldn’t hit this so hard.

Everything gives way to darkness. This isn’t sleep: this is my body giving up.

Man wasn’t meant to see this. Man was meant to stay on the ground. My mother said that she believed in angels, and maybe she was right. What are the implications of travelling as fast as we’re suggesting? That’s what I asked Tomas. I said, Really, the actual implications. Do we know? We put carcasses in the centrifuge, reaching g forces equivalent to this, and we watched them quiver and be pulverized. So I said, Are we sure that this is the right thing? What are the implications? He said, The implications are that you’ll have travelled faster than anybody before you. You know what I mean. He sighed. It could break you. You’ll feel it, whatever happens. It’ll pull every part of you. So we make them sleep, I suggested, because then they’ll not know. They’ll wake up feeling like they’ve been in a fight, and not knowing who hit them. Oh, they’ll know, he said.

I open my eyes, like instinct, but it hurts. Everything’s glowing white, I would swear: even though the lights are off and my glass is dimmed, it glows.

White, white, white. Almost painful, it’s so bright.

I try and open them again, to see, and it feels like they’re being pressed on, forced and pushed down, and everything’s white when it should be black. My body can’t move, I discover. I wish I was like the others, safe and asleep. They don’t know what their bodies are going through. I can feel the bones in my face – the very essence of my skull, everything, underneath the skin, underneath all of me, every little part – and it feels as if it is being pulled apart.

I am in hell.

When I next open my eyes, it’s quiet. The rumble is gone, and it’s dark. My eyes hurt: all I can really see, apart from the darkness, are after-images of flashing white, as if I’ve been staring too closely at the sun. The beds hiss open, including mine. I hear Tomas’ voice.

‘Time to wake up, rise and shine,’ he says. The pressure of the sealed beds is meant to keep us asleep until the time the beds open, and the lights are turned on. The blackness around the sunspots in my eyes goes white as well, brighter than the rest, and I can’t see. I shut my eyes but the glow comes through the eyelids, so I try to turn my head. The beds are fully open. I hear voices.

‘Wow,’ says Lennox. ‘Holy shit, that hurts.’ He’s floating upwards, arching his back. ‘Oh my word.’ I hear something click.

‘What was that?’ asks Tobi, and Lennox laughs.

‘My bloody back,’ he says. ‘That noise was my bloody back.’

‘Move slowly, all of you,’ Inna says. ‘Stretch, sure, but be gentle with it.’

‘You never warned us about this,’ Wallace says. ‘Jesus Christ, I feel like I’ve been in a bar fight.’ The others laugh. ‘Tomas, where are we?’ There’s a slight pause as the transmission is sent back to Tomas, on Earth still. I wonder if he’s slept yet.

‘You’re in space,’ Tomas eventually says, his voice coming through a slight crackle. (Only a few seconds’ wait. That will get longer, I know.) The crew laugh again, and then coo. This is realized: we’re out here, wherever here is. ‘Call up the maps, that’ll show your position.’

‘How fast are we going?’

Another wait, then Tomas answers. ‘Forty-six,’ he says. ‘And that’s locked in. Engines resting.’ The delay here is really nothing. It’ll get worse the further we go. And it’s crystal clear. Used to be that, this far out, you’d be speaking through the hiss, hoping the message would get through, biting your nails. Another piece of technology that made all of this possible. ‘Is everybody awake, everybody okay?’ None of them say anything, but their silence is enough. I still haven’t opened my eyes, but I can feel theirs on me: wondering why I’m lying as I am, stretched out and strapped in still. They stay silent. I can hear them wondering. Tomas guesses. ‘Mira, are you up? Are you awake?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Not yet.’ I try my eyes again, and they work – I can see the blurred shapes of the crew past the spots – so I swing my legs out, haul my body up. It feels worse than I ever imagined. I’ve never been a fighter. I never knew what this might feel like, when the analogy was presented. I could only guess.

‘Up and at ’em,’ Tomas says. ‘I need you to start running tests. Begin with the batteries. We need to make sure they’re recharging properly for when we need to decelerate.’ Everything that isn’t the engine here is run off a battery. We took very few things from the previous space-flight attempts – the previous and failed attempts, by the South Asian Space Agency in the twenties, the Ishiguro not long after them – but we took their battery systems. Piezoelectric energy. It converts the vibrations of the ship into power. The rumble that we went through during launch, the slight shudder of the engines through the hull, even the repercussions of us being inside here and interacting with the ship herself, it all ends up as energy. It’s what keeps the lights on, the ship warm, and us alive. In a worst-case scenario, we’ve even posited that it could get us home, powering the tiny boosters that we would otherwise use as stabilizers. Worst-case. But the power is therefore precious. If they had to – we’re adrift, the fuel fails, something – the batteries are what would keep us alive. Though, they burn power a lot faster than they generate it. When we decelerate, when we’re reaching the anomaly, we need to sleep again: the pressure change, all over again. I cannot even think about that now. ‘I’ll give you a minute,’ Tomas says.

I feel a hand on my arm, and a face close to mine. ‘Are you okay?’ Inna asks. Her breath smells of mint, already, as if this is something she has taken care of before anything else. I dread to think about mine. That is such a small thing.

‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘Something went wrong, with the injection.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I didn’t sleep. I was awake through the launch.’

She squeezes my arm. Her nails: I can feel them on my skin, pressing down. ‘That’s a common dream, I think. When people are sedated, they manifest dreams of what they feel that they’re missing. It’s really a very common thing.’