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White walls were in fashion when I left Earth – buildings were popping up all over the place, painted white inside and out. People posted their bleak kitchens on social media, with alabaster walls and grey slate countertops and sleek plastic cupboards which opened by pressing them. Old houses were renovated, new houses were built, all using the same cotton-white paint, which, last I saw, was absurdly expensive for what it was. Point is, it was popular. If the world experienced what the last few years have been like for me, they might have gotten sick of it.
Not that the Hail Mary is entirely white – far from it, in fact; it just lacks the same kind of colour you’d find anywhere… organic. That, and the milky white of those kitchens on Earth still look at least a little nice when they’re lit by the sun. Here, in the vast expanse of space, we have no such luxury.
Rocky and I have been bouncing around the same couple hundred square feet of white-grey-blue-black together for nearly three years. Sue me if I wanna move some stuff around.
Rocky crawls through his tunnel, barely taking notice of my new arrangement. Then, he stops tinkering with his new gadget, stays quiet, and turns his face towards me.
“Grace?” He doesn’t add a verbal acknowledgement of the question at the end, but he does ever-so-lightly tap his claw twice.
“Yeah,” I reply, cool as a cucumber. He’s gonna love what I’ve done with the place.
“...Why is Grace being quiet, question? Have you done something?”
“Oh, uh… yeah, bud.” Alright, yeah, I mean, it’s not a huge difference, but- well, he’s been complaining about the way the lab bin impedes his movement when he’s in the ball pretty much since he made it. The fact that he hasn’t noticed I’ve moved it (and what a pain in the buttocks that was) is… unusual, to say the least.
“Care to elaborate, question?”
“The bin!” I exclaim, grin fading the longer Rocky stares silently.
Huh. He really doesn’t know.
“What about the bin, question?”
“I moved it. ‘Cause, y’know, it got in the way of your ball. Not anymore, baby! I did have to move all the inner workings, though, so you might need to double check I haven’t done something stupid, but-”
“Is good,” Rocky says, chittering for a moment before continuing down his tunnel. “Going to eat. Grace watch Rocky sleep after, question?”
“Of course, bud.”
Hm.
Maybe he’s just hungry.
Like any good scientist, I’ve decided to experiment with Rocky’s apparent lack of awareness about his surroundings.
It starts small. I move a few things here and there – switch the drawers in the lab around, rearrange our knick-knacks, that kind of thing. He doesn’t comment on any of it, so I decide to take a slightly larger risk: I put my quilt in the doorway, and wait for him to go in his ball.
“Grace special Earth quilt difficult to walk over in Rocky ball,” he chirps to announce his presence as he rolls into the lab. I’m eating my slurry. I am not enjoying it, so this comment (and his arrival), at first, perks me up. His subsequent lack of comment does little to make me happy, but it does intrigue me.
It could be said that I’ve gone a bit overboard. It’s been two weeks since I discovered Rocky’s alleged inability to remember where things were compared to where they are, and I’ve learned a lot. It’s almost disturbing to me – if I didn’t already know where most things are or should be, I think I’d get lost a whole lot easier. I’d also lose things a whole lot easier. There’s no way I’d be able to navigate with only the knowledge of what’s in front of me.
This line of thought is what got me here; I’ve managed to practically give the entire ship an interior design makeover. The lab’s table is now in the corner, with all the equipment surrounding the walls. I’ve moved one of the microscopes into the Don’t Go Crazy room, along with the gloves from the EVA suit. My bed is now jammed in the doorway between the control room and the airlock. Rocky has watched me sleep in that bed thrice now, and not commented on its new surroundings at all.
“Rocky,” I sigh one day, very much done with my experiments. We’re standing in the lab-turned-dining-room – my chair has been replaced by a stack of soft storage boxes held together with tape. The chair is hanging like a birdfeeder from the ceiling in the dormitory.
“Listening.”
“Do you ever think the ship has… changed, at all?”
He seems to think about it for a moment, clacking his claws together and chirping to get a better look at everything. Finally, he speaks.
“No.”
“Hm.” I go back to my coma slurry, before deciding that, actually, I’d rather have something to shake it up; I reach into one of the soft storage boxes below me and pluck out Yáo’s teensy little jar of hot sauce. It is no joke – he liked his spice the same way Ilyukhina liked her vodka: with a sharp burn on the way down. I find it an unenjoyable amount of spice, but ‘unenjoyable’ is better than tasteless.
Rocky makes a strange warbling hum as I do this, so I look at him while I put the sauce back.
“It’s hot sauce. It’s a-”
“Rocky know what hot sauce is. Rocky Grace have this conversation already when Grace found it. More important, how Grace know where hot sauce is without sensing using eyes, question?”
“What? Oh, like- as in, why didn’t I have to look?” At Rocky’s heavily emphasised nod, I grow confused. “Surely you’ve seen me do this before?”
“Yes, but during difficult important important important mission time. Can ask now, have time.”
“Well, it’s like- okay, so, you know how humans use our eyes to see? Well, it’d be really unhelpful if we could only know our surroundings based on what’s visible, ‘cause that limits us pretty heavily to what’s in front of us. So, once we’ve seen something – like, the layout of a room, or the inside of a storage box – we just remember where it is.”
“Remember where it is,” Rocky repeats, dumbfounded.
“Uhm. Yeah.”
“...Grace can navigate without seeing, question?”
“If I’m familiar with a place, then yeah,” I shrug. “People do it all the time. If you get up in the night for water or something, you don’t wanna turn all the lights on. Assuming you know where you are, you can pretty easily make your way around without seeing.” Rocky sits with the information for a moment, seemingly in awe.
“So Grace remember where everything is, question?”
“Well, not everything, everything. Like, I don’t remember the little details, but most people can remember the basic layout of something, yeah.”
“Grace Rocky demonstration now!”
That sentence is how I end up walking throughout the entire Hail Mary backwards.
Rocky later tells me that this is the stuff of classic Eridian horror: a creature that can remember what it has previously perceived outside of experienced memory alone.
I am an Eridian creepypasta.