Chapter Text
Ultimately, Rocky ends up moving in. Adding an alien to our crew is overstepping my authority in ways Yáo never could’ve imagined, but he and Ilyukhina are still asleep. I can’t bear to leave Rocky alone on his tomb of a ship, so I decide that I’ll accept whatever consequences this decision will have preemptively. Yáo probably won’t launch me out of the airlock for this. Probably.
Rocky turns out to be a pretty good roommate. He has a higher standard of cleanliness than I do, which, while annoying, is probably a good thing. The last thing I need is Yáo launching me into space for inviting a rock-alien to live on his spaceship and for making a mess of the place. Rocky frequently reminds me to tie down or trash my clothes, empty food packets, and various bits of lab equipment rather than leaving them strewn around the ship (Dirty. Dirty. Dirty!). He’s also incredibly smart. He matches everything I remember—and everything I learn—about astrophage, physics, and space travel beat-for-beat. I quickly discover that I don’t need to oversimplify anything to explain it to him. Even where there are gaps in general Eridian knowledge—I learn that they haven’t yet discovered radiation—Rocky proves to be a quick learner.
Best of all, he’s a good friend. Despite his freakishly good hearing and utter lack of understanding of alone time, Rocky proves to be very accommodating and attuned to human needs, so long as I explain them first. He is disgusted by my eating habits, but does not flee back to the Blip-A every time I pull out a meal. He even encourages me not to forget to eat. I return the favor, even though his one display of Eridian eating turns me off ever wanting to share a snack with him again. The fact that guarding sleeping friends and acquaintances is an Eridian cultural touchstone proves to be helpful too. Apparently, I am prone to nightmares. I don’t remember this being a problem before, but then I don’t remember much about being before, so it very well could have been. The first time I had a bad dream in front of him, Rocky thought I was dying. I managed to wake up and calm myself down quickly enough to explain the concept of dreaming before my alien friend could have a breakdown about his one and only conscious space friend dying in their sleep like his crew. After that hiccup, Rocky has proven to be a comforting presence. He’s surprisingly good at dealing with my leaky, barely-awake self for a person—sentient alien—who can’t have dreams, good or bad. And he keeps tabs on Ilyukhina and Yáo when I’m asleep or otherwise busy. I’ve given him very explicit instructions to come get me if anything changes, because no matter how nice, clever, and generally fun to be around Rocky is, meeting an alien seconds after waking up from a multi-year coma is a recipe for disaster. And I’d really like to be the one to explain to the captain of this ship what in the universe I was thinking, bringing an alien who lives in a hyper-pressurized ball filled with ammonia aboard the Hail Mary.
I think he’s glad for my company too. My time spent “alone” in space is nothing compared to his decades aboard the ship that had killed his crew. We set up a little space for him in the coma room so I can watch everyone sleep. It defeats the goal of not risking my crew’s first conscious experience aboard the Hail Mary also being their first contact with an Eridian, but it’s worth the comfort Rocky draws from it.
So despite the whole first-contact-with-sentient-life thing, my life eventually slips back into a routine: check on Yáo and Ilyukhina, check the Hail Mary for any problems (or further alien spacecrafts on her radar), eat something, plan a way to take a sample from Tau Ceti’s Petrova Line with Rocky, spend some time in the Don’t Go Crazy room, have a movie night if saving-the-universe-related plans haven’t swallowed up the evening, eat again, and go to sleep.
For a while, that’s how things go.
When Rocky and I finally go through with our plan to get a sample, the spacewalk is somewhat less terrifying than it could be because I know Rocky’s waiting inside. If my tether were to snap and send me hurtling off to die, at least someone would be there for my crew. Logically, I’m aware that Rocky’s Eridian claws and the xenonite barrier that protects him from the ship’s oxygen would prevent him from doing much to help them if something were to go wrong, but just knowing that he’d be there is a comfort. Maybe the whole watching-each-other-sleep thing has become a cultural staple for me too.
The Petrova Line stops all my lingering fears dead in their tracks. It’s beautiful. For a moment, I forget the sampler, floating among the twinkling astrophage. I run my hand through it, lights dancing between my fingers. Everything I know about astrophage—the luminosity readings, black dots on a slide in the lab, the climate projections—none of it is possible to square with what I'm seeing now. Plenty of beautiful things can kill you, my mind supplies. Bears, space, water—
"What Grace doing, question?" Rocky's voice breaks through my thoughts.
"Having a moment." Slightly annoyed by Rocky's reality check, I brush a hand through the astrophage one last time before closing the sampler and returning to the airlock.
Once I’m back inside, a very relieved Rocky accompanies me to the lab to analyze our new Petrova-goo. And… wow. Once we take a look at the sample, the Petrova Line, for all its beauty, pales in comparison to the wonder of our discovery.
"Life is reason! Life is reason!" Rocky trills, so fast the translator can hardly keep up.
We've proven that something is stopping the astrophage from multiplying. We haven't saved the universe just yet, but it feels real now— within reach. It's as if I'm brushing my fingers over that ultimate success. It's not tangible, not like the Petrova Line, but it feels almost—
"Life is reason!" Rocky exclaims again, tripping over himself as he rushes through his tunnels.
"Life is reason for what?" I ask, still half-focused on the microscope.
"Life is reason star not die."
Oh.
"Why didn't you just say that?!"
Rocky bounces with excitement. There's a biosphere. The Tau Ceti system— oh, wow, third contact! We're going to make third contact! Rocky's theory is that there's a predator of some kind—something that "eats" astrophage—that keeps its population in check, possibly an organism that evolved alongside it, something built to live in this astro-ecosystem.
Riding high on our discovery, Rocky and I make our way to the Don't Go Crazy room for some celebratory karaoke, chattering in shared excitement as we walk. "It's like... space scotch broom," I tell him, "An invasive species to the Sol and Eridani systems—"
"Not know word."
"What— oh, scotch broom?" I laugh. "You're not from San Fran."
"Yes. Am from Erid. Grace know this."
I explain scotch broom, which is apparently equivalent to the Rough-Bodied Longworm (lots of new words are required to explain that one) on Erid. Without its natural predator, the Symmetrical Wandering 𝅘𝅥𝆕𝅘𝅥𝅗𝅥, to keep its population in check, it has become a nuisance a bit like Earth's termites, getting into materials and shredding them. Apparently, it caused a small crisis during the construction of Rocky's ship when it ate through some lab equipment.
We air our grievances about invasive species—especially the interstellar one that landed us here—to the tune of Get Back by the Beatles, as rendered by a man missing his memories of the lyrics and a rock with just over two weeks of experience with human music under his belt. Obviously, it's the best music anyone has ever produced.
Once we finish our round of karaoke, we return to the barracks to tell Yáo and Ilyukhina about our discovery. I’ve explained to Rocky that they can’t hear us, and I think the fact that I still like to talk to them confuses him, but he goes along with it, enthusiastic as usual.
“Life is reason! Life is reason!” Rocky tells them and finally, I really believe we might just be able to save the universe.
That bit of euphoria doesn’t last very long. Rocky and I work out that, to get our hands-slash-claws on the predator, we need a sample from the planet at the end of the Petrova Line. Getting that is going to be a whole lot more technical and a whole lot more likely to result in our deaths than our last sampling mission. Beyond the obvious risks, there’s the problem of Yáo and Ilyukhina. Unconscious or no, Yáo is still our captain, probably because he has actual training for situations like these, and therefore, I’m hesitant to do anything too extreme without his permission. Of course, if he doesn’t wake up soon, Earth and Erid are going to have to come before his authority… but better than his permission would be his piloting skills. I’ve tried to fly the Hail Mary a few times for practice. To put it lightly, it’s still not a smooth ride. Whereas I’ve got some muscle memory I can put towards using the lab equipment on board, sitting in the pilot’s chair has not yet jogged my memory whatsoever. As best I can tell, I was never meant to fly the ship, even if I’d been the lone survivor of the crew. It’s a bit funny that the team that sent us up here seems to have preferred dooming humanity to trying to teach me to fly the Hail Mary. The lack of confidence in my abilities is astounding, really. And accurate.
Rather than leaping into anything that will almost certainly get us all killed, Rocky and I meticulously plan out our mission. We design a sampler; Rocky exploits my opposable thumbs to help him link together the longest chain the universe has ever seen; I read the Hail Mary’s manual cover to cover practically on the daily, though it does very little to help with my lack of pilot training; and we prep the lab for whatever new form of alien life we’re going to bring on board.
Currently, we’re taking a break from saving the world(s) to share some more cultural experiences. Rocky hums along to the score of A New Hope, which we’re watching on my laptop in the “bedroom.” Hands aching after hours of linking the chain together, I’m fidgeting with a piece of xenonite to distract myself from the soreness. Rocky would be horrified if I occupied my hands with popcorn instead, tempting though it is. We’ve got a few packets of it on board, to go with the apparently never-ending list of movies we’ve got access to. I appreciate the concern for our space entertainment options.
Yáo and Ilyukhina are breathing softly beside us, and I split my attention between watching the movie—which I’ve probably seen six times in the last two weeks—and keeping an eye on them. They both look better than they had when I’d first woken up, having lost some of their painful gauntness over the past few weeks.
We make it about halfway through the movie when Rocky suddenly tosses aside his light-to-echolocation converter and demands I pause it.
“Grace hear, question?”
“Hear what?” I ask, praying that it isn’t the sound of my ship tearing itself apart or something. Surely I’d be able to pick that up.
“No, human hearing weak.” Rocky pushes me to the side with the edge of his ball, moving himself towards Ilyukhina.
“Rocky, what is it?”
“Different.”
“What’s different?” I demand.
“Grace friend…” he trails off, leaning towards Ilyukhina, reminiscent of a dog cocking their head to hear better. “Heart pump faster,” he finishes.
Sure enough, the screen monitoring her vitals displays her heart rate at just over 70 beats per minute, faster than I’ve ever seen it before.
“Ilyukhina?” I ask shakily. This feels like a turning point, like she’s going to wake up or take a turn for the worse. I desperately hope it’s the former.
Her heart rate shoots up, settling at over a hundred beats per minute.
“Is bad, question?” Rocky asks.
“I dunno, buddy. I haven’t seen—”
Her eyelashes flutter.
Eye movement detected, Mary’s computerized voice blares out.
“Grace?”
“I think she’s—” Ilyukhina’s eyes fly open. She shakily reaches an arm up to her throat, where a breathing tube is still controlling her respiration. Okay. Okay, I should really have a plan here.
“Grace heart also fast fast fast, statement,” Rocky comments, unhelpfully.
“I— right. Wait outside.”
“Ilyukhina okay, question?”
“Yeah, she’s… I just— remember what we talked about?”
“Yes. Eridians not forget. Will wait outside,” he says, shuffling his magnetized ball up the ladder and out of sight.
Ilyukhina is straining for air, unable to breathe in the way her body wants with a tube down her throat. Her eyes are wide and panicked.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” I tell her. Mary positions itself to remove the breathing tube. “This is going to be uncomfortable. Just… uh, try to relax?” If anything, she looks more frightened. “You’re safe. Everything’s fine. It’s just—” Mary removes her breathing tube. Ilyukhina coughs weakly. I wince with sympathy and help her sit up.
What’s two plus two? Mary asks, unhelpfully.
“Ignore that. You’re okay.”
Incorrect.
Ilyukhina stops coughing, slumping back against the pillows. She looks between me and Mary's robo-arm, eyes unfocused.
“Grace?” she rasps.
“Yep. Yep, it’s me.” I’m glad that the flashes of memories I’ve recovered about our friendship (coworkership?) on Earth are real. A second wave of relief washes over me when I realize that she remembers. She knows who I am! She’s not an amnesiac like me. Whatever had gone wrong with my coma system, it hadn’t affected hers.
“Can you tell me your name?”
“O-Olesya.” Her voice is hoarse, but audible. Mary finally decides to make itself useful and hands over a packet of water, which I open and hand to the Hail Mary’s (human) engineer. She gratefully accepts.
“How are you feeling?”
She takes a sip of water and, impressively, manages not to cough it back up. “Coma,” she says with a shrug. “Where’s Yáo?”
“He’s still asleep.” Her eyes widen slightly, and I decide that now is as good a time as any for explanations. “There was a problem with your feeding tubes. I woke up first and managed to correct it but you were… I thought it would be best to... to let Mary handle things. Yáo is still recovering.”
She nods slowly, taking it in. Before she has a chance to respond, Mary begins to remove the various tubes and monitors from the rest of her body.
“Don’t look,” I advise her. “It’s… weird.”
She smiles slightly and keeps her eyes on me instead. “You saved our lives,” she says.
“Uh…” I respond, cleverly, proving to her that I am very deserving of my spot on this ship.
Ilyukhina laughs and takes another sip of water. “Take the compliment, Dr. Grace.”
I nod. Gosh, it’s weird to talk to another human.
“Thank you,” she repeats.
“It— I— really not a big deal.”
“Life or death,” she takes another drink, “Fate of humanity… seems like a big deal to me."
“Okay, it was a medium-sized deal.”
She laughs.
“Grace okay, question?” Rocky’s “voice” echoes from the other side of the door. I freeze like a deer in the headlights. Ilyukhina blinks at me. “Ilyukhina okay?”
“Grace.”
“Mhm?”
“What— who— Yáo is still asleep?”
“Yeah, so… it’s a long story, uh…” I kick myself internally. I thought I had a plan for this!
“Grace, question? Not coming inside, but Grace answer? Making sure Grace okay.”
“We have all the time in the world,” Ilyukhina says in disbelief.
“Right. So. That is Rocky. He’s a, uh, he’s an alien. I made first contact!” I do jazz hands; Ilyukhina looks confused. “Well, he made first contact,” I ramble on, “Or second, since astrophage was first, but this… that wasn’t sentient life. Rocky— he’s an Eridian— from the 40 Eridani system? Their sun is dimming too. We’re here for the same reasons, and really, he’s been very helpful—”
Ilyukhina is gawking at me. “Can I meet him?” she asks.
“What? Oh. Uh. Yes! Yes. He’s… are you afraid of spiders? Well, he’s not a spider, but he looks a bit like—”
She sits up and grabs my shoulders. Her face goes pale with the effort, but she speaks undeterred. “Please. Shut up.”
“Right. Yep,” I say, adjusting her pillow so she’ll be able to see Rocky. “Rocky, you can come in! We’re all good!”
Rocky bursts into the room, overflowing with excitement. “Hello, human! I am Rocky. Was worried that you would not wake up but you have! We get to meet now. Good, good, good!”
“He’s just like you,” Ilyukhina breathes, cutting off Rocky’s excited rambling.
“Sorry?” “What mean, question?” Rocky and I say at the same time.
“Nothing,” Ilyukhina says, leaning back against her pillows. “Wow.”
“Good wow, question?”
“Yeah. Yeah, very good wow.”
“Nice to meet!”
Ilyukhina shakes her head in disbelief. “Nice to meet you too, Rocky.” She’s handling this well, all things considered.
“Name, question?” Rocky asks politely, even though we’ve already programmed Ilyukhina’s name into his translation software.
“Olesya Ilyukhina. Olesya’s fine.”
“What name mean?” Rocky asks me.
I look at Ilyukhina— Olesya? Does the first-name basis apply to me or just Rocky? I can't quite remember what I called her on the Vat.
“Not sure,” she says. “It’s just a— oh,” she points to me. “His name is a word.”
“Grace,” Rocky affirms. My name is much shorter and less musical than the Eridian names he’s told me.
“Is your name a word?” I ask Rocky.
He thinks for a moment. “Yes-no. Has meaning. Is not one word.”
“What does it mean?” Ilyukhina—Olesya—we need to have the name conversation at some point—asks.
“Mean…” Rocky thinks some more, probably trying to put it in terms simple enough for my translation system to work it out. “𝅘𝅥𝅗𝅥𝅘𝅥𝆕 𝅘𝅥𝅘𝅥 engineer Blip-A 𝅘𝅥𝅗𝅥𝅘𝅥” Realizing the translation system has failed to produce most of the words he’s looking for, Rocky stamps his foot in frustration. “First part is name when Rocky hatch. Add during 𝆕𝆕𝅘𝅥𝅗𝅥𝅘𝅥.” Rocky taps a foot again. “Important life events. Engineer, mission, and Adrian mating celebration.” That explains why his name is so long. “Grace friend name similar?”
Olesya shrugs. “I’m not sure. Officially, I’m Doctor Olesya Ilyukhina. But title is… formality. We can be friends, yes?”
I’m pretty sure this means I am also allowed to use her first name.
“Yes yes yes! Friends,” Rocky says.
He turns towards me in his ball. Ilyukhina—Olesya—looks at me too. It still takes me a moment to get the memo that I’m also supposed to respond. “Yes! Yes, we can be—are— we’re friends.” Nice going, Grace.
“Good good good,” Rocky chimes. He’s handling second contact with alien life better than I’m handling contact with my own species. Have I always been like this, or did the coma system error erase my memory of social cues as well?
Olesya adjusts her position so she’s sitting mostly upright. Clearly, it takes more effort than she expects, but I don’t try to help her. She looks determined to manage it on her own. “How long have I been asleep?” she asks me.
It’s been about a month since I met Rocky. The time between waking up and first contact is a blur. “About six weeks since I woke up,” I respond.
She takes a breath. It’s bad news. We both know it’s bad news. I’m trying to ration out my meals, but I know there’s not enough food on the ship to support all three of us for long. If we starve before we solve the astrophage problem… well, we’ll just have to work quickly.
“Have you made progress?” she asks.
“Yes! Yes, we got a sample from Tau Ceti’s Petrova Line. We suspect there’s some kind of crazy alien biosphere activity going on that’s keeping the astrophage in check. We’ll need to take a sample from the planet at the end of the Petrova Line to figure out what it is. Everything’s basically ready to go.”
She beams. “How soon can we do it?”
I falter. This is the hard part. “Uh, there have been a few problems— or… not problems. Just…” I think I’ve forgotten how to frame things professionally. We’re friends, right? “I don’t know how to fly the ship,” I admit. “I don’t remember my EVA training, and I don’t want to risk wasting materials without Yáo’s permission.”
“Grace,” she says. Concern is written across her face, but her tone is kind. “You belong here as much as myself or Yáo. If you’ve found a way to take a sample, you don’t need our permission. We defer to your expertise.”
“My…” I realize suddenly that I’ve been unconsciously avoiding the issue of my memory loss. “Okay, uh, my coma system… there was no issue with the feeding tube, obviously—” stupid! “But it— it screwed with my memories somehow. I’ve recovered some of them—I know what astrophage is, obviously,” I add hurriedly as Olesya fails to keep her growing concern off her face, “I know about my experiments, I’ve read the papers, I remember writing them.” Mostly. I leave that out. “But volunteering, my training, that’s all gone.”
“Amnesia.”
“Yes. Retrograde amnesia. I can make new memories just fine, and I’ve been getting flashes of Earth, but…” I make an intense study of the floor. I don’t want to think about this. I don’t want to think about Earth, which I’ll never see again, maybe not even in my own memories, at least not clearly or in any organized fashion. I want to go home. I think I miss San Francisco, even though my memories of it are fuzzy.
“Has been difficult,” Rocky fills in. I look up, silently thanking him. “Eridian memory is perfect. No forget. Ilyukhina memory good, question?” I make a mental note to change her name to Olesya in Rocky’s translator.
Olesya reaches out and squeezes my hand as she replies. “I think so.” She thinks for a moment. “We could test it.”
Both Rocky and I perk up at that. A test sounds like fun to me and Rocky… well, Rocky’s probably excited to beat us both at a memory game.
I grab the deck of cards I’d found stashed in one of the Hail Mary’s many storage compartments while looking for food and water after waking up. I have a feeling it will see more use now that I’ve got a human companion who can actually hold them. As much as I love Rocky, I’m not about to let his atmosphere turn my one deck of cards to ash. With some effort, I also haul the whiteboard down the ladder to serve as a table, since it can be tilted.
When I return to the barracks, I find Rocky and Olesya chatting together. Rocky is explaining the ins and outs of xenonite to her. “Grace,” she exclaims when I enter, “you know about this?” She taps his ball. “Xenonite?”
“Aliens are real, xenon is a solid,” I say, nonchalantly.
Olesya laughs, tapping the ball again. Rocky presses a claw against her hand. “Wow,” she breathes.
I pull the cards out of their box and shuffle them.
Rocky instantly snaps his attention to me. “What what what!” he exclaims, notes so high my ears can hardly pick them up.
I make a bridge and shuffle them again.
Rocky is practically vibrating with curiosity, light translator and all of his attention trained on me. Honestly, I feel like the coolest person in the world. No, in the universe.
“What for, question? Amaze amaze—𝅘𝅥𝅗𝅥𝅘𝅥𝆕𝅘𝅥!”
I shuffle the cards again. “What’s that last word?” I ask, trying not to preen at the attention.
“Is like when—” I shuffle the deck, and Rocky breaks off his sentence to wiggle with enthusiasm. “Amaze! Is like when Grace look for long time. Amaze amaze amaze.” We’re missing a lot of words for whatever this concept is.
“Interesting?” I guess
“Have ‘interesting.’ Is interesting interesting interesting. Great interesting for listen— or see.”
“Fascinating?”
“More! Must—” I’m just familiar enough with Rocky’s musical language to recognize the emphasis on the word— “stop and listen.” I shuffle again.
“Mesmerizing?” Olesya offers, looking thoroughly amused.
After some deliberation, we decide that ‘mesmerizing’ is the closest English translation for Rocky’s word and I type it into the translation system for future reference.
Eventually, I finish shuffling the cards (or rather give up on trying to impress Rocky when I drop half the deck). Once I’m done collecting them (extra intense shuffling for maximum randomness, I tell Rocky and Olesya, who is laughing at me), I lay them face-down on the whiteboard-table. Then, Olesya and I explain the rules of a basic human memory game to Rocky. Before we start, I make sure Rocky’s light sensor can’t see through the cards. No cheating here. Once that is confirmed, we begin.
I let Olesya take the first turn. It’s only fair, since she’s the one whose memory we’re "testing." She flips over two cards in the bottom right-hand corner of the whiteboard. A two and a four. I make sure their faces are visible long enough for Rocky to read them with his light gun. Olesya marvels at it the moment he pulls it out, which is encouraging for my chances of winning this game. If she’s paying attention to the alien… maybe the amnesiac has a chance at victory after all!
I flip two cards next to hers on my turn, not revealing a match. I turn over a face card for Rocky—who can’t flip the cards himself through his ball, instead pointing enthusiastically and loudly making his frustration known when I fail to precisely locate the cards he intends—and we have to explain the basics of human monarchies before our next turn. When my turn rolls around again, I realize that my chances of victory are fading fast. Rocky, the cheater, very efficiently distracted me with talk of Eridian governmental systems, which has replaced my knowledge of the cards I drew on my last turn.
Rocky bounces up and down like a child at an amusement park after I flip my first card, and I just know I’m missing something. Olesya’s smirking too. I flip one of the cards Olesya tried earlier without success.
“Know know know!” Rocky exclaims with a frankly evil amount of delight. He points out the card I drew first, the one just to the right of my last guess. I tap the one to the right of it, just to mess with him. “Grace stupid, question!” he says, in a tone that doesn’t sound particularly questioning. “Eye correction not work?” Olesya bursts out laughing. I point to the card I know Rocky meant all along. Now that Olesya’s awake, I’m going to be relentlessly teased by an alien and a human. Good to know.
“Yes yes yes!” Rocky says, so loudly that his notes drown out the translator’s read-out. I get the gist. I flip over the card. Two fours; he’s right.
“Knew it,” Olesya says.
I hand Rocky his prize, slipping the two cards under a magnet I’ve attached to the wall since he can't hold them himself. I think we’ll need more magnets for his collection.
Rocky gets to go again, since he guessed—no, remembered—correctly. He chooses two entirely new cards, which hints to me that I don’t need to worry that there’s a potential match waiting for me. Or he’s being nice. I doubt it.
Olesya similarly chooses two cards at random. She looks a bit better than she had when she’d first woken up, the movement of reaching for the cards clearly helping with her circulation after years spent asleep. The second Rocky’s light detector hits the cards, he starts bouncing with anticipation again. It takes me a moment, but I find the match and swoop it up before he can. His wiggling stops, but he doesn’t look too disappointed.
“I think you broke his heart, Grace,” Olesya says. Rocky looks extra pathetic, most certainly on purpose.
“You’re the worst,” I tell him.
“Not worst,” he points to his cards, “tied with Grace.”
I groan. Olesya laughs.
We complete a few more rounds before anyone finds a match. Luckily for Olesya and I, Rocky’s poker face is non-existent... and not just because he doesn’t have a face. It levels the playing field somewhat, since all the benefit he gains from having a perfect memory, he promptly loses by revealing his hand immediately whenever we draw a card he remembers seeing a match for.
This time, Olesya pulls the ace of spades. Rocky wiggles so aggressively I’m surprised it doesn’t create an audible frequency. Unfortunately for him, she remembers where I uncovered the ace of hearts a few turns back. Initially, I celebrate the two cards she has won for humanity. Rocky may have a near-perfect memory, but us humans aren’t completely useless! And then she finds two more matches in a row. Now, I'm dead last.
My turn does not result in the massive comeback I’m hoping for. Nor does my next. Rocky gets a run of like six matches, though, so there’s that. Olesya is better at this than I am, but even she is nothing compared to Rocky. He has begun to realize that he needs to contain his excitement if he doesn’t want me or Olesya to swoop up his matches. The only reason we get any at all is that he’s not very good at it. Even with his inability to contain his competitive enthusiasm, he easily beats us both with seventeen matches. Olesya finishes with six, and I wind up with a measly three. Altogether, that’s nine points for mankind and seventeen for the Eridians.
“We need Yáo to wake up,” Olesya remarks, collecting the cards and shuffling them, much to Rocky’s excitement. “Three humans against one Eridian… might win!”
“Don’t inflate his ego!” I say, as Rocky basks in the objectively correct praise of his species.
We finish A New Hope and play a second round of our memory game, this time with Olesya and I on the same team. We lose by even more points, just six between us to Rocky’s twenty. His poker face is improving. Olesya announces that she is hungry, and Rocky swiftly excuses himself to go link some more chains, leaving me to explain that particular taboo to her.
“Y’know, I had a whole procedure for your introduction,” I tell Olesya, as she shovels ramen into her mouth, clearly fighting her urge to down the whole cup at once. “I was gonna explain everything and then introduce you in the lab and— well.”
Olesya sets down her meal for a moment and shrugs. “Was good introduction.” She thinks for a moment. “Yes, startling, but I was not expecting normal.”
I smile. We’re in space, sharing a ship with an alien, and we’re supposed to save the world. Normal is not happening.
“So,” Olesya starts. She looks very intently at her cup of noodles. I think I know what’s coming, so I say nothing. “Amnesia.”
I nod. Why didn’t I work this into the plan?
“Grace.”
“Yep.” I realize I haven’t been looking at her.
“What do you remember?”
I take a breath, fighting the urge to downplay my memory loss. It’s not that I think I’ll scare her. No, every memory I have of her, every moment we spent together on earth… she’s brave. Brave enough to volunteer for a suicide mission in space with no guarantee of success. I don’t want her to know how afraid I am. It’s stupid, I know. And yet…
“Grace?”
“It’s… yeah. Not much. I didn’t even remember my name when I first woke up.” I swallow. It feels wrong to say it out loud, like it might’ve been a dream if I’d just refused to acknowledge it.
She finishes her cup of ramen and sets it aside, turning her focus entirely towards me. I stare at the floor. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to have a conversation partner who has eyes.
“I didn’t—don’t—remember the launch, so I didn’t realize…” I gesture vaguely to the ship. “Space. Outside our galaxy. All that. It took me a minute to figure it out but… yeah.”
“You did not realize you were in space,” she repeats.
“Well, I figured it out, so—”
“No, no,” she shakes her head, “God, Grace. You understand how awful that is?”
“Yeah,” I answer, weakly. “It’s all coming back,” I assure her. “Slowly.”
“What do you want to know?”
I think for a moment, appreciating her directness and feeling incredibly grateful that the coma hadn’t wiped her memory too. “Why am I here?” I ask.
She exhales. “What do you remember about the project?”
“Astrophage, Stratt— I used to be a teacher. I think she… kidnapped me? Carl, and, uh… getting motion sick on a plane, the boat. It’s scattered.”
She blinks at me. “Stratt kidnapped you.”
“Maybe? I told you, it’s all kind of…” I gesture vaguely.
“Why do you think Stratt kidnapped you?”
“I remember being at school, teaching. Middle school. Anyway, Stratt—or her staff? I’m not sure—someone showed up and told me they needed my help with an apparently super-secret project. I think I said no. And then I remember the lab, so…”
“Stratt kidnapped you,” Olesya gasps, looking surprisingly amused. “She would.”
“She wouldn’t suspend her disbelief about the beanbag,” I add. Olesya raises her eyebrows, confused. “We used to play Lava with this beanbag— actually, I guess I packed it; it’s on the ship! But it was like… a teaching game? I’d toss the beanbag to a student and ask them a question to answer before the ‘lava’ could melt their hands off or something.”
“There’s lava on the ship?” she asks, feigning alarm. “And they let you pack it?”
I laugh. “See? Suspension of disbelief!”
Olesya shakes her head, smiling. The moment passes, all too fast. “What about the launch?”
“Nothing.”
“You don’t remember volunteering.”
I shake my head.
“Do you remember DuBois and Shapiro?”
“Yes, I… a little. It’s foggy but—”
“What do you remember?”
“Their faces, bits and pieces—”
Olesya sighs. Now, her eyes are trained pointedly over my shoulder.
“DuBois was our scientist. Shapiro was the backup.” I say nothing. I still don’t remember, but if I’m here, then… “There was a mistake. A mathematical error with astrophage. DuBois and Shapiro were killed. This was nine days before launch. There was no secondary backup—”
“So Stratt asked me.” The memory pulls at the edges of my mind. I can almost picture the scene: Stratt, an office, my heart pounding out of my chest…
“In days, you made the choice we were given months to consider.”
No, I want to say. But I am here. I’m here, so I must have agreed.
“You were already unconscious when we launched. There was not time to have you trained, and Stratt believed that it would be safer to put you to sleep early.”
“I’m sorry,” she adds when I don’t respond.
I shrug, afraid I’ll start crying if I open my mouth. I hardly remember DuBois and Shapiro. Before the coma, I already knew they were dead. So why—
“Grace, you are very brave,” she says.
And now I’m crying. I wipe my eyes helplessly.
“You woke up alone in space with no memories, and you saved my life, made contact with sentient life, and got a sample from the Petrova Line. In one month. Grace—”
“Thank you,” I croak out, wiping my nose on my sleeve.
“What happened, it is very, very sad. But you were meant to be here— as much as Yáo and I.”
I nod, because God, what else can I do?
“Hail Mary, full of Grace.”
I laugh wetly and Olesya pulls me into a clumsy hug. We’re going to save the stars.