Chapter Text
It has been three months since I sent the beetles back to Earth.
Rocky and I have since started our journey to Erid.
“I don’t understand.”
“What is it you don’t understand, Rocky?”
“How can Grace stare through that thing for so long every day? It is not like something will suddenly appear. We are in deep space, Grace.”
It’ll be another three years and five months until we get to Erid, and yet I keep checking the Petrovascope. Rocky has improved the Petrovascope so that it’s sturdy enough to use even when we are accelerating or decelerating. Well, in truth, he told me what to do, and I was the one out in space struggling to follow his instructions.
“If something gets in our way, and I wasn’t constantly checking the Petrovascope, we’d crash.” I look away from the scope and look at Rocky. “The Hail Mary doesn’t have any shields, remember?”
Rocky turns around. “Yes, I remember. But chance of us hitting something is really low, less than 0.000000—“
“I get it,” I interrupt Rocky. “I know we won’t hit anything, I’m just bored.”
“If you are bored, Mary and I can help entertain Grace. We can play a game. I read about human mind game called shess.”
I look at Rocky with a confused look. I upgraded Rocky’s voice module so that it can learn new words on its own and add them to his vocabulary.
“You mean chess?” Rocky taps his left foot on the floor twice. “Yes, chess. Grace want to play, question?” I sigh, “you just want to flaunt your newfound chess skills, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“All right then, one game.” I get down from the platform and walk with Rocky to the laptop that he wants to play chess on. Since the Hail Mary wasn’t equipped with any board games, we are going to have to do it on a laptop.
“Amaze, amaze, amaze. Rocky going to beat Grace, statement!”
“Don’t underestimate me, Rock.”
Now that I think about it, I might have been wrong for giving Rocky access to all human knowledge. A human laptop would be instantly destroyed if it were to make contact with Rocky’s atmosphere, and my knowledge on electronic devices only goes so far. So with a little help from the dozens of coding texts that are aboard the Hail Mary, I connected the programme that translates Rocky’s music notes into speech, to one of the laptops. So now his voice controls the laptop in any way he wants…
I beat Rocky after not even four minutes of the game. He turns around poutingly, “I do not understand, statement.”
“That’s all right, Pal, you’ll get it eventually. Keep hacking at it.” I get up to make myself a cup of coffee.
“I will. And I will be best player in all of the Milky Way. Better than Magnus Carlsen.” I laugh, “or Garry Kasparov.”
“Does not matter, I will be best!” Rocky continues muttering to his laptop. Once the coffee machine is done, I take the mug and walk over to the strand of Taumoeba we’ve bred to make sure they’re still doing all right.
So far, all of them are still alive and well. Thankfully, I haven’t had to intervene at all yet. If I did, that might’ve meant the samples I sent back to Earth might have the same issue. That would surely doom Earth, since there is no one to take care of the issue.
Even if it does work; if they find the beetles and plant the Taumoeba on Venus, it’ll take at least a couple of months for the sun to reach its full luminosity again. And that would take another guaranteed 16.3 light years until that light reaches Erid. It has kept me up at night so many times already, especially considering I cannot go back to check if everything is going well. I have around another two decades of having no clue if the human race—and all other current life on earth—survives. Fun.
Anyway, I’m getting more used to living with Rocky. There is no research to be done so we are just spending our time together. I have learned a lot more about Eridians, and I feel way closer to Rocky now. He’s a really smart being, and Eridian culture is truly fascinating. I can’t wait to meet more of them.
I have also started to notice that both Rocky and I have started to mimick certain behaviors of each other. Like for example, Eridians do not have a front in the way that we have a face, and yet Rocky does usually face me in a certain direction. Now, Eridians do often have preferred arms to use, in the same way that we have left-handed and right-handed people. But that does not mean Eridians have to always face their body a certain direction. Rocky has started to mimick me in that front because I do almost always face him with one side of my body. And I have started to mimick him slightly aswell, I now tap my toes to the floor or my index finger to the wall or desk when I want to be heard. I believe Eridians developed that habit because they see and communicate in sound, whereas when humans want to be heard we just raise our voice.
One thing though… I usually don’t see Rocky wearing any clothes. Yet he does wear a utility belt when he’s working. And I know Eridians do have clothes, because he had this celebration outfit when we were celebrating the strand of CO2 resistant Taumoeba.
I think he might just be a naked mad-man 24/7 now that I think about it. But hey, after over 40 years of solitude I wouldn’t wear any clothes either. And now, considering Eridians can see through walls, they can already see through my clothes. It’s not like I’m hiding anything from them anyway. Maybe I should give it a try. Might be quite a free feeling, no?
As I’m checking each breeding tank one by one I’m hearing an inconsistent ticking sound. It’s probably just Rocky making something.
I finish the cup of coffee as I walk back to the lab where Rocky is still learning new chess strategies. “Oh, I thought you were making something.”
“Why would you think I was making something, question? I said I was learning chess. Do you need something made, question?”
“Oh, no no no, I don’t need anything. I just heard a ticking sound, I thought that must’ve been you.”
“No, I have been here learning new human things. I thought you were making inconsistent ticking noise.” I look up from above my glasses. “So, neither of us was making a ticking noise? Then where did it come from?”
“Breeding tanks okay, question?”
“Yes, yes. I just checked, they’re all okay. The Taumoeba is fine.”
“Good, good, good. I have no clue what that noise was. Space rocks, question?”
“Maybe—“ More little ticking sounds. “It does sound like it is coming from outside the Hail Mary.”
It almost sounds like rain, but there’s no rain in space as far as I know. “What is that sound, question?”
“I don’t know. Mary, do you have any visuals on what it could be?”
“Searching for foreign objects…” I jog over to the Petrovascope as the sound continues. It really does sound like a type of rain. I adjust the Petrovascope and look through it. Nothing.
“What does Grace see, question?”
“Nothing yet… gimme a minute.”
“If the sound is big problem, a minute can be too long. Hurry.”
“Yes yes, I’m looking.” I turn away from Rocky and mutter under my breath, “so bossy...”
“I heard that. Rocky has great hearing, statement.”
I sigh, “I’m still seeing nothing through the Petrovascope.”
“Look harder. What do you see, question? I cannot see same as you, Grace, you are going to have to tell me. Wait, I am being stupid, statement.” Rocky scrambles away, and then comes back with a remote.
He taps some buttons, and Rocky’s hull-mounted external Eridian camera starts moving around. Of course, I totally forgot. Rocky had me install some extra Eridian tech onto the Hail Mary for our journey back to his planet. It’s the same camera he used to ‘see’ me as I caught the Blip-C.
I glance over to Rocky, who is attentively listening to what’s going on.
The sound is becoming more frequent and loud, the more I hear it, the less it sounds like rain and more like… hail? “Mary, have you found something yet?”
“Yes. I have located a foreign object drifting close by. Step back, adjusting Petrovascope pointing to Right Ascension 5 hours 35 minutes, Declination minus 5 degrees 23 minutes.” I let out a sigh of relief and step away from the Petrovascope. I still haven’t fully mastered navigating it based on orders like that, thankfully Mary can do it for me. I take a look through the Petrovascope and—
“What is it, question?” So far, I’m only seeing a shadow covering the stars behind it. “I don’t know yet, Rock, it’s too far away to see.” It’s an object with sharp and angular edges. It almost looks Eridian from so far away. “Did the Eridians send another ship this way?”
“I do not know, have not heard of any other ship. Could be other alien ship?” Another alien? One with the same Astrophage problem as Earth and Erid?
“Could be, but why would they only get here so late?”
“Humans were also late with Astrophage problem. Rocky was alone 46 years, Grace was not even born yet.”
He has a point, the Astrophage started from one point, and spread through its neighbouring stars. It could have just been a while for this third alien civilisation to even have the problem in the first place. Let alone any time it would’ve taken for them to figure it out, and to send a ship this way.
The closer I get, the more detailed the shadow becomes. It’s not as angular as I thought before. It’s actually quite cylindrical. It just looked like a rectangle from far away, the further away something is, the more it looks like it’s 2D.
There’s one big cylinder, with two smaller ones on both sides, kind of placed like a sled or a helicopter’s landing skid, but cylindrical. Those could be the ship’s fuel tanks, The Hail Mary has the same design, but with three fuel tanks instead of two.
The ship is getting even closer, so close that you can see the exterior.
It seems to have a searchlight mounted at its front as a kind of camera, and one huge propeller on its back. A propeller? That makes absolutely no sense.
Propellers work by pushing against air, and space has a serious shortage of that. In a vacuum the blades would spin freely without pushing anything.
Come to think of it, the propeller isn’t even moving.
Hell, the ship isn’t even going in a straight line, it’s rotating slowly like it’s been blasted off into space without any engines. But there’s clearly engines on the ship. Maybe they ran out of fuel? And what we’re seeing is the wreckage of a ship with a crew long dead?
The ship is now close enough that we can see the full exterior. There’s something written on the hull of the ship in extremely familiar symbols.
“It’s… it’s human-made.”