Chapter Text
The thought experiment was innocent enough. Could the astronauts save energy by coming partially out of their comas as they approached Tau Ceti? What if they had the consciousness to think and perform their research without needing to expend calories through movement? The technology needed to accommodate such a notion wasn’t completely science fiction — certainly no more so than the Hail Mary herself.
Prosthetics already in use around the world could react to nerve impulses sent from the wearer’s brain. Perhaps the Hail Mary could function as a giant prosthetic that the astronauts could control with just their thoughts. The trio would live longer — years, even — by using far less energy, giving them more time to solve the Petrova problem.
Primary test results were encouraging. The experiment gained more and more traction as it summited the tall ladder of bureaucracy until it eventually reached the apex of Eva Stratt’s desk. Dr. Grace, sitting across from the director herself, carefully appraised the state of the science and presented his official judgement: “super cool!”
Eva looked up at him over her laptop, fingers still dancing on the keys.
“I’ll be trying the technology tomorrow, if you’d like to observe,” she offered. Grace rewarded her with a huge grin.
“Heck yeah.”
Eva sat calmly as a laboratory technician glued a rainbow of electrodes to her scalp. The glue felt cool on her skin, and she held her hands in her lap to keep from itching. The robot in question, lovingly deemed “Armando” by its makers, sat across from her. A series of metal arms, each with a unique appendage in the “hand” position, awaited instruction. It was just a portion of the robotics team’s overall capabilities meant for demonstration, but it was impressive nonetheless.
The robotics team leader, a reedy man with retro tortoiseshell eyeglasses, gave the green light.
“Go ahead, Director Stratt.”
Eva thought about raising her left arm. Armando raised its left-most arm. She thought about picking up a thin glass test tube from the display table. The robot obeyed.
“Excellent work, team,” she nodded approvingly. Armando nodded in tandem as the scientists around her tried to suppress the grins her praise engendered.
“Me next, me next!” Grace’s hand shot up in the air. Eva assented, and the laboratory technician began gluing a second set of electrodes until Grace had his own ponytail of rainbow wires. He immediately pictured himself dancing, and Armando wiggled awkwardly. Eva shot him an exasperated look, but her admonishment died on her lips as sparks began to erupt from the connection between their electrode wires and the robot’s input site.
Grace immediately grabbed his head as pain ripped through him, forcing a gasp out of his lungs. A deafening electronic whine filled the air as the robotics team rushed to disconnect him and Stratt. When he attempted to open his eyes, bright light attacked him, and he only managed to squint. As his vision slowly returned, he caught a glimpse of his own face. That was strange. He didn’t remember a mirror. And then, his mirror image rubbed at his temples while his own hands were solidly grasping his thighs. He froze. Suddenly, his body was registering a barrage of unfamiliar sensations. Silk against his chest where there had been jersey. Soft hair on the back of his neck. Freezing fingers clutching itchy wool pants.
Realization dawned. Stratt — it could only have been Stratt who coaxed his face into that severe expression — shook her head — his head — at the person in her body who could have only been Ryland, absently running her hands down her hips.
“Say nothing,” Stratt mouthed, and he nodded as a flurry of techs examined them, checking after their safety, removing the electrodes, pulling at their hair.
“I have a meeting,” Eva stood abruptly, nearly toppling herself over as she searched for her new center of gravity. Engineers scurried back like plovers. Grace cleared his throat, fighting down panic. “You mean, I have a meeting,” he said in Eva’s voice.
“Naturally,” Eva winced, trying and failing to sound nonchalant. It took Grace a moment too long to realize he was supposed to lead the way in this arrangement. Ignoring more than a few odd glances, they finally, weak-legged and wobbling, made it out of the laboratory.
It was an agonizing walk to Eva’s office. If the crew passing by in the hallway thought it was strange that the Director and her second in command looked like they were learning to walk for the first time, nobody dared mention it.
The second Eva’s office door closed, they erupted.
“What the fuck-”
“Am I you?”
“Happened to us-”
“Jeez, I’m hungry-”
“And how the fuck-”
“Are all bras this tight?”
“Do we fix it right this second?”
They stared at each other. Grace rubbed the back of his neck nervously, mussing the copper hair laying there.
“Um,” he said, the word emerging from Eva’s mouth for perhaps the first time, “when multiple people were plugged into the robot the whole machine overloaded, and our consciousnesses got switched, I guess?”
“I gathered as much,” Eva snapped. “Tell the robotics team to start fixing it right fucking now.”
“I- I don’t want to say that-”
“Well, if I had my own voice, I would, but we’re having,” she grit her teeth, “a situation.”
Grace nodded along, feeling a bit light-headed. Eva dialed the robotics director and held out her cellphone, already ringing. Grace took it instinctively.
“Director,” came the anxious voice as soon Grace put the phone to his ear. “I am so sorry for the incident.”
“Oh, uh, it’s ok. Mistakes happen,” Grace said apprehensively.
Stratt shot him a glare that implied Grace’s body was about to hit someone for the first time.
“Fix it now,” he said more sternly, then added, “please.” Eva heard the tinny voice replying but couldn’t make out the words. Grace nodded along to the conversation, occasionally interjecting, and finally hung up.
“The robot’s input is fried. It’ll take a week to fix,” he sighed.
“I want it done tonight.”
“I knew you’d say that, so I told him. He said the best they can do is 48 hours.”
“So we are stuck like this, she gestured between them, for two days.”
Grace shrugged.
Eva put her head in her hands, or rather, Grace’s head in Grace’s hands, and groaned.
She gave herself two full minutes to let her mind run amok with contingencies before pulling herself together and exhaling forcefully. Grace’s glasses fogged and she scowled as she took them off to wipe on his t-shirt while Grace bit back a laugh.
“It’s only two days. We can do anything for two days,” he tried to reassure her. Eva wasn’t so sure.
They spent the rest of the day safely enclosed in her office, waiting out the clock. Nobody could know about the incident. Eva had clawed out every scrap of respect she ever received, earned every drop of trust placed in her, and she could not afford to have any stakeholder doubt her sanity. Not if she wanted to project to succeed. Grace was a maverick scientist and a brilliant man, but a strategist and a diplomat he was not. The fewer people who saw them like this, the better.
Eva had dinner delivered to her office, which delighted Grace greatly, “like room service!” They worked deep into the night, and when he yawned for the umpteenth time, failing to cover his mouth, she decided she never needed to see her molars again and sent him to bed. Unfortunately, that meant her bed. Grace pursed his lips and looked like he was about to protest, but she cut him off.
“Can you imagine the talk if my body came walking out of your room in the morning? Don’t even think about it.”
Which is how Grace came to sleep in sheets that smelled of Eva’s perfume, and Eva slept in a rumpled, unmade bed. At least the ships cameras would see Grace’s body emerging from his room as usual.
Grace awoke to the sound of a door slamming and opened his eyes to his own body looming over him. He started violently and jumped back, falling backward over the edge of the bed. Eva rubbed the spot between her eyebrows, skin rougher than she was used to, where a headache was already starting.
“Get yourself together, Dr. Grace,” she walked over to her chest of drawers and selected a sweater and a pair of slacks that she placed on the edge of the bed for him. “We’ll work from my office again. And for the love of God, please do not shower.”
Eventually, the two situated themselves across her desk as usual. Well, almost. Grace’s body took pride of place behind the desk while Eva’s body leaned back in the chair, propping her feet up on the corner. Eva plowed through her morning barrage of emails, struggling to type with Grace’s fingers, while Grace chewed on a pencil (there was no way she was letting him put plastic candy in her body) drew longhand graphs in his beat up lab notebook. They passed hours like this, and Eva was finally coming around to the idea that they could survive these now 36 hours when Grace asked:
“Do you always feel like this?”
“Like what?”
“I dunno,” Ryland twirled the pencil in his hand and Eva flinched to hear such an Americanism escape her lips, in her voice no less. “Tummy achy, I guess.”
“Take note than when you act as me today, you avoid words like tummy achy.”
“I feel weird, you know,” he lowered his voice and whispered pointedly, “down there.”
Eva dug around in her leather tote bag. Fine motor skills were more difficult with his large hands. Finally, she was able to extract a thin package wrapped in yellow plastic and slid it across the desk.
Ryland picked it up and examined it.
“What do I do with this?”
“You’re smart,” Eva deadpanned. “You’ll figure it out.”
Ryland went beet red. How he managed to bring such a severe blush to her face was another question entirely. He slipped the pad into his pocket, then frowned.
“Are all of your pockets this small?”
“You’re lucky this outfit has pockets at all.”
Ryland didn’t have a chance to respond before she pulled a sheet of paper out of her bag.
“This is my schedule for today.”
Grace scanned it.
“So I have to go to all of these meetings as you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You couldn’t possibly.”
He wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be an insult. Eva just said it as a statement of fact. Not that she was wrong.
Eva brought out a red pen and started attacking the sheet like it had personally offended her.
“Besides,” she continued, “you’re right that I don’t - didn’t feel very well and I can’t afford to get sick. So we are going to take advantage off this disaster and use it as an opportunity for me to be in two places at once.
“How so?”
“You take my body to the medbay, get antibiotics or whatever Lamai prescribes, then go eat and sleep. I'll keep working."
“And, uh, what are you going to do with my body?”
“I’m going to take all meetings I possibly can as you, then focus on paperwork.”
“You’re going to feed me too, right?”
“If you’re lucky, your stomach might even see a vegetable for the first time in months.
Grace gasped.
"You wouldn't."
Eva raised an eyebrow, and Grace couldn’t help but smile. The expression she pulled made him look roguishly handsome. He made a note to raise his eyebrows more often.
A loud ping from Eva’s phone cut his thoughts short. Eva grabbed it, read the message, and opened her laptop. With one hand, she started a meeting, and with the other, shooed him out out of the room. Grace mock-saluted her and mouthed “aye-aye, captain.” As he left, he heard his own voice greet a host of important people with more dignity than he was aware he could muster. And was she - oh dear. He hoped no one remembered that he could now apparently speak French.