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As soon as the pictures came in from the Venus probe, Eva Stratt got to work. She spoke with every reputable xenobiologist she could find. Every one of them pointed to Dr Ryland Grace. All of them told her, in varying degrees of politeness, that he was a little… unhinged. And given what the “normal” members of his field were like, that was saying something.
“He’s an odd one, but he knows his stuff,” said one New Zealand researcher, with a dozen tropical birds perched on his head, arms and shoulders.
“His math always checks out,” said another reluctantly. “Assuming you can even read it.”
A French speculative biologist, whose garage was filled with a model of an African elephant’s circulatory system that she seemed to have welded from plumbing parts, put things a little more colorfully. “He’s a fucking weirdo. Obsessed with aliens. I mean, all of us are, but he gets this glint in his eyes whenever you mention pentapedes. If anyone can figure out what’s going on with these fucked-up nightmare dots, it’s him.”
All in all, Stratt was almost disappointed when she tracked Grace down in person. He seemed fairly ordinary. The strangest thing about him was why an American middle school teacher would go to the trouble of wearing a blazer and tie.
Still, she keeps an eye on him as he buzzes around the lab they’ve set up for first contact with the Petrova line sample. Various military personel filter out, and she remains, sending emails and taking notes and putting out fires and glancing up, every once in a while, to make sure her guinea pig hasn’t ripped his suit. After six hours, his occasional muttering seems to have graduated to a full-on conversation with himself, but she doesn’t pay it any mind. She’s used to eccentric scientists. After twelve hours, around half past four in the morning, she does start to wonder if he’s going to get tired.
As if on cue, he cycles out of the airlock and pulls off his suit. “Wooh, it’s sweaty in this thing. Got any snacks?”
She offers him a sandwich and a bottle of rubbing alcohol.
“Bit early for a drink, isn’t it?” he says, nodding at the bottle.
“It’s for your hands. What have you found out?”
“Good morning to you too,” he says through a mouthful of sandwich.
She waits for him to finish chewing.
“Alright. Uhh. Let’s see.” He starts listing off from his fingers. “Astrophage keeps itself at 96.415 degrees Celsius—no hotter, no colder. Oh, and this is the coolest part—it stores the energy as mass, can you believe it? It’s incredibly efficient; that’s how it maintains the same temperature, even on the surface of the sun, and how it moves by expelling light. Hmm, what else… It has a magnetoreceptive sense, that means it responds to a magnetic field… It can survive in our air, by the way, so if I could stop using the suit that would be great… Don’t worry, I’ve still only killed one, and I counted one hundred and seventy-four in the sample… I got a good look at its organelles, too, and it is crazy similar to Earth life! It has DNA and mitochondria, can you believe it? Oh, yeah, and… It’s mostly water. Guess I still don’t have any evidence of that theory. Doesn’t mean I was wrong, though!”
Eva stares at him. He goes back to his sandwich. After a few seconds of silence, he looks up. “What?”
“You figured all of that out in twelve hours?” She wasn’t an expert, but that amount of work should have taken multiple teams of scientists multiple days.
“Uh… yeah…?” For some reason, he seems to be avoiding her eyes. “I mean, it’ll need to be peer reviewed, but I documented all my experiments if you want to take a look—”
“How did you even know what experiments to run?”
“I had some good hunches.”
“Hunches.”
“Uh-huh.” He’s still not looking at her. Suddenly, he claps his hands. “Oh, and I figured out why they’re going to Venus! They need carbon dioxide to breed.”
“What? You bred astrophage?”
“Yep! It’s hanging out with its parents in the lab!”
All at once, any suspicions fly from Eva’s mind. She stands up. “You’re going to come with me.”
Eva doesn’t think much of Grace’s uncanny affinity with astrophage—she doesn’t have time to question it, and all of his discoveries have been confirmed—until a few weeks later, on the aircraft carrier. She’s standing in the lab, sweeping her eyes around to make sure everything has been put in the right place, when a researcher at her elbow pipes up, “Is that Ryland Grace?”
The researcher is pointing at the opposite corner, which Grace claimed for his astrophage research early on. He’s currently bent over a microscope. “It is.” Already preparing for another rant about unprofessionalism, crackpot ideas, and/or Denmark, she says, “Let me guess, you know him from a certain conference?”
“What?” The researcher—American, going by his accent—gives her a confused look. “No, I knew him as an undergrad at Berkeley, actually. It’s just… it’s weird.”
“What is?” she asks absently, typing away at something far more important.
“Well… you know, he was a bit awkward in college, and he’d always you ask the same question as an icebreaker. ‘What would you do if the sun was dimming?’” He laughs nervously. “Funny coincidence, isn’t it?”
She frowns. “...Yes. Very funny.”
She must have done something scary and intense with her face again, because the researcher scurries away, leaving her with her thoughts. On a whim, she Googles ryland grace uc berkeley. One of the first results to pop up is a paper from the undergraduate journal. A hypothetical thought experiment: analyzing the worldwide zoological and economic impact of a dimming sun.
It’s from 2012.
She crosses the lab and taps Grace’s shoulder.
“Hm?” He looks up from the microscope. A gummy bear is stuck to his cheek. She peels it off and throws it in the trash. “Hey!” he says indignantly. “I was going to eat that. Probably.”
“I need to go over something with you,” she says, pushing her tablet into his face. He adjusts his glasses, and his eyes widen as he reads. His knee starts to bounce. He laughs awkwardly, scratching his neck. “Wow, that’s a trip down memory lane! I didn’t even know this was on the internet. How did that happen?”
“I’m more surprised by the fact that you didn’t think this was relevant to share with the team.”
“My undergraduate environmental science paper?” He attempts another laugh. It sounds a bit like a dying lamb. “I don’t think anyone wants to read that.”
“Dr Grace, there has been very little prior research on the topic of how to deal with a climate situation like the one we’re in now. Your paper directly addresses it. And it was rigorous enough to be featured in your university’s student journal.”
“Um. Okay. If you say so!” He brushes a few locks of sweaty hair from his forehead.
She narrows her eyes. “Out of curiosity, is there anything in particular that motivated you to choose this rather specific research topic, back when you wrote it?”
“Oh, you know, just thought it would be interesting.”
“A hunch, you could say.”
“Exactly!” He pushes his glasses onto his chin and turns determinedly back to the microscope. “I’m going to go back to these samples now, if you don’t mind.”
She sighs. “Alright. I’ll pass this on to the climate science team.”
“Great! Glad to hear it!” He shoves a handful of gummy bears in his mouth.
“And please, at least try to keep to the lab safety rules. These are considered a biohazard now.” She snatches the gummy bear bag from the lab counter beside him, and strides away, popping a few in her mouth while he’s not looking.
“Pretty sure gummy bears are always considered a biohazard!” he calls after her.
“Get back to work!”
Eva hates HR duty.
There’s always someone complaining. Either the breakroom cereal tastes “off,” or someone is convinced their anime figurine collection was stolen, or so-and-so keeps inching their cubicle further into so-and-so’s workshop. You would think that a group of grown adults working to prevent the apocalypse could manage their own conflicts, but alas, you would be wrong.
This time, it’s the engineering department complaining, and Grace is in the middle of it. Reportedly, he’s been hanging around Dimitri Komorov’s workshop, butting in to people’s projects and giving unsolicited advice. At eleven P.M., Eva finally has half an hour to spare, so she heads down to Grace’s quarters to confront him. She’s about to knock on the his door when she hears his voice coming from inside.
“...No, it only has to withstand one Earth atmosphere of pressure, remember? …Oh, right. I didn’t think of that… Yeah, yeah, I know, stupid leaky brain. What about the second alloy?”
Eva raps on the door and calls, “Dr Grace? Could I speak with you for a moment?”
He mutters something that sounds like “Fudge, I’ve got to go,” then calls out, “Sure, just a sec!” A moment later, the door opens.
He’s wearing a pair of TARDIS-patterned sweatpants and a graphic tee that reads All the Best Science Jokes Argon. His eyes are hung with their usual bags, but other than that he looks upbeat. Eva peers over his shoulder to see if there’s someone else in the room.
“Who were you talking to?”
“Oh—uh—just someone on the phone.” He scratches his neck.
“There’s no cell service. We’re in the middle of the Indian Ocean.”
“Just got lucky, I guess. Maybe there was a passing ship with a, uh, a hotspot.”
“A hotspot,” she repeats.
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re aware that we don’t allow any other ships to come into proximity with us, yes?”
“Oh. Right. Th-that’s strange.”
Another painful silence, then she sighs. “May I come in?”
He trips over his feet getting out of the way. The crew quarters each consist of a single room, a couple meters across. She takes a seat at the desk, and he takes a seat on the narrow bunk across from her. Their knees are almost touching. Eva doesn’t see a cell phone anywhere.
“Dr Komorov informed me of the improvements you suggested for the spin drives,” she tells him. “He said they passed all tests and significantly improved both efficiency and resilience.”
“Oh! That’s awesome. I’ll—”
“Dr Lokken also expressed her satisfaction with the changes you recommended for the centrifuge, and made me promise not to tell you how impressive it was that you came up with them.”
He smils crookedly. “Sounds like you broke your—”
“She also called you a ‘mansplaining show-off who doesn’t know how to mind his business.’”
“Ah. Well, that’s fair.”
“Other members of the engineering department were less charitable in their reports of your involvement. Several expressed annoyance at your ‘meddling in their work,’ disbelief at what they called ‘ridiculous ideas straight out of Frankenstein’s ass,’ and skepticism at your qualifications.”
“Let me guess. The Frankenstein line was Santos?”
He’s trying at a smile, but it’s clear the feedback is getting to him. Eva dials it back a bit. “Personally, I see no reason not to trust your suggestions, since everything you’ve recommended has worked out well so far, give or take a few tweaks and tests. But I am curious where it’s all coming from, since you’ve never had any formal engineering education.”
“Oh, you know, I did some self-study here and there.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Enough self-study to have a detailed working understanding of metallurgy, magnetohydrodynamics, and thermostructural metamaterials engineering?”
He shrugs and raises his hands as though to say, what can you do?
“Look.” She rubs the bridge of her nose. She needs at least three more coffees to deal with this. “I don’t care where you get your ideas from, as long as they work. But you can’t keep barging into another department and ordering people around without at least giving me some way to defend you. If you can’t tell me where you’re getting this engineering expertise from, I’m going to have to put my foot down.”
His face twitches between several expressions: irritation, anxiety, frustration, dread. Then he bows his head and grips his hair. “Ahh, fudge it.” He shakes his head slightly and uncurls himself, his hands on his knees, his eyes flitting around the room. “I’m going to tell you something crazy.”
“Please do.”
“I… Ah, fiddlesticks.” He rubs his chin. “I was diagnosed with schizophrenia.”
That… was not what she was expecting.
He leans his forehead against one hand. His leg bounces. “When I was twelve. And ever since then, I’ve been getting meds and therapy and everything. I’ve got it under control. But the diagnosis never felt… quite right. Most people, they hallucinate different things throughout their life, but for me… It’s just this one guy. I used to call him my imaginary friend.” He laughs dryly. “And… he’s an alien. So there’s that.”
Eva nods on autopilot. An alien. Of course.
“Anyway, this alien—I call him Rocky, cause he looks like a rock—he’s, uh, he’s pretty smart. He’s really smart. He used to help me with my math homework. Helped me cheat on a few exams, actually. I probably shouldn’t have told you that. But, you know, I always assumed that he was just some other part of my brain helping me out. Until the Petrova line.”
She leans forward. “The Petrova line?”
He glances up at her, then back down to his bare feet. “Yeah. See, Rocky’s always had this… backstory. He had to leave his planet because a curved line of little red space algae was eating his sun’s energy. Then the rest of his crew died from some mysterious illness and he got stranded at Tau Ceti, where he started to hallucinate me. My therapist thought it was a projection of my loneliness and a method of rationalizing episodes of derealization… Ah, sorry, I’m oversharing. My point is… what was my point?”
“The Petrova line.”
“Right, right. When I got the email about the Petrova line, I couldn’t believe it. I even went and checked my old journals from when I was a kid. I was kind of obsessive about recording my hallucinations back then, and I had written down the exact wavelength of Rocky’s Petrova line. 25.984 microns. The same as ours.”
“You… predicted the Petrova line?”
“Ridiculous, right? But it was true. I thought it must be a coincidence, even though, like, what are the chances? But then Rocky predicted other things about the astrophage, like its magnetoreception, its organelles, even its body temperature, and all of it was true. And then he offered me an alternative explanation.”
“Which was?”
He takes a deep breath. “Soul-songs.”
“Soul-songs,” she repeats blankly.
“It’s a concept in Eridian culture. That’s the name of Rocky’s species—Eridians. They can sort of… telepathically link to the people that they match well with. And for some reason, Rocky linked with me.” He shrugs. “I know it sounds crazy, but… it’s the only explanation that accounts for all the evidence.”
Eva nods again, slowly. “Okay. So… So. What you’re saying is… your telepathic alien soulmate named Rocky has been helping you brainstorm solutions to the problems in the engineering department.”
He frowns up at her. “I mean, I don’t know about soulmate… Makes it sound kind of gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Just… Nevermind. Let’s just call him my telepathic alien buddy, if that’s alright.”
It’s at this moment that Eva Stratt comes to two very important conclusions:
- Her second-in-command is completely, utterly batshit crazy.
- He’s also her best chance at saving the world.
“Okay,” she says. “I believe you.”
Grace straightens. “Wait, really?”
“Absolutely,” she says, standing. “I’ll come up with something to tell the engineering department. Don’t worry about it.”
“Oh, thank heck.” He stands as well, burying his shaking hands in the pockets of his sweatpants. “I was really worried you would tell me to stay away. I think Rocky will be able to help with a lot more designs.”
“Me too,” she says, keeping her voice firm and sincere. “You won’t, ah, tell anyone else about this, will you?”
“God, no.” He looks horrified. “Will you?”
“I think it’s best to keep it down-low for now.” She opens the door and inches her way out. “Have a good night’s sleep, Dr Grace. Let me know if there’s anything I can help with.”
“O-of course! Thank you so much! Wow.”
She shuts the door and hurries down the hallway, ignoring the curious looks from a few guards milling about. By the time this is over, someone is going to need a psych eval. If not for Grace, then for her.