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“I wish we had met when the world wasn't ending.”
Eva Stratt sits in the cold, sterile waiting room, fluorescent lights buzzing above her. A poster hangs on the wall proclaiming the optimistic success of the Hail Mary mission, a diagram of the rocket and flight path, with a list and pictures of the astronauts on board.
The names on the list are wrong, because it had been designed and printed a month ago.
Ryland Grace lays in front of her, chest rising and falling in his medically-induced sleep. The machines monitoring him beep in regular intervals. He is wearing the mission jumpsuit, with golden wings and his name hastily embroidered.
“History is filled with unnecessary violence,” she says to the empty air. “I am from East Germany, Grace. I imagine you can put those pieces together. Growing up, I saw it all around me. You are American, so you do not know what it was like to have the scars of war still so present all around you. It was why I went into history for my undergraduate. I thought I might be able to understand it better. What I found was that people kill for stupid and meaningless reasons, and it happens again and again and again, because all these forward-thinkers do not bother to look back on it all and realize they are making the same mistakes that have been made a hundred times over. That is why I…pivoted. I was naive. An optimist, if you could believe it. I believed I could make a difference.”
She sighs heavily, world-weary, leaning forward in the chair. The plastic leather squeaks beneath her.
“Maybe I have, though I don't think they will write my name in the history books. Men write those books. But what I have been doing here, what I have been fighting for, is to keep the death toll to a minimum. People are going to die. There are going to be wars, I'm certain, over food and resources and scarcity. The rich will screw the poor and keep more to themselves than they need. That is the way it goes. But I hope the blood on my hands has prevented it from worse. I hope…” she inhales sharply. “Well, I hope. That's the long and short of it.”
She stares at his face, calm in sleep, his glasses askew on his nose. There is no terror, no horrified, animalistic pleas for mercy, no running away, no tears. He just sleeps.
“But I wish it hadn't been you. You could have left the project. When you discovered that Astrophage had water in it, I thought that was the end of it. That was where your expertise ended. But you came back. You insisted on working with the samples more, that you could do more. Nobody else had insisted like that. I still do not know why you did, but you did. And then you discovered how to breed it before any of my teams of experts working day and night.”
“You were brilliant. Stupid, immature, impossibly stubborn, but brilliant. I read your thesis. I read the transcripts of the conference. You were so passionate, so desperate. You called somebody a staggering waste of carbon. For a man who doesn't swear, you were surprisingly creative in your insults,” she continues, a huff of laughter in her voice. She pauses. “And I read your parents obituaries, dated just months before. I read your student transcripts where teachers noted a history of bullying and concerns at your lack of friends, that skipping two grades left you isolated and ostracized. We were similar in that regard. Maybe that is why, despite our differences, we understood each other so well.”
She goes silent. The silence stretches out between them like light-years drawing them further and further apart.
When she speaks again, her voice is steady, but thick with emotion. “You became the heart and soul of the Hail Mary and you didn't even realize. You were staggeringly oblivious to it all. You were the second-in-command and didn't know why you were in so many meetings. When I said you did not have family, that is only true on paper. It was here. It was the Hail Mary. It was–”
Her voice catches and breaks as she wails. “Why did it have to go so wrong?” she cries. “I had contingencies. I had a plan, everything was in order. All because of a stupid mistake, a conversion error–”
She swears between hiccuping sobs, a long string of German that she knows Grace would not understand and be affronted by if he were ever given the translation. She cries until her tears run dry, and sobs dryly long past. She sobs until there are footsteps in the hallway and a knock on the door. She wipes her tears away as she looks up.
Carl stands in the doorway, his face solemn. “We're ready to go. They're going to bring him up to the ship. The weather's clear and all final checks have been performed.”
Eva nods, scrubbing at her face. “Okay. Thank you. I was just…”
He nods. “I get it. That's why I'm here, too.”
She runs a hand through her hair, smoothing out the frazzled mess. She'll have to go to the bathroom to properly get her appearance back in order before she runs to the mission control room for the launch.
“He was a good man,” she says after a moment. “I only wish he had realized it sooner.”
“Past tense already? He's not dead yet, Stratt.”
Her jaw clenches and her voice goes tight. “Not yet.”
She lets her gaze linger on the man lying before her, his face peaceful and calm, as if he were just asleep and dreaming, not in a medically-induced coma and being sent to his death. Then she turns on her heel and marches out the door.
Carl steps up to the side of the bed. “Hey. I'm not sure what she said to you. Hopefully it wasn't too much, you know how she is. She cares about you, you know. Would never tell you to your face, but…” he trails off, sighing. “Yeah, you get it. We're not supposed to send you up with too many personal items. There's concern about triggering memories through the drug and that you'll sabotage the mission. We all know you wouldn't actually, you're not that kind of guy, but we gotta follow procedure. Between you and me, as much as she acts like she's the dictator of the world, she's got every government breathing down her neck for every choice she makes. The point is, uh, we snuck some stuff, anyways, added the weight to other things in order to get it in there. I'm not sure where it's hidden on the ship, but I helped pack it. We got letters and drawings from your kids, photos, that kind of thing. I hope you find it.”
Carl looks up as somebody approaches– a team of doctors and nurses ready for transport.
“You're going to do great,” he says. “You're the smartest guy I know, and I know a lot of smart guys. We all wish things had gone different, but for what it's worth, I don't doubt you for a second. I'll see you in the stars, Dr. Grace. Just know I'm looking up at you from all the way back on Earth.”
He squeezes Grace’s hand before taking a step back for the team to approach. He watches as they whisk him away, down the hallway and out of sight.
A million miles and several Earth-years away, Grace wakes up on the Hail Mary, en-route to Erid. He blinks through the sleepy haze as he stares up at the ceiling of the Hail Mary.
Had that been a dream? It didn't feel like one.
He remembers it like he was underwater, the voices distant and hazy, but clear enough for him to understand. He's read about this, he knows it's possible for comatose people to have some muddied recollection of things said to them while they were unconscious, or even to have perfect memory of it all. It didn't feel like his imagination. He didn't think his imagination would have ever imagined… Stratt crying.
“Grace awake? Grace okay? Face leaking in sleep.”
Rocky taps his chest. He's taken to wearing his xenonite suit and cuddling near Grace to watch him sleep. Grace had complained at first, but he had acquiesced embarrassingly quickly. Human touch was really important for mental health and the warmth of Rocky’s suit was pleasant and– okay, whatever. It was fine. He couldn't be blamed for being kind of a clingy cuddler when he was stranded in space.
“I'm okay, Rock,” he says, wiping his face, blinking away tears he hadn't realized were there.
“Nightmare? Human brains strange. Simulate bad things happening when supposed to be resting. Inefficient.”
“Not a nightmare, no. Uh,” he sighs, stretching. Rocky cringes away from him as his spine cracks, muttering about how gross it is. “You know how we talked about how some dreams can be memories? It was a memory, I think. It's weird, because I would have been unconscious at the time, but sometimes, because our brains are still active even when we're unconscious, things sort of…bleed through. It felt real, but dreams can feel real. I'm not a hundred percent sure if it was real.”
“Maybe-memory-nightmare?”
“It wasn't a nightmare. It wasn't a bad memory,” Grace sits up, propping the pillow behind him, running a hand through his hair as he mulls over the dream– memory– in his mind. “Well, it was bad. But not, like, scary bad, which is what nightmares usually are. Sad. Very sad. It was right before I was sent to space.”
Rocky goes quiet. He doesn't like talking about how Grace was sent to space. They've long since had the conversation about the circumstances. Rocky had been very angry and upset at Earth for a while, even after Grace had explained the desperation and complications, the explosion just a week before launch. Rocky had seemed to eventually understand, but Grace was still a little worried he had drastically ruined intergalactic public relations for Earth. Whoops.
Besides, Grace was still dealing with his own tumultuous feelings about the whole thing. He understood rationally that it had been the only real choice, but that didn't take away the terror and betrayal he felt. It had also really shaken his sense of identity– he had been operating for months under a false assumption of his own bravery and heroism, and that had weirdly made things easier to deal with. Finding out how terrified he had actually been, that he had been dragged kicking and screaming…it shook the foundation of who he understood himself to be, and he was still struggling to put the pieces together. There was a split between his pre-coma and post-coma selves. Sometimes he didn't feel at all like the Ryland Grace on Earth. Sometimes he didn't even feel like a person.
“Very sad,” Rocky finally says. He maneuvers himself next to Grace, saddling up against his side. Grace throws an arm around him and idly rubs a pattern up and down the xenonite suit as he thinks. “Talk about it. Good to talk. Help to get feelings out there. Thrum.”
“Humans don't like to talk about it.”
“Stupid!”
“Yeah, it probably is. Therapists would agree with you.”
“New word.”
“Uh, like a brain doctor, but not a neurologist. We've talked about those. Therapists are more for processing emotions and feelings, or for dealing with the symptoms of certain brain conditions that affect those areas. Certain illnesses affect neurochemistry. People take medication for it to help balance out the chemicals, but it usually doesn't fix it completely. So therapists are doctors who help people…like you said, get emotions out there. Process them. It's also just good in general. I'm kind of…particularly bad at doing that, though. I'm very bad at verbalizing how I feel. It ended more than one relationship.”
“So when Grace have nightmares and say talk about it is not important, Grace lying? Bad! Bad!” Rocky throws two of his limbs in the air in outrage, stomping angrily.
Grace laughs. “Not– okay, probably a little, but sometimes nightmares are just silly made-up things that don't actually have anything to do with anything real! Or they're memories that aren't actually important. At least one of those nightmares was, like, me being chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Do you– that's a prehistoric–”
“Rocky knows. Rocky watch Jurassic Park.”
“Well, that's not the most accurate source of information.”
“Also read Wikipedia,” Rocky says, waving his claw dismissively, a gesture he's almost certainly picked up from Grace. “Point is, Grace lie. Will make Grace talk about dreams every time, now.”
“Most dreams we don't even remember!”
“Bad human memory. Fine. Will make Grace talk about dreams when face leaks in sleep.”
“Fair enough.”
“Talk about sad-memory-dream. Why sad, question?”
Grace cringes. He'd kind of hoped to gloss over that, but Rocky was stubborn and had an eidetic memory. “Um. Okay. Well, again, I'm not sure it was a memory, because I wasn't…awake. We were put into a long sleep for the space travel, but I was put into one a little bit before, because…you know, the whole ‘ran away and threatened to sabotage the mission’ thing. It was of a couple people talking to me while I was asleep. Um, Stratt and Carl. Stratt was the director of the project, you know her, and Carl was a friend of mine who also worked on it.”
“Stratt. Yes. Mean science lady. Sent Grace to space.”
Rocky does not like Stratt. In fairness, Grace hasn't explained much about her besides that she was in charge and had been the one to make the call so send him to space. Talking about Stratt was difficult, because Grace still had a lot of complicated feelings about her, so he had avoided the subject altogether. It was hard to articulate she was sort of my friend but I was never sure if she liked me or not and then she shot me into space.
But Rocky was right. Talking things out was helpful, even if Grace hated it.
“She did. But she was also…” Grace sighs. “I mean we weren't friends. Not exactly. Honestly, neither of us had the time. I guess even Carl and I weren't exactly friends. We were all just working so much back then, pretty nonstop, so the proximity meant you were seeing the same people over and over, and there were people you got along with more than others. Like when you're in school or at a job, there's a difference between a favorite coworker and somebody you choose to spend time with. Do Eridians have that?”
“Similar concept. Yes. Continue.”
“So, we were kind of friends, but she always had kind of a wall around her. Metaphor. Emotional distance. I think it would have made her job more difficult to invest emotionally, because she was…like, all these big decisions had to be made, but nobody wanted to be the one to make them because they were so difficult and there was no good answer. Because if one country makes a choice and that has consequences, then that could start a war with another country, and even though it doesn't make sense to have a war when the whole world is dying and we should be working together, humans are messy and petty and territorial. So instead, they all picked her to be the one to make the calls, so that later they could all point at her and pin the blame for any fallout. I guess I don't…” he blinks in realization. “Huh. I guess I never asked how exactly she was assigned to that role. I wonder if she had a choice.”
He swallows, saving that particular emotional rabbit hole for another time. “Anyways. The point is, in the memory, she was talking to me. Like, saying goodbye. She was talking about why she made the choice she did, but also…”
Emotion wells in his chest and closes his throat tight. He hadn't realized how much he felt about this memory. He has to take a steadying breath and blink back some tears.
“She said she wished we had met under different circumstances. That we were similar in a lot of ways, that we understood each other. She said that I didn't have family on paper, but my family was the people on the Project. She–” his voice cracks, no longer able to keep his emotion at bay. “She cried. I don't– I know I kind of cry a lot but I'm a bad point of reference. Eva Stratt doesn't cry. She doesn't– she didn't–” his voice warbles. “I didn't know she cared.”
Grace laughs tearfully, far past the point of being able to keep himself from crying. But Rocky doesn't say anything. He just sits and waits for Grace to be able to pull himself together enough to keep talking.
“And then, um, Carl comes in, and he also says some stuff. How he believed in me, how–” he inhales and exhales deliberately, trying to steady himself. “How he would be looking up at the stars at me. And… well, I guess this might prove this to be just be a dream. He said he and Stratt left me some more personal stuff. That there had been concern about personal mementos triggering memories from the amnesia, but that they'd snuck stuff on anyways. I've been through the fuel bays and storage, so I don't know where that would have been. I guess it's just my brain making stuff up to…”
Grace trails off as he watches Rocky sit up very suddenly.
“What would it be, question? Duffel bag like with clothes?”
“Probably smaller, if it had to be snuck on. Uh, maybe a box?” Grace says, miming the size of a shoe box. Rocky chirps, jumping down from the bed and scurrying across the floor, much to Grace’s complete and utter confusion. He scrambles to chase after him, tripping over the blankets as he tries to keep up.
“What are you–”
“Box!” Rocky yells. “Has been driving Rocky crazy. Could not figure out engineering purpose. Design of Mary have purpose, function. Make sense. This not make sense. Thought maybe was weird human culture thing, but Grace never mention. Did not think it was worth bringing up. Maybe cultural taboo.”
Rocky taps aggressively at a panel on the wall next to a vent. “In here. Screws. Open!”
Grace stops in his tracks as his brain catches up with him. Rocky said there was a box hidden in the wall, lining up with what Carl had said. Which meant that– if this was the collection of hidden mementos– that his dream had been a memory, not his subconscious trying to make peace with things.
“Grace heart rate go very fast very sudden,” Rocky says, pausing in his furious tapping. “Grace okay?”
“Yeah– I just– yeah, let me get a screwdriver,” he says, fumbling through a drawer to find one. His hands shake as he kneels on the ground and begins to unscrew the panel. It is labeled as an access panel for the vents in case of repairs. He dismisses Mary’s warnings and error notifications telling him not to do this when no maintenance is required. This might be nothing. This might just be what it says on the lid and he's getting his hopes up for nothing.
He loosens the last screw and but the panel still stays propped up against the wall, not revealing its interior contents, yet.
Grace feels like he's going to puke.
“Grace open!” Rocky says, impatient.
“It's– I need a minute,” Grace says, standing suddenly to his feet. His head spins at the movement and he stumbles, leaning heavily on the counter. He can't quite manage to get a breath in as his vision swirls, thoughts racing far too quickly in his mind. He feels a tap against his shin and looks down to see Rocky. Grace curls back down to the floor and lets Rocky wrap his limbs around his shoulders as Grace clings back, pressing his face against the smooth xenonite.
“Sorry,” he mumbles as Rocky rubs a claw down his back. “Sorry. Stupid human brain.”
“Not stupid. If this is box, is proof friends cared. If not box, then Grace does not have proof and feels alone. Scared. Normal.”
That… was pretty much exactly what was running through his brain. Rocky was much smarter about this stuff than he was.
Grace takes a moment to just let himself be held as he collects himself, again. God, he really was a leaky space blob, but Rocky doesn't complain, making soothing hums and clicks that Grace can't translate. He waits until his heart rate begins to slow and his vision steadies, then leans back away from the embrace.
“Well,” he says. “No putting this off forever.”
He reaches for the panel, digging his fingernails in the seam and pries it off with ease. Sure enough, in that small hidden space, is a cardboard box. For Grace is written on the top of it, in Stratt’s unmistakable cursive handwriting.
He inhales sharply. So it had been a memory, after all.
“It's the box,” he says aloud, belatedly realizing Rocky wouldn't be able to see the writing. “Um. Let me see what's in it.”
He pulls the box towards him and opens the lid. It's filled to the brim. There's a flash drive set on the top, like what he had found with Ilyukhina and Yao’s duffels. He assumes it's probably the same idea, video messages and more photos from loved ones than could reasonably be printed out. He sets that aside for now, overwhelmed at even the idea of them, and sifts through the rest of the contents. There are a number of handwritten letters, from different team members, his students, even Marissa.
You dropped off the face of the planet you jerk, what about our weekly date? Though, I guess the fate of Planet Earth is probably more important than a diner steak, and Carl tells me you were kind of kidnapped into the whole thing in top-secrecy, so I can't be mad about you not texting.
He reads the first sentence and laughs as he skims through the letters, not having the emotional bandwidth to properly read any of them. There's a letter from Carl, though any letter from Stratt is notably absent. He kind of wishes she had written one, but he also doesn't know how he would have felt if she did. There are more photos of him, smiling with different crew members, a printed class photo from every school year he'd taught, a photo of himself and his parents from the year before they'd passed. There are drawings from his students. There's another one of his beanbags and a little plush fox he's had since childhood, vacuum sealed for space. Some of this stuff, he has no idea how they even tracked down in time for the launch, but they'd managed it.
He's fully crying by now, ugly tears rolling down his face as he sobs. He had been– he had been so afraid.
You didn't even have a dog, Stratt’s words had circled in his mind over and over, a thousand times, because it had been confirmation of his worst fears. That he'd had nobody on Earth who had truly cared if he was gone, no close friends, no partner, that he was worth more in space than he ever was on the planet he loved so deeply. But here it was laid out in front of him, that not only had she been lying, but that she was one of those people who would miss him.
He had known that she cared about the mission more than she let on, as much as she tried to maintain that cold and distant disposition. He remembers glimpses of humanity peeking through, the night of karaoke, the ice cream machine appearing in the cafeteria after he'd lamented to her about missing the boardwalk ice cream shop, the way she rolled her eyes and shook her head every time he walked into a meeting with a science pun on his shirt, but never told him to stop. She loved the Earth and was devoted to the cause, even when she had to destroy it for a chance at saving it. He remembers being cc’ed on long email chains before they had blown up the Arctic or paved the Sahara, to various zoos and wildlife preserves about saving and documenting as many species as they could. She didn't have to do that to save the world.
He just…he hadn't realized that he was a part of that equation. For as many rumors that swirled around the Vatt about his and Stratt’s relationship, he had never been a hundred percent sure where he stood with her, and he had been convinced she hadn't cared at all when she sent him to die.
You became the heart and soul of the Hail Mary and you didn't even realize.
“Oh, Stratt,” he whispers, cradling the box to his chest.
“What is in box, question?” Rocky asks, a petulant whine to his voice. Grace couldn't blame him for being curious. “Tell me!”
“Letters and photos and stuff. Oh, boy,” Grace wipes the tears from his eyes. “Um, we can go through it in a bit, I can read everything out loud but I should probably eat and get dressed and stuff, first.”
“Grace just putting it off because box makes him have big feelings.”
“Grace is putting it off because Grace is hungry and stinky and already dehydrated from crying so much,” he replies. “ I need a minute to process, Jeez, leave me alone. There's a lot of hormones and junk in my brain right now.”
“Fine,” Rocky grumbles, scurrying away.
Grace grins. “You know, in human culture, it's a bonding ritual to share a meal together,” he calls out as he gets a breakfast burrito. They're still early on in their journey, so he has real food he's rationing. “Do you want to watch?’
“Grace gross! Grace most disgusting thing in galaxy! Rocky wishes he never met disgusting alien!”
Grace cackles. “Love you too, buddy!”
Rocky makes a noise as he scurries further away in the ship. He still can sense Grace with his echolocation, but he does not like to see Grace eat up close. He had only watched once for science purposes and had found the act to be “disgust disgust disgust.”
Grace's laughter peters out as he looks down at the box he's still holding. It raises a lot of complicated feelings, and he's sure sorting through the contents will make him even more emotional, but for now, he's just glad to have it. It's proof that despite his fears, Earth had cared for him back.
He takes his burrito and sits down by the big window where he can see all the stars.
“You're looking at me in the stars, huh?” He says, pressing a hand against the glass. “Well, I'm looking, too.”