Chapter Text
I woke up covered in bandages and pain.
I had an IV in my right arm and there was an oxygen mask on my face. My head hurt, my eyes hurt— I could see, that was nice, even if everything was a little blurry— my throat hurt, and pretty much my entire upper body hurt. I couldn’t believe I was alive. And the pain was even bearable. I thought I would be in more pain after standing next to what was basically a bomb going off. Rocky.
I angled my head some from where I was laying— that hurt. The room wasn’t upside down anymore, Yáo was asleep on his bunk, Ilyukhina hers. She got a similar treatment as me with the oxygen, IV, and a bandage visible where her jumpsuit had had scissors taken to it. She also had wires for electrodes leaving the neckline of her suit. Yáo looked fine from here, but I watched that pilot chair suddenly weigh something like three hundred pounds and ram him into a wall, that couldn’t have been fun. And Rocky. Right where I left him. He’d definitely heard better days. There were… heat lamps and some electronics scattered around outside his airlock. And Yáo’s quilt, a spilled mug of coffee, and some sticky notes.
I made a horrible, wheezing cough beforehand, but I managed, “Mary, how long was I asleep?”
“Unconsciousness lasted ten hours, thirty four minutes.”
The sampler. Fuudddgge. I had to check on everyone— Yáo was awake before me, so we probably weren’t going to take a swan dive into a planet. Holy moly, I had a lot to do.
“Mary, what’s my blood oxygen content?” I rasped.
“90%.”
That was high enough, right? An A- was a good grade in my book. I pulled all of the fashionable medical accessories off and out of me. My left arm and side were a bit sore, way less so than I expected. I didn’t feel doped up, though. I moved my left hand, it was extremely stiff even though the bandages weren’t tight. Probably lost some function, I supposed. I used to be a lefty… not anymore. I peeked under a section of bandage and regretted it immediately. A wave of nausea passed over me, but I hadn’t eaten anything all day, so no insult to injury there. I had a vague thought that burn victims got limbs amputated if the damage was extensive enough— and I knew the bot had no reservations about that— so maybe it just… looked way worse than it actually was? Yeah, let’s go with that.
I stood and started retracing what had happened since I fell asleep. A quick status check from the computer said the other two were stable. Not that I could do anything to help if they weren’t, but it was good to know. I had to start somewhere, so I went for the sampler. The others were being looked after by the bot and it could do a better job than me. I wasn’t a doctor, not that kind. I wasn’t sure how to help Rocky. Yáo had done… something, I wasn’t sure what, I’d look in a minute. If Rocky was… no, but I couldn’t let all of this have happened for nothing; fishing was my idea.
Climbing the ladder was not fun, my arm and back did not like that. I complained very loudly the whole way. Lokken was going to get an earful for not putting the controls that turned gravity off at the bottom of the ladder instead of at the top.
The sampler was right where I left it in command, unopened. I brought it back down a level to the lab and stared at it sitting on the table for a moment. I’d have to replicate the atmosphere inside before I—
I heard Ilyukhina yell from downstairs. I moved way too quickly for my current condition and practically fell down the ladder to get to her. Yeah, she was trying to get out of bed. How the heck was she awake already?
“No. Absolutely not.” My voice cracked a lot, I sounded like one of my kids. “Lay down.”
She wasn’t quite managing to sit upright, y’know, because she had a hole punched through her a few hours ago. She did manage to get a good look at me, though, from her partially reclined posture. “Holy shit, Ry, what the fuck happened to you?” I must be quite the sight right now.
“Um. A lot. Nope—,” she was trying to get up again. I caught her by the shoulder in what I hoped was a “friendly buddy trying to stop you from killing yourself” way and not a “bossy and mean” way, because she could absolutely still judo flip me even in this condition if she wanted to. “We’re okay. You’re definitely not supposed to be up and about.”
“Says you, yummy mummy.”
“… Touché.”
Ilyukhina moved again, “What happened? Is Li—,”
“Seriously. You’re gonna pull a stitch. Or ten. I will explain if you sit still.”
She gave me a stink eye, but she did.
I explained from my own memory— spotted by getting knocked out twice— what had happened. We wouldn’t get a full picture until Yáo and Rocky could fill in the gaps, but I still knew way more than she did because she only remembered getting her suit compromised. She looked as devastated about Rocky as I felt and didn’t berate me for deep frying my body and lungs. Ilyukhina watched my mouth as I spoke because she was having trouble hearing, her suit breaking definitely ruptured her ear drums.
“We should all be very dead,” I concluded.
“Speak for yourself, I’m too cool to die. I survived space! Who even does that?”
“You, apparently.”
She’d been sort of angling her head over my shoulder while I was talking. “Did you get a good look at Yáo yet?”
Oh, fudge. Did I miss something majorly bad… I stepped over to his bunk.
Yáo looked unscathed compared to us, he had a butterfly bandage where he knocked his head, but that was it. He was sleeping with his mouth wide open and snoring, that was new. He was also… covered in sticky notes. I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t seen them before, they were bright yellow. Maybe I was a bit more out of it than I thought. A note on his forehead: “A-OK + vERy hiGh ☺” with an arrow pointing down to his face. One on his chest: “broken, no touch” One on his stomach: “gabbapemnton???” One on his wrist, next to his watch: “watch” One on his right thigh: “HANDS OFF, BOT!” And two on his left shin: “cyBorG?” and “space pirate”
“You packed that camera of yours, right? Be quick, we need to immortalize this.”
I snorted. “Nice to know you have your priorities straight.”
Ilyukhina gave me a pointed look. My bag was right here, I quickly took a bunch of pictures. She was unfortunately very right, this was hilarious. One of the bot arms had a sticky note with a crude pair of sunglasses drawn on. We left all of them, obviously.
Next, I checked on Rocky as well as Yáo’s handy work. More sticky notes: an emphatic “210°C!” on the floor and one for each infrared lamp, “LaMp,” “lAmP,” and “LAMp.” I relayed everything I was seeing to Ilyukhina since she was stuck in bed on the other side of the room.
It looked like Yáo did a crash course on Eridians and started warming Rocky up. The thermal camera he left on the floor confirmed that.
Ilyukhina whistled. “Damn. He saved my ass twice, and now Rocky’s. Rocky saved all our asses. You saved Rocky. I want a turn being hero.”
I blinked at the ridiculousness of that for a second. Maybe she was a little drugged up, too. I didn’t point out the whole “volunteering for a suicide mission to save Earth” thing. “Ollie, you literally almost died getting that sample, that more than qualifies.”
“Good. Can’t have men and lobsters stealing all my thunder.”
I chuckled, winced at the intake of air, and took in Rocky some more. I needed him to be okay. The temperature was important, but those charred vents were worrying me. His radiator organ had to be full of soot and oxides, that couldn’t be healthy. But I couldn’t go in there to do anything about it and we had this nice, thick, invincible wall between us. I had the best human engineer I knew, though.
“No. That’s a horrible idea.”
“What?” I whined. “We can’t sit around and do nothing.”
“I was there for that anatomy talk. He’s got blood vessels and stuff in there that are probably ruptured. You can’t blow “cold” ammonia in his vents, you’re gonna drop his body temp again and probably aerate his blood. He’s not supposed to have air inside his blood like us.”
“It’s unclogging a radiator with some compressed air.”
“Which is basically cardiovascular surgery. I’m not letting you operate remotely on an alien because you won’t even help me with my damn shots.”
Dang it. I hated it, but she was probably right. I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing first aid on a human, forget whatever this qualified as. I had a lot of notes, but our understanding of Eridian anatomy came from an engineer, not a doctor. I really hated not doing anything for him, though…
“The sampler!” Stupid brain. Just the thing that might save two worlds and also your own life, not important at all. Maybe I was a little drugged. I felt more scatterbrained. Or maybe that was the pain. Or the adrenaline of almost dying twice. Whatever, I scrambled to the lab.
“Fuck, no fair,” Ilyukhina huffed behind me.
I looked back down at her, “I can turn gravity off—,”
“No, you need it for your instruments,” she said.
“You should stay laying down, anyway. I can stabilize the sample.”
“Okay… don’t fuck it up, yeah?”
I fucked it up.
Rocky helpfully put an indicator on the outside of the sampler that gave a reading on the interior environment. It was Eridian numerals, but nothing I couldn’t suss out. -51ºC, 0.02 atm, and I already knew the atmosphere’s elemental makeup from our ship’s spectrometry. Easy, right? The lab was a mess, all the drawers and cabinets were open for some reason and pretty much anything that used to be glass was just some sparkly, fine sand. I found a cylindrical vacuum container that was big enough to fit the sampler inside and only a little bit cracked from our Tokyo Drifting in a spaceship. I sealed it up with some epoxy and got it to hold a vacuum seal again. Next order of business was feeding whatever aliens we rustled up. The lab had plenty of Venus Astrophage for testing and none of those samples broke. Those containers needed to be a bit sturdy because, well, the only reason I was here to begin with was because of a mistake with the stuff. Not taking any chances like that. I got some Astrophage on a swab, dropped it in the vacuum chamber with the sampler, and pumped all of the air out. Let’s see how Astrophage liked being shark bait. I was allowed to be a little sadistic about this, the buggers were killing billions of people. It was slow-going only using one, non dominant arm— the left one was starting to complain a bit louder now— but eventually, using (somehow intact, thank God) chemical samples stocked in the lab, I recreated Adrian’s atmosphere inside the sealed chamber. I heard a click as I finished adding the argon and Rocky’s sampler opened when it sensed the same pressure on the outside as on the inside. Genius. I quickly moved my whole contraption into the lab blast chiller, pumping the temperature down to -20°C, as low as it could go. I just had to hope that the predator and whatever else was living in there could handle the balmy weather. If there was a predator in there, the black tip of the swab would turn white again as the Astrophage got eaten off of it. That could take a while, I went a little overboard on the Astrophage as evident by the fact that there were enough of them to be visible. Hopefully our predator was very hungry. And hopefully whatever else was living in there also ate Astrophage, or ate something else that we caught in there. I didn’t want any potential grub starving to death before I could run an analysis on it. Once I let them settle and have a bite, I just needed to swipe the swab on a slide and take a look. The predator was attracted to Astrophage, so the swab should be covered with them after a while…
Well, how was I supposed to get the swab out without breaking the seal on their atmosphere? I smacked my forehead with the bad arm and cussed a little. That hurt. At least Ilyukhina couldn’t hear my rampage of kicking at stools.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid!”
Sample in a box and no way to get it out. Real smart. I guessed I was a bit more addled by the pain and whatever the bot gave me than I thought I was.
I found an unbroken laptop for Ilyukhina to access some command screens from and I slunk down to the dorm, feeling like scum.
Ilyukhina jumped when I was suddenly next to her because she hadn’t heard me come down the ladder.
“I’m gonna put a bell on you,” she sighed.
“I messed up.”
“… What did you do.”
She didn’t look horrified after I explained myself. “Rocky and/or me will make another, larger vacuum chamber and we’ll use the IVME or something to get the sample out that way. That’s what NASA made it for. In vacuo microbiology equipment, right? It’ll be fine.”
“Oh, thank god,” I sat down heavily on my bunk.
“No, thank me. He’s not stealing my thunder, either.”
I flopped onto my back, forgetting that it was covered in cuts.
Ilyukhina inhaled sharply at the sound I made, she heard that. “Get drugs. Go to bed. I’ll run diagnostics from here.”
“But—,”
“You’re not helping anyone like that. Heal up.”
Yeah, she was right. Again. I ordered painkillers from the bot and it passed me some pills. Whatever it gave me knocked me right the heck out.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
Damn Grace almost gave me a fucking coronary. My ass got impaled, it was his job to get me back inside, and then I wake up and he’s nowhere to be found. He tripped over his own legs all the time, I thought he fell into Adrian. And then he did show up and he looked like his students toilet-papered him instead of his house. Saving me and then immediately saving Rocky… I hated to admit it because his entire wardrobe was science puns, but Grace was secretly badass. I’d let him know when he wasn’t wacked out on pain meds.
Mary wasn’t looking too hot. I supposed it could’ve been worse, we all could’ve fucking exploded from that massive fuel leak. I would say it was lucky we didn’t, but that was thanks to Yáo.
I accessed the ship’s overview from where I was on my bunk, balancing the laptop on my chest with my chin on the trackpad since I couldn’t sit up. I saw half a dozen micro-breaches in the hull. They all seemed to be internal, nothing that would make the Astrophage shielding in the bulkhead migrate to Adrian, nothing leaking air. Nothing immediately screaming HOLY FUCK WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE. The breaches were probably less than a few centimeters in any dimension, but those were the ones big enough for Mary’s computers to detect. I would have to do a full sweep of the crew cabins and storage. Or, rather, I’d make Yáo help me whenever he was lucid. I could not move. My entire abdomen was yelling very loudly at me. My hip ached like a motherfucker. And I was definitely on some strong painkillers, the stabs and aches I felt were the alleviated version. Still, I was alive. I really, really hoped I got to tell Nadya about this one day. I survived space. I should probably be more shaken up, I was just dumbfounded.
I did some work arounds and brought up some more information from command. Grace’s retelling of things matched the navigation logs and we were missing two fuel bays. All told, the ship had a little more than 5,000 kg of fuel left, which would be plenty to get us to the Blip-A, if slightly slower than the trip here, a few extra days. We’d be out of fuel after that, but Rocky had a metric shit ton. The spin drives held up, which made sense, they were supposed to handle Astrophage-levels of thermal energy. Just a lot of patches to be made, maybe an EVA to check what equipment broke on the hull and wound up in my hip— some telemetry was down. That was less pressing.
An hour passed while I checked up on all of that. The bot had me on those damn soup tubes again, I guessed something digestion-related got snagged by the hunk of metal. I couldn’t fall asleep because of my aches, but I didn’t want to take anything that would knock me out. I was watching Rocky sleep.
Grace started to writhe and groan in his bunk. I watched the bot give him an IV of something and it quieted him down a little bit. It followed that up with a cannula for oxygen. His lungs were definitely damaged from breathing straight ammonia. From what I knew of burns, they would hurt more before they started to heal. I was glad he helped Rocky, but I hated seeing him in pain. At least I couldn’t hear it as well. The web archives said I’d get full hearing back in about a week, maybe two. Between Yáo’s leg and Grace’s arm, somehow I was the one coming out unscathed, I’d just have a cool scar— I’d been in space! Well, that was assuming we didn’t all die like we were supposed to. Dying was definitely a disqualifier for being unscathed.
I distracted myself from my anxiety and Grace’s ordeal as well as my own pain by reading some code. Some people had tea and put on TV to relax. I dug around in proverbial computer guts and had the bot pass me my store of vodka. The metal didn’t hit my liver, why not? Alcohol is medicinal, it blocks pain receptors.
I hadn’t had the downtime to go through the bot’s code since we woke up. I helped code the thing with Dr. Lamai’s team. It was a Theseus’ ship of a machine: recycled surgical robots, new untested tech, and a Frankenstein mashup of medical IRIS code and three other coding languages that handled its procedural algorithm and movement. If by some miracle we caught some alien microbe that was edible and had calories, we might still need to be in comas on the trip back. Obviously that was a last resort, but I would like to make sure the bot was up to the task if we needed it. We did, in fact, have some more coma drugs left, Lamai’s special pentobarbital cocktail. But something had gone wrong with my sensors, I would like to know what so it didn’t happen again to any of us. And, in the event that we weren’t making it out of this, the bot was responsible for helping me with my preferred method of departure. I would really like it if it didn’t fuck that up. The med bot was functioning fine now— it just did surgery on my ass— but I didn’t want to rely on the assumption that the sensor issue was a one-time fluke. I needed to do a full work up on the code, for one reason or the other. The bot printed out layman’s English text of what care it provided while we were asleep, but it didn’t give the whole story. For example, I died for a week and came back to life. Since I was in the code anyway, I wanted to figure out how to have the bot recognize pain more accurately through the EEG so something that only presented with pain— like Yáo’s leg— could be caught earlier. That seemed the most pressing considering what Grace was going through. It was a large task and a lot of medical research on my end, but just a matter of adding new lines to the code rather than combing through backlogs of code executed on the trip here. I focused on the new code first and saved the full work-up for later. Lamai even had preexisting code in here to sense pain, but it hadn’t been sensitive enough. I didn’t blame her or anyone on her team for that; this was literally the first robot of its kind. We were alive, it did its job.
The massive research session combined with the coding took me about ten hours. I usually had Lamai or one of her minions helping me out— I was not a doctor— but I thought I did a decent job. Besides, I couldn’t get out of bed, so this was the best use of my time for now. I made all of my edits in a virtual sandbox first, just to be safe, considering the robot was actively taking care of Grace. I rationed some vodka for when we had a predator to send on the beetles and switched to coffee. Then I thought better of it because I had started reading about my own heart getting shocked. Maybe I would ease up on the caffeine, especially after the extreme workout of almost dying.
I paused my typing when I caught Yáo moving out of the corner of my eye.
“Hey, big guy. How was your first trip?”
“… How did I get over here?”
“I’ll take that as a ‘really fucking good.’”
He slowly sat up and peeled the sticky note off of his forehead. He frowned at it slightly. “Don’t say anything.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Captain.”
He expertly ignored me. Yáo secretly loved my ribbing, I could tell. “How are you feeling?”
“Surprisingly not like utter shit. Still not looking to repeat that experience anytime soon, but y’know.”
“Mm. Me neither.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah…” He walked over to me and recognized the bot’s code. “Can you edit patient charts in there?” He kicked with his left leg, “I lost some weight recently, something like fifteen kilos. I don’t think the bot adjusted my dosage.”
I chuckled a little, “Oh, you were really high on painkillers…”
“Yes. I did not mean to do that… sorry.”
“No need to apologize. Bot said you cracked a bunch of ribs. People need rest after that. You’re not actually a cyborg.”
Another hum of acknowledgement, I barely caught that. And then his face dropped. “Shhhiit. I didn’t— the sampler—,”
“Grace took care of it for now.”
“He… got up already?” He looked over to him, whining low and shivering in his bunk. “I mean… shit.”
“Yeah, he’s insane. But it needed to be done, so…”
I filled him in on the ship’s status and he immediately went into Mama Bear mode again. First, he went up to command and stabilized our orbit fully, he said he programmed some extra engine burns if our flight started to decay at all. We were not touching Adrian with a hundred kilometer pole. Or chain. Or anything for that matter.
I shot him a suspicious look as he came back down the ladder with a wince. “Should you be moving around?”
“I’m fine.” He crossed the room to me and gestured at the laptop. “Can you show me where these breaches you mentioned are?”
I did. I trusted him not to push himself, and the hull did need patching. I showed him what the computer indicated as top priority for repair and I watched his jaw set. “Nothing that’s not fixable.” No response, so I kept going. “Li, if you hadn’t flown like you did we would’ve crashed and burned a hundred times over.”
He opened his mouth, I stopped him. “If you bad-mouth my commander, I’ll poke your sternum.”
A ghost of a smile, “Understood. You weren’t too bad yourself. I think you might’ve broken a world record.”
“For time spent in a vacuum? Oh, shit, that would be so cool…”
Yáo slinked off, looking less like a kicked puppy, in my opinion. He gathered some loose scrap metal and one of Rocky’s xenonite gun-thingys that had been left out from chain-making and tossed across the room. That xenonite would withstand anything, it was just like slapping on a bandaid, no engineering experience required. I directed him to the largest breaches first, just small dings where the metal warped inside the ship. Not dangerous, but they needed fixing or they would grow when the ship underwent acceleration forces again. Those were in the storage room closest to the engines. Him even fitting in the small storage compartment took some moving supplies around. The dorm was a mess of large bags and small plastic totes.
He climbed back out after a while. I watched him cringe in pain. “I sealed two. The remaining patches needed won’t be big enough to cause any potential problems with just the small engine burns we’ll be doing. I’ll hunt them down later.”
I nodded, “You rock.”
He fell onto his back on his bunk and threw a hand at Rocky. “No, he rock.” I snorted. “How long have you been up? You should be resting.”
“Not that long. I was going to run a full diagnostic on the bot since it’s going to be taking care of us for at least the next—,”
“Bot’s not going anywhere, it’s attached to the ceiling. You can run it later.” I scowled. He softened. “I’ll watch Rocky, take a nap.”
“Yeah, alright,” I surrendered. I kept typing for a moment, “I’m turning your alarm off, I would like to sleep in.”
“Yeah, you’ve earned it, I’d say,” Yáo laughed dryly.
“Elton John, I’m Still Standing? Really?”
“I picked that out yesterday… it was funny at the time.”
“We’ll put a bookmark in that.” I shut the laptop.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
Yup, those burns were definitely hurting now. I knew the bot gave me something for the pain, but it hardly did anything except make me a bit loopy and drowsy. I faded in and out of consciousness, yanked awake by intense pain and pulled under again by some drug or another. I wasn’t sure how much time passed, I heard Yáo and Ilyukhina a few different times. Eventually the pain started to subside. Either enough time passed that the burns were healing or the computer worked out the right blend of painkillers.
I came to and checked in on my friends. Ilyukhina was asleep, hugging her laptop like a teddy bear. Yáo was also asleep, wrapped up in his quilt and sitting upright with his head lolled against the xenonite wall. He had been watching Rocky, who still hadn’t moved. I closed my eyes and swallowed my mounting dread. I wasn’t sure how long it’d been, but Eridians only slept for a few hours at a time. Even after getting injured like that… I had the feeling I’d been out of it for at least a day, maybe two. If he still hadn’t woken up in all that time…
Tap, tap, tap.
I fell out of my bunk and onto my right side in my hurry to get to the airlock. That hurt, could have been worse though, because gravity was halved. I crawled across the floor, probably looking like a cheap horror movie scare with all the bloody bandages.
“Rocky! Are you okay?”
He made a low rumble, too quiet for the computer to pick up, but I recognized the chords. “Sick…”
“Yeah, you’re sick, you almost died!” Yáo wormed under his blanket and I lowered my voice. “Are you okay? How can I help?”
Rocky tried to stand, but his feet slid out from under him before he even raised himself off the floor. I heard another deep thrum, but I couldn’t pick out any words. “You have to speak up.”
He did, the computer caught it this time. The volume of the translated voice thankfully didn’t wake the other two. “How… did I get here, question?”
“I brought you here.”
“Grace touch my air, question?” He didn’t wait for a response and pointed at my arm, “Skin rough.”
It was a thin bandage, he probably “saw” straight through it. “Yeah… I’ll be alright.”
“You hurt self to save me. You save me. Thank thank thank.”
“You did it first,” I pointed out. “You saved all of us. Thank thank thank.”
“Li-Je and… Olesya okay, question?”
“Yes, they’re just resting. Humans sleep a lot while we’re healing. We’re, uh, not going to be doing much of anything for a while.”
“Am same.”
“Are you going to be okay? You were on fire. Um, Yáo warmed you up to your ACS temperature,” I threw a hand to a lamp.
“Is good good good. Friends save me… I am sick, I will heal.” Rocky moved again, shifting his legs under himself. He was loafing like a cat, I hadn’t seen that before.
“Are you still cold?”
“No, am better.”
I squinted suspiciously at him and hit the button on the surge protector. I watched a shudder run through him.
“Ah. Mmm. Amaze. How work, question?”
“Infrared light. Like Astrophage.”
“Mmm.” He wiggled a little, getting comfortable. “Ship safe, question? Sample is safe, question?”
“Yes and yes. I made an Adrian atmosphere for it and fed in some Astrophage. I sort of… don’t have a way to get a sample out now, though.”
“Why stupid, question?” Very not tactful, but the tone wasn’t accusatory, he was genuinely worried.
“We’re all a little stupid right now. Pain does that. And the medicine we take to stop the pain also does that.”
“Hangover.”
I chuckled a little and winced. “A little like that, yeah.”
“Bad breath.”
“Hey… you can’t even smell— oh, yeah, my lungs. Yeah, those got hurt, too. I’ll heal.”
“I can fix problem with sample. Go to sleep. I watch.”
I managed to walk to bed this time instead of pulling my crawling routine out of The Ring. The bot bandaged my right arm, I’d been bleeding because I yanked my IV out when I rolled out of bed. I hadn’t noticed. It put a fresh needle in the back of my right hand, running out of places to use.
Rocky’s pitch raised, “Hurt. Hurt. Fast. Hurt.”
“It’s alright, I’m okay,” I reassured him. “Just medicine.”
He made a… discontented cooing noise, not convinced, apparently. “Why help me, question?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“Risk life to save me.”
“You’re my friend, I wasn’t just going to let you die. You’ve gotta… get back to Erid.”
“Hm. You all willing to die for Earth. Good humans. You risk self for me, I do same for you. No all Eridians would do this.”
“Yeah, no… not all humans… either,” I said, getting ready to clock out again.
“Friends are brave.”
I smiled, “I… guess so. So are you… nerves of steel.”
“No, nerves are crystalline silicon. Grace tired stupid.”