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Ryland Grace scurries through the grass patch, the gray buildings getting smaller and smaller behind him. He approaches the metal fence, and wonders what he’ll do when he reaches it.
If he reaches it.
Cloaked in deathly white coats, their footsteps pound behind him, each thump against the grass increasing in volume. They’re closing in on him. Ragged breaths move through his mouth in regular, gasping intervals. There’s a reason why Grace bikes to work instead of going on foot.
Suddenly, he’s no longer being supported by his feet, and he finds himself face down on the grass.
It all happened in a flurry. The men in coats pin his shoulders to the ground, and the wind rushes out of his lungs through a sharp gasp. Grace tries to roll away, anything to escape his impending death. He flails, his palms, rough from the chemicals he had to handle in the lab, brushed through the dew-moist grass, as his fingers try to grasp on to anything that would stop them from taking him away.
The grass reminds him of the gentle, pristine bed he used to lie in as a kid. This one has a sharp scent, cold and metallic. Another good memory erased by whatever this mission was doing to him. The grass is a blade now.
“No… PLEASE! You can’t do this —”
His own voice hurts him. He hates how desperate he sounds, hates how cowardly he is. Stratt was right. He is a coward.
“Dr. Grace, we need you to calm down. Struggling will only make it worse.”
Nothing registers. He’s panicking too hard, tears mingling with the dewdrops on the grass.
“No — PLEASE — Don’t do it!”
His pleas fall on deaf ears as they prepare the needle, the very needle that would put him to sleep for 11.9 years, maybe even forever. He tries not to think about the second idea.
A phone rings in the distance. It’s his, now faced down on the grass, slightly cracked. He wants so badly to reach for it and see who it is, to tell them that this is the last time they’d hear from him. He wants to hear someone’s voice, anyone…
He feels a sudden prickle of pain, as if a rose thorn had caught his skin. A numbing coldness flooded through his veins, and the initial sting gave way to a dull, throbbing ache in his body. Everything hurts, but there’s no more fighting.
A final thought drifts through his mind as what Stratt had said earlier about him having nobody to leave behind. Grace knows he should just be brave and go. He knows that nobody will miss him if he goes.
But what if he wanted to stay purely because he loved the world he lived in?
******
For a while after they sedated Grace, he felt unusually… floaty. It felt like existing between two worlds, and being unable to settle in any. Am I dead? Grace wonders. Is this what death feels like?
He wanders through the “afterlife” which turns out to be a… corridor of the medical facility? An open door awaits him at the end of the corridor (thank god there’s an end to it). A figure lies on the bed in front of him, but he’s too far away to make out who it is. As he floats closer, he sees it.
Hands, rough from writing.
Fingernails, caked with soil and dirt.
Hair, damp and messy with sweat but where a few curls still held.
The figure on the bed is him.
For a moment, he thinks it isn’t. The man on the bed is too still, too pale beneath the blinding white lights. Tubes trail from machines into his fairly toned arms, like roots forcing themselves into dead soil. His face is streaked with tears that never got wiped away.
Grace hesitates, then steps closer. He makes an involuntary sound. It doesn’t echo, despite the silence in the corridors behind him.
The figure doesn’t move. The machines let out a steady beep, indicating that he’s still alive.
Grace reaches out, hoping for warmth, or just to feel something. He reaches for the faint red marks on the figure’s arm, a result of the restraints they put on him during sedation. Instead, his hand passes through skin like cold mist through air.
He jerks back violently as a memory hits him in flashes.
Grass in his mouth, people grabbing him, his phone ringing somewhere out of reach. The needle. Cold in his veins. The realisation that nobody was coming to save him.
A horrible sound escapes him before he realises it’s a sob.
“Oh god,” he whispers. “They actually did it.”
He sinks into the chair beside the bed. Or maybe through it. It’s hard to tell anymore. His unconscious hand lies limp near the blanket. He can’t tell if the figure’s at peace, but from what he remembers, most probably not.
Grace stares at it for a long time before carefully reaching forward again. This time his fingers don’t pass through completely. It's faint, like trying to hold water.
He grips his own hand.
Cold.
Not corpse-cold. Just empty-cold. Sedated-cold.
His throat tightens.
“Hey,” he says softly to himself. “You okay there, buddy?”
No answer.
He laughs weakly at his own joke, then wipes at his face even though the tears aren’t real.
Time feels weird now.
Sometimes people come into the room. Doctors. Technicians. Men and women in white coats speaking in hushed voices. None of them ever look at him. They only look at the body in the bed.
He keeps talking.
He tells unconscious-Ryland about dumb things he suddenly misses. The feeling of a dry erase marker on his fingers after class or walking through the beach and feeling the fog on his face.
Time passes, but he doesn’t know how much.
Until one day, a lady in black walks in, her ginger hair falling into place behind her. Eva Stratt.
Grace feels a wave of feelings he can’t name. Was it hatred? Sadness? He doesn’t know. He wants to reach out and tell her that she murdered him although she can’t see and hear him. He wants to shake the daylights out of her to make her see what she did to him.
Until she takes the unconscious-him’s hand and presses a kiss to it.
“I’m sorry, Grace.” She whispers, and there’s a hint of regret in her voice but she swallows it, refuses to let it show.
“I believe in you. Always”
******
Grace lifts his head sharply. The fluorescent lights flicker strangely, stretching into long silver streaks.
The world is pulling away from him.
“No,” he says immediately. “No no no no —”
His grip on his body’s hand weakens. The walls transform into a patch of whiteness, and suddenly, he is somewhere else.
The walls are made of metal this time. Not solid concrete. The place is smaller, more machines whir. Rows of suspended coma pods line the walls, each labelled with some words his vision is too blurry to read.
After a while, he regains his vision, and the world stabilises again. Words stare back at him from one pod in clean black lettering.
COMMANDER YAO LI-JIE.
Another pod nearby reads: OLESYA ILYUKHINA.
The other pod’s lettering isn't that clean. It seems more rushed, but it read: RYLAND GRACE.
All three bodies lay still in their pods, each with a robotic arm tending to them. This time, there are more tubes in his arms, and he does admit, it makes him a little squeamish. He looks away, and all he sees now outside the window is a black patch, the surroundings dotted with stars, and earth getting smaller and smaller.
The stars have always mesmerised him, although he hated the idea of going to space. He’s captivated by the sight, his eyes never leaving the window.
Then he notices movement. A figure stands near Yao’s pod. Grace startles violently before recognising him.
Yao looks translucent somehow, edges blurred like smoke. He stares down at his sleeping body with an unreadable expression. For a moment, neither of them speak. Then Yao glances over. “Dr. Grace.”
Grace is almost relieved at hearing another voice. “Oh thank god,” he blurts out. “I thought I’d gone fully insane.”
“Perhaps we all have.” Yao chuckles, stealing a glance at his own unconscious body.
Another figure appears nearby. Ilyukhina, pacing beside her pod with her arms crossed.
“This is stupid,” she mutters in Russian-accented English. “I hate this.”
Grace laughs faintly, and it's the first time he does since the mission began.
******
They drift through the ship together. Sometimes they sit beside their own unconscious bodies, sometimes they explore dark corridors. Time is strange here too, just like in the medical bay back on earth.
Grace grows oddly comforted by them. But most of all, he doesn’t feel lonely. They share stories of family, and life before the mission.
Once, while sitting beside the pods together, Grace asks, “Do you think we’re dead?”
Yao considers. “No,” he says finally. “Not yet.”
Ilyukhina snorts. “If this is the afterlife, it is terrible design.”
Grace actually smiles. It isn’t too bad to have company.
However, at some period of time, strange things begin happening.
Yao starts flickering.
At first Grace thinks it’s just the weirdness of this place. But then one second Yao is standing beside him, the next he’s simply… not. Gone like smoke in the wind. As time passes, Ilyukhina disappears too.
Alone again, Grace heads over and sits beside his unconscious body, talking to himself like before.
“They probably woke up already.”
His words echo strangely, and an ache settles in his chest. He tells himself that he’s happy for them. Of course he is. That means the mission’s progressing. It means they survived the coma, although he doesn’t really see them around.
Maybe they’re still waking up, he thinks.
******
Eventually the walls blur again, just like how it was on earth, watching his body motionless on the bed.
His own thoughts feel sluggish now, like sinking underwater. Sometimes he forgets what he was saying halfway through sentences. Sometimes he stares at his own pod and struggles to remember why seeing it hurts.
Most of all, he’s tired. So tired.
One final time, Grace presses a hand weakly against the glass of his coma pod. Inside, his sleeping body floats in pale light.
“I hope you make it,” he whispers.
The ship vanishes. It’s already turning into a vapour.
******
“What’s two plus two?”
Ryland Grace doesn’t remember anything.