Chapter Text
“What’s two plus two?”
His heart hammered in his chest, too fast to be comfortable. Something like the trace of panic laced his blood, his bones, and there was irritation there, too, intertwined with it all like a dizzying cocktail of sudden emotional flurry.
He felt like he had been running, though he couldn’t feel his limbs; not in an exhausted sort of way. The absence was more conditioned, like he simply hadn’t needed to think about the fact that he had legs and arms and feet and hands in a long while.
“What’s two plus two?”
The irritation tipped the scale over. A computerised female voice pestered him again and again. His heart hammered, still, but now it had that bitter taste of frustration to it.
He didn’t know where he was. His eyes felt like they were seared together with a soldering iron, the lids heavy like led. He didn’t know what was happening, why this computer was asking him a preschooler level question. Four! He wanted to yell, if only to make it quiet down, but his mouth refused to answer him. And his heart kept on hammering, unceasing. Some bad dream, he must have had.
Except there was no trace of it in his mind. Not even that faint outline of a memory, a sound, a texture. Only the adrenaline in his veins, the fast pace of his blood flow.
He battled his body into some state of submission. Vision, first, then speech and finally breath. Motion as a whole proved more challenging, too many variables, too many small elements to coordinate. His mind was slowly coming online, a sort of steady widening stream of consciousness. Like turning the stopcock open on the burette of his mind.
He ignored the strangeness of the thought. There were more pressing issues to attend to.
Tubes, wires, the robot arms above him. Adrenaline, but also exhaustion.
He didn’t want to go sleep again. He felt like there was something dire he needed to see to. His body and mind, however, were overtaken by such a powerful spell of fatigue it was all he could do to close his mouth to stop it from drying out more in his sleep.
The second time he awoke, the adrenaline was still there, but the trace idea of where it had come from was gone. There was only the drive to get up, to move forward, to complete his objective—the objective was unknown, only a whisper, buried somewhere in his consciousness.
“What’s your name?” he was interrupted as he tried to get up.
Nobody—so my mother and father call me.
“Incorrect,” he would have laughed if he could figure out where the thought had come from and why he’d spoken it out loud. It had to have been a quote, but from where? Something he’d read recently, perhaps, except it suddenly dawned on him that he had no clear idea of reading anything, only that he had to have done it, at some point. He could read; he was sure of that.
“Attempt number two: what’s your name?”
He had to have one, didn’t he? People had those. They had names and ages and birthdays, he was confident, but he didn’t seem to remember any at all.
“I am the sand guardian, guardian of the sand!”
“Incorrect, attempt number three: what’s your name?”
He was snickering now. It hurt his throat. What the heck was that? His mind-mouth filter didn’t work, yet. Or maybe that was just how he’d always been—speak first, think later.
Wasn’t that a terrible realisation? That he had no clue, if this was a temporary flaw or a consistent facet of his character?
Remember. Your objective.
What objective, he wanted to ask but couldn’t. His mind didn’t answer to him, not yet.
More sleep wouldn’t fix it. He had no say in the matter.
A memory. San Francisco solo apartment and The Red Line. Something like a reflex to turn away awoke within him when he spotted the very corporeal red line of his blood on the floor.
The dead people that didn’t move him at all; yes, they were too far gone, and strangers to him, at least for the moment, but perhaps he was just a psychopath. Or was it sociopath?
He didn’t know. He wasn’t a psychologist.
Something was pressing on his mind, a burning hole, like there was supposed to be an associated thought there, but…
This wasn’t helping.
No memory, no name, no nothing. Only a faint idea that he was meant to be doing something; an instinct that was buried inside, now, not so pressing as before, but still decidedly there. Only that, and a body that was exhausted, muscular but yet still weak.
Irritation, again.
Well, at least it’s a constant to hold onto.
Not a psychologist/psychiatrist, but maybe a doctor?
He would have tested the title before his name, if he had one of those. Wasn’t that oddly freeing, though? No name… something silly, to play with.
I will be… Albert Einstein, King of Lightland, Ruler of all Energy!
He laughed, and it still hurt, though less. The meal had already made him stronger, and his throat was less raw.
“Self-ambulation detected,” said the computer. “What’s your name?”
“I am Emperor Comatose. Kneel before me.”
“Incorrect.”
The computer was far less amusing than it could’ve been. He sighed.
His field trip led him to a laboratory, and that pressed on his mind too. It was part of the objective, perhaps. Perhaps he worked at a lab doing something important. He had to be a scientist. What kind?
Question one: lab coat?
Necessary.
Not a physicist.
Question two: laboratory goggles?
… maybe.
His vision was slightly blurry. Right, perhaps he wore glasses as a whole. That was unhelpful.
Question three: gloves?
Personal and sample protection.
What useful information—like his head was a walking safety protocol. Still, if it was also sample protection… he gazed around the room, locked in on the laminar chamber. That felt like something he used a lot.
Some type of biologist, then. If this was a patient ward, perhaps he’d been working on the cure to whatever ailment had… removed the other people from the world, and he’d gotten sick in the interim? He didn’t feel sick, but he still wasn’t sure how much he was supposed to be feeling; a grogginess like from a long hard sleep after a night of drinking.
The calculations that ran though his head were all over the place; not methodically—from some intrinsic knowledge, he knew them to be right—but by virtue of the science. A broad spectrum of knowledge, some inkling of how physics worked, enough to figure out viscosity or volume or displacement; enough to call simpler formulas to the forefront of his mind.
Acceleration is the second derivative of position with respect to time—
Perhaps even a little more than a simple understanding of the subject, then.
And there was this giddy feeling as he did his gravity experiment, like he was recalling somebody else doing it—
“—is 5 inches!”
“Is not!”
“Hey, guys! Before we start arguing about inches, let’s look at the formula again, okay? I know this is exciting, but look; what do we see?”
“…centimeters…”
“Good job, Ma—”
The stopwatch was familiar. He had done this sort of thing before, this hands-on sort of visual science that led to palpable conclusions, numbers that felt like more than just symbols in an equation.
Interesting. Not of much use, but interesting.
He did know more than just the bare minimum, that was for certain. He scribbled fervently on a wall, mad-scientist style in a toga of bedsheets and some strange drive to complete an unknown task. This wasn’t the task, but maybe it would lead him to it.
Oh.
He wasn’t on Earth, was he?
There it was again, a memory. Dinner with Marissa, talking about the Petrova Problem; trying to drink away the trepidation. His mind had to contain something, then, some semblance of a personality.
I am not a vegetarian. I am not abstinent. I have a friend.
Wasn’t that a depressing sequence of information? Still no name, not his own, but at least something more towards that objective—the Petrova problem. Not a human sickness, then, but a planetary one.
Which meant those people weren’t random patients.
His world was small, for the moment. Only two rooms, a ladder. A laboratory and what was now closest to a morgue. A robot that spoke in a feminine voice and took care of him, like some sort of fudged up auto-nanny.
It suddenly felt too big, anyway.
He felt weightless for a few seconds, not physically but in that sort of mental way, where the mind decides it simply can’t deal with anything anymore and the world becomes a rushing movie scene, the person—a spectator, not there in any capacity beyond as an observer. Then, it faded, his body physical again and tears on his face and an emotion, too strong, unnamed, not one that he could ever hope to contain.
His mind didn’t run in thoughts anymore. The objective fell away. His heart still hammered and it almost hurt him, in that.
He was alone. These two people, his friends, more than that, were dead.
He had loved them; that he was sure of. It didn’t matter how, didn’t matter when they last spoke, it didn’t even matter that he could hardly remember anything about them. That he didn’t know their names. They were his people, and now they were—
He tried to stand again, found that he couldn’t quite figure out a way to arrange his limbs. It was too much. They were dead. What was he supposed to do? He couldn’t deal with whatever this was alone. He needed somebody to help him, needed a guiding hand, he was unable to do this alone. He didn’t even know what needed doing. He didn’t know anything. He needed another person to hold him through it, to—
He bit down on his hand, an instinct, perhaps. It didn’t help, it only hurt, so bad, suddenly and he only started to cry harder. He was out of breath. He couldn’t catch himself again, lost in this space where he didn’t know what his next step should be.
He hit his chest with his fist, then again, heaving. His vision was too blurry, swimming, the light around him a sea…
He crawled over to the bed and beneath it; it was a smaller space that he could tuck himself into to feel a semblance of safety. He wanted to say something, to say their names, to ask them to wake up, futile effort though that was; his mouth opened but only more sobs fell out, broken. Unheard by anybody.
He wanted—
He didn’t know what he wanted. He didn’t know anything.
More tears. He wrapped his arms around himself, fought against the sudden restraint of the bedsheets. He was in pain, and that wasn’t okay. He was sad, and that wasn’t okay either. He felt hungry, too, maybe, or thirsty, and the lack of knowledge was also not okay. Everything was wrong. He couldn’t fix it.
He pressed the side of his thumb into his mouth, chewed on the skin more softly than before. His breath came out of his mouth, hitting the now wet skin in rapid exhales. He closed his eyes, tried to do anything to feel better, but he couldn’t figure out what. He barely knew how to name a single cause for his tears. It was too hard. He was alone.
A foggy memory pushed to his mind, not anything concrete, only...
-You have to breathe…-
-Breathe through your mouth,-
and just like that, it vanished.
The robot was saying something. He couldn’t begin to make out the words. He pushed himself as hard as he could against the metal and plastic on his sides, couldn’t help but whine as a headache began to press on his eyes. Why did his head hurt? Why was he crying? Why couldn’t he breathe?
He wrapped his arms around his legs and bit down on his forearm. It hurt again, it didn’t help, and he didn’t know why he’d done it if he already knew the action was in no way a solution. He pushed himself forward, then backward, rocking on the ground, his back hitting the metal behind him softly every so often.
That instruction, from his memory, again:
-have to breathe-
-mouth-
Over in a flash.
He opened his mouth, trying to get in a gulping breath. There was some familiarity in it, a part of his mind that relied on muscles and routine, not on memories, to get a hold on this moment. He puffed out his cheeks, letting the air stay inside, but something like bile came up his throat and he was forced to exhale forcibly, with another sob.
“—emotional distress,” said the robot voice. It grated on his ears, and the robot arms were objectively horrifying.
“No, no, no…” he managed, thought he didn’t know who he was talking to, or why, or what he was trying to say.
He was shivering.
“Physical and emotional distress,” the robot repeated.
The light dimmed in the room. He bit his lip, then once more pushed a finger between his teeth, the side of his thumb. It was an unconscious decision, again. It made him stop trying to breathe through his mouth, but it was something else to focus on. Something to keep his breath from spiralling farther.
He was tired. Everything was terrible.
“Playing: nature sounds. Locating patient.”
A noise like wind brushing against trees and rain falling over pavement. A thunderless storm in a dark room, sounds like he was in a cabin, tucked away safe and warm in a forest.
He could feel his heart, his pulse. It was so high.
His small space was beginning to feel suffocating. He crawled out of it, tried to stand up and finally managed with the help of his hands on a wall.
“Patient detected.”
He froze. The robot arms rushed towards him, and he wanted to run but he was so scared, his heart was beating too fast and he was still so out of breath, his throat aching from the crying and tears still falling down his face, a headache unrelenting, present, pressing on his eyes, everything was wrong—
The arm inserted a syringe into his vein. He screamed.
“…stering sedative, 8 mg midazolam. Restraining patient.”
He tried to move away, but the arms grabbed at him. Two of them held him in place, not painfully, but firmly enough to make him cry even more. From this angle, he could see his two deaddeaddead friends, and it was too harsh a reality to remain in without anguish.
“Let me go—” he sobbed at the arms. He felt his mind giving way to some sort of pleasant blankness.
The robot voice didn’t respond.
His breathing suddenly stopped jumping. A deep serenity spread through his system. Like being wrapped in a blanket and held, his mind supplied, the thoughts coming at a snail’s pace. Like curling into the armrest of a couch with hot chocolate and a good article. The robot arms released their hold on his arms and for a moment in the blissful nothingness, in the awareness that was filtered through a thick mist, he was worried that he would fall forward. They caught him again, though, only differently. He was led to the bed, more so lifted and carried there and tucked in again.
The world dimmed, and he was asleep again.
He woke up again feeling better. Not only emotionally, but physically, too. There was some sort of ointment, probably numbing cream, over the places on his arms where he’d desperately bitten at the flesh, and his head felt pleasantly fuzzy, the way it did when one took a codeine pill to ward off aches.
His thinking was clearer than before, in spite of the drug-induced haze.
The robot offered him another meal. He ate it, swinging his legs beneath him, sat upright on the bed. It helped stretch out the muscles and occupied his mind.
When he finished gulping down water, the coolness of it a relief on his rough throat, he closed his eyes and prepared to look towards his…
His ex-crew members.
He couldn’t remember how he got back to the bed. He figured it was the sedative’s effect; it was likely a mild anterograde amnesia inducer—something to stop a memory from forming; he’d definitely heard its name before, though now he could scarcely repeat it again.
“That was kind of unnecessary,” he said to the robot. His voice was still shaky at best, but speaking out loud was probably the only way to get it back to being steady. “I don’t have many of those as is. Memories, I mean.”
He tried to laugh to himself, but the joke felt flat.
Some part of him, an uncomfortable and cutting part of his mind, was embarrassed at the memory of what he did remember. That he’d needed the sedation at all, that he’d broken down like a child, that he had crawled around the floor, trying to pacify himself but unable to. He pushed it away. There wasn’t any time to mourn his own behaviour; the objective was back, still unidentified, but important, and he’d wasted enough time.
He jumped off the bed and walked over to the woman. Or rather, he tried to, but not two steps in the computer voice flared.
“Angular anomaly!”
He sighed. He had no clue what that meant, and with how little he remembered, and still high on codeine or some other painkiller, he was likely of little use in fixing whatever problem had occurred. Maybe if he ignored it, the complaint would go away.
He walked closer to the woman.
She didn’t look beautiful. Her skin was like parchment, old and dried and dead. Her eyes were closed, which was a relief. His heart still picked up speed, but nothing so harsh as before.
“She’s dead,” he said, quietly. “And that’s… that’s just how it is.”
He felt uncomfortable, gazing at the body. It was an unfamiliar sight and one that made his skin crawl. He probably didn’t see a lot of them before, didn’t work with a lot of dead people. He hadn’t expected to, but it was nice to have confirmation.
Though it felt inappropriate in the moment, he opted for a thought experiment.
“Okay, if this wasn’t… my friend, and it was a mouse… okay, yeah, I’d be uncomfortable as heck.”
He tried to imagine injecting the animal with something or cutting it open. A shiver ran down his arms.
“Right. So I don’t work in vivo, probably. Or I’m really bad at it.”
“Angular anomaly!”
“Oh, shut it,” he waved the robot off.
He focused on the woman’s face. It wasn’t destroyed. It was still distinctly dead.
She was his friend, and yet those features, which he probably knew well, were now the anatomy of a stranger—
He turned away. This wasn’t helping.
Memory flash:
-Cry later!-
-Mission first!-
it helped, maybe a little, to remember being yelled at like that.
He sat down on the ground, cross legged, his hands on his knees; like for meditation. He could probably focus enough to get some sort of memory back.
His mind felt like it was trying to give him everything back desperately, except there was nothing to give. Such a degree of memory loss was too noticeable. He wasn’t just born today, so why was his memory that of a person with barely a few days to their name?
He took a deep breath, tried to push something to the surface.
There it was.
He noted down the information on a dry-erase board he found at the lab. Why did somebody send a dry erase board to space? He didn’t know, but half of the objects at the lab looked distinctly like they belonged anywhere but on a spaceship. Did pipettes even work in space? He supposed they did give him gravity, stronger than anticipated though it was, so perhaps that issue was also resolved.
WHO AM I?
His own handwriting stared at him from the board. It changed, depending on the marker, and he seemed to not favour any particular hold. It wasn’t anything important, but it was something.
The list ran down. Science, Bay Area, a diner-lover who was bad at cooking. He liked bacon and eggs, and with that thought came a silly repulsion at the thought of tomato soup, so he put that down as well. His plate in the memory had had cilantro on it, and if he was a regular at the place, then they probably would have known if it bothered him, so he wrote “okay w/ cilantro” on there for good measure.
He was muscular. Had that always been the case? Not bodybuilder physique, for certain, but something more than a hint of muscle beneath flesh. There was still fat on his body, an amount likely closer to the lower recommended range for his age (that, unfortunately, he still had no read on; he had yet to even find a mirror to try a visual estimation), but fat nonetheless. He was a healthy, sporty physique.
“Yeah, somebody typically muscular probably doesn’t spend a whole thought train being excited about it,” he sighed, writing a tentative “no?” next to the “Always muscles?” bullet point.
He still didn’t know his name. He wracked his brain. He was a teacher, he lived alone. He really liked his job, liked the act of teaching, liked his students.
He had friends, for sure. It was a relief—it would have been depressing to find out his only two friends were dead. Or that better yet, he had none to speak of at all. Fortunately, there was Marissa.
“Anyone else?”
He closed his eyes, rubbing at his temples. A black man in a suit, walking with him. Same man, standing behind a glass pane, saying something, but the words were blurry. Ca… Cameron? No. Carl. There was another woman, too. She had a stern but kind face. She was behind that same glass that Carl had sat behind, but it must have been a separate memory. He closed his eyes harder, trying to remember anything more.
A blank stare. Hands folded over one another. Her face, again, closer to his, too close to have been an accident, but still absent of expression. And a smell, like jasmine. Perhaps it was perfume.
“Okay. Mystery blonde. Or is that ginger? Sure. Maybe a friend, maybe… who knows.”
He ran a hand through his too-long hair. Closed his eyes, calmed his breath. More memories would have to come. He had to have gotten here somehow, and if he was awoken with all those tubes inside his body, then perhaps… perhaps they’d been put there on Earth. Maybe he slept all the way until… wherever he was, now. If that was the case, maybe this memory loss was temporary; maybe something went wrong with the enforced sleep he’d been put into?
“Yeah—” normally, he assumed, he would have spoken his name, there, to pacify his mind by tricking it somebody else was talking. Or simply to put his thoughts on the outside. But there was no name, still. He sighed “Yeah, me, people don’t just get sent off to space with their mind wiped. Though that sounds like a really cool movie.
He laughed to himself, then started to focus again. Breathe in, breathe out, his focus on The Red Line—The Petrova Problem; not on remembering, just on the concept.
His mind played to his whims, for once. The woman was Eva Stratt and she was important. Important was probably understating it; she had the world in her palm. She was trying to save it.
And he had a name.
“Doctor Ryland Grace!” he exclaimed.
He put them both down on the board. Eva—did he call her Eva?
He tried his best to recall.
--“Ms. Stratt?”--
No?
Maybe in a different memory?
“Thank you, Eva, comfy…”
Yes?
But then one barely coherent, but still there, travelled to the front of his thoughts.
--Eva—shoot, I—sorry--
He gave up and wrote her whole name next to ‘mystery woman’. It wouldn’t hurt to remember her surname, in any case, he thought.
He smiled and wrote RYLAND GRACE at the top of the board.
He clasped his hands in front of him.
“Okay. I’m starting to look like a person. I’m somebody!”
The celebration was cut short by—
“Angular anomaly!”
“Okay, fine, I’m coming,” he got up, made his way to the hatch that had so rudely refused him before.
“Ryland Grace!” and there it was, open.
He could do this.
A different solar system. Not his own.
Was that cool or horrifying?
“Both,” he declared into empty space. His breath was already coming in short gasps. “But more terrifying.”
It wasn’t like the panic from before, which he was thankful for; not yet at least. It didn’t feel so encompassing. It didn’t make him feel so helpless.
It was still panic.
His left hand came up, but instead of reaching forward to press a button on one of the panels, or do anything remotely useful, it began a sequence of events. First, he raised his elbow and pressed it next to his cheek, as though he was adjusting something—those glasses that he might have usually worn, maybe, though he still hadn’t managed to locate them. Then, the hand travelled to the back of his neck, his nails dragging down the skin. He didn’t press too hard, only enough to feel a slight burn afterwards, one that vanished quickly. At last, the hand settled over his right forearm.
Grace followed the motion with his eyes, his heart still too fast. Muscle memory, or whatever that had been, was strange. It took over, sometimes, in habitual patterns, in things performed typically without constant input.
His attention was being pulled back towards the mortifying ordeal of being gosh knows how many light years away from Earth.
He barely noticed when his fingers began to move.
He searched for something to distract himself with, steadily tracing featherlight drawings into his forearm. It probably was something from muscle memory, a movement the origin of which he would unearth later; or maybe it was something deeper, more innate.
The patterns felt random, unstructured, but repetitive. He couldn’t focus on them too hard, or he would gain too much control of his hand, and the absentminded movement would cease.
He breathed in, shaky, but not a heave.
“Where did they find an astronaut with anxiety, and why am I him?” he muttered, then had to heave in a breath, air hungry.
He focused on the sensation of his own fingers, tried to ignore the pattern itself. His conscious brain, he directed towards the screens. Towards the Astrophage that had been in his most recently resurfaced memory and that was also a finite resource on the Hail Mary, it would seem.
Diagram of ship, rooms—no thinking about the dormitory, only his fingers tracing something into his forearm—more rooms, fuel, tanks that could be abandoned, some of them spent, spin drive—
Nothing. His breath shuddered. But, no, not all hope was lost. There was that temperature, an exact number that he knew.
That captivated his attention.
It was unfortunate, Grace thought, for all the five seconds he had before his mind gave up on him again, that there seemed to only be awful revelations in store for him.
He was on a suicide mission. He had just shot his two companions away, into the stars, his heart heavy, brain barely moving forward from their death, and now he was going to have to come to terms with the fact that he was also going to die.
He had to keep a hold on himself. One breakdown had been enough. Terrible moments of helplessness where he couldn’t figure out what he needed and couldn’t stop crying and hid under the bed should probably be kept reduced to maximum once per week.
Of course, a week was arbitrary. He was in space, outside his solar system. There wasn’t a day, or a night, or a week, or a month.
“Computer,” he croaked. “Nature sounds.”
He gasped in a breath, already sounding like he was sobbing despite no tears coming to his eyes. He was useless. This was useless. He was going to fail the mission—whatever it was—because he couldn’t keep his emotions in check—
The sound of rain played over the same speaker that spoke to him in a feminine voice. Rain, and thunder, and trees. Grace tried to breathe through his nose, tried to focus on the fake storm that filled the room, but by then tears were starting to fall from his eyes and he was already feeling like he couldn’t deal with it, like he needed a hug from somebody and—
Autopilot, he supposed. His hand wrapped around his nose and he opened his mouth, the warm air hitting his palm as he forced himself to close his eyes, to only hear and to breathe in, then hold, then out. Four seconds each. His chest hurt, so did his throat.
All of his muscles were tense. But no, he would be fine. He could have a breakdown later.
Hell, going off his spotty memory, it wasn’t like he had anyone on Earth that would miss him. He was becoming less and less sure that Carl or Eva had been his friends, and if the timeline of events being mapped out in his head was more-or-less complete, Marissa was probably mostly pissed off that her weekly dinner-date had suddenly bailed on her.
Wasn’t that a cheerful thought?
He let go of his nose experimentally. He was still out of breath, but the crying had stopped almost as soon as it had started, and though he was shivering terribly, he wasn’t choking on his own saliva.
“My bar is on the ground,” he whispered to the empty space. “My bar is so far down the ground, I left it on Earth. A multitude of lightyears away.”
And then he started laughing. Hysterically.
So, everything was going great.
It must have jogged his memory, because then he wasn't looking anywhere present at all.
In her office—Eva Stratt’s office—in an armchair, opposite her. Her face was stern, brows furrowed her eyes and mouth a thin line, her hands on the desk in front of her, grabbing onto one another for dear life.
He was laughing. He was staring at her, at that stern expression and laughing.
“She—she’s going to think—”
She pinched the bridge of her nose.
He recalled a thought he must have had there: Maybe he was approaching a sort of inevitable psychotic break.
“Doctor Grace. Can you be, how do I put it, a grown, serious man for another minute so we are able to finish the meeting?”
He was only able to reign in his laughter for long enough to look her in the eyes and say:
“You know me too well to think I’m capable of that right now.”
He opened his eyes. His laughter fizzled out with a few residual ha, has.
A memory. Of her. Strange.
She was exactly the same in it as in all the previous ones—stern, almost scary looking, but also slightly sad, what with the shape of her face and eyes. And yet, instead of obediently following her demands, instead of trying to demand something himself, he had been laughing right in her face. She had looked irritated, true, but also hadn’t done much except for requesting he stop.
They were friends, then. Maybe. He still didn’t know. Each new memory gave a point in either direction. He doubted he’d figure it out in the foreseeable future. Maybe enough memories would never return to him, and he would never know; would forever (although forever was now a laughably short period of time) be left to wonder about her.
“No, no, Ryland,” he shook himself out of his mind. “You’ve had enough depression for one day. One waking period. Whatever.”
He awkwardly gave himself a pat on the back.
Then, he went back to clicking things on control panels. Nothing quite like being left to manage a ship you had no memory of ever knowing how to operate.
It happened again. He had woken up from some terrible dream, something that he couldn’t remember—and wasn’t that its own frustration, one he’d pay mind to later—and it was all he could do to curl into himself, to rest his back against the wall, more so slam it into it, really. He fought his covers, trying to wrap them around himself, watching the shadows of the ship with a horrified thought like “what if those are monsters out to get me?”
It wasn’t like an anxiety attack, exactly. Or it was an anxiety attack, but with something more to it.
He didn’t know what. He was out of breath again, sobbing, again, into his hands, like that could help anything. His covers didn’t obey him, didn’t want to get into his hands enough to be wrapped around his shoulders. The breathing technique wasn’t working, it was too late, he was too far gone, couldn’t fight it.
He almost bit his arm again, but the robot arms stopped him. Armando, he’d called them, he thought.
“Playing nature sounds.”
ARMando, right! He giggled through his tears. Wasn’t that silly? He pressed the side of his finger against his lips, chewing on the skin, his teeth sliding against the nailbed. Armando upped the lights, and all of the room became illuminated, though not painfully so. It was nice.
He was still scared. What if Armando got hacked and attacked him?
Some part of him knew it was insanely stupid. He was in space; there was nobody to hack it; but that meant he was utterly alone, and that was deeply, deeply sad.
Scary, and sad. A familiar, awful combination.
It was simple, was part of the problem. It wasn’t a complicated issue to wrap his mind around, he wasn’t figuring out an equation, a terrible conundrum—only his own mind, feelings that were downright primordial, and yet they proved too much to deal with.
He finally managed to get the blanket to cooperate and wrapped it over his head, hiding in the comfort of it. If he focused on it enough, he could pretend he was at home—wherever that was, but it didn’t matter, not now—in his bed, or on the couch, curled into the armrest, or maybe even into somebody, listening to a storm rage outside.
He yawned. Being scared was exhausting.
He slowly lowered himself on the bed and turned over to his side. His heart was still racing, but he was tired enough to fall asleep through it.
It happened again the next night. Grace was steadily becoming assured his memories sucked.
Grace hadn’t been sleeping well. Between the nightmares and the emotional turmoil of enough panic, or perhaps a specific mixture of the forgotten contents of his dream and the horror itself, sending him into a spiral, a vulnerable helpless mess that the robot arms of the ship could only somewhat get under control. He hadn’t yet been sedated again, and he wasn’t certain if there simply wasn’t enough sedative aboard or if he had yet to reach that threshold of dread where the automated systems said enough and took the decision to calm down out of his hands.
If only it were a decision, he thought. If he could simply choose to be calm, there wouldn’t have been any problems.
He was exhausted, when zero gravity hit.
He’d done his best to prepare mentally. He knew the Hail Mary had been approaching Tau Ceti orbit, he knew that meant engine cutoff, which in turn meant loss of his comfortable 1.5 g’s. He had been listening to the automatic voice of the computer tick off the seconds.
He almost vomited, the moment he felt his body begin to float.
Human bodies didn’t evolve to be in zero gravity. They had evolved with the very specific idea that their time would be spent on planet Earth, pushed towards it with the force of 9.8 meters per second per second. Not zero; certainly not so far away from the planet that he couldn’t even see it.
He screamed into the empty space; his arms came up and waved around desperately, legs kicking out at random. He almost pressed some button on the control panel, only missed a lever by perhaps half an inch. He pushed his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, pressing his face into his thighs with enough force to catch the panic attack before it started properly.
Astronaut with anxiety. What a fantastic idea. I’m sure whoever thought of it deserves a medal. He thought, bitterly.
He was shaking. He was trying his darndest to keep his brain online fully.
“I’m not falling!” he was out of breath, but perhaps speaking to himself would help. He wasn’t crying, yet, so that was a good sign. “Everything is fine! This was the plan! This… was the… plan…”
He heaved a breath and immediately exhaled it all.
Darn it.
He felt something coming up his throat. For a few mortifying seconds, he couldn’t connect that fact with anything at all, not until he started tasting bile.
“Arman—” but he wouldn’t be able to ask for a bag or anything, there wasn’t any time. He haphazardly grasped the zipper of his jumpsuit and pulled it open vomited the contents of his stomach into his clothes.
It took all of three seconds for him to start feeling terribly like he was about to begin crying.
He shook his head. No. No more. His mind was feeling off but it would be alright, he would get some semblance of control over this. Even if the feeling of warm puke on his chest and in his clothes was making him feel terrible and distinctly like he was about to go at it again, the emptiness of his stomach be damned.
He felt wet and uncomfortable. He needed to get out of these clothes.
He remembered a similar thought, and...
She stared at him, eyes trailing up and down his body.
“How did you even manage this?”
He giggled, shrugging. She kept staring for a few seconds more, until the end of her frown began to tip upwards and she had to press her hand to her mouth to stop the laughter.
“No, Rylie, how are you covered in tea? Did you fall into my cup?” she sighed heavily. “I was going to finish adjusting the space plan for the ship and write that speech for tomorrow…”
She ran a hand down her face. Her shoulders were shaking, and when she was visible again, she was very clearly still fighting against her amusement.
“God, stay here, I’ll get you a shirt.”
He stayed in the dark room, swinging back and forth on his feet. Eva didn’t need to know that it wasn’t a proper accident. She’d been swearing at her screen in Dutch and German, and he even caught something that sounded vaguely Chinese in the mix, more than typing. This had been the first time in the past hour that her shoulders weren’t frozen up with tension.
“Arms up,” she said as she returned.
“I can change myself,” he retorted, extending a hand to grab the T-shirt. She pulled it out of his reach and quirked her brow ever so slightly.
“I once saw you take 3 minutes to get out of a sweater, Ryland. Up.”
He complied. She awkwardly patted him on the head, and he started laughing again.
“You’re silly."
She shook her head at him, her expression neutral again. No, he could see that barely concealed—if you were looking for it—fondness, in the crows’ feet near her eyes and her relaxed forehead.
“Rylie—"
So that was weird.
He would examine that later, perhaps when he wasn’t living in his own rejected fluids.
He could imagine her leading him by the hand, back to the storage, where he found an assortment of shirts with science puns on them and some passable pants, and then to the dormitory where he could use the sponge bath station to clean himself and feel less terrible. He could almost feel the ghost of her palm, cold—he was certain it would be freezing against his own skin—guiding, and that was comforting, in an odd way.
It didn’t really matter why. It helped. The fear was steadily subsiding, calming down more to a bearable level of anxiety that only occasionally sent a shiver down his spine.
Grace felt almost entirely back to himself by the time he made the ill-advised decision to launch himself straight at the hatch. Still, crashing into the ceiling was nothing more than a slight physical pain, so he was able to get himself back into the control room and strap himself into the pilot’s seat soon enough.
It was finally time for some fun science.
Grace looked at the space around him, using the visible light setting of the Petrovascope, through empty blackness until Tau Ceti. Some part of him, some distinctly simple and human element, was mesmerised by the concept, by the fact that he was in space, staring out at objects that no other human had seen this up close before. Some foolish, perhaps dumb and masculine instinct in him preened at being the first.
Most of him was simply occupied by finally getting to do something towards the mission.
He found Tau Ceti, switched the setting over to the Petrova frequency and let his eyes take in the halo of red light around the star. Still breathtaking, to the humanity in Grace. Only vaguely interesting and expected to the scientist in him. And then, there, a red line—the Petrova line.
He cheered, fidgeting excitedly. That was extremely cool; extremely useful, too.
His mind was already running through the possibilities; he’d need to figure out where the line led, and probably sample Astrophage from within it, for starters. Then—
A flash of light. Something new.
It only took him a moment of pondering, of looking at the suddenly consistent flare of red coming towards him, to switch back to the visible spectrum.
There was an alien ship approaching him.
Some childish instinct must have awakened, then. He kicked out his legs, laughing with glee and waving his hands.
Aliens!
“Holy fucking shit!”