Chapter Text
The ship’s circadian rhythm is desynchronised from any actual time zone on Earth, but Okafor’s body still earnestly believes it’s three in the morning when the commander summons them to the mess. That’s why, when she hears 40 Eridani A b's response to the Long Shot’s first radio handshake, she does it in her pyjamas and bonnet.
The crew pours into the common area, settling under amber lighting onto the sleek, worn benches which have facilitated half a decade of regulated meals. A low murmur is already rolling around the room. The table slides into extended configuration; Commander Vance stands at the head, flanked by Priya Raghunathan and Felix Owusu – Astrosoter’s diplomat and linguistic anthropologist, respectively. Vance has an expression of strict determination on her face. Raghunathan seems puzzled; Felix is just pale.
Okafor places herself between the science specialists. Vasquez, who doubles as their pilot and, more importantly, knows Okafor’s coffee order by heart, sets down a flat white before her in a magnetised mug. Okafor rubs her eyes for a moment before taking her first sip.
Vance starts explaining what they’re about to hear. Okafor doesn’t need the preamble.
Everyone already knows what this is about. It’s only been 8 hours since they started broadcasting their first ‘hello’ message, repeated alternatingly in ASCII and the same senary-modulated Eridanian encoding from the distress call that brought them here in the first place. What Okafor doesn’t understand is why they need all hands on deck to hear the response.
Demir, the engineer, is the last in the room. He sits, grumbling in Turkish, when Vance tells him he probably won’t want to be standing for this. “Will it even make sense to us?”
“Who knows,” murmurs Felix. “It doesn’t to me.”
Okafor has a second to think that that’s probably a worrying thing to hear from their language specialist. Then Vance, seeing everyone settled, orders the Long Shot to commence playback.
A voice comes over the speakers. It speaks in a male register, with an American accent, in crisp English. Hello, Astrosoter. Nice to meet you. There’s a brief pause before the speaker continues. We weren’t expecting company for at least another decade or so.
To Okafor’s left, primary science specialist Abigail Holt puts one hand over her mouth. To her right, Vasquez stage whispers, “What the fuck?”
The voice has a warm, low tone. It sounds like the speaker is smiling. He says:
But uh, anyway, welcome to Erid. We’re happy happy to have you. And I think I have a lot to update you guys on, gosh, because you left Earth about 17 years ago, objectively, right? Okay, where to start? Oh, yeah. Okay. Um, first, they’d like me to ask if you want to dock onto the space elevator here. We might need you to transmit some schematics for that. But it’ll be the best way to resupply you if you need anything – you know, anything like food, water, fuel, other materials – I won’t assume you have enough Astrophage to get back to Earth, but we can provide all that if you want, and we can help plot a course. Oh, and, also, about the Astrophage. I have really good news about the Astrophage. I’ll get into that. Sorry, I should say, sorry, I know I’m not using the NASA radio discipline, I don’t know it. Uh. I’m not an astronaut.
While the speakers broadcast this very mundane voice across the ship, a fervour grows among the crew. Vasquez wonders, “Is this a person? It sounds like- could this actually be a real person?”
“That’s what we want to know,” says the commander. “Wait; listen.”
“This has to be synthesised. Right?” Vasquez turns to Demir. “They made a Siri out of the audio on Pete.”
“Don’t you recognise that voice?” asks Holt. She has her hands pressed to either side of her face, staring into the middle distance.
“How could there be a human on this planet?”
“Recognise from where?”
“Hail Mary.”
Oh, whoops. The voice on the speakers interrupts the hushed speculation. Okafor wonders, for a brief moment, if it’s going to announce this is all just a practical joke. It says, Right! Where are my manners, ha! Hi, hello. My name is un, uh, it’s guh- ah. No. Hello. I’m Dr Ryland Grace.
“Okay, let’s take a step back,” says Vance, “and start from first principles.”
Okafor, Raghunathan, and Vance are huddled among the flat black coalescence of monitors that forms the Long Shot’s cockpit. The boys – or rather, ‘boys and Holt,’ as Holt griped – were not invited. Demir has hustled to the lab to try to understand how the message could have been synthesised; the scientists are listening to the recording on repeat in awe while Felix takes notes.
Vance says: “Either this is or isn’t a human, and if it is, it either is or isn’t Ryland Grace.” Yep, that should cover their bases.
“Holt was doing back-of-the-envelope calculations in the commons,” says Raghunathan. “If the Hail Mary got to Tau Ceti and then immediately came here, or even changed course after leaving Earth to head straight to Eridani, it could have arrived before us. I don’t see how else a human could have gotten here. Unless they… I don’t know, teleported? Time travelled?”
“Shall we ask Demir about that possibility?” Vance snorts.
“No. Well, I don’t know. This is already insane,” Raghunathan mutters.
“Agreed.”
It is insane, but isn’t that par for the course for the last five years of their lives? They’ve made it this far in one piece. Okafor steers things back on track. “So, if it is a real human”, she hypothesises, “it’s probably Ryland Grace. It could be another one of the Hail Mary’s crew, but then they wouldn’t sound like that.”
“It’s not a real human,” says Raghunathan – Priya, their ambassador, sensitive and shrewd. Okafor observes her deflating under the settling revelation. “It’s not, is it? Dr Grace died at Tau Ceti. He wouldn’t have the fuel- or the food-”
Vance nods to herself. “I’m trying to understand how they could know to imitate him.”
“Is it really his voice?” asks Okafor. “Are we sure?”
“Holt thinks it sounds like him.”
Of course, they all know who Ryland Grace is. Earth’s original expert on Astrophage, and the second in command on Project Hail Mary. Both the official and informal names for their ship – Astrosoter, and the ‘insufficiently optimistic’ Long Shot, respectively – derive from his work. His work is the reason they’re here.
But Abigail Holt is the only one who met him. He’d been her teacher, once upon a time, and then she’d followed, moon-eyed, in his footsteps. Grace is the reason Holt is here. Okafor imagines she’s still in shock.
Vance asks, “Okafor, what’s your read on this?”
“…Well, we know the Eridanians sent a ship to Tau Ceti before we did.” Part of the reason they were here was out of hope it’d been successful, after all. “It’s possible it made the trip, but didn’t leave the system for some reason.”
Raghunathan asks, “And survived for all those years? And then ran into the Hail Mary? Do you think they could have met?”
“Or, they found the ship after the Hail Mary mission was complete and somehow scraped it for data. Either way, it would explain how they know his name.”
“Right.” Vance affirms. She puts one hand on her hip. “More specifically, what’s your read on the message? What would you infer about the speaker from this?”
Oh. Okafor misunderstood. She’s here as a psychiatrist as well as a physician, after all. She thinks it over for a moment.
“I can’t make a, a prognosis from this audio alone.”
“Yes, yes, we know. Do it anyway.”
She knew Vance would say that. At this level of familiarity with the crew, Okafor’s adherence to protocol verges on cursory if she doesn’t regulate herself. “Okay. Well. A few false starts, interrupting himself. It sounded like a person talking, not text-to-speech; Demir may be able to corroborate that. The disorganised speech pattern indicates distraction, excitement, or someone for whom coherent verbosity is a rusty skill. His greeting was, frankly, childish, and his tone was- the eagerness could be a mark of isolation. 'Happy happy' isn't quirk, either; it's a symptom. Word-finding difficulty under emotional load is one of the smallest, most boring signs of someone whose verbal fluency has atrophied from disuse.”
What else? Oh, yes: “He was obviously being prompted by someone or something in the room with him. He also couldn’t say his own name.”
Vance wonders, “Forgotten?”
“Or reading off a script,” says Raghunathan. “Coached.”
“Well, I’d like to know what Felix has to say, but I think”, Okafor tells them, “if that speech was entirely coached, or simulated, it was done by someone with an – I’d say, fairly impressive understanding of human conversational patterns. I don’t believe anything on Pete was as informal as that.” She hasn’t quite wrapped her head around what that means about Eridanian intellect, although she’s itching to. Okafor concludes: “About the name specifically, he could have just been lying.”
“I assumed he was lying about most of it,” Priya admits with a shrug. “About ‘Taumoeba’ specifically, but also, probably, the resupply option seemed like an excuse to get us mated to their elevator. Well, all of it, really. All of it sounds too good to be true. It’s frustrating – I could get a better read if I could meet him in person, but…”
“But seeing him in person would give us what we wanted anyway,” Vance concludes. “Okay. So, in summary?”
Okafor says: “I don’t know what Ryland Grace sounds like. I don’t know if that’s him, or someone pretending to be him. But it does sound like a real person, and a person who’s been alone too long to put on a good performance of anything other than himself.”
“And we think that if it’s a person, it’s Dr Grace,” says Raghunathan.
“Right,” says Vance.
“But it can’t be a person.”
They all emphatically agree. Priya kneads a knot on the bridge of her nose.
“Okay,” says Vance. “So, with that in mind, we need to draft a response.”