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When Mr. Grace first vanished, no one told the class anything. All they knew was that one day, Mr. Grace was gone, replaced by a boring, cagey substitute who fielded all their questions with “let’s all focus on the assignment please.” Theories ran wild, as theories often do, and a bunch of thirteen-year-olds can come up with some crazy ideas. The theories, or hypotheses, as Abby insisted on specifying, ranged from reasonable (a relative is very sick and he’s gone to care for them), to paranoid (he’s very sick and has gone to live out his remaining days in Italy), to completely absurd (he was kidnapped by the government for some kind of important discovery). All in all, it was just a bunch of loose speculation, and aside from mourning the loss of the only class kids actually looked forward to, life went on as usual.
The evidence provided by Mr. Grace’s (brief) return did very little to clarify things. The whole time he seemed… off, but that could have been a result of any of the hypotheses currently running around. Nothing he said gave them any indication, and by then they were so deep into their puzzle-solving that they didn’t want to ask just yet. They wanted to sus it out for themselves. The scientific method! Had Mr. Grace heard that reasoning, he probably would have informed them that the scientific method actually involves exploring every possible avenue. Yes, including the easiest and most obvious one.
They never got the chance to ask. One minute he was back, ready to start the day, and the next he was gone again. They’d never seen him leave school that fast. Not even on the last day of school each year, during which he could often be seen bolting comedically towards the staff lot. This wasn’t funny. Not a classic Mr. Grace bit designed to, eventually, demonstrate some kind of scientific concept for them. Not a joke to lighten the mood after a tough exam period. He was just gone.
The classroom was silent for an unusual amount of time after Mr. Grace left. The door slammed shut behind him and the students were left in their places, thoroughly silenced by the peculiar nature of their teacher’s departure. Most classrooms full of eighth graders would have dissolved into chaos within a single minute of the teacher stepping out the door. On that particular day, Grace’s class took five.
Michael was the first to break the silence.
“Um. What?” It wasn’t a particularly eloquent statement, but it was, all in all, a pretty accurate summation of the general feeling in the classroom.
“Is he okay?” Theresa asked.
“Maybe it’s the sick friend he has. He got a text that something was up and had to go,” Trang piped up.
“We don’t know he has a sick friend,” Abby cut in. “That’s just speculation.”
“Oh, big word,” Larry muttered. She shot him a glare that had little effect.
“Maybe he was late for a meeting?” Harrison suggested.
“During his scheduled class?” Abby replied snidely.
“I dunno. They have… big teacher meetings or whatever.” She rolled her eyes, not even dignifying that with a response. There was another lapse in the room as the students each tried to individually evaluate the situation before them. It was like a collective agreement had fallen over them all. An instinct that each of them felt simultaneously. It’s probably nothing. That didn’t look like nothing.
“He didn’t…” Abby glanced over her shoulder. She could barely hear Regina with how quiet the girl usually talked. “He didn’t look at his phone.” The suggestion felt more damning than it should have.
“Okay, so that rules out the text idea,” Trang said bitterly.
“Still could’ve been a meeting!” Harrison defended.
“He probably just realized he left his stove on,” Abby said.
“Sounds like him,” Tamora agreed. A small, fragile laugh fluttered through the room, doing little to soothe the anxiety the children were feeling.
“Y’know, I was kinda looking forward to the game,” Luther huffed dejectedly. “He hates us.” Another flurry of laughter, a bit stronger this time.
“Maybe he has a date,” Theresa tossed out.
“During his scheduled class?” Abby reiterated.
“You never know. Teachers lead mysterious and unknowable lives,” Trang informed her. He had, at some point, translocated from sitting in his chair to sitting on top of his desk instead, taking advantage of the unplanned and unsupervised free period the students had been gifted. Tweens are, after all, rather fickle creatures. And teachers seem quite invincible when you’re young and uncertain.
It didn’t take long for the uneasy atmosphere in the class to dissipate. Despite Abby’s best efforts, the study hall quickly devolved into what was essentially indoor recess. Some kids were chatting, others stood at the whiteboard drawing nonsense Abby couldn’t even begin to describe. A couple commandeered Mr. Grace’s trash and recycling bins to play some kind of modified game of cornhole with bunched up paper. Waste of trees, if you asked Abby, but none of them saw fit to consult her.
Abby was part of the incredibly small cohort of students who actually followed their teacher’s instructions and did work for other classes. After all, they didn’t actually know why he’d run out or how long he’d be gone. It could be a test to see how they’d behave. Or if it wasn’t, he could’ve let another teacher know he was leaving and sent them to monitor. Or the principal could walk by at any minute and look inside. Regardless of the situation, the outcome would be the same, and Abby was not about to ruin her spotless record by getting sent to the principal’s office along with everyone else.
Although… saying she “did her work” was really only half true. Sure, she had an assignment out in front of her. An easy one, too. It was just a worksheet from history class with a couple questions about the American Revolution. Light work if you actually bothered to pay attention in class. Which Abby definitely did. Her meticulously color-coded notes could attest to it. She estimated it would take her about ten minutes. Tops.
She just couldn’t force herself to focus. Her eyes scanned over the page and absorbed the letters in front of her, but each word seemed to enter her brain separately, drifting around pointlessly instead of shaping coherent sentences. Likewise, whenever she did manage to cobble something together, she would hardly get one word on the page before she lost her grip on her thought process yet again.
It was probably nothing. She knew, for a fact, that it was probably nothing. Likely related to why Mr. Grace had been absent for a while, sure, but it couldn’t be that bad, right? He was just Mr. Grace. Eccentric like that. And he’d… seemed fine when class started, hadn’t he?
She was sure it was fine. There was nothing to worry about. Not the sun getting eaten, or the sun turning giant and eating the earth, or a stray black hole, or the heat death of the universe, or anything like that.
Not the stricken look on Mr. Grace’s face right before he ran out of the room.
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Mr. Grace was not at eighth grade graduation. Of course, he’d always joked that he wouldn’t be. “You want me to sit in the most poorly designed chairs ever constructed, for an hour, while people read your names? I already know your names.” But he’d always follow it up with a laugh and a warm, assuring smile. The kind he used to make sure you knew he was joking, just in case it didn’t land.
Abby wouldn’t say she was… worried, per se. She also wouldn’t say she was hurt. She would be incorrect on both counts, of course, but she was also thirteen, and thirteen-year-olds aren’t all that well known for their emotional maturity. So she didn’t acknowledge it, at least not fully. But she was worried. And she was hurt.
It was probably cheap to say that Mr. Grace was her favorite teacher. Mr. Grace was everyone’s favorite teacher, to the point that you’d probably get shanked in the bathroom if you disagreed. But sometimes popular things are popular for a reason, and Mr. Grace was her favorite teacher. He was funny and he was nice and he let them watch stupid videos in class and play games and his assignments never made her feel like a piece of paper was calling her stupid. He was the only teacher that didn’t brush her off when she excitedly talked about the new skill she’d picked up in riding. He’d never minded that she did work for other classes while he taught, as long as she still participated and did well on the tests. He’d just been… good. He was a really good teacher, and she’d wanted to see him at graduation.
She’d also wanted to see him at graduation because she’d never gotten the chance to give him his gift. It was currently tucked into her mom’s bag, along with all the other ones she’s spent the last week putting together. She’d made one for all of her teachers, because she didn’t want anyone to feel left out, but she’d spent the most time on Mr. Grace’s. The notes weren’t much to look at, and the ‘gifts’ were all just random gift cards that her mom had gotten for her, but it meant a lot to her. Part of her just wanted to make sure her teachers remembered her when she was a famous doctor one day. But another part of her was grateful. Especially to Mr. Grace.
“Hey! Hey, Abby!” She turned around just in time to exchange a hug and a squeal of excitement with Theresa as the other girl raced to her side. “I can’t believe it! We did it!”
“Woo! Highschool!” Larry announced, appearing from behind Theresa. “I’m gonna die!”
“God, don’t even say that,” Micheal muttered, completing their quartet with his emergence from the crowd. “Highschool isn’t real. Highschool is a scam by the deepstate. Me, personally, I’m gonna go live in the sewers.”
“They’re gonna make documentaries about you, dude,” Larry informed him. “The sewer man.”
“That’s gonna be my legacy. The rest of you will be forgotten by time, but not me. The sewer man lives on.”
“Until we all die in thirty years,” Abby pointed out. Even as she said it, the gravity of it didn’t quite hit her. Thirty years is a long time when you’re thirteen. When you’re only just cresting your first decade, it’s hard to imagine living for three more of them.
“Joke’s on you,” Micheal said, spreading his arms dramatically. “The sewer will provide.”
“Oh! There they are!” Abby turned around, torn, as children her age often are, between embarrassment and excitement at the sight of her mother. “I’m so proud of you, honey!” She was quickly pulled into a suffocating embrace with absolutely zero say in the matter. On any other day, it would have bothered her a lot more. But today was graduation day, and big events had a way of making people more susceptible to sappy bullshit.
“Come on, everybody get in, we have to get a picture!” Nervous, awkward laughs accompanied the kids as they arranged themselves into a line to take a picture. They stood side by side, looking, for all the world, like a bunch of soldiers on their first day. Mr. Grace would have told them to pretend they liked each other. It was cliche, but it never failed to work.
“Come on, guys, let’s pretend we like each other!” Micheal declared, filling the role in Mr. Grace’s stead. It was enough to get everyone more comfortable, throwing their arms over each other’s shoulders and holding unpleasantly long smiles while their parents gathered to take pictures. The ordeal couldn’t be over soon enough, allowing the kids to finally break their line and disperse once again.
“Here,” Abby’s mom said, taking her bag off of her shoulder and rifling through it. “Do you want to hand out your letters now? People will start leaving soon.”
“Oh. Uh, yeah,” Abby said. Her mother produced the envelopes and Abby took them, carefully holding the stack together to make sure nothing fell out. Abby’s mom smiled, replacing her bag.
“I’ll be waiting by the car.”
“Yeah. I’ll be quick,” Abby said. She didn’t wait for a response before darting out into the crowd, desperate to locate everyone before they left and she never saw them again. Sure, her mom could probably mail the letters if it came to it, but she wanted to see their reactions. Maybe it was a bit of an ego thing, but she was thirteen.
Most of her teachers were relatively easy to find, but she couldn’t shake the sinking feeling in her stomach as the pile in her hands steadily shrank down towards the final, remaining card. She maintained her cheerful demeanor with every teacher she encountered, accepting hugs and congratulations and assurances that she would do wonderfully going forward. All she could think about was the card left in her hand. The mystery tied to it.
“Mr. Boivard?” she asked the last teacher before she was left with only one card in her hand.
“Yes?”
“Um. Did you see Mr. Grace anywhere?” She held up the last card by way of explanation. Immediately, Mr. Boivard’s expression shifted into something she couldn’t quite decipher. A little uncertain. A little nervous. A little sad.
“Sorry, Abby, I haven’t seen him all day,” the teacher informed her. She’d figured that would be the response, but she’d had to try. “If you want, I can pass that along to him, though.” He gestured to the card in her hand.
“That’s okay,” Abby said. “I’ll just give it to him later.”
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It took another four years for Ryland Grace’s final eighth grade class to learn what actually happened to their favorite teacher. They departed their graduation and went off to high school, leaving middle school and the memory of that chaos-filled science classroom behind. Over time, the question of why Mr. Grace disappeared in the middle of the school year became less and less dire. The attention span of a teenager is only so big, after all.
By her senior of high school, Mr. Grace’s vanishing had become little more than a funny story Abby told her new friends, whenever the topic of middle school came up. “Oh yeah, one time my science teacher straight up disappeared forever. No one knows where he went. It was crazy.” He faded into the background of her life. Just another teacher that came and went. More memorable than most, but still just a blip in her march towards eventual success.
She remembered one thing vividly though. It was the part of the story she never told anyone else who hadn’t been there. The look in his eyes when he’d told them all about astrophage and the dangers it posed. The sudden dread that had overtaken him. The things that, in hindsight, Abby knew he’d been leaving out for their sake.
Thirty years is nigh incomprehensible when you’re thirteen. When you’re eighteen, it’s still not that easy to wrap your head around. But it’s easy enough to get the severity of the situation. By the time Mr. Grace’s thirty year estimate was up, Abby would be in her forties. Her mother was in her forties now. Instead of an impossible infinity away, the hour of humanity’s destruction was suddenly, painfully tangible.
It didn’t help that she could see it. Details were largely kept hidden from the global population, but they got the gist of it. World governments were collaborating to solve the astrophage problem. They were trying to buy time with ever-more extreme measures. It wouldn’t be enough. The death toll would still be massive. The news tried to play it down, but Abby wasn’t stupid. They just didn’t want people to panic, but she knew how this was going to end. Maybe she was just nihilistic, the way eighteen-year-olds are prone to being. Or maybe she was just trying to tell herself that to avoid facing the reality that everyone working on solving the problem wasn’t trying to save individual people. They were just trying to save the species. Any death toll that wasn’t 100% was what they were gunning for.
When Project Hail Mary was announced, it was the first time in a long time that Abby actually felt hope for her future. It was the stuff of legends. It was Star Trek in real life, a mission across the stars to save the world by discovering a cure for the astrophage threat. Suddenly, instead of a deadline for death, there was a deadline for survival. Twenty-six years. She just had to survive another twenty-six years, and then Hail Mary would send back the results of the mission and save everybody.
What she was most in awe of, though, were the astronauts. Three of them, because that was all the ship could afford to carry. Three of them, without enough fuel to get back. Their names weren’t revealed until the day of launch as a safety measure, but Abby would often try to picture them in her mind. She often found herself looping back to Jean Luc Picard as her visual, but she could hardly be blamed for it. She’d trust Jean Luc Picard on the Hail Mary. And she could picture him doing that. Sacrificing himself for all of humanity.
It was something she’d probably never understand. She felt like a coward for it, but she knew she’d never have been able to do it. No amount of “you’ll be a hero” and “it’ll save the earth” could have convinced her to go on a suicide mission like that. Part of her imagined that there must be something deeply wrong with whichever three madmen had volunteered for the assignment. The rest of her was too amazed by them to care. Three faceless heroes, braver than she could ever be.
Until they weren’t faceless anymore.
The old eighth grade group chat had been silent for months now. It had been absent of anything meaningful for even longer. It was the fate of all class group chats to eventually wither away and die as their original users drift apart and carry on with their lives. The younger you were when the group chat was made, the more inevitable its death became. There simply isn’t enough connective tissue to keep such a group chat active. It doesn’t take long for “being in the same class once” to stop being a reason to talk to each other.
On the morning of the Hail Mary astronaut launch, the Grover Cleveland Middle School class of 2017 group chat was lit up like an astrophage-less sun.
Larry King: Holy fuck shit balls fuck nuts holy FUCK
♥️Theresa♥️: did you guys see the launch announcement????
TrickOrTrang: there’s no way.
Mike: Woah, shit’s going down in the gc
Regina: are you watching the hail mary launch announcement?
Mike: no??????
Hairy Son: TURN ON YOUR FUCKING TV DUDE
MyNameIsJeff: holy shit
Larry King: is that where he fucking went?
Tammy: its gotta be
Tammy: right?
Mike: WHAT THE FUCK
Hairy Son: YEAH
Regina: it makes sense. he wouldn’t tell us where he was going if he was working on a top secret project
♥️Theresa♥️: this is actually insane
TrickOrTrang: holy shit. Fuck man I really thought he had cancer the whole time.
The astronauts of the Hail Mary were supposed to be people they didn’t know. That was Abby’s thought process anyway. Sure, some people out there would know them. But not her. Not the people she knew. Not the people she looked up to.
She couldn’t tell if it was just that her memory of him was so foggy now or if he really hadn’t changed in the past years. The picture of him on the Hail Mary crew roster looked just like how she remembered him. The launch announcement had him listed as the “science specialist.” To her, he just looked like a goddamn teacher.
Next to him were the faces of a woman and a man that Abby didn’t recognize in the slightest. That was how it was supposed to be.
She hardly knew how to feel about it. Indifference, because he’d been her teacher for only a year. Pride, because hey, I know that guy! That’s one of the heroes who’s going to save earth, and I was in his class! Something else.
She glanced away from her computer and over towards the shelf on the other side of the room. Her eyes traced upwards to the lockbox she kept at the top, decorated with small pictures of horses and opened by a small necklace key that she never actually wore. It was a childish artifact, but one she’d never been able to give up.
Inside that lockbox were all of the keepsakes she’d deemed important over the years. Invitations to birthday parties and cards she’d received for her birthdays in turn. Glowing report cards from many a teacher. Tickets from movies she went to see, old amusement park wristbands, the occasional picture from a school dance photobooth. And, somewhere, buried in the pile of knicknacks and reminders, a sealed envelope containing a twenty dollar gift card and a letter she never got to send.
Abby: We should do something for him.
Mike: bro, hes in space and im not going out there to get him
Abby: I mean we should send him something. Encouragement.
TrickOrTrang: Like, notes? They’re launching in like, an hour.
She looked back over at her lockbox, then back down to her phone. Maybe it was just the completionist in her, wanting to round out the project she’d started all those years ago. Maybe it was the part of her that was still grateful for the times Mr. Grace had let her eat lunch in his classroom without asking questions. Maybe it was the fact that she had nothing else to offer the people who were about to go out and die for her.
Abby: There’s a NASA email. We could all send them an email for Mr. Grace? They can send it to the Hail Mary before it gets out of range
Larry King: Bruh, they probably won’t even read them
No, they probably wouldn’t. Selfishly, Abby could admit that this wasn’t for Mr. Grace. It was for her. So she could feel like she did something despite knowing full well that she didn’t.
♥️Theresa♥️: I mean, it couldn’t hurt, right?
♥️Theresa♥️: Like
♥️Theresa♥️: Worst case scenario they just don’t read it
Hairy Son: Worst case scenario we get assassinated by the CIA
Mike: dude
Abby sighed, closing the group chat and tossing her phone onto the bed. It had been a stupid idea anyway. A spur-of-the-moment attempt at alleviating her guilt for being down here while her former teacher went out there to save her. To save everybody. At least, she supposed, he would never have any competition in the “cool teacher” department ever again.
It was stupid. It was pointless. Mr. Grace would never read it anyway. Another letter to live at the bottom of the metaphorical lockbox.
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“Grace stare at thinking machine for five earth hours. Position not change. Bad.” Among the various downsides of the long trip to Erid, such as consuming coma slop and constantly checking the taumoeba farms with irritating frequency, was the fact that Rocky was getting unpleasantly acquainted with human functioning. Being called stupid for not sleeping had been one thing. Getting corrected on his posture by a sentient rock spider was a whole new low.
“Yeah, well, it’s comfortable like this,” Grace informed his companion. He was, of course, lying. Now that it had been pointed out to him, he could identify several issues with his current position, including a crick in his neck, an ache in two separate parts of his back, and the fact that one of his legs had definitely fallen asleep. However, fixing the issues would be admitting failure, so he resolved himself almost immediately to just suck it up until Rocky had dropped the subject for a sufficiently long amount of time.
“Grace body weak. Stay too still for long time stupid.”
“Thanks, bud.”
“Sarcasm,” Rocky reported. It sure was.
There was a scuttling sound and Grace craned his neck around to see Rocky pacing his little cockpit bulb in irritation.
“What so important about thinking machine?” Grace leveled an unimpressed glare in Rocky’s direction.
“I’m just sorting through everything. It’ll be easier for your scientists if this data is more organized.” That was total bullshit, of course, and he was pretty sure Rocky knew it. The data on the Hail Mary contained the entirety of human civilization, from biology to b movies. There was simply no feasible way for him to sort it into a more coherent form than the one it was already in. In reality, Grace was just bored out of his goddamn mind and had gotten sucked into his deep dive through the annals of the computer system.
“Can wait. Take break.” To be fair, Rocky was, technically, correct. He probably did need to get up and take a break. He was definitely starting to get tired. Maybe tired enough to counteract all the blue light he’d been injecting directly into his retinas for the past few hours.
“Fine. You win,” he grumbled after a few moments mulling it over.
“Amaze,” Rocky declared dryly. After a second, he tacked on, “sarcasm,” just in case Grace didn’t get it. He’d gotten it.
“Yeah, yeah, just gimme a second…” Grace muttered. He turned back to the laptop he was working on, closing out of the random tabs he’d opened up to look through. He got through about six of them no problem, but just as he clicked delete on the seventh, he caught a flash of something strange. It looked like a standard email page, as if he’d somehow randomly opened someone’s gmail while looking. Of course, it would make sense for everything to be included, so on its own that wasn’t too bizarre, but he did find it amusing that he had it pulled up.
On a whim, he backpedaled and pulled the email tab back up. Looking at it more clearly now, he could see that it wasn’t quite a one-to-one of a typical email screen. Most notably, it offered him no option to “send” one of his own, nor did it had any additional mailboxes. Instead, the page just showed a single inbox, with the number attached to it indicating that he had 26 unread messages.
“Break time, break time!” Rocky hissed.
“In a second!” Grace shot back. “Just let me look at this.” Rocky grumbled something in Eridian that was definitely an insult. Something about him being stupider than taumoeba, which wasn’t all that much of an insult in his opinion considering how much trouble the clever little rapscallions had cost him.
He turned his attention back to the email folder and opened the first unread message.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Project Hail Mary
Dear Mr. Grace,