Work Text:
I spent the first few days after I found Rocky again in blissful happiness and unadulterated optimism. But soon, the time came to return down to the floor of Hail Mary while in thrust configuration (down to Earth – never again).
“Ugh.”
I scrunch up my nose in disgust.
My store of normal food is decreasing rapidly. I still have some left, but if I continue eating three full meals a day, it’ll be all gone very soon. And because I am not emotionally prepared to remove all that remaining joy from my life at once, I decided to try and stretch it by allowing myself only one normal meal a day and filling the rest of my metabolic needs with the coma slurry. While the substance is perfectly nutritionally balanced, it also has this dense chalkiness to it that makes me want to clear my throat every time I even think about it.
But even though I hate the taste, I’m still glad that I have it. Because once it’s gone…
I leaf through my notes on Taumoeba biology while chewing on the straw of my rehydrated sustenance.
The idea of using alien amoebas as dinner sounds outrageously stupid at first. And at second. And third.
However, just like the Astrophage, Taumoeba has many baseline characteristics similar to Earth-bound unicellular organisms. It has the double-layered cell membrane, it even has mitochondria as a proper eukaryote, which basically puts all we knew about the evolution of unicellular life on Earth in a bin.
Never mind.
The point is – all of this points to sharing a common biological ancestor with life on Earth. Thus sharing the chirality of commonly used sugars and amino acids with life on Earth, which could potentially be my salvation.
You see, many organic molecules are a bit like human hands. They come in two variants that are mirror images of each other.
Human enzymes are very specific about the shape of molecules they are willing to interact with. If you made an L-glucose soda pop, it would simply whizz by your body without giving you any energy. But Taumoeba sharing a common ancestor with me means all of its glucose should have the tasty D-shape I need to be able to burn it in my mitochondria.
On the other hand… Taumoeba is an amoeba.
Most amoebas on Earth are nasty little mischief-makers. They’re often harmful to humans and produce toxic stuff that you don’t want anywhere near your intestines.
So before I produce my first Taumoeba porridge, I need to make sure that the porridge will not eat me from the inside instead.
That means the time has come to start identifying all substances that can be found in your ordinary Taumoeba. Thankfully, Hail Mary’s lab is well equipped for unknown biological matter identification.
First I produce some cell lysate cocktail from a hefty bunch of these little scoundrels, then I start separating it by running it through a centrifuge… a lot.
My relationship with centrifuges has been very ambivalent lately. I am even more obsessed with balancing it perfectly than I used to be. Can’t really put a finger on why.
Once all bigger chunks like membranes and organelles are separated, I can make a series of samples from that. Then I start chemically separating the major biomolecules. Then there will be time for some serious mass spectrometry, and a lot of searching databases for the kinds of molecules I might be looking for.
I reminisce briefly of my days of studying molecular biology. I used to spend many hours in the lab performing very similar procedures. If only I had known back then what it would come in handy for… I will be the first scientist in our local star cluster to make a molecular profile of the alien organism called Taumoeba. And no other human will ever see that. I can only receive a standing ovation from my set of micropipettes.
I am interrupted from my daydreaming by a sudden feeling of discomfort in my abdomen.
I sigh, settle the sampler tray I was holding onto the lab table and head for the smallest, yet arguably most important room on this ship.
Another disadvantage of a predominantly coma slurry diet is that there is something very… liquid about it.
It is useful if you are in a coma and completely dependent on a set of more or much more invasive tubes sticking out of your body and a medical robot without any sense of humor.
Not so much if you’re trying to hold precisely timed scientific experiments.
As I meditate on my interstellar throne and ponder the real deep questions of the universe, Rocky’s voice reaches me from far away.
“Grace, I have important question!”
The thin sliding door separating my throne room from the main corridor is of course no obstacle to the superb Eridian echolocation.
It took me some time getting used to the idea of my roommate seeing-hearing through any wall on the ship – everything, everywhere, all at once.
“What’s happening?” I ask at normal volume, because I know he can hear me perfectly well.
“What is correct order of watch Star Trek on portable thinking machine, question? Searched human data, conflicting answers.”
I put my face in my palms.
“Rocky! This is not a good moment to discuss something like this–”
“Many say you start with Next Generation. But chronologic first is Enterprise. But first first is Original Series. I confuse!”
“Rocky, I am in the middle of something private here… we can talk about Star Trek later!”
“Grace says something private, means defecating. You no want talk while defecating but want talk much much much while eating. It same. Rocky no understand.”
I claw at my hair in embarrassment.
“It is NOT the same!”
“It is.”
“It’s… I just- ugh. Give me a moment okay? I will come to you!”
Introducing him to the wonders of human television was in retrospect perhaps not as amazing an idea as I thought.
I press the button that makes everything below me safely transported to the endless vacuum of space, and–
CHRRRRK! CRACK!
Huh. I haven’t heard that sort of sound before.
I try again but all I am rewarded with are some more scary noises of the mechanism and a not very pleasant smell coming from it.
I dare say we have a problem, and Houston is definitely not going to help us solve it.
So I turn elsewhere for aid: “Hey Mary! What is happening with the restroom?”
“Invalid question input,” the robotic voice of the ship replies helpfully.
“Oh, come on.”
After a quick inspection it seems to me that the in-cabin part of the toilet is working properly. Stuff is clogging somewhere further down the drain.
I guess there’s no time better than now to become a space plumber!
I climb up to the cockpit and search the many displays to find the one with life support systems overview.
“Okay Mary, let’s try this again. What is the status of the universal waste management system?”
“UWMS system check – fluid recollection unit functionality nominal. Water filtration unit functionality nominal. Warning. Waste repository unit at 98.6% capacity.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. The residual waste should be removed automatically after reaching a certain threshold, but for some reason this did not happen.
I look up a button to manually jettison the contents of the waste repository.
“Unable to execute. External dump line error,” Mary protests.
“External, eh?” I don’t like where this is heading.
I put up on display Hail Mary’s schematics and after a while I manage to identify the external line dump outlet position on the hull just above the lab floor. It is slightly raised from its surroundings and capped with a thick ring. I try to burn its shape into my mind.
“Rocky?”
“Grace finally go watch Star Trek with me, question?”
“Not yet. I need to do an EVA first, to save us from some real stinky trouble. Will you come here to monitor everything while I’m outside?”
I can feel the disappointment radiating from him (in any other situation I would rejoice that I managed to convert my only space roommate to being a Trekkie, but there are more pressing concerns right now), but he does what I asked for and gets into his seat at the cockpit. I explain the situation to him, we make sure everything on the ship is safely stored before we turn off spin drives (nobody can force me to perform an EVA in non-zero g ever again) and finally, I go suit up in my trusty Orlen.
The airlock is cycled with a hiss and once again I find myself staring both up and down at the same time at the immense void outside our comparatively tragically insignificant vessel.
With a deep breath I anchor my tether securely to the airlock and float over the edge.
I immediately regret looking around the space.
Travelling at a speed where relativistic physics get to show their part has some weird effects on what you can see. When I look towards the nose of the ship, the stars in the background seem to be piling upon each other, as if they were trying to huddle closer and closer. On the other hand, the void behind the back of the ship seems almost empty, everything spread out. And the colors of the stars are pretty off too. I wonder which one of them is Sol, but I have no way of identifying it right now. Should be somewhere on our flank and slowly receding to the blackness behind, since we are moving further away from it. Also from all fully functioning human-compatible crappers in this universe.
I push myself alongside Mary’s surface until I reach the level of the lab. Then I look around and it takes me some time until I figure out where I should be looking.
Finally my eyes land on something that reminds me of the shape of the outlet in the schematics, except this one is missing the ring-cap on top. Which might be the source of the issue.
I try to examine the inside of the pipe but I am immediately met with a solid block of something glossy obstructing the hole.
“It is frozen, that’s why it’s clogged!”
But how did it freeze when the surface of the ship is supposed to be covered in a layer of stable 96.415°C Astrophage?
The pipe is pretty thin. It probably does not have the Astrophage coating that the rest of the ship does.
“Good, we fix. Find way to melt ice. Stop more freezing for rest of trip. Humans inefficient, make too much waste too often, will happen again,” Rocky replies over the radio.
“Hey, it’s not like you make no waste!”
It’s not that long ago since we had to figure out how to deal with the stuff that comes out of Rocky during his weekly ‘matter exchange with external environment’. I did not even dare to try flushing it down the UWMS, that stuff would jam it immediately. Blip-A apparently had a way more durable waste management system. In the end we had to simply jettison it from the airlock.
“It’s too bad that we’re already way beyond the border of Tau Ceti’s system. If we were still parked at the orbit of Adrian, I could have just rotated the ship to present the frozen remains of my last dinner to the star and its heat would deal with it,” I think out loud.
“Too far from any star, not enough heat.”
“Yeah, I know. I just remembered that other spaceships built by humans before Mary used to deal with freezing that way.”
“Measure outlet precisely. I will construct heating device,” Rocky offers.
“That would be amazing, thanks Rock,” I reply and start doing as I was told, describing to him everything he might need to know. Unlike me, he will remember all of the parameters.
When we’re done, Rocky asks: “How many spaceships humans built before Hail Mary, question?”
“More than I could count. Most of them stayed in orbit around the Earth, but some took humans to the Moon of Earth. And probes without any crew were sent all around the Sol star system. Some like Voyager got even further, but not any close to the distance Mary can make thanks to her Astrophage spin drive.”
“Amaze! Humans built spaceships without Astrophage! Incredible!” Rocky squeals in wonder.
Sometimes I forget that the Eridians never thought about sending people outside their planet’s atmosphere before the Astrophage crisis hit them.
“I think it’s even more incredible that the first ship you decided to build on Erid was an interstellar one and it worked. We took many slow baby steps with our space program, you just took one massive leap!” I reply honestly.
“We boldly go where no Eridian before,” he remarks and I burst out laughing so hard that I almost forget holding on the rails while sliding back to the airlock. It’s a good thing that I am tethered.
“I make good joke,” Rocky comments with pride.
“Yea, you nailed it, Mr. Spock. Now let me beam back on the ship,” I say as I close the outer hatch and let the oxygen cycle back into the airlock.
When I return, Rocky is already in his workshop and working on the new component.
Since we’re in zero g now, I can’t continue doing my lab work, so I just settle close by and observe him at work. Seeing his many three-fingered hands swiftly shaping the material with absolute precision is mesmerising.
It makes me wonder whether the gap in our technological knowledge about things like space exploration and computers is to be blamed on human inadequacy. Eridians are incredibly capable (at least the one on board of my spaceship definitely is) without any artificial aid. Meanwhile us humans with our unreliable memory and subpar dexterity simply had to invent way more technology to achieve the same results, and a side effect of that was inventing things useful beyond these basic needs.
Why would an Eridian invent a computing machine when their brain can do the most complex calculations within seconds? However, without the need for a computing machine, you’ll never get to the greed for a machine that can run Cyberpunk 2077 on highest settings.
“Why Grace staring, question?”
“Because Rocky interesting at work, statement,” I grin.
I fold my arms behind my head and do a full body spin. After so long in 1.5g it feels unexpectedly pleasant to be weightless for a while again. I let all my muscles go limp.
“Grace called Rocky Mr. Spock before. Is it because Vulcan is pretend planet in Eridian star system, question?”
I gasp. “Oh wow, I did not even think about this! That’s kinda insane isn’t it? There’s like sixty stars closer to Earth, and for some reason they chose 40 Eridani to be the home of Vulcans.”
Almost as if Gene Rodenberry had a premonition there’s someone willing to become pals with humanity living there… well, minus the pointy ears. And all humanoid features in general. Clearly the reality is not constrained by a limited budget of 60s television production.
“Do you think that one day, we’ll have our own federation of planets?”
“When Eridians meet Grace, they for sure want meet other humans too. With Astrophage, future travel to Earth possible,” he considers seriously.
“Yeah… if we make it… and Earth does as well… we could be at the beginning of a new space age,” I say dreamily and honestly, I feel a bit moved by that idea.
“Heat-recapture-stop-freezing-excrement-device finished. You now install.”
Ah, yes. Right now, the beginning of a new space exploration era also depends on our success with repairing my Frozen Throne.
Time to suit up again!
I get ready for my second EVA of the day.
Rocky sends his new invention through his airlock and I then take extra care fastening it to my EVA suit so that it has no chance of drifting into the void. I don’t have any need to test it; if Rocky says it will work, that means it will work.
Fastening it to the dump line outlet is not difficult. There is a piece of isolation at the inner side of the ring that I remove as the last step before final tightening. The interior of the ring is of course filled with Astrophage as our best stable source of heat.
I don’t have to wait for long before the ice inside the pipe starts to melt.
“Heat-excrement-device in place, question?” Rocky calls impatiently over the radio.
“Do we really have to call it that… whatever. It is, you can tell Mary to try venting the waste repository.”
I barely manage to dodge away before Rocky does exactly that.
With a vibration transmitting into my feet (that are now firmly wedged under a rail closest to the outlet), Hail Mary lets out the biggest fart that’s ever been ripped in interstellar space.
The waste leaves her in what appears to be a perpendicular line for me, but of course it is still travelling with the enormous forward speed we now have, so it will fly through space in roughly the same direction as we do, just slightly angled.
It’s good that we’re still so far from Erid, because by the time we get there, it should miss the planet by several million kilometers.
Perhaps another planet captures it with its gravity. It can then become the first biomatter moon in the 40 Eridani system. If Eridians had any sight, they would call it the Brown Moo–
“Grace! Grace! Is working properly? What happening, question? Can’t hear you!” Rocky’s worried voice interrupts my infantile daydreaming.
“I hear you buddy, it works perfectly, good job!”
“Good. Now come watch Star Trek with me!”
