Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Grace

“Original crew was 23. Now is only me.”

I stare at the translation. I don’t believe it.

“They…did they die?”

“Yes.”

Oh no. “W…er…Bad.”

“Bad bad bad.”

I sigh. “My original crew was three. Now it’s just me.” I put my hand up against the divider.

Rocky puts a claw on the divider opposite my hand. “Bad.”

“Bad bad bad,” I say.

We stay like that for a moment. “I’ll watch you sleep.”

Then suddenly reality jumps. One moment I’m floating there with my hand on the divider wall, and the next moment I’m floating there with my hand on the divider wall, only it’s not my hand. This isn’t my body!

I have five arms! And I don’t see color, just a weird colorless 3D image of everything around me, and — oh no — through the divider wall I see a human form with a hand across from mine, but it’s like I have x-ray vision because I also see the skeleton. I see the skull.

I scream. At least, that’s what I try to do. It comes out as a loud disorganized series of notes.

What happened!?

I’m shaking. I’m panicking. I would think this was a dream, but it’s too weird even for that. It’s like reality turned upside down. No, inside out.

I fold my arms inwards towards my… carapace? It’s comforting somehow, but when I realize that the comfort comes from moving an Eridian body it freaks me out again. Why am I in an Eridian body looking at a freaky skeleton!?

“Well, this is unexpected,” the skeleton says.

It’s such a calm, normal thing to say. Not at all like something a creepy skeleton would say. It completely throws me for a loop.

“What?” I say. It comes out as notes. I recognize them, both from instinct and from having listened to Rocky for days. This is the way Rocky talks.

I think I’m Rocky. And if I’m Rocky, is that skeleton me?

“This isn’t supposed to be able to happen between different species. It’s never happened before. But we’ve also never met another intelligent species besides us before, so I guess intelligence and connection is all you need to bond. It’s weird though. Your body is really weird. No offense.”

Is that Rocky? Is that Rocky in my body?

“What happened?!” I scream at him. “How did this happen?”

“We both realized we’re in a similar situation. That created a connection between us, and I guess it was strong enough to cause a bond.”

“A bond? We just swapped bodies! What the fuck?!”

“Why are you so surprised? Wait, does this never happen to humans?”

“No, never. Does this happen to Eridians?”

“Oh, sure. I’ve switched with my first mate countless times. Don’t worry about it. This is completely normal, and we’ll be fine. Well, except for the part where we’re different species. That is weird. But we’ll get used to it.”

“Oh…” I want to say, “Oh God,” but when I think “God,” no Eridian word comes out of me. “How do we fix this?” I ask.

“It’s not something that needs to be fixed,” Rocky says. “Actually, this is a good thing. It’s already making communication a lot easier. We understand each other intuitively now. I’m glad this happened.”

I’m flabbergasted. He really doesn’t have a problem with this? I don’t even know what to say to that.

And then suddenly I feel really woozy. “Oh no,” I say. “I think I’m going to…sleep.” I wanted to say, “I think I’m going to pass out,” but sleep seems to be the closest Eridian word there is for that.

“Of course you’re going to sleep. I was about to when we switched.”

I start shaking again. I’m going to pass out. I feel helpless and terrified and overwhelmed and—

“Relax,” Rocky says. “I’ve watched you sleep before. I’ll watch you sleep now. You’re safe.”

No, I’m not. I’m the farthest thing in the world from safe. “No,” I say. “No, no, no, no…” Then everything goes silent.

Rocky

I watch the human float across the divider wall. Poor guy. The first time you switch shakes everyone up, and switching into a body from a different species without any prior experience, when you didn’t know switching was possible, must be a major shock.

I float here, watching the human in my body. Looking at my body through this human body is weird. Looking at anything through a human body is weird.

Every couple of seconds, there’s a gap where my perception shuts off for a moment. It takes me a while to figure out what’s causing the gaps. Then I realize it’s the covers passing over the round things set into my face. In this body, I can’t even feel that they’re round. I only know they’re round from having looked at them from back in my own body. When they’re covered, my perception completely shuts off. I don’t seem to be able to perceive things through obstacles anymore, except through the divider wall for some reason.

Also, by obstacles, that includes my own body. My perception now only works in one direction, the direction the round things are facing.

That’s scary. Someone or something could sneak up behind me, or something else could happen, and I wouldn’t have any idea. I look resolutely at the human, who I said I would watch, but the nagging feeling that anything could be happening behind me gets worse and worse, and I feel an almost irresistible desire to look.

How do humans live like this?

Wait a minute… The human knows things are happening around him even when his head isn’t pointed in the right direction. If he’s facing away from me, and I say something, he’ll look at me. He looked at me when I tapped the divider wall and pointed to show him the atmosphere beads.

Peeling my gaze away from the human, feeling very guilty about it, I reach out and tap the divider wall with one of my two hands. I instantly become aware of the contact between my hand and the wall, and not just through touch. It’s the same way I was able to hear the human speak earlier, right after we switched.

I think humans have two ranged senses, the directional one, which is more detailed, and the non directional one that only tells you something is happening in a certain direction so you can look at it, or lets you hear voices.

The directional sense is kind of like looking out into space with a camera.

Oh, I bet it’s a light sense!

That’s so cool!

I go back to watching the human. It would be wrong to look away, but…this is so boring. Watching someone sleep through light sensors is really, really boring, because you can’t focus on anything else. It sure was kind of him to agree to do this for me before we knew we would switch.

It’s been a while. I hate this. There’s no way to even know how long I’ve been watching. I can’t go searching for a human clock because I have to look at him.

For the first time in my life, I seriously consider breaking a promise to watch someone sleep. But I can’t do that. He’d be horrified if he knew I was even contemplating that.

Or would he?

It occurs to me that he doesn’t seem to care as much about sleep watching as I do. I had to tell him to sleep in the tunnel, and before we switched, when I asked him to watch me sleep, he said no at first. I think humans don’t always watch each other sleep. So as wrong as it feels, maybe he won’t mind if I…

I look around the tunnel. That machine he uses to repeat what I say, that he always looks at after I say something, is in here with me. I can stay in the tunnel, knowing that if something were to happen to him, I would hear it and be able to look in that direction, and then be able to act to protect him (or at least, I’d be able to do that if there wasn’t a divider wall and we shared an atmosphere.)

I think he’ll understand if I just stay in the tunnel. I’ll stay in the tunnel and look at the machine.

There are markings on each of the little squares he puts his fingers on. I recognize them. I know their names. It’s a writing system! But why put all the letters of their alphabet on a machine that has to have been made for adults who already know how to read?

I tap one of the squares with a finger, and the machine changes. Suddenly there’s a bunch of light coming from the top part of it. The light is strange. There are so many different kinds of light on different parts of the flat surface.

Covering most of the surface is a very bright rectangle, with less bright patches on it that from letters. The letters all form words that I recognize, fragmented words, but I recognize them all as parts of things the human said before he fell asleep. The very last thing written there is, “No no no no.” I feel my face do something uncomfortable. I don’t like remembering him being unhappy in my body.

For the first time, this machine is starting to make sense. The reason I couldn’t understand how he used it before is that it’s a light showing machine. Most of the information he gets from it comes from light, not sound. He calls it a computer, a word which I don’t have a translation for. He also used the term “thinking machine,” but I think that’s some kind of translation error. Machines don’t think.

He likes to move his fingers over the top part of this machine. I place my finger on the machine and movie it upward. The whole rectangle moves! It moves upward through the edge of the device and partially disappears! “Underneath” the rectangle are a bunch of different things. I don’t know what to call them. I guess I’ll call them light objects. Each of them have words written underneath them.

I read all the words. The sound of them fills my mind, but I don’t know what most of them mean. Then I see a phrase that makes me pause. “Amnesia Diary.”

Well, I don’t know what a diary is, but I know amnesia is a word for memory loss, something I already knew the human struggles with. He records information using this machine because his memory is so bad. I’m curious to see more about his memory recording system. I touch the light object above the text with my finger.

A new rectangle appears, filled with text. The first sentence makes something within me lurch.