Chapter Text
“Grace.”
I groan, rolling over. Did I really have to wake up? I must have stayed up late last night working on the Astrophage breeder again. Surely whoever had come to bother me could wait just a little longer. I shifted again. Why was my bed so uncomfortable…?
Oh. I was on the floor. This wasn’t Stratt’s Vat, or the launch site. This was… right, the Hail Mary. I was on the Hail Mary. Asleep on the floor.
“Grace awake, question?”
I mumbled affirmatively, making a weak thumbs up with my right hand. With my left, I-
I couldn’t feel my left hand.
I started to scramble to my feet, but the movements were uncoordinated, and I crashed down. Ilyukhina would have laughed and told me I didn’t live up to my name… if she was alive. Why was I thinking of her now?
“Grace clumsy. Why is Grace on floor, question? Grace not sleep on floor, Grace sleep on-”
“I know, buddy. Or- I don’t know. I don’t remember falling asleep.”
“Rocky hear. Grace lay down on floor and sleep. Sleep long time.”
“Why didn’t you wake me up?” I wasn’t even in the dorm. This was the lab.
“Grace need sleep. Sleep help Grace heal.”
I got to my feet more slowly this time. There was a faint sense of vertigo, like a milder form of what I often felt when taking an elevator, as I looked around the lab from the higher vantage. How tired had I been, to just curl up on the hard laboratory floor and take a nap?
My left arm was numb. I couldn’t feel anything from it, though I knew it was still there. Looking at it, I noticed tremors still ran through it every few seconds. The shakes had not stopped since the other day. Sleeping on the floor probably didn’t do any wonders for its condition.
As I stretched, joints popping and muscles aching from spending so long laying on a hard surface, I tried to remember what happened. Did I just… get tired, and decide the floor was more convenient than going to my bed, or laying in some blankets? Annoyingly, I couldn’t quite remember what led me to choose to do this, and it took me a moment to remember I had been working on the Taumoeba tanks.
Even more annoyingly, I was starting to feel a pain behind my eyes. Waking up with a headache. Just great. My vision was also blurry– well, actually, that would be caused by the fact that my glasses are askew. More than askew– they’re practically hanging off one ear, and I’m so used to them being like that, I haven’t really noticed or bothered fixing the position.
The pain flared up as I focused on it. “Ow.” I muttered, putting a hand to my head.
“Grace think brain hurt, question?”
“Yeah. Sure.” Close enough. I hadn’t really explained headaches to Rocky in detail, because every time it came up, I already had a headache, which makes it harder to explain things. Though… I had powered through them for whole days plenty of times during my years teaching.
Now. What was I doing on the floor?
They put you there, my thoughts answered unhelpfully. That made no sense. Only Rocky and I were on the ship, and Rocky sure wasn’t the reason I woke up on the floor.
A memory pushes against the back of my mind, the one I’ve been trying to recall in full since the incident the other day.
“Guess I must have been pretty tired. I fell asleep without meaning to.” I conclude, cleverly. Sure… I probably wasn’t in the best of states, with whatever has been going on with my arm, and my laser focus on making a Taumoeba strain that can survive Venus's and Threeworld’s atmospheres. When did I last sleep intentionally? Well… that was hard to know, seeing as I did not yet know what time it was on the Hail Mary. The ship had its own counter for days, hours, minutes since the mission started, since the time dilation would prevent keeping it synced with Earth days from being a viable option.
“Bad bad bad.” Rocky said, fidgeting in his concerned way.
“Well… I’m awake now.”
“Grace wake up. Yes.”
Oh. I… I couldn’t do this to Rocky. What if I was actually dying? What if I was dying, like his crewmates? I’d had this train of thought far too often now. I can’t leave him. I can’t do that to him.
“Okay… today I’m going to figure out how to fix this. Like we talked about.” I said optimistically, gesturing to my left arm.
“Rocky help. Rocky fix.”
I rub my eyes, glasses already removed and clipped onto my shirt. It’s been hours, staring at the screen of the laptop in front of me, dull headache a constant companion despite my efforts to ignore it. I gained back some feeling in my left arm during that time, fortunately. I would probably feel more relief if I didn’t feel like I was floating away.
My thoughts are blurry. I switch the tab on my computer, looking at the notes document where I wrote down some possible causes of my extended ailment and some details that support it, along with the details that don’t seem to fit. My eyes struggle to focus on the words. I’m only interpreting utter nonsense when I try to read them.
Various medical terms swirl through my head, half broken and trailing off into scrambled letters. When… when was it that I last slept? How long since I woke up from my unplanned nap?
The fact that I didn’t know the answer to that probably just showed that it had been too long. Soon enough Rocky would be getting after me about it.
Rocky… where was he? I didn’t hear him moving around or working nearby, and no sound of his voice reached my ears.
In fact… the ship was eerily quiet. I didn’t notice the silence was there, but it was suffocating. What about the sound of the engines, the hum of the lights?
My arm started tingling again, taking up all my attention. I looked down to see it writhing in an odd way, like my skin was actually crawling. Weird, my bandages should still be on, they should–
Cracks spread their way up my arm. I recoiled with horror, but I couldn’t get away from the increasingly unrecognizable thing attached to my shoulder. The arm started to break into pieces, tiny legs sprouting from the chunks of flesh. They were like little insects, which had once been part of me. They crawled away, some sprouting wings and buzzing around my head, and this was impossible, and–
I jolt awake, scrambling to my feet, and promptly tripped, barely catching myself as I dipped towards the ground again. I swayed on my feet dizzily.
“Grace fall asleep. Been working too long. Grace okay, question?” Rocky trilled with concern.
“Weird dream.” I muttered, my voice coming out odd and grating inside my throat.
“What Grace dream about, question?”
I didn’t answer. The ground was moving under my feet, forming into waves like an earthquake. There were no earthquakes on a spaceship, though. My thoughts started drifting away, and for a moment I felt disconnected from my body, viewing the scene from far away. A vivid memory of the dream came to me, and for a moment I felt like I was living it again, insects buzzing and crawling from where my arm used to be.
The idea of it was enough to make my knees buckle under me.
“GRACE!”
The floor was tilting a lot now. In a moment it would become parallel with my face. Weird. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
A familiar clunking sound started far away, and then got closer. Someone was playing music.
“Grace go see Armando STATEMENT. Move. Grace move.”
My response is a grumble; I’m exhausted, but I do what the voice says, moving to get to my feet, though I don’t remember laying down. Black spots appear in my vision.
“Rocky help.”
A large ball rolled up next to me, and I leaned on it for support as I stood fully. I followed the guidance of the ball, which I could feel even with my vision failing me. This felt… weird. It all felt weird.
“Ladder,” said that voice I’d been hearing. Hey… I knew that voice. It was right, there was a descending ladder below me, which I knelt down to better inspect. “Down. Down ladder.” He said as I hesitated.
“So bossy…” My voice trailed off as I realized how odd it sounded reaching my ears. Was that… my voice? It had to be. I’d intended to make the sound, hadn’t I? Right. Ladder. Better focus on the ladder.
I focus on descending, knowing distantly that it would probably be pretty bad if I fell. One hand down, then the other. My left hand has only a little feeling, and shakes when not placed on the ladder. Left foot, followed by the right. Repeat several times. Second hand, first foot. On the second foot, I step onto my loose shoelace and slip.
My foot dangles in the air for a terrifying moment.
I scramble to get it back on the ladder, and succeed, but my other foot slips off in the process. Too much of my weight is put on my weakened left arm, which releases its grip. I barely even feel it, but I do feel the strain on my right arm and the newly secured foot.
Come on. Just a few more rungs.
My left arm is shaking again, and I find myself unable to maneuver it. I move my foot back onto the ladder, anyway. I’m forced to continue the descent with just my right arm.
When I reach the bottom few rungs, I fall backwards, but my back collides with something earlier than expected. Rocky is behind me, supporting me in his ball. I breathe a sigh of relief.
“Clumsy clumsy human. Armando!” The arms may or may not hear him but sense my distress and act anyway, reaching out and taking me. I don’t resist them.
Armando tries again to diagnose me and comes up with nothing. Finally, the arms move to change my bandages. I brace myself for any discomfort this may cause. Usually, this is done while I’m asleep. That’s when I spend the most time in Armando’s reach. My eyes drift down, to where the old bandages are being pulled away–
Burns are not supposed to look like that. My mind is still waking up, but I know that’s definitely wrong. The scarring is discolored, darker than it was before, veering on black in places. The sight makes me nauseous. The discoloration is patchy, with green at the edges of the darker areas. I don’t even react to it verbally, stunned into silence. How long had this been happening? How did Armando not notice it?
Maybe this isn’t something Armando is programmed to handle.
The pieces start to fall together.
Not long after sustaining this injury, I was exposed to unknown contaminants from Adrian’s atmosphere. At the time, and even for days after, I thought nothing of it, thinking it couldn’t possibly pose any danger to me. Now, I wasn’t so sure.
It seems like the simplest explanation. The tube exploded and something infected me, despite our separated evolution– assuming it was a microorganism and not something else from Adrian’s atmosphere. That means I’m really, really unlucky.
Most pathogens have had years alongside humans, plenty of time to develop, through random mutations, a survival strategy that takes advantage of the human body. The organisms in Adrian’s atmosphere shouldn’t be able to make sense of our biology, having evolved lightyears away. That was why I assumed they could not affect me. But I was wrong, and somehow, it happened anyway, if I’m right about this.
Is this even something my immune system would be able to fight? I don’t have a fever, which is bad, because a fever usually indicates that your immune system is working to fight an infection. No inflammation either, as far as I can tell. Is this something I’d be able to fix with any means available? I’m not a medical doctor. The closest thing I have to one is three robot arms. I’m still better off than I could have been knowledge wise, at least. Even if I still haven’t proven my theory that not all life needs to be water based.
Right. I was working on the issue before I passed out. Again. How am I supposed to do scientific research if I keep falling asleep? Well… I have practice with that, actually. Working while severely sleep deprived in the past really paid off.
First person to get an alien disease… I have a real streak with alien interactions.
Before I do anything, though, there’s an ugly truth I have to face. A conversation I need to have with Rocky. While Armando fusses around, he’s been waiting patiently for results. He probably couldn’t even tell there was anything wrong with my wound. The difference is mainly in color, which he can’t see, and he doesn’t know how burnt human flesh is supposed to look in various stages of healing, anyway.
“Hey, uh…”
“What wrong with Grace, question?”
“I think I’m figuring that out–”
“How fix, question?”
“Working on it. But… We, uh, need to talk. About something.” I took a breath. “We need a contingency plan in place. In case… well, what I mean, is… can you figure out a way to interact with the control screens?”
“Rocky is best engineer.”
“Yeah. Yeah you are.”
“Is not needed.”
“Well… there is a possibility, just a possibility, that–”
“No.”
I flinch as Armando starts rebandaging my arm and shoulder. “We have to be prepared.”
“No. Grace not die! Rocky fix.”
“Neither of us know how to fix this! It’s very possible that I– I could die!”
“No.”
“Well… if you could prevent me from dying from sheer stubbornness, I’d certainly live forever. But things don’t always work out how we–”
“Rocky know that!” He shook a fist at me. “Won’t let Grace die.”
Okay. He wins. “Then let’s figure this out. Right now. Before I pass out again.”
“Grace need rest.”
“What do you want from me?!”
“Fulfill biological needs and not die!”
“Come on, I can’t sleep now– I’m running out of time, Rocky!”
“How Grace know this, question?”
“My symptoms are only worsening. The skin on my arm is– it’s turning black, Rocky! Like necrotic flesh. If we’re fixing this, we have to do it sooner, not later.” I breathe in and out, an idea coming to my head. “If there’s nothing else we can do, and I don’t regain use of my left arm, uh, we might have to amputate it.” My right arm, which only had an imprint of Rocky’s claw, didn’t seem to have as many issues, so I figured I didn’t have to worry about losing both of my arms.
“What second to last word mean, question?”
Oh. Right. We hadn’t discussed this. “To remove a limb.”
“Grace have too few limbs already!”
“Sometimes it’s necessary. To save the rest of the body. That’s a last resort, though!” A last resort that seemed concerningly close.
I had a new lead, though. I may not have much of a chance of pinpointing which organism, exactly, caused my current ailment, but I can still study the organisms from Adrian’s atmosphere. Run some tests. If they’re still alive. My focus has been on farming the Taumoeba, not keeping the rest of the microbes alive. If I can figure out what kills them, though, I can utilize it as an antibiotic. Preferably one that doesn’t kill me as well. Nitrogen doesn’t work on all the organisms as it does with Taumoeba, of course– Astrophage already proved that. Other substances might target a mechanism common to Adrian’s life forms, though.
“Rocky, I’ve got an idea.” I stand up, forgetting about my previous weakness and disorientation, and black spots fill my vision. I lean on the bed for support, expecting them to pass. Impatiently, I start walking towards the ladder. It seems like the black spots aren’t clearing. In fact, they’re growing, and I stumble to the side dizzily.
“Grace!”
Suddenly, for a moment, I exist outside time and memory, the only thing I know being the feeling of something grabbing onto me. My vision is completely black, the mechanical sounds around me my main input.
For a moment, as the robot arms move me back to the bed, I don’t even remember getting up in the first place, and wonder how I’ve teleported a few steps away from the bed. When did I move? Only through logic I understand I must have walked all that distance at some point.
“What just happened?” I ask, dazed.
“Grace nearly fall!”
I put the pieces together. I stood up, but passed out, my brain not supplied with enough blood quickly enough to keep me standing. It’s happened before, when I moved up from a sitting or laying position too fast, but normally passes after a few seconds. Armando noticed me stumbling, luckily, and caught me before I could hit the floor. The robot arms “came in clutch” as my kids used to say.
“Rest! Grace rest!”
“But I know how to fix this!”
“Tell Rocky. Then rest!”
I sigh and start to fill him in.