Chapter Text
The second video started with darkness, random flashes of light, something rustling against the camera, and muffled muttering.
It took a few seconds, but eventually the camera was situated, showing Doctor Grace frowning at it. In this video, he was wearing a space suit. Not like the kind astronauts wear on a space walk, but the stereotypical jumpsuit that astronauts wear on a space ship in movies. The uniform kind. There was also gravity this time.
He stepped back carefully, hands held out the way one would when trying to calm an agitated animal. Once he was sure that the camera wouldn’t fall, he lowered his hands, still frowning at the camera.
“Okay,” he muttered, glancing around himself uncertainly. “Uh.”
He clapped his hands together, shifting awkwardly on his feet. “Okay.” He said, only slightly more confidently. “I’m Doctor Ryland Grace. I’m a, uh, molecular biologist. I don’t… I don’t really know what’s going on.”
He swallowed, looking around himself again. “I don’t remember anything.” His voice trembled slightly. “Well, okay, that’s not entirely true. I remember some things. It’s been a few- I’ve been here for a few days and I’ve remembered a couple things. My name for example. I didn’t know that before. When I woke up.”
His frown deepened, and he sighed. “I should probably start from the beginning, huh?” He said, voice quiet as if he were talking to himself rather than the camera. “Okay.”
He took off his glasses and ran his free hand through his hair and down over his face. Then he started talking.
“Okay, so, from my perspective everything is… kind of insane. I woke up on this ship,” he gestured vaguely at his surroundings. “with no memories. Like, nothing. Not even my name. The, uh, arm… robot downstairs was asking me basic cognitive questions—that thing’s not very smart by the way, didn’t like my alternate answer for the square root of eight—and I was like, really weak. Couldn’t really move, could barely open my eyes, like… you know how sometimes when you take a nap you end up more tired than you began? It was like that but… amplified. By a lot. I know now—or at least I think—I was in a coma. For years.”
His glasses were hanging under his chin now, the hooks of them hanging by his ears. He wasn’t looking at the camera, rather staring blankly at something just past it. “It took a while to get mobile. I also didn’t have any clothes, which was weird. Um, when I did get mobile, the first memory I got was about the petrova line?” His voice lilted up at the end as if it was a question. He grimaced at the camera, shrugging, as if to say ‘what can you do?’ He seemed just as confused about his first memory as anyone else would be.
“Not anything about it in particular, just the fact that it exists.” He shrugged again. “There were- are. There are two other people down in the med bay area. Uh, Yao and Ilyukhina, if I remember correctly. I didn’t remember their names until like… today, I think it was.” He turned and looked directly at the camera.
“They didn’t… they didn’t survive the trip.” He admitted carefully. “Both of them have been dead for a while. I don’t know how long exactly, especially considering I don’t know how long the trip has been, but minimum a few months. If any of either of their families is watching this, I am so sorry for your loss. I don’t remember much about either of them, but I do know they were my friends.”
Grace stood in silence for a moment, frowning down at whatever was in front of him, out of the view of the camera. “I’ll, uh. I was gonna give them a kind of burial. I might do that on the camera so that their families can watch it if they want to? I don’t really know anything about their cultures or have any of the resources to be able to give them a proper burial, and I apologise for that, but I’ll do my best. I’ll do that at the end of the log, though. I’ll finish explaining everything first.”
“I think it was on the second day,” he continued, “when I actually realised that I was in space? I figured out that I was a scientist pretty easily considering I knew what everything was in the lab downstairs. It did take a little longer to remember that I was specifically a molecular biologist, but that’s neither here nor there. Uh, the way I figured out that I was in space was because of the gravity in here. It’s too high. At first I thought that maybe I was in some kind of centrifuge, but that didn’t make any sense considering the gravity was the same in both the lab and the dormitory, which meant that if it was a centrifuge it would have to be… massive. Uh, I had to remember my name before going from the centrifuge idea to being in space. That sounds weird, but it’s because my name was like… the ‘key’ to actually get into the control room—the room I’m in now.”
He gestured around himself. “The way I remembered my name was by remembering that I’m a teacher, or more specifically, one of the last lessons I had with my students. I also remembered that the petrova line is alive, the sun is dimming, and the name of the ship somewhere along the way. Um, when I got into the control room, one of the screens showed a star? It showed that the ship was either approaching or retreating from it, and I thought it was the sun at first. It was not.”
He glared at something to his right—presumably the screen in question—before looking back at the camera. “Other things I’ve remembered is how I ended up on the Petrova Task Force.” He wrinkled his nose, glaring at the camera. “I also remember the guinea pig thing. Thanks, Stratt. If you don’t know what the guinea pig thing is—which would be the vast majority of people watching this—then don’t worry about it. All things considered it’s nothing bad.”
He sighed again, taking off his glasses to rub his face again. He put them back on properly this time. “I think that covers everything? For now at least.” He turned to look at something behind him. “I’ll be right back. For the burial thing. Their bodies are still downstairs, I’m gonna go get them.”
He turned to walk away, then hesitated and turned back to the camera. “I think I mentioned that they’ve both been dead for a while? Like at least a few months? They’re kind of… mummified? In a way. Just, prepare yourselves, I guess.”
With that, he disappeared down a hatch at the edge of the room and there was a few minutes of silence.
He soon returned, carrying the body of what was once Olesya Ilyukhina over his shoulder. With one hand, he opened what was likely the airlock and gently set her body down inside of it. Then he stepped back, closed the airlock, and moved to grab the camera.
He held the camera in front of the window of the airlock. “The only way I can really give them any kind of burial-esque thing is by sending them out of the airlock. I’m trying not to feel bad about it, especially considering there’s not really any way to get them back to their families on Earth. Or me to mine, for that matter. If I have one.”
There was another few seconds of silence before Grace spoke again. “Olesya Ilyukhina, I commend your body to the stars.” He presses a button on the airlock labelled ‘jettison,’ and Ilyukhina’s body shoots out of the airlock, disappearing into the endless void of space.
He repeats the process with Yao’s body. Setting down the camera to retrieve him, placing him in the airlock, then holding the camera back up to the small window. “Yao Li-Jie, I commend your body to the stars.” He presses the jettison button.
He stands there for a few more moments, holding the camera up to the window as he stares out into space. Grace’s reflection can be seen at the edge of the window. The more observational would notice that he wasn’t looking through the window into the airlock, but rather at the reflection the window provided him. He was frowning, and, though it could be attributed to the pseudo-burial of his comrades, there would be people who would speculate that it was for other reasons.
Something tied to his reflection.
Eventually, he sighed and lowered the camera, muttering something about needing a break. The footage cut and the video ended.