Chapter Text
When Olesya Ilyukhina failed to wake up on board the Hail Mary, 8 lightyears away from Earth, she was surprised by how many faces were waiting for her.
“I dreamed about you,” she told them, but knew with an emotionless clarity that she was not dreaming, now.
Yao did not meet her eyes.
Shapiro waved hello.
DuBois said, “Dr. Ilyukhina, the mission is in serious danger. Grace is going to wake up alone, and Stratt lied, he isn’t here willingly, she drugged him and -”
“Wait, wait,” she said. She held up her hand, and was caught off guard at the sight of it. It looked perfectly normal, and also different. Wrong? A little. She turned around even though she knew what she would see. Those hands looked wrong, for sure. She turned back to her crewmates.
“Actually, keep going. Grace had to be drugged? Shit that sucks. Hey, so, why are we ghosts?”
“We don’t know much more than you do,” said Yao. “But you can feel something about it, can’t you?”
“Feel-?” But she could, at the back of her mind right next to the cold certainty that she was not dreaming, but dead. The knowledge that something - no, that she - that there was - “Oh my god, what is that? Why can’t I know what it is?”
“Maybe that’s what it means to be a ghost,” Shapiro suggested.
“I know this is all impossible. And stupid,” DuBois said, looking so annoyed that Ilyukhina almost laughed. “But I’ve decided to act as if it’s real. And I recommend that you do as well, because if it is, then Earth is in deep trouble because you were the last person who had any mission training at all. And now we need to -”
Yao interrupted him. “There is no emergency, now. Ilyukhina, please, process for some time. But with the understanding that you are still a part of Project Hail Mary, and the mission is not complete. Then we will try to answer all your questions.”
“Sure, sure, unfinished business, classic ghost stuff. Yeah I’ll take five,” Ilyukhina said. “DuBois, Shapiro?” she smiled. “Is good to see you.”
---
She paced the Hail Mary, walking on whatever surfaces she chose - she was aware of the gravity of the ship's deceleration, but it didn’t seem to bother her. She found herself bemused at how little she was panicking. Not at all, in fact. She had known she would die in space, and she had known she would work on the project. Neither had been frightening to her. This was a different order than she had expected, though. So she was dead like, one year early, not too big a deal. Except that now the Mary had no engineer.
And ghosts were real, that was a big one, wasn’t it? Would have liked to know that before. She waved her hand back and forth through a lab table. The ship was dark, of course, the Mary’s motion detectors wouldn’t pick her up. No effect on the table or on her hand. Ghosts, spirits, souls.... she wasn’t religious, never had been. Who was, these days? And she still wasn’t; it was a big leap from ghosts to God, in her opinion. And, just because she knew she wasn’t dreaming didn’t mean it was true. Or, this could still be some weird science thing; they all fell into a black hole and it did something incomprehensible to spacetime...
Wait, no, that’s dumb, she thought. She noticed again the nameless knowledge that was rooted in her mind. Felt at the edges of it. It was like remembering only that she had forgotten something. It was like seeing sunlight through a curtain that she had thought covered a solid wall. It was unable to be described without metaphor. She was coming around to it.
All right - she died, her immortal soul or whatever the hell was still around, and maybe could do things? Still part of Project Hail Mary. Unfinished business. Maybe that’s not so bad. “Maybe this rules, actually,” Ilyukhina said. She lifted her feet and floated, ghost-style. She tried to turn her face scary, Beetlejuice-style (didn’t work). She tried to turn on the light with her psychic powers (also didn’t work).
She put her hand to the wall of the Hail Mary, pushed through. Stepped into space.
It was not like the spacewalks she had done when she was alive. Real spacewalks are incredibly stressful, even for someone as experienced as her. Always one eye on her suit, her tether, her oxygen levels; and the other on the ship, and her tools (she had assembled some of the Hail Mary’s skeleton herself, in spacewalks, she knew every part of this ship). And it was loud - the radio, the hums and hisses of the spacesuit’s life support, her own breath and heartbeat whooshing in her ears. Now, it was perfectly silent, as silent as anything has ever been. And her full attention was on the vastness of space, rolled out to infinity in every direction and bright with stars.
Ilyukhina lay back on the hull of her ship and watched the galaxy go by.
---
“Reporting for ghost debrief, sir!” Ilyukhina said with a crisp salute and a grin. “And a little more about Grace please, because that is worrying!”
“Wow, you got chill like, really fast,” said Shapiro. She sat crosslegged about 4 feet in the air; the men stood. They had gathered in the dormitory, in the dim green light of Grace’s still-functioning coma support system.
“What can I say, Russian fatalism,” she grinned again. “And because I am so happy to see you. What is deal with that, anyway?”
“Let us start with what happened before launch. Then we will share what we have learned so far about - ourselves.” Yao nodded at DuBois.
“After the explosion… we were still here,” he said. “We didn’t know why and still don’t. And we didn’t see anyone else who died there as ghosts which, assuming this is real, is strange and I don’t like it.”
“I have already started assuming this,” Ilyukhina said.
“Martin still thinks this is all a really long, detailed dream he’s having,” said Shapiro. “It’s fine, he doesn’t let it affect the mission.”
“It’s not that I think that, it’s just that anything else is impossible.”
“Sure, those are different. Anyway, we figured if we had already died for the mission, we were getting on that ship! And finding out what happens! What else were we going to do, haunt somewhere on Earth? Boring.”
“And I still had a duty. We both did. Every thing we have done on this project has been to give Earth some tiny percentage more chance of survival. If our presence here could affect the mission in even the smallest way - and it can. We figured out something we can do.”
“Yes!” Ilyukhina pumped her fist. “This is what I was hoping for, you can teach me to move things around, slam doors, ghost powers?”
“No,” said DuBois. “Despite many attempts, we have not been able to influence the… material world.”
“Except Yao, who got the lights to flicker that one time,” said Shapiro.
Ilyukhina made a cheering motion at Yao, but he did not smile. “Once only,” he said. “Ten days ago, when your feeding tube pump lost power.”
Oh, shit.
“But this is very good data!” she exclaimed. “So maybe we can a little bit, in emergency, if we are very motivated! Very good to know!” He continued to not meet her eyes.
“What we can do, though,” DuBois continued, “is influence someone’s mind.”
“Not a lot! And it’s pretty hard. But we can all get in an idea or a feeling usually. I think it depends on how well we know the person. Grace is the easiest for me besides Martin, and Yao is crazy good with both of you,” said Shapiro.
“Well, now Grace is the only one we need to worry about. This is the way we can still help,” said DuBois. “We’ll be his eyes and ears, collaborators, his moral support. Communicate as much as we can.”
“Our role is more important than ever now that Grace will have no living support,” said Yao. “And because, as DuBois said, he did not agree to come on this mission. He is angry about being forced to die for it.”
“He tried to refuse and Stratt had him tackled and sedated. It wasn’t pretty,” Shapiro said.
“And he’s starting to experience adverse effects from the coma,” Dubois said. “Confusion, amnesia. It’s apparent even in his dreams. The chances of success now that he’s alone are…. very low.”
“Not low enough to give up,” Shapiro kissed his temple. “And he’s not alone.”
“I would say, alone-ish,” said Ilyukhina. “Well, chances were already low, and something is better than nothing! So now teach me how to do mind control."
“It is not control,” Yao said. “It is more like a sharing.”
“The experience of making mental contact is different between living and dead, awake and asleep. Try it with one of us first. It will be less intense than with someone alive, but your first attempt might still be overwhelming.” DuBois said.
“Okay! I am ready to try out new ghost powers!” She held out her hand to Yao as if inviting him to dance. “Shall we?”
Are you sure, he did not say. Instead, he took it.
This was a bad idea, this was a mistake, she should have asked her to choose someone else, waited until she wasn’t so tired from trying so hard for a week straight, until it wasn’t so damn RAW, she would have understood. Her thoughts echoed, back and forth, louder and louder. It didn’t matter that she would never, ever blame him, she just didn’t want her to know how much he felt he had FAILED them, both of them, his crew, his responsibility, Grace too because he might have succeeded with only one crewmate but he would never survive with none. Not even counting how he should have known, spoken up, refused until he saw him say yes with his own eyes. And what was it all for, this strange second chance, this almost ability, if he couldn’t fucking save them, and that was the worst part, how close it had been, if that meant it been possible and it was only that he was too weak to do it -
The lights flickered on and off, all the still blinking stars on the medical panel, the green flipped to red -
“Olesya,” Yao’s voice cut through. Calm, somehow. “You are making it worse. Please attempt to share one of your own thoughts with me. Remember yourself.”
Yī, èr, sān, chetyre, pyat.*
They were face to face, clasping both hands, overlapping. But not the same. Present in the moment, for her, peaceful, not dwelling on any guilt or anger, as if this awful day had not already been traumatic enough for her -
“No,” Ilyukhina said. What?
“I am not having bad day,” she said. “I see my dead friends again, I am learning ghost powers, I float around in space with no suit, just to look at the stars. Have you seen it out there? There are so many!” She really was so bright, so fearless. Of course what she said was true. A deep, knowing affection crowded in on the spiral. “Sure, mission status is bad, eh, was always pretty bad. But I think Grace can still do it. And this mind control is pretty powerful stuff. Worth a shot, yes?” Almost a smile.
“If I had known - I mean, you are right. I should have waited. Tried with someone else. But I only wanted to tell you… well, you know.”
He knew.
Ilyukhina became aware of her whole self again, blinking off tears that floated away and vanished, still holding Yao’s hand in the green half-light. She let it go only to fling both her arms around him and squeeze.
“Wild, isn’t it? You were talking out loud, by the way,” said Shapiro.
Ilyukhina laughed and released the hug. “But I did it, yes?”
“You did it,” Yao said, “and on a very difficult first run.” He gave her a slight bow, and a full smile.
___
Ephemeron: The Dream They Gave Me When I Was Dying
It was like one of my old stress dreams, from the day before the launch, but when I had the dream before, it always ended with the ship exploding. This one was different.
I was back on the Vat, and all the emergency alarms were going off, blaring and beeping and that annoying voice that says “Error.” They were going off because of the explosion, which was on the other end of the ship and getting bigger so slowly you could barely notice it. And all the people around me were moving in slow motion too, almost frozen. But I couldn’t evacuate, because I needed to find DuBois and Yao, or the crew would be incomplete. So I was running around looking for everybody, and no matter where I was on the ship I could always see it, exploding by inches. And then I ran right into Martin and Annie, and I was so happy because we just needed to find Yao and then we could get off the ship and we would make the launch in time.
But they wouldn’t leave, they kept trying to get me to stay, and the explosion was actually a sun, right there on top of the Vat, getting bigger and brighter. And I was like, I’m pretty sure astrophage cause explosions and not suns, so it exploded again, faster now, until Annie said that scientifically, what was the difference? Basically nothing, an explosion is just a sun that’s very small and short-lived. And so it was a sun and it swallowed up the whole ship and I could see someone at the center of it, holding out their hands. Grace? I tried to reach out for him but since it was a sun now it rose up into the sky and left us three floating on broken driftwood in the ocean.
We were floating for a long time, in the dream, and the sun was so hot and so dry. We all had to hold hands so we wouldn’t float apart. Annie was crying and saying “I’m sorry.” And Martin said, “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
And then I realized that the ship alarms had still been going off, all this time, but I only realized this because they had just stopped and now it was quiet. And we all washed up on this rocky beach, and Yao Jie Li was there, and he had a pirate chest and a tiki bar, which I thought was very funny. And he opened the chest and gave us our flight suits (oh, because floating shipwrecked so long had rotted all our clothes). And he said, “please, stay, and watch the sunset with us.” And we drank on the beach and watched the sun sink down out of the sky, just like it had risen up from the ship, but this time slow and with all the purples and oranges and sunset colors. And it got bigger and brighter until it came down all the way to the ground and touched us.