Chapter Text
The stench of yesterday’s failure wouldn’t leave the lab.
He had left the ventilation on overnight hoping to get the room in order before Grace arrived. But his efforts were made in vain as the room smelled worse than the days before, like stale, sickly-sweet heavy rot. The air felt heavy and humid, and Simon could taste a faint chalky bitterness at the back of his tongue as he breathed. It reminded him of the compost back home.
Yet another reminder of his sins.
Seventeen days. They only had seventeen days to prove that the prototype works before he would be cut from Eden, from the Father’s vision, forever trapped on paper dooming them all.
It was two hours after the meeting time and Ryland Grace had yet to make an appearance. Two hours of wasted time due to tardiness. A complete lack of discipline, it was a wonder how Grace got that far in his education.
Then came footsteps down the hall. It wasn’t the heavy, measured strides of Professor Vance. They were uneven and hurried. Was it Grace? There was a sharp clatter of a plastic strap sliding down an arm, which was followed by a startled, quiet curse.
Clumsy.
The automatic lab doors opened with a hiss and in came..
Well it had to be him. Ryland Grace.
He was a walking, lurching catastrophe. Simon watched as the stranger immediately caught the toe of his shoe on the thick yellow power cable on the floor, falling forward with a gasp. His eyes widened as his right arm flailed wildly, his duffel bag falling off his shoulder before bumping into one of the lockers. The coffee in his left hand sloshed over the rim of his lidless paper cup splattering on the pristine lab floor.
“Sorry sorry!” He fumbled, nearly dropping the cup entirely as he tried to hook the duffel bag’s strap back over his shoulder. “I’ll clean it up, give me a sec!”
The man hastily placed his coffee on top of one of the lockers before taking a handful of tissues from his bag, dabbing them on the mess he made. The tissues immediately went soggy, tearing against the rough concrete floor, leaving behind a sticky trail of white lint. Simon took in the rest of him. His hair was a wild static mess of curls that looked like they hadn’t seen a comb all semester. A prominent dark smudge of ink took up the entirety of his right sleeve cuff, and his clothes looked like they had been pulled straight from a laundry hamper this morning.
Straightening up with the dripping crumpled mass of soggy paper in his hand, the stranger looked around the lab, scanning the walls and corners in search of a trash bin, eyes brightening when he spotted one. He scrambled over to the bin, dumping the tissues in. Wiping the residue off on his pants, he turned and faced Simon.
“Hi! Simon Burch, yes? Please say that I’m in the correct room. It’s my first time in the engineering building and I got lost. Somehow ended up in the robotics wing earlier and–” He paused, nose suddenly wrinkling as he finally took in a deep breath. “Also, wow, no offense, but it stinks here. Is that the chlorella?”
Simon’s jaw tightened. Within seconds, he already understood exactly why Grace had lost his stipend. The man had absolutely no filter. “You’re late, Grace.” Simon said, voice thin and flat.
Grace sheepishly smiled at him, a hand scratching the back of his head before turning towards the prototype in the centre of the room. The generator was anchored on a small adjustable platform, allowing it to be brought higher or lower depending on the need. Grace approached the generator with wonder in his eyes, fingers brushing the seams between interlocking panels. His gaze wandered up towards the monitor that displayed the gas composition, scanning over the data on the screen.
His mouth opened to speak, however he stopped himself before he could. Pausing, before trying again.
“Hey, um. The fabrication is really beautiful. Pretty. Seriously.” Grace cleared his throat and gestured vaguely to the titanium hull, eyes darting between the machine and Simon.
A spark of gratification flared in Simon’s chest. He had spent weeks perfecting his design and months constructing the prototype itself. It felt great to be acknowledged. And it felt too good to be true. And he knew it. The awkward, disjointed delivery already had set off an alarm, his instincts detecting the invisible weight of a ‘but’ hanging in the air.
“Though… there’s a few issues.” Grace pulled out his copy of the blueprints, and rolled them out on the nearby counter, after which he waves Simon over. The offhand way Grace waved him over irritated him. Yet, he knew all too well that something was majorly wrong with his design if it can’t even run a single proper cycle. If the answer was on those sheets, he needed to see it. He stepped up towards the counter and leaned over. Simon looked at the paper, circled and annotated with red ink.
Grace’s handwriting was a frantic looping scrawl, but as Simon’s eyes tracked the marks, he realised that the majority of the circles were on each return bend of the chlorella lines, and one large one on the lighting system.
“All of these turns here,” Grace said, pointing at the pipeline, “have to go.”
What?
“The return bends? They’re necessary to keep the generator compact.” It was designed to be a modular system, allowing easier scaling across small rooms to large space stations. The removal of the return bends would increase the size of the generator exponentially.
“Compact but deadly.” Grace countered, tapping against one of the cross-section diagrams. “The internal diameter of these pipes is too narrow. Chlorella has a relatively resilient cell wall, but it's not built to handle thirty-two thousand Gs of force. And so the algae in these pipes are getting shredded as they move throughout the pipes. Not to mention every time they reach the return bends… It's like thousands of mini car crashes happening per second.”
Simon felt the air leave his lungs. The image of yesterday's chalky grey sludge flushing out of the valve flashed through his mind. He knew he had failed the plants, he had sinned, but he didn’t think he was torturing the very life that meant to bring them salvation. The weight of his ignorance pressed down on him, suffocating and heavy.
Grace didn’t wait for Simon to respond. His finger started to trace a path from one of the bends. “Well to make it easier to understand…” he paces over to the whiteboard on the lab wall. Uncapping one of the markers, he starts to write.
“As the algae nutrient mix. Um, ANM for short, gets pumped in through the pipes, the sheer stress from the pump tears the cells apart.” Grace explained, falling into an analytical rhythm, in a tone that made his failure seem less like a disaster and more like a riddle to decipher. He drew out a narrow channel, before drawing a few small circles which got progressively more deformed as he moved up towards the bend. Some even stretched and flattened into a single line, while others remained relatively unscathed. “At the same time, as the algae gets sent through here, they hit themselves extremely hard and die.”
To punctuate his point, Grace scribbled ‘SMACK!!’ in large capital letters followed by a few arrows from the wall of the bend. He even added a few crude lines next to the wall to represent the dead algae that settled along the sides of the walls.
Simon watched as the marker flew across the board, his jaw tightening until his teeth ground together. He felt like he was a kid again, learning something from the Cultivators back at the compound. Has he not grown enough already?
Grace drew a thick arrow to the right before starting on the next illustration, this time, a closer look at a return bend. “Then dead debris from that starts to settle on the walls,” Grace continued as he shaded in the algae portion of the figure before drawing a larger clump at the corner of the bend “—and the constant moving fluid pushes it to the side of the pipe and slowly but surely, settles on the corners of the return bends here.”
And yet, the truth told by Grace’s lecture sank in like a cold weight.
“The velocity should have cleared the blockages.” Simon’s jaw clenched. He had triple checked the hydrodynamic equations and found nothing wrong. At fifteen liters a minute, the flow alone would have dislodged any algae stuck on the side.
The blonde turned to face him, his eyes wide with excitement, a half smile on his lips. Oh, he recognises that look. It was one that he saw on the Arborists whenever he was being pruned and corrected. Grace thinks I’m a fool. He is amused by my disgrace.
“Yeah it should have, but only for a viscosity similar to water. Your lighting system here,” Grace turned back to the board, scribbled down ‘UV lighting system’, and tapped on the whiteboard after. “Is cooking your algae. You cranked the intensity up so high that your lighting system is generating a lot of heat. 130°F is more than enough heat to denature the algae proteins. This makes the ANM way thicker than it should be, resulting in sludge coagulating on the sides of the pipe. Given that your cycles are 5 minutes each, it has more than enough time to cook and harden. I will bet good money that there is algae still stuck in the prototype now, unable to be flushed out even with high water pressure.”
Under the ‘UV lighting system’, he listed more points; “destroys chlorophyll”, “denatures proteins”, “ROS → cellular lysis”.
Finishing the list, Grace turned around, making eye contact with Simon. The manic energy vanished as quickly as it had arrived earlier, now leaving behind a sudden awkward stillness. He grimaced, before muttering a quick apology and running towards his coffee and downing whatever was left in the cup.
“Hence… the smell.”
Simon stares at the whiteboard. His pride screamed at him to defend his work, to shield the design he had laboured over. But Grace made sense. That was the point of having a science consultant wasn’t it? To tell him where he had utterly fucked up, to correct his sins, and to make the Father’s mission a reality. Perhaps Grace deserved to be a PhD candidate afterall. He diagnosed the issues in his design in less than a day when Simon had to resort to trial and error to figure out the issue. And it has been weeks without progress.
Ryland Grace may as well be his saving grace right now.
“We will have to change the pipes and lighting system.” Simon simply stated.
“Yeah?” Grace seemed far away.
“We have two weeks.” Simon hated to admit it, but added anyway, “I need your help.”
Simon turns back towards Grace who was packing up his things, seemingly stilling as he processed the request. Simon braced himself for the inevitable shift in the other man’s expression. Perhaps it will be the look of judgement? Or condemnation?
Instead, a strange blank look settled over Grace’s features as he stared at Simon. In Eden, no one asks for help. Everyone is expected to perform and meet expectations regardless of how they feel. Was Grace too from Eden? Only doing as told and never more? Did Father send him because of a revelation? No one outside the compound had reacted like this when he asked for assistance.
Simon braced for correction, he had overstepped, he had-
“Right.”
Grace set his duffel bag on the counter, the word hanging in the air, short circuiting the anxious spiral in Simon’s mind. Grace grabbed his paper cup and tossed it into the trash bin from where he stood. Grace straightened up and placed his hands on his hips heaving a large sigh.
“Ooookay, that's more than I signed up for honestly. Actually I didn’t sign up at all. Sorry tangent. Well, I’m out of my depth here, Burch.”
Simon blinked. He has expected Grace to be arrogant, especially after picking apart his prototype on the whiteboard behind him. But now the confidence from just a moment ago was completely gone, replaced by a self deprecating chuckle as he threw his hands up in surrender.
“Out of your depth?” Simon asked.
Grace nodded, sighing as he leaned against the counter. “I can tell you why the algae is dying, give you the numbers of theoretical shear stress and rate of cell wall degradation. But for the actual build itself? I’m more likely to break it.”
He turned to look at the prototype, expression turning grim. “And Dr. Owen made it very clear that this is my only shot. If I mess this up, I can bid farewell to my doctorate.”
Glancing back at Simon, he says, a tad softer this time, “Are you sure you even want my help? I don’t exactly have a great track record with… well, anything right now.”
Not part of Eden then. Admitting a lack of ability or calling oneself a liability was dangerous. Was weak. Was an act that would bring about the painful pruning corrections of the Arborists.
“I don’t need you to build the machine.” Simon said flatly, cutting through the nervous energy that Grace is projecting. “I’ll be doing the main fabrication and replacement portion while you handle the biology parts of this project. That is what you are here for.”
Simon paused, his eyes drifting back to the clogged prototype. He thought for a bit. If Grace was as clumsy with tools as he was with his own feet, it was just common sense to keep him away from the main assembly. But there were plenty of tedious tasks to do here as well, requiring more patience than skill level.
“You can also help with the simpler tasks.” Simon continued, pointing to the diagram on the whiteboard. “You mentioned the chlorella being stuck in the pipes. After I dismantle the system, you can help clean them out before we send them for recycling.”
Grace’s eyes brightened, a visible wave of relief washing over him as the tension dropped away from his shoulders. “Yeah, that I can do. I’ll go start on the theory bits now!”
He reached for his duffel bag to get his laptop out, but stopped midway as a loud deep growl echoed through the quiet lab.
Simon glanced up at the digital clock mounted on the concrete wall. 13:14 it read. The hours had slipped away as Grace was giving an impromptu lecture on why his prototype did not work.
“When was your last meal?” Simon questioned.
“Yesterday afternoon I think.” Grace muttered, face bright red from the embarrassment as he rubbed the back of his neck. “After my… fumble, food was not really high on my priority list. I kind of just forgot to eat.”
A sharp, hollow tug in Simon’s own stomach reminded him that he hadn’t eaten either. Too focused on his failures in the past month, so terrified of what would happen if NASA were to pull their funding, that he had completely neglected feeding his own body.
“We should get some food first.” Simon said, moving to go get his things in the locker.
“There’s a diner just a few blocks down the road. My treat, assuming my credit card doesn’t decline.” Grace offered, letting out a small nervous laugh.
“After you?”
“No, you. Seriously, please lead the way. I’ll probably get lost again if I try to find the exit on my own.”