Work Text:
Grace cries a lot. I, as his best friend and the only sensible entity on this ship, have made a list to start investigating his idiosyncrasies.
We have been heading for Erid together for a few months. So far, Grace has cried over:
- His breakfast burrito
- A photo of a monkey he saw on the portable thinking machine
- Me (I was sitting next to him. We were not talking. I think I got an extra leaky one)
- He thought he smelled his breakfast burrito. He awoke from his sleep to tell me this.
- A song he remembered the tune of but not the words to
- The same song when he remembered the words
- Crabs
- The idea that he could just search up the song he was previously remembering
- No more Mondays (celebration)
- No more Mondays (grief)
- His hands versus my claws
- Armando’s inability to travel between rooms (he “felt bad for him”)
- Not being able to smell anything most of the time
- His shoelaces started to fray (I have given him xenonite aglets)
- Me giving him xenonite aglets
- Something he called “Phineas and Ferb”
- Music made for a game called “Tetris”
- Never having to attend a “Teams meeting” again
- His Minecraft dog died (he downloaded one of the older versions to show me, and I am thoroughly enjoying it, aside from the “Creeper” which killed his dog)
- A memory he got which was triggered by a song by some man named Harry
- His breakfast burrito and its impermanence
- The Wikipedia article for the Petrova Line, in which he features
- The sea
- The fake sea inside the Don’t-Go-Crazy room
- Star Trek
- How many Taumoeba he’s killed
- He started wondering whether the Taumoeba will like their new home, or if they’ll miss their distant relatives (despite not having seen them for hundreds of generations)
- How small I am
- How big I am (two minutes after the previous entry)
- The concept of doughnuts
- My offer to try to make doughnuts (which is when I learned what they are)
- My offer to try to convince the nutritional scientists to make doughnuts when we get to Erid
- Clouds
- The idea that Erirdians have never seen clouds
- A “screensaver” on the portable thinking machine depicting an idyllic green field and blue skies. When questioned, he said it was “nostalgic”
- The soundtrack for The Lord of the Rings
- Bicycles
- Freddie Mercury
- The AIDS crisis (admittedly my fault), followed by a list of diseases and happenings which could have been stopped or helped but were not, which I will count as one entry for the sake of brevity
- A song called “La Vie en Rose” in a film called “WALL.E”
- My warmth
- Roadworks will no longer be a thing in his life
- A memory of him driving very fast to get to Eva Stratt for some Astrophage right at the start of Project Hail Mary, triggered by the thought of road works, which he laughed so hard at he cried
- Xenonite’s existence
- A bad joke which he could not translate; I am reliably informed it is a bad pun
- He found a set of googly eyes on the ship which he says must have belonged to Ilyukhina, one of his deceased crewmates
- Me offering to help him with exercises to keep his joints happy
- His first day without a breakfast burrito (he has plenty more, he’s just trying to “save” them)
- He looked out the window
- Seagulls
- Me (when questioned, he would not elaborate)
- Music by someone called Mitski. I admit that I cried too, though I am glad it is a pitch he cannot hear.
- The idea that he will never feel the sunshine again (gave him a hug for that one, and noticed that he keeps gravitating towards my warmth whenever he looks out of the window)
- Home owner’s associations not being a thing on Erid
- Fishing incident
- How beautiful the Petrova line was to be in, even if it is destructive to two entire inhabited planets
- The idea that no one will see Adrian (planet) besides him
- The number seven
- Chocolate
- The idea that no one will see Adrian (mate) (worth noting he’d cried about the same thing for me long before we headed our separate ways the first time)
This gives me a lot of data. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any singular theme which may cause tears, or any one emotion they’re attached to. I can understand my leaky Grace just fine, but I’d like to do it better. There are a few things I have noticed, however:
- He cries a lot about life on Earth, as well as memories he has about or on it
- He cries a lot about music
- He cries a lot about things which are seemingly insignificant or unnoteworthy pieces of life on Earth, but which he will never again experience
- He cries a lot about me
Hypothesis: Grace cries a lot about many things, but especially about things he cares about or is attached to (such as Earth, his memories, music, and me).
I will continue to record his cries. I have learned that crying is good for people, but not this much, usually. If all goes well, I will be able to develop a way to fix unwanted cries.