James Smythe: The Explorer

I wake up and look at the gauge. It’s like an alarm: you’ve been lying down, happily asleep, and you think you hear something, so you sit bolt upright, startled. Have you missed your wake-up call? Your eyes focus immediately – far quicker than they usually do upon waking – on the numbers on the little screen next to you, and they read whatever number you want to hear, the exact time that you wanted to wake up. You didn’t oversleep, and your alarm is about to ring, or play the radio, or start your morning coffee being made. I didn’t oversleep. I am still alive, still ticking down, still with miles and miles and percentages to go until I am gone. 11%.

I will, if my training is right, sleep through my own death. Assuming that I push this to the very limits of the fuel and then ride out the battery backup I will pass out as the life support systems start to fail, as the oxygen dribbles out. What I’m breathing out will be more potent than what I’m breathing in, and I’ll start to feel tired, and I’ll nod off. My death itself, my actual moment of passing – an inevitability now, surely, as much as breathing itself – will come as I dream of something, and I’ll be oblivious. It’s a gentle way to go, the way that my mother always said that she wanted.

‘I want to be asleep, and it to just happen,’ she would say, and my father would quote something from when he was younger, from a suicide note of this rock star who killed himself.

‘It’s better to burn out than to fade away,’ he said. ‘I want to burn out.’

‘You’d be lucky to do any burning at all,’ my mother said, ‘and if you set yourself on fire I’ll kill you myself.’ I miss them. Not as much as I miss Elena. My mother died long enough ago that I’ve done my mourning, and my father… I mourned, and he might yet be alive. There would never be a chance of reconciliation. Maybe he might step forward to get money for an interview, a spewing of what I was really like – siding with his enemy, the one he beat and emotionally destroyed for so many years – but then he would disappear again. I still miss him: he’s my father, for better or worse. Elena was everything, though. She was my all, my entire, my absolute. When we got married, our vows promised to love and honour and obey, and I broke those last two, a majority number destroyed, because I had plans and dreams and aspirations that I failed to take her into account with. She didn’t want me to leave, couldn’t believe that I would actually go ahead with it. I was always saying things: that I would go to Africa, to do refugee reporting; that I would climb a mountain and write about that; that I would someday like to go to space, or to the depths of the ocean, or to those still uncharted parts of the rainforest where there are those few civilizations that we’ve left alone, to develop naturally, technology free, staring up at the helicopters as they take pictures, wondering what those things in the sky are. I said all those things and she used to cradle my head and stroke along my hairline and listen to my dreams about that, but she didn’t actually believe I would do it, because those things, they’re not the sort of things that people accomplish. Her dreams were of rising to the top of her field, of the family we could have, of realism. Even I didn’t believe in mine, not until I saw that they were looking for people for the space mission. Even then, as I filled out the forms, I questioned every single answer, and wondered if I shouldn’t just sabotage myself. Back then it would have been so easy to invent a heart murmur and keep my dream intact.

‘I would have gone, but the doctors wouldn’t let me,’ I could say, and then, when the trip actually happened, that would be my story. ‘I was up for that job, but health reasons stopped me,’ I could say; and if I said it enough, maybe I’d start to believe it.

My head aches, a combination of the old-faithful pressure and the alcohol from last night. I am sure – there’s an old joke, in comedy shows, cartoons, about the stages of mourning, where characters run through them as they describe what they should be feeling. I should be suffering them. I look them up on the computer, in the encyclopedia. Stage 1: Denial and Isolation. Ha ha! There is nothing to deny, and I can’t help the isolation part of it. I would if I could, but I can’t. Stage 2: Anger. There is nothing worth getting angry for. Stage 3: Bargaining. Please, God, if you do exist, save me. Turn me around, turn this ship around. Flick it with your mighty fingers; spin me back to Earth, to the Moon, even. I’ll take whatever I can get. Stage 4: Depression. This is often accompanied by addictive problems to help deal with the pain, such as the use of alcohol or drugs. Stage 5: Acceptance. I’m going to die.

I start watching Arlen’s video. I barely recognize him. It’s been so long – and it seems even longer – since I last spent any time with him, and the only video isn’t much like him, because he’s working in it, running diagnostics before we even left Earth. All work and no play. I laugh when I see his beard. We were an attractive crew, for the most part. It seemed like it was part of the overall package: find relatively charismatic crewmembers, make sure that we’re photogenic; you get people to care about the project. Guy comes into frame, over Arlen’s shoulder, and they shake hands. Guy clasps Arlen’s hand in both of his, pumps it up and down.

‘When you going to get around to me?’ he asks, and I tell him that it won’t be until we’re up in space. He smiles at that, like he’s remembering where we’re going. ‘Oh shit, well, I guess you’ll know where to find me, yeah? Fuck!’

‘They’re really good people,’ Arlen says, when I ask how he likes the rest of the crew. ‘It helps, you have a good crew, this whole thing will go a lot quicker.’ Now, here, that makes me wince to watch him say that. Nothing can possibly make this go quickly. ‘But all of them – you included – you all seem like good people.’

‘What are you doing now?’ the me on the video asks him. ‘Now, right now, I’m testing the propulsion systems, checking that they’re working.’ He flicks a switch, a light goes green.

‘What do you say to those people who argue that you aren’t a pilot if a computer is doing all the flying for you?’

‘To those people I say, well, you come up here and fix that computer if it all goes wrong, or you land this thing upon re-entry. The Ishiguro ’s a costly girl, I can tell you that much.’ He smiles, and the video clicks at a stop. There are no manual controls, and I don’t know how to fix the computer. I pull myself to the back of the main room and unseal another champagne, and drink. Stage 5: Acceptance.

The Ishiguro was one of the last things named or revealed about the expedition. There was a board of name suggestions, with DARPA wanting to move away from their traditions.

‘We’ve had enough of the grandiose,’ they said, ‘and there’s only so many Voyagers that people can stomach.’ They ran a competition through the website to get suggestions, and the one that ran the highest, that tested the best, was Destiny . ‘The Destiny ,’ people walked around saying, trying it on. ‘The Destiny is boarding. The Destiny is ready for take-off.’ When we signed up we didn’t know about a name; it was kept under wraps, for a huge media reveal. The day that they selected us they told us the name, showed us the banner that they were preparing to slather all over the ship itself. Our faces told them all that they needed to know. (Afterwards, Guy made a joke: ‘We’re fucking astronauts,’ he said, ‘not fucking My Little Pony jockeys!’) The next day there was a meeting that we weren’t party to, and after that they took us back for another reveal.