Chapter Text
Twenty-seven years after the launch of the Hail Mary and 16.3 light years from the Eridani system, an alarm rings out.
Then, a groan and a hand fumbling to find the digital OFF button.
Ximena Reyes pulls her covers off her face, but then immediately tucks them under her chin to ward off the chill.
She squints at the thin blades of light peeking through the sides of her blackout curtains and sighs.
Through sheer force of will, she manages to sit up, find her slippers, and shuffle to the bathroom to get ready for the day.
Well. Night, really. Her day, most everyone else’s night. For now, at least. She’s honestly not sure how much longer she can keep this up.
That’s what she thinks every time her alarm goes off, anyway. Followed immediately by: maybe today. Maybe it’ll happen today.
The thought buoys her, even if the days on the calendar steadily slip by without any indication of success.
She very deliberately does not think about the swaths of naysayers and pessimists as she tames the frizz on her curly, dark hair, though their numbers seem to be growing by the day. She’s skimmed a couple of online think pieces and messageboards during her own darker hours. Despair is like a virus, easy to catch and pass along. Indulging in it does her no good, and she knows this, but when she had gotten the news that her mom –
Anyway. She has faith. Simple as.
Some form of religion has been in her life as long as she can remember. Her mother, dressing her up in itchy, lace-trimmed dresses on every Sunday morning, the Gloria echoing in the rafters, consumption of the Eucharist, further prayers for their dying world. And for Grace.
She didn’t understand at first for a long time, the difference. Her catechism class taught her all about sanctifying grace – what makes the soul holy, giving the soul supernatural life, infused by the Holy Spirit. And actual grace, a sort of spiritual nudge from God to embrace good and shun evil.
But no. The priest prayed for Grace. A person. For his wisdom and discernment. And for protection.
Ximena was old enough to understand that this person seemed important, and curious enough to do her own research to figure out why.
Her parents had of course told her about the astrophage crisis when she was still quite young, that the sun was dimming. So had school and so had culture as a whole. Back then, it was a slow motion apocalypse, feeling far off enough that there was concern but not outright worry. She remembers each year of her elementary school only taking one or two days out of the whole year to talk about it, what the alien microbes were doing, that something called a task force comprised of people from all around the world had come together to think of a solution, and how one brave man was currently taking a long sleep on a long journey to fix it.
Grace was the man’s name, his last name. Dr. Ryland Grace, former academic turned middle school teacher, part of the Petrova Task Force. Last minute volunteer to board the Hail Mary after the other two science officers died. And the sole survivor on board after a malfunction inadvertently killed the ship’s commander and engineer, though as Ximena read articles about what could have gone wrong, he wasn’t even awake to know that yet.
The words sit heavy in her soul as she reads, devouring article after article on her tablet after she finishes her (painfully easy) math homework. Her young mind does not fully understand everything she reads, but she is able to pick up on the clinically dire tone the articles convey.
Dr. Ryland Grace was, in summation, the only chance the world had of survival. And even if he survived and made it all the way to Tau Ceti, who was to say there would be any solution to send back to Earth? It was very possible that he would arrive halfway across the galaxy and then die there anyway without anything to show for it.
A staggering thing for a ten-year-old to come to terms with on their own.
After that, praying to God in a traditional sense seemed a lot less important than keeping the knowledge of what Grace was doing for all of humanity closer to her heart.
Hair done, she scarfs down a quick “breakfast” of Earl Grey tea and a blueberry bagel and checks her watch.
She has a few minutes.
“Disappointed” was maybe the correct term to describe what her parents thought about her turn from religion to science. More from her mother than her father. A lot of words muttered under her mother’s breath, clucking tongues and sullen silences, praying the rosary for Ximena’s soul. That was fine. Ximena had other priorities.
At the end of the day, Dr. Grace’s work within the field of molecular biology, and his studies on astrophage, made more sense to her than Sunday mass ever had.
She has faith.
Ximena tip-toes slowly, quietly to the bedroom where her mother sleeps. She gently turns the doorknob and pushes into the room.
Her mother’s bald head is turned away from the door, and the room almost feels balmy compared to the rest of the house. The lunch Ximena had set on the bedside table hours earlier sits barely touched.
She tries not to let that familiar anxiety grip her. She checks her watch again. Her father would be home in a few hours from second shift and could fix her some late dinner.
It was the best they could do, under the circumstances. Juggling schedules and bills and medical treatments and doctor’s appointments all while the Earth grew colder and statistics became mind-numbingly incomprehensible.
She checks her mother’s pallor, her breathing. She kicks up the thermostat on the space heater to battle the plunging night temperatures. She sweeps some crumbs from the bedside table into the trashcan.
Cancer didn’t care about astrophage or dimming suns or the mysteries of the universe. Bad evolution, Ximena would say. God’s will, her mother would say back.
She grips the corner of a heavier blanket, arranging it just so on her mother’s bed. She closes her eyes, listening to her mother’s slow, deep breathing.
Please, she thinks hard, willing the words into the ether, imagining the intent hurtling off into space light years from where she stands now. Please. Save us.
She closes the door softly behind her and picks up her bag, stuffed full of books, notebooks, pencils, and other odds and ends.
She’s almost out the front door before she remembers.
Quietly, she runs back to her room and plucks the pendant and chain off her nightstand, thumbing over the worn, discolored edges, her grip around the figurine comfortingly familiar.
She slips the token of a grinning fox into her pocket and heads to work.
*
It is May in Texas and not supposed to be this cold.
That’s what the locals would’ve said about fifteen years ago, when the shift from too-hot summers to milder spikes and frigid winters was still new.
The cold was no longer a novelty. Instead it became the new normal, an unforgiving force that blanketed the Earth, uncaring of what it took.
Like cancer, Ximena had once thought.
She bundles her coat around her as she hurries to her car. She’s halfway to the university before her numb fingers start thawing.
Humans are adaptable, annoyingly so. Life, still, somehow, went on.
When climate projections turned into reality, it was clear that humanity — mostly— would band together to help alleviate the astrophage crisis, until Grace (hopefully) sent them a solution.
Around the world, old infrastructure was updated, replaced with new technologies that had sprung up from the discovery of astrophage’s power, supplying near-endless energy, heating, and cooling, making them a universal basic service around the globe. And while that may have mitigated many a humanitarian crisis, over the years climate disasters, food and medicine shortages, and supply chain disruptions still caused the death of millions upon millions.
Had her mother’s cancer developed fifteen, maybe even ten years ago, they would have still had access to more advanced medication. As it was, she was given doxorubicin – “The Red Devil.” Effective in its destruction. Debilitating in its side effects. And she was lucky to get it.
Ximena drives past one of the many churches on her route, and sure enough, there are a handful of cars in the parking lot. It had become a bit of a thing recently, though some churches had boasted 24/7 services since the exact day of the twenty-six year anniversary of the Hail Mary’s launch.
That had been over a year ago. One year, two months, and fourteen days to be exact.
It was all the news had talked about for weeks. If Earth was to receive a solution from Grace from the Tau Ceti system, it would come any time after that twenty-six-year anniversary date. Thirteen years to travel to the system. Thirteen years to send the beetles back. Obviously a solution wouldn’t spontaneously appear the moment he arrived (if he arrived), but that date kicked off a stopwatch that every person on the planet was deeply, desperately aware of.
Hence, the 24/7 services. Cropping up in all religions around the world. Someone to always be there, to pray for him. To pray to him.
Her mother had sneered upon hearing this. “Güero,” she had muttered acidicly. “Sacrilegious. Should pray to Mary. Not to some white boy.”
Ximena did not comment on the many very-white Jesus images in their home.
Some sects had certainly taken it too far, in her opinion. Bizarre, cult-like worship of Dr. Ryland Grace, overly charismatic con artists professing to have received communication from him directly, supporters hanging onto their every word, desperate for hope. Some lifted him up as a god-like figure, incapable of wrongdoing. Some incorporated in Grace’s published works as biblical texts, extrapolating life could exist outside of the Goldilocks zone to aliens are coming and they will smite the nonbelievers, your time is coming.
She thought that all a bit odd when astrophage was already that — an alien life form that would bring about their destruction. Not sentiently, of course, but the result was the same.
As for her… privately she held the idea of him close to her heart, like a silent companion. Growing up, it was normal to see murals and statues of him everywhere, some depicting him as a regular teacher on bended knee, smiling, surrounded by students. Others depicting him with two fingers raised, a halo of gold around his head, staring up into an arcing red Petrova line.
She thinks back to one of her undergrad years, where someone had assembled a little shrine to him as a joke in the sciences building. Just a printout of one of the few publicly circulated photos of him with the text TAP HERE FOR GOOD LUCK ON DR. SIMON’S GENOMICS AND BIOINFORMATICS FINAL NEXT WEEK 😭🙏with a white candle lit beneath. Within hours, the shrine had grown, similar desperate pleas to Grace for help with other science finals written on the printout or added as a post-it note. More candles, trinkets, photos, and plastic toy fox figurines grew in a pile around the initial printout.
Ximena only passed by it a few times and never added anything to it, but in her franticness one afternoon, she paused and stared at one of the many photos of him distributed around the shrine, smoothing her thumb over the pointed ears of the fox pendant in her pocket, and thought please please please let me pass my Cosmology final please let me remember the math and then went on her way.
Pass she did. And then she finished her undergrad years. And now, somehow, her graduate work is almost complete.
Blue twilight has descended by the time she pulls into the rural observatory parking lot, the lights of the city softly glowing in the distance. Her breath fogs in the cold night air as she gathers her things and scrambles into the research center, shoulders hunched up to her ears.
She absently wonders (hopes) if Luis is working tonight too as she swipes her keycard into the building.
Contrary to popular belief, astronomers did not spend all their time in front of a telescope. She didn’t even know how to manipulate the large, 82-inch telescope housed within the university’s observatory center. That was Luis’s job. Her job was to sit in front of an absurd amount of computer screens and parse data. That, and working on her graduate thesis.
The discovery of astrophage and the Hail Mary mission had catapulted not only the desire but the need for careers in STEM. Fortunately, physics and data science came easy to her. And you’d be hard pressed to find any kid born in the last twenty years who didn’t have some kind of obsession with space or space travel.
Astronomy had felt like the perfect fit.
As terrifying as astrophage was for their own solar system, the little alien microbes were also doing their damndest to eat away at thousands, if not millions of other neighboring stars. How far and how quickly did the infection spread? How long had it existed? Did spectral class or star mass factor into which stars were being eaten? What exactly happened when a star’s energy was fully consumed? How did it affect nearby exo-planets and other celestial bodies?
These questions and more had been hot topic research questions for the past two decades, and Ximena felt extraordinarily lucky to have a hand in collecting the data to help answer them.
Her primary work this semester had been tracking the luminosity output of the binary star system Luhman 16, two brown dwarfs about the size of Jupiter and somewhat close by, only 6.5 light years away.
Her secondary, much more secret work this semester was scanning the night sky in hopes of spotting the beetles.
She dumps her things at her desk, grabs a cup of coffee, and logs in to her network.
First things first: she checks the messageboard.
It was composed of astronomy and astronomy-related grad students from around the US, the idea concocted when a handful of them had met at a conference some years ago and growing from there. The overlap being, of course, astronomy and astrophage discussions, with the occasional speculation of what Dr. Ryland Grace was doing right at this moment, if he was indeed still alive.
She scrolls as she sips the brew that is more chicory than bean, the world’s coffee supply having taken a substantial hit from the changing climate.
Nothing out of the ordinary. No mention of spotting IR flares from the beetles. A rather pessimistic throwaway comment from some guy out in UCLA about new research regarding survival statistics of long-term comas.
It was well-trodden ground at this point. Everyone had their opinions. Every single argument had already been made for whether Grace would, or would not, succeed. There was literally, truly, nothing anyone on planet Earth could do except mitigate what they could and kindle any ember of hope or faith that still managed to burn despite the odds.
She’s moved on from the messageboard and is two pages deep on the astro-ph network, downloading recently published papers on the topics she’s interested in, when she hears a soft knock behind her.
“Luis,” she says with a smile, hoping her warm cheeks aren’t betraying her. “How goes?”
He shrugs but is also smiling. “It goes. You?”
“Too cold, didn’t want to get out of bed, the usual.”
“Yeah.” He looks at her with the most sincere eyes she swears she’s ever seen. “Your mom doing okay?”
“Yeah. Kinda. I dunno. It’s really taking a lot out of her, but the doctors say she’s responding well to the chemo. Or, the cancer is, I guess. It’s pretty aggressive, and it’s just… hard to watch.” She doesn’t let the familiar bubble of anxiety expand in her chest, and her eyes stay dry, her body and brain numb and disconnected to the rote updates she provides to others. Not that Luis was just anyone else, but burdening others with the depressing details of a cancer battle wasn’t exactly a good time.
He nods in sympathy. “Offer still stands; if you need to take off at any point, just let me know. And, you know. I’m happy to just sit in here and contemplate the pretty pictures of space I line up for you. That is all you do, right?”
“Ha, ha,” she says. “Likewise, I can just punch in coordinates on your computer and take naps for you. That is all you do, right?”
“Ouch,” he grins. “Fair play.” He tilts his head toward the screens stacked on top of each other. “When you’re ready to do some infrared scoping… just let me know.”
She had tried her best to be sneaky about her penchant to search the night sky for IR signatures over the past few months, but Luis had immediately picked up on her intent.
“You think he’s actually still alive? You think – he’ll actually find a solution?” she remembers him asking. Not sarcastically. Not skeptically. But with an open curiosity.
“I think… anything is possible. I have faith,” she answered.
He had looked at her contemplatively. “Faith, huh.”
She pulls her fox pendant out of her pocket and sets it next to her keyboard. Maybe tonight, she thinks. Anything is possible.
*
It’s two in the morning, and her eyes are crossing from the data she’s been compiling.
No significant changes from Luhman 16. Not that she expected any, but these are the things that need constant tracking. Output luminosity degradation of 0.028% from her last calculation the previous week. It had taken 6.5 years for this light to reach her eyes, and the hope is, of course, that the degradation has stayed consistent without any wild drops.
She laces her fingers together and stretches her arms high above her, groaning at the movement.
Okay. Time for a break. And an IR peak.
She grabs a cup of coffee for her and for Luis and heads into the observatory proper.
Luis is similarly hunched over his computer when she walks in, his brows low in concentration.
“Can it wait?” he says. “I’m in the middle of calibrations.”
She’s about to open her mouth to apologize when he quirks a grin at her. “I’m literally just kidding. Lining up the filter as we speak.”
She sets down his coffee and gives him a light thwack on the shoulder.
“What’ll it be, boss?” he asks.
She ponders for a moment. “Let’s take a look at the usual ascension and declination. After that….”
The problem with space was that it was big. And also very empty, except when it wasn’t. And existed all 360 degrees outward from their own planet. The beetles, comparatively, were tiny specks that, yes, emitted IR light from the astrophage powering them, but so did a lot of objects in the night sky. The telescope they had at their disposal was good, but obviously nowhere near as powerful as those orbiting their planet, controlled by NASA and the ESA and JAXA and so on.
Why, then, did this matter? If the beetles were coming, they would be spotted by one of the official agencies. Or, hell, even other observatories around the world that had access to better tech, better telescopes. Everyone, the entire planet, straining toward Tau Ceti, watching it move through the night sky as their planet turned and their solar system hurtled through the universe.
It mattered because desperation makes a person look for hope in the unlikeliest of places. It mattered because everything in her life was so wildly outside of her control, an astrophage crisis she couldn’t solve and a cancer she couldn’t cure, and doing this felt like something instead of nothing. Even if it was simply an acknowledgement of Grace’s existence and his purpose, a faith that neither time nor space could sever.
“Shift the declination down two degrees,” she decides. “I have a good feeling about it.”
Luis gives her a little salute and starts clacking away on his keyboard.
She lets him do his thing and watches as the telescope slowly shifts, the metallic, mechanical groaning reverberating in her sternum. A few long moments as the aperture opens and captures the heavens. Then he plugs in the second coordinates, and this time, the telescope barely moves, only slightly off the original mark.
“All right. Done,” says Luis, straightening. “Lemme know what you find.”
“Fingers crossed,” she responds, giving him a quick grin.
The imaging and data are still loading onto her computer by the time she’s back at her desk. She doesn’t get her hopes up, having done this song and dance so many times already with nothing but empty space to show for it.
She scrolls through the data from the first set of coordinates, knowing what to look for. Her stomach grumbles, and she idly thinks about making a stop at the grocery store on the way back home after her shift. She makes a mental note to text her dad, if that pound of chicken is still in the freezer or if he used it last week to make chilaquiles. Data from the first set of coordinates is a bust. She scrolls through the image captures anyway, eyes snaking over the pinpricks of light from distant stars and the hazy glow of closer objects. She ponders if the store will have fresh tomatoes in stock as she pulls up the data from the second set of coordinates. Oh. Tomato soup and grilled cheese. Now that she’s thought about it, she can’t stop thinking about it. She’d roast the tomatoes first, see if there is some fresh basil ready to be plucked from her mini-greenhouse –
Wait.
She scrolls back up to the data she just skimmed across. An infrared wavelength spike – tiny, mere decimals, but there.
Her palms go sweaty as she pulls up the imaging. She zooms in, dragging the image to find the exact coordinates, and –
Well –
Four dots. Packed tightly together, definitely giving off IR signatures. It could almost look like a star cluster except for that.
She needs more data.
Her heart in her throat, she writes the more precise coordinates on a sticky note and jumps out of her seat and back to Luis.
She bangs into the observatory, making him jump in his chair. “Holy – ” he starts.
“Those coordinates,” she says with urgency. “The second ones. Can you center in here?”
He takes the sticky note from her. “I can,” he says slowly. “You see something?”
“I don’t know. I think so. Maybe.” She paces as he wastes no time punching in the coordinates. The telescope moves a fraction. She tells herself it could be anything. It could be nothing.
“Done,” he says. She races back to her desk, Luis hot on her heels.
Her computer parses the data. Loads. She grasps at her fox pendant in her left hand, holding it like a lifeline. Please, she thinks. Please Grace. Save us.
Luis watches over her shoulder as she scrolls through the data.
IR wavelength spike. Higher due to a more concentrated field of view. Her heart hammers.
She pulls up the visuals.
There’s four distinct dots emitting an IR frequency, slightly obscured by their own bodies propelling them forward.
“Oh my god,” she whispers.
“Is that…?” Luis asks behind her, dazed.
She immediately reaches for her phone and opens up one of the few social media accounts she still has active, navigating to NASA’s page.
Nothing.
She then opens multiple news sites. No breaking news there either.
There is simply no way the major space agencies of the world haven’t seen this yet. She imagines the frenzy, communication directors and media relations folks going mad, frantic to release a statement before anyone else sees what they have and spills the news all over social media.
Well. She’s not going to do that. But like any good scientist, she desperately wants to triple- and quadruple- check her work.
She whips around. “Do you still have that contact at the observatory in Argentina?”
“Marta? Yep – just tell me what to ask.”
Ximena copies over the second set of coordinates onto another sticky note. “These coordinates, IR signatures. Just need confirmation if they’re seeing what we’re seeing.”
“On it.”
He runs back to the observatory proper while Ximena thinks, her mind racing. A cold front was currently pushing through to the east, so cloud cover meant she couldn’t get any confirmation from anyone out that way.
It was late enough in California. She pulls up the messageboard.
URGENT: Anyone on the west coast with good visibility able to check these coordinates? IR frequency data and visual confirmation pls.
She taps her fingernails on her desk as she waits, gripping her fox with her other hand.
are u asking about what i think ur asking about someone from Boston U asks. Not helpful. She doesn’t respond.
It’s silent for a few long minutes until someone named Josh from UC responds with finishing my boot up – I’ll take a look in a few.
She sits up a little. Likely he was at the Lick Observatory, which had a bigger and newer telescope than they did at the university here. He would certainly be able to confirm.
Her mouth felt dry with both anxiety and excitement. If these were actually the beetles, that meant… well, it meant a lot. It meant that Dr. Ryland Grace had survived the journey. It meant that he woke up in the Tau Ceti system, completely alone, 12 light years from where she sits now, the only human to have ever achieved such a feat. It meant that he had figured out something, at least, something enough to send the beetles back. It did not necessarily mean there was a fix. Though she couldn’t imagine someone like Grace sending back four beetles just to say “sorry, nothing here!” Though maybe he was just that thorough, and just that apologetic, to send four beetles for redundancy instead of just one to let Earth know that Project Hail Mary had been a complete waste from the start.
Oh god. Her stomach roiled. She couldn’t go down that line of thinking. First things first: confirmation.
Eleven years ago, when she looked into the night sky toward Tau Ceti, he had actually been out there, awake. Working the problem. Completely and utterly by himself.
Tears well in her eyes unexpectedly. He sacrificed everything for his planet, left it all behind to be a part of the solution. He didn’t know when he was put in his coma that he’d wake up alone. He had probably been so disoriented, expecting to see Commander Yáo and Engineer Ilyukina, only to find them already passed on so many light years prior. From what Ximena read, they had been good friends. She can’t imagine trying to process all of that on top of the literal weight of the world on his shoulders.
Luis bursts through the doors and skids to a stop behind her, interrupting her thoughts. “She confirms,” he says breathlessly. “Same IR signature. Same visuals.”
Not a few moments later, a new message pops up on the messageboard.
Holy shit. Ximena, I have both visual and data confirmation. Those can’t be anything else but the beetles.
She sits, just breathing, Luis’s hand on her shoulder behind her.
Other messages immediately start rolling in.
the fucking WHAT
Sorry did u just say the beetles
omfg im checking now too, I see them!!!!
HOLY SHIT DID HE DO IT DID HE ACTUALLY DO IT
“Oh my god,” she says again. At some point, tears had started pouring down her cheeks. She sobs into her hands, loud and heavy. Luis turns her chair around and grabs her, pulling her into a tight embrace. She clings onto his shirt for dear life, his shoulder soaked with her tears.
At some point she pulls back and looks at him, his own eyes red-rimmed.
“What do we do now?” he asks, his voice hoarse, weighed down by what this all means.
“Nothing.” She grips the fox tighter in her fist. “We wait. And we hope it’s enough.”
Thank you, she thinks, the words like a clanging bell in her soul. Thank you for what you did, whatever it may be.
*
Twenty-seven years after the launch of the Hail Mary and 16.3 light years from the Sol system, an alarm rings out.
Dr. Ryland Grace is meeting with what is essentially the Eridian equivalent of an aerospace engineering team. He can do that now. When he’s not teaching his pebbles, he’s meeting with different teams and delegations to exchange knowledge, helping them bolster their scientific advancements while learning as much as he can from them. They’ve synthesized every essential nutrient and mineral that his body needs. He’s adjusted, as much as he can, to living on an alien planet, the only human for light years, in the comprehensive and meticulous care of his hosts, who are as grateful for him as he is for them. The Petrova arc on his chest no longer bleeds, but throbs occasionally, and sometimes the Eridians catch him far away, head tilted, as if listening to musical notes in the distance. Just one of his quirks, they say. It’s what makes Grace, Grace.
He’s attempting to explain a fairly abbreviated history of how spacecraft make atmospheric re-entry back on Earth, but the engineering team is equal parts horrified and fascinated by the idea of a fiery controlled entry and keep asking question after question. Unfortunately he’s also just about reached the end of his knowledge on the subject without doing some deeper dives into the mechanics of it all, which really isn’t his strong suit anyway.
“Hang on,” he says, standing to get his laptop. “Lemme find some videos to show you what it looks like. Ooh, there’s that one scene from Apollo 13, it’s not totally accurate, but it might be a good visual – ”
The Eridians who are conversing with him later say it was as if he fell asleep mid conversation, his body up and animated one moment, then suddenly collapsed to the ground. Eerily similar to an Eridian, completely without control and under the mercy of their own biological processes. However, there are a few present who had heard details from the medical thrums, those that strained to keep Grace alive during those darker, earlier periods after arrival. For humans, or at least Grace, this is not typical, instead an indicator of sickness or injury.
Worse, then, after that sudden collapse is the completely abnormal seizing of his outer extremities, disturbing abbreviated movements that convey both pain and fear. It is unlike anything they have ever seen before and thus cause for great alarm. A few tap the xenonite barrier and call out to him in panic. One runs for the emergency cord that Savior Rocky had pointed out to them when they first had the honor of meeting Savior Grace. They pluck the cord frantically, signalling that something is wrong and help is needed.
By the time the medical team arrives, suited in xenonite and inside the biodome, Grace’s body is still and silent.