Chapter Text
“My hand is up,” Grace finally snapped.
A low murmur rippled through the class. He stared them down, arm up, shaking his head. One by one, they settled, little shuffles of discomfort at being caught.
“I mean, guys, I’d expect this from the little pebbles but from big grown kids like you? I’m shocked. Maybe you don’t want to learn about photosynthesis, huh? Maybe we need to revisit the baby stuff, the life cycle of the butterfly?”
A chorus of horrified chirps and trills erupted from the class and he waved his hand again and they fell quiet. “That’s what I thought. Good. Now, question for the class star...”
The kids went deadly silent. Grace turned away, pretending to consult his notes as he tried not to smile. He whipped around, paper star raised, “Who can tell me, with their arm up, which compound both human,” he pointed to himself with a smile, “and plant organisms use to live?”
A wave of arms shot into the air at blinding speed. One of the kids, a little grey-orange pebble named ‘Bowie’ raised their arm slowly, unsure. Grace pointed at him. “Bowie, let’s hear it buddy.”
Bowie’s classmates turned to observe, with the class star on the line, the atmosphere was tense.
“It is... I think this... is water?”
Grace didn’t react immediately, enjoying the build-up. Then, he rushed forward and slapped the star on the partition. “That’s right! Bowie, you’re a genius! And the new proud owner of this week’s class star! Round of applause for Bowie, guys.”
The other pebbles drummed three of their legs on the ground in thunderous applause as Bowie jumped and trilled in delight.
“I remember!” he crowed, delighted. “Both are simple organism!”
Grace snorted, shaking his head. “Yeah, thanks for that, pal,” he said before clapping his hands together. “Right, great work today, guys. Speaking of water, I want you to go home and work on your water cycle models, okay? And no, Alanis, spoken word is not an acceptable alternative.”
Alanis kicked her seat, annoyed and even without a face, Grace was certain she was rolling her eyes.
“Okay, get out of here, see you tomorrow,” he said, waving them off.
“Mr Grace! Human question! Why tall, question?”
“Mr Grace Mr Grace Mr Grace Mr Grace Mr Grace-”
“Mr Grace is true water goes in and out of human? Disgust.”
“Mr Grace how old until learn how human die? Is soon for you, question?”
Grace held up his hands, feeling the beginnings of a headache building. He’d done a good job of establishing class time as focused learning time, avoiding tangents and getting off track. However, the second he ended the class, he was bombarded with a slew of intrusive, alarming or bizarre questions about being human. He'd thought the kids would get the questions out of their system but they never seemed to run out of things to ask.
“Okay, okay. Let’s make this quick. I’m tall because I’m genetically blessed and also humans tend to fall between the 5-6 foot range with some exceptions. I’ll die when I mark another test that uses ammonia-rich materials to write on despite giving you guys perfectly good slates. And yes, MJ, water goes both in and out of humans and no, I will not elaborate and if you ask again, I’m talking to your parents. Now, scram. Beat it, can’t wait to see your models.”
“Thank, Mr Grace!”
“Thank!”
“Thank, see you tomorrow. I use slate this time!”
He laughed as they scurried away, letting his weight sink against his makeshift desk for a second, so tired he felt heavy. He was choosing to ignore the signs of his body weakening.
He’d been on Erid for a year and a half. Maybe this is just what ageing is, especially after so many bodily ordeals in space. Did he sometimes feel exhausted for no reason? Sure. Was his appetite infrequent and his sleep excessive? Absolutely. Did he occasionally black out and come to shaking and sick? It didn’t matter. Adrian had ran every test the Eridians could think of, even inventing a few new ones, and they couldn’t find any changes, mutations or suspicious masses to investigate. It was highly likely that this was some special space sickness that no one knew how to handle because he was the first one to travel this far and encounter it. Deep-down, he knew his body was rejecting the Eridian atmosphere. No matter how well-constructed the biodome was, artificial gravity under 29 atmospheres of pressure still had an impact on the human body. He only consented to semi-regular tests to stop Rocky from worrying about him so much. His desire to find ‘Grace cure’ kept him positive.
He packed up and made the walk along the beach back to his house. He hummed away to himself on the walk, enjoying the gentle lap of the simulated waves. He craved something other than the sticky hot air hanging around him, hovering above the waterline, the clear absence of mosquitos somehow still making Grace itch. It was Summer in the biodome, mid-June. They had replicated an Earth day with a near-perfect faux-Sol orbit so Grace could sleep and keep any kind of schedule. Rocky had insisted that Grace’s environment needed to mirror Earth seasons after reading about external influences on human mental health from material in the Mary’s Archive. But sometimes, stood on the edge of the coast as his body sent little warning tremors that said ‘something is coming for you, age or infirmity, you can’t outrun it or out-think it’, he wished an unseasonal storm would rally and blow right through him. Remind him that life existed beyond his little sphere, beyond his mind, beyond the make-believe of the biodome. Make him feel like when it all ended, he would feel something when he died and wouldn’t just fade away.
But the dour thoughts were fleeting, he never let them stay long. He didn't want to be unhappy. Nothing in life was guaranteed, health least of all. So, he stopped worrying about the end. Just kicked his feet in the sand and went home.
Grace’s evening was incredibly standard. He ate dinner and tried to cook up some of his meagre vegetable yield from the greenhouse and the result was so shrivelled and sad, he wished he hadn’t bothered. He’d managed to work with the Eridian agricultural team to manufacture some different flavours of vitamin juice. His selection now included:
- Orange
- Milky Orange
- Sour gummy
- Kale
- Kale Light (The Worst)
He grabbed a Milky Orange and pretended it was more delicious than it was as he reviewed his lesson plans for the week. He went to his office to tinker away with his research. He had a trajectory for collecting planetary and sun samples mapped out on the wall. They were still planning the trip and Grace was still mapping the known universe from the other side of it. The new constellations, stars, moons, belts, planets, anomalies that he would stare at on scans and ache just to know what they were.
He blinked and it was dark. He trudged downstairs to undertake the base of his hierarchy of needs: scrolling through movies on his laptop just to fall asleep before he chose anything.
As far as Grace was concerned, his evening was complete.
“GraceGraceGraceGraceGrace! Grace come now! Received signal, new new never before! Up up up, Grace so slow!”
Rocky usually managed to wait longer than two seconds before barging in but tonight he launched into the hall, screeching as he slammed into the bedroom.
“Rocky, what the heck," he whined, face pressed into the couch cushion in protest. "How many times have we talked about 2am visits? Sparingly!”
He was just getting ready to get annoyed when Rocky scrambled up to his position on the sofa and used two limbs, trying to pull Grace’s leg.
“Could be danger, need Grace, need Grace help!”
He didn’t have to say anything else. Grace was up, snatching his glasses from the coffee table before racing after Rocky. It took some time to cross the biodome, Grace was in embarrassingly bad shape, and from there were a system of tunnels that held the stasis atmosphere of Grace’s biodome but were mainly used for working labs, quarantine, storage, medical and any important meetings.
Rocky led him to one of the meeting rooms with its huge communications panel. Grace had built it over the course of a year using manuals from the Hail Mary. He immediately got to work looking at incoming signals, trying to catch his breath. There was a new signal, the location was listed as identified but it kept cutting out and cutting back in from somewhere else. Co-ordinates flashing and changing, again and again. How was it reaching them?
“This is weird," he murmured. "Don't know if it's 2am weird, though. Why was it so urgent, it's not-”
"Quiet, Grace, listen!" Rocky went to his own control panel and the speakers jumped to life with an unknown voice.
“-gone, they’re all gone. I don’t know why I’m fucking praying but just, please, God, please, help me.”
Grace’s blood ran cold, his heart thumping strangely in his chest. It was human. A human voice. He hadn’t heard a real human voice outside of a movie in so long. It sounded like a man. But the way he spoke, like he was on the edge of oblivion, it was awful.
“I just want to live, please, please, I just want to live. Is that so wrong?”
The voice cracked and buckled and Grace felt like there was a vice on his chest.
He scanned the control panel and startled at the flashing light. He looked over at Rocky in alarm. “Is this signal live?”
Rocky bounced up and down in confirmation. “Distress signal. Need Grace Rocky help. Moving signal, stranger not speak Eridian. Grace can fix, question?”
There was a huge shuddering breath through the speakers from the live signal feed and Grace’s hands froze above the control panel for a second. His brain knew there was not another human in the room, but his body was thrumming with adrenaline, telling him, like us, like us, like us! He forced himself through the fog of sensation.
“Has he said anything else?” he asked, trying to fix the signal to one pinpointed location. How can it be moving so quickly? How could it be in eight different places at once?
“Stranger frightened. Need help. Sound human. Stranger sound hurt,” Rocky said, a morose trill in his tone.
Grace nodded. He tried to stay unemotional, work the problem. But the shuddering breaths coming through the speakers were making him dizzy. He hadn’t heard another human breathe in years. “I can’t lock onto one point, it’s moving too fast.”
Rocky clambered up beside him. “Different co-ordinates each time, question?”
Grace hummed, ready to confirm when he scanned the list of numbers being tagged on his second screen. “Oh. Wait, these are repeating. There’s lots but they’re repeating.”
“Repeat, question?”
“Look at each thirteenth point, it’s the same. There’s overlap.”
“Stranger not moving. Signal moving, statement.”
“Yeah, but how?”
He started noting down the points of overlap, trying to decipher if the speed of the signal changing had any rhyme or reason. Rocky chittered anxiously at his side.
“I’m praying, I’m... I’m begging. Please, help me. I want to live. I can’t die like this. If you can hear this, please help me.”
Grace’s knuckles were white on the edge of the console.
“Grace heartbeat wrong, Grace hurt, question?”
He nodded. He shook his head. He tried to clear it. “What if...” Think, Grace.
“Please. I’ll be better. I’ll be good. I’ll redeem myself, for all of it. I’ll do anything. Please help me.”
Pleading, he was pleading for his life. Come on, think, Grace. “What if we respond –”
“How respond when no locked signal, question?”
“Let’s open up, what is it, twenty-three channels. We send our voice down all of them and maybe if the signal is jumping around, it’ll be like tuning into the right radio station at just the right second on his end.”
“Grace Rocky Disc Jockeys,” Rocky said, determined.
“That’s right,” Grace murmured, joining Rocky in setting up line after line of communication, all open at once. It looked like they were waking up the universe tonight.
Grace had bolted one of Mary’s cameras to the monitor so the Eridians would be able to see them from the Hail Mary on their planned planetary sample trips and vice versa. He woke it up and dragged the application onto the open channels, the little red glow telling him it was prepared to send his face halfway across the universe whenever he was ready.
“That’s twenty-three. That should be enough to start with,” Grace said, leg bouncing as he monitored the returning signal dancing from point to point, taunting him. He looked at Rocky. “Ready?”
Rocky raised a solid thumbs-down and Grace punched in the active comms, his face lighting up the big screen that covered the far wall of the meeting room as he broadcast to the stars.
“Hello, this is Dr Ryland Grace of the Hail Mary, speaking to you from the Eridani 40 system, can you hear me?”
There was no response. As they waited, Grace’s heart thudded in a dull kind of panic. They had taken too long. They were too late. They’d lost the man who’d begged them for his life. The only other human-sounding creature he may ever hear and he had missed them.
He tried again, voice strained. “This is Dr Grace of the Hail Mary, can anyone hear me? Can anyone – ”
“What?”
Grace jumped and Rocky smacked his legs over and over again, urging him to respond.
“Hi! Hello! Hey, we picked up your signal and it sounds like you’re in trouble. Can you tell me where you are? Do you need help?”
Another painful stretch of silence. Then, a broken, stifled sob.
“Don’t do this to me. This isn’t fair.”
The voice was muffled, like whoever was speaking had his head in his hands. He sounded so completely defeated, it sent a bolt of fear down Grace’s spine. A long-dormant human instinct awakened that told him, this person is in grave danger and you must intervene, quick, quick, quick. The sort of instinct that made you stop the car, or break down the bathroom door, or start running. Someone needs help and you need to move.
He scrambled to speak, trying to keep his voice level. “We want to help you, okay? My name is Grace, please let me help you. Where are you? Can you give me your location?”
“Stop. Stop it. Fuck, I really am going crazy, conjuring fucking miracles and angels."
The voice wheezed a terrible approximation of a laugh. And then his voice turned darker.
“Or is this you? What, was I getting too beat down, wanna’ give me some hope to crush later, huh? Go fuck yourself!”
Grace was trying not to let panic rear it’s ugly head. He didn’t understand. Who was he shouting at? He could see two of the channels had gone dark, the signal was still jumping a little, making new connections and losing old ones.
“Can you... hey, can you see me?” Grace waved into the camera lamely, feeling scared and pathetic, even trying a weak smile. “Can you see me? I’m waving, I can’t see you, but I can hear you. I want to help.”
“You want to help.”
It was toneless. Hopeless. It made Grace’s fear ratchet up. Maybe he could see Grace, or maybe the connection wasn’t showing video. Maybe there was no screen on the other end of their connection. Maybe the other man was blind. They had no way of knowing. Grace nodded fiercely. “Yes! I want to help. Are you hurt? Please, just send us your location and we’ll come and get you, we’ll figure something out.”
“Your name is Grace. And you want to help.”
Grace looked at Rocky helplessly before looking back to the camera. He was intimately familiar with despair. He couldn’t do this. The universe couldn’t present him with a human if something cosmic wasn’t intending on letting Grace help. He slowed his breathing, he had to stay calm. If another human life was in his hands, he needed to handle it with care. He tried changing tact.
“Yes, yeah. One thing at a time, though. Can you tell me your name? I can’t see you so,” he trailed off, wringing his hands painfully as he waited for a response. Rocky leaned heavily against his leg, a comforting weight. He could, no doubt, hear the thundering of Grace’s heart as he begged the stars for something impossible.
“Simon.”
It was so human, Grace couldn’t help it. A relieved smile lit up his face, even as he felt his throat tighten. “Simon. That’s, hey... that’s a great name. It’s nice to meet you. Listen, just hang in there, Simon, I’m coming to get you. Okay, you hear me? We’re going to figure this out and I’m coming to get you.”