Chapter Text
“What is two plus two?”
I groaned and shifted slightly, though I could hardly move, for whatever reason. That couldn’t be good, but at the moment, my mind was focused more on a different thought.
Who the fuck was waking me up by asking math questions?
“What is two plus two?” The voice repeated.
Well, that was easy.
“Fff…”
Weird. It was hard to speak too. This was, I decided, just plain irritating.
“What is two plus two?”
“Fuck off.” I said, deciding it was more appropriate than four.
“Incorrect. What is two plus two?”
“Ff- Four!” I grumbled. There, would that shut whoever this was up? Of course I knew the answer. I didn’t need to be nannied like this.
“Correct. What is…” The voice suddenly got jumbled with a more distant echo of itself, asking the same question I’d just answered.
“Four, damnit!”
Then I heard two responses at once. A closer incorrect, and a more distant correct. Wait. Why were there two of them?
“What is the square root of eight?” said both voices, but I was trying to move, to sit up, rather than responding. This felt familiar, somehow. Not the voice, but waking up and struggling to get going for the day. Though… when had that happened?
More importantly, where was I?
The voice repeated its question– both of them did, but I ignored it. If I answered, it would probably find something else to ask.
Only… another voice rang out, one I could barely make out, whoever it was trying to answer the question I had ignored. It seemed they were having the same issues with speaking I did at first, and sounded masculine.
Still ignoring the other voice– which was probably not even human, come to think of it– I called out.
“Where the fuck are we?”
The response was quiet– I couldn’t quite make out what was being said.
“Louder. I don’t have superhearing, as much as I would like to.”
Gibberish. Unintelligible gibberish.
“Okay, I’ll come over to you.” I start moving again, fully intending to just walk over there despite the weakness I felt.
“Hostile intent detected.” Said the math questions voice.
“Wait! Shit! No-”
Robot arms, actual fucking robot arms, reached down from the ceiling and grabbed me, forcing me back into the position I’d woken up in. I felt a prick and then–
A bag rustled nearby.
I opened my eyes, still crusted over with sleep, and looked to the side. The top of a blonde head of hair appeared in my peripheral vision. At least I couldn’t hear any stupid math questions.
Someone had put a blanket over me, which was good, because… I had previously been unclothed. That was weird, waking up completely naked in a sterile room, especially because there was another occupant. There had been a bunch of tubes connected to me before, and I was relieved to realize they were all gone.
“H-hello?” I asked tentatively, the sound coming from my throat rough and scratchy.
The blonde next to me stood up and waved tentatively. A middle aged white guy, with glasses, though for some reason they were positioned oddly on his face, dangling just off his chin. He was holding a bag of skittles, and wore a t-shirt that had a diagram of the forces affecting a sphere on a slope, captioned “That is how I roll”. So. He was a nerd.
Why was I in this weird room with a skittle eating nerd? More importantly, who… was I?
First conclusion: I’d been kidnapped. This guy was either my kidnapper or another kidnappee. If that’s a word. I’m a botanist, not a linguist.
A botanist! There was something about myself. So I remembered something.
“I have no fucking clue what’s happening. Can you help with that?” I asked Blonde dude.
“Language.” Blondie said, seemingly reflexively, before blinking and following with more words. “Uh… I don’t know a ton myself. I was hoping maybe you would have answers, once you woke up.”
“I don’t even remember who I am.”
“Makes two of us. I can’t even access the rest of the ship until I remember my name.”
“The ship?”
“Yeah, uh… I did some experiments. With pendulums. Conclusion, we’re in space.”
“In space?!” Well, that’s not too surprising. I’ve been in space before. “I’ve been in space before?!”
“Have you?”
“Why am I back in space?”
Blondie squinted at me. Maybe that had something to do with the fact that he wasn’t wearing his glasses correctly. “Mark… Watney?”
“Who? Me? Why do YOU know MY name? I certainly don’t remember yours, unless it really is Blondie.”
“I don’t think so.” He shook his head, and his glasses almost fell off. “Wait. If Mark Watney is actually your name, maybe we can use it to access the rest of the ship.”
“Yeah. Just give me a moment.”
Blondie left the room, climbing up a ladder, while I got my bearings and some clothes. There’s casual clothes stored in the ship, along with what appear to be more official uniforms. They have nametags on them. Nametags, which probably have the names of us, the crew members. Did Blondie not think to look at these?
There are three different names: Watney, which is, apparently, my own surname, Yao, and Grace. I’ve only seen two people on the ship, but there’s also three beds including the one I woke up in. So…
I check the third bed. In it is a dead man, who looks like he’s been deceased for a while.
This brings up a lot of questions. First, how long have we been here? I don’t remember much of anything, but I definitely don’t remember the journey here. From what I can gather, it seems Blondie and I were both in medically induced comas. But why? Why take that risk, unless the journey was really, really long? It would not need to be that long… unless we were going further than ever before. All the way to Neptune, maybe– that would take a long time. Being stuck in a confined space for several years… well, it could drive the crew crazy.
The man in the bed before me, though, had not survived the coma. Yao, I figured. Meaning Blondie was Grace. Or it could be the other way around, and I was assuming wrong.
Grace was still working his way through his bag of skittles when I climbed the ladder and emerged into a room that looked like a lab. It was a large bag. I would have to convince him to share some with me.
“Dude, did you not see the names on the uniforms?” I asked.
“Uniforms?”
“Apparently not. Does Grace ring any bells?”
Blondie frowns and thinks for a moment. “That… sounds right.”
“Okay. How the hell did you remember my name but not your own?” Am I that important to this man? Are we lovers? No. No way. I can’t even come close to imagining that.
“There was… a lot of talk about you. I don’t remember why. I just remember seeing your name and face on tv before.”
“I’m famous?”
“Yeah. Don’t let it get to your head. Let’s see what the ship is hiding from us.” Grace went over to another ladder, and started to climb. A voice, the same vaguely feminine one that woke me the first time, spoke.
“What is your name?”
“Dr. Grace.” Blondie responded.
“So you’re a doctor, then? Don’t let it get to your head.” I interjected, before the robotic voice responded, repeating Grace’s name and allowing him access.
“Your first name is Ryland?”
“Unique. I know.” He said as he climbed the ladder. I soon followed, and we emerged into a new room, filled with screens. A control room, clearly. One of the screens has a display of the sun. I frowned. Why would we need something like that? To monitor our distance? Right, if that were the case it would be getting smaller. Maybe we could measure that.
“So… what do you remember?” I asked Grace.
“Petrova line.” He said, but that meant basically nothing to me.
“Pet- what now?”
“Petrova line… the line of infrared light from the sun to Venus. They took samples from it, and… the dust was moving. Like it wasn’t dust, but some sort of life form.”
I frowned. Life, in a magic line in space? That sounded like some sci fi nonsense. Or… it would, if I didn’t remember it.
“Shit! Holy shit!” I stood up from the couch. The people on the television screen stirred into a commotion, matched by everyone else in the room with me.
Space dust should not move like that. It was impossible. There wasn’t life in space. There wasn’t even life on Mars, unless I’d missed it. Unless all the Ares missions had. Here it was, though. Space life, supposedly, caught on camera.
The sun was dimming. There was a line connecting it to Venus. There was life in the line. What sort of nonsense reality had I stepped into?
Well. My life had been pretty full of nonsense for a while now.
“The sun is dying.” I said, remembering. “The fucking sun is dying!”
Grace only nodded. I wondered if he was stopping himself from commenting on my strong language again.
I looked at the display of the sun again, with new ideas as to what its purpose was. “So what are we supposed to be doing?”
“I haven’t remembered that yet.”
“So. This could be a vitally important mission, for the sake of the world, and neither of us remember what we’re even supposed to be doing? Oh! And Yao is dead. What the fuck happened?”
Grace flinched. “I’ve been trying to figure that out myself. It’s just… my memories are coming back slowly. Too slowly. We… might both have brain damage.”
“No shit.”
A very squishy meal and a bit of thinking later, I climb back up to the control room, where Grace still waits. The man is analyzing the display of the sun, looking contemplative.
His expression changes.
“That’s not our sun.”
“What?”
“The size– it’s different. It's too small to be Sol.” Grace looks at me, starting to panic. “We’re in a different star system.”
“What?” I go to look at the display. It’s… bigger than before. “We’re getting closer to it!”
“This– we’re so far from Earth, this is–” Grace’s breathing quickens. “I– we can’t be here! This is impossible! We haven’t even sent manned crews farther than Mars!”
“Woah, calm down, man.” I reached my hand out, but Grace stepped back– and promptly tripped over his own feet, crashing to the ground. He scrambled to his feet on his own before I could do anything, and started frantically engaging with the screens.
“Tau Ceti.” He said after a moment. “That’s Tau Ceti.”
“Tau Ceti?!” We’d achieved interstellar travel. But how? “No way. How would we build a ship that could get there within our lifetime?” Had the coma actually been a stasis, of some sort?
“A new fuel.” He turned to look at me. “Astrophage.”
I can almost hear a rushing in my ears. Grace is right. This is insane.
Wait.
“How much of that did we use getting here?” I ask warily.
Grace goes to check the fuel tanks, searching the displays before finally finding the right screen. He pauses, just looking at it. Seconds pass. A minute. Then two. Three.
Grace finally speaks at five.
“More than we have left.” He says, voice starting to waver. “Whatever the reason we’re here may be… Mark, we’re not going home.”
Well, shit. Not again.