Chapter Text
It had been about five weeks and Ryland still barely knew where he was or how he got here, just that everything was absolutely terrible and he wanted to go home. He had been about a year into his trip back to Earth and was trying to find anything besides mindless TV to entertain himself with when Mary started picking up weird readings. There was a growing energy signature that Ryland tried to find where it was coming from but couldn't find anything. If he wasn’t on a mission, maybe he would have investigated, but he had to get back to Earth and save his star as soon as possible. It couldn’t wait for him to satiate his curiosity.
After several hours of intense, fluctuating energy signatures from all around, Ryland swore he could hear voices, hundreds, thousands of them overlapping, getting louder and louder. He’d covered his eyes, trying to block them out but it did nothing, it was almost like they were speaking directly into his mind even though Mary registered sound. Then there was light. Then nothing.
When Ryland had woken up somewhere unfamiliar it had taken less than twenty minutes for strange people to start demanding answers that he didn’t know, all of his questions ignored. They’d only stopped when he just broke down crying. He didn’t know where he was, how he got there, or what was going to happen to him and everyone and everything was awful.
Over the course of three days Ryland had been able to explain that he was from Earth sent to Tau Ceti to figure out why it wasn’t dimming from Astrophage so he could save his star. During that time he learned he was in a dead universe, at least that’s what he was choosing to believe. He was in a space station and when he saw out the window, the only stars he could see were far in the distance, everything within at least 200 light years had to be gone. It looked so empty.
On the fourth day, Ryland had been allowed back on the Hail Mary to gather data from the hard drive and was hoping to get his belongings only to find that most stuff had been removed and distributed. If Ryland hadn’t been so terrified of everyone around him he might have gotten upset, but even after only five weeks of being here he understood. Everything here was strictly rationed.
It didn’t take long for Ryland to learn what the Quiet Rapture was, which was honestly the most terrifying thing he had ever heard of. From what it sounded like, this universe had been raptured, leaving only a handful of space stations stranded with nothing but a few asteroids and moons. Considering the fact that Ryland was here and these space stations were far beyond current human space travel capabilities, Ryland had to assume that he had been the one to be raptured into this universe and not that his whole universe was gone. At least that’s what Ryland was choosing to believe. That’s what everyone else seemed to be choosing to believe as well. Everyone wanted to believe that there was a living universe they could go to.
Ryland had almost immediately been put on the task of trying to reverse engineer what was done to him. No one had to tell him twice. Not only did Ryland not want to be in this horrible universe for a moment longer but he had to get back home. He still hadn’t sent off the beetles, the closer he was to Earth when he released them, the more likely they were to return to Earth or at least close enough that someone could physically get them. He was going to release them when he was about a year out or if he started finding issues with the ship or himself. Even if he didn’t get back to Earth, the taumoeba needed to, however, Ryland would really like to go back too.
That left himself, these people, and all of Earth dependent on Ryland or someone being able to figure this out. Ryland just hoped that there was someone smarter than him here who just needed this data and somewhere to go to get them out of here. Ryland didn’t even know what the data was, he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Ryland wished Rocky was here, he would probably be able to make sense of the overlapping voices, none of them seeming to be in any language that had ever been recorded and impossible to isolate. Rocky would probably have them home by now.
Ryland hated everything about this place. It was cold and dark everywhere, hallways and rooms poorly lit, there weren’t many spare clothes to go around, Ryland only had three changes now which seemed to be more than most people. Even with his hoodie and hat he was allowed to keep, he always felt cold. He was grateful that he was allowed to keep his blanket, a small luxury in this cold world.
Everything was dirty. When Ryland first got here he had been very aware of how bad the people smelled, how grimy most surfaces were, and how nothing ever got truly cleaned even on the occasion it was washed but he’d already blocked that out. Water was a precious resource and even if it was recycled, the little bit that would be lost every time someone bathed added up too quickly. Since he got here, Ryland’s clothes and body had been sanitized only twice, he didn’t know with what, because it certainly wasn’t water, and he really didn’t think he wanted to.
Under normal circumstances, Ryland was sure he would ask a million questions about everything, but the haunted look in everyone’s eyes told him the less he knew about this universe the better. Sometimes he was able to remind himself to not ask questions, but his curious nature often got the best of him. He had a pretty good idea where the protein in the food they were eating came from and he wasn’t about to confirm his suspicions, grateful he had the sense to keep his mouth shut. He was going to pretend that somewhere these people were farming insects or beans.
Food and water was rationed carefully, Ryland sure that what he needed to sustain himself was calculated to the last calorie with his body mass calculated along with his activity level. Thankfully, Ryland had been able to get past the taste of the food in the first few days, it now just kinda tasted like nothing with only a hint of unpleasantness. A minor improvement from the coma slurry. When he first got here, Ryland had always felt hungry, but he was beginning to get used to the meal sizes and was adapting many of the mannerisms he saw around him to conserve energy.
Everyone here looked sick. Everyone but soldiers looked thin and frail even if Ryland had seen they were physically strong. Their skin was dry and cracked and hair dull and brittle, several people marveling at how soft and smooth Ryland’s was when they touched him, how soft his hands were, theirs all covered with calluses and scars. They were particularly interested in how soft and strong his hair was, Ryland just thought it was greasy and gross. More concerning was how pale they all were. They looked awful. Ryland hadn’t even noticed how horrible everyone looked until he saw a Black man that he could only describe as pale. It wasn’t that his skin was naturally a lighter shade, objectively it was dark, but he couldn’t think of any way else to describe it but pale. That must be what happened when people had never seen sunlight once in their lives along with every other horror of this universe.
Ryland knew that he stood out and everywhere he went people looked at him. The easiest stares to deal with were those of distrust, he was someone new and unexpected in a universe that seemed to know nothing but fear, suffering, and pain. These people were barely alive and they certainly weren’t truly living, Ryland didn’t think he’d heard laughter from anyone since he got here, he’d barely seen smiles.
The worst looks were those of people who looked at him with hope, possibly the first real hope they had ever had in their lives. Some people believed that Ryland was coming here to save them, he had no idea how to tell them that he didn’t know how. He wanted to and would do everything he could, but he didn’t think he would succeed. Even he could feel the crushing hopelessness of this place weighing on him after just a few weeks, he couldn’t imagine a lifetime of that, no wonder their eyes looked dead.
People talked in quiet voices, they pretended not to overhear conversations that weren’t for them, they kept their heads low, a defeated look about them. There was no privacy, no warmth, little light, and hope that faded a little more every day with the stars. One day, if they lived that long, they would be staring out at nothing but an empty void. Ryland hoped he would either be out of here or dead by then.
There were barely any people left, from his guess, there were somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 between all stations, and yet people didn’t just die, they killed each other. Just a few years ago a space station called Eden attacked a space station called Filament and destroyed it. Didn’t they have more important things to do than kill each other? On top of that, the people from Eden who had been arrested by the COI were then sent down to something called a blood ocean to see if it could be used to synthesize food, water, and air and most of them had died down there. Ryland stopped asking questions about almost everything he was curious about after that unless he felt it was important. All the answers were always bad. It was more talk of how the ends justified the means but it sounded like there were only ever means.
Thankfully, a lot of time and resources were diverted into trying to reverse engineer what happened to Ryland, the only real hope that these people had long term was getting out of here. Even if they did get food, water, and air from their freaky prisoner of war blood oceans there were too few people to keep them from inbreeding for long especially if they kept killing each other. If Grace was right about the raw numbers, that was technically enough to sustain a population, but that didn’t even count the people who were past the age of reproduction and those who were infertile. Ryland also really didn’t want to one day be informed that he was going to be entered into the gene pool whether he liked it or not. It sounded like the kind of thing these people would do.
At the very least the scientists that he worked with seemed largely okay, he didn’t like any of them, but he didn’t take issue with any of them either. They were curious about Earth, looking at the logs of what Mary had on Earth culture, history, and ecosystems when they thought that Ryland wasn’t looking but almost never asked him about it. There were several people who were in charge of him but the person directly in charge of him was a woman named Ava. Considering she wasn’t a scientist but rather military, Ryland was fairly certain that he was in her custody, not just under her command. At the very least she seemed reasonable, Ryland was pretty sure that was the best he was going to get from anyone here.
With how few people were here, it wasn’t all that surprising that everyone went by their first names, a lot of people didn’t even have last names. Ryland had quickly stopped going by his last name when he felt too pretentious and even more out of place by going by ‘Dr. Grace’ and wanted people to stop asking him why he had a woman’s name. No one here minced words. When everyone was on the verge of dying, being polite seemed to stop being important. Ryland hated that he could already feel himself adapting to the culture, this wasn’t what he wanted to be, but the misery of this place felt suffocating.
Ryland had been alone in the room that had become his lab for several hours, trying to make sense of anything. He preferred it when he was alone, it felt more lonely when he was surrounded by people he didn’t know how to interact with. Just because trying to find some kind of pattern in the energy signatures while listening to the voices over and over again hoping something would make sense hadn’t worked the last hundred times didn’t mean it wouldn’t work this time. This was not his area of expertise, astrophage and taumoeba he understood, this, he couldn’t even begin to wrap his head around. Who would even be best cut out for this? A theoretical physicist? He had no idea. Ryland was probably the worst person for this, he studied life in a universe that was all but devoid of life. He wanted the astrophage problem back.
He was pretty sure that the other scientists didn’t like working with him either. The data had all been copied over and over again and studied in different labs with different equipment even on different ships and stations. He hated this, he just wanted to go home, he wanted Rocky.
Yelling tore Ryland from the pointless task of trying to find any pattern in anything. Standing up, he opened the door to his lab against his better judgment. Curiosity in this universe always led to bad answers, Ryland had told himself over and over again that he would stop and yet sometimes he couldn’t get past his curiosity. He just wanted to understand the world around him no matter how bad it was. Maybe he was a slow learner.
The yelling was louder outside and Ryland cautiously headed towards it, wondering if someone would escort Ryland back to his lab if he was out long enough, he still had no idea how much of a prisoner he was, no one else really seemed to know either. At the very least he was a well treated prisoner, he was treated better than a lot of citizens here. If that was how the COI treated their civilians he didn’t want to know how they treated their prisoners. Well, apparently they sent them down to blood moons, so, that was the bar. At least Ryland was smart enough to not ask if it was literally blood, knowing the answer already based on how horrible this universe was, and certainly wasn’t about to ask how the blood got there. Why couldn’t he just be in an incredibly vivid nightmare?
Ryland was about to turn the corner towards the sound of yelling when a figure hurdled around the corner and Ryland felt an arm wrapped around his chest, pinning his left arm to his side and grabbing his right, and a knife was pressed to his throat. Ryland just heard a strained whimper escape his lips, barely even sure what was happening. He should have just stayed in his lab, all answers in this universe were bad, why did he have to be so stupid?
“Stay the fuck away from me!” A man’s voice shouted, Ryland flinching at how loud it was directly in his ear, the knife pressed harder against his neck in response. “I’ll fucking kill him! Get the fuck away from me!” The man slowly backed away, Ryland following, trying to force himself to stay calm even though he could feel himself trembling and tears burning in his eyes, desperately looking at the soldiers who rounded the corner to save him even though he didn’t think there was anything they could do.
There weren’t any guns here, which made sense for being in space stations and a bullet piercing the outer wall would be devastating, but that meant that all fighting was up close and personal. It’s not like they could shoot the man holding Ryland hostage from a distance.
“What room do you have access to?” The man demanded, still backing up.
“Lab 16!” Ryland squeaked. “Please don’t hurt me. I’ll do whatever you want, don’t break anything, don’t hurt me, pl–”
“Open it.” The man cut Ryland off as they reached the door to the lab and Ryland didn’t even hesitate to comply, punching in the code.
Thankfully, as soon as they got in, the man shoved Ryland away and demanded he stay in the back corner which he was more than happy to do. At least that probably meant he was genuinely just a hostage and this guy wasn’t actively looking for someone to hurt. God his bar for what was good news had been lowered so drastically.
“Get the fuck away from here!” The man screamed, deadbolting the door. “He’s important, isn’t he? Even try to break down this fucking door and I’ll kill him! If you don’t fuck off I’ll start cutting him apart!”
Ryland whimpered and pressed himself as far as he could into the back corner as if he could somehow be forgotten about. He tried to focus on the sounds of the overlapping voices still coming from the computer, trying to take comfort in them, at least they were the voice of someone who was actively threatening to hurt him.
He stayed huddled in the corner for which was probably less than five minutes but for what felt like an eternity. The man turned to face Ryland and he couldn’t suppress a yelp of terror. It was partially fear of his captor turning on him but most of it was the way the man looked. Was that even a man? Was he human?
The man’s left arm seemed to be made of some red, swollen, scaly skin, the left side of his face had…was that a second mouth? Ryland wasn’t even sure what he was looking at with most of it, so much of his skin having that same swollen, scaly appearance, and it almost looked like some kind of fin behind his ear.
Before Ryland could get a better look at him, the man turned towards the computer where the voices were coming from and started screaming at it. A lot of what he was saying didn’t seem to make much sense, but it almost sounded like the man…understood it. Did he?
“I-I’ll turn it off.” Ryland offered, just needing this to stop especially as the man started getting more aggressive. He had no idea what was going on but this guy clearly wasn’t in his right mind, keeping him calm was Ryland’s best chance of survival. Probably.
Thankfully, the man nodded once, demanding that Ryland move slowly and then ordering him back once he’d shut off the computer. Ryland was more than happy to stay as far away from this guy as possible. Ryand was alive, if he was severely injured, and if anything had been damaged. Every single time, the man got more and more agitated, screaming, pulling at his hair, scratching at himself, and waving his knife around for emphasis as he spoke. Eventually, Ryland had practically begged everyone to just go away, they were making things worse. For now that seemed to work and the man practically collapsed in the corner furthest from Ryland, visibly shaking.
“I’m sorry.” The man whimpered after several minutes of tense silence. “I’m sorry.” He repeated, almost sounding like he was crying. “I’m sorry.”
Ryland had no idea what to think of that and certainly didn’t know what to say, pulling his knees to his chest, both out of fear and desire for warmth, wishing he was brave enough to get his blanket on the other side of the room. He had no idea why this man would take him hostage, threaten to kill him multiple times, scream at everything, and then apologize. He couldn’t be apologizing to Ryland, right?
“Did I hurt you?” The man turned his head a little, looking at Ryland, unmistakably talking to him.
Ryland shook his head, thinking for a moment before speaking. “What are you going to do to me?”
“I don’t know.” There was a slight sob in the man’s voice. He had no idea what was going on, but he was pretty sure this guy was just as scared as Ryland was. Why?
“What do you want?”
The man shook his head. “I just want them to let me go. They won’t stop hurting me. I-I can’t take anymore. I can’t do it anymore. I want to go home. I need it to stop.” The man’s words began to jumble as he repeated himself, running fingers of his hand not holding the knife through his hair, tugging on it as he spoke.
There were about a million questions that Ryland wanted to ask the man like who was hurting him, why, what happened to him, what was going on and so much more. Instead, he focused on the most important question. “The recording of those voices, could you understand them?”
The man rested his head against the wall and made himself smaller, clutching the knife tighter. “Fuck off.” He was going to take that as a yes.
Ryland tried to search his mind for anything he could say or ask that would be safe, but had no idea. This had to be one of the most confusing hostage situations out there, it was certainly the most confusing hostage situation Ryland had ever been in. Was it the only hostage situation he’d ever been in? He’d been kidnapped and held against his will by Stratt, he wasn’t sure how many times though and he wasn’t sure if this was technically being held against his will by the COI considering he wasn’t allowed to go where he pleased but also had nowhere to go. His life was weird.
He was in the middle of thinking of how he could maybe explain the situation to this guy when he calmed down a little and see if there was a way to get him to listen to the voices and see if he could get something no one else could when he heard the clatter of something metal on the ground. Looking up, Ryland was pretty sure he couldn’t see the knife in the man’s hand. Did that guy just…fall asleep? He was pretty sure that wasn’t a good strategy when taking someone hostage.
Slowly, Ryland removed his shoes and crept carefully across the cold metal floor, grabbing the blanket from the back of the chair, not sure what he would do with it, maybe use it to throw on the man and try to unlatch the door and run in the moment of confusion? Probably not, but he didn’t know what else was silent, accessible, and wasn’t important.
When he got close to the man and carefully picked up the knife from the ground, the blade stained with someone’s blood, he was surprised at how the man looked. The weird mouth, red skin, fins, and everything else was gone, the man looked surprisingly…normal. Well, normal for the people here. He still had the pale sick look about him but whatever Ryland was seeing earlier was gone.
His clothes were torn and stained with dried blood, most of it looking like his own from how it was set in the fabric, but Ryland didn’t see any injuries. He was muscular, hair was wild and looked tangled, it plastered to his face with what looked like drying sweat and fairly fresh tears, and circles under his eyes so dark they looked like bruises. He had to be exhausted.
Hesitating for a moment, Ryland wrapped the blanket around the guy’s shoulder as he watched him tremble again, sure he had to be freezing with how thin and torn his clothes were. More selfishly, he hoped it might buy him a little good will. “Please be a little more reasonable after a good night’s sleep.” Ryland whispered, unsure if he was talking to himself, the man, or praying. He wanted to open the door and get this guy out of here but wasn't sure if the man would be taken away or killed and his first possible shot at fixing this would be gone.
Holding the knife tight in his hand, Ryland retreated back to the other side of the room, huddled in his corner, and waited.