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“What is…this, question?”
You pause in your scrolling to look at Rocky. Right, no eyes—you can’t use any sort of gaze to figure out what he’s asking about, because he doesn’t have a gaze for you to follow. “Which one, bud?”
“Mmm…” The hum means he probably doesn’t have a word for whatever program he’s looking at. Rocky had picked up written language like a charm, just like he picked up everything else quickly due to his essentially perfect memory. Maybe one day you’d show him Suits. That was probably a human show he could relate to. He gestures to your screen with his light-gun…thing, as well as to his own texture plate with a different arm. Man, you could be so much more productive with that many appendages. It makes you think of that absolutely ridiculous scene from NCIS, where they try to fend off a ‘hacker’ by having two people type on a keyboard at the same time. (‘Dump them on the other side of the router’…good lord, your profession was so severely misunderstood.) “Middle of screen, there.”
The footrest you’re sitting on creaks a little as you lean forward to take a closer look at what he might be pointing at, because the deictic ‘there’ is not super helpful in this instance. The metal bar really wasn’t meant to take so much weight all the time, but neither you nor Grace liked to sit fully in the seat due to the whole pilot-detected shtick that happened every time one of you sat down. You were currently in the ship’s files under the pretense of ‘taking stock.’ Really, you were indulging Rocky’s curiosity and taking him on a tour of the Hail Mary’s software, much of which you had helped build and install. Your brow furrows, because most of these words should be ones that he recognizes by now.
Ah. It’s probably that.
“Doom. Hah, okay. So the word ‘doom’ is bad, like death. It means…something really negative is probably going to happen. Like, you see something really dangerous coming your way that you can’t avoid, and you say, ‘we’re all doomed!’ So it can be a noun and a verb. Oh, and an adjective.” You were much more pedantic than Grace about explaining the intricacies of grammar to Rocky. Listen, language was complicated, and you felt like you had a better appreciation for that than most. Sure, you weren’t a linguist; but one missed dash or colon in a line of code could mean accidentally shutting down an entire spacecraft. (Mariner 1 was a prime example of this; okay, technically, it was a combination of a couple different factors, but the missing hyphen certainly hadn’t helped.) “But most of the time it refers to something in the future. Probably inevitable, but it still hasn’t happened yet. Oh, and there’s an Indiana Jones movie that uses it in a title.” You mentally add this to the list of movies to show him.
Rocky nods—his version of a nod, at least, which you’re certain wasn’t actually an Eridian gesture, but rather something he had picked up from you the two of you—and hums again. “Eridian word for this is ♪♩♫♩♪. But why on ship, question?” The chords toward the end lilt up sharply in alarm. “Is self-destruct, question?” His tone gives you the sense that if this is the case, he thinks you should delete it. Like, right now.
You smile while adding the new word to the database, which was kind of your baby. After taking one look at whatever the hot mess of a spreadsheet Grace had tried to cook up in those early days as an English-Eridian dictionary, you had very quickly and forcefully taken the project over. “No, no. Just like Indiana Jones, it’s being used as a title. This is a video game.”
“Oh! Grace explain this.”
“I’m sure he did.” You have no idea when video games came up, but it was probably during one of the times you had gone back to the ship to sleep, before Rocky had insisted that both you and Grace sleep next to each other at the same time so he could watch. Lame. You would have loved to be the one to explain video games. “So yeah, this is one of those. It’s kind of…a ubiquitous example. Okay, that word is probably not helpful either. It’s like when you’re trying to explain a concept to someone, and you use the most well-known example to explain it. That’s kind of what Doom is. It’s also like…” You turn a little toward the hatch to yell, “Grace, you told him what a meme is, right?”
There’s a bang and a yelp from the lab. “Ow—yes, I did, remember? When you said, ‘oh lord, he coming,’ and we had to tell him about religion and a frog on a unicycle.”
“Right, thank you! It’s kind of a meme,” you say, turning your attention back to Rocky. “Whenever anything has a screen, pretty much, someone will ask, ‘Can it run Doom,’ and the answer is almost always yes. You can even make it run inside of other video games, as long as you can get switches to work.” The explanation is actually a teensy bit more complicated, but Eridians don’t really have electronics, so you decide not to go into in any further. For now.
“I see.” He’s quiet for a moment; there’s a barely-detectable hum emanating from his carapace, one that you’ve so far been able to identify as his thinking-noise. Grace can’t really hear it, and your usual response is that it’s probably because his ear drums are too damaged from working with kids. Finally, Rocky sings, “Rocky want to play game. Rocky play Doom.”
“Oh, uh, well—”
“You’re letting him play Doom?” Grace says from the hatchway. His arms are crossed, and with the flight suit tied around his waist, it creates a very unfair image of his biceps. “I don’t know about that, it’s kind of…violent.”
You scoff while shaking your head to rid yourself of the thought of his upper arms. “Okay, Mr. Grace. It’s not that violent. Also, Rocky,” your voice turns a little gentler, “I don’t know if you can. I mean, the Mary can definitely run it—there’s no question about that—” Doom.exe had been installed sometime between the first and second bag of vodka, just to see if you could. It had been disappointingly easy, which you should have expected, given that it was already on one of the laptops and thus only required being uploaded to the ship. “—but I’m not sure how you’d play it from inside your ball.” A beat. “Well, I guess we could make some kind of controller that connects to the ship wirelessly. Like Bluetooth. Or a Wii controller.” It was simultaneously like both of those things and also neither of them, but, again, not really the time to try and explain that. “But I’m not really sure how we can do that.”
Rocky chitters and stands up a little straighter. “Is easy! I make, thinking-machine-expert-human help—” One of these days, you were going to talk to him about coming up with a shorter name. “—and I guess Grace help too.”
“Ouch,” is all Grace has to offer.
He scurries off into his ‘bedroom’ to collect the tools he needs for this endeavor. “I call when ready for help!”
And then it’s just you and Grace in the cockpit. He smiles at you with his arms still crossed, peering at you over the tops of his glasses. You turn back to the ship’s many screens in an attempt to busy yourself. “Doom, huh?” He says.
“Yeah. I kind of forgot it was there.”
“Hm.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I just said ‘hm.’”
“Yeah, but it was the way you said it.”
“I think you’re spending too much time with Rocky.”
You roll your eyes and turn back to him. Yep, his arms are still crossed. “You said it like I’m going to get him addicted to video games. Like, first he plays Doom, and the next thing we know he’s playing League of Legends and getting banned for offensive speech.”
Grace laughs at this, a sort of half-choke, half-guffaw that makes you smile a little more than it should. “Rocky would never. We haven’t even taught him those words.”
“Yeah, but there are probably Eridian versions. The other players wouldn’t even know what he was calling them.” Still smiling, he offers you hand, which you accept as you heave yourself up from the metal footrest of the pilot’s chair. “What’s the harm? We’ve got time to kill. A little bit, anyway.” You glance at the countdown to your projected orbit around Tau Ceti-E, which is displayed on one of the many screens in the cockpit. His hand is still holding yours, even when you’ve fully stood up, and you give it a squeeze. “We could use a little fun.”
Grace just looks at you, then, his eyes unreadable. Somehow, Rocky’s musical tones are easier for you to understand than whatever this is.
“Thinking-machine-expert-human!” Rocky calls. And thus the moment is over before you can even begin to analyze it, and you walk past Grace without a second glance. (This takes a little bit of effort. Not that you’re thinking about it, or anything.)
--
You would like to say that designing the controller was simple. That Rocky had cleverly built some xenonite contraption that you, in all your wisdom, had seamlessly figured out how to connect to the ship, and Grace stood by and watched it all very impressed and in awe of your intellect.
As if.
How it went, instead, was that first you had to explain to Rocky the sorts of controls that he would need in order to play the game, like a joystick and some buttons, so that he could properly design the shell of the controller. Then you had to look through endless pages on one of the laptops to find anything that might remotely help you with wiring the damn thing, and of course Rocky couldn’t help with this part, although he absolutely offered anything and everything that he thought about all of it.
(“No, that is not right…wait! Wait! Go back! What is that, question?”
“That is a helicopter. Don’t know why they—well, I guess we—thought that would be helpful. We are not building that, before you even ask.”)
Grace, of course, is about as helpful as a piece of gum on the bottom of your shoe, which is to say, not at all.
Okay, maybe that’s not fair. He did have some insights on the wiring—why a molecular biologist knew that much about circuitry evaded you, though it did shed some light on how eager he was to tear into the ship’s electrics—and his general proclivity for problem-solving was greatly appreciated. There was a moment you would spend a long time trying to forget: he had abandoned leaning against the broom in his hands to lean over your shoulder, humming while you pulled up various schematics on the laptop, and his breath just barely grazed the shell of your ear. You swear you could feel his grin when he pointed at the right one, his hand on your shoulder, before pulling it away to clap and subsequently departing to pilfer whatever wiring he felt the ship could spare.
It was nothing, probably. Just excitement at solving a problem. This was something you had learned about Grace very quickly; the pure, unadulterated joy that came whenever he figured out the answer to a question that had been bugging him, no matter how big or small it was. You told yourself you had only catalogued these details out of an absence of other stimuli to pay attention to. The way his brows furrowed while he thought, the flashing change in his face when he finally found the answer to whatever he was thinking through.
Stimuli. That’s all.
From there, it was even more endless trial and error getting the electronics to work, much less connecting it to the ship wirelessly, interrupted only once by Rocky ushering you both to sleep. “Humans need sleep before finishing controller,” he had factually stated. “They start to bicker. Very, very annoying. Not efficient, not at all.”
“We should have only taught him nice words,” you had grumbled as you’d dutifully laid beside Grace on the floor of the dormitory while Rocky watched above you.
He smiled beside you, and you reached forward to take the glasses off his face and gently fold them up before placing them beside your makeshift cot. It was, frankly, astounding, what little care he had for the object that was critical in helping him do his job. “He wouldn’t have much to say about you if we had.”
“Har-har. As if. He likes me more than you.”
“Thinking-machine-expert-human correct. Rocky like much more than Grace. Grace is slow, and impatient, and—”
“Thank you, Rock.”
--
After many more rounds of trial-and-error, the controller was ready to go. Well, as ready as it would ever be, because even if you had some amount of free time on your hands, it wasn’t infinite.
You warn Rocky about the likely-inevitable lag (another English lesson) before booting Doom up on one of the screens in the cockpit. It takes a second longer than it normally would, likely from the tweaking you had done to try and accommodate for the xenonite controller in Rocky’s hands, which he is currently fiddling with. “It not working,” he sings impatiently.
“Yeah, it’s loading, buddy, you gotta give it a sec—”
The title screen pops up, and before you can even instruct Rocky on how to continue, he clicks one of the buttons on his controllers like he’s done this a million times before. You and Grace watch in awe as he quickly figures out the controls, adjusting the joystick and pressing buttons to move around and shoot while simultaneously monitoring his texture screen.
You turn your head toward Grace, who is, unfortunately for you, crossing his arms again and raptly watching the screen. “You think there’s Mountain Dew somewhere on here? It seems fitting,” you finally say, and the way he laughs is enough to keep you going for a long, long time.
“Humans, quiet. Rocky concentrating.”
The two of you watch him for a while before slowly moving toward other parts of the ship to pass the time. Later, you’re fiddling with one of the sleeping platforms in the dormitory—it’s still getting stuck in the wall—when Grace joins you again.
“Hey.”
“Hmm?”
He comes up beside you. You stop messing with the platform, then, and lean against it instead in order to face him. “He seems to be really enjoying himself.”
“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised that video games are the universal boredom-killer.”
Grace just smiles and nods, the orange fabric of his jumpsuit rustling as he crosses his arms (for, like, the millionth time that day, or whatever passes for a day out here, you note). “You didn’t have to do all of that.”
“Not like I was doing much else.” You’re trying to be nonchalant, but he’s looking at you so earnestly that it turns out to be quite difficult.
“I know. It’s just—you—I’m glad it’s us, up here.”
All you can do is swallow hard and nod. “Me too.”
He looks at you a little longer before opening his arms up. “Come here.”
“…Yeah, okay.” You let him hug you as you think about just how glad you were about that fact, too. That he had, apparently, finally volunteered for the mission, even though you knew how much he must have given up just to agree to this all in those final days.
You’re also thinking about how nice it feels to be so close, that even though it’s probably some psychological or physiological response to touching the only human for trillions of miles, there’s something about the fact that it’s Grace—Ryland—that makes it feel so sweet.
A distant clunking that quickly grows closer interrupts the moment. “Humans! Humans! I finish Doom. Is there Doom 2, question? Rocky like video games. Very fun, much more fun than—oh!” He pauses in his tunnel at the entrance to the room, as if he had just noticed the situation the two of you were in, despite the fact that his hearing definitely worked much further than the distance between the two of you and the hatch of the dormitory. You decide to attribute this to his excitement about video games (which, relatable). He abandons his previous train of thought to shift around excitedly. “Oh! Oh! Is human mating activity that thinking-machine-expert-human explain—”
“No,” both you and Grace say at the same time.
“No? But is exactly like what thinking-machine-expert-human describe.”
You step away from Grace and move toward Rocky. “No—well, yes, it is, but like I also explained, it depends on context.”
“Oh,” he hums, a little disappointed, “oh, okay.”
“And yes, there is a Doom 2, just. I will look to see if we have it.” You definitely do. While you walk toward the cockpit with Rocky, you miss the way that Grace slowly opens and closes his fists. “You finished that very fast.”
“Was very easy.”
“Hah. Okay.”
Rocky is unusually quiet while you boot up one of the laptops. After a while, he hums lowly, a beautiful collection of chords that sounds a little like it’s tinged with grief, but it’s gone as soon as you notice it. “So…no mating.”
You smile ruefully (and simultaneously decide you will not be teaching him that adverb). “No. It’s a little more complicated than that for humans.”
He simply hums again and watches you click through the files on the computer. “Is okay. I ship.” You choke and cough at that before laughing. “I use word correctly, question?” He trills along with you gleefully.
“Yes. Yes, you did.”