Chapter Text
The knob was turning. Static noise. There was no one, ever.
Plick
A drop of blood fell in the exact same spot as the others.
Simon tried to understand if they had abandoned him completely.
Left there, forgotten, sacrificed.
He pulled away from the radio to go to the controls and move. If he kept moving, maybe the monsters wouldn't find him.
Plick
He knew there was a hull breach, but there was literally nothing he could do about it.
While holding the levers forward to reach another spot, he stroked his arm, absent minded. A small form of comfort.
From his wrist hung a glass pendant with a seed inside, from which a tiny leaf was sprouting. It was probably the most precious thing he owned, and it wasn't even his.
It belonged to someone who hadn’t survived.
He stopped and resumed his search with the radio. The light on the speaker remained sadly off.
I will never leave this place.
He drew on the map with a marker to know where he was, he tied his hair back because he couldn't stand it in front of his eyes anymore and besides, it was unbearably hot inside the hull. The sea of blood surrounding him was at the perfect temperature of 37 °C.
Getting out was imperative, but if there really was no one left, no one could help him leave. He didn't know how long he had been left alone, time felt strange and even though the oxygen gauge seemed to keep dropping, sometimes it went back up. He supposed it was broken, which meant he could die at any moment.
Dying from lack of oxygen wasn't the worst thing in the world, he would feel fatigued until he basically fell asleep, never to wake up again.
Probably drowning in a sea of blood would be worse.
He tried to remember the scent of earth, tree bark and leaves. The last tree, humanity's hope that something could still grow, had been destroyed along with the station carrying it.
Searching for a radio signal across the sea required a certain amount of planning and attention to detail that he usually lacked and even more now that he felt like his brain wasn’t functioning - he had found some alcohol and drinking it looked like the sensible choice.
He turned the radio knob, more static noise.
He took a picture of the outside to check that everything was clear. He had seen something like a monster not long before, which he knew for a fact was alive because it had moved in two consecutive photos, and in the third, it was completely gone. But maybe if he just pretended nothing was wrong, nothing bad would happen.
He focused on his bracelet again.
Plick
Many drops were falling. A bit everywhere. Another thing he had decided to ignore, or at least postpone until worrying about it actually brought a solution.
There was nothing in front of him. Only a barren landscape that seemed so distant due to the black and white instant photo, when in reality it was just a few meters away from him and submerged in warm, thick, dark red blood.
The room became dark again, too dark for his eyes to adjust easily. There was something particularly frustrating about the fact that an important sense like sight couldn't help him fully.
He found a bag with something to eat. He had a sort of déjà vu. Have I been here before? Have I eaten anything since I arrived?
Those external photos, he knew they shot radiations. He had taken so many of them... maybe he was dying and these were hallucinations.
He was moving again to explore a new quadrant. Straight ahead, always. How big was this sea?
They left me here to die, there is no one left coming to save me.
I don't matter, and I never mattered.
This is bigger than me.
The ship was hit by a series of impacts that actually lasted about fifteen seconds, but time seemed to stretch on forever.
Simon fell on the floor, splitting his lip. It had already happened a few hours ago, or maybe a few days ago, he didn't know anything anymore.
How long had it been since he last slept? He had already split his lip, he had already fallen, yet this felt like the first time, there were no other wounds.
The hull shook with a vibration, letting out a terrifying sound of bending metal.
The adrenaline made him see things more clearly, it almost felt like he could see better in the dark, so he rushed to the camera and pressed the button to see what had hit him.
He saw empty sockets, where eyes probably should be, and sharp teeth decorating a mouth so large it could swallow him and his ship without even chewing.
The glass of the porthole had cracked further, now a very thin stream of blood leaked down and gathered on the floor.
The metallic smell was horrible.
He didn't want to stop, he wanted to run as far away as possible, but he had probably moved for too long and drawn the attention of the creature living at the bottom of the sea.
He crouched on the floor, hugging his knees, waiting for the hull's vibration to stop echoing through his entire body.
He could pretend he wasn't really there, he could keep looking at that impossible glass circle and wonder if the bad things he had done in life deserved the punishment he was receiving right now.
According to Ava, “You got a lot more than you deserve.”
“Shut up,” he whispered in the dark.
How long he had been alone, he didn't know. It didn't feel like he had ever slept, and every time he tried, something happened that pulled him up from the floor.
This time the porthole had given way, and the blood was rushing in quickly, bound to fill the entire submarine in a few minutes.
“I don't want to die in here!” he screamed at nothingness.
You got a lot more than you deserve.
After what you did.
“It wasn't my fault.”
He just wanted to leave, to be free.
The hull was tilting.
He knelt in the blood, cupped some of it in his hands, and drank it.
He woke up on the dry floor, the porthole intact, a metallic taste in his mouth.
He really wished he could have some water.
The radio, broken for days, was waiting for him, and it took him hours to fix it before he started searching to see if anyone was out there.
The knob was turning. Static noise. There was no one, ever.
Plick
A drop of blood fell in the exact same spot as the others.
Simon tried to understand if they had abandoned him completely.
Left there, forgotten, sacrificed.
He pulled away from the radio to go to the controls and move. If he kept moving, maybe the monsters wouldn't find him.
Beep.
He rushed to the radio.
Beep.
He brushed the hair away from his forehead because it kept getting into his eyes. He decided to tie it back.
“Is someone there?” he tried.
No sound came out of the radio, so he tried checking the screen and there was a message.
-CONNECTION ESTABLISHED-
Ryland Grace had a mission to complete: save humanity. No small feat.
The problem was that he was completely alone. His crewmates hadn't survived the journey. Clearly, the coma wasn't safe even for those carrying the gene.
He was slowly recovering all his memories, and because of this, he still felt a bit confused at times. He always wondered if he was missing something to get the job done. He had been orbiting Tau Ceti for weeks. He had learned how to activate the centrifugal force and life had become easier.
He knew it was a suicide mission and he didn't believe he had once been the type of person to say yes. But maybe when there is no other hope left, courage is found.
He liked his lab and he liked spending most of his time there continuing his studies on the Astrophage, calculating trajectories on where to go. He didn't know how to pilot, but he did it anyway, trying to learn as much as possible to at least know how to move around.
Sometimes he found himself in parts of the ship with no memory of how he got there, which would normally drive him crazy, but he always blamed it on exhaustion - it wasn't easy to maintain a consistent sleep wake cycle on the ship - and on the amnesia.
He had finished calculating the maneuvers to get onto the Petrova line to collect Astrophage samples and figure out why Tau Ceti wasn't dying.
The clock read 23:00, that was certainly not the time to do an EVA that would take hours.
He decided to have dinner and asked the computer for his meal, which provided the usual paper cup of ramen with boiling water. He wondered how many the ship had left.
-CONTACT REQUEST- beeped the computer.
“What?” He stopped chewing his bite and put down his chopsticks.
“What do you mean?”
-CONTACT REQUEST-
He abandoned his dinner and dashed into the cockpit. The message was flashing on a monitor.
“And where did you come from?” he said, squinting at the screen and adjusting his glasses.
He retrieved the data on the signal's origin. Was it possible that a human artifact was wandering around these parts? What if he was wrong and had slept longer than the four years needed to get from Earth to here? If someone was nearby, if Stratt had sent someone else, another expedition... it didn't make much sense. But maybe it was something he didn't remember.
Stupid broken brain.
He grabbed his laptop and calculated frequency, origin, and distance. It had to be very close, also because the Hail Mary didn't have a long-range communication system... What if it was aliens? The thought crossed his mind. After all, why not, the universe is a big place.
He wondered if the beetles had accidentally sent a signal, that surely had to be it.
But no, it wasn't coming from inside the Hail Mary.
Maybe an echo of something human traveling through space for a long time that had hit him, and he just had to wait for the wave to pass. He waited.
-CONTACT REQUEST-
He also thought of interference, but that was dismissed almost immediately. There was nothing out there with him. Just him for millions of kilometers.
No object had been identified by the ship, and even though he trusted the onboard instruments, he took the trouble to rotate in all directions to look with his own eyes and see if there was anything around him.
Space can be truly empty.
A malfunction! Why not, it could be that too. He restarted all navigation systems and ran a diagnostic check, which, however, reported no errors.
Two hours had passed, and two hours spent doing calculations after he had already worked all day were starting to be too much. He passed his hand over his face, his eyes blurring. He asked the computer for some coffee, which it provided but reminded him of the time.
“Yes, yes,” he said.
He didn't know what to do with a signal actively seeking contact in deep space that absolutely shouldn't be there.
Sure, a malfunction could still be the cause, but maybe there was something escaping him, a solution he hadn't thought of.
Maybe it was something so obvious to anyone whose brain wasn't made of pudding - he couldn't wait to remember everything clearly.
Whatever it was, that signal was certainly meant for him, and so he paused for a moment. He turned off his scientist brain and let himself be washed over by that feeling of fear mixed with excitement for something he didn't know, and decided to reply.