The Explorer

I had the ambition to not only go farther than man had gone before, but to go as far as it was possible to go.

– Captain Cook

1

One of the first things I did when I realized that I was never going to make it home – when I was the only crewmember left, all the others stuffed into their sleeping chambers like rigid, vacuum-packed action figures – was to write up a list of everybody I would never see again; let me wallow in it, swim around in missing them as much as I could. My name is Cormac Easton. I am a journalist and, I suppose, an astronaut. Part of my job on the ship was to be in charge of the communications with home, taking video and writing updates, sending them back to Earth directly. There wasn’t a guarantee of how long any of the broadcasts would take to get there – if they got there at all, as far out as we were, what with the chance of interference – but it was something. It was how I had been sending all my reports, but I assumed that they’d know what to do with something more personal, that they would pass it along. The list was deep. Elena was at the top. I had missed her before we’d even left. On the days leading up to the launch I had been trying to get hold of her, leaving messages, telling her how I felt, because what screwed us up was this, my job, this trip; and I wanted to see if, when it was all over, we could try again. There’s always hope, that’s what they say. As soon as I worked out that there wasn’t ever going to be that chance for reconciliation? It became something else. I wasn’t missing her any more: it was despair, maybe, or another word for when you fall apart, when you can’t cope, when it all crumbles. I hid my feelings from my crewmates because I didn’t want to ruin their trip, didn’t want to bring them down. That went into my messages. I told Elena that I missed her, and that I would always miss her, and that, if there was a God, we would see each other again someday, even though I didn’t believe that. It just felt right to write it, in case.

Some other people that I’ll never see again: My parents, my mother and father. My parents are – were – teachers. My mother left my father in the late stages of their lives, post-retirement, and he decided to cut himself off from me completely. In books, they say that familial rejection is often a direct result of one’s coping mechanisms, but I think he had been looking for an excuse. We barely ever got along, and when he disappeared, he really disappeared. No phone call on my birthday, no letters, nothing. It’s been over five years since I’ve seen him. He might be dead for all I know. Sometimes that’s what I assume. It’s easier than explaining what really happened. My mother died six months ago, something to do with her heart, and my father didn’t come to the funeral, or call, or anything. I had a cat as well, though he was missing when I left, which was typical – a packed suitcase on the bed usually meant a holiday, and he went off and hid somewhere, unforgiving of us for abandoning him. It was bad enough with Elena gone, frankly. My friends, though they all lived elsewhere, kids and jobs and the breakup with Elena dividing us. And then my crew: the crew that I came out here with, that I started this journey with. My crew died in bits and bobs, dribs and drabs, up here, with me. My crew: I was never really a part of them, even after all the training, because they knew more than me, technical things. This trip relied on them to happen. I was chaff. Civilians never fit in completely; those people had been training their whole lives. I was here for PR purposes; they were here for the science. I would argue that I was here for the adventure, as well, for the sense of exploration: they would understand that, I think, but I can’t tell them that now. They died one by one, falling off like there was a checklist. First to go was Arlen.

Arlen was First Pilot, from somewhere in the American Mid-west – Ohio, I think, but he spoke about the country as if he’d lived all over, throwing names of cities and towns into conversation, always with a tale to tell about them. He was a storyteller, one of those types, and older than the rest of us by a few years. When we all met he was clean-shaven, but he grew a beard for the trip, because he wanted to see what happened to it when we were in stasis.

‘When we get out,’ he said, ‘this sucker might have grown. I want to know just how frozen we actually are in those things.’ We were only in them for a fortnight, but he said that if it grew fast enough he’d be able to tell the difference. He thought that it would be hilarious if it grew so fast he would go from tidy to unkempt over the course of a single sleep. He was all about the joke, Arlen. He died in stasis, or just didn’t wake up, however you want to think of it. We all came out of the pods one by one, as we had in training: his was meant to be first, so that he could switch on everything, run diagnostics before the rest of us turned out; but, for some reason, his bed didn’t open. By the time we prised it open he was gone. Something must have happened to it during the launch period, because everything was fine when we got into them; we had run stress tests to make sure, and those things were meant to be idiot-proof. In a worst-case scenario, they were even meant to be our escape pods: the thought of one malfunctioning didn’t exactly fill us with confidence. We all came out of our pods soaking wet, because something about the sleep made you sweat, made your entire body lose its water. Arlen wasn’t wet: his skin was a filthy grey-blue, hard and crusty and starting to flake off in fingernail-sized chunks of dust. We tried using the defibrillator on him but nothing happened. The skin cracked, and his eyes were so dry they looked like marshmallows, and we realized that we were going to have to put him back and seal him off. We said some words, told Earth, a few of us cried; but that wasn’t a mission ending critical, as Ground Control called it. That was why we had more than one pilot.

‘Things can go wrong,’ Ground Control told us. ‘You have to be prepared.’

Second to die was Wanda. We jokingly called her Dogsbody, because she got all the awful jobs, and pretty much did whatever her superiors told her to do. That included me, for some reason; even though I had no official rank, she acted as if I did. Respect, maybe, or honour. Something. She had been recruited straight out of some Ivy League university, and she acted it. When she did what we asked, it was always grudgingly, and she was surly, sad. We speculated that she really missed home. She was American as well – she and Arlen, the American contingent, first into action, first to leave, like some old joke about one of the wars – and her accent was Southern, but she always said that she was from DC. We had something in common: headaches. I get bad headaches in low gravity, which I didn’t realize, of course, until we were up here. I think most people have the potential to get them, over long periods of time. It’s the pressure. I never had headaches before we came up here, and neither did Wanda. We were the worst to get them – or, maybe just the worst to feel them, at first, before we got used to them. Wanda died outside, in space. Her suit had a tear, or a crack, and we ran so many checks, over and over on all the suits, that when she died we couldn’t believe it. There was a routine maintenance scan on the hull every few days; we cut thrusters, made sure that the outside was holding up, that the hull’s integrity was normal. We were pushing ourselves into new parts of space; the first time that we had been here, manned, this far out. The hull could have developed issues, so we sent Dogsbody – Wanda – out to check it, on her wire, and we ate breakfast. She reached the apex of the craft and her line went taut, and she drifted off, her helmet filled with blood, thick enough that we couldn’t see her face. When we dragged her in her eyes had burst behind her eyelids. Her head had drowned, really, flooded the helmet like a bathysphere, like a goldfish bowl. She’d kept her mouth shut, squeezed her eyes shut like we were told in cases of depressurization, but her nostrils … We hadn’t even thought about the nostrils. Guy suggested that we all wear earplugs in our noses after that, when we went on walks, but we didn’t, because we knew that if the helmets failed us, no amount of plugging cavities was going to keep us alive.

Guy was third. He was German, and that wasn’t his real name. His real name was Gerhardt, but we had to prise that out of him, really bully him to tell us. He hadn’t used that name since he was a child, he said. To hear it made him angry. Guy suited him better. Gerhardt suggests a fat man, a chef, huge and mustachioed and swirling. That wasn’t Guy, who was thin and tall and bald, almost hairless. He was chief scientist and engineer. We debated turning around after Wanda died, head back to Earth whether Ground Control gave us permission to or not – could we even do that? The systems weren’t meant to put us in reverse until half the fuel had been depleted, but Guy helped develop the tech that made the ship run: he would almost definitely know the safe codes to reprogram the systems, to manipulate our journey, change the coordinates, change where we were heading. Everything was safe codes and protected routes that we weren’t able to change. We went silent as we put Wanda’s body back in her stasis pod, stopped – although, we never actually stopped, of course; we were always drifting, because that was the nature of space, no stopping, nothing ever ceasing – and we sent a message home, and waited for the reply. There was an eight-minute wait for messages to reach home at that point – four minutes to send it, four to get the reply, but we had to give them extra time for any anomalies. We sent the message a few times, to make sure, and waited and waited. Eventually, they told us we were carrying on; that we couldn’t afford to stay still, that we should turn the engines back on a.s.a.p. The life support in the ship is piezoelectric, charging itself from the vibrations that the hull makes as the engines rattle it, so as not to deplete the fuel supply; the longer the ship stays static, the less time life support has. The ship was built to keep us moving. We were told that we had to progress, that Wanda’s death wasn’t crucial, so we did, for a while. Quinn and Emmy didn’t like it: they argued, wanted to turn around. I supported them, and when they told Guy that they were turning the ship, it turned into a full-blown argument. Quinn was screaming at him, using nothing other than a sense of morality as his argument (people had died, we owed them something) and self-preservation (people had died, and there might be more), and Guy grabbed the walls suddenly and he had a heart attack, scrabbling at his chest with his hands, beating at it like he was fighting off another man, an actual physical attack. In zero gravity it was scarier than seeing it normally; normally you imagine people crumpling to the floor, but Guy was a cartoon version, a terrified and confused wolf plummeting down a ravine, clutching at his chest as he fell. As Emmy kept saying that night, consoling us, or trying to: it would have happened anyway. And Guy had been losing it: he accused me of things, started getting paranoid, seeing things. There’s no telling what this amount of pressure can do to the human body, let alone to the mind. We were past any point where anybody had been before, and we had to accept that, and move on. We were as fit as we could be; we would either cope or we wouldn’t.

Quinn was next to die; and with him, it became almost funny, or like a setup for some awful TV show, where you expect the presenter to reveal that it had all been an overly elaborate joke. He was the second pilot, though he always referred to himself as a caretaker.

‘I only push the occasional button,’ he told me in his first interview. I am a journalist. That’s why I’m here, that’s my motivation, to document this, to take film clips, to write about this. We live in a time of interest, of being able to remember this stuff forever: it’s not like when it was paper, which faded and peeled and tore. Data lives forever, and we’re in a new age of journalism: the age of permanence. I could win a Pulitzer for this, everybody said before we left. I was writing up the adventures of those who go further than anybody ever has before. This is the stuff of sci-fi movies and books, of dreams: it’s humanity exploring again, crossing the deserts, reaching the poles, scouring the depths. We’re doing it because we can, is the first line in my article. In the film of this, I am the fourth actor’s name to appear on the screen. I’m the everyman. The stars are Arlen – it’s a shock twist when he dies so early, so his part is almost a cameo – and Quinn, but Quinn’s face is biggest on the poster. Quinn was handsome, charming, roguish. All those things. He looked like a prince, or some sort of Arabian herald; dark hair, sharp jaw, blurry blue eyes that were at odds with his heritage. Quinn was British-Sri Lankan, but had spent most of his youth in California. He had a curious English drawl, slipping into it when he asked for stereotypes, for tea, for a sandwich, to wear some trousers, but the rest of the time it was pure West Coast, smooth and swift. Quinn died when I was outside the ship, working on some wiring to try and get control of the computers. We shouldn’t have been out alone, but we were down in our numbers. We had lost all contact with Ground Control, so we panicked; he was trying to turn the ship around, which meant overriding the systems, which meant working on something outside the ship as well as the computer system inside the ship at the same time. When I came back Emmy was crying, absolutely hysterical. Irreconcilable. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but she was gone, inconsolable, and Quinn was on the floor, his eyes rolled right back, blood around his head because he’d fallen down – the engines were off, and we were still, and gravity, being what it is, had taken its toll – and he had hit his head on the wall at the wrong angle, a cruel accident, the sort of thing that could have happened to any of us, and I couldn’t even get Emmy to try to save him because she wouldn’t stop screaming. I looked in her eyes, and she was just petrified. It was terrifying, really. There was blood on her hands, and it looked like – or, it could have looked like – she was responsible, but she didn’t say anything about it when I asked her, and I had to have faith. I had to. When I had cleaned up the mess and turned the engines back on, I bundled his body into the stasis beds – have you ever tried to move a body in microgravity? It floats and wobbles and hits you, inadvertently, and you almost forget that it’s a body, because it’s suddenly all physical mass and form, but with no weight behind it – and sealed it up, all the bodies there, peering out until we got home. They all looked like they were asleep, apart from Wanda, with the blood around her eyes. I don’t know why we didn’t wipe it before we put her to sleep. And then there were two. Last – apart from me, if I’m going to die – was Emmy.

Emmy died – I use that word, but, really, maybe it’s not that bad, maybe there’s something can be done, I don’t know – only hours after Quinn, really. We were barely speaking, because something had gone wrong with her, I think, in her mind. That was the other thing they warned us about: snapping. She seemed to blame me for the deaths of the others, and she wouldn’t look at me, not properly. She screamed at me that it was my fault, that I was somehow responsible for everything. She called me a murderer. We didn’t speak, and she refused to sleep. Eventually I worried about what would happen to me when I slept – because she seemed, suddenly, like she could do something – so I had to keep her sedated most of the time, strapped into her bed. They had warned us, when we did all the training, that this would be psychologically tough. I seemed to be fine, but Emmy bore the brunt of their warning. They bandied around words in training, in a joking way, but you never knew if they were actually joking. And then after our journey, and all the deaths! How could you stay sane? Even I don’t know how I’ve held up; if I’ve held up. We powered down and I sent another message back, not knowing if it would reach home, but praying, and praying that, somehow, they could reply, and we let the time tick as the life support system whirred. With only the two of us we knew we had enough life support to stay there for a day or so – a full complement of 6 had 6 hours, so we did shaky maths based on the sizes of our lungs, and the backup tanks that we could wrench from the now-spare suits and fit to the system. So we sat, and she was silent until she finally decided to speak to me. She sounded so threatening, like some villain from a movie, telling me that she was fine, trying to psychoanalyse me, getting nowhere. When I was scared enough – for my life, for what she might try and do when I slept or when my guard was down – I was forced to put her to sleep. I had to. I had to sedate her, and then I put her in stasis until we could get home, when they would wake her up and fix her. I had to.

That was a couple of days ago. She missed the best part of the trip, when we – I – hit our fuel limit, the 51% mark, when the ship was meant to turn itself back, send us all home. It didn’t. I watched it creep to 52%, and then tick over, and I waited for something to happen. I assumed deus ex machina: there would be clanking, something mechanical, and the ship’s engines would kick in, boosters taking us into that beautiful curve, and then I’d suddenly see Earth in the distance, a pinprick of light. I would get to watch this all on the monitors, trying to remember the star formations that we had passed, laughing as a formation that was on our left was now on the right, as I tripped past it and gaily waved. I watched it creep to 50 from 51, and then I stopped the ship. That much I knew how to do: there is a pause button, big and green, like you would find in a cartoon. All systems are frozen before they shut down automatically. They are kept on a hyper low-energy standby to preserve them, like a TV set or a computer. They Ding! when you bring them back online. When there’s a problem, a red light flashes and there’s a beep, a long, solid, irritating beep from the system speakers. The designers must have loved sci-fi films. I froze the systems so that, when they came back on, they would kick-start. I imagined the computer’s AI as being like a late student, realizing that the alarm hasn’t gone off, and then running to compensate. It wasn’t, and when I rebooted all I got was more forward movement. I spent 2% percent of the fuel wondering if we had already turned, and were heading in the right direction, heading home, but we hadn’t and we weren’t. That was that: I travel forward until I run out of fuel, and then I use the life support – a week, maybe, given that it’s just me, if I breathe in shallow breaths and then rely on the spare O

tanks in the external suits – until I run out of air, and then I die. In many ways, it’s calming, knowing that it will probably happen: I remember reading something in the papers years ago, an article about a journalist who knew that he had cancer, knew that he was going to die, and said that it eased him. He moved on, and he had his family move on as well. There were rumours that his wife started dating before he was even dead, because that’s what he wanted. Not everybody reacts that way, but he did: he found a tranquillity in it.

All that I’ve got up here is tranquillity now, I suppose.

2

I eat meals by myself; or, rather, I eat them in the room with all the sleep pods and my dead colleagues, because it’s either that or the cockpit, or one of the other parts of the ship. We’ve got expansive engine rooms; massive chambers full of tech that I don’t understand, all to process the air and the water, keep us going; and storerooms, spaces that would be empty if they weren’t filled with crates of supplies we’ll never use. The power supply is cutting edge; until a year ago, it was touch and go as to whether they’d get it down small enough to actually even launch. They did. I don’t know how we ever doubted them.

It’s amazing how fast you can get bored. Emmy’s been dead for two days – I keep using that word, because in an ordinary situation we would get home and she would be brought out of sleep and somebody would be able to help her, with drugs or surgery, something to balance her. But here, she’s dead. I know that we’re not going backwards, and no pods have returned to the ship to tell me their rescue plan. I mean, not that they could have one in the first place. It would take them so long to reach me that I’d be dead by the time that they did. There is no Plan B.

I’ve become like a vampire, sitting here in the dark on my own, lusting for something – anything – other than this, other than here. I’ve turned the lights off – I flicked the switch when the computer shouted that we were crossing paths with an asteroid (Nereus, the on-screen prompt told me), just to look at it, really. Couldn’t see it though, the real version. There’s technology on the screens that shows you images, composites of what’s really out there with CG stuff, to give you information. It painted in the path of the asteroid for me; I see its tail in the distance, as it runs towards Earth, where it’ll swing around, passing close enough for bedroom-astronomers to get excited. From here, Earth is a speck, a twinkle, a flash of light. We were in space for two reasons. Guy was running tests on anomalies, things that probes and satellites and telescopes couldn’t even begin to fathom, all to further our knowledge of space. That was only the secondary reason, though: science taking a back seat to something less tangible. Our primary remit was to inspire people, to be explorers. To show the people of Earth that we – as a race – were able to take ourselves further, to push our limits, our scope. Nobody explored any more, so we were the new vanguard. It was so exciting, so important. We were going to be heroes.

The lights are off now all over the ship, and I have decided to not switch them back on again. I don’t need to, not yet. There’s very little to see here, and the lights inside the sleep pods and from the panels keep me going. Nobody’s been here before, and it’ll be years, maybe more, before people come here again. Why would they risk it? I like that nobody will know what happened. An assumption: the contact-capsules never made it back to the Moon, never made it back to Ground Control and DARPA, and they will think something happened to us. There are so many possibilities, each of them worthy of a movie. We made first contact, and now are in another galaxy, being tortured, or prepping an invasion force. We exploded, and now orbit the Earth as chunks of what we were. Somebody in the crew got Space Madness and killed everyone else. We had a hull breach. We crashed into a moon, an asteroid field, a spatial anomaly that nobody had factored in, or seen before – we made a discovery! We popped a fuel cell, ran out, we’re adrift. We never left Earth, and it was all a cover-up, our launch filmed on a sound-stage. There are different scenarios that they’ll run because they just want to know what happened to us, and this will set them back fifteen years of research. Next time, it’ll be safety first; minimize the risks. They’ll take years deliberating about whether it’s worth it; they’ll only go out with a real purpose, a reason to do it (colonization, or fuel, maybe). It’ll be decades before they think it’s safe, and the ship won’t be a prototype: it’ll be tested to near-death before it’s sent up. They’ll try to save energy by launching from the Moon, maybe, and the ship will be bigger, and it will have more fuel, and a crew of pilots and engineers. No useless straggler of a journalist. It’ll be packed to the gills with the fail-safes we went without, like an AI pilot. Whatever happens, that ship will go up and then come back down, having done what it was meant to do, even if the crew all suffer a fate that couldn’t ever be predicted. It might not even have a crew to begin with: keep it less fallible.

The ship is clean, absolutely clinical. It’s like an operating theatre, not a doctor’s surgery: there isn’t much around to tinker with. There are no lines on the floor to give us directions, no screens and beeps. There are panels that run computers, and there’s a table with a transparent lid that shows what we keep inside it – food bars, books, medical equipment. On one wall of the main cabin run plastic chairs that fold down from the wall like a cinema, all with clips on the sides that click onto the pins on the sides of our trousers to keep us sitting down if we don’t want to float. On the other wall is a table, a booth, built in, enough seating for all of us, same principle with the clips. We were meant to sit together once a day for meals. There was a list of rules that some psychologists thought up, to help us deal with being out here for so long on our own.

‘It brings about a sense of camaraderie,’ they said, ‘to remind you of the comfort and security of being together: not alone, but part of a unit, working together towards a single goal. Subconsciously, it will remind you of eating home-cooked meals with your family.’

‘That’s a great idea,’ I remember Quinn saying, ‘but my mother never cooked shitty meal bars from cellophane packets.’ There are no knives and forks, clearly, just hundreds of sachets of meal bars. They’re all sponsored by fast-food companies, and they taste just like the real burgers and chips and puddings, only in these reformed bars, hard and crispy when they’ve been heated, soft and damp when not. We have exercise machines, all designed to provide physical stress, resistance, and we’re meant to use them for half an hour a day to prevent bone loss. Then there are the beds, designed for comfort and stasis, used every night. They sit at a 45-degree angle, and we sleep with buffers around us to stop us slipping in any direction. There are padded straps to hold us in. We all, at one point or another, floated whilst sleeping. It seemed silly not to. They all have doors. Their glass is frosted, but you can still see the bodies through it. We have everything we could ever need up here, in the front, in what passes as a cockpit, a lounge, a bedroom, a cabin. It’s almost upper-class.

I’ve thought of killing myself, but something stops me. Just think, it says, you’ll go further than anyone else has ever been. You’ll see deeper into space than anybody else has ever seen. You’ll make history.

‘But nobody will ever know,’ I reply, and the something doesn’t say anything back to me, just sits there in the dark. I take my place in the chair at the front of the ship and decide to ride it out.

I take sleeping pills. I don’t know what I’m trying to achieve by this. Sleeping pills are a cry for help, right? I take a handful, because I don’t know how many I’m meant to take. They’re not even kept in the medicine cabinet: we were given our own supply, because we were told we might have trouble with sleeping. I vomit them up into a white paper bag, then dispose of it in the refuse. It makes me feel awful. I don’t know why I did it. I’ve never been that sort of person. I’ve never had that sort of strength.

When things beep on technology you don’t know how to operate it’s the worst thing in the world. There’s a flat panel covered in switches, next to the big Go/Pause button, and there’s a screen covered in jargon that means nothing. It’s fine knowing about the placements of stars: why they build this thing for only engineers to understand I cannot fathom. I understand the fuel readings, and I understand the energy cell readings – we are running at 42% fuel, 93% piezoelectric-efficiency, six hours of reserve energy in the cells – and I understand how to tell that Life Support is working. On the screen, a tiny number flashes: 250480. I don’t recognize it, or know what it means. It’s in a small box, the kind that pops up when the computer crashes or when you open a program or when you’ve got a meeting scheduled. It starts to beep as well, and there’s a tiny red light, the size of a pinhead, that starts flashing, a solitary LED that I wouldn’t even notice if I wasn’t floating directly over it. There’s a Help system on the computer so I boot another screen and type it in, to search through the thousands of documents about how this shuttle works, but nothing comes up. 250480. Nothing at all. It doesn’t seem to reference anything; it doesn’t seem to have any meaning.

‘I have to ignore it,’ I say to myself.

Something that might be of interest: we could have travelled faster than we have been. The engines that we’re fitted with are two-year-old tech, and the advancements that have been made since then are incredible. We could have been doing this almost three times as fast, but the rate of fuel consumption meant that we would have been lucky to reach the Moon. Signals through space, though, they’re different; they’re waves. They travel faster than we can, because they don’t weigh anything. We give them a distance and a direction and fire them off, and Bang! We hope that they hit their targets. We haven’t had a long-distance message since we left our orbit – or, technically, the magnetosphere, so the scientists told me. Maybe this is what happens when a message arrives. Maybe there’s some sort of subspace signal, and this is the information. 250480. This is their way of telling me I’m going to be getting home.

The light stops shining just as I am getting excited, and the beeping stops a second, maybe two, after it. The 250480 is still there on the screen after the prompt, but it rapidly gets shunted down the list as the fuel readings – 41% fuel, 93% energy, six hours’ life support – tick by and replace it.

Outside, the sky is beautiful. We – that is, those of us in space, travelling here where nobody has been before – we don’t think of it in terms of sky, or even as space. We think in terms of an actual space, of blackness, of The Dark, that which we don’t understand. We over-word it, write about it in terms that we think people will find attractive, beautiful, moving, meaningful. We mystify it: It’s what we don’t know, something else entirely, something abnormal and terrifying and still and completely other-worldly, in the most literal sense of the phrase. Here, where you’re close enough to touch it, it is just space; there’s nothing to touch even if you want to. And there’s no definition of a horizon, no way to tell where we actually are, not really. We can say, ‘Well, we’ve travelled this far’ – I can say, ‘Well, I’ve travelled this far, I know how much fuel the ship has used, there’s no resistance, the readings must be right’ – but the relationship I have to what’s out here is nothing. It’s a number. This deep into space, there’s nothing. It’s dark, like oil or tar. I can’t see stars. If this wasn’t already fucked up enough, I’d worry there was something wrong. As it is, I revel in the nothing. I drink it in.

The ship has this thing that we call the Bubble, built into the ceiling of the main room, a raised dome of impenetrable plastic where we can get a 360-degree view of everything around us – and when they were all still alive I could see it, and they told me what it was we were seeing, what was Earth, when the light was right. From that distance it looked white, almost. Shiny, like a tiny coin.

When we first woke up it was all I wanted to stare at, even when we were dealing with Arlen’s body. Using the telescope computers’ highest zoom. We left in August, and the clouds were thin. Those first couple of days I would just catch myself watching Earth behind us, marvelling when the planet was half in darkness, a nearly perfect line jutting across the land, scraping along as the planet turned, a duvet being slowly pulled back, waking people as it went. At any given moment you could see how much of any country was still asleep, their cities lit up like embers, and how much was awake, lights off, going about their business. Through the digital telescopes we could see ships in the sea, the path they were cutting, tiny dots with white trails like slugs. We could see planes hitting the atmosphere, commercial flights. We could see the shape of cities, and make faces out of them; we could see faces in the clouds, only from the other side of them.

Being in space gives you a sense of philosophy, a sense of something other than yourself. You look out at the sky – because we’re used to that thing above us being sky – but when you’re part of it, what is it then? It’s nothing, or it’s everything. It’s just where you are. Here, in the middle of space, or at the end, or the start, I have no idea – here is just where I currently am.

The beeping starts again. It’s been hours, days maybe, and I’ve barely thought about it. I’ve been sleeping. Being in constant total darkness makes you far more tired than you realize. I wonder how they do it in the Arctic, in Iceland. And we have clocks here, but they’re hidden, on computers, so you forget when day starts and night ends, or vice versa. It’s easy to sleep when you ought not. I might be on a ten-hour cycle of days now, for all I know.

The beeping cuts through the hum of engines, and the light, even as tiny as it is, can be seen all the way across the main room. The screen has that same message, that same chain of numbers, and, again, the search box on the Help software doesn’t offer anything. 39% fuel now; it seems to be going down faster than I predicted, and faster than I would like. Faster than it should, actually, and by some way. I try typing the numbers into the computer back at itself, like it’s a line of code, an instruction – maybe this is its way of giving me help, offering me a sort of sentient way to turn this thing around? – but nothing happens. I’m sure that the pilots would have known what to do with it. Arlen would have flicked a switch, one of the hundreds labelled with numbers and abbreviated codes, and that would have stopped it. Quinn would have tapped the screen, smiled at the number.

‘They’ve found us!’ he would have said. ‘All the way out here! And they’ve brought our favourite food and drink with them!’ And we’d have had a meal at our table with the gravity switched on, not worried about how much of the energy it would waste, and not worried about whether we’d make it home because we would already be there.

A few hours later the beeping finally stops. The ship is now on 38%.

It drops around a percentage point every few hours. I’ve taken to watching it properly. There’s a diagnostic control you can input that I read about in the Help files – I’ve read them all now, digital-cover to digital-cover – that shows you exact values, so you can watch the fuel tick down in millilitres, but that takes the fun away from it. This has become a game, seeing if I can predict when it will next click over. I can get it down to an art: the engines have a remarkably constant rate of consumption, and there’s no resistance out here to bog us down, slow us, change the maths. My first guess is three hours off; my third just twenty minutes. By 33% I nearly have it at a countdown.

This is the moment in the film where that word repeats – countdown, countdown, countdown – and we fade to the beginning of the mission, as we’re all being strapped into our stasis beds. We were only allowed to stay in them for two days – a number that didn’t rely so much on science as the few tests that had gone before (which we assumed were on monkeys, but didn’t ask) – because they were depriving us of oxygen, to keep us under, to keep us stable. We asked what could happen if something went wrong and we had too much or too little oxygen, and the doctors told us that we could get cramps, that sort of thing. As a journalist, you notice tells. It’s like gamblers: there’s a fine art to seeing when people are lying, when they’re holding aces. What you develop in my line is something else, though, a stage past that. It tells you when the giveaway signs are something you shouldn’t push. Leave it alone, it’ll be better that way. The doctors knew something, or suspected something, and we signed documents that agreed that they had no legal control over us; that we chose this trip, and the inherent risks therein. You don’t want to know. The launch itself was automated, and we were all asleep before we even heard the countdown voice over the loudspeaker (which I assume that they did, though I have no proof). Stasis is odd: it’s not cold, but you’re frozen. Really, you’re just asleep, but whatever drugs they give you shut down as much of your body as they can without causing any damage, and, as you sleep, they lower the temperature. When you come out you are soaking – the sci-fi films of the 1970s got that much right – but from your own sweat. But there’s no shivering, no hang-over, no feeling of sickness. You come out, you shower. (We have a pod in the back, in the changing room next to the airlock, that you climb into. You press on the ceiling – which stops you floating upwards – and the pod fills with soapy water, which is sucked out, and then fills with recycled water, which gets sucked out again. I haven’t used it in days. I keep forgetting.) We did the stasis because of the G-forces – the acceleration, Quinn explained to me as we were strapped in, was so great that we could all be damaged from the initial launch to break from the Earth’s atmosphere, and we were going to pass so close to the Moon that we would maintain the speed until we were clear of it, and we were going to be going so fast that there would be an atmospheric change, a drop in temperature that we couldn’t even hope to survive. Stasis kept us whole and kept us alive. We only needed to be there for a few days, but then, why not miss as much of the trip as possible? We woke up when we were well past the Moon, and we found Arlen, dealt with that, then we took turns in the shower, and then opened the vents for a few seconds to suck out all the water that was floating around. We were awake then, and we went about our business: checking the systems, checking we were all healthy, making notes, recording interviews, watching the Earth become a dot through the Bubble.

I’m halfway through a percentage-cycle. Dinner tonight is McRib pulled pork flavour bar, dessert a Cadbury’s chocolate cake bar. Later today I will open the cap on a bottle of water and watch it hang like a balloon in the air, and use a straw to try and suck it up as I float around in the chase.

I look at my beard in the mirror of one of the reflective silver wraps of a meal bar; it reflects me distortedly, like it isn’t really me. I haven’t yet questioned my sanity, though I probably should; but I can see this beard that has started growing, because I haven’t shaved, because I haven’t taken the care of myself that I probably should. I’m still exactly the same. I look at the crew, one by one, to see how they’re different. Arlen’s beard hasn’t grown; they say that it happens after you die, but I’ve frozen him. I’ve frozen them all. We never change, even out here.

27%, and an all-stop, hitting the big button in time with the tick of the fuel calculator. There’s six hours of backup life support charged in the batteries – but, again that’s based on a full complement of crew, so for me that’s well over a day, maybe even closer to two, two days of just being able to sit here, ebbing about on nothingness. I wonder if I’ll drift over that time? I log onto the computer, open my drive. This is where all my recordings of interviews are. There’s hours and hours of them, all broken down into categories: pre-launch nerves, childhood histories, moments of greatness, thoughts on the crew, thoughts on space, thoughts on each other, the interview process, how they want to be remembered, the problems with space, the problems with the craft, the concept of what it means to be a hero, the concept of what it means to be an explorer. I sort them chronologically and click on the first one. Emmy’s face fills the screen, fills the screens on the bulkheads further down the room, and her voice comes through the speaker in the ceiling, clear, perfect.

‘I started off working in a hospital – I did my training in Brisbane and Sydney, then I moved to UCL – and I worked in St Barnabas’ Hospital for the first three years, and then was recruited, I suppose.’ She laughs. ‘Recruited! That’s what they called it. And then there was three years of training before I was even asked if I wanted to go on a mission. We did Zero G triage tests. They have this shuttle that we went up in, hit the atmosphere, and we had to operate on it. Nothing real, only these dummies, but blood bags, so we could watch that stuff floating around. What happens if somebody, I don’t know, needs an amputation of something and we can’t get gravity stabilized? We might have to operate in Zero G, and we needed to know the intricacies of it, how to deal with it. There’s a lot more clamping involved.’

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.