Chapter Text
I wake to the melodic chirp of an Eridian alarm clock, just like I do every morning. As I roll onto my side to depress the mechanism that triggered the sound, my back twinges. It always hurt in the mornings. Pushing myself up and into a slouched sitting position, I retrieve the bowl of powdered painkillers at my bedside and choke down a dose. I ran out of over-the-counter pain medicine well before my biodome was established on Erid, and without familiar plant life on the surface, several traditional medications were unattainable. Luckily, plain old acetaminophen was easy enough to produce with the raw materials the planet afforded. Creating a palatable binder; however, proved more challenging. For the time being, the loose, powdered painkiller was a marvel of interspecies science (and a welcome respite from my complaining back). Thank God – or actually, thank Stratt – that we had several terabytes of human knowledge to work off of.
According to my well-worn watch, it has been just under 3 earth years since Erid became my full-time home. I spent almost a full year just hanging out in the atmosphere, waiting for construction to finish. It was a little barren, and Eridians really struggled with understanding some of my very human requests, but it was a home I was happy to have.
Up until a few months ago, I was still fairly unwell from the journey. Armando could diagnose me with whatever new malnutrition-based malady struck, but he couldn’t treat me for it all – especially not when the medication reserves started to run low. I relied heavily on my own knowledge and the assistance of Eridian scientists to stay alive.
Fortunately, distilling the base vitamins a human needed into a drinkable slurry was possible with the resources available. It tasted terrible. It was lightly carbonated and extremely bitter. Every morning I drank one serving, and swallowing it down made me shudder.
Several years before the Mary, when I had a puttering social life and hadn’t yet been fully shunned by academia, I went to an event for a colleague – she had been accepting some sort of award, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters was the drink. San Francisco bars love to make the strongest, worst drinks around. I was assured several times that I would just love the Aperol Spritz that was served. It was $21, and it tasted just like this vitamin slurry. One got me drunk, the other keeps me alive. Both make me gag.
I finish the drink and take several spoonfuls of enriched Taomoeba from a container kept in my fridge. Another step in keeping me alive. The fridge was Eridian but was heavily based on 1960s GE Electric Iceboxes. Rocky told me that several of the items found in digitally archived copies of Sears Catalogues had become trendy with the Eridian people. While much of their functionality was lost on the Eridian userbase, I understood the appeal of employing alien technology in the home – even if it was just for looks. While I received the demo units calibrated for human use, several of the items were planned for widespread manufacturing. The idea of an Eridian housewife (housespouse?) making some sort of heavy metal casserole in an off-brand retro oven always makes me crack a smile.
My clock chirps again, a second alarm to remind me to a) get up for real and b) get moving. Today was important. I’ve spent the last several months working with Eridian scientists and psychologists and doctors to assure everyone involved that I’m healthy and functional. Ready to be a productive member of society. Ready to get back to teaching. Today was supposed to be my last physical before I got the all clear from the medical team.
Just as I slip on my second shoe, I hear an impatient banging at my door.
“Hold on, I’m coming!” I shout, even though I certainly don’t need to. The banging continues uninterrupted. I hear shrill musical notes from beyond the door, but my inferior hearing can’t make heads or tails of what’s being said.
I jog to the door which, ouch, my knees, and I swing it open. Rocky and two other Eridians greet me; one several feet taller than Rocky and slate grey, the other closer to Rocky’s size and marbled yellow tones.
“Grace, Grace, Grace. You need to come now,” Rocky says. “Eridian scientists need Grace’s help. Very important. Come on come on come on now. Move fast please.”
“Woah, woah, woah. Rocky what’s the hurry?” I haven’t seen him like this since we were actively trying to, you know, save the world(s).
“No time come on come on come on,” he squeals again, voice high enough that it’s almost out of my hearing range. He scurries down the path and toward the air lock where he entered my enclosure from. I begin to follow after him, trailed by the two unknown Eridians he arrived with. One of them – the grey one - speaks up.
“Rocky is too excited. Please stay calm Doctor Grace,” it turns the ‘front’ part of its carapace toward me as we follow Rocky to the air lock. There are several dialects of Eridian speech, which all seem to be roughly the same but with some variant of accent. This Eridian sounds different than most I’ve met so far. Certainly harder to understand.
“I am apologize for the disturbance,” it continues. There is definitely a grammatical difference here as well. I briefly think about the doubling back for the translator on my laptop but decide against it. I can figure this out. “It is not every day we get new alien on planet.”
My jaw goes slack but I don’t stop walking. Rocky ran far ahead to the airlock and we trailed behind by a few hundred feet. “Another alien?” I ask, dumbfounded.
“Apologies. Clarification. Another human.”
At that news I stop walking. Rocky screams an obscenity at me. “Hold on. Another human? What do you mean? How?” My mind is racing. I guess technically Earth could have sent another ship – it had been long enough for one to make it here if they shot it up a couple years after I left– but why? Did they do a backup project to the Hail Mary? If my math was right, they had probably only received the Beetles 3-ish Earth years ago. They would have needed to have launched the ship before the Beetles made it back. None of that made any sense.
“Apologies, further clarification,” my thoughts were interrupted by the second Eridian. It had a much deeper tone to its tune, but a similar lilt to the way it sang. “I am ♪♩♫♬ and this is ♫♫♪. We are scientists. Eridians are doing space explore projects currently. You know this.” I did know that. He continued on speaking.
“While we explore nearby planets and moons we found a vessel. Ugly ugly. Not smooth like Doctor Grace ship. Very rough. It was covered in wet.”
Covered in wet. What did that even mean?
“We got close and scan vessel. There was human noise inside. Sound of several organs working very poorly. Compared to recorded notes of how bad Doctor Grace sound when experiencing many illness. Sound similar. Weak sounds. Wet in lungs. Too wet even for wet race of human.” I nod along dumbly and begin stumbling toward the door where Rocky was about to throw a fit.
They grey Eridian, ♫♫♪, interjected. “Because Eridian people have are become familiar with Doctor Grace, we create small tunnel with human atmosphere. Moon was small and barren. No atmosphere. Human ship ugly and damage. Must have crash. Seal shut tight. Human experience certain doom. Lucky for human, we extract safely. Not lucky for human, we do not know what wrong with him. He very different from Doctor Grace. Maybe die.”
As we approach the airlock, Rocky looks like he’s about to vibrate out of his carapace. I understand why now. A human in a damaged, crude vessel was found almost dead on a nearby moon, wet, and close to death. “Ok, let’s get him in here.”
--
Rocky doesn’t want the new human in my biosphere. He's extremely concerned about several things. Disease, radiation, contamination. Valid concerns, but I'm more concerned with keeping this new human alive. The two Eridians, who I had decided to refer to as Viktor and Ivan, are on my side.
It takes several Eridians to bring the new human into my space. The human is inside a semi-transparent Xenonite chamber that required eight Eridians just to carry. They were accompanied by several other Eridians I did know: Rocky’s partner Adrian, who is an important part of the team that keeps my dome functional, and a few of the scientists and medical professionals who have been working with me to ensure my health.
Once the new human is brought in, the miniature containment dome is deconstructed. The stench hits me like a wave. Over the years, I’ve grown accustomed to occasionally smelling the Erid atmosphere on the various creatures and objects that came in and out of my home. Things are sterilized regularly and my air is cycled, but I still know what a bad smell is. My home isn’t entirely sterile by any means.
This new human, though, makes me feel like I haven’t used my nose in years. He stinks of rot. Now I know what they meant when they told me he (and perhaps his vessel) were covered in wet. The human is apparently male. He’s shirtless on the top but has on severely tattered pants and soaked shoes. He’s drenched in what, to me, is unmistakably blood. The air is saturated with the stink of blood and decomposition. I pull my shirt up over my nose in an attempt to block the smell. It doesn’t work.
“Alright, I’ll need help with this,” I turn to the remaining Eridians. The team who carried to man in had dispersed, but Rocky, Adrian, Ivan, Viktor, and the members of my (our?) medical team remain. “Someone needs to get several gallons of potable water here quickly. We need to clean him up so we can see what’s going on. Rocky, Adrian – pull Armando from my living room and bring him out here. I need his help to assess.” I turn back to the man lying on the Xenonite table in front of me and I let out a shaky breath. All that blood. I began to turn back to the assembled team. “Ivan, can you –” and then my vision goes black.
--
I’m only out for a few moments, but I did hit the ground hard. I certainly feel it. The higher gravity means every stumble caused some severe bruising out here. I didn’t know blood would affect me like that. Maybe it’s just the quantity.
I bring myself back to my feet and let out another shaky breath. Several large containers of water had been brought in, and someone had the intelligent idea to bring in rags made of heavy, beige fabric with it. With the help of the assembled team, we quickly work as much blood off the man as possible. My stomach churns aggressively. My head feels too light. I work on.
Once he's cleaned up, Adrian wheels Armando over to where the man lay, still motionless. I can see the labored rise and fall of his chest. I have so many questions.
Armando works the man over, but I still don’t trust the machine to be fully autonomous with human care. I haven’t forgotten that my crew died due to an error in care. I don’t want to let the first human I've seen in years slip through my fingers. The man’s clothes were cut off with surgical precision and he was quickly intubated. Adrian and their team had been working on replicating several human drugs, and it seems like this is the trial run for a few. A replicated antibiotic is pumped into the man. He’s given an eye-watering dose of a prototype synthetic opioid that had been medical team’s pet project for months. I silently hope that he doesn’t have any drug allergies.
As we stand by and watch the medical robot work, I really look at the man. He’s missing an arm. That’s pretty apparent. There’s a ragged stump where his left arm used to be. The skin on the end of the remaining appendage is mushy and discolored. Armando begins to remove the flesh. I sit down to avoid another embarrassing fall. I force myself to watch. I want to intervene if something goes wrong, but I don’t know what I could even do. I’m barely an astronaut, and I’m certainly not a physician.
As Armando works, I sit and stare. Rocky is chittering away, nervous about our new development. I glance his way and he gives me an awkward thumbs-down thumbs-up. I return the gesture. The new human is covered in yellow welts and he has a jagged wound on the side of his face. His flesh is peeling in places. He’s red, even without the blood, like he was freshly boiled. I don’t see how he makes it out of this alive. Selfishly, I want him to. I need to know how he got here, why he was sent, what happened to hi--
“The new human is very different than Grace,” Adrian says, breaking the building tension and my spiraling thoughts. “Bigger. Fewer appendages. Skin is very… Texture.”
I nod in agreement. “He looks different than me. His skin is red and he has pustules – little pockets full of fluid – all over his body.”
“What about the teeth?” Rocky asks. The others hum in agreement.
“His teeth?” I ask in return.
“Yes, yes. Teeth. Boney protrusion normally found in human mouth,” Rocky sounds exasperated. I roll my eyes. He, of course, can’t see that I did that.
“I know what teeth are, buddy. What’s wrong with his?”
“New human has teeth on the side of its face.” Rocky shoots back. “Extra teeth. They sound sharp.”
My eyes shoot back over to the man on the table in front of us. His arm is being stitched together at the end by Armando, so I carefully approach from the other side of the table. I gently turn his head towards me and –
“I’ll be danged,” I whisper out loud. “He has teeth on the side of his head.” And he did. On his left cheek there was a slit, about 3 inches in length, where sharp teeth jutted out from his damaged skin and knit together to a closed mouth. The teeth didn’t appear to attach to his jawbone – they seemed to protrude directly from the muscles at his cheek, perhaps sprouting directly from the side of his skull.
“This is not normal?” one of the doctors asks.
“No,” I let out a laugh. “Not normal at all.”
--
Armando continues to work on Erid’s newest edition for several hours. Taking blood, draining pustules, and running dozens of tests. The Eridian doctors leave after the first hour passes, determining they can be called back if additional measures need taken by their teams. Ivan and Viktor want to stay, but also determine there is little they can do to help.
“We will be back when it wakes up,” Viktor assures me. When. They have more confidence in him living than I do. Which, why wouldn’t they? I had lived through being very ill. From their perspective, humans must be very resilient for such squishy creatures.
And then it’s just Rocky, Adrian, and me.
“I don’t like this.” Rocky says, fidgeting while he stares at the new man. “What if the new human is a danger. What if he makes Grace sick. What if he hurts Grace?”
I thought the same things. The yellow pustules on his body, the extra teeth, and the bounty of biomatter we cleaned off of him didn’t inspire confidence. I should have worn some sort of protective suit. I had gloves on, of course, but with the quantity of pathogens and sheer amount of blood, I’m sure I am somehow contaminated.
“Hmm. New human needs us,” Adrian hums. They’re much more level-headed than Rocky. They don’t get worked up about things, they’re much more solution-focused. “Too late to worry about if Grace is exposed. We will just fix them both if that happened.”
I nod in agreement. I have already lived well past my expiration date – if helping one more guy is what puts me in the ground, then so be it.
Suddenly, Armando finishes its work. It retracts from the man and seems to focus on me. “Patient diagnosis available,” it speaks.
“Shoot, about time. What’s the damage?” I ask. Rocky and Adrian both lean forward in anticipation.
“Patient is severely burned. Damage was caused by exposure to extreme heat and heightened levels of Radiation," Rocky shivers when he hears radiation. "An extremely high concentration of radiation is detected. Patient underwent a traumatic amputation to the left arm, requiring an additional 8cm of flesh and 3cm of bone to be removed. Patient appears to have a severe infection which has not yet reached septic stages. Patient prognosis is extremely poor. Recommended treatment is euthanasia. Proceed with treatment?”
“NO!” I say, before the machine can even finish the sentence. “No, do not proceed with treatment. Provide treatment alternatives.”
“Treatment alternatives not recommended. Prognosis is extremely poor,” Armando reiterates.
“New word. What does it mean? The treatment you don't want?” Rocky asks.
I lean toward him to explain outside of the microphone range of the machine. “It means Armando doesn’t think he will live. It means the recommended course of treatment is that we kill him.”
“No no no. Not a good treatment,” Rocky sings back. Adrian stamps a foot in agreement.
“I agree,” I turn back to Armando. “Disregard prognosis and provide life sustaining treatment. Don’t stop until he, uh, well. Don’t stop until he wakes up or dies naturally.”
“Confirmed. Overriding recommended treatment,” and with that, Armando turned away from me and went back to cleaning up the seeping cysts on the new human’s face. I let out a shaky breath.
“New human will make it,” Rocky trills to me, obviously picking up on how dejected I am at the likely outcome of this new addition. “Humans are resilient. It will make a full recovery.”
“He,” I reply.
“He will make a full recovery,” Rocky corrects himself.
--
I’m kicking myself for setting up shop outside. The new human, my roommate, is set up on the metal table he was carried in on, right outside the airlock doors. We’re several hundred yards from my home, and even with Rocky and Adrian here I don’t think we can safely transport him anywhere. So I guess I’m going “camping.”
Rocky insists that Adrian and I both rest while he watches. I concede. While he was gone, Adrian had relied more communally on other unpaired Eridians to watch over their sleep cycle. Now that Rocky was back, they were both very serious about watching over each other. This was a little inconvenient for Rocky, because he also always wanted to make sure I was watched while I slept. I’m sure getting us together in the same place is huge for him.
Adrian shuts down, just like Rocky does. One minute they’re upright, observing the human with me, and the next they are functionally a paperweight. I’m a little jealous. Between my already-aged back and the lame fall I took earlier in the day, my body aches. Lying on the sandy, rocky ground of Erid is… Less that superb.
I stare up at the top of my biodome, able to hear Rocky occasionally shuffle behind me. He’s positioned himself between Adrian and I. We’re all lying on one side of the table, just in case the man wakes up. I have to be here – he can’t wake up to alien rock spiders and a robot.
Eventually, I drift off. Lying underneath a starless sky, protected by the watchful eye of my alien best friend, hoping a highly irradiated and possibly mutated scrap of a human wakes up. And I really hope he wakes up. I have a lot of questions.
--
The new human does not wake up.
Not for several days.
It’s been almost two weeks since the man had been brought into the biodome with me. Two weeks that he had functionally been on half-ass life support via a med-arm that we uninstalled from my living room. Two weeks of pumping him full of Eridian brand generic antibiotics and crossing our fingers. Two weeks since one of the best pieces of medical robotics that Earth ever cooked up told me he was a goner.
Somehow, though, he was healing.
It seems like I spend almost every waking minute either at his bedside or pacing the beach. Adrian and Rocky have come and gone. Occasionally some of the scientists come and check on him – but so far, nothing. He’s breathing on his own now. He doesn’t need to be intubated to inflate his lungs reliably. And, miraculously, his burns are slowly scabbing over and healing. I half expected his skin to slough off, Ouchi-style*, but it didn’t.
And the arm didn’t grow back, so he isn’t some sort of super mutant, no matter what the extra set of teeth on the side of his face seem to indicate. Nice. He’s been out so cold, I finally stepped away to take a shower and change this morning. Rocky had indicated to me that I was “gross gross gross,” and he could practically hear the bacterial buildup on my clothes. What a rude guy.
The new arrival has, unfortunately, gotten into the way of some of my plans. I’m supposed to be teaching a class of about 20 of Erid’s most promising pebbles right now. I don’t know if it’s offensive to call their young pebbles, but it’s what I’ve been doing. I think it’s cute.
Classes have been postponed indefinitely while we figure out what’s going to happen next here. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed. I love teaching, and it’s been years since I’ve had a good chance to be in a real classroom. Sure, I got to teach other scientists back on Earth, but then they died and I got sent up instead. I’ve been teaching Eridian scientists for years as well, trying to work through all of their Earth science questions, but it’s not the same. I miss teaching kids.
I’ve been planning on using the old translator program on my laptop for the first few classes, just to keep things easy for the kids, but I’ve been working with a team here to cook up a tool that would allow me to just speak Eridian. The demo unit is built to look like a crude keyboard, and it plays the sounds Eridians use to form words. I was a mediocre piano player in middle school, but I’m sure the encouragement of alien communication will give me plenty of reason to practice and get, like, really, really good.
According to my watch, it’s about 2pm Pacific Daylight Time. I’m extremely doubtful that it’s actually that time in San Franciso right now, but it’s that time in the replicated alien Bay Area that I live in now. Artificial sunlight streams in through the gentle fog, and I can hear the waves from the very-convincing (if not a little too warm) ‘ocean’ just down the beach.
I wish this guy would wake up or die so I can move on with my life. No, no I don’t. That’s insanely selfish. I want him to heal at a normal pace and be okay. And then I want to get back to my life.
I’m absolutely lost in thought about how I would love to walk down to the beach and work on some lesson plans when I hear a distinctly human gagging noise.
“Eye motion detected,” Armando says.
“Shut the fudge up,” I reply.
The man on the table gags again.
“What is your na-” Armando begins to ask, and I cut him off.
“Ryland Grace,” and I rush to the table. Before I can get there, he has the feeding tube pulled out of his throat and he tries to stand. His eyes are still swollen from whatever did all of this to him, but he peels them open. They look aggravated and runny. He looks at me with fear. And then he starts ripping out tubes.
Oh no, I’ve been there before. “Hey, hey, hey! Slow down,” I try to use the most soothing voice I can. “You’re going to hurt yourself!”
His eyes lock with mine, and for a moment they go wide. “’m dead, aren’t I?” he slurs out. “Why does being dead hurt so bad? Ouugh,” he groans pitifully and rolls around on the table.
“Armando, deflate the catheter and increase painkillers,” I command, voice shaky.
“Catheter deflated for removal. Pain medicine administration imminent,” it replies flatly.
The man in front of me groans loudly again, but it trails off. I hear the relay click, allowing the flow of more medicine into the IV that he, thankfully, hadn’t ripped out.
“That feels really nice,” he says, incredibly slowly. And then it clicks for me. Holy moly, this guy was speaking English. I feel a few tears slip out. The first human I’ve seen in years and we speak the same language. And he didn’t die! My lucky day.
The man leans back down onto the table, banging his head against the hard alloy. I rush to grab a pillow from the pile I’d been sleeping on.
“Alright, guy, I’m gonna just slip this under there…” I gently grab the back of his head and lift it up to slip the pillow under. His hair is greasy and still sticky with gore. I’ve gone nose blind to the smell, but I’m sure he reeks. I wipe my hand on my clean pant leg and it leaves a stain. Yuck.
“Why’s it so heavy out?” he asks, his pupils blown.
“Uhh, well…” I start. “We’re not on Earth.” He laughs at that.
“Of course we’re not on Earth. That place is gooooone,” he drags out the last word with a low laugh. My heart sinks.
“Earth is… Gone?”
“Yeah, where have you been? All the planets and the stars are all gone. They’ve been gone for so long,” he lolls his head back. “Just you and me in Heaven now. No more spaceships for us.”
He’s obviously delirious.
“We’re not in Heaven,” I resist the urge to add that Heaven doesn’t exist.
“Chyeah, we’re definitely in Heaven,” he rolls over on the table, lying on the side that still has the full arm. “I dunno how I got in, but there’s no way this is another space station.”
I shake my head. “You’re on Erid, it’s a planet.”
“Huh-uh,” he shakes his head in disagreement. His moves are getting sloppier now. “All the planets. All the stars. They’re all gone. That happened more than 20 years ago. No more planets for me to be on.” He gives me a look that says checkmate. I raise an eyebrow at him. “That means you’re an angel. Or you’re dead. But I’m gonna guess angel. You look too good to be dead.”
With that, he goes back to sleep.