James Smythe: The Explorer

‘We’re thinking about using the name Ishiguro ,’ they said. Hidenori Ishiguro was the man behind the initial design of the ship’s engines, the engines that were going to let us make this journey, before the team of scientists – including Guy – tore the project away from him and made it something globally funded, huge in scope, and definitely going to happen. He was enigmatic and brilliant, and we all respected him. ‘It’s a fine name,’ we all agreed, and they announced it at a reveal a week later, where the man himself whipped a cloth off the name-plate and the audience clapped. The press weren’t taken with it.

‘It’s too subdued,’ they said. ‘It doesn’t mean anything.

Where’s the sense of magic, of reaching for the stars?’

‘Can’t please everyone,’ Arlen said when we read the art

icles. ‘Especially when they want fireworks and you’re giving

them dust.’

After Arlen, and the tick over from 11 to 10%, comes Guy. His videos are shades of light and dark, veering wildly from him being happy, singing for me, laughing about a joke, playing up to national stereotypes – he was a good sport, most of the time – and then suddenly being serious.

‘We’ve signed up for this; we accept our fates, if they occur.’

‘What fates?’ I ask.

‘Well, what if we reach the turnaround point and we don’t turn around?’ He’s prescient: I didn’t even realize that we had this conversation. Oh God.

‘They’ve run the trials three times now, unmanned, and it’s always turned around on those occasions.’

‘There’s always a first time,’ Guy says. ‘Those were much shorter runs, as well.’

‘Could you fix it, turn us?’

‘Perhaps. The computer is intricate, temperamental. I would give it a go, but I wouldn’t need to.’ He flashes a smile – he’s missing a tooth, three or four across from the front centre, and I only now really notice it, and find it fascinating: why didn’t he have it grown back? Why did he leave that gap there, a gap that could be gotten rid of so easily, just one injection?

‘Why did they not put manual controls in, Guy, in case something goes wrong?’

‘In case? Nothing goes wrong. The computers are perfect, and it keeps us from making any fuck-ups. We are only human, you know? You see us, we hit a switch, we play with a joystick, we fuck it all up. The computer has a course, we stick to it, we get home. Simple.’ In the film I would pause the tape at this moment, freeze him on the screen. Famous last words. I think that’s how the film might start, with that chunk of premonitory exposition, that interview, and then the freeze, then a draw back to reveal me alone in the craft, the others dead, in their beds, and then pull back further, the ship in space, puttering along as the fuel gauge flicks numbers over like an antique railway station clock. Cut to: The opening credits.

There is a way to fix this. Guy knew it, he could have done it. He died too soon. If he was me, the last one, last of the Mohicans, he could have gotten home, told them what happened.

‘I spent so long alone!’ he could have cried. ‘Alone!’ And, ‘I had these messages, and they didn’t mean anything, so I ignored them!’

As if by magic, another beep, another flash of the red light. 250480. The message never changes, telling me that there’s something wrong, but not what that something is. I just can’t fathom it. I write it over and over as I write my blog entries (which I’ve maintained, even now, alone, with no idea if they’re reaching home or not). I contemplate writing it on the walls, all over the crisp whiteness, so that if I’m ever found they’ll think I have succumbed to Space Madness, but decide that it’s a pointless joke. It’s not a systems warning, not a fault, and, as best I can tell, not a message. The AI in the computer hasn’t become sentient. I don’t believe it’s an alien trying to reach me – there’s nothing out here, that much is clear when you get here into the stillness, the darkness – so it’s just a beep. Perhaps it’s a way of telling me that there’s a problem with the fuel. Perhaps it’s just nothing. It stops, the light, the beep, just as the computer drops to 9%. There’s stillness again.

I write my blog entries into the computer every day, and I send them, telling Ground Control what’s been happening, just so that there’s no confusion. I want them to know that it’s just me up here now – or, me and Emmy, really, if they wanted to save us, two bodies, not one – and I tell them about the warning, the numbers, because they might find a way to send me a message back. They probably could. Or: they always told us that they could travel faster, just not for as long. Maybe they’ve fixed that? Maybe they’ve had a breakthrough in the last few weeks, and there’s a ship roaring towards us right now, and it will pull alongside us and lower its doors and I’ll get to drift over, and I’ll be saved. I write that in the blog, and everything else, even down to my dreams and what I’ve seen outside the ship, to give them a better idea of where I am. I write them and then I click Send, and then I don’t look at them again, because I really can’t stand the thought. It’s one thing to watch videos of the others, seeing stuff through their eyes for a second. I couldn’t stand to relive this trip through my own eyes, I don’t think.

I miss gravity. So many days into nothing, into my floating inside the ship that is floating in space, like a Russian doll, and I have decided that I want to feel the floor beneath my feet again. We were never going to put the gravity field online when we started off: all I know is that it burns through the piezoelectric batteries like nothing else on the ship.

‘The sheer energy required to sustain it is monumental.’ I can’t remember which one of the crew told me that. I flick the switch, and there’s a humming coming from all around the walls, making us shake, a subtle vibration, like a washing machine, and I push myself towards a standing position for when it kicks in. I am suddenly pushed to the floor, and there’s a sound like jumping on twigs. Something in my leg snaps. The pain is monumental. It roars up my side, and I collapse to the floor, my other leg buckling under my weight, twisting behind me. The sting from that one is negligible: the injury in the other has caused blood to start spilling out of the root of my trouser leg, puddling out around me into a pool. Amongst all of this, the beeping starts again, and I am heaped on the floor, unable to see the screen. Deal with the leg first. There are bandages in the medical cupboard, I’ve seen them, and painkillers, and probably whatever else I’m going to need. I try to roll the trouser leg up but something stops it, something hard and sharp and like being stabbed, and I assume that it must be a bone. Scissors. I need to cut it free.

I drag myself across the floor to the table, trying not to look at my leg, trying not to let it drag – or worse, snag on anything, the jutting bone facing outwards like a little hook looking for a catch – and hoist myself to the seats. The cupboard is above that table, and I manage to get it open without having to push myself up any higher than the seats themselves. From there, the scissors. My shaky hands don’t do justice to the fabric, tearing and ripping as best they can, until I can finally see the damage itself. With the pink of the blood, the yellow of my skin, it looks like coral. It looks – as with coral – almost aerated, fine holes, bubbles running throughout. This is my shin, pushed out and upwards and through the skin, a one-inch punch, as neat and delicate as my own surgery on the trouser leg.

In the kit there is a huge roll of bandages, some elastic strips, some plasters, a self-cleaning syringe with multiple doses of morphine in it, another with some sort of anaesthetic, another with antiseptic. There should be tens of bottles of painkillers, as well, but the tray is nearly empty, their slots sad and vacant, only one bottle left. I wonder which of the crew was using them; we were warned that they could be addictive, that the headaches, the sickness we might feel would pass, that the painkillers were strictly for emergency use. There’s a metal splint. I take the syringes and the splint and the bandages and shuffle backwards on the bench, pulling my leg by the thigh until it is flat – or as flat as I can get it – on the bench with me. The beeping persists from the computer. Fuck.