Chapter Text
It was a cold, wet morning. Clouds still darkened the sky, a stark reminder of the night of howling thunderstorms. She had never cared much for storms, or cold, for that matter. Bundled in a heavy sweater, she prepared a thermos of coffee and checked her car's status.
She had just enough time to stop by the pop-up lab and check that everything was in order for both the delivery sample collected by the Arclight Mission that splashed down the day before and for the arrival of their new scientist, who would hopefully be able to find the answers she and the rest of the world so desperately needed.
The world was gradually growing colder. So minuscule that no one would be able to tell, at least for now, but that would soon change. That, along with life as they all knew it to be. Crops would fail, animals would go extinct, and soon, the need for food and drive for survival would win out against cooperation and unity. Soon, in the coming future, societies would begin to collapse, and she would have to stand by and watch as famine turned to war. This was perhaps the very brink, the ledge before all of humanity fell over the edge of the world into chaos.
Eva Stratt never intended to become the director of Project Hail Mary. She studied history with a focus on international relations. A simple ESA administrator to director in less than a decade was a heavy responsibility, but the United Nations agreed that she was the only person intelligent and level-headed enough to take the lead. It was her job to find a solution by all means necessary. She was given total control, and she suspected it also would make her a nice scapegoat in the end, but the hope for humanity outweighed her singular life. Though, before that happened, she would use her power to do what others could not, would not. She would risk everything, had risked so much already, and now, she would have to risk more. On a middle school science teacher.
By 3:45, she was stepping out of the black SUV, looking up at Grover Cleveland Middle with nothing short of unease at the San Francisco fog and the remaining chill in the air. She knew it was in her head, the Earth wouldn’t start showing real signs of temperature dropping for at least another few years, but she hugged the coat around herself tighter.
“Director,” Carl, her assigned driver, began, “Do you need me to come with you?”
“No, can you just wait by the car. This should be quick.” Carl nodded once. Stratt turned back to the school, thinking back to the file she had read on Dr. Grace the night before, when she was presented with him as the only option for whom to first make contact with whatever was in the Petrova line.
His name had been left off all the lists of scientists when first beginning this world-changing project, and it made sense. Dr. Ryland Grace was a middle grade science teacher, not exactly doing hard-hitting research in a lab. But the moment the Petrova line was revealed to be made up of possibly living organisms, her lead scientist mentioned Dr. Grace’s name with a sigh, and she would come to find it, for good reason.
The scientist’s name was one of many Dr. Grace called out in his dissertation several years before. She was up half the night attempting to wrap her head around it. While she found the reading dense and somewhat incomprehensible at times, she found herself pleasantly surprised at the audaciousness of the prose. Anyone who could write and publish such veiled insults towards leading scholars in his own field must possess some degree of courage and intelligence.
She spent the other half of her restless night researching the man himself, finding footage of him calling another prestigious man “a staggering waste of carbon” at the UNESCO conference in Denmark. At that, she chuckled again to herself. Whoever this man was, he had just the right amount of passion to piss people off. And she liked that. She needed that. The world needed that if they were ever going to survive the next 30 years.
And so, she walked through the empty halls of the school until she found the room she was looking for: 113. She peeked in through the open door and saw a rather staggering classroom, seemingly filled to the brim with color and science material. Detailed planets hung from the ceiling, the walls were covered in science posters, some with equations, others with terrible science puns that even she understood.
“Knock knock.” She said, stepping into the room with easy authority and an upper hand on the man sitting haphazardly in his chair beneath what appeared to be the sun. She noticed the red tape, presumably the Petrova line, connecting the sun to Venus.
“Who’s there?” He replied easily, humor in his voice.
“Not good at jokes,” She replied, shaking her head.
“Not good at jokes, who?”
Her first impression of Dr. Grace was wondering if this was the same man she saw on the video taken years ago. As she began to explain herself and what she needed, she noticed a shift in Dr. Grace. He went from a casual ease to looking like an animal trapped in a quite small cage. This could not be the same man who believed in his own research so much that he was willing to insult some of the biggest names in science. He seemed unsure and, dare she say, modest about his research, nothing like the cocky, self-assured scientist she had been looking for.
Doubt started to seep its way in as she wondered if it was too late to fly in another scientist, but no. She had already decided Dr. Grace would be the man to look at the sample and so, she practically forced him into the car and into the lab. Once she made a decision, she stuck with it, another reason she was at the top of the list to run the project. This was humanity's last chance, a Hail Mary, if you will, and that meant she did not have the luxury of self-doubt and second-guessing. Her gut told her Dr. Grace would prove to be of some use, and she was rarely ever wrong.
She watched on with the rest of the higher-ranking officials as Dr. Grace ran test after test on the sample, ultimately able to come to the findings that they were in fact, alive, they could be killed, and they were made nearly entirely of water. Unexpected and probably a little heartbreaking for Dr. Grace, but Stratt was more focused on the speed at which he was able to find these answers and the levity he brought to the lab, even after finding out he was essentially an expendable guinea pig. Sure, she had sought him out because of his research, but, in all transparency, yes, he was correct in his assumption. Once it was determined not to kill him, she would be sending out the samples to scientists across the world, even to a few named in his tirades against the scientific community.
When she found him sitting outside the lab, clearly distraught, she again wondered how someone so intelligent could have so little faith in himself after being proven wrong once in an otherwise groundbreaking experiment with extraterrestrial organisms.
“Sorry if I overreacted in there, Just, uh, realizing I was wrong about the only original idea I ever had.” Stratt simply stared at him. She thought scientists were used to experimenting and getting things wrong every now and then. While she didn’t have much experience in being wrong, she thought she would probably handle it better than this man, who looked utterly defeated by a single-celled organism.
“Yeah. What else did you learn?” Stratt powered on, hoping for more from him. He had spent days in that lab, conducting experiments with some of the best technology in the world. If she could just find the same feeling in him when he was in the lab, puzzling out how to approach the being, maybe he could be someone she could work with.
There was no doubt about his intelligence. The minute he was placed in the lab, despite his protests, she could see it in his eyes: he belonged. He looked more and more like the passionate scientist from the video. She felt like she could see the cogs in his brain turning. Even if he so happened to be wrong about this organism not needing water, she still needed him. Not the Dr. Grace from the classroom, or even the defeated shell of a scientist sitting before her now, but the one from the lab. The one from over a decade ago, willing to defend himself.
“I have 347 other biologists in 21 countries mobilizing as we speak. So thank you for your help. I’m glad you didn’t die.” Stratt knew that if she wanted to, she could force Dr. Grace to join her team. She had already forced a few choice members of her development team through mild threats and her connections to the UN, but with him, she knew it would need to be his choice. Otherwise, she’d find herself having to drag along the version of Dr. Grace that would surely be of no help. She wasn’t quite sure how to ignite fire in him, but she would start where she knew many people couldn’t resist. With a challenge. With a suggestion that maybe he didn’t belong. That maybe 347 other biologists were smarter than himself.
To her great surprise, that did the trick. Dr. Grace asked to be given a chance, and Stratt, with a smug smile to herself, announced she had left him three dots. They had already been left in the lab with his name on them, of course, the call to pack everything up had only been a ruse. But she wouldn’t let him ever see her belief that he would come around and do what was right.