Chapter Text
“What’s two plus two?” The voice jolts you awake — almost.
Instinctively, you try to formulate a response, even if you aren’t sure what the answer is. You’re finding it very hard to move your lips, much less vocalize.
“What’s two plus two?”
Again, the voice is enough to send searingly bright flashes of activity in all of your axon terminals before the sensation is immediately squashed again by the hazy, underwater feeling that’s currently suffocating you. Whoever, whatever was out there — weren’t they going to help?
You try to answer again, to no avail.
“What’s two plus two?”
You’re starting to feel panic rise in your chest, as if someone’s placed a solid concrete slab on top of you. You try to move your limbs this time (since you remembered you had those too), but they feel like lead.
Fortunately, the sudden rush of adrenaline seems to override the haze to a sufficient amount such that you feel your eyes pry themselves open. The harsh light rushing in sends another cascade of neurotransmitters through your useless body.
“Eye movement detected. What’s two plus two?”
Your lungs let out something close to a hiss as you try to form words. You are acutely aware of your heart trying to beat out of your chest. You are alive. And you can start to feel things with the tips of your fingers now.
“Incorrect. What’s two plus two?"
A spark of indignation — that’s a new feeling. That hadn’t even been a proper answer. Something about its behavior is taking you back to some faraway place. Your vision dulls in recognition. You idly drift off, thinking of questions, answering incorrectly, harsh reprimands of disapproval from your boss…
…your boss?
Your surroundings come back to you in a roaring, dizzying split second — you gasp for air and clench at the material you’re laid on as you choke on your own sentience. Your eyes snap back to focus, taking in your surroundings in an increasingly rapid succession like a computer rebooting.
“Incorrect. What’s two plus two?"
“Ffuckin — ffffour. FOUR.”
“Correct.”
Despite your situation, your stupid monkey brain gets a rush of relief from answering a question correctly. You’re numbly becoming aware of the fact that it’s probably the breathing mask strapped to your face that’s making it so difficult to fill your lungs to the capacity you want. And your eyes hurt. The room you’re in is so blindingly white — the lights, ceiling, and equipment surrounding you has all had the landlord special, it seems. You squint. Couldn’t they have made the whole ‘waking up from an induced coma’ experience a little more comfortable?
You blink.
Now how did you know about that?
You’re mulling this over when you realize you have company.
Two steel arms are zipping around you, no doubt poking and prodding you and checking your vitals. The medical robot meant to babysit you for the whole time you were asleep. Or so you think.
You try to speak again, feeling fairly confident despite the immense difficulty in getting your jaw to move the way you want it to.
“Can you please remove the mask?”
“What’s the cube root of eight?”
You sigh.
“Two. Can you please remove the mask? It’s very uncomfortable.”
“Correct. Oxygen and CO2 measurements are not yet sufficient. Please wait before removing oxygen mask.”
You close your eyes, a mild headache forming. Figures.
It’s coming back to you in pieces now. Seeing the terrifying robot arms has begun to jog a lot of your memory. You remember seeing it being built, after all. And testing it out at various stages of its development. Though you hadn’t been directly involved in building it, because you were the end user, they’d fine-tuned a lot of the system for you. The model in front of you was sleeker, faster, smarter, and privy to about 50,000 more possible failure modes than its predecessor. It was leaps and bounds ahead of what had been on the Hail Mary.
Your eyes shoot open again, and you wince at the light. You had to stop doing that.
The Hail Mary.
Holy shit.
It doesn’t come back to you in a rush — it’s more like the chips and cracks in ice melting.
Project Hail Mary — humanity’s magnum opus.
About 16 — well, considering your own travel time, more like 20 — years ago, every nation on Earth embarked on their most daring project yet: working together.
And miraculously, it worked. It took the collapse of several ecosystems and bringing the world’s superpowers to the brink of war, but it worked.
You assumed so, anyway.
Shortly after the Hail Mary’s departure, Earth had launched Project Revelation. With only the hope that they might be receiving precious cargo soon, the world had worked tirelessly for 16 years to make sure they got it right. A quasi-station craft to settle into Venus’ orbit and keep an eye on the progress of the Sun, equipped with several smaller ships ready to deploy….something. Whatever the solution to the Astrophage devastation was. They had been prepared to perform any function just short of rearranging the planets.
And then the answer came.
In the form of three small, unmanned crafts that landed squarely in the Pacific. The Beetles. It seemed like every single armed force descended upon the area like vultures. John, Paul, and Ringo were hastily recovered and brought ashore. John was unsalvageable, with a crack in the hull and its contents ripped away in the vacuum of space or washed out in the icy ocean. So then there were two — Paul and Ringo.
No one really had the time to laugh at the coincidence. You could remember the moment as clear as day now, when the capsules were opened. It was like the whole world was holding its breath, watching trembling hands recover the contents. They couldn’t upload the memory fast enough, hundreds and thousands of people trying to get a view into the small isolation chamber.
When every bit of data was finally transferred, they were met with hundreds of meticulously organized files to comb through. Everything from “travel trajectory” to “ship functionality feedback” was carefully arranged in alphabetical order. But at the top, there was one folder that stood out:
“URGENT! OPEN THIS ONE FIRST!! HOW TO SAVE EARTH!!!!!!”
And thus, Project Revelation was a go. The next few months were a blur, with mass manufacturing of Taumoeba and plans to tactfully spread them along the Petrova line.
Your team included the six sent up to the Venus station (the APH-X, you recall) to deploy the Taumoeba in controlled intervals. Specialized capsules filled with the creatures were to be released inside the mass of Astrophage, programmed to scatter them at a certain dispersion rate.
“Oxygen and CO2 measurements are complete. Vitals measurements are complete. Please hold still.”
The arms whir down and begin to remove bits of medical equipment from your person. The mask (thankfully), various electrodes and tubes (ouch), and countless cuffs and straps you’re too tired to assign a role to.
“Please state your name.”
You sit up gingerly, rubbing the nape of your neck. You only have to think about it for a few seconds before you give it to the robot. It feels strange and foreign on your tongue, like it hasn’t been used in a while.
“Good morning, Captain.”
The arms retract and sit motionless at the top of the stark white room, and you feel a little sad that your only companion is gone. But all things considered, you feel fine. A little stiff here and there and in dire need of a drink, but fine. This robot was an engineering marvel.
“Can I please have some water? And how long was I out for?”
The robot zips back down with a pouch of water, and you take it gratefully and gulp it down.
“Time of induced coma: approximately 4 years, 0 months, and 0 days.”
You wince. That was a long time.
“Happy anniversary, I guess.” You mumble to no one, testing out your muscles. You could spy a hatch above you, and you were itching to get out of the sleeping quarters to assess the rest of the ship. It was fairly small (only built for one comatose person and one busybody robot), and you were starting to get claustrophobic.
Besides, there was still something nagging you at the back of your brain. You test out the ladder at the end of your bunk and begin hauling yourself towards the hatch, chalking the difficulty up to wonky gravity rather than your physique.
You remember Project Revelation. You remember the APH-X, and you remember being a part of that team. You remember deploying the Taumoeba near Venus with your own two hands, and taking fervent record of your observations.
If that was the case, where the hell were you going right now?
The hatch opens easily, and you find yourself in a hallway sort of space that has an overwhelming amount of equipment. Nothing crazy complicated, just a staggering amount. Containers, vials, every simple tool you can imagine, various types of buffers and reagents. There’s even a small workbench in the middle.
You stand there sort of stupidly. It looked like a lab, but a kiddie version of one. It wasn’t like the Hail Mary, equipped with every single scientific tool ever invented. The most sophisticated thing you could see was a compound microscope. It was as if it were designed to start experiments but stop before any complex tests could be performed. Like the sample was supposed to just sit on the table to be scrutinized, if that.
You look around once more at the mass of empty containers of various sizes again.
“…ah.”
It comes back to you at once, and it chills you slightly.
***
“Doctor!”
You blinked and refocused your eyes.
“I’m sorry. What was the question?”
Eva Stratt narrowed her eyes at you. You could practically feel the irritation coming from her in waves. Next to you, Chloe, your lab associate and best friend, snickered. You kicked her under the table.
“…as I was saying, we need to get all of our intel on Taumoeba out to the scientific community in an organized manner as soon as possible. While we conduct Project Revelation, we need to have all eyes on any negative side effects that may come from the Taumoeba. Doctor,” she said with a pointed look at you again, “you will be in charge of this task. In addition to your own studies, you have access to all of the research that has been done thus far on the Taumoeba by every country.”
You realized everyone in the room — your entire lab — was looking at you at this point.
“Oh. Um.” You cleared your throat and kicked Chloe again, who was biting her lip. Stratt gave you another look.
“I appreciate the offer, but I’m not sure if I’m up for the job.”
The room was silent for a moment before Dennis piped up incredulously.
“What do you mean, you’re not up for the job? You know more about the little guys than any of us. Probably more than anyone in the world.”
“I don’t think she means she’s not up to the task,” Zahra put in with a chuckle, “I think she just means she doesn’t want to do it.”
You groaned and put your head in your hands.
“It’s not that —”
“You’re just preoccupied at the moment. Am I right?” You can hear the shit-eating grin in Atsuto’s voice.
“Shut up.”
“Excuse me.” Stratt’s piercing voice is enough to cast an immediate silence over the room.
“Doctor, what is the meaning of this? I do not mean for this to be a suggestion. It is not a fun side task or a promotion. This is an order.”
“No, I know. I know.” You glared at Atsuto and Zahra giggling to each other.
“Then please enlighten me — what is preventing you from accomplishing this order?”
You don’t know how to respond to that without sounding like an idiot.
“It’s because she’s obsessed with Ryland Grace.”
You want to vaporize Chloe.
“I am not—”
Stratt’s expression immediately silences you. It’s the one she only gets whenever he-who-must-not-be-named is mentioned. Some strange mixture of irritation, indignation, and guilt. You weren’t sure what to say.
“She has been very diligently studying his recordings.”
You blink in surprise as Dr. Sheikh, the quiet woman currently number one in the world for single-celled organism research, chimes in.
“The team is very impressed with her extrapolations on the Eridian race. If not the world’s leading expert on Taumoeba, she is certainly the world’s leading expert on Eridians. I, for one, think it would be foolish to ignore the entire secondary chapter of Dr. Grace’s trip when we already have a full team of experts that know nearly as much as she does about Taumoeba. I would be happy to take on the task, if not nominate Dr. Liang.”
Chloe preens, and you feel a rush of relief and affection as your team nods their heads in vigorous agreement.
“Thank you Dr. Sheikh. That was a much kinder approach to my own sentiments.” You sigh. “I think it’s frankly a waste to be forgetting about the Eridians right now. Not just because they’re the first ever confirmed signs of intelligent life besides us in the universe, but they could be a useful resource. Think about it. They had the same problems as us, and the same approach. If something goes terribly wrong with Project Revelation, odds are they’ve encountered it too, and maybe even found a solution.”
You saw the gears turn silently in Stratt’s head. If there was one thing she loved more than anything, it was risk mitigation.
Finally, she sighed and bored into you with an intense glare.
“Do not think you are clever in attempting to frame your silly fascination with alien life under the guise of supporting Project Revelation. I am disappointed to learn that you have been slacking on the role I assigned you to in lieu of watching Dr. Grace’s diaries every night.”
You winced as Chloe hid her face again. Unfortunately, that was close enough to the truth that you couldn’t even protest.
“However…” Stratt let out a huff, irritated. “I have been under immense pressure to pursue this Eridian equation.” She rolled her eyes. “Apparently every nation is concerned we will be under alien attack any day now, when we may not even have a planet to defend in the first place.”
It made sense. Nothing except for the essential information related to Taumoeba had been made public, but word of mouth was powerful in times like these. The whole world knew about Eridians now, and as humans have been for millenia with anything unknown, they were scared.
“They could be right. We know that the Eridians were pivotal in helping us save our own planet, but we don’t know their intent beyond that. They could be the solution to problems we haven’t even thought of yet, or they could be the beginning of our first intergalactic war. We just don’t know.” It comes out in a rush, but you can’t stop yourself. “I’ve compiled a cohesive report on every log Dr. Grace recorded about Rocky (Stratt’s eyebrow twitched at the alien’s pet name). I took detailed notes on everything in the videos and organized them based on relevance to their language, biology, known scientific advancements, et. cetera. I’ve identified the most crucial gaps in knowledge that are still left over from Dr. Grace’s studies and I’ve drafted a plan for an addendum onto Project Revelation to explore 40 Eridani. Why not take advantage of the launch we’re already conducting to keep going? If we attach one of our backup spacecraft to the APH-X, we can set a trajectory for 40 Eridani after all of the Taumoeba have been successfully deployed. It’d only take one, maybe two of us. We have the means of reaching them and communicating with them. It would be a shame to overlook a huge risk because of our own tunnel vision.”
Stratt looked at you for a painfully long moment. You held her gaze. You hoped she couldn’t tell you were sweating through every layer of your clothing. At last, she stood.
“Dr. Sheikh. Dr. Liang. You are now in charge of handling the transfer of all information related to Taumoeba.”
She turned to address you, mildly irritated.
“You have 30 minutes to assemble all of your materials on Eridians and your plans to take action. I am calling an assembly in G-201 immediately. Do not be late.”
Then she was gone.
And you had just bought yourself a ticket to 40 Eridani.
***
You spin in the captain’s seat, idly scanning the plethora of screens in front of you.
So: you were currently on trajectory to reach Erid, the home of the Eridians on a spacecraft affectionately dubbed the Rocky II (name courtesy of yourself). Your goal was to make contact with the aliens, check on their Petrova line, take as many samples as possible, and figure out if they were friend or foe. You’d then head home, or in case of emergency, eject four of your very own Beetles to send back to Earth with all you’d gleaned.
You close your eyes and slump in your seat, breathing a sigh. In the Great 16 Years of Bated Breaths, humans had the time to perfect spin drive technology. It was cleaner, faster, and more fuel efficient. You could make the 6 year trip in just 4, and you’d have enough fuel to bring you home. You were incredibly lucky.
Unlike the Hail Mary.
You push that thought aside. There were far more important things to tend to. Such as figuring out where the hell you were.
The engineers calculated the time it would take to almost get you to Eridani to be about 4 years, which meant you were in deceleration right now. What they were unable to pre-determine, however, was the exact amount of time left over. Everything in physics is just one big approximation.
It takes some messing around with the screens, but you figure out how to pull up the map. Your mind is shockingly sharp for having basically no mental stimulation for 4 years. It might’ve been the sophistication of the technology, but you think it’s more likely due to Stratt ceaselessly drilling the motions into you.
The blinking readout in front of you displayed loud and clear:
TIME TO DESTINATION: APPROX. 0 YEARS, 2 MONTHS, 14 DAYS.
For all intents and purposes, the engineers had been pretty bang-on. Though it seemed like a depressing amount of time for your puny consciousness, you knew that was an incredibly tight margin in the reality of space. Hats off.
Still, you can’t help but deflate a little.
“Two and a half months, all on my lonesome.” You say out loud, stretching in the chair. Your voice sounds very small in the expanse of the cabin.
Back down in the lab space, you poke around until you jog the memories of where everything is. You aren’t really sure what’s going to meet you there -- are they going to welcome you? Let you study their kind? Deem you a threat and blow a hole in your ship?
You shudder at that and sit on the nook jutting out under the porthole. You don’t see much but your own troubled expression reflected back and specks that might be faraway stars or just smudges on the glass. There wasn’t much left to do but steel yourself and prepare as much as you could.
But despite it all, you feel a thrill run through you. You might not be the first person to come into contact with intelligent non-human life, but you might be the first one to live to tell the tale.
“Okay,” you whisper to yourself, staring unblinking out into the inhospitable darkness. “Let’s see what we find on that planet.”