Work Text:
The tradition had started, as many things on the VAT started, by accident.
Someone , nobody remembered who, and at this point it was probably better not to investigate , had figured out that the mess hall's projector could be hooked up to a laptop with a standard cable, and that the VAT's satellite connection, while theoretically reserved for research and international conference calls, was more than capable of streaming a film if you waited until eleven PM when Dr. Stratt's communications people were finished for the evening.
The first movie night had been fifteen people huddled around a laptop that one of the engineers had balanced on a stack of journals.
The second had involved the projector. By the third, it was an institution.
Stratt had never officially sanctioned it. She had also never prohibited it. This was, Dr. Grace had explained to Yao with the confidence of a man who had spent six months learning to interpret Stratt's silences, as close to a ringing endorsement as you were likely to get.
"She walked through the mess at half eleven last week," Grace had said, "looked at the screen for approximately four seconds, said nothing, and left. Four seconds, Yao. She was assessing the film choice. That's basically a thumbs up."
Yao had been reasonably certain that was not what had happened, but he also hadn't argued. Dr. Grace had a gift for finding optimism in the most structurally unsound places and, on a boat full of people working on humanity's last chance at survival, that was probably a more useful trait than rigorous epistemology.
Tonight was a Friday. Movie nights were Fridays, except when they were Thursdays due to scheduling conflicts, or Saturdays when something had gone wrong on a Friday.
Tonight was definitively a Friday. Nothing had gone wrong. Yao counted this as a victory.
He arrived at the mess at half past ten to find it already half-full.
Grace was there, which was notable. Grace was reliably there , movie nights were one of approximately four circumstances under which the man could be guaranteed to stop working before midnight. The others were: a direct instruction from Stratt, a lab emergency, or someone physically unplugging his equipment and standing between him and the power socket. The movie nights worked because Grace genuinely loved films, in the earnest, slightly embarrassing way he loved most things, and because Ilyukhina had at some point made it abundantly clear that he was expected to attend and that she would take it personally if he didn't.
He was currently sitting in the middle of the second row of chairs someone had dragged in from the side offices, with a bowl of popcorn on his knee and his legs stretched out in front of him, looking, for the first time in recent memory, like a man who had nowhere specific to be.
"You're early," Yao said.
"Shapiro said she had a suggestion." Grace's voice had the carefully neutral quality of a man managing his expectations.
"I wanted to get a good seat before Ilyukhina takes the only comfortable chair again."
"I heard that !" said Ilyukhina, from the comfortable chair.
"Good. I meant it affectionately."
"Of course you did."
Dubois arrived carrying two mugs of something hot and handed one to Grace without being asked. Carl was already there, sitting slightly apart from the main cluster in the way Carl always sat, close enough to participate but positioned such that he could observe the room with equal ease. Dr. Lokken came in behind Yao, still holding a pen and a clipboard, making no attempt to pretend he hadn't been working until two minutes ago.
Shapiro arrived last, laptop under one arm, looking pleased with herself in the particular way that meant she'd already made a decision and was waiting for everyone else to catch up.
"Right," she said, pulling up a chair and spinning the laptop to face the group, "I found something."
"What kind of something?" Dubois asked.
"New release. Dropped this week on streaming, had a limited theatrical run last month. Tom Ryder."
"Oh, he's good." Ilyukhina straightened slightly. "What is it?"
Shapiro read from the screen: "Across Every Distance. Tom Ryder's most personal project yet, a sweeping romantic epic about the distances we travel and the people who make the journey worth it. Breathtaking practical stunts, haunting original score. Critics are calling it career-defining."
"Career-defining is good," said Carl.
"I watched the trailer. There's a sequence on a cliff in the first act that looked genuinely dangerous."
"Practical stunts," Lokken said, looking up from his clipboard for the first time. "Not CGI?"
"The production notes say they used real locations for everything."
"I'm in," said Ilyukhina.
"I'm in," said Dubois.
Carl nodded. Lokken put the clipboard down, which Yao took as a yes. He looked at Grace.
Grace was eating popcorn. He had not said anything. His expression was the expression of a man who had decided on a face and was committed to it.
"Grace?" Shapiro prompted.
"Sure," he said. "Romantic epic with practical stunts. What's not to like."
It was slightly less enthusiastic than his normal film-night energy, but it was late, and they were all tired, and Yao didn't think much of it.
Shapiro connected to the projector.
The title card came up in gold.
ACROSS EVERY DISTANCE
Tom Ryder, Yao had to concede, was very good at his job.
Forty minutes in, the room had settled into the specific quiet of people who had forgotten they were watching a film. The plot was involving ... a scientist working on something classified and important, a love story interrupted by circumstance and distance, Tom Ryder doing what Tom Ryder apparently did best, which was looking at people like they were the answer to questions he'd spent years asking.
The scientist, the love interest, was played by an actor Yao didn't immediately recognise. Brown hair, slightly rumpled, a way of explaining things quickly and then catching himself and backing up when he registered confusion on other people's faces. A certain quality of enthusiasm that read as genuine rather than performed, like the character couldn't quite help caring this much about the work.
He was watching Grace eat popcorn when he noticed.
It was subtle enough that he might have missed it. The character on screen had turned slightly under the lights in a corridor, and the angle caught something , a similarity, a resonance, a structural echo that Yao's brain filed under interesting before he'd consciously registered what he was comparing it to.
He looked at the screen.
He looked at Grace.
The character on screen had Grace's mouth and Grace's haircut and Grace's particular way of holding himself when he was standing still, which was to say with his weight slightly too far forward, like he was perpetually three seconds from moving somewhere.
Yao put this observation to one side and kept watching.
Twelve minutes later, Tom Ryder's character walked into a lab where the scientist was working alone, sat on the edge of a bench, and said:
"You know what your problem is? You forget to eat unless someone puts food directly in front of you."
The scientist didn't look up from his notebook. "I eat."
"You eat when I feed you. That's different."
The scientist looked up then, with an expression of mild affront, and said, "That is factually inaccurate," and Tom Ryder laughed.
Yao became very still.
He had heard that exact exchange. In this mess hall. Approximately three weeks ago.
He had been the one to say you forget to eat unless someone puts food directly in front of you, and Grace had said that is factually inaccurate.
He stared at the screen.
The character's name, the scientist , Yao had registered it in passing in the opening act and filed it away , appeared again in a title card on a lab door.
Dr. Ryland Gradce.
Oh.
Oh.
"Pause it." he said.
It came out very calm. He was proud of that.
Shapiro paused it.
Everyone turned to look at him. He was already looking at Grace.
Grace had gone very carefully, very deliberately still, in the manner of a small animal that has decided the best response to a predator is to stop existing as a perceivable entity.
"That character," Yao said.
"Mm," said Grace.
"His name is Ryland."
"Reasonably common name."
"Ryland Gradce," Yao said. "G-R-A-D-C-E."
A pause.
"It's a completely..."
"That is an anagram of your name with one extra letter."
Silence.
It was the silence of a room full of scientists registering a variable they had not previously accounted for and running rapid recalculations.
Then Ilyukhina said, slowly and with great weight, "Ryland."
"It's a common name."
"He's wearing your shirt."
Everyone looked at the paused screen. The fictional Ryland Gradce was wearing a blue and grey flannel shirt over a dark t-shirt.
Everyone looked at Grace.
Grace was wearing a blue and grey flannel shirt over a dark t-shirt.
"I own multiple..."
"That is the shirt you're wearing right now," Dubois said.
"Flannel shirts look similar..."
"Ryland." Ilyukhina stood up. She stood up with the energy of a woman who had just been given information she intended to pursue to its logical conclusion and nothing was going to prevent her. "Do you know Tom Ryder?"
Grace ate a piece of popcorn. This was, Yao thought, not the response of a man who did not know Tom Ryder.
"...Define know."
"Oh my god," said Shapiro.
The room erupted.
It took approximately four minutes to get things back to a manageable volume, during which Grace made one (1) serious attempt to stand up, was physically prevented from leaving by Ilyukhina sitting back down directly beside him, ate three more pieces of popcorn with the focus of a man who was trying to be somewhere else mentally, and said the words "look, it's complicated" twice, neither time convincingly.
"Okay," Dubois said, when the noise had settled enough that speech was possible. "From the beginning. Slowly."
"There isn't a beginning..."
"Grace."
Grace looked at the ceiling. He looked at the paused screen. He looked at the door with the expression of a man measuring distances. He looked at Ilyukhina, who gave him a smile that contained no warmth and a great deal of expectation.
He sighed.
"Tom Ryder is... my ex-boyfriend," he said.
Shapiro made a sound like she had swallowed her own tongue.
"We dated for..." Grace stopped. He started again. "We were together for a while. It ended. I ended it. I thought that was ... I thought we were both on the same page about that." He looked at the paused film. The frozen frame showed Tom Ryder holding the fictional Ryland's face in both hands with an expression of devastating sincerity. "Apparently there was a page I missed."
"How long ago?" Lokken asked.
"Three years, roughly."
"And he made a film."
"He made a film."
"About you."
"About a character named Ryland Gradce who wears my clothes and works in a lab and has my conversation habits, yes." Grace's voice was admirably flat. "Yes."
"The title," Dubois said, with the tone of someone piecing things together as he spoke. "Across Every Distance. You're... we're on a ship, in the middle of the ocean."
"I'm aware of where I am, yes."
"He's talking about..."
"I understand what he's doing, DuBois."
"That's either incredibly romantic or quite alarming," said Lokken.
"You said it ended," Yao said carefully. "Did he ... did he know that?"
Grace ran a hand through his hair. "I told him it was over. He said he didn't accept that. I thought he was ... I thought that would pass. People say dramatic things. I had the conversation, I thought it was done." He looked at the screen again, at the poster-perfect image of Tom Ryder looking at the fictional version of him with his whole heart on his face. "He didn't accept it."
"He really didn't," Ilyukhina said, with a complicated mix of expressions that seemed to contain both deep sympathy and genuine amusement fighting for dominance.
"Can we also..." Carl, who had said nothing until now, spoke in his usual measured way, which meant everyone listened. "Can we address the part where this film is streaming? Internationally? Meaning anyone can watch it?"
Grace put his face in his hands.
"Yes," he said, muffled. "Yes, they can."
"Your mum could watch this film," Shapiro said.
"I'm aware."
"Everyone you've ever met could watch this film."
"Shapiro."
"The entire scientific community..."
"Shapiro."
"I'm just..."
"I am aware of the scope of the distribution, thank you."
Ilyukhina patted his knee. It was not entirely clear whether this was comfort or strategy.
"Wait!" said Yao.
Grace looked at him with the eyes of a man who had already seen what was coming and had accepted it.
"How..." Yao said, "...did you meet Tom Ryder?"
"I would prefer not to..."
"Grace."
Grace sighed. It was a different kind of sigh from the previous ones , less mortified, more something that might have been resignation with a seam of genuine fondness underneath it, if you looked carefully. "My brother..." he said.
"Your brother," Ilyukhina repeated.
"My twin. Colt." Grace said it like the name was something he'd said many thousands of times. "He works in film. Has done for years. He's ... he works on the physical side of things. Stunts." He paused. "Specifically, he's Tom Ryder's stunt double."
The room went so quiet that Yao could hear the ship.
"Your twin brother..." Dubois said very slowly, "...is the stunt double for Tom Ryder."
"Has been for about fifteen years."
"Which means your brother and Tom Ryder look..."
"Colt and I are identical, yes." Grace said it with the particular patience of a man who had answered this exact implicit question many times in his life. "So yes. Approximately. With some differences. Colt has better hair and he's slightly taller and he's never once tried to explain the carbon cycle to anyone at a party."
"And your brother invited you to set," Yao said.
"He used to. Before all..." Grace gestured broadly at the ship around them. "Before. He'd call me up and say come and watch, it'll be good for you, Ry, you spend too much time in the lab, come and watch someone pretend to fall off a building." He smiled slightly.
"He wasn't wrong about the lab thing. I went a few times. Colt introduced me to people. Tom and I got talking."
"Over what?" Shapiro asked.
Grace looked at her. There was a pause. "He asked me what I was working on. I told him. He asked a follow-up question. I kept expecting him to stop being interested, and he didn't." Another pause. "He never did, actually. Annoying trait."
The mess hall was very quiet.
"So you dated..." Yao said.
"We dated. It was ... it was good, for a while. Different worlds, complicated logistics, but it was..." He stopped.
"It was good. And then I changed my profession to teaching at a primary school in another city, and things got complicated and I ended it. Then I was offered to join the Petrova Taskforce." He picked up his popcorn bowl again and looked at it without eating anything. "I thought he understood."
"He made a forty-million-dollar film about not understanding." Ilyukhina said, gently.
"Forty-seven." said Shapiro, who had pulled out her phone and was reading. "The budget was forty-seven million. It's performing very well. There's a..." She stopped.
Everyone looked at her.
"There's a quote in an interview," she said, in a careful voice.
"Tom Ryder, press junket for this film, last month." She turned the phone around.
Nobody moved for a moment. Then Dubois leaned over and read aloud: "'I made this for someone specific. He knows who he is. I hope he watches it and understands that some distances aren't as final as you think they are.'"
Grace stared at the ceiling.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. Can we watch the rest of the film."
"Are you..." Yao started.
"I'm fine. I'm ... yes. I'd like to know how it ends, actually. Given the circumstances." He straightened. "Academically."
Shapiro reached for the remote.
"If anyone says anything during the scientist's scenes..." Grace said, without looking at anyone, "I will revoke their popcorn privileges indefinitely. I have that power. I will use it."
"You don't have that power," said Ilyukhina.
"I'm Stratt's head of research. I have some power."
"You once forgot to eat lunch for four days in a row."
"That was one time."
"Four consecutive days is not one time, Ryland, that's a pattern."
Grace opened his mouth, closed it, and turned to face the screen with the expression of a man choosing his battles.
The film resumed.
The ending was, Yao thought, objectively very good. Tom Ryder's character stood in the rain outside a building that was clearly supposed to represent a research facility, and said, loudly, to no one in particular: "I don't care how far away you go. I will wait."
The credits rolled.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then Dubois said, very quietly: "He waits."
"Yes," said Grace. "I noticed."
"In the rain."
"It was a cinematic choice."
"Ryland..."
"I know, DuBois."
More silence. The credits finished. Shapiro closed the laptop, which clicked back the mess hall to its usual lighting.
Grace sat for a moment, popcorn bowl balanced on his knee, and Yao thought, not for the first time, and probably not for the last , that for all Grace's professional manner and his lab hours and his somewhat aggressive normalcy in the face of being one of the most important scientists on earth, he was also just a person, and he had an ex-boyfriend who had made a forty-seven-million-dollar film about missing him, and that was a complicated thing to sit with in a room full of colleagues at eleven thirty on a Friday night.
Ilyukhina, because Ilyukhina had her moments, didn't say anything. She just handed him the rest of her popcorn.
He took it.
"Right..." Grace said eventually, and he stood up, and he gathered himself, and he was once again Dr. Grace, head of the Astrophage Research Taskforce, responsible and tired and fundamentally fine. "Good film. Good stunts. I'm going to sleep. Nobody mention this in the lab tomorrow."
"Of course." said Yao.
"Obviously." said Dubois.
Ilyukhina said nothing, which was, now Yao thought about it, somewhat different from agreeing.
The News Travels
It travelled the way all news on the VAT travelled, which was to say not by phone, not by message, not by any official channel, but by the inefficient and unstoppable medium of human beings walking through corridors and saying things to each other.
It started, as best as Yao could reconstruct it later, with Shapiro.
Shapiro, to her credit, had not set out to tell anyone. She had simply gone to return a spectrometer to the equipment bay at seven thirty the following morning and run into Dr. Leclerc, who had said good morning and asked why she looked like she'd slept badly, and she had said well, we watched the Tom Ryder film last night, and he had said oh, the new one, I've been meaning to watch that, and she had said yes, funny story about that film, actually.
By nine o'clock, Leclerc had told Komorov. Komorov was constitutionally incapable of keeping information to himself, which was a somewhat paradoxical trait in a man working on a classified project, but nobody had ever managed to cure him of it. By ten, Komorov had told Dr. Redell. Redell, whose life experiences had given him a finely calibrated appreciation for absurdity, told the story to two engineers over coffee, because it was genuinely too good not to.
By lunch, the mess hall contained the specific low-grade hum of a room full of people who are all pretending not to know something.
Grace walked in at quarter past twelve, collected a plate from the buffet line, and looked up.
He looked around the room.
Several people who had been looking at him immediately looked elsewhere.
He looked at Yao.
Yao kept his face very still.
"Who..." said Grace, quietly and with great precision, "...told people."
"It may have ... spread organically," said Yao.
"Organically," Grace repeated. He sat down. He looked at his food. He looked at the room, where people were very carefully eating lunch and absolutely not staring at him. "How many people."
Yao made a small noncommittal sound.
"Yao."
"Approximately... most of them."
Grace put his fork down. He picked it up. He put it down again.
"Komorov," he said, flatly.
"He may have been a vector, yes."
"Did Stratt..."
"I don't know."
Grace nodded slowly. He picked up his fork. He ate a piece of his lunch in silence. Across the mess, Komorov had developed a very intense interest in his own soup. Dr. Redell, to his credit, met Grace's eye and gave a small apologetic shrug that conveyed at least some genuine contrition.
"Okay," Grace said. "Okay." He said it the way he said a lot of things when he was deciding not to make them bigger than they needed to be.
"Fine. It's fine. It's not like he kept it secret , there's a press quote, apparently. Anyone who wanted to know already can."
"That is a generous perspective." Yao said.
"I'm a generous person."
"You once put a passive-aggressive note on the coffee machine that said 'for the love of all that is left of our solar system CLEAN THE FILTER.'"
"That was practical instruction, not aggression." He paused. "The filter genuinely needed cleaning."
Yao did not argue this point.
Grace ate his lunch. People gradually stopped pretending not to look at him and went back to their conversations, which was the social equivalent of the sea settling after a disturbance. By the end of the meal, things were almost normal.
Except for the moment, on his way out, when Komorov stopped him at the door with the expression of a large man who has done something he knows he shouldn't have.
"Grace," he said. "I am ... sorry about the..."
"It's fine, Dimitri."
"He does seem to love you very much, from the film."
"Komorov..."
"Very much. The rain scene..."
"I know about the rain scene."
"'I will wait,'" Komorov said, solemnly, with conviction, as if this were a toast.
Grace closed his eyes. "Thank you, Dimitri. For your input. Please go back to your soup."
Stratt found him at four o'clock.
This was not, in itself, unusual. Stratt routinely found Grace at four o'clock to brief him on something, or to collect a briefing from him, or occasionally to physically remove him from a lab he'd been sitting in since seven AM. What was slightly less usual was the specific quality of her expression as she came through the door, which was not quite like any of her standard expressions. It was not the Expression of Incoming Administrative Problem. It was not the Expression of Someone Has Done Something Inadvisable. It was something Yao, watching from across the room, would have described as ... entertained, if Stratt were a person who was entertained by things, which she technically was but gave limited evidence of.
She stood in front of his desk. She said nothing for a moment.
Grace looked up. He looked back down at his work. He looked up again.
"Don't." he said.
"I haven't said anything."
"You have a face."
"I always have a face."
"You have a specific face right now."
Stratt was quiet for another moment. Then she said, with the precision of someone choosing words carefully for reasons of their own: "I watched the trailer."
Grace set down his pen. He set it down in the way of a man setting down something that might become a projectile if he held it any longer. "Did you."
"Forty-seven million dollar budget. It's doing well internationally."
"I've heard."
"The character is called Ryland Gradce."
"I'm aware."
"G-R-A-D-C-E."
"Stratt. Please."
"One extra letter."
"I know."
"He changed one letter."
"Eva!" he said, and he almost never called her Eva, which meant he was either genuinely distressed or genuinely embarrassed or some precise combination of both. "I understand the situation."
Stratt looked at him for a moment. She had, he knew, pulled him out of his classroom and put him on this ship and made him responsible for a mission that would determine the survival of the species. She had done it without asking. She had relied on him, in her way, more than she relied on most people. She had never once, in all of that, expressed anything that could be clearly identified as sympathy.
She said: "He seems serious about it."
"He's always been serious about things." Grace said, quietly. "That was never the problem."
Stratt looked at him for another moment. Then she said, "The Hail Mary launches in eleven months."
"I know."
"There are more important things to think about."
"I know."
"Nevertheless..." she said, and stopped, and seemed to decide something. "Nevertheless. You should contact your brother."
Grace looked at her. "Why?"
"Because..." Stratt said, with the air of someone making a concession they will never speak of again, "Colt apparently left three messages with my communications office this morning. He says to tell you that he tried to warn you, that this is what Tom is like, and that you should have taken his calls when you still had a working phone signal." She paused. "He also said, and I'm quoting directly, 'tell Ry I told him so approximately six years ago and I want it on the record.'"
Grace stared at her.
Then, slowly, despite everything, despite the entire mess of it, his mouth curved at one corner.
"Classic Colt." he said.
"I'll arrange a communication window this evening." Stratt said. "Thirty minutes. Don't spend it arguing about the film."
"We'll absolutely spend it arguing about the film."
"I know." she said, and walked out, and Yao was almost certain , not quite, but almost , that her mouth did something in the corridor that was not entirely not a smile.
Grace called Colt at eight o'clock, in the communications room, alone.
Yao did not listen at the door. He was simply walking past the door when the sound of laughter came through it , genuine laughter, unguarded and bright, the kind Grace almost never did in public , and he kept walking, because some things were private.
He did hear, as he turned the corner, the tail end of one sentence.
"...you absolute disaster, Ry..."
And then the corridor swallowed the rest of it, and the Atlantic moved dark and cold outside the portholes, and somewhere very far away, a man who loved someone had made a film about it, and named his character one letter off, so there was no question who it was for.
Yao thought about it the whole way back to his quarters.
He thought it was, probably, the most human thing he'd heard in months.