The Explorer by James Smythe

here, now, a second time, to watch them, or claim responsibility.
    I can’t sleep. I lie on the floor – or, slightly above, most of me touching the hard metal panelling, the rest of my body seemingly floating underneath the crates, like an upside-down bed but with none of the rest that a traditional mattress might bring with it. When I don’t move for extended periods, it feels like those parts of me that pressed against the crate above me have become loose, detached. It was never like this before, the first time. In the main cabin, they are in their beds, strapped in. They don’t have gravity for them, but they have bumpers, holding their bodies in. Part of our training was – can you believe this? – practising sleeping when in confined and constrained spaces. We slept in normal beds with rubber frames around our bodies at first, then they tilted the beds, like we were patients in a hospital, the bed-frames controlled by the specialists. They explained that they had to save space: the beds on the ship were to be at an angle, not unlike that found when sitting up in bed.
    ‘It’ll help blood flow as well,’ they said, though Emmy always said that they were lying about that.
    ‘A lot of what they tell us about the medical stuff they’re doing is a lie,’ she told me one day. ‘They just want to cover themselves, and if you don’t ask questions it’s a lot easier.’ I asked her about the bone loss, because that was another warning. ‘It’s an issue, sure, but not for us,’ she said. ‘You’d have to be out in space for years for it to really cause you issues. That’s space station health worries, for the guys who are up there on six-month or year rotations. We’re not up here for long enough. You eat your meals, drink lots of water, exercise, you’ll be fine.’ She was so sure, and that reassured me. I trusted her, because that’s what we do. It’s who we are, as people: we’re intrinsically built to trust.
    As I lie there, shaking with something, I don’t know what, like I’m ill, actually sick, I wonder what’s happening. I’m so scared, because I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t know what it means, and all I can do is pray that I have actually gone insane, because the alternative – I can’t even say it – is far, far more terrifying.
    I unstrap myself, no concept of what time it is. The rest of the ship is completely dead, however (that word, like a prediction, a crystal ball); one of the benefits of the crew sleeping in their pods is that they’re pretty much prevented from hearing noise from the rest of the ship, by design, blocking out voices. We were meant to sleep in shifts but never did: there was always to be somebody watching the ship, making sure that everything was fine, but with no need. Everything was so automated we might as well have been at home, were it not for the purpose , for our being the eyes and ears of the people who might want to be in our position. Guy said it best as we waited for the lift to take us up to the ship, the day we launched.
    ‘We’re the new explorers,’ he said. ‘This is like Columbus, or those guys who first went across the Antarctic. We’re adventurers, right? We’re inspiring people.’ That was the only thing that he ever seemed passionate about: what we were doing, that it was important. To me, specifically, he spoke about how important my role was. ‘You have to tell it like it is: tell the world that we’re not heroes, we’re just people seeing what can be done. That’s crucial, right?’
    I open the door to the storeroom, sliding it back. The lights in the rest of the ship are still on, and they make me blink, blinding me slightly again. I drift down the quiet hallway towards the main room, the cockpit.
    ‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ I say, aloud, quietly, into the nothing. I cross the threshold, and there’s the other me: looking so much younger, clean-shaven, peaceful. I stare at the sleeping crew for a