Chapter Text
"Eye movement detected. Cognition assessment: What is 2+2?"
"....What?"
"Answer incorrect. What is 2+2?"
His head aches with a pounding that he's never felt before in his whole life. He feels like he's been asleep for years. His limbs ache, and wires wind around his hands and feet. He's in a sterile looking room - a hospital, perhaps? This would be the most likely conclusion - Except for that something doesn't feel quite right.
He groans, and lifts his head up to the window with an embarrassing amount of effort and a groan.
The infinite expanse of space stares back.
Uh-oh.
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His head is splitting. He stumbles from the bed he woke up from. Tubes rip from his body. That hurts.
A thin red line of blood splatters from his hand to the floor, almost like-
Parrot stares at his phone, his eyes glued to the screen as the news channel showed an image of a thin red line against black.
“We are now just minutes away from our first look at the samples from the Petrova line! Ladies and gentlemen, we are making history here. Now let’s hear what the director of the Petrova Taskforce himself has to say-”
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Parrot notices two bunks next to him, each covered by white sheets. He rips them off.
Two corpses stare back at him.
Oh, god.
His head splits, and he sinks to the ground.
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“Who wants to play a game of the beanbag is lava?”
“Lava! Lava! Lava! Lava!” His students chanted.
“Who can tell me the speed of light?” Twelve kids raised their hands.
“Olivia!” He tossed her the beanbag to.
“Quick, it's burning your hands!”
“Uhhh, a billion kilometers per hour!”
“Yes!”
Olivia tossed the beanbag back to him. “Mr. Twice, what’s the Petrova line?”
“Uhh, pass.”
“You can’t pass.”
“My mom says we're all going to starve because of it.”
“My dad says it's fake.”
Parrot sighed.
“Okay guys,” he said, taking red tape from his desk drawer and hanging it between the models of the sun and Venus that dangled from the classroom ceiling. “About a year ago, somebody called Irina Petrova discovered a line of infrared light between our sun and Venus, and since then, our sun has gotten a little less brighter. That’s it.”
“So no big deal,” Olivia shrugged.
“It’s- it's a medium deal. It's a medium to small deal.” Like the middle schoolers they are, his kids soon moved on to asking about other things that were more important to them, like when their homework was due and what they were going to learn next lesson.
After they file out of the classroom, Parrot sat back in his chair and stared up at the model of the solar system and the thin red line now in it, rolling the miniature telescope on his desk between his fingers when his door opened, and an unfamiliar man with dark hair and and glasses entered.
“Doctor Parrot Twice?”
“...Maybe.”
“Did you write this?” The man held up a paper. Parrot squinted. An analysis of water based- Oh.
“That was a long time ago.”
“Do you stand by what you wrote?” The man picked his model telescope and inspected it.
“I was fired for standing by what I wrote.”
“You were fired for calling the leading expert in molecular biology a staggering waste of carbon at the UNESCO conference in Denmark."
“....”
The man followed him out to the parking lot.
“Dr Twice, we need your help.”
“I- I’m just a teacher.”
“You have a doctorate in molecular biology.” A tall, military-looking man came up to stand behind Wifies. This didn’t seem good.
“Sorry, I didn't catch your name?...”
“It's Flame.”
“Do you really believe life doesn't require water to exist?” Wifies questioned.
“Life on Earth might, but a completely different species that evolved on a completely different planet would have different conditions and requirements for life.”
“But listen, I’m sure there are thousands of people more qualified than me. So-”
“It survives on the surface of the sun. Does it sound like a water-based life form to you?”
Before he followed Wifies into the black SUV, he paused to look at Flame.
“The sun’s dying.”
“Yeah.”
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Parrot was not sure what to make of this. He was standing in a giant laboratory, surrounded by all the pieces of equipment he could possibly dream of, behind a ten-inch thick window of glass in a giant hazmat suit.
“Wifies, is all of this actually necessary?”
“This is an extraterrestrial sample. We have no idea how it may interact with the human body.”
“Wait. Am I expendable, bro? Is that why you guys chose me?”
“That's not the only reason.”
“So you guys don't care, uh, if I die. Great.” Parrot joked, but Wifies took his hand off the microphone button and turned to the officials behind him. “Wait a second, you guys have to discuss it?”
“The consensus for now is that it would be better if you didn't die.”
“...I appreciate that.”
“Also, the lab is filled with argon. Try not to rip your suit.”
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“Dude, nothing is getting through them. IR light, gamma rays, visible light, nothing.” Parrot threw his hands up in exasperation. The officials in the room that had been watching him intently at the beginning were now all half-asleep. One of them was reading a newspaper.
“Alright, I've wanted to do this all day.” He took out a nanosyringe and poked it into the Astrophage.
The black dot turned clear.
Parrot threw his hands up in victory.
“It’s a cell!”
Wifies jerked to attention behind the glass. “It’s a cell. Wake up, IT’S A CELL!”
“This is- this is first contact, dude!” Parrot couldn’t believe it. “Yes! Let's go- Uh oh.”
“What?”
“It died.”
“...”
“This is good, guys. Now we can find out what it's made of.” Parrot put the sample in, and before long the results are there for him to read out to the room.
“Oxygen, …hydrogen.”
“Oh.”
“It's made, almost entirely out of hydrogen.”
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It was a little crushing to know that the one chance he'd had to prove himself right was gone, but he found he didn't care all that much. Parrot had left high academia years ago, and now he was much happier in a classroom.
On his first day back, a kid’s voice piped up. Abby.
“What’s happening to the sun?”
“The whole class suddenly grew much more attentive.
“My dad says it’s not a big deal,” Michael said.
“My dad says it’s a government conspiracy,” said Tamora.
“Okay…” Parrot sat back down at the edge of his desk. “So there’s algae in the ocean, right, and now there’s sort of a space algae growing in the sun.”
“Astrophage?” said Harrison.
“Yeah.”
“Astrophage. And it’s growing on the sun. Or near it. People aren’t sure.”
“So what’s the problem?” Michael asked. “Algae in the ocean doesn’t hurt us. Why would algae on the sun?”
“Astrophage is starting to absorb a lot of the sun’s energy. Just a tiny percentage. But that means Earth gets a bit less sunlight. And that’s a problem.”
“So it’ll be a little colder? Like a degree or two?” Abby asked. “What’s the big deal?”
“You guys know about climate change, right? How our CO2 emissions have caused a lot of problems in the environment?”
“My dad says that’s not real,” says Tamora.
“...It is. Anyway. All the environmental problems we have from climate change? They happened because the world’s average temperature went up one and a half degrees. That’s it. Just one and a half degrees.”
“How much will this Astrophage stuff change Earth’s temperature?”
“...We don’t know. But if it breeds like algae does, at about that same speed, Earth’s temperature could drop ten to fifteen degrees.”
“What’ll happen?”
“It’ll be bad. Entire species - will die out because their habitats are too cold. The ocean water will cool down, and it might cause an entire food-chain collapse. So even things that could survive the lower temperature will starve to death because the things they eat all die off.”
Parrot resisted the sinking urge to put his hands in his hair.
“A lot of livestock will die. And it’s worse than that. On land, crops will fail. The food we eat will become scarce. When that happens, the social order breaks down and-” Parrot stopped himself there. These are kids. Why is he going this far?
“How- How long before this happens?”
“Climatologists think it’ll happen within the next thirty years,
Just like that, all the kids relaxed.
“Thirty years?” Trang laughed. “That’s forever!”
“It’s not that long…” Parrot says. But to a bunch of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, thirty years may as well be a million.
Thirty years. Parrot lookeed at their little faces. In thirty years they’d all be in their early forties. They would bear the brunt of it all. And it wouldn’t be easy. These kids were going to grow up in an idyllic world and be thrown into an apocalyptic nightmare.
They were the generation that would experience the Sixth Extinction Event.
Parrot felt the pit of his stomach cramp. It was a room full of children. Happy children. And in the next thirty years, they were going to starve.
Parrot could not let this happen.
“I have to go do something.” He blurts, taking his bag. “The rest of this class is study hall. Stay in your seats.”
He sprinted down the hallway, world spinning around him.
Parrot ran red lights and got to the lab they’d been in as fast as he could. When he stumbled into the parking lot, out of breath, Wifies stared at him.
“What are you here for?”
“Leave me some samples,” He blurted before anything else. “I'll- I’ll study them. I can find out more. I’ll work on it.”
“No.”
“No? Why- why not?”
"According to your notes, there were one hundred and seventy-four living Astrophage cells in the sample. And you killed one yesterday, so we're down to a hundred and seventy-three."
Wifies continued. “Every lab that's going to get a sample - and these are the top scientific institutions of every country - will get five or six cells each. That's it. We don't have enough for more. Those cells are the one hundred and seventy-three most important things on Earth right now, and analysis of them is going to determine if humanity survives. I’m not leaving samples here just so you can fix your bruised ego.
“It’s- it's not about me! It's not. It's about my kids,” Parrot can barely breathe.
“You have no children.”
“Yes, I do! Dozens of them. They come into my classroom every day. And if I do nothing about this, all of them, all of them, they're all- they're all gonna starve in thirty years.”
Wifies stared at him, his expression unreadable.
“You get three cells. Plus the one you killed.”
“Get to work, Dr. Twice. The world is counting on you.” Then he tossedParrot his own model telescope. When had he taken that?
“It’s all yours.”
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Parrot has to do this for his kids.
They’re not his kids. But they're his kids.
First things first, he checks the control panels.
There are four unmanned probes in the system, labeled Beetles. They are vaguely beetle shaped, so…
Each of them has about five terabytes of storage. Why would this ship have probes with so much…
Oh, crap.
Parrot’s out in space. He’s another star system. He doesn't know how much fuel it took to get here, but it was probably a lot. Sending a ship to another star probably took an absurd amount of fuel. Sending that ship to another star and bringing it back would take ten times as much fuel.
He checks the fuel panel to refresh his memory.
REMAINING: 20,862 KG
CONSUMPTION RATE: 6.043 G/S
The consumption rate was 6.045 grams per second before. So it’s gone down a little bit. And the fuel amount went down too. Basically, as the fuel gets consumed, the total mass of the ship goes down, so it needs less fuel per second to maintain the constant acceleration. Okay, that all makes sense.
He has no idea what the Hail Mary’s mass is, but to be able to shove it along at 1.5 g’s of acceleration on a few grams of fuel per second…Astrophage is amazing stuff.
Anyway, Parrot doesn’t know exactly how the consumption rate will change over time (He could work it out, but that was complicated). So for now he’ll just approximate it to 6 grams per second. How long will that fuel last?
Parrot does the math.
He will run out of fuel in about forty days.
Parrot doesn't know what star that is, but it’s not the sun. And there’s just no way to get from any other star to Earth with just forty days of accelerating at 1.5 g’s. It probably took years to get here from Earth - which might be why he was in a coma. Interesting.
Anyway, all this can only mean one thing: The Paragon isn’t going home.
This is a one-way ticket. Those beetles are his way of getting information back to Earth.
There’s no way Parrot has a radio transmitter powerful enough to broadcast several light-years. That wouldn't even be possible to build. So he has these little “beetle” ships with 5 terabytes of information each. They’ll fly back to Earth and broadcast their data. There’s four of them for redundancy. He’s probably supposed to put copies of my findings in each one and send them all home. If at least one survives the journey, Earth is saved.
Parrot is on a suicide mission. The beetles get to go home, but his road ends here.
He must've known this when he volunteered. Everyone on the ship must've.
Parrot is going to die out here. And he’s going to die alone.