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It was different from the memories I had been experiencing since I woke up on the Hail Mary with not idea who I was.
It definitely shared many of the same qualities of what I'd previously been experiencing: the way I was pulled completely and fully into it with no idea of my surroundings, the feeling I now associated with these memories coated with a wash of sepia tone from my brain, the frankly absurd contents.
But, in other ways, this one was much different.
One moment I was in the Don't Go Crazy Room, idly flicking changing the videos once in a while as I contemplated how to complete the mission I was only mostly sure I knew, and the next I was on a beach.
It looked different from any I had seen in other memories (although that wasn't saying all that much, as I hadn't gotten a memory of any kind that took place on a beach), but still I knew there was something odd about it from the get-go. Something about the way the air moved, or the feeling of the pebbles under my feet, or the subtle waves in the water. Something small and quiet in me wanted to stand up from my sitting position, to look around me at the new scenery I was present in, but I didn't follow any of its suggestions. Everything was a bit hazy and it felt like someone else had the reigns, like I was in a theater and watching a documentary. I heard someone make a surprised noise, and at that my head turned to see someone else on this beach, maybe a dozen yards away (Gosh, I really am American, aren't I?) The figure walked quickly over to me, cane tapping on the rocks as he did, before stopping to simply just stare at me.
With the haze in my vision and from a distance, the most distinctive thing about him was his sweater, nearly identical to the one I was actively wearing save for the fact that his was far more ragged. As he got closer, I began to recognize more things, from the color of his hair to the frames of his glasses and, eventually, his face. I stared at myself, and he stared right back at me. His face was one of unmitigated surprise, and I couldn't imagine mine was any different (literally, if we actually were the same person, somehow).
"How could this be poss—" was all that the other me managed to say before disappearing.
And that was the moment I came back to myself, sitting on the grated floor of the Don't Go Crazy Room.
His voice sounded just like mine, in the type of way that you jump when you hear a recording of yourself because it sounds so different from your inner monologue. He sounded older, a hint scratchier, and his words were said with a strange musical lit to them that I couldn't connect to any culture I'd ever known of, but the base was exactly the same. That, combined with the sweater he had on and the face that matched exactly to the one that had a habit of staring back at me in a mirror, and I couldn't deny that it was me.
But what conclusion do I even draw from that?
It didn't seem like a true memory, not in the same way that the others that had been jumping up on me were, but it wasn't just something from my imagination, I was sure of it. It couldn't be something I'd experienced before, I simply just knew that none of that was anything I'd felt before, like if I got a memory where I could suddenly perfectly understand Spanish. But what else could it be?
I sat with the experience for a few minutes, legs dangling down and nearly touching the bottom point where the illusion of the 3D space jarringly ends. I couldn't get any ideas that made even a lick of sense, and I decided that whatever the conclusion I should draw from it is, it wasn't so pressing that I couldn't figure it out in the morning.
About three days later there was another one, except it wasn't even in the Don't Go Crazy Room, this one hit when I was exploring deep into the Hail Mary's navigational sub menus. (Look, it gets really boring when you're trapped light years away from any other human and don't have a clear next step, okay? And it'd probably be in everybody's best interest if I knew the ins and outs of this tin can rocketing through space at way too fast of a speed, just so I don't do anything stupid like fly it directly into Tau Ceti upon arrival into orbit.) I was looking at some of the emergency protocols, what triggered when and which things needed an actual human to execute programs vs what the computer would just do by itself, when the screens around me vanished.
I was on the beach again, but this time the figure (aka Seemingly Me But Older) was already stood in front of me, and a weird rock inside of a clear case was beside him. My body felt like it was out of my control in a floaty, distant sort of way, but when I tried to lift my hand and wave at him it worked, albeit more sluggishly than I intended. The person in front of me smiled and spoke.
"Hey! I'm Doctor Captain Ryland Grace," he seemed like he was repeating something he'd been told to say verbatim and was annoyed by, "and Rocky and I think you might be me from the past?" He (Doctor Captain Ryland Grace, apparently) gestured to the rock (Rocky, presumably) beside him, who wiggled at the attention, which. Was weird.
Whatever, maybe the cause of my amnesia also gave me weird vivid hallucinations that seemed like flashbacks. Not like that was the weirdest thing about my situation, at this point. Sure, I'm talking to my future self and a sentient (maybe even sapient?) rock, why not. I was just going to roll with it.
"I also think I'm maybe you from the past? Or, rather, you're me from the future." I said, mouth cooperating with me at least slightly better than when I first woke up from the several year long coma. "I'm on a spaceship by myself and don't really remember much." If I'm going to be rolling with the punches, I might as well be straight forward with it. "What is, uh." I gestured kinda vaguely around the direction of the sentient/sapient rock I think future me called Rocky, not sure what words to use to describe the… creature? Alien?
"Oh, Rocky? I guess you haven't met him yet, he's an Eridian—they're global apex predators in a similar way that humans are. They can't see but their echolocation is leagues better than anything on Earth, and so is their engineering! A lot of their infrastructure is made out of Xenonite, basically a two-part epoxy of Xenon that's fully a solid and way stronger than any material humans regularly interact with. They also live at like 400 Celsius in Ammonia and—"
Rocky cut him off with a string of musical cords and chirps that Future Me seems to understand entirely.
"Oh right, don't be scared when you first meet the Blip-A! He's just trying to be friends and cultural differences are weird, also righty-loosey lefty-tighty! And think about atoms when he hands you a nonsensical string of weird beads!" Future Me gets poked in the ribs by Rocky for the last comment, and I don't get to see the fallout before I'm back in the Hail Mary, blinking at her settings screens.
Out of everything my brain could've made up, it decided on a musically talking rock named Rocky? Who could make weirdly strong solids out of the noble gas Xenon?
I shook my head to try and knock my neurons back into place and got back to work, weird visions be darned, I have a mission to do.
Sure enough, only a day later I encounter a ship the Hail Mary's system went ahead and marked initially as "Blip-A" and got sent a package made out of Xenon and filled with hot ammonia. And the occupants of the ship are seemingly from 40-Eridani and have the same build as the Eridian I'd seen. Well, at that point even the most persistent skeptic inside of me had been proven wrong about the hallucinations/dreams/memories/prophesies.
Assuming, of course, that this wasn't just more hallucinations, something not unheard of for a person trapped in solitude as long as I've already been. Geez, I hope it's not that.
Once again, I was on the beach with the future versions of myself and the alien I'd been trying to save two star systems with. I'd gotten broadly used to it in the few times I'd been there so far, and we'd already gotten the whole "make sure to not make all these mistakes" part of the talking-to-your-future-self out of the way. I'd explained my random spacing out to (present) Rocky as a weird human thing, something that may or may not bite me in the butt in the future, but that was an issue for future me to deal with (haha, get it. Unfortunately I couldn't actually shuck that responsibility to the actual future me.)
Regardless, he was busy regaling me about the tales from when he first got to Erid and the Eridians were still getting the specifics of the bio dome correct, when a certain topic came up.
"That was the day that Rocky had initially planned for our official mating ceremony to be, but the basically-typhoon outside really put a damper on—"
"Wait, mating ceremony? Between us and Rocky?!" I interrupted in shock. What did he mean mating ceremony, surely it wasn't what I thought it was. And surely if it was, it would've come up in conversation already.
Rocky chimes in with something directed toward my future self. The only bits I managed to catch and translate quick enough were along the lines of "Grace stupid," which didn't bode well for either of us.
"We… didn't want to tell you about, well, us, because we didn't want to mess with your relationship with your Rocky. It was probably inevitable no matter what, but it really isn't our place to butt in on your lives. You could even just forget about all of this, if you want!" Future me tried to reassure me.
And, okay, maybe I had already grown closer to my Rocky than I could ever remember being to another human, but that was a low bar. I couldn't remember anything more than fragments around my family or past partners, and we'd been trapped in a very cramped space ship for quite a while by that point. It was only natural that we'd get close, especially with such a high stakes and time-sensitive goal linking us together.
I'd been silent for too long in what I belated realized was future me's expectation to respond, so he took the initiative once again. He cleared his throat.
"I suppose we can be more blatant about it now, huh?" He rolled up his sleeves at the words revealing a faded brown circular tattoo on the outside of his left forearm near his elbow. "This is my mating mark from Rocky. We obviously couldn't actually exchange chunks of carapace, but the engineers here figured out tattoo ink easily enough with the literature on the Hail Mary. The dye was actually partly made of his carapace to get the color, so it was close enough to the real thing to count." Future me had a goofy smile taking up his whole face as he said that (is that what I look like when I smile about a crush? Gosh.)
The rest of the vision was spent with future me gushing about Rocky, with the occasional addition in very dumbed-down Eridian from the mate in question.
At one point, Rocky shifted his carapace closer to future me and said something too complicated for me to catch that made future me laugh. I couldn't help imagining myself and the Rocky back in the ship in the same position, before shaking the thought out of my head. My brain was probably just trying to process this new information in any way it could, which includes weird ways. That's fine, I just didn't need to dwell on them (even I knew it was a lie, but I allowed myself to believe it anyways.)
I knew for certain that I was acting weird around Rocky for at least a week before we actually put fishing into practice. Future me didn't have a better way of getting the Taumoeba out of Adrian's atmosphere, but he at least gave enough ideas and advice that ours didn't go nearly as bad as his did, thankfully. It was only after I'd woken up from the stress power nap I'd taken after we were safely secured in orbit that Rocky confronted me about it. I knew it was coming eventually, I had both been very insistent on certain fishing plans and also fumbling and blushing at every moment I was talking to him and not too absorbed in logistical planning.
"Why Grace acting weird, question?" Rocky asked quizzically as I finished brushing my teeth.
"Uh, what do you mean?" I said, stupidly. "I mean, okay I know what you're talking about, obviously, it'd be wild if I didn't at this point, but, um, I'm not sure how to tell you. You know the prophecies I've been having?" The word visions was too close to eyesight-related words for my liking, and it wasn't like I was restricted to human definitions of simple words, so prophecies was what got chosen once I decided to explain them a bit more to him. "Well, I found out that apparently in the future we are… mates."
At that, Rocky visibly reacted, flinching in his ball. I knew that it didn't quite mean exactly the same things as it did in humans, but I was still new enough at Eridians body language to not be sure what it did mean.
"Did Grace think Grace Rocky not mates, question?" He said with what I thought was incredulity.
"We never talked about it so—wait, do you think we're mates?!" I thought I'd left the land of wacky-things-to-learn-about-my-relationship-with-the-alien-I'm-sharing-a-spaceship-with when I'd exited the vision, but apparently not!
"Rocky thought Grace Rocky mates. Grace Rocky share close living space and seek comfort together and not family. Grace Rocky mates under Eridian definition." Rocky said, as though I should have found this obvious. And, frankly, his definitions didn't sound that far off of what it was defined as for humans, though it was vitally missing the most important part.
"For humans, we have to love each other in a specific way and talk about that to be mates."
"Does Grace not love Rocky in specific way, question?" He asked, I stalled trying to come up with a good answer, but he just continued on before I figured it out. "Rocky love Grace like mate."
I could feel my face start to burn as I tried to get all of my suddenly scattered thoughts and feelings back in a line. It was rough, as I hadn't expected for this conversation to suddenly turn into a confession of love and question of reciprocation instead of the anticipated mutual awkwardness.
Did I love Rocky? Thinking back to my previous relationships, the ones I remembered at least, and I couldn't immediately say. They'd all felt differently to how Rocky and I were, often swept up in a whirlwind of feelings about the other before calming down and either petering out as we got to truly know each other or getting destroyed by a big blowup fight or revealed secret. Rocky was closer to something like Stockholm syndrome (ignoring all the bad parts and also that it doesn't exist), we were strangers that grew to rely on each other in every way possible, he was probably the only being I could remember ever trusting as much as I did.
"I think I do love you." I quietly admitted.
"Are Grace Rocky mates now, question?" He said with a nudge from his ball into my leg.
"Yeah, I guess we are now." I said, smiling down at him.
I remembered one of the first things my future self had warned me about, the unintended side effects of breeding the nitrogen-resistant Taumoeba the way he and his Rocky did. It wasn't something I would have thought could particularly happen (although tennis balls in a jungle made a little too much sense, in a dread-inducing way), but I suppose alien life forms can have some unusual evolution quirks, who am I to stop them. But I made sure that Rocky and I had thought the possibility though before we started breeding them ourselves.
The solution ended up being a predominantly aluminum shell inside of a xenonite container, one made of a Xenonite blend that was purposefully tighter at the atomic level. After managing to get something that could survive at the needed nitrogen levels, we did a little experiment with a whole glob of Taumoeba, a thin Xenonite barrier, and a temptingly scrumptious slide of Asrophage and kept an eye on it for a week to see if they could manage to break through. The little guys couldn't, as evidenced by the distinctly still-present astrophage after the week had passed. Just to be sure, we wrapped the contents of the Beetles (and three newly created Xenonite Eridani-bound Beetles) in as many different materials as we could spare before sending them off in their respective directions.
On one hand, my job was now done. The whole reason I'd met Rocky, or even why I ended up in space in the first place, was now over. Sure, both Earth and Erid would need to wait several more years before they'd be able to receive and actually implement the solution, but it was out of my hands at that point. Now, I was left with the question I'd been putting off since my visions first began.
At the end of the journey, did I want to go back to Earth, or go with Rocky back to Erid?
My future self once said he was glad, in hindsight, that his situation forced his hand into choosing to live on Erid. I, unfortunately, didn't have the same luxury (if I'm jealous of him and thinking of it as a luxury, does that not mean I already made my decision?)
I buried my face in my hands as my mind couldn't make itself up. The war between what I thought I should want and what my heart called for was only getting more intense as it continued, and I couldn't stop myself from digging into it deeper and deeper.
A chime sounded from beside me, and I extracted my head from it's prison/hideaway to see Rocky next to me, his carapace at me tilted in concern. In that moment, all the noise in my head suddenly ceased, replaced by the warm knowledge that I was soon to be on the way to Erid.
I stepped out of the special human airlock that sat between my special human transportation and the bio dome proper, and was met with a sight I simultaneously was seeing for the first time and had seen many times before.
The rocks were nearly identical to how I remembered seeing them (although I never payed all that much attention to their exact placements), but the water was still and the lights slightly too bright. Regardless of the imperfections in their replica of Earth, it was by far the best gift I'd ever received.
"I love it. This is beautiful, thank you." I aimed it at all the Eridians waiting in their little bio dome suits, but especially at Rocky. He gave a little happy wiggle in response before throwing his two primary arms up in excitement.
"Rocky will start planning our mating ceremony! Every high up official will be there, Rocky will ensure."
"Just make sure it isn't on the Iℓ∀th, they'll mess up the weather that day." I laugh, adding a little wink at the end.