The Explorer. James Smythe
something this important. There’s thirty seconds before you sleep, thirty defined seconds and then there’s nothing. I stare out of the glass of the pod and then I remember my leg, which now is healed, the blood only a tired stain on the clothes, faded almost completely, and I can move it, flex it, and I know that something – either the end, before, or this now – cannot be real.
The door to the bed opens and spits me out. This is how it was the first time, still totally familiar; the weirdest sensation, leaving you soaking wet, gasping for air, as if, almost, you’ve forgotten how to breathe. For that first second it’s so alien, so complicated, and there’s so much water dripping off you that it feels like you’re drowning, maybe. The water drips off me, and the ship sucks it into its vents, ready for reprocessing, for turning into drinking water, shower water. I’m dry in seconds.
My eyesight is still screwed up, so I rub at my eyes, blink wildly. I jam my foot against the corner of the room, steady myself. The whir of the ship – engines on, moving quickly, but nothing like the noise I heard before, when I woke – is nearly distracting, because it’s so quiet again, that same hum as it always was, engines working fine, ticking along. Then I see Arlen. I had forgotten. I’d forgotten what he looked like when we opened the bed, found him there. He looks the same; almost blue, flaking like an old wall.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say to him, ‘I had to get into the bed.’ I pick him up – he weighs nothing, like an over-full sack of dust – and put him back, strapping him down, tying him in. I hate to touch him, but I have to, so I’m careful. The ship is so dark still, and I’m suddenly not used to it. ‘Lights,’ I say, and they flick on one by one. Everything here is like it was. I look to the cockpit: I remember it being pulled off, cracks spreading across the view screen, then being torn out. It’s all so clean. I look around to see if Emmy is okay in her bed: she’s still strapped in, as if nothing ever happened. She looks utterly tranquil, peaceful. Her eyes are shut. I look at the rest of them: Arlen, so blue and chalky; Quinn, handsome and sharp-jawed, stony-faced; Guy, his face in a smirk, almost; Wanda, Dogsbody, but her eyes aren’t red any more, and her face is clean, which is odd. Then I get to the last bed, my bed, which should be empty; but there’s a body in there already, like all the others, and I take a second before I focus on the face, recounting, wondering if I’ve fucked up, and then I really look at him. It’s me, my face. He’s clean-shaven and pure and his cheeks are glossy and his hair parted and neat. He looks as I did weeks ago, when we left on this mission. He is in my bed, and he is breathing softly, the gentle rise of his chest, the puff of his cheeks, sleeping as I sleep, the exact same way.
‘Fuck,’ I say. I hit the glass front with my hand, wanting to stay where I am, let me focus on the face; I try to breathe, but it clogs in my throat, so I cough it out, force it out. I pull myself up, until we’re face to face, look through the glass. ‘This is a trick,’ I shout, ‘who’s fucking with me?’ but I know that it isn’t a trick, that I’m not being fucked with. I feel my guts roar, faster than I can control, and I taste it in my mouth, vomit, awful and bitter. I swallow it down on instinct, because I don’t want it floating around. Every part of me wants to open the bed, but I don’t. I can’t explain it. I don’t.
Shaking – quivering – I hurl myself across the room towards the computers in the cockpit, look at the date on the computers, at the updates from Ground Control. The screen is emblazoned with the message that we had waiting for us when we woke up – Dear crew, it reads, Welcome to your new home for the foreseeable future! – and it’s time-stamped, marked as unread. I check the monitors, the gauges and dials and numbers that I know how to read. We’re on 93% fuel, which means we’re only hours out of warp, and that’s what it was when we woke up, one by one, popping out of the beds ready to be the explorers we were destined to be. Arlen was meant to be first up, first out of bed. When we got out of the sleeping pods, Arlen didn’t. He was meant to have been up hours before us, preparing the ship, turning the lights and heat on, checking that the life support systems were working. He died, and we assumed that the system malfunctioned. It was unexplainable, no matter how hard we tried: the diagnostic tests showed everything working perfectly. It hits me again: the system didn’t malfunction; I did. I opened his bed during warp, and I dragged him out and I squirrelled myself away in his place. I pull myself across to him and examine his body through the glass. This is what the scientists warned us could happen if we weren’t in stasis: rapid dehydration, massive decomposition of the flesh, incredible bone loss. I wish I had closed his eyes before I put him back in, because they look like they’re fake, like they’re made of paper, the pupils drawn on in dusty black pen.
I killed Arlen. It’s all I can think, and all I can see, and I’m so confused that I start crying, and I have no idea how I can stop.
Arlen had an hour before the rest of the crew were woken up, and now I have that hour, somehow. I swear into the space around me, and I cry so much and watch as the tears peel away from my face before they drip off, and I stare at Arlen, who watches me, letting me know how guilty I am. This is my fault.
I have to hide, I think. They can’t see me like this. The ship is just a huge fucking coffin, rigged to explode, dragging its crew into the furnace as it goes, and we exploded because I was there, and this – all of this, seeing myself, like a mirror, like a trick of the light, like a magician’s finest hour – all of this is wrong and unreal, because it has to be.
Only: it feels real. I gasp and feel the floor, and it feels real enough, and everything is how it was. I don’t know how, but I’m back on the Ishiguro, and it’s the start of the trip, and I’m not the me that I was.
I panic, because I don’t understand what’s happening, how I can be here, and pull myself through the rest of the ship, turning the lights on all the way down to the engine room, past the airlock and the changing room. There are rooms back here. We barely ever had cause to go into them, because they didn’t have anything that we needed. Two rooms near the back – the base – of the ship were exclusively for fuel cells and engine access panels, another exclusively for the battery; they had routine checks, mostly by Guy or Wanda, but the rest of us didn’t touch them. We weren’t trained to, and we didn’t want to. One of the storerooms was where most of the food supplies were kept, but that was too frequently used; and then the storage room for walk supplies, emergency power tools, that sort of thing. This is the one: I don’t remember ever going in here, because we so rarely needed anything from here. If you needed to hide somewhere, this would be the place. From where I’m floating, the ship is actually enormous, cavernous, far bigger than six people needed; so much space filled with nothing but fuel cells or enormous batteries or storage crates. This is where I’ll hide. I find a crate, full of spare parts for the ship, piping hose and sheet metal. It’s fastened to the grated floor with clips and carabiners, to keep it rigid in no-gravity. I loosen the straps, only slightly, just enough to leave a gap about a foot deep underneath it, and I slide under it. This will be fine as a hiding place, unless they put on the gravity and the box falls down to crush me. That won’t happen. Assuming that what I think has happened has actually happened – I am back here, at the start, and everything is going to happen the way that it originally did – the gravity won’t be put on for a short while yet.
I think about what I’ll do when the crew wake up. I’ll go to them, and tell them what’s happened, surprising them as they do their routine checks on the systems, as they run their diagnostics. When they find Arlen’s body, I’ll explain: they all died, and I was alone, and then I died as well, blowing up the ship because I didn’t want to die slowly and ingloriously, and now I’m here, and I killed Arlen, dragged his body out of sleep before I should have, left him in the coldness of the ship to choke to death, to freeze. Hello, I’ll say, take pity on me; even though I know that they won’t. They’ll hear my words as the ranting and raving of a madman, of an identikit stowaway. They’ll brandish their pitchforks and storm the castle, and demand that I’m killed for what I’ve done: or, at the very least, held accountable. They won’t listen. I know that the me that’ll be out there won’t listen, that’s for sure. He’ll stare at his hitherto-unknown twin as if he’s insane. He’ll want to know what’s happening, and he’ll be overly aggressive, to prove he’s not a part of the conspiracy, and they’ll want answers, proof that I’m