The Explorer

1

We work in shifts. When he’s awake, I’m asleep, or watching him sleep, or trying to sleep. The abundance of tablets helps matters, and I tell myself that I shouldn’t feel guilt for taking them, because I’m helping maintain a constant timeline. My addiction is part of the cycle, because – I work out – the first time I did this I still had a broken leg, still had all that pain to deal with, and I took the pills for as long as I could. I don’t know if the timeline changed when I changed it – if I did things differently, told my crewmates I was here, for example, if that broke everything, somehow. I don’t suppose it matters. All that matters is that I’ve been here before, and that I’m back here again, living this over and over. Each time I started the cycle again I kept on taking the pills, and every time I woke up back at the start I carried my now-addiction with me. At nights, when the first version of me – the original, the best, untainted by whatever the fuck has happened to me – when he sleeps I sit at the computer and try to work out how many it’s been. I want to know how long I’ve been doing this for. I think it’s been years. I think I’m significantly older. If I were a tree, I would have rings to count. Here, I can only rely on the rate of my body’s degradation, on the grey hairs I’ve got. How long does it take for a broken leg to heal? For those sorts of cuts I have on my body – and those clustered on my back, echoes of Emmy’s last gasp – to scar the way that they have, and to heal into fresh pink puckered skin? How long for addiction to set in, real genuine addiction, thick and cloying in your blood so that you shake and shiver and sweat when deprived of your craving? How long for teeth to loosen under decay, to not be cleaned and to start freeing themselves, their bone-loss aided in part by the lack of gravity, the lack of anything to test them on, the lack of vitamins, the sporadic food, the constant periods of wake, the gritting of said teeth? How long to lose those teeth? How long to see a hairline that recedes by a full centimetre at the peaks, to reach behind and feel what might be the start of a friar’s patch? To see your skin yellow under the weight-loss, to see your ribs jut forth? It’s probably close to a hundred times I’ve done this, gone back to the start and seen how far I can get; but then, sometimes I think I’ve gone insane: that a number like that is a vast understatement, or maybe an overstatement. I can’t tell. There are no videos, no logs. All I have is fourteen scars, and all that tells me is that I reached the point of fighting with Emmy before I put her to sleep at least thirteen times before this.

The other Cormac still sits at his computer and writes his diaries every day, because there’s nothing else for him to do. I have a recollection of the boredom, but it’s been replaced, sort of, turned into a feeling of calm. This is less stressful than it was when I was perpetually hiding. Now, I know where Cormac will go and what he will do, because I was there for everything that first time. It’s hazy, but I’ve watched the start of this over and over again, and somehow… It’s like muscle memory. You repeat something enough, it becomes an ingrained habit. You don’t even think about it. I know that when he sleeps, he will sleep right through, and I can be there instead of him. I know that he doesn’t keep a day/ night cycle with anything resembling structure or order, which means I have to abandon mine, if I ever even came close to having one in the first place. He writes his blog entries and presses send on them all because, at this point, he still thinks he’ll get home. When they reach the 51% mark, he thinks that the ship will do as it’s meant to and turn around, and he’ll reach Earth again as that intrepid hero-explorer, him and Emmy; and the people will congratulate him, because he survived. He’s the one who saw space as it was meant to be seen: dangerous, unbridled, as wild as the mountains and seas used to be in the days when they were uncharted, when they were unmapped.

‘I wonder if they’ll call me an explorer,’ he asks aloud. I wonder the exact same thing.

I spend the first couple of days doing nothing, because that’s what the other Cormac does. He seems wilfully ignorant of the subterfuge, steadfast in his belief that he’ll get home. All of this is reasonable to him. It’s all acceptable, at the very least. Sometimes he looks at Emmy and thinks about opening her bed and seeing if she’s better yet, if she’s willing to sit down and talk, but he decides against it. Instead, he sits in the cockpit and watches out there, at the dark, or he goes to the Bubble and looks out of that, or he slides around the living area and touches everything. He’s bored, and he watches the percentages every time they click down. This was when the clock-watching began. 52%. It’ll be tomorrow that he’s crushed, that he works out he might not make it home.

Cormac watches as the numbers change, bracing himself for what he assumed was going to happen. I can’t see him because he’s in the cockpit, but I can remember how it felt: the disappointment. After a while he hits the button and the engines stop, and we’re drifting. I’m on the floor, and I can’t see through the vent I was looking through, so I move, adjust my position. He breathes, pauses, speaks to himself.

‘Okay. Maybe it needs a reset,’ he says, and then he hits the big button. ‘Go,’ he says. It does, and he watches out of the cockpit at fixed points in space – stars in the distance, the vaguest suggestion that the rest of the solar system still exists out there – but they don’t move. We’re still moving forward; we don’t rotate. Our axis is immobile. He looks around the room, sighs. ‘Come on,’ he shouts. ‘It’s on 51%, we’re going home now.’ He wills it to do something it hasn’t even got the slightest intention of doing. This – anything he’ll attempt now – is pointless. ‘Come the fuck on,’ he shouts again. From behind my bars, this reminds me of nothing but a zoo: of seeing an animal, caged and boxed and limited in his scope, and desperate to try to break free but totally unable. That’s the point of a cage. If you could escape, it wouldn’t be a cage in the first place.

50%. Cormac has decided to press the button again. He does it almost nonchalantly, throwing his whole weight into his arm in exasperation. The ship whirs as the reverse boosters kick in, and then we drift to the ground, and the engines fall silent. He stomps around the cabin and hits the computer screen, and shouts for Ground Control to answer. He either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that it won’t work; I can’t remember which. I watch him call up Elena’s picture, standing on my tiptoes to see through the right grate at an angle that’ll let me see her as well.

We took that picture in Cromer, on the seafront. It was blustery, and that’s why she liked it; the wind behind her, her hair loose, her skirt puffed up, and she’s laughing.

After a few minutes Cormac darkens the screen and paces around the room. He eats a meal bar, even though he only had one a few hours ago. He breathes deeply. He stares at the dead faces of his crewmates, and he listens to the creaks of the ship as it gives him air, as it slows down, as I shift inside the lining trying to make myself comfortable. We’ve got a few days of this coming, because he – I – thought that somehow, through miracle or coincidence or something, somehow I might be rescued.

I won’t be, obviously. I just want to tell him to get on with it.

He stares at the computer because he doesn’t understand it. I understand it slightly more now, I think – all this time watching Quinn and Guy from the outside, being able to actually see what buttons they press, as opposed to the frantic guessing that Cormac is doing, pressing them to see what they do. He shouts at the screen as it dribbles to 49%, screams that it has to go back now or he won’t make it all the way.

‘This isn’t fair,’ he says. He sounds brattish, petulant. I pop another tablet into my mouth and wait, because soon he’ll get tired – by my estimates he’s on a 36-hour stretch of fake daytime, and night’ll happen fairly soon. I need more of the pills (for the addiction, and the shiny new ache running through the small of my back), and more food, and a replenishment of my water. I can remember when I wrecked my leg in that first run – when Cormac will hurt his, soon, all too soon – and I can remember looking through the medicine cabinet, thinking how empty it was. There were painkillers left, but not many, so I know I can’t take them all. Just some. That’s okay: some is all I need.

He gets tired, starts pressing the buttons with less gusto. I’m tired too – you give me gravity and there’s only so long I can stand here for. Every part of me shakes as I think about food and the pills and clean water and sleep, so I lie down, listen as he presses the buttons and mutters to himself. Eventually there’s the hiss of his bed – the air being let out, the oxygen flow starting, the second hiss as it seals after he gets in. I look for him but can’t see him, so I run to the hatch and open it, watching until the lights click off, one by one. It’s night: I’m allowed out.

I take food bars – we’re out of the popular brands now, because we ate them first, there being something comforting about them – and we’re down to the curry bars, the pie bars, the goulash bars that Guy insisted we bring, all labelled by supermarkets or bad television chefs. I carry handfuls of them from the storeroom to the lining, dropping them to the floor, and I take water, extra flasks – the ones that would have belonged to Arlen and Quinn, I think – and fill them with clean water, along with filling my own. I don’t know when I’ll next get out.

Cormac starts the engines again, because he knows that it’s pointless to not: his life support relies on them. (This is before he will do the maths that will change this, that will tell him he can stay still for longer: right now he’s running on Guy’s rules, where he had two days at most before charging the batteries; and it’s before he finds the button on the computer to display the amount of battery charge remaining.) He wonders if, actually, the ship isn’t going the right way: maybe he’s got everything wrong. We drift up and float again as he scours through the maps on the systems, calling screens up in the Bubble, getting courses plotted and matched. It takes him most of the day to work out how to use the systems, because they weren’t a part of his training, but when he does he’s quite nimble with them. He rotates the map to see if the overlays fit – it’s not an exact science, because stars go dark, he knows, and because nothing is as pixel-perfect as the computer suggests – but if he can find Orion he can find almost everything else. He sighs as he does everything, because this feels futile, even at this point. All of his friends are dead. There’s nobody waiting for him back home. He’s Ground Control’s perfect candidate: he’s alone, and he no longer cares if he lives or dies, not really.

He hasn’t told himself that, yet. He’s got a while to go before he reaches that decision. Tonight, as he sleeps – forcing himself to, knowing that he has to or he’ll lose it totally, and that it relies on him to get himself home, and Emmy, don’t forget her, she’s still alive – tonight, I decide that I’m going to watch the launch. We watched it when we first got up into space, after dealing with Arlen’s body, but I didn’t really see it. I told myself I would get to it another time. For some reason I never did. My plan was to address it when I got home, maybe edit it into something, splice some interviews and soundbytes into it… That will never happen. I find the file on the hard drive and boot it up, and I make the screen as big as I can. I want sound, I decide, so I need to keep the earlier version of me asleep. I open his bed as quietly as I can and then take the same sedation kit that I watched him use on Emmy, and I draw a shot into a fresh needle and slide it into his arm. He shoots awake as I press the button, and his eyes are only open for a second, not even long enough that he’ll remember this, the dose strong enough to keep him down for hours and hours. I make the screen large and turn the volume up, and I watch the video. There’s no commentary; it’s the footage taken from the cameras fixed to the side of the ship, rigidly pressed against the body of the craft. The countdown is on there: it was played loudly to the crowd below over huge speakers, like New Year’s Eve celebrations, and it counts from twenty, waiting for the ball to drop. As it hits one the noise of the crowd cheering swells, and is replaced by a rumble of the engines. They’re unnatural, the most unnatural noise ever made, the loudest grind and churn of technology, designed to do things that have never been possible before. The flame spits from them, and then the smoke. It looks for a second like it’s billowing underneath the craft, like the craft isn’t going anywhere, and then it does. It pushes away from the ground, and everything – the launch-pad, the crowds and crowds of people, thousands of them, like at a festival or something – everything disappears as quickly as it can, spiralling into miniature. The smoke continues until I can see the coastline as a crack, and then the coast itself. The launch was designed to be faster than man had ever travelled, to get past the gravitational pull of the Earth with the minimum of fuss. It manages it. The East Coast of the US is a smirk for a second, then a grin, then every detail is there, and it’s like those pictures they showed us in school, or on those old BBC identification cards, the Earth as a perfect sphere of green and sand-colour and blue and then clouds, and then space behind like a black halo. I watch as it pushes further and further away, until it’s a marble, and then it’s only the size of the Moon from my back garden, and then it’s almost nothing. I watch this all, and I write down exactly what I can see, and then when it stops – as we’re in the darkness of space, filming nothing but the hull, the occasional sputter of the engines – I start again from the beginning.

When I’ve finished writing, I press Send on the entry. The earlier version of me will never know.

It’s the most intense déjà vu, watching yourself doing what you’ve already done; less like seeing a recording, and more like catching a glimpse of yourself in a mirror that you didn’t know was there, seeing that flash of your limbs, instantly recognizable, but you still wonder if it’s a ghost, an intruder, somebody spying on you. With all the other versions of me, it’s worse still: like a mirror in front of a mirror, hundreds of your hands flashing around, even though you can only see the ones in the here and now with any clarity, only your body itself and the initial reflection. Everything else is background, mountains beyond mountains stretching into the distance. Watching Cormac doing what he’s doing puts everything that I am into context. He calls up that damn picture of Elena so often, stares at it, weeps – those early days, when he was weeping for himself, not actually for her, but because he felt so guilty, and I just want to say, You should see how I feel, because I was here when it all went, I made this what it is. You want to talk about guilt? Try aiding in the deaths of at least a few of your crew.

When I try to work out why I had to do that my head hurts. When Cormac sleeps I read entries on the ship’s computers, in the encyclopedias and textbooks, looking up entries on time travel, reading about it in fiction – books, movies – and trying to equate the examples to my own situation. Everything points to this being a paradox: I was on the ship when these things all happened, and they happened because I was here, which means I was always here twice. When I break the paradox, it resets: like, when you have a cut and you pull the scab off, you reset the wound, put it back to zero, because you need that scab to stop from being infected. Every other version of me is the scab being knocked off by something or other, and the body resets itself. You need to heal, it says, so it makes a new scab. I’m older, I know that: if I was a betting man I might say years. Two years. Maybe three. So, for three years, this body – which is time, in this example – has been trying to heal itself, and I’ve been the shitty, flawed little scab that keeps catching on kitchen surfaces and shirt sleeves. Time fixes itself, but my body is staying the same. You stick your hand into a fire once, you learn not to do it again. My body – or my mind, or whatever bridges the two – has been learning, I think. Every time I do something over and over I learn not to do it again. I can’t remember it, but that doesn’t matter. Maybe part of the key to time fixing itself is that the me that’s here can’t remember being here. Maybe my journey – ha! – is part of what has to happen.

I still don’t know how I get out of the other side. I know that I can’t go on like this. I’d go mad, if I could remember the other times. Or maybe I already am?

I lose another tooth as I’m eating: I pull the bar away, the taste of coronation chicken in my mouth still, mixed with blood, and the tooth is embedded in the soft paste. I swear quietly, pull the tooth out. It’s black and sore, like bruised fruit around the root, and I feel the hole it’s left – front and centre, top row right – running my tongue into it, poking around. I put the tooth in my pocket and strap myself to the floor, to try and sleep, because I’m so tired constantly now, trying to match Cormac’s hours. He’s been doing this for far, far less time than I have, and his stamina is enviable. As I drift off I think about how much the body can fall apart before it dies. I worry every single tooth in my mouth, and most of them seem to shift as I poke them. How long can you go without cleaning your teeth, without seeing a dentist? How did they used to survive in the days before toothpaste and dentists? I wake up and feel another tooth loose in my mouth, swirling in blood and saliva, and keep my mouth shut. I pull it out gently, slide it into my pocket and close it, trapping it with its friend.

I spend the rest of the night reading about famous explorers: every single explorer who did anything worth their salt, who found something or went somewhere just for the sake of it. I read about their exploits and their adventures – even those who we know next to nothing about – and they’re still remembered, still written about. What they did is sometimes lost – they tried to reach somewhere; they disappeared, searching the seas and were never found; they went into jungles looking for lost cities of gold and never came back – but they’re remembered. They fought trials and tribulations, fought nature and chaos, and diseases – scurvy, insanity, malaria, frostbite. They fought all of those things, and they persevered.

Guy always said that we only did this because we wanted to see something that nobody else had ever seen, and because we wanted our names to go down in history. We’ll get that, even if it’s as the long-disappeared crew of the Ishiguro: the Marie Celeste of the mid-21st century.

He can’t surprise me: not with the things he does, because I remember them. Every moment is a recollection, a brief, tiny memory slipping in. The way he does things, though. They’re nothing like I remember. He seems angry, hitting the buttons on the computer, thudding away as if it’s the thing that has wronged him. He swears under his breath, and he keeps talking about everything that’s happened. They say that, in quiet solitude, people are inclined to talk to themselves, to work things out that way. I have been alone – surrounded by others, but still – for so long now, and I haven’t lost it. If you count all the times that I’ve done this, my loneliness can be measured in years. Compared to Cormac, my loneliness is extravagant.

I don’t even feel like we’re the same person. We have the same face, sure: his is somehow more defined, having more clarity to it, his stubble manicured, his hair kempt. From here, he almost looks like he could have been the leading man, not Quinn; compared to me, he’s an Adonis. We have the same face, but his is all gritted teeth, hard and firm and determined. Mine has become loose and tired. Where it used to have definition, mine has dropped at the jowls even through the weight that I’ve lost. His teeth are perfect, or as perfect as a childhood without orthodontics can give him; neat slides of blunt white knives. Mine… I look punched. I look wrecked. He is tense and angry, and when he talks to Elena – which he does, calling her picture up, chatting to her, telling her how sorry he is – he sounds weak. He queues up the videos that we sent home, copies them to a playlist and sets it going, and watches as we get onto the craft in the first video, and then get knocked off, one by one. Each subsequent loss makes him wrench at his hair – which is fuller than mine, closer to the front, his widow’s peak less strict – and he runs his hand through it, pulling it into shapes. His has grown since he stepped onto the ship, but mine is somehow static, or shorter, or delayed. We’re brothers, not twins, a year or two between us; the same parents, but different genes.

And he’s dull. Watching him do the same things over and over is mind-numbing. I have spent so long watching other people, struggling to get past the fact that I can’t speak to them – that I can’t go and hold them or shout at them or argue with them – that now, as he does nothing, and I have no desire to interact with him at all, it’s more frustrating. It’s brutal.

I send another message home as Cormac sleeps. I spill it all. I tell them what’s happened, in case they ever come to get us, open the door and find us stuck here in some crazy perpetual loop, enacting the same thing over and over. I tell them what happened to me, and I write to them about Cormac.

He’s so boring. Maybe worse? Maybe even worse than nothing? He’s moping and tired, and the way that he looks at those pictures, over and over? I remember watching videos of the crew from the first time around: I can’t wait until he gets onto that. He will do it out of boredom, and I want to grab him and tell him that the boredom he feels is nothing. Try watching it, I want to say. Try watching boredom.

I feel angry at him, at the pictures he stares at, the constant mourning he’s undertaking. I think I’m not mourning Elena any more. Like, maybe mourning is a chemical reaction, and I’m past it, time having done its job. I think about her and she’s like a ghost, you know? Like a reflection. She can be erased, because she seems like somebody who’s barely real. When I picture her in my mind, she seems different to how she looks in his picture. In that picture she looks happy.

I don’t know what happens at the end of this. I don’t know if this resets, or it ends and then it’s actually over, or what. I don’t know. I can’t possibly know. I’ve been here before, and I keep thinking of this as being like a circuit. Like, maybe I haven’t been able to close the circuit? You think about a current: it needs to reach point b from point a. What if all the other times I’ve been here, I’ve failed? Maybe this time I have to complete the circuit. That makes sense, right? You land on the snake and get sent back, and you desperately try to roll a six to get to a ladder and claw your way out? Maybe this is the time I roll double sixes, snake eyes.

I send the file, and then regret it. Because, if they are still receiving these, they’ll think that I’ve got Space Madness, and that’ll be my legacy. The thought of that alone makes me laugh, and I have to bite my lip to stop from waking the sleeping Cormac.

He bangs the dials at the front of the ship and swears at them again, and then he sees it, on that screen: I had almost forgotten. 250480, it reads, that chain of numbers and nothing more, and the beep from the systems, and the little red light.

‘What?’ he asks the air, and doesn’t get an answer. He sits in the chair and finger-taps the screen, using his nail to make a thin sound that I can’t hear from here, but I remember. He reads the number aloud and then presses buttons to try and make sense of it. Within minutes, the screens are covered in PDFs of the manual, everything you could possibly want to know about the operating functions of the ship laid out for you, exposed. He searches the indices but nothing, then does a full text search, but nothing; so he looks for warning messages, and spends the next few hours of his life comparing the few hundred plausible warning messages that the system can throw up with the one on the screen. They’re nothing alike. A real warning message will have a key, and will darken the screen, and will beep, this constant tinny recurrence that sticks until the problem is fixed. This time, when the beeping starts – an hour after the message appears – it’s a drone, a thin whine like a dog feeling sorry for itself. ‘What the hell?’ Cormac asks, hitting the speakers to see if the noise will stop. He sits back and looks at the screen, at his depleting fuel gauge, and he knows that they can’t be entirely coincidental. Coincidence doesn’t exist. When your body is ill – symptoms – they’re related, because everything in a body is related. Everything in this ship is related, tied together with wires instead of muscles, but still. You pull a wire, something else is going to stop working. We didn’t turn around, even though that’s what we were programmed to do, and then this message and this noise… Well, they must be related. It’s a fault.

Only I know that it isn’t a fault, that we were never meant to turn around. I know everything, because here, in the lining, I am almost omnipotent. I have seen things I shouldn’t have seen, and I know. The ship wasn’t meant to turn around: we were meant to carry on into nothingness, drifting into space, going – yes – further than any man had ever gone before, but with no chance of return or reprieve. You follow coincidence to its natural conclusion, that message isn’t a fault, or a chance warning. We were meant to see it. It was meant for us. I look at the string of numbers, straining to see them with my eyesight how it is, but able to read them because I can remember them so clearly, so indelibly printed onto the back of my eyelids, or somewhere deep inside my brain as they are. I can remember them, and I laugh at their purpose, and I slip off and fantasize – not dream – because this is the lining, and I am still alone, and nothing can change that.

When he’s asleep I go and look at what he has looked at; and I look further. I look past the computers and the screens at out there, at space. The stars are gone. It’s pitch black out there, total darkness. Nothingness.

Whatever the number is, it is this. This is it. It is nothing.

2

Here is what might have been.

The first bed to hiss open stays shut until it’s meant to open, because there is no hand of a stray Cormac to open it, to yank it wide in a desperate act of self-preservation. Arlen steps out, dripping wet, groggy, sweat all over him, running down his beard. He dries himself and turns the ship on, lighting the rooms, and then starts running diagnostic programs. He sings to himself, because that’s the sort of person that Arlen was: he sang a lot. He makes sure that the ship is safe for the rest of us, and then greets us as our beds open and we all drift out. He steadies us until we get to the shower, and then he leaves us as we say hello to each other, laugh at the fact we’re all in our underwear, all soaking wet. I stand next to Emmy and we don’t really look at each other, because there’s bad blood there, still – and because she knows about Elena. She knows how much I loved her, how much I wanted to make it work with her. She’ll say something at some point, but now is not the time.

When we’re showered and dressed – in our identical jumpsuits, slightly different colours on the badges like some prototypical sci-fi TV show – we each start our jobs, checking we’ve got everything we need. Guy runs more diagnostics; Quinn sits in the cockpit, reads all the readouts and checks they’re fine; Wanda resets the beds, setting the water to drain, starting their cleaning cycle; Emmy feels our pulses, one by one, and takes our blood pressures; and I sit at the computer and boot it up, and start writing something, my first entry. We’ve just woken up, I type, and it feels amazing. I decide to leave Elena out of this, because I’ve got a job to do, and it’s important that I do it. Elena will always be a part of me, but she’s gone, and this is now. It’s important – and that’s not to demean her, God no, but this is important for humanity. I have to carry on. I have to be strong.

We gather for the broadcast and greet home, and tell them what it’s like. It’s televised, beamed to hundreds of countries. Arlen does most of the talking, because he’s the elder statesman, with his beard and his vitality and his healthy heart. He jokes about the rest of us, says that we’re still finding our feet, and then he drifts upwards, out of shot. It’s a gag, but we all think it works, that it’ll play well back home. Who are the audience? It’s the kids. It’s the children, cross-legged on the floor in front of their TV sets, smiling at us, putting our faces on their walls. When the broadcast is done we all gather and chat, and eat our first meal on the ship, processed bars still, Big Macs and Quarter Pounders and McRibs, but we revel in how they taste, because they’re an experience that we’re having independent of everybody else in the world. I say that, and Quinn asks if we can even say that up here. Can we even say in the whole world when we’re no longer there? he asks, and we ponder it, because he has a point. In the universe? I ask, tentatively, as we agree that it’s better, for the best. We’re part of something bigger.

We do our jobs. Wanda goes on a walk with some of the friends she’s made amongst her crewmates, and she never feels guilt. She’s constantly happy, so awed at being in space when she’s still so young. Who gets this opportunity? she asks, and we say, Well, you do. You deserve it. She blushes. She walks outside the ship and finds the rush of it incredible, and we all want our turn. Next time we stop, Guy says, the rest of you can try. Guy is hard and quiet, but we trust him, because he knows more about how this all works than the rest of us. We listen to him when he tells us what to do, and we do our jobs. We write and speak to home, and they send messages back, and everything is amazing. One day, Emmy sits me down. We should talk, she says, and she asks me about Elena, lets me know that she’s aware what happened. You can talk to me, she says; just because of what happened between us doesn’t mean we’re not friends. So I tell her everything: about how it happened, why it happened. I tell her about my guilt and she listens to me, and I weep into her shoulder and watch as my tears, which are droplets on my cheek, thick and salty, drift away from my face and into the air to be sucked up by the vacuum pumps in the air filtration system.

We gather around to watch the fuel tick from 52% to 51%, and when it does the ship hums and grinds, and we watch as we turn and start heading back home. We cheer when it does it, because we’ve reached the peak, the furthest point ever. We’ve seen space. We shoot a pod from the ship, a collection of flags of all the countries united in this project, and it unfurls, and there’s the money shot: one giant, unified flag, not fluttering apart from in our wake, square and blunt against the nothingness of space, and it flits off as we move, there for eternity, to drift.

We land in the sea, the Atlantic, the coast of Ireland. It wasn’t expected, but was nearly impossible to predict. We knew it would be a water landing; that was part of Arlen’s training. We would be coming in so hot we had no other choice. The camera crews sprint to catch us as we disembark, the craft steaming in the water as the door hisses open and we wave, one by one. They cheer our names. Quinn and Emmy are together, and we all know about it, but we’re happy for them. Quinn asks if I care; he didn’t want it to upset me, because of Elena. I have been open with them all. I’m fine, I told him. They do articles and interviews in glossy magazines, holding hands, talking about the future, about kids, a wedding. I do interviews that are more serious. I write my final article, then get a book deal, high six figures, and it’s an easy write. There’s a chapter on Elena, on the circumstances heading into the trip, because I argued blind that she was key to my mindset, that she was totally important. Without her in there, there was no book. The publisher liked it. Human tragedy sells. It gave the book a personal touch. I don’t win the Pulitzer, but who cares, right? Instead I keep writing, and I write a novel, a pulpy, sci-fi thing about a man who is trapped in a perpetual loop, a time loop, like so many other sci-fi stories wrenched from the back of magazines – there are no original ideas, not any more – but this one is more human, or trying to be. I write that and it sells pretty well, and they turn it into a movie and they cast it, and the Cormac isn’t the star and it makes a bit of money and I’m set, because I invest, and I meet a woman, but she looks just like Elena sometimes, and in the light she looks like Emmy, and I sometimes confuse her with them, because her name is Emily, and it’s so easy to get these things confused.

When I die, my obituary calls me a writer and an explorer. That’s all I ever wanted, I think.

My fantasies always involve other women; never Elena. I can’t picture her there when I really think about getting home, because she’s gone, and I killed her – or, near as – and nothing I can dream of can change that, not really.

3

The beeping stops in the cabin, and that’s enough to wake me, just the cessation of that noise. He’s asleep, so I sneak out. How quickly you collapse: he’s stopped shaving, stopped caring. I don’t remember showering this little. When there were people on the ship, I had one a day. He hasn’t, not since Emmy was put away. I’ll bet he stinks. I know I do.

I shower myself, and shit, and shave. I decide that, even though I’m falling apart, I can do it with dignity. He doesn’t know how good he’s got it. I eat, and take the pills, which I barely notice now, and I sit at the computer and know what’s going to be there, because I’m already thinking it. He’s still writing the blog entries, Cormac; he’s charting what he’s done that day, his thoughts. They’re not worth reading, because he’s so naive, so clueless.

Instead, I try to work out how this ends. I shut my eyes and try to picture that final scene of my life, as I drifted into space. I remember feeling like somebody was holding me: maybe that was me? Maybe the me now saves the me then? Maybe I tried but failed? I should be more diligent. Maybe I’m meant to save him, and maybe there’ll be a DARPAfunded craft only a few hundred klicks back, and maybe they’ll grab him and take him home and patch him up and maybe give him his life back.

I know that they won’t. Which means, the best I can hope for is to stop me coming back here again. Because this – reliving these memories, this pain, this confusion – it’s not something that I would wish on my worst enemy.

I watch Cormac open a bottle of champagne, and I watch as the froth dances around the cabin, and he floats with a straw and hoovers it up, giggling, the bubbles and alcohol going to his head. He’s drunk within seconds. I remember this. He goes to the computer and starts hammering the buttons, and he messages home, even though all he gets is static.

‘I miss her,’ he says into the microphone, ‘and I want to come home, because I’m so alone and this is so unfair, and this is no way to die. It’s going to take so long, still. I can’t take this long.’ I remember this. He tells the computer that he’s going to end it, and he takes a thin shard of plastic from the medicine box and holds it against his wrists. He’s still broadcasting to the static. ‘You can all see it,’ he says. ‘You can all see how much pain I’m in, right? Because they’re all dead, every single one of them. Elena!’ It’s a cry. From here, if it didn’t sting, I’d almost think it was pathetic. He can’t go through with it, because he’s too weak. There’s nothing there: the ability to kill himself is wholly absent from him. He cries instead, and drops everything, and cleans up after himself, and then he drunkenly tries to sort out the ship’s course, hammering the keys, opening software he doesn’t understand. I remember all of this. When he finally gives up it’s to go to bed: he slides into the open-front coffin and shuts his eyes, and I watch until he stops murmuring, then sneak out of the lining. At the computer I can see that his hammering has been useless, ineffectual. He doesn’t know that. Tomorrow, he’ll see that the fuel is rapidly burning itself out, and he’ll think it’s because of something that he did.

I inject him with the final dose of sedative and watch him slump when I put gravity back on. I suit up, tie myself a security line, take the spare tool with me. I cling to the outside of the ship, and I open the panel that controls the engines and stare at the wires. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I grab a thin blue wire and pull at it. It feels like enough. I know that when I go inside and start the engines again, the fuel will be burning faster; that the blue wire somehow controls the accelerant, or the speed with which the fuel is fed into the engines, and that the ship will gradually get faster and burn more and more of it as it goes.

I stay outside and watch space until the air in the capsule starts to run out. It’s still calm.

He notices that it’s going down faster than it ought to, that the fuel supply is ticking quickly. He watches out of the Bubble at the nothing, and he tries to discover what’s making it happen.

‘Are we going faster?’ he asks aloud, which we are, of course, because that’s how the fuel is going so quickly. ‘Holy shit.’ He keeps reading the manuals over and over, and searching the database, trying to find anything that can point the way for him. I feel sorry for him, because I remember how this felt, and now know why it’s happened. He sits and watches the numbers as they tick over, and he panics when the numbers and the beeping starts. It doesn’t herald the change in fuel content, but it seems related. Coincidence, he will start to fathom. He writes something, and leaves it on the screen, unfinished, it seems. It’s the first piece he hasn’t bothered to send.

That night, as he sleeps, I leave the lining to read it. It’s normal: an outpouring of emotions, self-pitying and terrifying to read. It’s my voice, but nothing like I remember it.

I’m trying to keep myself stable, and constant, and normal, but I’ve been here so long I can’t even remember what that feels like. In the daytime, I treat everything like I should: I keep my spirits up, and I look out of the Bubble, and I wonder where the stars have gone; and I try to fix this, to turn the ship around, but I know it’s all useless. I’m so far out there will be no getting home: maybe I could make it to the Moon before I choked and died from lack of oxygen, from the power giving way, from the fuel running out, but then, what’s the point? They’ll see something in their telescopes and find me months after I’ve died, drifting and rotting and boneless. What will a lack of oxygen do to the body? Will it preserve it? Will it make everything worse?

Maybe I’m better to be out here, alone, and drifting. Maybe I’m better off dying when my time comes. They’ll remember me at home, just like Guy said that they would. They’ll remember us all. I try to stay chipper in the days, because otherwise I should just end it all, here and now. But at night, before I sleep, it sounds like the ship is creaking, and it feels like I’m being watched, and the watching eyes are just thinking, End it, Cormac. End it.

He’s all talk.

I’d forgotten about being actually alone. For the last – how long has it been? – I’ve had the rest of the crew, and Cormac, all doing things I didn’t necessarily see the first time around, managing to surprise me, to confuse me. I’ve been alone but never lonely, not really. Now I am. Cormac isn’t real company. I know what he’s doing, just as the left arm knows where the right is. He doesn’t do what I want when I want. He sits at the computer and mopes, and watches the videos over and over. He focuses on that video of Emmy, talking to him, addressing him like they were strangers.

‘I did my training in Brisbane and Sydney,’ she says, to the camera, cool and delivered like we were taught during our training, preparing us for the media interviews we did before we left. They told us that they would book us more for when we returned, fill our calendars, put that training to good use. She reels it off to camera like she would for anybody, but Cormac reads it as something for him, personal insight. She’s repeated her story thousands of times before, in every interview – press or job – that she’s ever done. Cormac is blind to it; blind to her.

He switches all the lights off, all over the ship. Everything, room by room, goes dark, apart from the main cabin, lit by the neon coming from the computer screens and HUDs. He sits in Quinn’s chair and pretends to be pilot, but I have to strain to see him, even more now it’s so dark; and he talks himself through rescue attempts, speaking them aloud, reciting them. This much trauma – to have your wife die, then to see your friends die, one by one, not knowing that (you) Guy was to blame for it all, or near as damn it – this much trauma can only fuck with you. I thought I was totally holding it together. I thought – hindsight being a wonderful thing – that I was an exemplary example of a stranded astronaut. If they managed to retrieve the black box, it would stand testament to my skills and mental fortitude.

We both watch the numbers on the screen, although I can barely see them from here – a fuzz of red faux-LED, where the distinct shapes – 1s, 4s – make sense, but the rest require fathoming. We’re on 39% fuel, 94% piezoelectric. Nobody can ever claim to having felt déjà vu until they watched the same thing, the exact same thing, for the second time in their life, waiting for the exact same moment where the numbers tick down, 39 to 38. Cormac watches and waits, and it finally happens. He doesn’t look satisfied, or dismayed; he just looks blank. He opens a file on an adjacent screen, types something, brings up a stopwatch and sets it off; and he watches the numbers fly on that screen as well. He just sits and counts. I decide to sleep, so I strap myself down further towards the back of the ship – in case he hears me, if I snore, or cough, or anything. I dream about myself in space, the way it ended, spinning, alone, everything exploding, both the ship and myself, because that’s what happened in the pressure of that vacuum; and I dream of the thick blackness that engulfed me. In the dream, it swallows me over and over.

I wake shaking, sweating. I take another painkiller, dry swallowing it, gulping it down with saliva from my mouth, and I lie back and put my hand on my heart, because it’s racing, thudding like it wants to come out of my chest. Through my paltry flesh, it feels like it’s going to split my ribs.

‘Please,’ I say, because I don’t want to die, not now. ‘Please.’ Cormac is asleep, finally; draped over the captain’s chair, head lolled to the side. I leave the lining, still holding my chest, wrapping my right arm across to my left as if it will hold my body together. I don’t know what’s happening, but I pull myself to the medicine cabinet, open it as quietly as I can, and it isn’t until I’m standing over it, using my other arm to stop the contents drifting everywhere, that I realize the pain has gone, that I was just dreaming. I’m alive, still, and my heart is racing, but I’m fine.

Who am I kidding? I’m not fine.

In the bathroom, as Cormac’s head lolls backwards in the cockpit, I examine myself again. Another tooth, but that’s to be expected. I crick both my knees, having the room to extend, and listen as the bone in them grinds against itself. They told us that the cartilage would be the first thing to go. It’s a wonder I’m not in more pain. (Then I remember the painkillers, strong enough to dope a horse, and I’m no horse.) I look at the scar on my leg, the others on my back, and I wonder how long the bone in my leg took to heal here, where bones don’t work the way they should, where the body isn’t right? If I had to put pressure on it for any real amount of time, sans self-medication, would it hurt? Would it even work properly? I try to feel the bone through my skin, and it seems fine: but I can’t believe that it is.

I’m a fucking disaster. I don’t have any chance of getting home, no chance of putting right any of the shit that went wrong, no chance of doing anything to save myself. I’m expendable. Cormac out there, he’s the important thing. If I can get the circuit complete, maybe he’ll wake up and won’t have to do this again. Or, maybe he won’t wake up at all.

That’s the first time I realize what I think I have to do: to save Cormac, I have to kill myself – this later version of me.

Cormac is angry, furious, even. He screams at the computers, which will never answer back.

‘Why is the fuel going down quickly? This is going faster than it should.’ He finds our speed and writes it down, and then searches, and he can’t be sure, but he thinks it’s faster than it should be. It is. I know about Guy’s tampering, now; about trying to make it easier on us. In some ways, maybe we should have been grateful – or maybe I should have been, because I was all that was left. Am all that is left.

I’m having trouble with my tenses, sometimes. Is this now or then? It’s so easy to get them confused at times like this.

In the movie of this, assuming that anybody’s still watching, that anybody has stayed in their seats and dug in for more popcorn, this is the scene where I pace up and down a room, working through ideas, dismissing them or scrawling them on a giant blackboard. In reality, I lie down in the lining with my pen and paper and make tiny, almost illegible notes about nothing. I can’t change anything, because every time I do – or have, previous versions of me – everything resets, back to the point where, what, we entered hypersleep? We hit warp? To that point I can’t change it. I wonder if the loop ends when Cormac’s life does. Will I just wake up back at the start – or, another version of me – and have to do this over and over again, forever, until my body is so crippled that I can’t even open that door and kill Arlen at the beginning, so the loop resets as soon as it starts, and that’s it, hell, for me, forever? Maybe that’s the answer: this is hell. When I die, I start again, looping, somehow back alive, my body broken but going again. Maybe I’ll do this until I get into that loop, stuck in agony and going round and round, dying over and over and over again, the pain and the torment and the loop, and nothing else until the end of time.

Fuck.

Cormac has managed to work out how long it is between percentage points, which means he’s made a spreadsheet of sorts, telling him how long he’s got left. It won’t stay like that: something happens, and the fuel goes down faster. For now, at least, he’s got it down pat. He sits and counts down from ten using the stopwatch app until the numbers roll over.

‘Three… Two… One…’ He’s perfectly on. The fuel counter drips down to 33%. It’ll be about a week until it accelerates. What are we going to do with all that time?

The only thing stopping me from killing myself is the knowledge that I’ll probably wake up with my throat slit on the floor of the ship, and I’ll keep dying until I manage to, somehow, heal, and then I’ll keep reliving that pain, that agony, for the foreseeable. It’s got to be better to see this through. It has to be.

4

He sleeps so much. He sleeps, and then he wakes up and writes his fucking blog entries, and he reads the manuals for the ship cover to cover, the stuff that only Guy read. He searches on the computer for the meanings to some of the phrases, the equations, and he nods as if he understands them. He doesn’t. He’s fucking clueless, spiralling along like a patsy. He goes to the Bubble and he calls up overlays, and he makes notes, and in his blog entries he writes about the things that he’s seen, because if they do recover the broadcasts – they should reach Earth eventually, he knows, though they might be scrambled, and they might be late (and I know now, given DARPA’s intentions for us on this flight, they might be conveniently ignored, or buried, because who wants those ramblings becoming public? They aren’t heroic, aren’t intrepid, aren’t anything but one man and his head) – because if they do recover them, they’ll be the last things he’ll have ever written. In his delusions, he writes that he thinks they might be his own eulogy.

Who knows? I wanted to go for the Pulitzer, for a work of journalism that broke boundaries, that told humanity something new. Maybe, through these dying thoughts, I’ll have achieved that.

He speaks about things he knows nothing about, inserting the names of galaxies and nebulae and words of description that mean nothing to him, flowery language to somehow offer the punctuation of meaning, to imply knowledge that he doesn’t have. If Emmy were awake she would tell me that I was being narcissistic. She would point out that he’s me, and that I did all of this, and that I’m only seeing it this way now because I’m on the outside, because I can appreciate it for what it actually is. I would argue with her, and tell her that even first time round I knew this was fucking pathetic. Everybody needs an antagonist, I would say, and he is mine.

‘See? Classic narcissist,’ she would reply.

After days and days of sleep, I wake up when he presses the button and we stop. I almost shout, because I fall a foot or so, the straps slackening, and my back hits the floor, the exact same spot where it was cut, where it’s scabbed over. I already ache constantly: this is just another complaint. I try to not make noise, but I barely care. I don’t think he would notice if I did. He puts on that video of Emmy again, and he watches it on one screen. On the other he’s got his pictures of Elena, and he picks the one of her taken in Cromer, and zooms in, and he weeps. He watches them both and he sits there feeling guilty and he cries for himself. If you could only see yourself, I think, and that makes me laugh, because it was entirely accidental. Jesus Christ, Cormac. Pull yourself together.

With the lights off, it’s harder to keep track of him. I can see his shape in the cockpit and the lounge, but when he’s in the hallways he’s a ghost. He can see better than I can, I guess; and he’s got a little torch on his suit, the kind they have on life jackets, so I can see that when he shines it. He finds the food he wants: when I leave the lining, I’m left grabbing whatever bars I can find first, fumbling in the dark and trying to stay silent. Somehow, despite his self-pity and mourning, he’s the alpha male, and I’m left scrabbling for his scraps.

We spend two days there. Two full days, doing nothing, watching as the numbers on the piezoelectric counter tumble, as the air starts to thin. His shitty calculations are based on him being the only person who needs to breathe, and here in the lining, at the back of the vacuum pumps and airdispensers, I’m suffering. I feel light-headed, and spend much of those days lying down. First time around, it felt – I remember it feeling – almost like an adventure. I remember trying to keep my spirits up, or, at least, that’s how I wrote the blogs. I read them now and they’re awful, mournful, dark as anything. He’s suffering and I hate him for it. He should have just killed himself. He should have had the nerve to end it like a man, in the bathroom, in the shower, a knife into his neck or his wrist, or put the gravity on and use the safety cord, tied off around something. I see him contemplate it, when he looks at the pictures of Elena: he looks at them and at something that he’s written, a file on the computers about her that I can only read a sentence of before I have to stop, because it’s still so fresh. Did I think I wasn’t still in mourning? I’ll always be in mourning.

If you could, you might say it wasn’t my fault, but it was, and it is, and it always will be; and I will never see you again.

Instead he watches all the videos, but he’s barely watching them: they’re just there as company for him, voices in the quiet of the ship, something else to bounce off the walls. I go out and watch him as he sleeps, and picture myself putting my hand over his mouth and nose, bracing my weight against him as he wriggled away from it, stopping him: but that’s not how it happened. If I kill him, I’ll only end up here again. I might as well see it through to the end for once, if I can.

(That makes me laugh, again, another thing that I find funny in this fucked-up situation: that Guy would be proud of me. I’ll be the first Cormac to complete a loop of this particular section of his own life, and the only man in history to see the furthest point in space twice. I should get a medal.)

He moves on to videos of Quinn when he’s exhausted the trove of Emmy interviews he’s taken. There’s no malice in them: he watches them for company, occasionally chipping in as the videotaped version of him asks a question. He mirrors the question, vocalizing it aloud, and sometimes, once or twice, I catch myself doing the same: three of us, different times, all saying the same thing. We’re so predictable. Can a man change? Only with hindsight, and even then I’d be suspicious.

Eventually he starts the engines again, and he shouts, into the deep of the ship.

‘I’m going to bed,’ he says, not aiming it at anybody, but it’s my klaxon. I drag myself to my feet and count down to a hundred. He always found it easy to sleep. Tonight won’t be any different.

It’s as I’m staring at his face, thinking about how much of a stranger he is. I write something else to send home.

I can try to reconcile this, to make sense of it – to say, I wasn’t here the first time, and so I’m just trying to make it all work, but I was here the first time, because those things happened, and they can’t have been a coincidence. Which means I’ve always been here. Time is a straight line, and my life on it is a line, until I reach that explosion, until the first me, the original – or am I still the original? I don’t know – until the first me goes back to the explosion, and then he does it again, over and over, scratching over the timeline like a scribble. I don’t think that time is looping: it’s just me. Back home, they don’t have a clue. They’re just carrying on as before.

Don’t even get me started on why this is happening. I think about that for too long, I’m liable to go insane (if I’m not already there). If this is how it’s meant to happen, all I can do is see it through to the end. If I complete the loop and I come back next time, then, well, another plan. Something else. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

And if we don’t come to it, nobody will ever have read this, and none of it will matter.

When he wakes up, he’ll see that we’ve carried on losing fuel, because that’s what happened before, and he’ll panic, and none of that can change. All I can do is stay out of his way, now, and watch as he pushes us towards… whatever.

He wakes up and panics, as I knew that he would, and he grabs his suit.

‘If I go out there, I can maybe fix it,’ he says, but he can’t, and we both know it. Still, at least he’s trying. It’s the most admirable thing he’s done so far, the most proactive. I watch him change into the suit, step into the airlock and seal the door behind him, and then I watch as he disappears from my field of vision. I’ve got a few minutes so I sneak out, and it’s the first time I’ve been on the ship by myself. Sure, before – when I was still the first Cormac – I thought that I was, but I wasn’t. Now, here: this is me truly alone. The devilish part of me thinks that I should start the engines, fry him, drive off, the most expensive joyride in history. I don’t, of course. Instead I take more painkillers, drink clean water, and I look at the picture of Elena that he’s left on the screen, that he’s been staring at and reminiscing.

I can berate him for doing it as much as I like, but, truth be told, given the opportunity, it’s what I would be doing as well.

Outside, he can’t see anything wrong with the ship, because there isn’t. No pipes need fixing; no holes have appeared; nothing is leaking. This is how it’s meant to be, Cormac. This is just how it all happens.

Cormac turns the lights on and it blinds me, for a minute. He’s listless and lost and he flits from terminal to terminal, from action to action. He’s still watching the videos, accompanied by the faces of the dead as they tell us about themselves when they were alive – not who they really were, but who the public perception of them was. Quinn talks about his life as a pilot, but he was more than that. Emmy speaks about doctoring, about healing, but she never mentioned that in person. In person, she drank and she laughed and she joked and she flirted, and she never once mentioned that she was a doctor. It’s a different voice in the tapes, almost, a professional sheen that she never carried away from the training rooms. He’s given up. It’s so hard to watch him like this.

He finds the rest of the champagne. He gorges himself on food, eating dessert bars instead of a meal, and he laughs and laughs, and he tapes himself doing it, and then broadcasts it. He drinks the champagne and he sobs and sobs into the small flasks of it, as he drinks it through the straws. When he’s not quite finished he drifts around the cabin in a ball, and he convulses. He drinks more when he thinks that he’s ready, and then he’s sick, remembering to do it into a bag, and then he cries more, great heaving wheezes of tears, and he says Elena’s name over and over, over and over as he cries. When he passes out – floating in the air like some possessed child in a movie, his back arched, his arms and legs dangling, his head lolling back, tongue out, eyes twittering – I leave the lining and help him into his bed. He could catch me – and this could all be over – but he won’t. I put him into the bed and strap him down, and he doesn’t stir.

I take a champagne back to the lining with me, and a burger bar, and a cherry pie bar, and I sit and eat them and think about how little time is left.

I always said that the thing I was saddest about, when they had pretty much stopped printing paper books, was that I couldn’t tell how long was left until the end. I could find out, but that feel, that sensation of always knowing was gone. I used to love the way that the cluster of pages grew thinner in my hand, how I could squeeze it and guess the time it would take until it ended. I loved endings, when they were done well: I loved knowing that it was finished, because that was how it was meant to be. An ending is a completion: it’s a satisfaction all in itself.

From here, I can squeeze the pages, and I know there’s not long to go. I’ve been here before, but I don’t know the actual ending yet.

He recovers by vomiting, by holding his gut with both arms, holding as tight as he can. It’s worse in zero gravity, I remember that much: it feels like you can’t even get close to making your stomach settle. That sense of your insides swirling you get after being sick? That doesn’t leave. He heaves into bags and then puts them in the chute, and he clutches his gut and whimpers. He’s still drunk, so he swigs water until that makes him feel ill again. He sleeps and he cries as he sleeps, and he’s like a child. Staying away is hard, but it’s how it has to be. I remember everything, almost, even though I was in that state. I remember that I was on my own. When he wakes up, he sits at the computer and he cries and cries: because he feels awful, sick and ruined; and because he misses Elena, and because of how she died, and how much guilt he’s storing, that he didn’t even go to her funeral; and because he’s alone. He knows he’s going to die, as well. He might not have admitted it, at the time, but he knows it. Watching this – watching the movie – everybody knows it. The only reason I’m sure of it is because I’ve seen this already.

Hangovers in space don’t work like on Earth: there’s nothing to ground you. When the room feels like it’s spinning, it’s because it is. Your blood pressure is already fucked up, so that sensation – the feeling of being drunk rather than the alcohol actually being in your bloodstream – that lasts far longer. We were warned by DARPA not to over-drink before we left.

‘The champagne is for celebration, for you all to share. Don’t drink it all at once: it’ll make you sick as dogs.’ I remember that, and Cormac remembers it now. I’m not sure that we did before we drank it. Or, maybe that was the point. He cowers and stares at the numbers – at his life-clock, ticking down – and then puts on Arlen’s videos, and watches the big, bearded, larger-than-life man laughing and joking his way through the very first video any of them recorded, before they even took off. He yammers as he waits for the camera crew to leave, to stop their panning shots, epic, widescreen, 3D shots; and for the injections to start before lift-off. He talks about the crew.

‘They’re good people,’ he says, ‘really good people. It helps; you have a good crew, this whole thing will go a lot quicker.’ Cormac cries, his standard reaction to almost everything, it seems. I’m well past it, by now.

Guy’s videos. Fuck. I don’t think that I can watch them. Cormac laps them up, because he thinks that they will contain the secrets of the universe. He trusted Guy implicitly, and these videos – these brief, utterly vacuous interviews – are probably nothing but lies. Guy smiles, and jokes, and tells Cormac not to touch anything. He’s lying about everything, and Cormac doesn’t have a clue. He tells the me in the video about what it means to be an explorer, proselytizing about how good the feeling will be to have done what we will do. When he’s done, Cormac writes a new blog post, about how Guy would have known what to do.

He could have fixed it all , he writes. He wouldn’t have been in this mess, and he would have made it home, and it – this – would all have been worth it, for him.

When Cormac has finally gone to sleep I rush out and alter his post.

Guy was a real fucking traitor, I write, and if you’re reading this, Ground Control, the rest of you are too. I hope you hate yourselves for what you did. I hope you feel guilty.

It feels good to write it, to put it down, to actually speak it. I send it.

When he wakes up, Cormac puts the Guy videos on again, as background noise. Guy talks about famous explorers.

‘They’ll remember you forever!’ he says.

‘Fuck you,’ I say out loud. Cormac doesn’t hear me.

The next day he reads the numbers, over and over, and he sees the numbers and he tries to work out what it means again, as if the systems encyclopedias might somehow have updated, and might magically give him the answers he desires. He types it into the computer and I watch him as he spends the day reading stuff he’s already read. He gets into a thread about aliens – we’re back here again, that thinking that something internal might be something, that something – a flight of fancy – can spiral into thoughts of invaders, of extraterrestrial life, of so much more than being stuck in a tin can until you die. He knows they don’t exist. He knows that, here, so close to the Earth, really, not even a tenth as far as some of our deep-space satellites and probes have travelled, there’s no chance of finding anything. He knows, but he hopes. I don’t. Not that I’ve given up: I just don’t know where we go from here.

‘Save me,’ he whimpers.

‘I would if I could,’ I say. I wait all day for him to sleep, but he doesn’t, and we’ve totally lost track of time again, because it’s like the Arctic here, no lack of daylight from the strip lighting. I take the painkillers in the lining and sleep, so lightly, barely even sleeping. I can’t remember when I last had a full night; what it’s like to put my head to a pillow, to feel that stillness of a bed, of drifting into proper sleep. I can’t remember what it’s like to actually dream: the things that I had before, the echoes of previous versions of me, they weren’t anything to do with me letting go. If anything, they were me clinging on. I wait for Cormac to sleep so that I can go out there, but he doesn’t, so I watch him.

I realize that I won’t get to sleep again before I die: at least, not in a bed, with a duvet, pillows, a mattress, the warmth of another person next to me, sharing my space.

‘I just want to get to say goodbye to Elena,’ he says. He’s looking at her photograph as the ship is full of the noise of the crew cheering, that first video home, where we lied and didn’t say anything about Arlen. The cheers seem to cling to everything Cormac says, rising and falling with a strange serendipity.‘I miss her so, so much.’ He strokes her photograph on the screen, and then clutches himself, pulls himself tight, winces at whatever it is that he’s thinking. ‘This is so unfair.’

He reaches over and puts on the videos of Emmy again, to punish himself: because she’s as close to an admission of guilt as he can offer. He watches her talk about her training, smiling in her casual, semi-professional way, and he hammers the keyboard, writing letters to Elena, to his parents. He knows that they’ll never read them – that there’s no possible way that they ever could – but that doesn’t stop him. He cries as he writes them, finding it cathartic and powerful at first, because there’s real meaning there: and then he realizes that he’s done, that the people he’s writing to are even more dead than he is, and that there’s no going back from here. All he’s got left is to join them, and he’s always been an atheist, never believed in a higher power, especially not out here, where it’s so cold and dark and so absolutely full of nothingness.

Tomorrow he’ll break his leg. We’re nearly there, Cormac. We’ve nearly made it.

5

As the other Cormac gives us gravity, I brace myself against the lining, pushing back to stop from falling, and I don’t get to see him fall because of that: but I hear the crack of his leg as he lands oddly, such a small fall, but so vital. It makes me wince, and I take a painkiller like a gut reaction, a reflex. He howls, and by the time I’m on tiptoes back at the vent all I can see is the blood, soaking through his white uniform, the bend in the trouser leg like a right-angled pipe, where the bone is jutting through. My own leg starts hurting just to look at it, and I rub at the scar, ill-formed and only barely healed. In the cabin, he pulls out Emmy’s medicine cabinet, yanks the drawers to the floor, growling like a chained dog as he does it. He’s remarkably resilient, holding himself together through the pain far better than I thought he would: there aren’t tears, just howls of agony. He paws at the anaesthetic needles, jabs them into his own neck and presses the button, and I watch as he gets that glossy look in his eyes and the drugs run through him, taking the edge off. It’s not enough: he immediately sticks himself with another, and he tries to ignore the angle that his jutting bone is making, and the blood. If he concentrates on the blood, he’s likely to lose it. Antiseptic injections, to prevent infection, are next: he sticks himself like an old pro, desperate to save himself on some battlefield, and then he laughs, as he remembers that he’s going to die, that antiseptic won’t help that, that none of this – the pain, the bone, the risk of infection – will make the slightest bit of difference when he’s dead. He decides to bind and tie off his leg, because he needs his mobility. He isn’t just going to lie on the floor of the craft and wait to die.

I can’t remember exactly, but I think that that was the moment that I decided to end it for myself, rather than ride it out. I watch as he passes out, just as I did, as he keeps coming to, his mind rolling around from consciousness to not. He splints his leg, because he thinks that he should. He keeps sleeping, and if I didn’t know better I would be worrying that he was dead, but he isn’t. I do know better. I’m tempted to head out there, see what I can do, but there’s nothing. This is sewn-in, hewed. I could change something, but then only a few seconds – half a minute? A minute? – later I would be right back at the start. I’ve made it this far: let’s see what it’s like to die.

He puts gravity back on when he wakes up again, starts the engines, watches as the 9% on the screen shouts at him, as the beeping of the 250480 tells him something he cannot understand. After a while he sleeps, in his bed, strapped in but with the door open so that his leg can drift. He leaves that part free and it swings around as he twitches in his sleep, like a cat’s tail. I manage to leave the lining for a few minutes, and I write a blog entry myself.

Acceptance: the final stage of grief, right? Is this all I’ve been working towards?

He coughs in his sleep, and I put myself back into the space between the walls. He doesn’t wake up, but I decide not to risk it. My daredevil days are over.

My first interview, after I got past the paper stage, the form sent in and stamped and approved, my name written down somewhere by somebody as a potential candidate. We were sent to a building in New York, unlabelled from the outside, like a secret. We waited in a nondescript waiting room, the magazines on the table reflecting nothing but the secretary’s tastes, and we leafed through them and tried to not make eye contact with each other. We didn’t know why the others were there – we didn’t know what field they were from, or even if they were here for the same thing. The building had so many offices, and any one of them might have been for a different DARPA project, and it wasn’t right to probe, so I didn’t. Nobody else did either. There was a part of me that wondered if it was a silent first test: can you make it through the first stage without getting excited, without spilling the beans? I passed, with flying colours.

When they finally called me through to the room, I sat in a comfortable chair, one of those expensive ones they fill fancy office spaces with, and faced a panel of three, two women and a man, all older. They told me their names and shook my hand, and asked me why I had applied.

‘Because I want to explore something,’ I said. ‘It’s all that I’ve ever wanted to do.’ They wrote that down. ‘May I ask why you want to know?’ It was cocky, bolshy, but that was who I was, who I used to be, as a journalist. Before Elena died, and my world fell apart.

‘It’s crucial,’ they said, ‘because some people do this for the glory, for the rewards, and that’s not something that we necessarily want to encourage.’

‘So my answer was the right one?’ I asked, and they smiled, but didn’t reply. They asked me other questions – about my health, about Elena, my parents – and then told me that they would be in touch. They stood and shook my hand, and they each shook it harder than the last, and I thanked them for the opportunity and left. When I got out, the same people were in the waiting room, and they were all biting their nails or checking their emails, and I wondered about every single one of them: about whether they wanted onto the trip because they were excited about the opportunity, or because it was something to put on their CV. I looked at every single one of them and hoped that it was the latter, that they didn’t get the job and I did, because, I thought, my intentions were pure. I deserved it.

Wanda’s videos fill the screens. She feigns excitement, and then leans in and whispers to me that the controls are fake, and then makes out that she’s joking. She’s not. She knows what’s going to happen. She knows everything, and she can’t deal with it, and she knows we’re all going to die. It’s just a matter of when.

The me sits at the computers and reads everything again, and then stumbles upon the bit about the Crash Assist, where the craft jettisons the cargo to lose weight, then fires the stasis pods towards Earth with their own parachutes, and the rest of the hull collapses and falls apart, to harmlessly tumble towards the ground, the people, the sea, whatever. It’s a eureka moment. He’s in agony, still, dumb and blinkered by the drugs he’s taken – aren’t we all? I think – and he reads how to do it, over and over, and then starts typing into the computer, commands that he doesn’t understand but that he’s been instructed to use. Only now do I wonder why it was there, that fail-safe we would never use, and I realize that it was only ever intended to be used if something happened during take-off, the cargo being jettisoned from the rear to allow it to safely hit the sea we launched over, allowing for recovery of the ship’s guts, and maybe us, if there were even parachutes in the first place. He presses the Enter key, and the main hull door seals, and I realize that I’m locked out – my entrance to him is through that door, back past the lining, past the cargo rooms.

He presses the button again, and the noise is awful, grinding and churning of doors that have never been opened before, and then the cold rushes to me – not actual cold, just the pull of the outside. There’s barely anything between me and space, nothing sealed, nothing airtight. I’ve got seconds, I reckon, until all the doors are open. I plough myself to the vent overlooking the changing room, kick at the vent as hard as I can, shoulder it, and it starts to give way, and then it does, and I’m into the room, pulling on a helmet as fast as I can manage, yanking my head into it as the air rushes out, slamming the visor down, breathing, fiddling with the dials to give myself some time, to get me breathing, and then the door to the changing room flies away from me, and I’ve got no time. I fix the bungee, because I’m suddenly afraid to die. This isn’t what I want.

The ship is suddenly still, all the air gone. Everything from the cargo rooms, the changing room, all the loose bits and bobs are suddenly floating. They drift, and I go with them, knowing that Cormac is about to initiate the countdown, and I float to the doorway between us, stare through the transparent window set into it. I have to stop him doing this. If I have a reason for being here, it has to be that, surely? It has to be to save him. I hammer on it, but I know he won’t hear me, so I hammer harder, because there’s nothing else to do. He presses the button, and the lights dim, and the numbers on the computer screens wipe away, replaced by that countdown.

30. He just sits in Arlen’s chair and watches it, 29, 28, 27. I in turn watch him, and then I can see it, out of the front window: that blackness, totally stark against the rest of the stars, like a puddle of oil; but slick, floating in front of us. I didn’t see it first time around: my eyes were too full of tears. 26. I get to the Bubble, 23, and look at it, and it gives me a reading straight away: ANOMALY, it says, ANOMALY 250480. I didn’t do this last time – the first time – because I didn’t see it, not until it was too late. What could a computer tell me about what was happening to me, or what was going to happen to me? Now it tells me everything: there’s something out here with us. With me.

This something was our secondary objective; or, maybe, our primary objective, and we just didn’t know it; the thing that Guy yammed on about and we ignored, because he was a scientist doing science. It was the thing that he was going to measure, that he acted off-hand about, off-the-cuff, almost. He was lying. He knew about this – about how vast it is, how massive, how it must mean something. Where it was: that it was further than we could reach. He knew how we could reach it, though. This was his life’s work, and he knew that it would kill him. That’s why it was throwing up the message on screen so much: it was a warning. We were meant to fly into the storm, but we were never going to tell home how strong it was, or tell them how to combat it, or what it was going to do. We were just meant to tell them where it was. Anyway, maybe it would turn out to be harmless, just a smudge on a window. Or, maybe it’s something more important, deadly to the human race, sliding across space to swallow us whole. I suppose I’ve been inside it for awhile: I suppose it’s why this is so dark. Why I’m doing this over and over. I’ll never really know, not now. Now, it doesn’t actually matter.

14 seconds left, and I read something on the screen about how much it’s grown, and then, based on that, projected growth, and I don’t know how big it’s going to get, or what that means, but I like to think that it means Guy was actually trying to save us all – like, maybe it’s going to get big enough to envelope the Earth, and maybe he was there all along, not the bad guy he ended his life as, but the one I made friends with, who seemed reasonable, who seemed penitent for what he had done. There’s a greater good.

3, 2, 1, and the ship cracks up, and the pods jettison, because I hear them roar past, and then everything is silent. This is how it should be. The front wall of the Bubble splinters and I’m suddenly floating, attached to a large lump of hull that looks like an airlock, still, a metal box, dragging backwards. Cormac is in front of me, twisting forwards, still strapped to his chair, heading towards the blackness of the anomaly. He’s going to hit it, and that’s what sends him back to the start, makes him do this again: I have to stop it, save him.

I push off the Bubble as fast as I can, blast CO₂ for a boost, knowing that he’s only got seconds before this is pointless, before he’s done, and then I’m at his chair and pull him out of it, and the bungee goes taut but he’s still ahead of me. It’s attached to the helmet, so I yank it off, because I have to do something. The pressure makes me blind, and we were told to shut our eyes but I don’t, because this only ends one way. I have seconds, seconds, and then it hits me: this is what happened. I was here the very first time, because I have to have been for this all to happen, and I felt hands on me, because I was heading towards what is almost a wall of blackness, cloying and tangible, like thick ink, and I felt somebody – myself, this future version of me, the me from now – save me, pull me away from the blackness, and towards the nothingness behind us. It’s a paradox, a closed loop: I was here so this could all happen as it did. You can’t change time, because my gut tells me I can’t. I parse it: I can do exactly what happened the first time, grab him, push him into the blackness, because that’s what I’m meant to do. Every thought I have that doesn’t involve it makes me hurt. But, then, here and now, that pain means very little to me. Cormac is the definitive version; I’m just a later version of him, a version that never has to exist. I have seconds to change everything, seconds when this might become something different, and I have to let us both go. The blackness – whatever it is – will cause him (or me) to go back to the start, prolong our lives for however long, cursing us. Now, I have to have the courage to do what he couldn’t. I make the decision, and my gut screams at me, aches, burns, and it feels wrong, but I have to do it, because this might be the only chance I get. What if every other time I’ve been here I’ve thought I’m meant to make it happen as it did? What if I thought I was meant to make the circuit closed, make it perfect, complete? Save Cormac by pushing him into the anomaly, because that way leads to life?

Maybe this time I should try something different. Before, I spun around and I was saved. Now: I open my fingers and he opens his eyes, and he sees me, and I tell him that it will be all right, but this time I’m lying. I clutch onto him and fire the CO₂ again. I look back and see it push apart the blackness, like throwing a stone onto the surface of a lake, once so still, now broken and disturbed, and I clutch Cormac as we push away from the anomaly, going away from the still-exploding ship, away from the blackness, away from everything. All we’ve got is each other, he and I, I and he, and I did what I had to do. He coughs and chokes in my arms, and I don’t look as all those things they warned us about start happening to him. I can feel him going in my arms, and then I can feel it happening to me, because now my eyes have been open, and you can never survive this, no matter what you do, who you are. I opened my eyes to look at the blackness as it swallows the wreckage of the ship, the hungriest thing I’ve ever seen: the darkest part of space, swallowing everything in its path. I let go of Cormac, because he’s done, and so am I.

I wait and feel my lungs stop, and I open my eyes wide and stare forward at the nothingness, going onwards forever, it seems, on and on, with or without me there to see it, and my head feels like it’s about to burst. I’m not back on the ship. I don’t have my scars. I’ve not opened the door and killed Arlen, and I haven’t started this all again, confused and lost and alone but not alone. I haven’t done that. I wait to see if it’ll happen before I die, and if it does, if I’ll even remember this moment in the first place.

From here, space looks like it does from any garden, anywhere. It’s so still.