Chapter Text
“What’s two plus two?”
Something about the question irritates him. He’s tired. He drifts back to sleep.
After a moment, the voice speaks again.
“What’s two plus two?”
He reaches a hand up to rub at his eyes only to find his limbs not cooperating.
“What’s two plus two?” the voice repeats again, and vaguely, he feels his face scrunching up in annoyance. He blows air out of his nose.
“Lrmln,” he says. Then he pauses. He’d meant to say “leave me alone”— a completely reasonable response, in his opinion— but the words slurred past his lips, his mouth barely able to even pronounce the syllables.
“Incorrect.” The voice is soft, feminine, yet devoid of emotion and tone. There’s an electric tinge to it, and he realizes that that is a computer.
He’d been arguing with a computer.
“What’s two plus two?”
“Hlllch?” He tries, attempting to say hello. It comes out as a weird jarble of mixed sounds instead.
What the hell is going on? He can’t move. Can barely think— nothing is working the way it should be. His body refuses to listen to him and it’s like his eyes are glued shut. He’d process things if his eyes weren’t glued shut.
…
There! Movement. Eyes flicker behind eyelids. Wiggling his eyeballs around takes a lot out of him, somehow.
Open!
Nothing.
Open! Please!
Nothing.
He wiggles his eyes one more time, glancing around at the darkness behind his eyelids.
Then they shoot open.
He is blinded. The light sears into his retinas in a way no light has done before.
“Gah–”
“Eye movement detected,” the machine says. “What’s two plus two?”
Okay. Time to categorize.
He can’t move his arms. Or his legs. Or his body. His thoughts and eyesight are still a little fuzzy, but shapes are fading into view. His concentration is slowly coming back. LED lights above. Cameras looking down from the ceiling.
It is not a comforting sight.
But that’s not the focus.
What is the focus is the dozens of needle-like and medical things (scalpel, more needles, etc) attached to two sets of robotic hands, right where fingers would be. The entire setup hovers above his face. It’s not pretty.
“Fffff….oooooh….rrrr,” he tries, and once again, the computer speaks.
“Incorrect. What’s two plus two?”
Shit. He can feel the inside of his chest begin to shake, and panic rises up to his throat. Summoning all of the strength he can, he tries to open his mouth.
“Fffour,” he finally manages, and the computer hums, machinery against eerie quiet.
“Correct.”
Oh, thank god. He can talk. Can he move?
“What’s the cube root of eight?”
“Oh, shut up.” The words rush past his newly awakened vocal chords before he can even process anything, and he gasps in surprise.
He talked! Again!
“Incorrect.”
But he couldn’t even care less. He just talked. Just talked!
“What’s the cube root of eight?”
“Two times e—” He chokes on a cough, and elects to speak more slowly. “— to the two-i-pi.”
“Incorrect. What’s the cube root of eight?”
He wasn’t incorrect, actually, thank you very much. This computer just wasn’t very smart.
“Two.”
“Correct.”
Hell yeah. He quietly celebrates with a little cheer.
Silence passes.
Seems like the computer doesn’t want any more answers.
That’s fine.
He drifts off to sleep.
…
Consciousness grabs him like a moth to a flame, and his eyes blink open before he can even process what is happening.
His arm twitches, and he celebrates before he can even process what it means.
Arm movement! Movement!
A bit of effort later, and he’s sitting up— his arms are sore from doing so, but he’s up!
“Full body movement detected,” the computer says, soft voice cutting through the silence. “What’s your name?”
“Really?” He asks, raising a brow. Speaking feels so cathartic. “This?”
“Incorrect. Attempt number two: What’s your name?”
“….Uh.”
Wait.
Wait. Why doesn’t he know his name?
What—
“Incorrect. Attempt number three: What’s your name?”
“….Shit.”
“Incorrect.”
A flush of fatigue travels up his veins and through his body— he must’ve been sedated, he realizes.
He doesn’t get the privilege of having another thought before robot arms gently lay him back down in bed.
…
When he wakes again, it’s to a robot arm in his face.
He jerks backward, eyes barely catching the glint of a razor before the arm retracts. Shakily, he reaches a hand up to his face, feeling smooth skin where there once was stubble.
“You shaved me?”
“Consciousness detected,” the computer says. “What’s your name?”
“I… still don’t know,” he admitted.
“Incorrect. Attempt number two: What’s your name?”
“Alright, I’m not doing this again,” he mutters, and he pulls himself off of the bed, yanking an IV out of his arm. “Edwardo, or something. I feel like an Edwardo.”
“Incorrect. Attempt number three: What’s your name?”
“…”
Instead of answering, he stands on two shaking legs.
Then one goes down, knee buckling.
“FU—”
“Physical distress,” the computer says, and the robot arms give chase.
He yelps, scooting away from them and shoving himself under one of the other beds. The arms give up, of course— they can only reach so far, and that’s nothing against a human who’s only fuel is adrenaline.
They stop. They wait.
They’re run by a computer. And a computer has no concept of time. They’ll wait as long as they need to.
Which would be fine, if he wasn’t completely confused, disoriented, and with no idea as to where he was.
Tears escape from the sides of his eyes with each throbbing jolt of his knee. He’s not sure if he’s felt pain like this before.
“Hey,” he calls, reaching up and weakly shaking the leg of the bed he’d sought shelter under. “Hey— wake up? Humans? Other humans? Someone?”
“What’s your name?”
“I said humans,” he gritted. “Humans? Someone?”
“Incorrect,” the computer says, and he has to hold back a pained laugh at how absurd this all was. Jeez, this was so bad. Everything was so bad. His leg hurt, his arms were weak, and if he squints, he can see the remains of what happened when he’d rolled over and gotten out of bed.
There’s a red tube of something hanging from a bag near his bed. If he squints, he might be able to make out the letters on the label. The tube itself seems unremarkable, though. It’s just a thin red line of—
The recording studio isn’t too crowded when he gets in early.
So he does, parking his bike near the building and locking it before he walks inside. He’s booked the place for about three hours, today— he’s got a few lines he needs to work out and record before he gets back to his apartment and begins editing. Then he’d have to go to work soon after.
He’d probably save more money if he’d just made breakfast at home instead of ordering something at a cafe— but he values a good bacon egg sandwich and hot coffee more than his rent sometimes, and today was one of those times.
The room he booked isn’t ready yet— a downside of getting there early– so he sits down and pulls out his phone, fully ready to enjoy his food.
An email catches his eye before he can even unwrap his sandwich, though.
Something about a thin red line, whatever that meant. He’d meant to unsubscribe from it a long time ago— he’d left that life behind. Wasn’t for him.
He glanced at the clock. Still about twenty minutes before his room would be ready.
Nothing better to do than to read it, then.
TO: Astronomy Curiosities [email protected]
FROM: (Irina Petrova, PhD) [email protected]
SUBJECT: The Thin Red Line
This was just an emailing list of small things that scientists– especially professionals in their domain— would chat about whenever it struck their fancy. He sipped at his coffee as his eyes scanned the text scrawling down the white email page.
Hello, professionals. My name is Doctor Irina Petrova and I work at the Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg, Russia.
I am writing to you to ask for help.
For the past two years, I have been working on a theory related to infrared emissions from nebulae. As a result, I have made detailed observations in a few specific IR bands of light. And I have found something odd—not in any nebula, but here in our own solar system.
There is a—
“Mr. Albert Allington?”
He flinched, nearly spilling his coffee– his eyes torn from the email and into the eyes of a young woman. Huh. They were fast today.
“Yeah,” he cleared his throat, shoving his phone in his back pocket and standing up. “That’s me. Call me Avery though. I hate my name.”
“Avery—” he rasped, the name tearing through his throat and sending a jolt of recognition down his spine, just as the memory had mere seconds prior. “My name is Avery. Albert—” he winced, that name grating on his nerves. “—Allington. Avery.”
“Correct. Good morning, Dr. Allington.”
“…Doctor??”
The rasp becomes a screech, and Avery (thank god he went by Avery and not whatever… Albert was) pulled himself out from under the bed. “What do you mean, doctor????”
There was no response.
So, obviously, Avery’s response to that was to scream.
...
“Pilot detected,” the computer says, when Avery slips into the pilot’s seat. “Angular anomaly.”
“Shut up,” Avery mutters, and he flicks a few switches at random. Thankfully they don’t do anything much– just turns on and off some lights. One made a number on the screen go up— he quickly flicked that one back off. Not risking it.
A few days of being alone really does things to the mind. In that time, he’d found out—
-
His name was Avery. Specifically Albert Allington, but that name was fucking horrible so he’d elected for Avery instead.
-
He had glasses. No wonder he could barely see shit when he woke up. He’d found the glasses sitting in their case in one of the storage units, with a label on it simply labeled For Avery.
-
He was a teacher! Well. Kind of. He’d been a proud fan of the open-world game Minecraft, and decided to use both his skills at the game (Skywars, baby) and his passion for biology. His educational Youtube channel had a few thousand subscribers, he thinks.
-
Speaking of biology. When was anyone going to tell him he had a doctorate in the thing??? Specifically molecular biology– okay, nerd. He would’ve chosen botany if he wasn’t allergic to pollen, apparently.
-
He’d technically been taken to a lab in the middle of butt fuck nowhere since he was one of the, and he quotes the lady from his memory, “qualified” to research sun-eating dots that came from this thing called the Petrova Line.
And last of all, he was in space. That was reason for panic (he’d panicked for about two hours after seeing the light of the stars through a tempered window. Then he’d cried for about an hour after that.)
“Nevermind that,” he muttered, blowing a strand of hair out of his face. Dirty blonde, like all of the other strands of hair on his head when he looked at himself in the shiniest reflective surface he could find— it turned out to be a glass beaker. Whatever. Time to use the hair tie he nabbed from a bag with his name on it.
He’d also scavenged a new shirt (with a stupid Minecraft print on it… he loved that) and a pair of shorts. He’d even found a bottle of brown hair dye in there. So he dyed his hair brown…?
Avery, admittedly, had also stolen a few things from the other bags. A few space-bags of vodka from one, along with an assortment of playing cards from another.
…Rest in peace, you two.
He didn’t know them, but he’d never forget the sheer terror he felt when he moved to wake up the other humans on the ship only to find that both of them were hooked up to nothing. Bodies unmoving. Cold.
He’d rather not dwell on the cheesy goodbyes he’d given them before sending them back out into the stars.
“Angular anomaly.”
“Can you shut your trap?” Avery hissed at the computer’s automated voice, flicking a light switch out of sheer boredom. He fidgeted with the ship’s steering thingamabob before he glanced at the screen— huh.
He paused his fidgeting.
ANGULAR ANOMALY: RELATIVE MOTION ERROR
PREDICTED VELOCITY: 11,422 KPS
MEASURED VELOCITY: 11,871 KPS
STATUS: AUTO-CORRECTING TRAJECTORY. NO ACTION REQUIRED.
Uhh. Was it just him, or did those two KPS numbers just go down.
He blinks, and watches the numbers go down even more.
And more.
And more, increasing more and more as the seconds ticked by.
Kilometers per second. That meant something was moving. And if kilometers per second was decreasing, then…
What was that thing he’d heard about? That moved the ship? A centrifuge? In space– the science and mechanical technicalities of that would help with– what was it again?
Gravity?
Oh.
Oh no.
Avery was a second too late in grabbing the buckle of the pilot’s seat before his gut lurched and his weight suddenly disappeared.
“SHI—”
He’s floating. He’s floating and his face has smashed into the side of one of the screens, narrowly avoiding any important-looking buttons at the cost of his glasses getting pushed painfully to the side of his face. He looks up.
It’s a logo. Mission crest, title, whatever you call it.
He’s seen enough NASA documentaries to know what it is. It’s a circular thing, with an outer ring of blue and white text scrawled across the top and the bottom.
Hail Mary
It reads, across the top, with
Earth
on the bottom.
The name and the “port of call”, although Avery was pretty sure the ship couldn’t have come from anywhere else other than Earth of all places.
Around the edge of the circular symbol are three names.
姚
ИЛЮХИНА
ALLINGTON
He was Allington, and the other two names are ones he recognizes with a pang of deep, deep sadness. They had their names embroidered on the suits their corpses wore, when he sent them back out into space.
…Best to not dwell on that.
Instead, Avery shifts his attention to the temperature readings that flash all over what seems to be a map? Of some kind?
…
Oh. It’s a map of the ship. A layout, to be specific– an outline of it, with various rooms seperated by thin lines. Every few meters, there would be another temperature reading.
96.415°C.
What’s so important about 96.415°C?
C’mon, brain. C’mon.
“96.415,” Avery muttered, staring at the temperature reading. “Degrees Celsius.”
It was Avery’s second day at the lab, and he was currently in a sealed off room, in a protective suit, with multiple incredibly important government officials on the other side behind a glass barrier.
Suffice to say, not the best conditions to put a scientist in. Especially a scientist who can’t really do anything properly due to being in a hazmat suit.
“What does that mean?” The woman on the other side of the barrier asked, startling Avery out of his groove.
“It means these dots have a base temperature of hot as hell,” Avery snapped back, his head jerking up to glare at the officials behind the glass. “If you wanna keep asking so many questions, how about you come in here and figure it out yourself?”
“Hey,” A man next to the woman spoke up, leaning into the mic. He was dressed quite neatly— in a suit and tie, sunglasses perched on his nose. “I know you hate Ms. Richards and all, but please. Be polite? There’s a lot of important government people back here and frankly I don’t think any of us wanna be on the other end of a legal team if shit gets fucked.”
His name was Alex Carson. He was Emily Richards’s bodyguard. Avery decided, in that moment, he liked the guy.
“You,” he said, pointing at the man through the glass. “Are my friend now. You’re invited when I go eat sad tacos later this evening.”
“Anyone else coming?”
“I don’t have other friends.”
“So this is a two man show.”
“Pretty much.”
“Boys,” Richards sighed. “Focus.”
“I’m taking you up on that offer,” Alex added, before he pulled away from the microphone. Avery grinned, turning back to the experiment at hand.
He poked it. With a nanosyringe, of course, he wasn’t a barbarian. It may be an incredibly expensive piece of equipment, the small thing— but they let loose a rogue researcher in a lab full of extremely tempting cool looking science stuff and told him to go ham on an alien substance.
Of course he was gonna use a nanosyringe.
And of course he was gonna poke a dot with it.
One of the dots burst. The membrane seems to fold in on itself and the dot bursts.
It dies.
Avery celebrates with a loud cheer.
“What?” Richards asks, leaning forward into the mic. “What is it?”
“I split the membrane!” Avery announces, a wide smile on his face. “I penetrated it with a nanosyringe and now I can study the insides!”
“You poked it with a stick.”
“I very scientifically poked it with a very scientific stick,” Avery corrected. “In a very scientific way, might I add.”
“And you didn’t think of doing this beforehand because…?”
“Because fuck you, don’t question my methods.”
“…Carry on.”
So Avery carries on. He carefully put the needle into a spectroscope, ejecting the goop of the dot onto the platform. Then, he sealed up the chamber, firing up the analysis and leaning back patiently, watching it rumble.
“So what are you doing now?” Came Richard’s voice again. Avery sighed.
“If you have to know,” he started, tilting a head toward the group. “I’m using the atomic-emission spectroscope. It sends x-rays into a sample to excite the atoms inside, then watches the wavelengths that come back. Didn’t work when I tried it on the live stuff, but maybe there’s a difference when I use the dead stuff.”
The machine beeped.
Avery lit up, moving over to it.
“Alllright! Time to figure out what a lifeform that isn’t water based is made out of—”
He fell silent.
“…Dr. Allington?” Richards asked. “…Avery? Avery, answer me.”
“…Carbon,” Avery started, in a flat tone. “Nitrogen. Hydrogen. Oxygen. The ratio of hydrogen on oxygen is two to one.”
“…What does that mean?”
“…” Avery turned back to her, tears threatening to bubble up in his eyes. “It means they’re water based.”
“…How—”
“I don’t know,” Avery grit out, flailing his arms in a half hearted shrug. “Internal temperature, maybe? What goes on inside doesn’t go on outside?”
“…”
“…”
“…Fuck,” Avery breathed. Every paper he’d ever written was wrong. “Fuck, fuck, FUCK—”
A table was flipped. Two, even. Avery personally saw himself out of the lab after flipping a third, clipboard clutched in hand and face fuming.
…
“Hey.”
A paper bag was waved in front of his face.
“Avery, right?”
“..” Avery looked up from his sitting on the curb to meet the yellow-green eyes of one Alex Carson. The bodyguard held a paper bag in one hand, and a to-go box in the other.
“Pretty sure Richards told you who I am.”
“Yeah.” Avery snorted halfheartedly. “Yeah, she did.” He took the bag, feeling a warm solid object inside– another box? Maybe?
“You invited me for sad tacos but didn’t specify from where, so I took matters into my own hands.” Alex shrugged, opening his own takeout box and sitting beside Avery on the curb. “Talk to me, man. What’s got your panties in a twist?”
“It’s—” Avery set his food to the side and buried his face in his hands, smudging his glasses and screaming a muffled scream. He lifted his head. “I had this hypothesis, you know. A few years ago. Penned a paper on it and everything. ‘An Analysis of Water Based Assumptions and Recalibrations of Expectations for Evolutionary Models’. It was about— something about how aliens didn’t need water n shit to survive. But… the dots. They’re…”
“Water based?”
“…Yeah,” Avery finished, lamely, before he picked up the bag again and reached in, pulling out a box. “So I’m just.. stupid, I guess. I’ve been defending a hypothesis that’s just been wrong this entire time.”
He opened the box to be hit with the sight and smell of three decently sized tacos. They looked pretty good, actually.
“Where’d you get these?”
“Oh,” Alex paused from where he had lifted one of his own tacos to his mouth. “That place down the street. The new one.”
“Huh. Didn’t know there was one near here.”
“Yeah.”
The two men ate in silence.
“These tacos are ass.”
“Oh yeah,” Avery snorted. “Agreed.”
More silence.
“…Is now a good time to mention I watched the UNESCO thing. Denmark?” Alex looked up, swallowing as he did. “I saw. The swing.”
“…” Avery scoffed. “What? The very thing that got me kicked out of academia? Bunch of posh bastards. Should’ve let me at them.”
“You didn’t deserve that,” Alex continued, his voice dropping.
Avery paused. Looked over.
“…Huh?”
“You didn’t deserve that,” Alex repeated. “Yes, your hypothesis was pretty far out there, and you did call out a bunch of individual people and insult a bunch of people in your paper, but you still deserved respect. What you certainly didn’t deserve was to be laughed at in front of hundreds of scientists and also on live television.”
“…Thanks, man.”
“Yeah.” Alex chuckled. “It’s honestly the least I can do. You’re still human, you know. You deserve to be listened to– you had pretty good points, too.”
“I beat the shit out of that guy,” Avery admitted, pulling out his water bottle from his bag and taking a sip.
“…” Alex slowly turned his head to look at him. “…You what—”
“3:27am in the morning,” another voice sounded, cutting Alex off. Avery turned to meet the eyes of one very amused Emily Richards. “On a Tuesday, if I recall correctly.”
“And I did a couple months for it,” Avery muttered into his water.
“A year and a half,” Richards corrected, shuffling through the papers in her arms. “You got lucky.”
“Extremely lucky,” Alex pointed out from next to him, eyes wide. “Dude, you got that swing in?”
“More than a swing.” Avery shrugged, throwing back another swig of water. “Multiple.”
“How are you so nonchalant about this??”
“Oh,” Avery shrugged, putting the lid back on. “I’m not. So, Richards, what’s that?”
“He’s not,” Richards addressed Alex first, before pulling out a piece of paper and holding it out to Avery. “I’m going to need you to sign these forms. So we can send you back. It’s an NDA, you know how those work, yes?”
“…I know how an NDA— you’re sending me back??” The screech echoed down the street they were standing on, as Avery forgot all about the box in his lap (it was empty anyways) and stood up, his glasses falling down to the tip of his nose. “No– no– I’m not?? Done yet??”
“You’ve done enough,” Richards reassured, in the least reassuring tone Avery had ever heard. “There are other scientists who can take over now.”
“No, no, no–” Avery jabbed a finger at her. “I don’t care how much authority you have. You brought me into this. I’m going to see it through.”
“There isn’t enough,” Richards countered. “We have a limited supply of the dots, and we need to work carefully with them.”
“Keep me in, then,” Avery argued back, the rising anger twisting his features into something between a grimace and a scowl. “I know what they’re made of. I can duplicate my old experiments. I know exactly what to do about them.”
“…Three,” Richards finally nodded, backing away. She tucked the papers back into her arm. “You get three dots. Then, when they die, you go home.”
“Fine. I get three dots of astrophage.”
“Astrophage?” Alex piped up, one brow raised. Avery grinned back at him.
“Sick name, yeah? I just thought of it. Means star eater.”
“…I’ll write that down,” Richards muttered, turning away. “See you at the labs, Dr. Allington.”
Astrophage.
Astrophage was powering the ship.