The Explorer Read Online Free
Author: James Smythe
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
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
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