Chapter Text
“What’s two plus two?”
Something about the question irritated me. I was tired. I drifted back to sleep. A few minutes passed before I heard it again.
“What’s two plus two?”
The soft, feminine voice lacked emotion and the pronunciation was identical to the previous time she said it. It was a computer. A computer was hassling me. I was even more irritated now.
“Lrmln,” I said. I was surprised. I had meant to say “Leave me alone”— a completely reasonable response in my opinion— but I failed to speak.
“Incorrect,” said the computer. “What’s two plus two?”
What was going on? Why couldn’t I speak? Why was pushy Siri harassing me? I felt panic start to rise in me. I was dead tired, I couldn’t even open my eyes. I didn’t feel much of anything besides soreness. I was in a bed? It was soft. I tried to speak again, maybe someone besides Ms. HAL 9000 would hear me. “Hhmmmnnuh?” I said. Well, that didn’t sound at all like “hello,” now did it?
“Incorrect,” it said. Maybe I was imagining it but it sounded annoyed. “What’s two plus—,”
“Oh, damn. Ssshhhit, shit!” I heard a man’s voice somewhat distantly. There was clanking and thudding that sounded suspiciously like someone tripping over their own feet before the voice spoke again, sounding closer. “I’m here—,”
“Incorrect. What—,”
“Oh, shut up. How do I get it to shut up?”
I heard a woman’s voice— not a computer’s— project from farther away, “Override: cancel cognitive assessment!” The computer voice stopped abruptly mid-math-question.
“There we go. Quiet,” he told me. “Annoying alarm clock that one is, yeah?”
I couldn’t see who was speaking. I still didn’t know what was happening. “Mmmf.”
“That’s alright. You can rest. You’re alright.”
Hey, I did not need to be told that twice.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
I woke up again feeling less like I got hit by a bus. And I opened my eyes! Impressive, I know. I got a better idea of what was happening almost immediately. I was in some sort of strange sick bay, on a med cot, with an IV line in my arm and electrodes on my chest. Everything was white and the lighting was harsh; I could make out some other weird, oblong, empty beds bolted by their sides against the walls so that they seemed to be hovering off of the floor and.. a horrifying robot arm like the ones used in intense surgeries. Just… dangling over me from the ceiling like a terrible, dystopian chandelier. I was also as nude as the day I was born, but someone had the decency to chuck a blanket on top of me, which was appreciated. I was in a hospital room, that was my guess. What kind of hospital didn’t use paper gowns? And had computer voices and robots, for that matter.
“Eye movement detected,” the computer voice announced.
“Oh, not you again,” I whined. Hey, words! Good job, me. Thankfully the computer did not try asking me to do math.
I heard more movement from beside me like before as someone entered the room. I couldn’t quite muster up the strength to move my head, though. Drats. “Hey, you awake for good this time?” the man’s voice asked somewhere off to my right. I only realized now that it was slightly accented, though I couldn’t place it.
I thought the phrasing was weird, I only remembered waking up once before this. Maybe it had been more than that and I didn’t remember. “I think so?”
“Great. How are you feeling? I know the answer is ‘like shit,’ but I’m going to need a bit more than that.”
If I was in a hospital and this was my doctor, he needed to work on his bedside manner. “Um. Tired. Like my arms and legs are weighed down.”
“Heh, yeah, they are,” he said lightly. But there wasn’t anything actually weighing me down... “Everything feel alright, though? No paralysis?”
Oh, that was a horrible question to ask. I managed to angle my head down slightly and watch my fingers wiggle, followed by my toes under the blanket. I let my head drop again, relieved. That took a lot of energy. “Thank God.”
“Right,” the man said, voice a bit clipped. Don’t know what that was about. I still couldn’t see him.
I wanted to go back to bed. I couldn't though, I had so many questions. I broke into the vault of them, “What’s going on?” That seemed like a good starting place.
“Oh, you’ll be fine. Drugs still wearing off and all that.”
“From what? Where am I?” This doctor sucked at his job.
“Oh, fuck,” he spat. Not a great thing to hear when you ask a doctor something.
“Not inspiring confidence, thanks.”
“Sorry, sorry. Er… what do you remember?”
“I—,” the realization hit me from behind, but as subtly as a rolling boulder. I didn’t remember anything. Anything. What was my name? Where was I? Where was I from? Who was talking to me right now? How long had I been asleep for?
My prolonged silence and look of absolute terror on my face seemed to be answer enough. The man came into view above me finally and fixed me with a stern but comforting expression, I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Hey. Breathe. Breathe. This’ll wear off.”
I focused on him and listened to his suggestion, taking in a deep, shaky breath. He was a younger Asian man. Well, I didn’t know my age, he could be the same age as me. He seemed kind, even if he was bad at being a doctor. He had warm eyes with just a hint of crows feet settling in around them. His hair was kept close shaved and he was wearing a light blue jumpsuit. There was a name embroidered in gold on a patch on his left breast— I assumed it was a name, I think those characters were Chinese, though we were speaking English. Hey, I knew that but I didn’t know my own name, great. A jumpsuit was interesting, too, though it didn’t give me too many more clues as to who this was. Lots of professions had those, anything from a janitor to a fighter pilot. Not doctors or nurses though…
I felt his hand squeeze my shoulder lightly and the pressure anchored me a little further. “First things first. Clothes and food, yeah? Can you sit up?”
I did. It took an incredible amount of energy, but the more I engaged my muscles, the less sore I felt.
“Good. Hold on.” He turned away from me and crossed the room to a mound of duffel bags piled in a corner. Not a corner, the room was cylindrical. It took me a moment to realize as I watched him move, using hand holds along the wall… that he only had one leg. The left jumpsuit leg was cut off and knotted halfway down his thigh. I got a better look at his suit from further away, too. On the left shoulder there was a round, dark blue patch with finer detail that I couldn’t quite make out, but underneath that was the rectangular patch of the Chinese flag. The right shoulder had another mysterious patch, white with a blue triangle and the abbreviation CNSA. It didn’t ring any bells at the moment, which wasn’t surprising given how many bells weren’t ringing that were supposed to be.
He returned a few moments later with a jumpsuit identical to his and a white toothpaste tube. “Eat, you’ll feel better. And put that on, please. We’ve got mixed company.” At first I thought he meant the computer and then I remembered a woman’s voice from earlier: more people. “I’ll be just in the other room, give me a yell if you need something. I’ll be back.”
I didn’t try to stop him. As much as I didn’t want to be alone, I did want to be alone to change, thank you very much. I hadn’t seen him enter the room earlier, but to my further bewilderment, he exited via a short ladder set into the wall and through a hatch in the ceiling. He mainly used his arms to pull himself up, he must be frickin’ ripped under that jumpsuit. Don’t know how I missed a hatch in the ceiling... This definitely wasn’t a hospital. Sick bay on a submarine? That hatch looked very Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. Okay, why did I know that and not my own name?!
My stomach roared. I looked down at the tube in my hand. Black-on-white text: DAY 1 — MEAL 1. Suuuper descriptive. But I was starving, so I unscrewed the cap and downed it. It was like a weird, savory meat gravy. Not what I was expecting at all, but it tasted incredible. Hunger tended to make things taste better and I wasn’t complaining.
I took a moment to stare at a white wall and disassociate a little. I couldn’t remember anything and I had clearly been asleep for some indeterminate amount of time. Medically asleep, a coma, the man had mentioned drugs. Coma patients got amnesia sometimes, right? Why was I in a coma? I didn’t feel sick: no fever, no aches, no injuries. I was actually feeling more and more normal by the minute, the “food” gave me a burst of energy. My brain was still floundering for an explanation for anything when I heard muffled conversation coming from above me. It was the man and the woman from earlier, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I didn’t think it was paranoid to assume they were talking about me. I considered the mystery man, Not-Doctor. He seemed to know about what happened to me, but in a non-authoritative way. Was it crazy to assume Not-Doctor was in a similar position as me, just without the memory loss? He did give me the same jumpsuit as his… I hadn’t inspected mine yet, I got so distracted imagining clues that I didn’t look at the one I was handed. Really smart.
I started to unfold the jumpsuit, it was a light blue, lightweight, comfortable material. I was met by a darker blue name patch on the left breast similar to the other suit’s: golden embroidery that read “GRACE.” I could only assume that was my name since I was handed this suit, but the name felt familiar. I thought that was a good sign. Something about the patch nagged at the back of my mind, though I couldn’t place a finger on what.
I continued to unfold the suit to look at the arms, the other suit had patches there. Sure enough, there was a dark blue, round patch like the other suit’s, only with an American flag patch underneath it. The circular patch had white text around the perimeter: “PROJECT HAIL MARY — EARTH.” That last part seemed ridiculously unspecific and unnecessary, in my opinion. There was an inner black circle on the patch that had more elliptical text: “GRACE,” the name I saw on the other name tag, “姚,” and a name in Russian Cyrillic, “Илюхина.” So… me, the man, and I guess the woman upstairs. I felt like Sherlock making these incredible deductions. In the very center of the patch there was an arrangement of three circles: a large yellow one with a white dot in the middle, beside that, a small blue one with a white plus sign, and away from the group, a small yellow one with a white capital “T.” There was a white arc connecting the pair of circles with their lone neighbor. This meant absolutely nothing to me, Sherlock-brain was failing me. “Project” was self explanatory, and so were the names. This was like… a team logo of sorts, maybe something corporate. That would explain the matching uniforms. It didn’t explain why I had the American flag, why Not-Doctor had the Chinese one, and why the third team member was apparently Russian. Those countries would never collaborate on anything together. I really hated what information my brain was selecting to remember…
I remembered the other suit had more patches and continued my investigation. My heart just about stopped when I unfolded the right suit arm. That was the NASA logo, I knew that one. The thing that was escaping me about the name tag came back around screaming into existence: astronaut name tags were gold on blue. Veteran astronaut name tags were gold on blue. These were astronaut clothes. I was an astronaut. A veteran astronaut. The mystery patch was a mission patch.
“Holy moly,” I breathed. I paused, “Seriously? Who says that…?” Me, apparently. Me. An astronaut.