Work Text:
There had been a lot of things I’d hoped would come of the future: self-driving cars, brain chips, Uber Eats via drone. I’d watched a lot of movies in my lifetime — both as a middle school teacher without a social life, and as an astronaut drifting through space with nothing else to do. Specifically, I’d watched a lot of science fiction movies. And that, I was now learning, had set me up with some very unrealistic expectations for my arrival back on Earth.
Over sixty years had passed since I’d last set foot on this planet. During those sixty years, the people of Earth had been a lot more focused on not starving to death than on developing hoverboards that shoot flames out the back.
So, things weren’t actually all that different here than when I left it. Aside from the new iPhone UI. And the International Space Station (Tourism Edition!). And the cold-tolerant leafy vegetables that somehow made their way into every meal, despite the sun’s full health. And— oh, yeah, the giant brass statues of me everywhere.
I was a bit of a celebrity. Stratt had been right about that. Of course.
Which led me to where I was now, doing what I’d been itching to do since I’d landed on solid ground in Houston months ago.
Yeah, I was in an internet rabbit hole.
“Do you know they named a penguin after me?” I told Rocky, flicking through a Futuristic Buzzfeed (which was basically just Normal Buzzfeed) article about me on the flashy glass laptop NASA had given me for work use only.
Rocky gave an interested trill beside me. Initially, I’d wondered if he’d get bored of my musings after a while, especially since he couldn’t actually see the webpage, but it actually seemed the opposite. I guess it made sense, though — this wasn’t just an internet rabbit hole to him; it was an alien internet rabbit hole.
Through the clear xenonite between us, I could see how attentively he was sitting, even if he was also working on his own little engineering project at the same time. I leaned against the barrier, grinning.
The World Space Council had been convening with the Eridians who’d helped bring me home for a few weeks now, ever since Earth had finally figured out a way to get them down here without killing anyone on either end. It had culminated in a sort of xenonite biodome structure similar to the one the Eridians had built for me on Erid, but much smaller and contained within a warehouse currently full of scientists and diplomats, who passed me carrying clipboards and swishing long lab coats with a youth I must have had when I’d first joined the Petrova Taskforce. Now, I spent my days tucked into a visiting corner crafted specially for me. It was an arched book-nook reminiscent of a bay window, jutting into the Eridian space and allowing me to feel close to my friends whenever I wanted. I’d laid a few quilts and cushions down over the crescent-shaped base of the indent, and another one was draped over my bent knees, my laptop propped up against them so I could scroll almost lying down. It was everything I’d ever wanted.
I was getting old, and sick, and tired. I got cold easily now, hence the blankets. And most of my organs were running on fumes, hence the return to Earth. But I lived for these moments with Rocky, and I could tell he knew I did. I didn’t care that this place was public and bustling — we had our conversations anyway, even if people were watching. I didn’t have enough time left in me to be bothered to tone myself down anymore.
“Ryland Grace the penguin,” I mused. “Catchy. Kind of morbid, considering I was partially responsible for making them extinct in the wild. But I appreciate the effort,” I continued, scrolling. There was a section about a movie adaptation of the Petrova Taskforce, which I promptly skipped past once my heart rate started to go up, and then the article was finished, and I moved on to the next tab I’d opened up.
This one was just a page containing all the articles on the site tagged with my name. Not because I was vain or anything! I knew already what people thought about me — all I’d have to do to get an ego boost would be to walk into literally any room in the world. It was actually kind of uncomfortable.
But I’d already googled the names of pretty much every person I’d ever known (Most of them were dead. A bunch of my students were still around, though, and reading about them had made my chest ache with pride), and my own name had seemed like the only logical thing left.
It wasn’t like I could just search “summary of every historical event since 2021” and get an answer.
Actually, Large Language Models existed now, so I probably could. But it would probably make something outrageous up and freak me out.
Everything I’d missed was just too vast, so I’d have to start small. Besides, it would probably break my brain. There was a reason I hadn’t been given internet access until a month ago — the same reason I hadn’t worked up the courage to open my browser until today.
“So, what else?” Rocky prompted, pulling me from my thoughts.
“Oh,” I said, refocusing my vision onto the screen and flicking down the list of articles. Rocky ran a tight ship when he was curious. “Well… there’s those interviews from my old students that we looked at earlier… a list of the most groundbreaking scientific papers of all time, nice…” I paused, zooming in on an image. “Haha, someone made us into a cereal brand.”
Rocky gave a musical sigh. “Why are humans so obsessed with marketable food?”
I beamed. “No, no, it’s awesome. I’ve always wanted to have my own cereal box.”
According to the headline, the brand was called Xeno-Bites — after Xenonite. It was horrendous. I loved it.
I kept scrolling, pointing out interesting articles and flicking through a few of them if they interested me. Rocky listened curiously. Apparently, there were university buildings named after me in twelve different states, funded by some sort of foundation set up in my name. It made me feel kind of weird, seeing so much credit and praise go to me for something I knew I’d walked into unwillingly. I’d googled my crewmates already, my throat tight. Yáo had a telescope. Ilyukhina had a Russian lunar mission. But I had so much.
“You saved all of Earth,” Rocky pointed out to me. “It was difficult for Erid to figure out how to thank me. They tried many things. Maybe naming things is how Earth tried to thank you.”
I hummed. “Yeah. Probably.”
It still didn’t feel quite right, but I let it go. I did save humanity, after all. Bow before me, Earth. Feed me your buildings. When I died, I’d promise to share them with all the other dead people who’d worked on the project with me.
More scrolling followed without much chance of ending. There were six pages of articles, and each page contained a lot. I had to keep stopping and explaining random idioms and bits of slang to Rocky, though at some points, I was just as lost as he was. Kids these days spoke a foreign language that made me feel like an old man, except all the other old men also spoke a different, equally foreign language to me, so I couldn’t even find any camaraderie about it.
Finally, I got to a headline on the second page that made me pause.
My fingers hesitated over the touchpad, hovering in confusion, and I tilted my head with a halted chuckle.
“Hah, that’s weird,” I said, my throat going a little tight even if I told myself I wasn’t bothered.
“What’s weird?” Rocky asked casually. He was still idly working away at his project beside me, which was good, because it meant he was probably distracted enough not to notice my heart rate going up a little.
I shook my head.
“Nothing, just… I think this article’s not tagged correctly.”
I read it again, my pointer drifting over the hyperlink. It was the same as the first time I’d read it; I didn’t know what I’d expected.
14 Historical Figures Who Were Probably Autistic (You Won’t Believe Number Twelve)
I rubbed my eyes and laughed again, this time a little lighter. Yeah, no way.
“What does it say?” Rocky pressed, finally sensing my attention had been snagged by something more than surface level.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. I didn’t know why I clicked on the article, but I did, giving it a quick skim. “Yeah, it’s just a bunch of important historical people. Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Alan Turing…”
“You’re not an important historical person?” Rocky asked.
“Yeah, I mean probably, but not— not for this list,” I tried to say, still scrolling. “I’m definitely not in it; I don’t know why they tagged my name, but it must have been some sort of—”
Number 5: Doctor Ryland Grace (Hail Mary Mission)
Fudge.
I stared at the subheading, my throat working as my mind whizzed at a hundred miles an hour.
No way. That was— this was so weird. Did people not realise how weird this was? Was it some sort of, like… practical joke that NASA had uploaded to my laptop for a laugh?
I’d seen these lists before, back in the 2010s. I’d always thought they were kind of strange. Especially since most of the people on them had been scientists. What people didn’t understand was that most people in the field acted odd. Being eccentric was how you discovered stuff, after all, and it wasn’t like the things they did had ever seemed that strange to me. Not emerging from your house for weeks until you’ve solved a problem? Long, rambling explanations that only make sense to the informed? Sounded reasonable to me. Those were the best conditions for research.
So, when people had started attaching labels to the natural behaviours of a perfectly healthy scientist, it had made me feel really gross. Why did it matter if Turing had a neurodevelopmental disorder? He invented computers! Who cared?
My eyes flicked down to the small block of text beneath my name. The answer to that question, it seemed, was a lot of people. And they cared a bunch.
Apparently, my neurotype was a subject of heavy debate. A subject of heavy, well-known debate. The speculation had, like, Albert Einstein-level popularity.
“People close to Dr Grace during the years he was working on Project Hail Mary described him as 'awkward' and 'socially clumsy', reminiscent of the social difficulties that come with autism,” the article read.
Rude, I thought. Nobody thought to say anything nice about me?
The paragraph continued:
“In footage from the few press conferences he attended with Eva Stratt, Grace also displays self-stimulatory behaviour like fiddling with his glasses, rocking boredly in his chair, and even one memed occasion where he broke the clip of a plastic pen in the middle of an important question (followed by a truly murderous glare from Ms Stratt).”
Beneath the text sat a gif of me behind a microphone, fiddling dangerously with a pen cap until it finally snapped and sent me jumping in my seat. I then sheepishly looked around, making sure no one had seen.
I didn’t remember the moment myself. I’d accepted that there were some memories I just wasn’t ever going to get back, and it must have been one of them. But flashes of the conference came back to me as I stared at the gif, including the mentioned glare, clear as day. I’d been banned from public relations after that.
Was it really all that weird for me to be fiddling with a pen, though? I did that all the time: fidgeting with things. Everyone did. It felt nice, helped me focus, calmed me down when things got a little too much—
I had to stop myself there, because my little knowledge of neurodivergence as a teacher with mandatory training began to kick in and, for a second or two, I started to get convinced.
I looked back at the page and kept reading, even though I told myself not to.
“Dr Grace was also known for being reclusive, keeping to himself in school and college and never marrying,” the article went on.
Yeowch. But that was perfectly fine, too. Wasn’t it?
“As is true for many of the figures on this list, it appears that he had a special interest in his research and little interest in people who didn’t share that trait. His radical ideas could also be attributed to the out-of-the-box thinking displayed by autistic individuals, including his blunt disbelief in the Goldilocks Zone.”
I was a scientist, I told myself. That was just what scientists did. We were weird! Nobody normal went into science and expected to make a breakthrough!
Finally, I was at the conclusion of the short segment.
“Since his departure on the Hail Mary, we’ll never really know what Dr Ryland Grace was truly like, although the idea that he was autistic gained mainstream acceptance after Ronald Griffin’s Oscar-winning performance in Project Hail Mary (2062). Whether or not Dr Grace really was autistic, he stands as an inspirational example for anyone who feels like they don’t quite fit in. His brain saved the world, after all!”
The section ended there, the article moving on to the next historical person. I was sandwiched between Nikola Tesla and Beethoven. God, that felt weird, even without the circumstances. I was just some guy!
Some guy with an armchair diagnosis for a mental disorder, it seemed.
Wait a minute, the article had said mainstream acceptance. I looked around, suddenly paranoid of the dozens of people walking past Rocky and me every minute. Did they all know? They hadn’t said anything. What did they think of me? Had they been treating me differently, under the misinformed assumption that I was something I wasn’t?
Was I?
Then, it came to my attention that Rocky was talking to me.
“Grace,” he repeated, tapping on the xenonite window between us. “Grace! Grace, what’s wrong?”
I pulled my gaze back to him and swallowed, shaking my head.
“Nothin’, Rock,” I said quietly, trying to reassure him.
“You’re stressed. I can hear it. Is it the article?” A pause. Then, sensitively… “Is it the humans?”
I shook my head again. “No, it’s not the humans.”
There had been a time, a few months ago, when being around other humans had lit my nerves on fire. So many of them, so many demands, so many people who knew more about me than I did. The Eridians hadn’t read my expression and body language and tone and twisted them into something else. I’d been able to control exactly what they knew, and exactly what I’d wanted to keep private. Humans, on the other hand, had beady eyes that stared.
It had been before the Eridians had been brought down to Earth. I’d locked myself in a room at the Johnson Space Centre and curled up against the door. I wasn’t proud.
It had taken two burly security guards for NASA to break in and “save” me. After that, everyone had been a little more gentle around me, like I was something fragile that they had to handle with care. It had been humiliating. My body was failing me, but my mind was sharp. I hadn’t known why I’d done it.
Thinking back to the training I’d had as a teacher… Maybe… maybe now I did know why.
It probably didn’t help that the door had been heavy, like an airlock, and opening it would have promised certain death.
“Grace?”
Dammit. Rocky.
“Yeah, bud, I’m fine,” I breathed unconvincingly.
Even though Eridians didn’t have faces, I could feel Rocky fix me with a dubious stare.
“You don’t seem fine. What’s in the article?”
I sighed, slumping backwards into my quilts and closing my laptop.
“It’s a list…” I began vaguely.
“A list?” Rocky echoed.
I really didn’t want to talk about it.
“It’s a bunch of people speculating about what I might be like. From back when they thought I was dead,” I explained stiltedly.
Rocky was silent for a moment. Then, he put his xenonite project down.
“That sounds uncomfortable.”
“Yeah. And they’re saying I might be…” I trailed off, something coiled tight in my chest. “They’re saying I might have autism.”
I could see the thoughts running through Rocky’s head. He was tilting a little further towards me now, and he subtly tapped against the floor a few times, a behaviour I knew Eridians used to hear better. In this case, he was trying to make out my expression. Or maybe my heart rate.
“I don’t know that word.”
I shifted uncomfortably, tugging at my quilt.
“It’s a medical term. It doesn’t matter, because I— I don’t.”
Rocky’s carapace tilted again. “What does it mean?”
With a wrung-out breath of air, I ran a hand down my face.
“I don’t know,” I complained. “I’m not an expert, so maybe it’s changed. But in 2021, it meant, like… someone who has difficulty understanding social cues, gets overwhelmed by sensory stimuli, and has really intense interests.”
I was remembering bits and pieces. I’d learned all this decades ago, and Stratt’s drug had made things hazy. But it was coming back to me.
“They might fidget a lot, not make eye contact… some of them don’t speak sometimes, or not at all,” I continued, because I didn’t want to stop. “It changes how your brain is structured, or something. Some things, like interacting with other humans, are harder, or awkward, or undesirable. But other things, like thinking outside of the box, come more naturally than for other humans.”
Rocky listened closely, then made a noise. It started quiet, almost like he was trying to stifle it, but once he got louder, I realised he was laughing.
The gall!
“What are you laughing about?” I demanded. This wasn’t a trivial matter. It was serious! The people of the future were accusing me of— of—
“That sounds exactly like you,” Rocky snickered, and my thoughts stopped in their tracks.
What?!
“No, it doesn’t. You don’t understand. I’m not—”
I cut myself off.
What was I going to say? I’m not weird? I’m not a freak? I’d had autistic students before, and there was no way I would have said those words to their faces.
“…Why?” I finally asked Rocky, wrung-out and lost for answers.
Rocky pushed his little project further away to focus entirely on me, then settled down with his legs folded beneath him.
“You said you preferred the fog on Erid. But humans on Earth say they love the sun. That’s sensory stimuli, isn’t it?” he pointed out. “And you rejected most Eridian fabrics because they weren’t soft enough.”
I did remember that. I stood by what I’d said, though; Eridian fabric was scratchy as heck. And the fog was beautiful!
“Your interest in science is very intense. Remember how many times I used to have to force you to sleep on Erid? You also fidget a lot. A distracting amount. Too much.”
This was feeling more and more like a performance review that I was failing, if not for the fond, teasing tone of Rocky’s voice. Maybe he was right, but I didn’t want to face it.
“And I have seen you interact with other humans,” he finished plainly, like that was evidence in itself.
I chuckled. “Oh, yeah?”
“It’s embarrassing.”
Finally, I let out a long breath and let it all sink in.
So, people thought I was autistic. Rocky thought I was autistic, even if I’d only given him a shallow understanding of it. It was just a human word, I supposed. It didn’t have to mean anything. But it still felt weird to learn firsthand how people perceived me. Awkward? “Clumsily social”? Did they think I was pathetic?
“Albert Einstein is on this list, yes?” Rocky piped up again when I didn’t speak. “So, it can’t be a bad thing.”
Hm.
Maybe he was right.
“That’s a good way of thinking about it, bud,” I told him, pressing the corner of my quilt between my fingers.
Fidgeting, my brain supplied helpfully.
Shut up, brain.
“I hope I didn’t give you a misleading idea of what normal humans are like,” I said without thinking, the words bubbling out before I could get a second to process the worry.
Rocky made a pitying noise.
“Not at all,” he assured me. “All humans are different. Just as all Eridians are different.”
I swallowed, managing a smile. As my eyes creased, I found that they were watering.
“Besides, if you’d been ‘normal’—” he said the word in a different tone, like he was quoting me but didn’t agree with the word choice “—maybe we wouldn’t have found each other after all.”
That was a sobering thought. A world without Rocky, without Erid.
“It’s just uncomfortable to think all these people… know this stuff about me,” I admitted. “I think I always knew I was a bit different. Maybe I thought I might be autistic. But it’s weird. There were a lot of stigmas around mental health when I left, and I guess I don’t want them to think I’m… weak.”
There was a long pause. And another dubious stare.
Finally, Rocky spoke to me like I was a baby.
“You have statues of yourself in every country.”
I felt stupid. “I know!”
“You are Earth’s savior. They welcomed you with canons. They fired canons, Grace—”
“I know, I know! I just—”
“You have a cereal brand.”
A beat. Rocky looked at me completely seriously.
The absurdity was too much, and I laughed.
“I do!” I said with tears in my eyes. “I do have a cereal brand!”
“A very important cereal brand. Very marketable.”
“They wouldn’t give a weak man Xenon-Bites,” I gasped out, overcome.
“Xenon-Bites?” Rocky echoed. “That’s what they called it?”
“It rhymes in English. It’s awful, I know.”
Finally, my worries were forgotten. Looking back now, it didn’t seem like a big deal. To Earth, I was a hero, social blunders or not. People refused to drop the “Doctor” from my name despite my insistence. Young scientists got nervous whenever I tried to talk to them. Heck, I’d gotten a medal from the president. And a pretty nifty gravestone. Did it really matter whether or not I met some criteria written by some crusty old guys a hundred years ago?
Well, it did matter. But not to anyone else. It mattered a bit to me, but only because, in retrospect, it made a few things about myself make a little more sense.
Rocky and I scrolled Futuristic Buzzfeed for a while longer, but I eventually decided it probably wasn’t healthy to be dwelling on the past. I had a lot to catch up on, but maybe I’d just read a history textbook instead.
It was getting dark, and the flow of diplomats and scientists through the warehouse around us had gradually petered off. I didn’t wait for Rocky to kick me out, though I knew he would if it came to that.
“I’d better head off,” I told him, peeling my quilt back and using my cane to slowly stand. Everything ached. That was what I got for sitting like a banana here for hours every day.
“Be careful,” Rocky warned me, but I cracked a grin.
“See you tomorrow.”
As I left, a short, olive-skinned woman named Maya stood from her chair nearby, slipping her own computer into her bag. She caught up to me quickly, hovering close by. I called her my NASA-appointed babysitter, but her official title was my assistant. Currently, her main job was making sure I didn’t trip and break my hip on WSC property.
“Do you know I have a cereal brand?” I asked her, my cane clicking against the ground with every slow step.
She smiled politely, all lipstick and youth.
“Yes, I do, Dr Grace. Let’s get you home.”