The Explorer. James Smythe
He’ll lead the charge against me. He’ll put me in the airlock and flush me into space, and they’ll watch as I scream and die, an alien, a clone, a gutless, brutal anomaly, and the guilt he’ll feel will be negligible. He’ll be desperately confused, sure, but he won’t feel guilt, because he’s the real me, and that’s how I would feel. I don’t know how I know this, but I can almost see it playing out in my mind, or like a gut feeling, like intuition. I have to stay here, or they’ll think I’m insane, or he is.
Is he? Am I?
I listen as the crew wake up, pulling themselves from their beds. I am crouched, hiding under the box, terrified, sobbing, biting my lip to keep from making noise. I can hear my own voice: it carries down the corridors more than any of the others, it seems. That’s probably just my mind playing tricks on me; I never thought that I spoke so loudly. Quinn was first up, and he found Arlen, woke Emmy, and they got his body out, tried to bring him back. As they were strapping him to the table – the medical table, the same place we ate our meals, everything with multiple purposes, wiped down after single tasks to prepare for the next emergency/meal – the rest of us woke up. I listen as Wanda cries, as Guy offers to examine his bed, as Emmy closes his eyes for him.
‘What a way to wake up,’ Quinn says, talking about Arlen but meaning himself.
‘Something must have happened to the air supply,’ I hear myself say, my voice like when you hear it on a recording: more nasal, not quite right, but definitely mine. ‘Or maybe there’s a crack?’
‘No cracks,’ Guy replies. ‘If they’ve got a crack, the door won’t lock. It’s a closed system: needs to make a circuit to shut properly.’
‘Maybe the seal itself?’
‘If the seal is torn, the door won’t lock either. It’ll be something else. These things can happen, fucking errors in the code or the wiring or the chips shorted out. Extremes of temperature, you know. These things can happen.’ We used to joke about his stereotype, about how he was German and so fucking efficient. It started before, when we were in training, but this was the first time we really noticed it. I remember it all. If I tried, I think I could exactly predict what I’m about to say: I mouth the words as they leave the other me’s mouth.
‘They can, but they shouldn’t.’ I can’t see it, but I remember what happened then: I hugged Wanda, told her that it would all be all right, even though I barely knew her. It was consoling. When Guy couldn’t hear us, we spoke about how he was too cold, too clinical. Quinn told us that he had to be, said that, if he wasn’t, who would be? And Wanda wouldn’t stop crying: I totally forgot that she had to be sedated that day, that Emmy had to take her to her bed, put her back. When we slept in them we just used the straps, closed the doors, but they weren’t locked or anything. I forgot that, for a while, it was like Wanda was dead as well.
I listen to the crew arguing as they try to revive Arlen, but they give up so quickly, because Emmy says that there’s no coming back when the body is in the state his is. She’s the one who tells them to stop, finally, and she calls the time of death as if this is a hospital. When she does it they all sigh, and Quinn shouts something in anger, and Guy doesn’t even pay attention, it seems, because there are things that need doing. This ship, he would have said if he had been asked, won’t run itself.
‘We should tell Ground Control,’ Quinn says. Nobody disagrees with him. The wait time at that point was only a few minutes, because of how close we still were to home, but I remember that it felt like forever, having to deliver that news. ‘This is the crew of the Ishiguro,’ Quinn says into the computer microphone, ‘and we’ve just come out of the pods, just checking in. Ship is stable, fuel reserves at 93%, which is in line with expectations. Captain Arlen Bester didn’t wake up after stasis, however; attempts to resuscitate him have been unsuccessful. Time of death was called at oh-seven-forty hours.’ He left out all of the details – about his blue skin, his chalky eyes – because there was no need to pass them on. We were warned, when we signed all of our disclaimers and NDAs, hundreds of pages of the things, that the beds could malfunction. It was one of the multitudinous ways that we could die, and DARPA couldn’t – wouldn’t – be held responsible. When Quinn’s finished, he suggests that we say something. We’re already standing around Arlen’s body as if it’s a proper funeral; all that’s missing are the clods of dirt to throw onto the coffin, the priest, the black suits. He turns to the other me, the original me, tells me that I should do it. ‘You’re good with words,’ he says. I remember my speech; I remember how it fell out of my mouth, like I was being sick in fits and bursts.
As the other me talks about Arlen’s beard, about what a cool guy he was, tells stories about stuff that happened in training, I hang onto the wall and wonder once again if I’m completely insane, and if any of this is real at all. I notice my leg, where I hurt it – where I remember the blood, the bone sticking through, so painful – and realize that, even though it still hurts, the wound isn’t sensitive. I wind up my trouser leg, expecting blood, a scab, a gash, but it’s healed. Along the line of my knee is a scar, like a sideways grimace, but it’s healed. I ball my hand to a fist and hit it, trying to see if it flinches with pain, and it does, but it’s only dull, like an echo, a memory of how sharp the pain used to be. As I keep listening to the crew it hurts more and more, until it’s aching again, creasing along the line where it feels slightly healed, where the scar is; until the pain starts creeping up my whole body.
I must have remembered it wrong. I must have. Despite how it looks, after a while it hurts so badly that I’m shaking slightly. The pain gets worse with each passing second. I have no idea how I’ll make it go away, and I shake and moan, because none of this makes any sense.
The crew are running diagnostics, sweeping the ship for anything that might not have been spotted. At the time – and again, now, as I listen to it for the second time in my life, word for word the same – Guy told us it was to make sure that we were safe.
‘Think of this thing as a rubber boat,’ he says. ‘You go for hours along a river that’s calm; it’s great, nothing wrong. You hit some rapids all of a sudden, and it gets a puncture, something tiny, barely even visible; you might not realize. But, you know, you made it through the rapids safe, and you’re alive, so you relax. When you’re then in the huge river, or the sea, in this instance, it doesn’t matter how still it is, how calm and relaxing: if you don’t find that puncture, that could be the thing that kills you.’ We had to search for the puncture, in case it existed. ‘This is nothing to do with Arlen’s death: it’s standard protocol. There’s nothing to worry about, it’s just something we have to do. Back to work, you know? Better to be safe than sorry,’ Guy said. Each member of the crew was assigned a room; each member scoured that room to check its integrity. I put myself behind the boxes, in between them; they’re curved, like a U in the room, a perfect human-sized space for me, and there’s space under them where they’ve been strapped down, where I can hide, like a criminal clinging to the undercarriage of a vehicle, praying he isn’t caught. I hide in there and wait as the door opens and somebody walks around the room. I don’t know who it is, because I don’t look, in case they hear me move. I know that it wasn’t me, because I was checking the main room: it was all I could be trusted with, because what else did I know? I wasn’t like the rest of them.
I first met Emmy months and months before the flight, along with the rest of the crew. There was a bank of seventeen astronauts and pilots that they were going to draw from, all of whom had been training, and all of whom were at various stages of that training; six doctors; four scientists. There were three of us journalists, and we had all done the physical checks, all the psychological profiling: days worth of questions about our lives, our hopes, our fears, our families. We had a week-long camp where we did physical exercises, pushed our bodies and our minds to the absolute limits; and then, at night, we socialized, but not too much. They let us out of our rooms every day for a few hours, kept us moving around the groups to see who we worked best with. There were no phone calls home, and they – a subdivision of DARPA, a government-sponsored conglomeration of companies that was privately funding the space trip – watched everything. It was like a television show, a reality one, where we waited for the viewers to vote us off. They had to make sure that