Chapter Text
Grace
ONE: Launch minus 42 hours 40 minutes and counting
Grace realizes that the last thing he’ll see on Earth will be the small barred window in his tiny room, a snapshot of the sun’s dwindling warmth turning the sky a murky gray. He laughs to himself. Of course Stratt would give him a perfect view of the launchpad. This is your future, he imagines she’s telling him. You will not mess this up.
There’s a heavy clunk as the steel door unlocks and Private Meknikov walks in, Grace tenses but chooses to ignore the Russian soldier. The clouds roll closer to the sun, pushed by a burst of wind that Grace wishes he could feel. He shudders, willing goosebumps to rise on his arm and tries to recreate the automatic curl a body makes when searching for warmth within. In a moment of wistfulness, Grace imagines he can feel the gusts of wind outside—he’s among everyone else in a dying world, but braving the cold with his feet firmly planted on Earth.
The pinch in his neck jolts Grace out of his thoughts.
“No!” Grace shouts, kicking instinctively. “You can’t! You can’t, y- gck!”
Meknikov grunts as he wraps his arms around Grace, wrestling him into a chokehold. The world blurs as Grace silently cries, panic and frustration turning into a terror that leaves him gasping for breath.
As he looks out at the darkening gray skies, Grace feels a strong burst of venom. I hate you, he thinks as Stratt’s face fills his mind. I hate you, he thinks to himself.
TWO: L-10 days and counting
Grace screams before he realizes that he’s saluting. What? His voice slowly dies away. He’s outside, on a ship, looking at the sun. The soft glow of the sunlight highlights the aircraft carrier in streaks of light orange. A crisp breeze brushes his cheeks. It’s… evening?
Stratt looks spooked, but Grace has basically just been murdered so he thinks he deserves a little break.
“Wait a minute,” Grace says, lowering his arm. He has his comfy jacket on and there’s something on his head. He takes it off. It’s his stupid Project Hail Mary hat that Stratt bought. He remembers throwing the hat onto his bed as he contemplated staying on Earth or going to Tau Ceti. What is it doing in his hands?
Blood rushes through his ears, a strange combination of terror and euphoria mounting in his chest.
Grace looks up.
Stratt is still there.
She looks at him, eyes wide. “What?”
He’s suddenly aware that he can hear Ilyukhina drunkenly singing “Party in the USA” horribly out of tune. She’s abruptly cut off.
“I think that’s enough.” Shapiro’s teasing voice echoes.
Shapiro, who was vaporized by a tiny mistake in handling Astrophage, who died along with Dubois.
Grace screams again. Stratt pales and covers her ears, but Grace doesn’t care. He turns and runs down the stairs and into the tight hallways, scrambling past an alarmed soldier standing at attention by the doorway. It’s Meknikov.
“I’m going to mess you up!” Grace shouts at the confused soldier as he flees. “At a later time!” he yells from a safe distance away. He’s running for eight minutes before his adrenaline fades and he has the horrifying realization that he’s been running in circles. Grace stops running and starts hyperventilating.
The edges of his vision gray out and time bends.
Ryland looks out the window and sees a void in place of everything he had once known. The bone-deep despair he feels in his gut seems to know before his mind: Ryland is all alone, approximately 12 lightyears away from home.
He tries not to think about his discovery of two bags the size of bodies.
Grace comes back to the present with a start, finding himself in the pod that was assigned to him for the Baikonur site. It’s pitch black outside. What the f…udge. Grace slaps his face. Get a grip, he thinks, conscious of his quickening breath. He’s on Earth and he’s fine. He’s on Earth and he’s alive. He’s on Earth and… he’s losing his mind.
Grace starts counting to ten- one, two, three, four… Is he in space right now? Is all of this a hallucination? Why can he hear Stratt pacing in her pod next to his? How can the faint smell of burnt coffee be- Grace has to start over his count to ten.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight… Grace had slapped himself in the face earlier. It hurt.
He stands up abruptly and stumbles out of his pod. Stratt’s office was not too far from him, but before he makes it to her door, Grace turns left. The path to imprisonment is still seared into his mind.
A right here and another one here. One more left and hidden in a small corner Grace finds it. The steel doors are open and inside is an inconspicuous room. He looks up at the corner. A small barred window frames the gray clouds outside.
His last view of Earth.
L-9 days and counting
Back in his pod, Grace pulls out a random piece of paper and snags a pen. He begins writing.
Possibility one: It was all a dream. A realistic nightmare… spanning multiple days with an impressive experience observable through smell, touch, and taste. Somehow, a dream that featured a cell he couldn’t have known about. He crosses “nightmare” out.
Possibility two: Grace has gone insane. A spiral down Google search and copious amounts of desperate notes later, Grace believes that he has not been exhibiting many signs of disorientation, sudden mood swings, or a million other symptoms. Still, the strange vision of space had been just as vivid as the cell. Grace puts a question mark under “going insane.”
Possibility three: He’s in a coma right now, dreaming he’s back on Earth. Grace closes his eyes, a burst of yearning pulling at his chest. He remembers the intense desperation to experience the turn of Earth, along with the rest of humanity. A desperate need to be surrounded by people—maybe not even people he likes but people. Then he’d know that he’s alive and won’t die alone surrounded by nothingness.
He opens his eyes. No, he’s not in a coma. He remembers everything and…he looks at possibility one. It’s too real, Grace thinks, even as he stubbornly ignores the lingering doubt that this is wishful thinking making it feel more real.
Possibility four- Grace pauses. Possibility four: He’s gone back in time. He was saluting Stratt. Like he saluted her at the party, in the same place, at the same time, wearing the same clothes and hearing the same people onboard Stratt’s Vat. He heard Shapiro.
He gets up to grab some water, stretching out his back. He groans and paces back and forth.
Grace remembers events that happened after the karaoke party. There was an explosion the next day, Stratt ambushed him with the whole crew and science team, he was given a couple hours to decide if he wanted to live, and then… yeah.
He double-checks the date again. It’s the day of the explosion. It’s already 9:24 am, and nothing has happened. Grace heaves a sigh of relief; he’s not handing coffee to Stratt and he can’t see the research center that would have been vaporized along with some of the brightest scientists. Astrophage didn't go boom. He’s safe.
Grace bites back a laugh at his ridiculous hypothesis. Yeah, right. He’s a time traveler and he can avoid death by traveling through time. What’s next? Teleportation? He crosses time travel out. After some consideration, Grace underlines “going insane.”
The ground rumbles. Uh oh.
Grace rushes outside, but before he can check the origin of the rumbling, he’s pinned to the ground.
“What?” He tries to say, but with his face squished on dirt what comes out sounds more like, “Mrk?”
“Sorry,” a voice says. “But you need to stay down.”
Grace barely registers that Carl has just tackled him when he sees a flash of a syringe.
“This is for your own safety,” Carl says.
Grace’s blood freezes. “No!” he feels a prick of pain in his neck and his vision quickly goes dark.
THREE: L-10 days and counting
Grace is saluting again. And Stratt is staring at him.
“Nope,” he says, and hightails it out of there.
He runs past Metkinov standing guard (“I’ll get you another time!” he shouts), and silently curses out Carl, the traitor. He doesn’t realize he’s crying until he crashes into Dubois.
“You’re crying.” Dubois states.
Grace sobs as he laughs because life is kind of funny. “Yup,” he manages to get out. “And you’re dead.”
Dubois looks at him like he’s stupid. “Not yet. The launch is in ten days. Plus the 11.9 lightyears to Tau Ceti, the testing that needs to be done, the findings-”
“Right.” Grace can’t stop the tears.
Dubois is starting to look concerned. “You are acting unusual.”
“Well,” Grace wipes his face, “I just discovered a major flaw in every single theory about time.”
Dubois’ eyes widen and he leans forward. “Of course, Dr. Grace.” He nods enthusiastically. “Please share.”
Grace’s voice wavers as he shrugs. “I’d show you but I have no idea what’s going on.” He’s starting to panic again. “You keep dying and Shapiro keeps dying. And-and I keep coming back to this stupid ship, saluting Stratt. Which absolutely sucks because she sucks and she doesn’t deserve it. And it would make it a lot easier if I stopped dying!”
Dubois looks nonplussed. “Just show your math.”
“Gah!” Grace says. And then: “Oh.”
He’s just discovered a flaw in every theory’s interpretation of time.
“Genius!” Grace shouts. “Dubois, you are so smart!” He seizes Dubois by the shoulders and hugs him.
“It’s just common sense,” Dubois says, but Grace is already speedwalking away, looking for the nearest empty room. He turns a corner and walks straight into the arms of guards.
FOUR: L-10 days and counting
Grace is back to saluting Stratt.
“Aw, man.” He says, lowering his arm. “I hate this. I hope to never salute you again.” Grace tells Stratt and runs away.
He creeps towards an empty room, double-checking around the corner for guards this time before slipping in. After quickly shutting the door and wrapping a random cord he found around the handle, Grace picks up a small whiteboard and bites off the cap of a marker.
Time has been perceived and theorized as moving forward—first with Newtonian theories about a universal time and later by Einstein’s theory of relativity. There are other, more philosophical theories positing alternate dimensions which have been mostly ignored, with no way to physically test it. But, Grace seems to be experiencing something to that effect. Time is repeating, or maybe moving sideways. There seems to be a consistent point of return, his salute during the karaoke party, and a point of disconnection from that timeline.
But based on the previous three instances, the disconnection point varies. In the first iteration, Grace made it to the day of the launch. The second one, he made it to the ninth day before launch. And…this last one was almost immediate. His point of return was the same day he was sent back.
Grace unhooks the left side of his glasses and drops the mini whiteboard onto a small table.
What changed?
He leans back in his chair as he laces his hands behind his head. His second time at the karaoke party, Grace ran away, freaked out in his pod, and then the explosion happened the next day. Then Carl showed up and basically killed him. Carl—is he at Baikonur right now? Actually, Carl. Carl changed. But Carl wasn’t there this last time. It was guards on Stratt’s Vat.
Worryingly, military people seemed to go after him earlier and earlier. Something else niggles at the back of his mind.
The first time experiencing the explosion, Grace was taking his morning briefing-stroll with Stratt. Except, they always began their walk at 6:00 am sharp wherever they were. They had barely gotten out of the motorcade when the blast of destruction killed Dubois and Shapiro. Yet, his second time through, the explosion didn’t happen until at least three hours later.
Grace picks up the whiteboard again. Assuming causality is still a fundamental element that reliably characterizes the way reality works, what could Grace have done that would prompt these changes? Was it a weird butterfly effect—some tiny, seemingly inconsequential difference that ripples outward and develops into large scale changes?
But Grace has no direct influence, or even that much indirect influence, on the actions of soldiers. Really, only one person has the authority-
The door bursts open and two soldiers barge in.
Grace stands. “Oh, you gotta be-”