Work Text:
You wake up in space, and everyone else is dead.
You don’t know who you are.
–
Allison is not ashamed to admit that, when she sees the first ping right at the edge of the solar system, four hours into the night shift, she cries.
The crying reminds her to take her Vitamin D supplement, and then she gets to work.
This far out, it'll be days before they can get any sort of transmission—not that there's a person there, but one of the crew members may have set it to send an automatic message—but they set up an intercept system out near Mars almost three years ago, and that is non-trivial to get spun up.
Twenty minutes after the first ping, her boss sticks his head in the watch center and says, “I saw your message that you have something. What's up?”
When she puts the signals information up on the main screen, he cries as well.
–
You wake up in space, and you are alone.
You don't know who you are.
–
Conventional knowledge holds that bodies do not decompose in space.
Conventional knowledge also holds that the Petrova line should not be possible.
The sun should not be dimming. Astrophage should not survive.
Grace remembers a lesson he once taught about the concept of a whale fall, the corpses of whales turned to their own ecosystems, decomposing slowly due to the cold of the deep ocean. They provide an evolutionary stepping stone for the species that survive on them.
He wonders if Yao and Ilyukhina are generating biodiversity.
–
You wake up in space, and you are alone.
You don't know if you like who you are.
–
Eva Stratt goes to jail. She is not there long.
She lives on a ship, and she does not think about the three people she killed.
When the Beetles return, she is one of the first people contacted, by those same people who condemned her.
She didn't save the world to be liked. That's not why she does it this time, either.
–
You wake up in space, and you are not alone.
–
The taumoeba work. The sun is already getting brighter.
There are so many dead.
–
You wake up in space, and you are not alone.
–
One of the first things Grace has Rocky build for him once he starts teaching is a giant globe of the Earth out of xenonite, big enough to put in some geological features that he can teach his students.
He has two of them, actually: one for his students’ side of the wall, and one for his side.
He teaches them about the Grand Canyon, about Mount Everest, about the Mariana Trench. He teaches them about Galápagos finches.
He teaches them about whale falls.
–
You wake up in space, and you are not alone.
You know who you are.