Rodney's definitely an unreliable narrator in this story -- he even knows it -- but I wanted the reader to feel the same shock he does when he realizes that he's been deluded for so long. Maybe he went insane when the mutiny failed, even, and there never was any reason to believe anyone was alive, or maybe he's been lied to all those years, and the others are out there. There's no way to know from where he is right then. (I did have another story that would have paralleled this in mind, but it would have provided too many answers, I think, that would have weakened this story.)