Chapter Text
It was a cold Tuesday morning. But then, every morning was cold nowadays.
Grace took his coffee dark since the cream and sugar rations were put in place, ate his one egg and piece of sausage at the diner as he pulled his jacket around his neck. Snow came down outside and on the television the Governor of Mississippi announced that the Ice Age was God’s punishment to Americans for legalizing homosexuality back in the aughts. He took another sip of his coffee, wincing at the bitterness. That might have phased him a few years back, but he’d heard crazier.
Wordlessly the waitress came over and filled his coffee back up to the brim. “How you doing this morning, Ryland?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Oh, you know. Can’t complain.”
His bike ride to school involved goggles and thick black gloves, a push against the mounting blizzard he was hoping to beat. He tried to get in early if he could, but he might lose that extra time. Shame… How was he supposed to prep those worksheets now?
He got in and took role call. “Katie?”
“She said she had work, Mr. Grace, she’ll be here later,” one of the kids answered.
“Got it. Ryan?”
“He’s still got vorta virus,” said another.
“Right. Leroy?”
“His family’s part of the caravan to Mexico.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Right, right…” He looked up at his classroom. All six students. Then, he sighed. “Well, let’s get into it.”
Sitting on his desk partway through the class, he showed them a tiny little seed - There weren’t enough of them to show all of them. Each of his students leaned in close to see it, their winter coats pressing up against one another. “So, you see, the inside of the seed is insulated by this outer layer… here.”
“Like an egg,” one of his students said.
“Exactly like an egg. Keep that up and you’ll earn yourself a beanbag, Madison.”
And when the schoolday ended, he watched the headlights of the buses peel off into the late afternoon snow, which was dying down from the full blizzard that had raged at about noon. “Stay safe, see you tomorrow!” he called after them. Then it was back on his bike, back to his apartment, flicking on the lights and taking a five minute shower to save as much water as he could. He made sure all his emergency lights were plugged in, checked his generator, then opened the cabinet. Whole lotta nothing. But that was to be expected. He had a few cans of spam, that was pretty good. Protein never hurts.
He cracked one open and sat down in front of the television with a sigh, eating it cold and sorely missing vegetables. The news channels all talked about various disasters. He skipped over them all. He had enough misery without watching the news, thank you. Instead he put on E.T. It was something he watched once or twice as a kid, and if he was being honest, he didn’t have any particular nostalgia for it. Or at least, he didn’t used to. Lately he’d found himself having an almost irresistible fondness of stories about friendly aliens that helped the human character out of a bind. Huh, how weird, what could that possibly say about his psyche?
Miserably he watched as Elliot Taylor made friends with a sort of creepy shriveled puppet and reached over to his bedside table for the dry ramen-and-duct-tape version of Rocky’s ship, the Blip-A. The government didn’t let him keep anything made of xenonite, greedy science-hungry bastards. But they couldn’t take his ramen noodle ship from him.
Well, that wasn’t true, they easily could. They had no desire to, because it was made of ramen. He held it out in front of himself, trying to see the real ship the way he first had. With all the wonder, all the magic.
“But… but it’s first contact.”
He was sitting in front of a sweet-faced woman, about middle aged, with brown hair and dainty hands crossed on the table in front of her. He had gotten back a few weeks ago. They called him a hero, but not much came of it. Or, he should have said, not much came of him. There was some casual attempt to act as though he was important, but really he wasn’t, and he knew that. The world did as it should have - It quit the sentimentals and went right to work on distributing taumoeba, devoting all its time and energy towards the scientific effort and having none left over to fawn over him. Fine with him. He never wanted to be famous anyway. He just wanted to go home. After having met alien life and coming home with alien stuff, there was a lot of not going home. Grace didn’t want to see a government compound ever again, but here he was.
The woman, Ms. Carol Grayson, smiled at him sympathetically. “I understand that, Mr. Grace. But this really isn’t the time to tell the people of the world that aliens are real.”
“Listen, I-I get it, aliens are always gonna be a big shock. But Rocky is the reason I made it back at all. I mean, these are not… mindless bug creatures from science fiction, they’re people. People, Ms. Grayson! I mean, doesn’t this change everything?! Aliens are real, we’re not alone! We can make contact with them, communicate with them, I can think of a dozen ways-”
She held up a hand to stop me. “We could,” she said, “But we shouldn’t.” He was flummoxed by that. With a gentle sigh, she tried again to explain it to him, lowering her voice as if she was talking about something terribly sensitive. “In the years you were gone, the world has gone through much hardship. This has resulted in an uptick in all manner of prejudice, hate crimes, and organized oppression and genocide by people who want someone to blame. For the most part, they have chosen vulnerable cultural groups.” She shook her head gravely. “We can barely treat each other with decendy. We are not ready to encounter actual aliens.”
Grace sighed, biting his cheek. She had a point, but it still felt like shit. “You know, you like to think people would come together over something like this…” he mumbled bitterly.
She smiled weakly. “We did come together. For many years. It’s the reason we’re still alive. But the pendulum always swings, Dr. Grace. Sooner or later it was bound to start pulling us apart.”
He sighed, dangling his glasses off of one ear and rubbing his eyes. He didn’t like her. It wasn’t really fair, she was only being nice. Maybe it was because she was too nice. She seemed condescending, like the way a therapist talked to you when they thought you were being unreasonable but didn’t want to say it outright. She talked down to him. He shook his head and asked her something he hadn’t meant to - The words just slipped out. “Where’s Stratt?”
Her brows got that little crease in them again, like she pitied him. “Stratt is in prison,” she said, “She was arrested shortly after sending you away.”
Grace’s jaw dropped. “But…” He shook his head. He didn’t know how to feel. Yeah, she tried to kill him, and he still wasn’t entirely over it, but… It was hard to imagine her in prison. He had always assumed she’d gotten away with it, that he would find her pulling the government’s strings ‘til the very end. “But she was trying to save us, she did save us.”
“Yes,” Grayson agreed, “But what the world needs right now is order, Dr. Grace. If we start making exceptions to international law now, then it will only lead to more disorder.”
He outright laughed at that. “You didn’t have any problem making exceptions when she was in power.”
She didn’t laugh back. “Times are different,” she said gravely, “You were away for a long time.”
The air was sucked out of the room, and he couldn’t think of an answer to that. Yes, he certainly was…
He stared at the ramen model of the Blip-A, holding it suspended in midair the way it floated when he saw it. So many years. All of his old students were grown up now. He had heard from a few of them, but made a point never to look for them - He knew it would be too heartbreaking when he inevitably discovered that one had died. When he left the world was electric, scared but unified, ready to do whatever it took and make any sacrifice for the good of mankind. But now it felt like it was falling apart. People had gotten tired. They were tired of being cold, tired of being hungry, tired of thinking hard about things. They wanted to blame someone. They wanted to lash out. The whole world was angry and scared and people were suffering more from that than from the storms and the draught.
In the times he came from, the world needed a cold, uncaring arm of absolute control like Stratt. But she was no longer needed, so she was gone. Then the world needed him, their so-called hero with a heart of gold to go and do the science they needed. Now he wasn’t useful anymore, and now the world needed Grayson. Falsely compassionate and political. A veritable master of pretending to care.
Guess the world moved on without both of us, Stratt, he thought. He thought to her a lot. One of these days he’d visit her.
As much as he hated it, Grayson was right. The world as it was would reject the Eridians, and the last thing they needed now was the world’s first cosmic war. Even still, it pained him to accept it. He would have liked to say that it was because he had big dreams for the world, but really it was selfish. He missed his best friend.
The city’s electrical curfew rolled into his neighborhood and all the lights and the TV shut off. He sighed. Time for bed, he thought. Back at it again tomorrow.