Chapter Text
Rocky climbed gingerly back into the dormitory.
Here, at last, his nakedness caught up to him. The corpses weren’t exactly people anymore, but they were at some point, and standing there all alive and healthy with his bits in the (non-existent) wind felt a touch disrespectful.
So, he knew he was in space. He knew it had something to do with this astrophage business. He knew his name was Rocky, but the ship’s computer didn’t like that name, so he couldn’t get into the cockpit. He knew the ship had a cockpit, because for some reason, Rocky was pretty sure he built this ship. Or, well, designed it. It all looked like something he’d mocked up in a 3D render brought to life.
“Clothes,” he said out loud, half hoping the computer would take it as a command, half to prompt his own memory. “I need clothes.”
The storage compartment. They’d be in the storage compartment under the dormitory.
Rocky instinctively knew where it was. He crouched down and found the access panel, tried to wrench it open himself, then remembered he’d specifically designed it not to open that way since the compartment needed to be maximally airtight on the journey over.
Over to where? Still blank on that.
“Computer, open storage hatch,” he said.
The computer answered, and the air-tight seal released, the hatch rising enough that Rocky could get a grip on it.
The crew’s personal belongings were at the top. Smart packing. The first box was labeled in Russian, yet Rocky could read it. “Aleksandr Kulikov.” Rocky knew that name. Why did he know that name? Crap, maybe he was friends with the corpses. Maybe he was an astronaut.
So why couldn’t he shake the feeling that he wasn’t supposed to be here?
Probably the amnesia.
In any case, it certainly wasn’t his stuff. He wasn’t Russian, right? He set that box aside and pulled out the next one. Annie Shapiro. Again, familiar. But not him. Onto the next box.
Steven Darling.
“Ugh,” he recoiled from reading his own name in sterile print. Yeah, okay, that was why he went by Rocky. His name was kinda gross. Way too nerdy. Even if he was, objectively, probably a nerd. He could do complicated physics computations with pen and paper.
“Okay Steven,” he sneered. “Let’s see what you like to wear.”
He unzipped the container and opened it up. Everything had a sterile, non-smell smell to it. The clothes slowly bounced up a bit, now that they were out of their air-tight packaging, and there, at the top of the pile, was a single ring. Loose. Just sitting there.
“What the…” Rocky picked it up. The metal was cold to the touch. It was silver with a square, green gem inlaid in the center, not sticking out of the top, but level with the thick band. His hand started to shake, holding it.
This was his ring. It belonged on his left ring finger. He was… married? No. Engaged. To who?
A flood of memories. Undergrad astrology, using the telescope together at midnight. Walking home, shoulders shivering, a jacket offered. Bright green hair, sometimes blue, orange or pink on a rare occasion. A warm laugh and a pair of decisive brown eyes. Long phone calls, falling asleep to the sound of their voice. Move-in day, the musky smell of damp cardboard, somehow the best smell in the world. A place that was theirs. Half-finished crochet projects and a cat tangling up the yarn. Arms around his waist, pulling him back into bed.
Adrian.
The love of his fucking life.
As soon as he remembered them, it was like he never forgot at all. How could he? They meant everything to him.
He brought the ring to his finger, meaning to slot it into place, but something stilled him.
Adrian wasn’t here. Rocky was out in space with two corpses and Adrian wasn’t here.
Had something happened? Something he couldn’t remember?
Rocky felt a lurch in his chest. It felt like he should be crying, but he couldn’t, and he didn’t know why. A wall in his mind, blocking both the feeling and the reason behind it.
His hand trembled, pulling the ring back. He gave it another long look, then clasped it in his palm and decided not to put it on just yet.
Clothes. That’s right. He was trying to put clothes on. He should do that first.
…
“Adrian! Adrian, oh thank god, I thought—you don’t want to know what I thought,” Rocky sobbed into the phone.
“I know, I’m sorry. If I could have contacted you any sooner, believe me, I would have.”
“Where are you now? It sounds noisy.” Rocky held the phone closer to his ear.
“I’m not allowed to say.”
“Not allowed to—”
Rocky’s eyebrows shot up. He ran to the office and opened his computer. It probably only took him a few seconds to open an audio program and hit record, but it felt like a lifetime with his heart pounding in his ears.
He put Adrian on speaker and didn’t say a word about it.
“You’re alright though, right?” he asked.
“Yeah. Mostly.”
There was a voice in the background. Adrian laughed.
“Yes, I’m fine. Physically and mentally. I’m not here under duress," they said.
“Sounds like you’re under duress,” Rocky said. “Are you sure there’s not a gun pointed to your head?”
“Be serious, or they’re gonna hang up the call.”
Rocky laughed. Something caught in the back of his throat, and the sound turned to a sob.
“You’re—are you—can you tell me anything?” he said.
“It’s… for the same thing I was doing before. A little more serious now. I should be able to tell you more soon, uh, at least, about when I’ll be back.” Adrian paused. It sounded like they were tapping something. The recording program was picking it up. “I convinced them to let me call you just to say I was okay, since I figured you’d probably be making a stink about it.”
“Mm-hm. I was gonna put up posters with your face on it and offer a reward,” Rocky joked. There was more background noise. Wherever Adrian was, it sounded big and busy. Like a warehouse or a factory.
“Aww, you’re sweet.”
Rocky’s heart tumbled in his chest. He wanted to reach through the phone and pull them out by the hand. He wanted them home, damnit.
“Okay, they’re telling me to get off the phone, now. I really am okay though! Please don’t worry. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
Click.
Rocky stood completely still for a long, shuddering moment. Then he sucked in a breath, wiped his eyes, and plopped down in front of the computer. Those taps were important. He couldn’t pick it up in the moment—too focused on Adrian themselves—but he recognised the rhythm.
They left him a message in code.
—
Whatever this code was, it wasn’t going to be so easy to decipher.
Rocky flicked his pen back and forth between his fingers. He’d received a series of blips from the Blip-A. That’s what he was calling the noises. They just sounded like blips.
The spacecraft itself he was enamored with. It was so strange and nonsensical. Like nothing any human would design. He wanted to know so badly how it worked, but in order to do that, he had to figure out how to communicate with the aliens inside it.
Because it had to be aliens. Right?
Rocky played the first sound again. A quick burst of sound, slightly reverberating at the end, but over within a second. He played it slower. Then slower. Slower, still.
It definitely sounded like there was feedback or reverberation, but that could have just been poor sound quality or due to the shape of the room it was made in. It didn’t have to mean anything.
The next sound was essentially the same. The same starting pitch, the same duration. Only the reverberations sounded different.
Okay, so the reverb meant something. Rocky could roll with that.
What’s the point in communicating with one singular note if the only thing different about it is the way it sounds like it’s knocking around in a bunch of different rooms?
“Echolocation!” Rocky shouted, sitting up ram-rod straight. He stuck his pen behind his ear and opened ten tabs on his laptop, pouring into every resource on echolocation he could find. Was there some way to capture the shape of a room or an object by hitting sound against it? Would that even be a transferable unit of communication?
Rocky ground his teeth together, curling ever closer to his computer as he found nothing, nothing, and more nothing.
Finally, he closed all the stupid articles and textbooks and brought up his beloved rendering program. At least Stratt had made sure to upload his heavily modded version. This digital playground was Rocky’s second brain. When he couldn’t follow his own thoughts, he brought them to life here, in a glorious greyscale grid.
“Soundwaves… how do I model soundwaves…” he mumbled to himself.
This was going to take hours, maybe days, but if it worked, he should win a Nobel Prize. Or a second one, considering the mission itself certainly made him deserving of the award.
…
Rocky was positively giddy about the tunnel.
Talking to Grace over the radio was a trial and a half. He did find a way to translate the echo-grams into 3D images, but it nearly killed his computer ten times. He didn’t have any hope of reliably sending back one of his own, so he drew shapes on the scale in GarageBand, like a pre-schooler. Grace got the idea, though, and they established some baseline vocabulary that way. Then Grace asked how to send something to his ship, and Rocky showed him where the airlock was by, well, stepping out of it. He waved. No one waved back.
He’d elected to call the device he received an echo-graph. It was basically just a cylinder with a few dials wrapping around the width of it, which when twisted could set a timer to take an echo-gram. A sound picture. It captured 360 degrees of view, so Rocky was in every echo-gram.
Grace, somehow, was never in the ones he sent. Rocky could tell from the sharp edges the models rendered, he was taking them in some kind of sound-proof box. Like a backdrop for a photography set.
That was how Rocky could finally get his ideas across about the tunnel. He knew Grace could build things. He saw the ship parts moving stuff around on the hull before he got the first radio signal—probably bringing the antenna inside for Grace to modify before sticking it back on. Rocky had a guess that all the strange filament around the ship was there as extra building material. The whole design screamed that this was an engineering species.
But Grace, unfortunately, was not an engineer.
He had a lot of questions. Concerns. Rocky explained with the models of their ships he’d printed using filament of his own: plastic wires melted down by the 3D printer.
Finally, Grace built the tunnel. GarageBand hieroglyphics was enough to tell Grace what the exterior of the Hail Mary was made of, so he could use the right adhesive. The tunnel was air-tight, and their ships filled the two sides with their respective atmospheres. Grace had made the connector from a transparent material, per Rocky’s request, but he couldn’t make lights. Rocky would have to provide those himself.
“Alright. Breathing fine, lights on, connection solid.” Rocky rapped his knuckles on the thick wall of clear material between the two sides of the tunnel. “You comin’ out buddy?”
He knew by now that there was only one alien on the other side. They explained to each other in rudimentary drawings that they were both alone, that the rest of their crews had passed away.
So his “Saving Grace” was one alien. One lonely alien out in the middle of a lonely star system.
Well. Now they were two lonely aliens out in the middle of a lonely star system.
A familiar set of swooping notes carried from the other side of the partition. The computer hanging from a shoulder strap on his hip picked up the words I and you, but nothing else. Rocky pressed closer. He was there, somewhere in the dark.
(He was calling the alien he for now, despite his better judgement. Who knew what this alien’s gender was, or if it could even possibly align with the human concepts of it. He just made a snap judgement. Adrian would probably have criticized him for it, but he’d correct course if Grace asked him to! Assuming he and Grace ever got to the point of understanding each other enough to even talk about preferred pronouns.)
A pair of legs came out of the shadows. Or maybe arms? They connected to a very angular torso. More legs followed behind. Rocky found his eyes trailing down, down, down as the little guy got closer.
And boy, was he little. Only about two feet tall, and covered in this strange, black and grey plating that reminded Rocky of armor.
“Oh. Uh. Hello!” Rocky raised a hand in greeting. The alien chirped and raised one of its own arms. Legs? Arms. Rocky decided to call them arms.
The computer didn’t recognise that word either. They’d never really discussed hello.
“Are you… wearing something?” Rocky gestured to the air around his head.
Grace tapped his own arm, and the plating thunked together. Rocky nodded. Grace spoke.
“I not die,” the computer translated.
“It’s safe in here though. Your atmosphere?” Rocky gestured to Grace’s side of the tunnel.
Hesitation. Then more notes.
“Bad space [unknown] make crew die.” Grace gestured all around him, then back to his armor plating. “I not die.”
—
“You have ten minutes. Which is very generous of me, might I add.” Eva Stratt, who Rocky now understood to be the woman who kidnapped his fiance to do important, world-saving science, sat at the end of the long conference table. She wore a black turtleneck and a very nice, not at all wrinkled beige coat. There was something remarkably refined about her, something that Rocky couldn’t help but respect, even if he did kind of want to strangle her.
“Go on, show her,” Adrian encouraged him to start. Their roots were starting to show. No time for bleach touch-ups on Stratt’s Vat, huh?
“Um. Right. So, uh, as you know, I’ve been told that you’re hoping to send a spacecraft to the Tau Ceti system to investigate—”
“Christ, how much did you tell him?” Stratt sent Adrian a sharp glare. Rocky gulped and skipped the next three slides.
“Regardless. Big science lab in space, right? The problem is, none of the equipment will work in zero gravity.”
“I am aware. We have the top manufacturers of every vital piece of equipment working on creating versions that will function in zero gravity. It is not a great concern.”
“Well…” Rocky glanced to Adrian. They gave him two thumbs-up, and he stood a little taller. “Well it should be. You don’t want to get all the way there and find out the equipment should have gone through a few more rounds of testing. You want off the shelf, well-tested, tried and true, top of the line equipment, right?”
Stratt pursed her lips.
“Prefferably.”
“I think I have a solution. We need the ship to make its own gravity.”
“And how would that—”
Rocky skipped ahead to the last slide.
“Centerfuge,” he said, pointing to the video. Let the visual do the talking.
He’d modeled the ship and applied all the parameters of deep space to the physics engine. Then he made the crew compartment detachable, attached it via cables to the engines, and had the whole thing spin.
“Oh, very impressive. But this is not a cartoon rocket. This is real life.”
“And this is a rendering program that accounts for gravity, friction, air resistance, heat, materials—”
“Okay, okay. I understand. Why are my designers not using this program? Why haven't I seen this kind of model until now?” She was asking Adrian. She looked to them with some level of deference.
Oh. Adrian had authority here.
Rocky ignored the twist of warmth in his gut that accompanied that realization. Nothing he didn’t already know about himself.
“Because my fiance coded it himself,” Adrian said.
—
“That’s… a radiation proof suit,” Rocky said. It took some back and forth to get there, but they got there. “Radiation killed your crew, because none of you even knew what radiation was, and you figured it out, studied it, and built yourself a radiation proof suit of armor to safely traverse the rest of the ship so you could leave your room, which was protected by the engines.”
Grace trilled a yes.
“Holy shit. You’re like… the smartest alien I know,” Rocky said.
“Not understand.”
“Joke. Uh, humor? No, nevermind. Too complicated. Unnecessary.”
Grace tapped his toes impatiently. At least, that’s how Rocky took the gesture.
“The one thing I don’t get, why was your room so far away from everyone else?” Rocky pointed to the two spots on the Blip-A model Grace had distinguished. The larger crew dormitory near the front, and his private room back near the engines.
Grace said nothing for a long moment. Rocky thought perhaps he didn’t understand, but then, finally, he spoke.
“Bad reason. [Unknown] reason.”
“What’s that word?”
“Relating to me.”
“Uhh… personal? Private?”
“Difference, question?”
“Not much.” Rocky shrugged.
Grace seemed annoyed. He didn’t like synonyms. He wanted one-to-one translations, which of course wasn’t possible. Maybe if they had time to spare after finding a way to kill astrophage they could go back and flush out the vocab database, but Rocky needed to understand him fast, so he preferred their translations quick and dirty.
“Alright. Let’s get to the point,” he said. “Astrophage on your star. Astrophage on my star. Bad, yes? You scientist, me engineer. Not a full crew but… better than being alone, right?”
“Yes.”
Rocky smiled wide.
“So let’s do this thing together, right? You and me?”
“Yes.”
“Alright! High-five!”
Rocky put his hand on the barrier. Grace took a step back, confused.
“You, uh, put your hand on my hand. It’s for bonding. Shows we’re happy! Excited!”
Grace let out another unsure trill, then slowly stepped back up to the wall and lifted one of his hands.
“Up five.”
Quick and dirty, alright.