James Smythe: The Explorer

Just hearing her speak is the best feeling I’ve had in days. On the screens she looks young, pretty, blonde, Australian; like you’d expect her to. Through the stasis bed her blue eyes are pinned open – I forgot to close them, I don’t know why, probably subconscious; I wanted her to keep looking at me, a shrink would say – and staring out in the light of the screens. It’s a trade-off: I decided to take seeing them open and dead in the stasis and alive and on the screen over not seeing them at all.

‘I used to work in the Sudan, doing health-check runs – there were a few people who needed surgery, torn ligaments, that sort of thing, but nothing out of the ordinary. For most people it was starvation, hunger. I saw some awful things. And then they asked me if I wanted something bigger, more challenging, more inspirational.’

I watch the videos until I pass out. She reminds me so much of Elena, and I don’t really know why.

Elena was of Greek lineage. She was a stereotype: passionate, annoyingly so sometimes, with this huge laugh, like a roar; all bust and arse for the first few minutes, until you get past that – usually with the laugh, the passion; a magnificent cook, which she got from her mother. We met when I was on holiday one year with some friends, and I was the only single one. I had decided that I’d spend the time there taking pictures, trying to make that part of my skill set stronger – that was my excuse, as the rest of my friends all smooshed up against each other and fed each other bits from their plates – and I met her the first day, holidaying by herself, because she really wanted a break from her old life. She ended up tagging along with our group. There’s no great whirlwind romance there: we met, we liked each other, we fell in love, we got married. Sometimes the simple stories are the best ones; the ones that don’t need explanation, that just happen, and that you accept as being The Truth, as being fate. In the movie of this, she would be played by a classic actress, beautiful but believable, dark and mysterious and loving. But, the film is about me here, now, and how I survived as long as I did on my own, in a capsule, just myself for company. Nobody has gone this far before, and people will want to know about this. They’ll queue to see it. They won’t mind who plays Elena, I don’t think.

I’ve finished my videos of Emmy, and moved on to videos of Quinn. We – the rest of the crew – wondered if they were having a relationship. They probably were; they’re both so good-looking, like models. I still have hours and hours left of backup power, by my reckoning.

Starting up again by pressing a button is anticlimactic, but it’s a necessity: the air is getting thin, and my headaches have gotten worse. I have stopped complaining about them – they are just there now, just something I can’t really do anything about. I never even asked Emmy if I could take a tablet for them before she died. There’s a cupboard full of medicines if I need them: I’m sure an aspirin won’t do me any harm. The cupboard carries everything, every sort of pill, like a tiny pharmacy, prepared for any eventuality. They didn’t save any of the crew. I press the button and the engines whir into place and we chug off, a steam train. There’s no concept of the speed we’re actually going right now. You can’t look out of the window and see the stars whizzing by. There are no markers or reference points; there’s just the darkness of space.

I slept heavily last night, and I ache when I wake up. I think that my sleeping patterns are fucked up, that I’m not sleeping at night, or what should be night. The not-day. I don’t actually know if it was night-time, not really. The clocks say something different to what I feel it is anyway. They’re all on Earth time, to acclimatize us, to help for when we made contact. Up here, it’s totally different. Twelve hours can feel like a lifetime. I wake up to the beeping again, 250480, little red light, and it takes me a few minutes (that I spend typing the number into the computer again, hoping that it might suddenly work out what I was asking, searching around it, yawning) to notice the fuel gauge. 25%, a full 2% lower than when I went to bed. I sit and watch the screen again, bringing up the detailed analysis. This can’t be right. Each percentage of fuel has its own smaller percentage, a mini-countdown, and it is ticking swiftly, a percentage point every couple of minutes. Something’s wrong, or more wrong, worse than it was before. We seem to be losing fuel at an accelerated rate. I don’t know why, and it hurts to be this clueless.

In one of Emmy’s videos she spoke about the worst moment of her career: treating a patient with internal bleeding, trying to save her, but watching the blood failing to congeal even after they had done everything that they could do, closed her wounds, healed her.

‘Being a doctor who can’t do their job,’ she said, and then trailed off. I drag myself to the Bubble and try to see as much of the ship as I can, but there’s nothing outside that might be causing this. There’s nothing on the computer, aside from the beeping, but I can’t even tell if that’s related. Sense says that there must be something outside. An engineer would know, a pilot would know. Even Emmy would probably know. I pull myself back to the main cabin and hit the fullstop button. Two hours of life support with the engines off, it says.

It takes me forty minutes to get out of my clothes and into one of the External Suits, check that the seals are tight, that there’s nothing wrong (because of Wanda’s mishap, and because there’s nobody here to even try to save me). They are incredibly warm, running off some sort of chemical reaction designed to help you out in deep space. I’ve had a couple of microgravity tests in these things, in the hangars on Earth that they set up for us to practise, to log hours; and two actual runs (if you count the one when Quinn died, and I hovered outside, uselessly).

‘Make sure you alert the rest of the crew when you do one of these, check that somebody is on the end of your Safe Cable at all times, ready to pull you back in if you need it.’ That was one of the major rules of the suits. They taught us how to work on the outside of the ship, in case we needed to. ‘You won’t need to,’ they said, ‘the ship is perfectly capable of taking good care of itself. But if panelling comes loose, something like that, you may need to assist one of the pilots in repairs.’ I’d give anything to be assisting right now. I float myself down to the back of the ship and step into the Exit booth – there’s a one-man exit, like a revolving door, with depressurized seals, and a door that slides back when you hit a button. It pulls wide to reveal the nothingness. The suit I’m in is fitted with loose magnets over all the limbs, designed to help you stay in an orbit of the craft itself – the scientists were thrilled with how difficult it would be to lose yourself, to float off into space. I cling to the ship like those baby monkeys you see on nature documentaries, and pull myself along on all fours. It’s silent and cold and I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing out here. I don’t even know what I’m looking for: damage, maybe, or an open petrol cap. It’s going to be that simple, I tell myself; you’ll see it, and fix it, and that’ll be that. All the stuff under panels, the broken and bruised parts of the ship’s guts, they’ll be fine. I circle the main body of the ship, never having any sense of which way is up as I cling to the cylinder and I look up and down the panelling, at the clean lines, at the lack of scratches and scuffs, at the perfect cleanliness of the body. There’s nothing. I get back into the ship and change again, and there’s ten minutes on the clock before life support would have run out. I start us up again, and watch the numbers. They have to be wrong.