Chapter Text
Colt was about to get in his car, ready to head home after a long day on set, when his phone buzzed.
Watch this, the text from Jody said. There was a video attached, the circle slowly spinning on Colt’s phone as whatever it was downloaded. His phone buzzed again as it passed the halfway point. Watch this right the fuck now.
And again: Please.
“What the hell,” Colt muttered. It’s downloading, I’ll watch it as soon as it’s ready. What’s going on?
I don’t know
But if Gail has anything to do with it I am going to throw HER out of a helicopter this time
Are you okay?
Just watch it
He scrolled back up. The video was ready, so he tapped on it.
It was blurry, clearly shot on Jody’s phone—he recognized the background as the bar the crew tended to hang out in. The camera swayed around dizzyingly for a moment as Jody appeared to fumble the phone. He could hear her curse. Then the angle stabilized and it zoomed in on one of the TV screens behind the bar. The light balance adjusted after a moment and he was looking at . . . himself.
Only not. This wasn’t him, wasn’t anything he’d ever done. He didn’t think he’d ever been caught on film standing behind a podium in a suit and tie. (Dress up for movie premiers and awards shows? Sure. He got invited fairly often, more so now as Jody’s plus-one. But he’d never been to any of those in a podium-adjacent capacity.) And his hair looked better than that. (Sure, it got messy all the time, but it looked good messy. This looked like how people with respectable desk jobs had looked about a month into COVID lockdowns.) And he hadn’t worn glasses since he was thirteen. (“Just give the kid contacts,” his dad had said to the optometrist. “He’s responsible. He’ll remember to wear them. And they won’t break when he tries something new on his bike.”) And he’d never . . . okay, he probably had had an expression like that at some point, caught between focused and nervous and irritated. He’d certainly felt that way sometimes trying to figure out the safety parameters for some new stunt. But he wouldn’t be on camera for that either.
And, most importantly, he’d never done all of that at once in front of a backdrop showing diagrams of the weird line between the Sun and Venus, and if he had, there wouldn’t have been a little information box under the news labeling him as “Dr. Ryland Grace – Astrophage Expert.”
So why was the TV showing him there?
Colt was distantly aware of his breath coming faster, of the sick cold feeling in his knees and armpits, the strained clench in his core. It felt like gasoline and dirty water, like everything spinning out of control. Not again. Not this again!
There was too much background noise in the video; Colt couldn’t hear what Dr. Ryland Grace was saying. He doubted Jody could have caught much, either, though. The audio wasn’t what mattered. The lookalike was.
It was a long video. Colt watched the whole thing, braced, waiting for the other foot to drop. But his duplicate didn’t do anything terrible this time. He just kept talking. The TV was clearly playing a news broadcast, which repeatedly cut back and forth between the recording of not-Colt, the anchors in the studio, and footage of some rocket launch with the caption “Project Hail Mary.” Jody’s video lasted until the news segment had obviously fully ended and moved on to another topic. As footage of a warehouse fire played, she finally lowered the phone, and before the clip ended, he could hear her say clearly and shakily, “What the fuck.”
Colt stared at the phone and repeated the sentiment. Then he called Jody.
She picked up immediately. “Hey.” He warmed at the sound of her voice, even tense as it was now. “You okay?”
“I don’t know. What the hell even?”
“You have no idea?”
“Hell no!” He started pacing. “Gail’s locked up, Ryder’s dead, I don’t think anybody else hates me”—that got him a jittery laugh—"and I don’t know why anyone would try to make me look like some space scientist anyway. Or how they’d get the news to pick it up. Australia was different, I’d just crashed a boat, that was . . . .”
“Breaking news. Yes. This looks more researched. You’d think they’d have caught a deepfake.”
“Did he say anything messed up? I couldn’t hear. It just seemed like news, not like a scandal.”
She made a sound of agreement. “I didn’t catch most of it either, but I heard them describe him as an expert when the clip started.”
“And then nothing went wrong about that, either, did it? Not like 'we found out he was lying' or anything?”
“Right, right, that’s the thing. I don’t understand. It doesn’t make any sense. I can’t see who would benefit from making people think—Oh?” There was muffled talking on the other end of the line. “Hold on, Colt, just—don’t hang up, don’t go anywhere, I’m just . . .”
His grip tightened on the phone. “Not going anywhere, Jodes.”
There was a pause and more muffled conversation. Colt figured Jody had moved the phone away from her face. Then he heard a huff of static and Jody’s voice, still distant. “Okay. Well. –Colt?” That last was sharp and clear again.
“Here.”
“Okay.” He heard her take another deep breath and let it out. “Okay. It’s alright. Jennie” (Jennie was her assistant on this shoot, someone who had never worked with Gail or Ryder, someone they both trusted) “just showed me a Wikipedia page. It looks like this Ryland Grace is a real person. The page has been around for a few years, although a lot more has been added in the last few months. He’s a real person and he works on Project Hail Mary, which is something related to the whole sun-getting-dim thing. It’s all . . . real. I guess he just looks like you.”
“….Huh.” Colt took a deep breath of his own, trying to move past that surge of adrenaline. “Well, that’s . . . a different kind of weird.”
“I’m sorry,” Jody said in his ear. “I saw him on TV and I just immediately assumed—”
“—That the person who looks exactly like me was another deepfake? Yeah, don’t apologize for that, c’mon. That makes more sense than someone else out there looking exactly like me.”
“He does, doesn’t he?” She sounded thoughtful. “More so than Ryder.”
“Yeah. I mean, video of a video, quality’s not great, but . . . a deepfake of me is probably more likely than some random person who looks that much like me.” He paused, tossing his keys up and down. “Hey, Jodes?”
“Mm?”
“Can you wrap up there? Thank Jennie—seriously, thank her for me, a lot, I was freaking out right there with you—and come on home?”
“I’d love that.” He could hear the smile in her voice, picture the relief on her face. “I’m not really in the mood for socializing anymore.”
“Great, see you soon.”
“Wait, Colt—‘home’ being--?”
He grinned a bit. “Your place is closer?”
“I’ll see you there.”
~~~~~
A few hours later, they were snuggled up together on Jody’s comfortable blue couch, takeout containers discarded on the table by the kitchen. Jody lowered the TV remote, having just hit pause on a certain scientist’s press briefing. They had watched several clips now. Most of it was from the same event Jody had seen earlier, filmed at different angles as different news outlets covered the same events. He also popped up in a fair amount of B-roll as one of several people standing near Eva Stratt, the director of Project Hail Mary.
“Definitely a real person,” Jody said with a sigh. “Thank God.”
“Yeah,” Colt said, a little distracted, still gazing at the screen where the man who looked like him was frozen mid-word.
"Colt . . . ." In his peripheral vision, he could see Jody stiffen, like she was bracing herself. “I’m really sorry,” she said in a rush. “I shouldn’t have freaked out. I should have looked it up before I texted you. I just-- The last time I saw you on the news and it couldn’t possibly be you, it was—”
“Hey,” Colt said immediately, as soothingly as he could, swinging around to give her his full attention. “Don’t apologize. It’s fine. It makes sense that’s where your head would go. It’s where mine went. It’s okay, babe.”
“Are you sure?” she pressed him. “No thumbs-up bullshit? Because you’ve been quiet and twitchy all evening, and I don’t know what else it could be.”
“It’s not that,” he said. “Well, it is that, but not the way you think.”
“Okay?”
Colt wished he had something to fidget with. He settled for folding and unfolding his hands, fingers interlaced left on top, right on top, left . . . .
“Colt?”
“I’m not being avoidant, I’m trying to think of how to say it. I have an idea, and I don’t want to tell you the idea because I want to see if you come up with the idea on your own.” That was true. It was also true that this was weirdly hard to talk about.
Jody, bless her, just settled back against the cushions and watched him. Colt glanced from her to the frozen face on the screen.
“What made you think it was a deepfake, at first?” he asked. “Like, obviously, he looks like me. But what made you assume he was a digital model based on me instead of someone who looks like me?”
“Movement,” Jody said promptly. He felt a surge of affection. Trust her director’s eye to capture things like that, even on a TV screen across the bar. “He doesn’t just look like you. He moves like you. Watch his hands.” She hit play again, then mute, and the scientist continued his lecture on the TV. “See that? He gestures like you do when you’re excited about something.” Ryland Grace pointed at a reporter in the audience. “You do that when you’re discussing rigging or props. You kind of nod at whatever it is, you don’t just point at it.” A little quirk of a grin as his mouth formed the words nice question. “You smile like that when someone has a good idea or makes a joke you like.”
Colt swallowed. “You think that kind of thing’s genetic?” he asked.
Jody made a “no idea” face. “Why?”
“Well . . . .” Left. Right. Left. “Remember—” He’d told her, right? It wasn’t like it was a secret. It would have come up in some casual conversation—that’s right, he remembered now, an offhand comment over lunch with some of the other stunties and production assistants. It had been years ago, though, before they were even really interested in each other. Had it come up when she’d met his parents? He didn’t think so. “Remember how I’m adopted?”
Realization played out over her face, eyes wide in the TV glow, mouth slackening in surprise. Her eyes darted back and forth between him and the screen, differently now—not looking for AI tells, but for something else. “I can see it,” she said quietly. “So that’s what has you worked up. You’re not stressed that someone is trying to trick you, or trick people into thinking something about you—you’re freaking out because you think you and this Ryland Grace are related. That you have a brother out there, maybe.”
He nodded. “Yep. And then I thought I might be making it up, but—”
“Oh, no.” She snorted. “No, that should have been obvious. Five years ago, that’s what I would have thought of first, not AI.”
“Curse of technology,” Colt agreed, buzzy all over again with the release of tension, with the relief that she agreed.
“Curse of Gail Meyers and Tom fucking Ryder,” Jody corrected.
“Ehh… sixty-forty?”
“Which one’s the sixty?”
“Lived experience.”
“Fair. I’d put it closer to seventy-thirty, personally, but you’re the one whose face was in the video, so we’ll go with yours.”
“How gracious of you.”
“Always.” Jody curled against him, the tension in her face and shoulders finally gone. “So, what’s on your mind?”
Colt ran his hands through his hair. “Nothing. A lot. I don’t know.”
“You maybe have a brother. You’ve been turning that over in your head for a few hours,” she prompted him. It was like working a script, trying to figure out motivations. He loved how her mind worked. “How are you?”
“Mostly . . . curious,” Colt admitted. “I feel a little weird about that. I mean, it’s none of my business! I’ve got my life—I love my life—and he’s got his. Even if we are related, that doesn’t have to mean anything. But still. I wonder what he’s like.” Jody might have been looking for AI clues as they watched and rewatched the footage, but he’d stopped after the first two clips. He’d been convinced. He was more interested in the smile after the question, the sudden stiffening of the scientist’s spine as someone interrupted his tangent, the joke slipped in at the end of the presentation as though a pun could lighten the impact of there’s no way on Earth to stop these tiny things from eating the sun, so we’re going to send people out to find an answer in space. “I mean, if we are related. If we’re not, I don’t care, I’m not going to creep on some random scientist just because he looks like me. But if he is my brother, I want to know so much! What does he care about? What does he like? Do we have anything in common?”
“You should meet him and find out,” Jody said. “I bet he’d be just as curious about you.”
Colt snorted. “Yeah, right. He’s a scientist on the whole save-the-sun project. He’d probably think I’m some dumb muscle guy.”
“Then he’s a dumb, stuck-up science guy and he’s not worth your time. But if he’s like you, I think he’d want to get to know you. I mean”—she shifted around to sit cross-legged, her back against the arm of the couch, facing him—“you do want to meet him if he’s really your brother, right?”
“Yeah,” Colt said, a weird tug in his chest. “I really would. It’s just—”
“What’s wrong?”
He took a deep breath, chest opening more than it had been. “I love Mom and Dad. I don’t want them to feel like, like they’re not enough, you know? I’ve always said I don’t really care about my birth parents. They gave me away for whatever reason, might have been good, might have been ugly, but it doesn’t matter. I was always really happy growing up and I didn’t want any other family. Mom and Dad know that. They even asked me about it, kind of a lot when I was a teenager, checking in and stuff. I don’t want them to think that now—” He broke off, choked up.
“That was about parents, though,” Jody said. “Not siblings. Even if they’d feel bad if you went looking for your birth parents—and it sounds like they wouldn’t—a brother would be different, right?”
Colt nodded, looking at the floor. The tension hadn’t fully settled. “I know. It still feels like I’d be saying they aren’t enough. That our family’s not enough. And it is, I just—I just wonder—”
“Colt. You saw someone on the news who looks exactly like you. You didn’t wake up one day and say ‘I want to learn about my family of origin.’ You got hit in the face with a possible sibling. They’re not going to mind.” Her lips quirked. “They’d probably want to find him as much as you do, honestly.”
That shook a laugh out of him. “Yeah, I bet.” His parents were warm, friendly, supportive. They’d adored Jody as soon as they met her (as they should) and he could see them being just as welcoming of a new . . . step-son? Kind of?
….Which just raised the question of why they hadn’t been adopted together. His parents would have been open to taking in two children. They would have told him, at the very least, if they’d known he had any siblings. So maybe he and the guy on the news weren’t related to each other after all, or Ryland had been adopted separately first, or . . . .
Colt put his head in his hands and groaned.
“M’fine,” he said, before Jody could do anything. “Too many things I don’t know, that’s all. I’ll call home in the morning. See if I can track down my records.” He sighed. “And maybe see if I can get in touch with this guy.”
A LITTLE LATER THAT NIGHT (COMEDY CODA):
“Worst case scenario, he’s a jerk and you never see each other again.”
“Nah,” Colt said. “That’d be alright. The worst case is that he’s just enough of a jerk that I don’t like him, but we keep trying to keep in touch and everyone’s uncomfortable forever.”
“Charming.”
“But hey, maybe we’ll hit it off and become best friends. I’ll introduce you to him, you’ll like each other, and in a few years we all co-produce the hit thriller Astrophage.”
“I think any movie based on the work they’re doing would be high on the technobabble and low on the action.”
He shrugged comfortably. “You’ll find a way to punch it up somehow. The little space shits are called star-eaters. That’s gotta have potential.”
Jody snickered.
“I just hope he’s an alright guy and that we get along. And that you two like each other. Otherwise, who cares.”
“He’s your brother. You can have a relationship with someone who doesn’t get along with me.”
“Sure, but”—he leaned toward her and kissed her cheek—“not sure I’d want to. I don’t think I’d like someone very much if they didn’t like you.”
She ran her fingers through his hair. “You’re sweet. --You go meet him and decide what you think of him first. Then I’ll decide if I want to meet him.”
Colt gave her a lazy salute and a second, more thorough kiss.
“It would be interesting,” Jody said thoughtfully, after they parted. “Having two of you around.”
Colt tilted his head. “You see two of me whenever I’m on set. At least.”
“Not quite. Two of the character. It’s different. Not two of you.”
“Yeah, well, he might not be anything like me, like you said.”
She played with the hem of his shirt. “Still might be hot.”
He spluttered, and her eyes crinkled as she watched his reaction. “Jody!”
“I’m just saying,” she said, faux-innocent. “What I could do with two of you . . . .”
“I—you—are you seriously suggesting a threesome with my hypothetical brother?”
She broke into genuine laughter. “No, of course not. The hot thing would be if there were really two of you. Sadly,” she put her hand to her forehead, “that’s not possible.”
He nodded. “We’d need cloning.”
“An alternate universe.”
“Time travel.”
“Nice. –Ooh, that’s an idea for Metalstorm II, don’t you think? Picture it.” She leaned back, hands splayed in full pitch mode, voice sliding into trailer narration. “‘The dust has settled. Peace is restored. Then—an accident. A man duplicated in time. Now, Aliena must choose between the comparatively lighthearted man she fell in love with, and the seasoned leader she’s with now. Or—must she?’”
He gave her a sidelong look. “I think you’re onto something there.”
“Oh?”
“Could be groundbreaking. Has any director ever made both the real movie and the porn parody?”
She smirked. “Not openly, at least.”
“Seems like a missed opportunity. I mean, the Oscar for Best Adaptation is right there . . . .”