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When Ryland Grace woke up– after going through the sheer humiliation of passing out yet again, waking up, and finally completing the cycle until he was fit enough to walk, perceive his surroundings, and sit down to analyze his situation—all he could feel was a rage so overwhelming that it made his hands shake and caused him to throw Ilyukhina’s empty vodka pouch onto the floor.
She actually put him on the Hail Mary!
They killed him. They condemned him to a suicide mission simply because he was their last hope. He wasn't even deemed worthy of saying goodbye to his students before being launched into the infinity of space—Grace was Stratt’s Laika, wasn't he? Her sacrificial lamb from the very beginning, ever since she realized how far Grace could go given the right equipment and incentive—to die as the decorated hero he never wanted to be. How cruel, how unfair, how utterly predictable of Stratt to do this. How on earth could he have thought she would accept his “no” when she hadn't accepted it from anyone else? Because there was some underlying sense of comradeship between them? Because they were cut from the same cloth? Lonely people who didn't fit into normal social conventions and contented themselves with their own form of autonomous happiness? How naive of Grace.
“What the hell! Goddammit! What a piece of shit!” Grace allowed himself to scream at the corpses of Yao and Ilyukhina, letting himself swear, he deserved it after enduring so much crap.
The drug failed. How terrible, he had been kidnapped by the woman who held all the power of every government combined. Truly a wonderful day to be part of the Petrova Task Force. Wait, actually, hold on! Grace stood up and grabbed the dry-erase marker he had found lost among the supplies over the last few days.
The drug failed! The French drug was a total failure! Stratt probably didn't consider that some people might carry a genetic resistance to the thing. Grace didn't know exactly how the drug worked, whether it was the kind that lost its effect depending on the individual's metabolism, or if it targeted a sensitive receptor in the brain directly, or even if it was the type capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier.
What did Grace know about drugs? About people's resistance to them? What did Grace know about himself?
“Come on, brain, show me the scientific potential,” he muttered to himself.
His stomach rumbled again. Well, thinking used up a lot of energy. That could wait until Grace was at least minimally functional.
“More food!”
Fortunately, Mary seemed happy to feed him her super tasty slop. He really hoped there was cocoa powder on this ship, if he was stuck with dubious instant coffee... Well, he was already on a suicide mission; stepping out into space without an EVA suit wouldn't be that hard.
It took a few days for his mind to become functional enough and for his big scientist brain to link a few hypotheses he had written all over the walls of the Hail Mary with articles he used to read back when he still kept up with neurobiology for fun. Grace was one of the many who believed in a functional treatment for neurodegenerative diseases associated with factors like Amyloid-Beta and Tau, maybe all that hope would actually be useful now. The French drug, which he chose to name the Amnesia Inducer Demonstrating Stratt’s Corroded Personality—AIDSCP, a hideous acronym, but she deserved it—could belong to the benzodiazepine class, considering its mechanism of action and the straightforward correlation between many antipsychotics and hypnotics.
“Benzodiazepine? Makes sense. Midazolam, maybe. Propofol if they wanted something heavier. Rohypnol would be way too cliché. Okay, quick review: what do I know about benzodiazepines?”
The term benzodiazepine relates to a chemical structure consisting of the fusion of a benzene ring and a diazepine ring, where the two nitrogen atoms are primarily located at positions 1 and 4 (1,4-benzodiazepines), or something like an intravenous anesthetic, and that was a big "if" for Grace. But Midazolam, Propofol, or Rohypnol could be affected by protein and enzymatic resistances in individuals with certain genetic mutations scattered across the globe. Still, that would be so cliché, so basic—a top-secret file like that wouldn't carry such simple information. Terrible names, though. Yeah, Grace hated the lack of accessibility in the academic world—try being dyslexic and pronouncing those names three times fast, it's impossible.
“Considering all that, what are my scientific hypotheses? Hmm... Neuronal transmission factors? What did Stratt miss?” Grace opened and closed his eyes. He really missed having a whiteboard right now. “Clinical trials? Well, now we might be getting somewhere.”
Stratt definitely overlooked some of the most basic analyses, like the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC) guidelines on CYP2D6 variations or Beyond classical benzodiazepines: Novel therapeutic potential of GABAA receptor subtypes. Maybe she didn't think those studies applied when the French CIA re-evaluated the drug's mechanism. She always had a bit of a problem with abusing her authority, and besides, Eva Stratt wasn't a scientist.
So, within the realm of benzodiazepine probability and the hyper-action of neurotransmitter mechanisms... For everything sacred, Grace desperately needed a lab. And paper, a pen, and maybe a tablet.
Assuming it was part of something along those lines, Stratt failed to account for research on the UR-M genotype and its effects on many modern drugs—a study being applied in pharmacology due to concerns over the consequences of dose escalation in certain patients. Many other opioids are metabolized by CYP2D6 or CYP3A5, whose loss-of-function variants can cause an uncontrolled requirement for higher doses just to achieve an effect. That mutation accounted for less than 1% of the world's population and, as far as Grace could remember reading, caused liver enzymes to destroy benzodiazepines before they could even reach the brain, discarding them like trash. It was an intriguing theory, and Grace circled “CYP2D6” on the wall four times before moving on to the next item.
“What are the odds of me having a mutated gene, Mary?” he asked the ship, which unfortunately did not reply. Its database probably didn't support that level of interaction, even with all its modern technology. “Well, what a stagnant start to our friendship. You could at least pretend to be interested in me.”
A pity that his only companion besides mummified corpses was a personality-less computer.
Grace looked at his scribbles again and tapped his marker against the wall three times. Right, Yao and Ilyukhina were dead, probably due to some defect in the feeding tubes. He was alone with his memories, an overwhelming sense of rage, and deep disappointment, Grace wasn't going to analyze the deep pain that thinking about Eva Stratt caused; they were nothing more than people bound by their shared loneliness, what his students called a "secret third thing," which he had never really understood, and, of course, the sheer terror of knowing absolutely nothing about how to fly an interstellar spaceship.
“Let's focus on what matters. What else do I know about relevant mechanisms to bypass various drug effects? What do I know...” he muttered.
Beyond specific genetic segments, there was the common pharmacological resistance found in some people in the Southern Hemisphere. For a time, switching from barbiturates to benzodiazepines was seen as advantageous, essentially due to the improved therapeutic index in cases of insomnia and depression. But there was a problem beyond addiction: benzodiazepines bind to GABAA receptors, ligand-gated ion channels known for opening chloride channels that regulate central nervous system functions. The drug's modulation of this receptor is self-limiting, and in the absence of GABA, benzodiazepines cannot open the chloride channel. Thus, the binding site for benzodiazepines can undergo an alteration related to the deactivation of this pathway that carries the amnesiac to the brain. Grace had no real indication that his own GABAA receptor was somehow resistant to drugs containing benzodiazepines from his college years or the brief period where he almost developed an addiction to sleeping pills—he was a freak, he knew that full well; all that stress had made him experiment with a lot of illicit stuff that took him to heaven and hell real fast—however, when it came to an amnesia inducer like the AIDSCP, he was more inclined to believe in the action of the blood-brain barrier.
Nothing could be confirmed without intense research using his own cells, so he just had to believe he was really, really lucky! He was alone in space, and the last human interaction he had was inside a cell, listening to Eva Stratt's monologue as a twisted version of encouragement and justification for her actions—the kind worthy of Moriarty.
“Preliminary conclusion: either the French drug failed due to a manufacturing defect, or I am genetically annoying. Congratulations, evolution. You finally decided to give me a useful mutation besides myopia and a worrying degree of astigmatism.”
Grace suddenly felt tired, so very tired. He was just a man, for God's sake! A middle school science teacher who gave everything for his kids, and it still wasn't enough. What did they expect from him here? The rest of the crew was dead; he was a man abandoned in the void. He understood Stratt's actions, even though he hated every second of it. Grace was the only option, and honestly? He had been her guinea pig ever since the Astrophage samples arrived at ArcLight. But her plan involved a support team, not an inexperienced man all on his own.
“Fudge, Stratt, why didn't you consider the 1% chance of this happening?!”
It was time to start planning his next moves. But first, he would yield the bodies of Ilyukhina and Yao to the stars, where they could rest in the arms of Morpheus upon the bed of the universe.
°°°
So, Grace was 11.9 light-years away from Earth, just as they had calculated. Near Tau Ceti, the farthest any human mission had ever gone. No joke or dog metaphors intended, but he was currently humanity's Laika, representing some sort of perverted hope born from the actions of the person who actually made this happen. He had already checked the entire ship and done the math after finding a whiteboard and more colored markers, not much different from the primitive math he had been practicing in his head since waking up from the coma. There were ten days left before the Hail Mary's engines shut off, leaving him drifting in space, dependent on gravity.
Ryland Grace was completely terrified.
I mean, that was definitely calculated. Stratt said so, and it made sense now. It was actually pretty foolish of him, why would she keep a middle school teacher on board the mission? Because he was an Astrophage expert? That didn't explain the training he received or why he was present at every official meeting. And being dragged from place to place like a dog on a leash—seriously, why was his brain so focused on dog metaphors? Was it some primitive response to trauma? There was probably some reading material about that on the computer Stratt sent—acting as if he were some important officer made no sense at all. He was an easily manipulable pawn; an implicit idea of closeness was all it took for him to stop questioning anyone's actions.
In the end, it was all because of a stupid gene he didn't even know he had because Stratt kept it hidden until the absolute last second, when he had nowhere left to run. How long had she known? Was it the same day she called him to her office just to ask for an opinion she didn't even want? She had already made her choice that day, and he was somehow part of her secret Plan B.
Okay, enough. Grace couldn't mourn forever. He had to plan. When he reached Tau Ceti, he needed to confirm whether a Petrova Line existed.
“I have enough food to last at least two years, assuming I don't die tomorrow from some weird inconvenience,” he didn't want to think about how that was because Ilyukhina and Yao were no longer alive—it still hurt to have lost two people he considered friends, even if it was through forced proximity. “I just need to figure out a way to handle zero-g when that happens. It can't be that bad.”
It was horrible. Oh Lord, it was terrible. The Hail Mary had begun the countdown to shut down its engines, and Grace was hyperventilating. He was afraid of heights, hated that loss-of-control feeling in his limbs on water slides, and avoided rollercoasters like the plague, how on earth was he going to survive zero gravity?!
“Mary! Abort mission! Route to Earth!” he yelled as the computer reached four.
As expected, the countdown continued. Three, two, one... and then he was floating, and it was fantastic! Great, perfect! Grace was far away from any solid surface now, and his stomach was churning. He could handle this; he wasn't going to throw up—of course not. It was just an automatic response from his body to the paralyzing fear that he would soon overcome. There was nothing to it—just being 11.9 light-years away from Earth, in a completely foreign gravity...
Grace threw up inside his own jumpsuit. There went his first official jumpsuit.
Fortunately, humans were very good at adapting to adversity. As soon as the rush of epinephrine and norepinephrine began to fade—cortisol definitely wasn't fading; Grace would be in a state of constant stress until he died like a space bubble—desensitization felt like a breath of fresh air after getting wiped out by a wave at the beach. Grace knew that feeling intimately; it was the exact reason he took swimming lessons in his early twenties. Of course, panic is energetically unsustainable, so it was no surprise that fifteen minutes after holding a bubble of vomit against his own skin to keep it within the confines of his jumpsuit fabric, Grace could move again without feeling sick.
He needed to change clothes and get moving. It was starting to get really gross. At least Grace could claim to be the very first person in human history to experience space sickness.
The laundry room turned out to be a pleasantly interesting surprise. Grace knew practically every inch of the Hail Mary's blueprint, but he never imagined he would be so satisfied to discover a machine capable of washing a vomit-covered jumpsuit in the middle of interstellar space, this was probably how Mark Watney felt when he realized the Hab had a working toilet. Considering his track record over the last few hours, it was quite possibly humanity's second most important invention, trailing only behind Astrophage itself. The real spectacle, however, was the Petrovascope.
Fudge, he had been dying to try that thing out ever since he managed to feel something other than stress, anger, and fatigue.
Grace spent a few seconds just admiring the equipment before even turning it on. He knew the technical specifications—he helped discuss some of them during the Petrova Task Force meetings—but reading a spec sheet and looking at the actual instrument were two completely different experiences. The optics were absurd, worthy of competing with the best telescopes ever built on Earth, and yet there it was, right outside the Hail Mary. For a brief moment, all the anger vanished, replaced by that old, familiar scientific curiosity that always found a way to survive, even when he was starving alone in his tiny apartment, ready to test whether the wall mold was a fungus that could survive human body temperature.
So he pointed the Petrovascope toward Tau Ceti, and as expected, there was a Petrova Line. Right where it was supposed to be.
“Tau Ceti has a Petrova Line, and it's not dimming,” Grace let out the breath he didn't even realize he was holding. That confirmed the star was infected by Astrophage as well. Horrible for any civilization orbiting Tau Ceti, excellent for the mission's scientific hypothesis. Great news for Earth.
But something was wrong, the line was broken. He looked again, wiped the lenses twice, and switched the Petrovascope settings back to optical view.
Orbiting near Tau Ceti's Petrova Line was a ship unlike anything he had ever seen before.
Alright, Ryland Grace was the first human to make alien contact without ever having wanted to go to space in the first place, Stratt would probably be thrilled about this, knowing her petty, desperate plan was working out as far as anyone could tell. Grace clenched his fists. Now was not the time. He needed to make contact with whatever was out there. Mary seemed to agree, as the approaching Blip-A triggered her sensors.
It was time to make alien contact.
°°°
Rocky was incredible. They had finally managed to construct a crude, basic language. It still needed refinement, but for Grace—who expected to be talking to himself for as long as it took to slowly go insane and die—it was enough. It worked well enough for Grace to stop talking to a cold, automated computer and start talking to... well, someone. Grace missed being able to say something and receive an answer other than silence echoing between the walls of the Hail Mary. He had wished so many times that Ilyukhina and Yao had survived; it would be so much easier if he weren't the only one condemned to a terrible, lonely death.
It was a horrific thing to wish for, but Grace was beginning to realize that those rotten roots he thought he had discarded when he built a new shell around being a teacher were still there. Maybe they would never go away.
But everything was fine. They were working together. Erid was losing its star too, just like Earth, and Rocky had been sent with his late crew to find a solution. They were allies with a common enemy.
Until Rocky asked that simple question that made his primitive brain remember why he was so furious when he woke up. What is a teacher doing in space? And frankly, Grace didn't know. Stratt herself seemed annoyed at having to send him instead of the qualified astronauts who blew up thanks to a ridiculous technical error—everyone made fun of his excessive caution when handling Astrophage, and look where that got them: the moment he looked away, the mission's primary and secondary science officers were blown to bits by a weighing error that should have been impossible. And then she was cruel and terrible to him. She said no one would miss him, that he had no children—and god, that hurt so much more than the persistent insinuation that he was just a nobody the world wouldn't miss.
“There is no one as qualified as you. And to be completely frank, we are lucky—lucky beyond our wildest dreams—that you are resistant to the coma. Do you think I kept you on this project for so long because I needed a middle school science teacher?” That's what she said, right? “God knows I didn't want it to come to this, but here we are. You were the third science specialist the whole time.” Was that supposed to comfort him? God, it still hurt. The memory was so vivid it felt like it would never fade. Grace was disposable from day one.
Stratt didn't even consider how he would feel, amnesiac, light-years away from home, receiving partial memory flashes that would never fit together properly. He would die without ever knowing he missed Thursday night dinners with Marisa, that he would never grade Luke's essays again, or ride his bike along the beach to watch the sunrise. And he would never see his kids again.
God, his kids! They graduated, surely, and Grace wasn't there to see it, to watch them pursue their dreams. Logically, he knew things probably weren't easy back home; Earth was likely in a state of constant emergency, with food and water rationing, under control bordering on dictatorship across every country.
“You don't even have a dog.” Funny. Stratt got almost everything right. He really didn't have a wife. No kids of his own. No parents waiting for him at home. No siblings calling on weekends or friends inviting him to Sunday BBQs, except for Marisa. But he did have kids! Not biological ones, but he had them! He had dozens of children, kids who showed up early just to display a science experiment they made at home, who covered his desk with drawings of rockets and poorly colored cells, who discovered with awe that an onion had DNA or that a star was so much more interesting than it looked in the sky. Even the most troublesome ones mattered to Grace! He did everything to make his classroom a safe haven because, after being cast out by the scientific community and having every research grant denied, teaching saved his life. He wanted to be an anchor for those kids who had pulled him out of the abyss without even realizing it. It made no sense for a teacher to be in space. What did his entire situation say about the world? They were willing to force him onto that ship—who could guarantee they wouldn't do the same to someone else?
She called him a coward and a liar, and maybe she was right in a way. But she made a mistake in believing Grace wouldn't do the impossible to deal with that burning sensation beneath his skin.
“Grace question?” the synthesized voice he chose for Rocky snapped him out of his reverie.
Grace looked at his alien friend and smiled.
“I don't know, buddy.” It was the only thing he could say as the tunnel between them seemed to grow smaller and more claustrophobic.
“You will be remembered as a hero.” What a joke.
°°°
Grace was ready to meet Rocky. He knew he wouldn't choose Earth the moment he identified the issue with the Taumoeba. There was enough food to last a good portion of the trip to Erid, and if not, well, he would have done his part by saving Rocky and Erid. Ryland Grace was not going back to Earth. As he set up the probes, he finally let that simmering anger flare up into a bonfire once more. He sat in front of the camera and folded his hands on the table.
“I could tell you a lot of things—that you were right, Stratt, that I actually managed to solve the Tau Ceti mystery, something Mrs. Cacéres, the volunteer who was supposed to be sent in my place, probably wouldn't have been able to do. I managed to breed a nitrogen-resistant strain of Taumoeba after months of trying and wanting to give up. I almost died, you know? If it weren't for Rocky, your entire meticulous plan, your last hope, would have died with me,” Grace said slowly, running his fingers over his sleeves. “But I didn't die. Rocky gave me enough fuel to go back to Earth if I wanted to. His people don't know about relativity and rely on Newtonian physics, so he had ten times more fuel than necessary for the trip to Tau Ceti.”
Grace smiled. It was so strange that he had found solace in a creature existing light-years away from his own species. Rocky had been alone for forty-six human years, and yet he still found room in his five hearts to stay with Grace, forging a bond that required nothing in return. It was unlike any relationship he had on Earth; Rocky didn't expect Grace to give up everything to save him, to bleed his soul out just so he could survive. Even now, Rocky had probably realized something went wrong with the Taumoeba and wasn't expecting Grace to abandon all hope of returning to Earth to save him. Rocky was, at his core, a genuinely good creature.
“When you signed my death sentence, you said I was a coward and a liar—which we both know is true. Everything you said was true,” he paused. “I run away from relationships, I only have one close friend, I'm an orphan, and I don't have a dog. But I had my kids on Earth, and everything I've done so far was for them, not for your last Hail Mary, but for those smiling faces who barely understood that in thirty years, they would be the generation dealing with the consequences of a dying Sun. It was for them that I walked back into that lab and demanded a chance to join the Petrova Task Force.”
Grace let out a shaky breath. How much time had passed since that day? If he had known what would happen back then, would he have done anything differently?
“Stratt, you've probably realized something is wrong by now, right? I don't sound like a confused man clinging to fragments of his memory, and neither Yao nor Ilyukhina are around. They died along the way, and I was the only survivor. Fortunately for you, your French drug didn't work. I had all my knowledge by my side while I did my job, as well as the work of a pilot and an engineer, until Rocky showed up. Do you see what a tragedy it would have been if your plan had worked? You relied on Yao's presence to guide me, but without him or Ilyukhina, I would have been just an amnesiac man in the middle of space, completely clueless about what to do,” he choked up, his eyes filling with tears at the thought of the two friends he had lost. “It would have been the worst kind of tragedy.”
Grace should stop now; he should send the files on how to cultivate the Taumoeba, but he couldn't stop talking or hyperventilating.
“Stratt, you said I was a fundamentally good man, despite all your other opinions about me. And you were right, I can't let go of the desire to help Earth, to secure a future for the next generation. So I'm sending a copy of my work and only three tubes of Taumoeba, just as you allowed me to have only three Astrophage samples. I won't provide anything beyond the bare minimum for you to work with. I'm sure you'll figure something out. Take this as a lesson I also had to learn: a world willing to sacrifice someone against their will will do it again every single time they face a critical situation—and a world like that is not where I want my kids to grow up and become the next martyrs.”
Grace was a coward, yes. But above all else, he had learned to be brave when it mattered.
He smiled, a crooked, ugly smile. “I can forgive you, but I still hate you, even if I understand where your motivations came from. You sacrificed your humanity to save the world; you knew what happens in desperate times. Well, I'm sure you'll manage to work with this—you're great under pressure. Besides, remember how you couldn't trust that 99%? Well, you shouldn't have trusted that 1% either without considering the 0.001% chance of your plan following a secret third path,” Grace gave a mock two-finger salute to his forehead. “Dr. Ryland Grace, signing off.”