Chapter Text
Parrot follows Wifies down a long corridor to the Maximum Security Unit of a Dubai prison.
“Why bring me here at all?” Parrot questions.
“Science.”
They enter a stark room containing a single metal table. On one side sat a prisoner in a bright-orange jumpsuit. An Indian man in his twenties with slicked-back hair.
He was handcuffed to the table, Wifies and Parrot sitting opposite him. The guards closed the door behind us.
The man looked at us. He tilted his head slightly, waiting for someone to speak.
“Dr. Ashswag,” Wifies said.
“Call me Ash,” he said.
“I’ll call you Dr. Ashswag.” He pulled a file out of her briefcase and looked it over. “You’re currently serving a life sentence for seven counts of culpable homicide.”
“That’s their excuse for me being here, yes,” he said.
Parrot piped up. “Dude, seven people died on your rig. Because of your negligence. Seems like a pretty good ‘excuse’ for you to be here.”
He shook his head. “Seven people died because the control room didn’t follow procedure and activated a primary pumping station while workers were still in the reflector tower. It was a horrible accident, but it was an accident.”
“If the deaths at your solar farm weren’t your fault, why are you here?” Parrot questioned.
“Because the government thinks I embezzled millions of dollars.”
“...And why do they think that?” Parrot said.
“Because I embezzled millions of dollars.” He adjusted his shackled wrists into a more comfortable position, and leaned back in the chair. “But that had nothing to do with the deaths. Nothing!”
“Tell me about your blackpanel power idea,” Wifies said.”
“Hold on. What’s in it for me?”
“I like what I hear, it could reduce your jail time. So start talking.”
Ash sat to attention. “What do you know about solar thermal power?”
“It’s when you have a whole bunch of mirrors set up to reflect sunlight to the top of a tower. If you get a few hundred square meters of mirror focusing all that sunlight onto a single point, you can heat up water, make it boil, and run a turbine.” Wifies replied.
“But that’s not new. There’s a fully functional solar thermal power plant in Spain right now. I could speak to them.”
“What exactly were you making for the UAE?”
“Well,” he said. “It was funded by them. But the idea was to provide power for Africa.”
“Why would the United Arab Emirates pay a bunch of money to help Africa?” I asked.
“Because we’re nice,” Ashswag said.
“And it was going to be a UAE-owned company that charged for the power,”
“There it is.”
He leaned forward. “Africa needs infrastructure. To do that, they need power. And they have nine million square kilometers of useless land that gets some of the most intense continuous sunlight on Earth. The Sahara Desert is just sitting there, waiting to give them everything they need. All we needed to do was build the damn power plants!”
He flopped back in his chair. “But every local government wanted a piece of the pie. Graft, bribes, payoffs, you name it. You think I embezzled a lot? Shit, that’s nothing compared to what I had to pay in bribes just to build a solar plant in the middle of fucking nowhere.”
“And then?” Wifies said.
Ash looked at his shoes. “We built a pilot plant—one square kilometer of mirror area. All of it focused on a large metal drum full of water on top of a tower. Boil the water, run a turbine, you know the drill. I had a crew checking the drum for leaks. When anyone’s in the tower, the mirrors are supposed to be angled away. But someone in the control room fired up the whole system when they thought they were starting a virtual test.”
He sighed. “Seven people. All dead in an instant. At least they didn’t suffer. Much. Someone had to pay. The victims were all UAE citizens, and so am I. So the government came after me. It was a farce of a trial.”
“And the embezzlement?” Parrot added.
“Yeah, that came up in the trial too. But I would have gotten away with it if the project had been successful. I’m not to blame here. I mean, yeah, stealing money, okay, I’m guilty of that. But I didn’t kill those people. Not through negligence or any other means.”
“Where were you when the accident happened?” Wifies said.
Ash paused.
“Where were you?” He repeated.
“I was in Monaco on a vacation.”
“You were there for three months. Gambling away your embezzled money.”
“What if you had been doing your job instead of away on a bender?
“What if you’d been there the day the accident happened? Would the accident still have happened?”
Ash’s expression was answer enough.
“Alright,” Wifies said. “Now we’re past the excuses. You’re not going to convince me you’re an innocent scapegoat. Now you know that. So let’s move on: Tell me about blackpanels.”
“Yeah, okay.” He composed himself. “I’ve spent my whole life in the energy sector, so obviously Astrophage is really interesting to me. A storage medium like that—man, if it weren’t for what it’s doing to the sun, it would be the greatest stroke of luck for humanity in history.”
He shifted in his seat. “Nuclear reactors, coal plants, solar thermal plants…in the end they all do the same thing: Use heat to boil water, use the steam to drive a turbine. But with Astrophage, we don’t need any of that crap. It turns heat directly into stored energy. And it doesn’t even need a big heat differential. Just anything above 96.415 degrees.”
“We know that. We’ve been using a nuclear reactor’s heat to breed Astrophage for the last several months.”
“What’d you get? Maybe a few grams? My idea can get you a thousand kilograms per day. In a few years you’ll have enough for the whole Hail Mary mission. It’ll take you longer than that to build the ship anyway.”
“Get a square of metal foil. Pretty much any metal will do. Anodize it until it’s black. Don’t paint it—anodize it. Put clear glass over it and leave a one-centimeter gap between the glass and the foil. Seal the edges with brick, foam, or some other good insulator. Then set it out in the sun.”
“Okay, what good will that do?”
“The black foil will absorb sunlight and get hot. The glass will insulate it from outside air—any heat loss has to pass through the glass, and that’s slow. It’ll reach an equilibrium temperature well over one hundred degrees Celsius.”
“And at that temperature you can enrich Astrophage.”
“Yes.”
“But it would be ridiculously slow. If you had a one-square-meter box and ideal weather conditions…say, one thousand watts per square meter of solar energy…”
“It’s about half a microgram per day,” he said. “Give or take.”
“That’s a far cry from ‘a thousand kilograms’ per day.”
Ash smiled. “It’s just a matter of how many square meters you make of it.”
“You’d need two trillion square meters to get a thousand kilograms per day.”
“The Sahara Desert is nine trillion square meters.”
Parrot’s jaw dropped open.
“You want to pave a chunk of the Sahara Desert with blackpanels. A quarter of the entire Sahara Desert!”
“It’d be the biggest thing ever made by humanity,” Ash said. “It’d be starkly visible from space.”
Parrot glared at him. “And it would destroy the ecology of Africa and probably Europe.”
“Not as much as the coming ice age will.”
“It’s a sound concept.” Wifies said. “But I don’t know if it’s even possible to implement. This isn’t like making a building or a road. We’re talking about literally trillions of these things.”
Ash leaned in. “That’s why I designed the blackpanels to be made entirely out of foil, glass, and ceramics. All materials we have plenty of here on Earth.
He pointed to Wifies. “I hear you have godlike authority over pretty much the whole world right now.”
“That’s an exaggeration,” He replied.
“Not much of one,” Parrot muttered.
“Can you get China to orient their industrial base around making blackpanels? Not just them, but pretty much every industrial nation on Earth? That’s what it would take.”
Wifies pursed his lips. After a moment, he said, “Yes.”
“And can you tell the corrupt government officials in North Africa to stay out of the way?”
“That part will be easy,” he said. “When this is all over, those governments will keep the blackpanels. They’ll be the industrial-energy powerhouse of the world.”
“See, there we go,” Ash said. “Save the world and permanently lift Africa out of poverty while we’re at it. Of course, this is all just a theory. I have to develop the blackpanel and make sure we can mass-produce it. I’d need to be in a lab instead of prison.”
Wifies mulled it over. Then he stood.
“Okay. You’re with us.”
‧₊˚✩ 🪐✩˚₊‧
“Have you met Dr. Chan?” Wifies asked.
Parrot shrugged. “I meet so many people these days, bro, I honestly don’t know.”
The carrier had a sick bay, but that was for the crew. This was a special medical center set up on the second hangar bay.
“Call me Egg. Nice to meet you, Parrot.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You too.”
“I’ve put Dr. Chan in charge of all things medical for the Hail Mary,” Stratt said. “He was the lead scientist for the company that developed the coma technology we’re going to use.”
“The company didn't survive, unfortunately. The technology only works on one in every seven thousand people and so has limited commercial potential. I’m glad my research can still help humanity.”
“Understatement,” said Wifies. “Your technology might save humanity.”
He led us into his lab. A dozen bays were each full of slightly different apparatus experiments, each connected to an unconscious monkey.
I looked away. “Do I have to be here?”
“You’ll have to excuse Dr. Twice,” Wifies said. “He’s a bit… sensitive on certain topics.”
“I’m fine,” Parrot swallowed, and tried not to think of all the hours as a kid watching nature documentaries about the birds that had been his namesake.
Egg said nothing.
“Dr. Chan, please bring us up to speed.”
Egg pointed to a set of metal arms over the nearest test monkey. “We developed these automated coma-monitoring and care stations when we believed we would have tens of thousands of patients. We never ended up using them.”
“Do they work?” Wifies asked.
“Our original design wasn’t supposed to be fully independent. It would handle everything routine, but there was a problem it couldn’t solve, a human doctor would be alerted.”
He walked along the line of unconscious monkeys. “We’re doing good on fully automated version. It’is run by extremely high-end software being developed in Bangkok. It will care for the subject in a coma. It watches their vitals, applies whatever medical care is needed, feeds them, monitors their fluids, and stuff like that. It’d still be better to have an actual doctor there. But this is as best as we can get.”
“Are they artificial intelligence?” Wifies asked.
“No,” said Egg. “We don’t have time to develop a complicated neural network. This is a procedural algorithm. Really complex, but not AI at all. We have to be able to test it in thousands of ways and know exactly how it responds and why. We can’t do that with a neural network.”
“I see.”
He pointed to some diagrams on the wall. “Our most important discovery was, unfortunately, the end of our company. We isolated the genetic markers that indicate long-term coma resistance. We can run a simple blood test to find out. And once we tested this on everyone we learned that not a lot of people actually have those genes.”
“Couldn’t you still help those people, though?” Parrot asked. “It’s only one in seven thousand people, but it’s a start, right?
Egg shook his head. “Unfortunately not. This is an optional procedure. There’s not medical need to be unconscious throughout chemotherapy. In fact, it adds a small amount of risk. So there just wouldn’t be enough customers to sustain a company.”
Wifies rolled up his sleeve. “Test my blood for the genes. I’m curious.”
“Sure.”
Egg got the needle into Wifies without delay and on the first try. The blood flowed into the tube.
The door open. Ken walked in.
“You called me?”
“Yes. We’re getting your blood tested.”
The blood draw was complete, and Wifies rolled down his sleeve. “Parrot. You’re up next. Ken, you too.” He gestured at the engineer.
“Why?” She asked. “I’m not volunteering.”
“To set an example,” Wifies said. “I want everyone on this project, even tangentially related, to get tested. Astronauts are a rare breed, and only one in seven thousand of them will be coma-resistant. We might not have enough qualified candidates. We need to be ready to expand the pool.”
“It’s a suicide mission,” Ken said. “It’s not like we’ll have a line of people saying, ‘Oh, me! Please! Please me! Pick me!’ ”
“Actually, we do have that,” Wifies said.
“What do you mean, we have that?”
“We’ve already had tens of thousands of volunteers. All with the complete understanding that it’s a one-way trip.”
“Wow,” Ken said. “How many of them are insane or suicidal?”
“Probably a lot. But there are hundreds of experienced astronauts on the list too. Astronauts are brave people, willing to risk their life for science. Many of them are willing to give their life for humanity. I admire them.”
“Hundreds,” I say. “Not thousands. We’ll be lucky if even one of those astronauts qualifies.”
“We’re already counting on a lot of luck,” said Wifies. “May as well hope for some more.”
‧₊˚✩ 🪐✩˚₊‧
“The science team sat around the meeting-room table. Me, Ken, Wemmbu, Ash, and Egg. For all his talk about cutting out bureaucracy, Wifies ended up with a bunch of de facto department heads and daily staff meetings.
Wifies sat at the head of the table, of course. And next to her was a man I’d never seen before.
“Everyone,” Wifies said. “I want you to meet Dr. Lomedy.”
The man to his left waved halfheartedly. “Hello.”
“Lomedy is a world-renowned climatologist from the United States. I’ve put him in charge of tracking, understanding, and—if possible—ameliorating the climate effects of Astrophage.”
Lomedy smiled, but it faded quickly.
“So, Dr. Lomedy,” Wifies said. “We’ve been getting a lot of conflicting reports on exactly what to expect from the reduction of solar energy. It’s hard to find any two climatologists who agree.”
Lomedy shrugged. “It’s hard to find two climatologists who agree on the color of an orange. It is, unfortunately, an inexact field. There is a lot of uncertainty and—if I’m being honest—a lot of guesswork. Climate science is in its infancy.”
“You’re not giving yourself enough credit. Out of all the experts, you’re the only one I could find whose climate-prediction models were proven true over and over again for the last twenty years.”
He nodded.
Wifies gestured to a disorderly mass of papers on the meeting table. “I’ve been sent every kind of prediction from minor crop failures to global biosphere collapse. I want to hear what you have to say. You’ve seen the predicted solar-output numbers. What’s your take?”
“Disaster, of course,” he said. “We’re looking at extinction of many species, complete upheaval of biomes all over the world, major changes in weather patterns—”
“Humans,” Wifies said. “I want to know how this affects humans, and when. I don’t care about the mating grounds of the three-anused mud sloth or any other “random biome.”
“We’re part of the ecology, Dr. Wifies. We’re not outside it. The plants we eat, the animals we ranch, the air we breathe - it’s all part of the tapestry. It’s all connected. As the biomes collapse, it’ll have a direct impact on humanity.”
Okay, then: numbers,” Wifies said. “I want numbers. Tangible things, not vague predictions.”
Lomedy scowled at him. “Okay. Nineteen years.”
“Nineteen years?”
“You wanted a number,” he said. “There’s a number. Nineteen years.”
“What’s nineteen years?”
“That’s my estimate for when half the people currently alive will be dead. Nineteen years from now.”
The silence that followed was unlike anything Parrot had ever experienced. Even Wifies was taken aback. Ash and I looked to each other. I don’t know why but we did. Wemmbu’s mouth fell agape.
“Half?” Wifies said. “Three point five billion people? Dead?”
“Yes,” Lomedy said. “Is that tangible enough for you?”
“How can you possibly know that?” He said.
Lomedy pursed his lips. “And just like that, another climate denier is born. See how easy it is? All I have to do is tell you something you don’t want to hear.”
“Don’t patronize me, Dr. Lomedy. Just answer my questions.”
He crossed his arms. “We’re already seeing major weather-pattern disrup“disruptions.”
Ash cleared his throat. “I heard there were tornadoes in Europe?”
“Yes,” he said. “And they’re happening more and more often. European languages didn’t even have a word for tornado until Spanish conquistadors saw them in North America. Now they’re happening in Italy, Spain, and Greece.”
He tilted his head. “Partially, it’s because of shifting weather patterns. And partially it’s because some lunatic decided to pave the Sahara Desert with black rectangles. As if a massive disruption of heat distribution near the Mediterranean Sea wouldn’t have any effects.”
Wifies rolled his eyes. “I knew there’d be weather effects. We just don’t have any other choice.”
He pressed on. “Your abuse of the Sahara aside, we’re seeing bizarre phenomena all over the world. The cyclone season is off by two months. It snowed in Vietnam last week. The jet stream is a convoluted mess changing day by day. Arctic air is being brought to places it’s never been before, and tropical air is going well north and south. It’s a maelstrom.”
“Get back to the three and a half billion dead people,” Wifies said.
“Sure,” Lomedy said. “The math of famine is actually pretty easy. Take all the calories the world creates with farming and agriculture per day, and divide by about fifteen hundred. The human population cannot be greater than that number. Not for long, anyway.”
“I’ve run the best models I have. Crops are going to fail. The global staple crops are wheat, barley, millet, potatoes, soy, and most important: rice. All of them are pretty sensitive about temperature ranges. If your rice paddy freezes over, the rice dies. If your potato farm floods, the potatoes die. And if your wheat farm experiences ten times normal humidity, it gets fungal parasites and dies.”
He looked at Wifies again. “If only we had a stable supply of three-anused mud sloths, maybe we’d survive.”
Wifies pinched his chin. “Nineteen years isn’t enough time. It’ll take thirteen years for the Hail Mary to get to Tau Ceti, and another thirteen for any results or data to come back. We need at least twenty-six years. Twenty-seven would be better.”
Lomedy looked at her as if he'd grown another head. “What are you saying? This isn’t some optional outcome. This is happening. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Humanity has been accidentally causing global warming for a century,” Wifies said. “Let's find out what we can do when we actually set our minds to it.”
“He drew back. “What? Are you kidding?”
“A nice blanket of greenhouse gases would buy us some time, It would insulate Earth like a parka and make the energy we are getting last longer.”
“Wha-” Lomedy stammered. “You aren’t wrong, but the scale…and the morality of deliberately causing greenhouse-gas emissions…”
“I don’t care about morality,” Wifies said.
“He really doesn’t,” Parrot said.
“I care about saving humanity. So get me some greenhouse effect. You’re a climatologist. Come up with something to make us last at least twenty-seven years. I’m not willing to lose half of humanity.”
Lomedy gulped.
“Get to work.”
‧₊˚✩ 🪐✩˚₊‧
For once, an aircraft carrier was the perfect place to be.
The Chinese Navy didn’t even question Wifies’ orders anymore. The higher-ups got sick of approving every action and finally just issued a general order to do whatever he said as long as it didn’t involve firing weapons.
We anchored off the coast of western Antarctica in the dead of night. The coastline sat in the extreme distance, visible only by moonlight. The entire continent had been evacuated of humans. Probably an overreaction—the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station was 1,500 kilometers “away. The people there would have been just fine. Still, no reason to take chances.
It was the largest naval exclusion zone in history. So big the U.S. Navy had to stretch itself thin to make sure no commercial ships entered the area.
Stratt spoke into a walkie-talkie. “Destroyer One, confirm observation status.”
“Ready,” came an American accent.
“Destroyer Two, confirm observation status.”
“Ready,” came a different American’s voice.
The scientific team stood together on the carrier’s flight deck, staring toward land. Egg hung back away from the edge. Wemmbu leaned over the railing. Ash was off in Africa running the blackpanel farm.
And of course Wifies stood slightly ahead of everyone else.
Lomedy looked for all the world like a man being led to the gallows. “We’re almost ready,” he said with a sigh.
Wifies clicked on her walkie-talkie again. “Submarine One, confirm observation status.”
“Ready,” came the response.
Wifies checked his tablet. “Three minutes…mark.”
“All ships: We are at Condition Yellow,” Wifies said into her radio. “Repeat: Condition Yellow. Submarine Two, confirm observation status.”
“Ready.”
“I stood next to Lomedy. “This is unbelievable,” I said.
He shook his head. “I wish to God this wasn’t on my shoulders.” He fiddled with his tablet. “You know, Dr. Twice, I’ve spent my entire life as an unapologetic hippie. From my childhood in Wisconsin to my university days in Seattle.” Parrot didn’t say anything. Lomedy was probably having the worst day of his life. If he could help by just listening, he’d do it.
“I became a climatologist to help save the world. To stop the nightmarish environmental catastrophe we were sinking ourselves into. And now, this. It’s necessary, but horrible. As a scientist yourself, I’m sure you understand.”
“Not really,” Parrot said. “I spent my whole scientific career looking away from Earth, not toward it. I’m embarrassingly weak on climate science.”
“Mm,” he said. “Western Antarctica is a roiling mass of ice and snow. This whole region is a giant glacier, slowly marching to the sea. There are hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of ice here.”
“And we’re going to melt it?”
“The sea will melt it for us, but yes. Thing is, Antarctica used to be a jungle. For millions of years it was as lush as Africa. But continental drift and natural climate change froze it over. All those plants died and decomposed. The gases from that decomposition—most notably methane—got trapped in the ice.”
“And methane’s a pretty powerful greenhouse gas.” Parrot replied.
Lomedy nodded. “Far more powerful than carbon dioxide.”
He checked his tablet again. “Two minutes!” he called out.
“All ships: Condition Red,” Wifies radioed. “Repeat: Condition Red.”
Lomedy turned back to me. “So here I am. Environmental activist.” He looked out to sea. “And I’m ordering a nuclear strike on Antarctica. Two hundred and forty-one nuclear weapons, courtesy of the United States, buried fifty meters deep along a fissure at three-kilometer intervals. All going off at the same time.”
Parrot nodded slowly.
“They tell me the radiation will be minimal,” he said.
“Yeah. If it’s any consolation, they’re fusion bombs.” Parrot pulled his cardigan around himself tightly. “There’s a small fission reaction with uranium and stuff that sets off the much larger fusion reaction. And the big explosion is just hydrogen and helium. No radiation from that.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“And this was the only option?” Parrot asked. “Why can’t we have factories mass-produce sulfur hexafluoride, or some other greenhouse gas?”
Lomedy shook his head. “We’d need thousands of times the production that we could possibly do. Remember, it took us a century of burning coal and oil on a global scale to even notice it was affecting the climate at all.”
He checked his tablet. “The shelf will cleave at the line of explosions and slowly work its way into the sea and melt. Sea levels will rise about a centimeter over the next month, the ocean temperature will drop a degree—which is a disaster of its own but never mind that for now. Enormous quantities of methane will be released into the atmosphere. And now, methane is our friend. Methane is our best friend. And not “And not just because it’ll keep us warm for a while.”
“Yeah?”
“Methane breaks down in the atmosphere after ten years. We can knock chunks of Antarctica into the sea every few years to moderate the methane levels. And if Hail Mary finds a solution, we just have to wait ten years for the methane to go away. You can’t do that with carbon dioxide.”
Wifies approached us. “Time?”
“Sixty seconds,” Lomedy said.
Wifies nodded.
“So this solves everything?” Parrot asked. “Can’t we just keep poking Antarctica for more methane to keep Earth’s temperature right?”
“No,” Lomedy said. “It’s a stopgap at best. Dumping this into our atmosphere will keep the warmth in the air, but the disruption to our ecosystem will still be massive. We’ll still have horrific and unpredictable weather, crop failures, and biome annihilation. But maybe, just maybe, it won’t be quite as bad as it would have been without the methane.”
I looked at Wifies and Lomedy standing side by side. Never in human history had so much raw authority and power been invested into so few people. These two people—just these two—were going to literally change the face of the world.
“Wifies,” Parrot says. “Once we launch the Paragon. What are you gonna do atter?”
“Me?” Wifies chuckled. “It doesn’t matter. Once the Paragon launches, my authority ends. I’ll probably be put on trial by a plethora of governments for abuse of power. I might spend the rest of my life in jail.”
“I’ll be in the cell next to you,” said Lomedy.
“You’re not… concerned about that?”
Wifies shrugged. “We all have to make sacrifices. If I have to be the world’s whipping boy to secure our salvation, then that’smy sacrifice to make.”
“Weird logic.”
“Not really. When the alternative is death for all humanity, things become very easy. No moral dilemmas, no weighing what’s best for who. Just a single-minded focus on getting this project working.”
“That’s what I try and tell myself myself,” Lomedy said. “Three…two…one…detonation.”
Nothing happened. The coastline remained as it was. No explosion. No flash. Not even a pop.
Lomedy looked at his tablet. “The nukes have detonated. The shockwave should be here in ten minutes or so. It’ll just sound like distant thunder, though.”
He looked down at the carrier deck.
Wifies put his hand on Lomedy’s shoulder. “You did what you had to do. We’re all doing what we have to do.
He buried his face in his hands and cried.
‧₊˚✩ 🪐✩˚₊‧
Parrot is in the lab, inspecting the science equipment when the airlock opens.
His first thought is of course, panic.
And then Theo rolls in, contained by a glass ball.
“Theo- Theo, why are you in a ball?”
“So I don’t die in your atmosphere, bro!”
Theo rolled along, knocking Parrot’s things over in the process as he chased after him.
“We can do science together, and save our suns!” Theo rolled past the mental health chamber. “This room’s boring, dude.”
Theo arrives in the lab. “Dude! This is so cool!” Parrot can hear his happy chirps beneath the text-to-speech. Well, at least one of them is having fun. “I wanna see human technology!” He bumps into a centrifuge. “Sorry, bro. I'm new to the ball.”
Parrot finally catches up with him. “Theo,” he tries. “Theo, my hand is up.”
“Yeah, bro?”
“You can’t just move into someone’s spaceship.”
“Right.”
“We have the same mission.”
“Mission.”
“But we’re two distinct individuals,” Parrot makes a separating motion with his hand. “With distinct boundaries.”
“Boundaries.”
“Working on their own separate parts of the mission. Seperately.”
“Seperately.”
“Got it?”
“Where’s my bedroom?”
“Bedroom?!”
[Paragon Mission Log - Tau Ceti, Day 10]
“So I have a roommate now,” Parrot starts. “The chore wheel’s a bit… lopsided.”
-
“No, no, more left, dude! Out pointy!” Theo grumbles as Parrot sets up the glass dome. “Bro, you’re seriously going to get out of a ball to sleep in a bigger ball?”
“Yeah, for the bed!”
“You don't even use a bed! And you keep saying 'out pointy!’ Bro, what does that mean?”
“We watch each other sleep. Eridians sleep differently from humans. Their body shuts down fully. If there’s danger, he can’t wake up. It's a survival instinct.”
“He has incredible hearing. He can see through walls. Personal space is at a premium.”
“Who ya talking to, bro?”
“You can hear me?!” The camera pans to the far end of the ship, and Parrot points at Theo sitting there with his legs tucked underneath him. “Bro, look at how far away he is.”
“Okay, what about this?” He whispers.
“Yup.”
“There’s no way you can hear this.”
“Yeah I can. You said ‘there’s no way you can hear this,”
“How about this?” Parrot drops his voice to barely a whisper.
“Yes.”
He groans. “I need a break.”
“Break from what?”
“Oh, forget it.”