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“This normal for humans, question?”
Rocky winces at the sounds that come from Grace at that. It had taken Rocky some doing to figure out how to use Grace’s vocal chords, but he also hadn’t screamed at the top of Grace’s lungs about all this.
Not for more than a second, anyway. Two or three at most.
“Quiet,” Rocky pleads and waits for Grace to listen to him, resisting the urge to cover his ears. To his credit, it doesn’t take long. Less to his credit, Rocky’s ears — Grace’s ears? Rocky’s mind behind Grace’s skin? — are still ringing. “One tap yes, two taps no. This normal for —”
Tap. Tap.
Rocky risks squinting open one of Grace’s eyes. As before, the light is immediately overwhelming. Once they figure out what’s happening, Rocky will ask Grace if it’s like this all the time, and how he hasn’t keeled over in overwhelm at it before. But he can read his own body language, though it’s very weird seeing himself from someone else’s perspective like this. Still, while it’s odd to see his body hunched up and half-hidden behind his legs, he knows what that means. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “Know how happened, question?”
Grace smacks his leg against the clear xenonite shell two times, shaking a little bit.
“Grace know how fix, question? Hope?”
Tap. Tap. Grace slumps even further.
“Bad bad bad,” Rocky says mournfully. Grace warbles in what Rocky thinks is supposed to be agreement.
Stratt already has scientists hard at work on building the taumoeba breeder tanks. She’s been wired since the moment the beetles hit the atmosphere. Since the moment they were close enough for sensors to read them, if she’s being honest with herself, and she’s not in the business of self-deception. No, she’s here to save the world.
Still, everyone has to rest eventually, and she’s been up for two and a half straight days. She’s forced herself to return to her room, even smaller and more featureless than her cell had been.
Unfortunately, the moment her head hits the pillow, she knows exhaustion won’t be enough to knock her out. Having half-expected this outcome, she pulls up one of Grace’s tapes on her phone, one that she hasn’t had a chance to watch yet. He always was relaxing to be around, except at the very end, and she’s curious if the effect will extend across however many lightyears are between them now.
The alien — Rocky — had been a shock, to say the least, but she’s almost comforted to see his ball rolling around in the background while Grace sits in front of the camera.
“Taumoeba,” Grace says, and Stratt frowns, because Grace doesn’t talk like that. Lilting in odd places but not a recognizable accent, words slurring almost as though he’s drunk. Is he drunk? There had been plenty of vodka for Ilyukhina. He did say he’d sent everything in the footage labelled STRATT WATCH THIS FIRST, just in case there was something useful that they didn’t catch onboard the Hail Mary.
Rocky makes a noise that sounds significantly less musical than his normal speech.
Grace winces and makes a rude gesture at the alien, snapping, “Ow! Ow ow ow!”
Rocky lets out a sound that even a human like Stratt can read as frustration. He extends one of his legs in a fine, you go gesture that seems vaguely…well, more human than Stratt is expecting. She had seen how Grace changed from the later footage to the earlier ones, so perhaps this is more of that? But no, something still seems off, with both of them.
A gas leak? But they’re not sharing atmospheres. Unless that’s the leak and that’s the problem? Clearly Grace had lived long enough to send the beetles and try to make it to Erid, so they’ll catch it, whatever it is, but…
“Taumoeba is astrophage natural predator,” Grace continues. “Whole ecosystem by Adrian keeps population of both in check. Taumoeba bred and stored alone in big tanks, but small tanks saved for —” He makes a sound then, weirdly Rocky-esque.
Rocky’s head tilts in just the way Grace’s always did when he was more out of his depth than he wanted anyone to know. Stratt sits up. Is that…no. There’s no way.
“You learn how Rocky speak so you can tell using computer,” Grace — Rocky, clearly — mutters, more irritated than petulant. “Or find fix!”
Grace gestures towards the camera in a clear hey, genius, remember that? way, the same way he did whenever one of the other scientists was missing something obvious. It’s still recognizable even in how different Rocky’s body is.
The video shuts off there. In the next chronological recording, Grace seems to be acting normal, and Rocky’s fiddling with another model in the background with a speed and grace that Stratt knows real Grace wouldn’t possess. Grace must have “found fix”, then.
She snorts, unsure how the hell Grace managed to stumble into swapping bodies with an alien and then not even to mention it, and puts down her phone. If that won’t calm her enough to sleep, nothing will.