Work Text:
“You have three hours.”
Ryland’s shoulders slumped without his knowledge. He continued to stare at Stratt, completely unable to do anything else. Fear spread through his body, crawling through his bloodstream, pumped further and with more ferocity with each beat of his heart, until he was paralysed by the weight of the decision before him. In an effort to keep himself from falling apart, he leant slowly back against the chair. It didn’t help.
Three hours. It was impossible. He already knew he wouldn't be able to summon the courage in that amount of time. Maybe… maybe if he’d had longer.
But then again, maybe not. He wasn’t a hero. He wasn’t even brave enough to ride his bike along the highway. He’d never done a single heroic thing in his life. It just wasn’t in him.
A suicide mission. That’s what she was asking.
The terror in his blood pulsed louder. The room was silent, still watching him, but he wasn’t really aware of it. With shaking hands, he pushed himself up from the table. Every movement felt weighted, considered. Like his body was already shutting down. Slowly, he turned without a word and walked toward the door. If the floor were to open up and consume him, he wouldn’t have raised any objections.
No one said anything as he left. Small mercies.
He didn’t know where he was going. He just needed to get out of that room. Out of their stares and expectant, hopeful expressions. He was a failure who would let them all down. He needed air.
He must have looked traumatised as he passed a few of the engineering guys in the corridor, thousand yard stare seeing nothing around him. Someone probably called out to him, but he didn’t hear it. Everything was muffled, so unimportant.
He tried to keep his breathing steady as he made his way further from that room of doom, sticking close to the wall of the hallway, just in case. He would never see any of these people again if he left. He’d never see anyone again, save for Ilyukhina and Yao. His students…
An involuntary gulp caused him to stumble, but he kept his feet. Air, find air.
Before he knew it he was at a heavy fire door that led out onto the roof. He pushed it open and finally felt the damp mist and fresh breeze of Kazakhstan’s winter climate wash over him. Okay, that was better. It wasn’t the same kind of fog that crept over the San Francisco Bay, but the familiarity was enough to ground him fractionally. The crumbling paint and gravel underfoot was also vaguely comforting - if he closed his eyes he could pretend he was at the beach.
Unfortunately, when he opened them again there were no crashing waves or salty taste in the air to greet him. From this vantage point, he could see most of the buildings that made up the compound, seemingly innocuous if not for the large perimeter fencing topped off with barbed wire, and occasional pair of Russian soldiers patrolling the grounds. The sight of their rifles reminded him suddenly of how Yao had decided to end his life.
Ryland exhaled shakily, bending over as a wave of nausea washed over him. He couldn’t do this.
He could not do this.
It felt better with his head between his legs, and he eventually slid down onto the floor, face buried between his knees, allowing the dampness on the ground to seep into his jeans. He ran his hands over the back of his beanie. He tried to keep his breathing steady, but shame and terror rose in equal measure in his chest, and rather than letting himself panic, he gripped the back of his head harder. Pinpricks bit at his eyes, so he squeezed them closed as well.
He didn’t know how long he sat there. Each second that went by was a second closer to making this decision. The clock was running down so quickly and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He almost wished for the ability to pause time, but in his heart knew that would only prolong his agony. He lost track of the minutes.
Imminent death, or up to thirty years of shame, followed by death with company.
He had always known he was a failure. That part wasn’t new to him. But being forced to confront his cowardice in this manner had to be someone’s idea of a sick joke. If he wasn’t so terrified, he’d have laughed at the idea of someone up there deliberately inflicting this upon him.
“Please, God,” he whispered, which was strange because he wasn’t religious at all.
There was no harm in it now.
At some point the panic hazed out enough for him to gather some rational thoughts together. “Okay,’ he mumbled. If I were to do this, what would it mean?
He’d have to endure the launch, was the first thing. Terrible enough as that would be, it was probably manageable. The next thing would be putting himself in a coma with the others, without a guarantee that he’d even wake up. That was less scary in the immediate sense, but more existentially bleak. Presuming he survived both the launch and the coma, he’d wake up in a different galaxy, so remote and unreachable the thought alone made him want to die. He’d have to float around in space for weeks, possibly months, and finally somehow summon the courage to kill himself before starvation did the job for him. And that was the best case scenario.
Anything could go wrong on the journey. They could wake up to find there was a problem with the ship and they never made it to Tau Ceti. They could die of a malfunction before even having the chance to find the solution to the astrophage. If everything went perfectly, and they arrived intact, they still might not be able to find out why Tau Ceti wasn’t dimming. And that would mean killing themselves knowing it was all for nothing.
Yao and Ilyukhina would complete the mission right up until the final act. They were brave. Ryland however… He’d end up alone once they’d heroically killed themselves, desperate and cowardly, wasting away until he just became a skeleton.
No, there was just no way.
He couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t.
He was a coward, and that was fine. Better to send someone who actually wanted to go. He nodded once to himself, wiping away a tear with the back of his hand as he settled on his decision.
Despite the clawing shame, he immediately felt better. Relief softened his shoulders and calmed his beating heart as he got up from the floor.
Let someone else be the hero. That’s just as noble.
His jeans were wet and dirty from the ground, and his legs and butt had turned numb, finally realising the cold he’d been sitting in, but he was resolute.
Living the rest of his life - however long that may be - with a certain level of guilt was far better than the alternative, he reassured himself as he made his way back inside, back down the fire escape stairwell, back down the warm corridors and past the cafeteria. He checked his watch. He still had a whole hour.
It didn’t matter. Better to get this over with.
He knew he’d be able to find her in the mission command block, where her office was, so he set off. It was only a short walk, but he thought he could imagine people staring at him as he went. Did they know? Were they judging?
Possibly. Probably.
He told himself it was the right decision, that he would be useless on the mission, that someone else should be offered the opportunity who wanted it and deserved it. But nevertheless nerves seeped through him as he approached the corridor of Stratt’s office. He stopped in his tracks at the sight of her in the hallway, talking stone-faced to Carl and one of the medical officers in charge of the astronauts’ coma safety. She noticed his arrival, her eyes shifting into something more closely resembling hope. As it was Eva Stratt however, he couldn’t be sure.
“Dr Grace,” she said, gesturing to the door of her office. “Go inside. I will be with you shortly.”
Another involuntary gulp. He said nothing as he passed them, and they said nothing either. Soon everyone would know what a coward he was anyway.
Stratt shut the door behind him as he entered, effectively shutting him in so he couldn’t hear whatever conversation was going on outside the door. He didn’t mind. He’d be lucky not to be thrown out of the base as soon as he told them he wasn’t going. Disgraced.
He took a deep breath before moving to sit in the chair opposite Stratt’s desk. His knee bounced anxiously as he slid his beanie off and let his glasses hang loose, rubbing his eyes. How was he possibly going to tell her?
She wasn’t going to understand, that much he already knew. There would be no words of acceptance. No comfort to be found in her tone. He was about to be flayed alive for this.
After months of trying to live up to her standards, working like a dog to simply meet her expectations and always yearning deep down for some level of validation from her… he didn’t know if he could take her cold disappointment.
But he’d made his decision. There was no going back now. And he would take the consequences any day, no matter how painful, because the other option was slowly dying alone in space.
She should never have asked him in the first place. It wasn’t fair.
It took a few minutes for Stratt to enter. At the sound of the door opening, Ryland bowed his head. He didn’t need to see her reaction when he told her.
Her footsteps approached the desk, and she took the seat opposite him. Neither of them spoke, Ryland still refusing to look at her. Clearly, she was waiting for him to make his announcement. He could already feel waves of disappointment emanating from her, flowing over him like a cloak. Did she know? Had she always known?
He steadied his breath. “I know you think I’m the right person for this job.” He finally looked up at her. Her gaze was intense, but there wasn’t a hint of impatience on her face. Only a steely kind of hope. His heart cracked. “But my place is in the classroom…”
“Stop pretending this is about your students, it’s so insulting.” She cut him off before he could finish explaining. “You do realise that a quarter of the Earth’s population will die within the next thirty years?” He’d never heard the edge of desperation that laced her words before. “And that is assuming the world leaders work together to ration food. Which we know they won’t.” Her eyes were glistening with unshed tears, and Ryland looked down, as if he could possibly deny the impact of his choice.
She continued. “So I would double the estimate.”
He swallowed. “I understand the stakes. I do. But I just don’t have it in me.”
There it was.
The world was silent. Even the pounding of his heart was absent in his ears. The weight of his words pressed into the room, floating between them like a physical product. What Stratt would choose to do with them, Ryland couldn’t bring himself to care. He deserved whatever backlash he got. Steeling himself, he forced the most shameful words he’d ever utter out of his mouth. “You just can’t talk me into it.”
She breathed, her brows pushing together in an almost pleading manner.
“I’m sorry,” he meant to say, but it came out as barely a whisper, chin wobbling as he took a gulp of air.
Stratt was quiet for a moment. “I’m not trying to talk you into anything.” Her voice was level, calm. “I’m just trying to make you understand what I’m about to do.”
He looked up.
“Please, stay calm.” She gestured to the door, instructing someone on the other side to come in. The chief medical officer entered, wearing latex gloves and carrying a box of medical supplies.
A terrible sensation drenched the inside of Ryland’s gut. “What… What is this?” He was laughing, surely this wasn’t what it looked like…
“Mission statement will say that we induced your coma early to maximise your safety.” Stratt’s voice sounded far away, but he was desperate to cling onto it, onto any other words than the dreadful reality of what she was saying. “You will be remembered as a hero.”
He was suddenly beside the full length windows, backing away from the medical officer. He didn’t remember standing. “Come on…” he pleaded, sure that if he denied this for long enough it wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen. Stratt wouldn’t do this to him.
But she would.
He knew it. Perhaps he had always known it.
“You may see this as me betraying you,” she implored. She was flustered. She wasn’t looking at him. “But it is actually me believing in you.”
Ryland took another step away from the medical officer, who had opened his box and was loading up a syringe. Two security escorts entered the room from the other door, eyes fixed on him as they approached.
“It sure feels like you’re betraying me!” he said, still refusing to actually believe this was happening. The security agents had him backed into a corner against the bookshelf, and he put his hands up placatingly. “Come on guys,” his mind whirled with desperate measures. He had to stop this. He couldn’t allow it to happen. He might as well die right here, right now. His eyes darted to the open door. “Let’s just talk about this some more-”
They stepped closer, the doctor now within grabbing distance. He didn’t think, just did the only thing he could at that moment. He shoved a chair toward the medical officer and leapt onto the bookshelf to stay as out of reach as possible.
“Sit down and we do this differently,” Stratt was saying from somewhere distant. If he’d had any capacity to pay her any attention right now, he would have noted how pained her voice was, how it cracked at the edges and merged into something resembling a plea.
His hands shook as he gripped the wooden shelves, books and trinkets kicked to the floor as he desperately tried to avoid the three men closing in on him. They weren’t armed, they didn’t even look like they wanted to be rough. So Ryland seized his opportunity.
In one motion he jumped past the two security agents toward the door, shoving them out of the way when they reacted to his movements. One of them managed to get a grip on his arm as he bolted for the door, but in his adrenaline fuelled state he somehow managed to wrench his wrist free. His legs were like machines underneath him, carrying him faster than he’d ever ran in his life out of the door and away down the hallway.
Run.
Just run.
He didn’t know where, he didn’t know how he would keep this up. He just knew he needed to run as fast as he could for as long as he could. The corridor was a blur around him as he sprinted through, uncaring who or what was in his way. He barged past a woman carrying a coffee cup, causing her to spill it all over herself.
“Hey!” she shouted.
Ryland registered the interaction without any emotion. Run, just run.
He could hear the two security guys in pursuit. There was shouting. Probably at him. Probably by them. But he didn’t hear it properly. His body had never moved so quickly. Adrenaline vibrated through his muscles. He burst out of the nearest exit and around the side of one of the other mission command buildings. His best hope was to get to the perimeter of the site. If he could find a chink in the fencing, or some way to climb it…
“Stop right there!”
The accented voice was eerily close to him. He couldn’t afford to look behind him to confirm, but with renewed terror he sprinted onward, his life literally depending on being able to get away-
The air was knocked out of his chest as he landed on his front, hard. It took him a second to comprehend that someone had run straight into him, knocking him down in one fell swoop. Panic clawed at him as he tried to suck in a breath that wouldn’t come. Suddenly there was the weight of two men on top of him. “No!” he finally managed to cry out, clawing at the grass for purchase as he tried fruitlessly to wriggle out from under them. His right arm was gripped behind his back, forcing his face further into the ground. His left arm followed soon after. “Don’t do it!” he pleaded. He had nothing left. He fought as hard as he could, but the guards on top of him were Russian soldiers, and weren’t speaking to him.
Suddenly Carl was there, hopping off the back of a truck along with a bunch of other security and medical people.
“Carl!” he shouted, desperately vying for the man’s attention. Once Carl saw what was happening he’d put a stop to it…
The man he’d come to consider one of his closest friends walked over, Ryland’s view of him slanted ninety degrees. “You know who you are,” was all he said.
Ryland half groaned, half screamed, the realisation that this was in fact, happening, washing over him in a suffocating wave of panic, betrayal and pain.
“Don’t do it,” he cried. “Don’t do it!”
No one listened.
From the corner of his eye he saw the medical officer approaching, needle in hand. Gloved fingers were on his tear-stained neck before he could stop them.
“Don’t do it!” he screamed, voice breaking.
The needle pierced his skin.
He didn’t know if it was his mind or body that gave out first. He felt the fight draining out of him, slowly slumping deeper into the ground where he was pinned. A lightheaded sensation overcame him, until all he could focus on was the dizziness behind his eyes, and a nauseous feeling in his throat.
He was aware of hands all over his body. Turning him, rolling him. He was on a stretcher - possibly? Being carried? The rumble of a vehicle underneath. A breathing mask fitted over his face. Everything was blurry. He summoned the very last ounce of strength he possessed to turn his head.
The sky had brightened. It dazzled his half closed eyes. The last view he had of Earth before darkness overtook him was somewhere far in the distance, where a thin rainbow banded across the blue.