Chapter Text
“What’s two plus two?” a clear robotic voice sounds from somewhere above me.
I drag my eyes open, only to immediately slam them shut against the blinding artificial lights. My mouth feels dry and tacky, my body heavy and unresponsive. I try and fail to groan with displeasure.
“Ah, he’s awake, finally. Yao, get down here!” a woman’s voice, thick Russian accent, but she’s clearly well-versed with English. Much better than any attempts I could make with any other language.
I feel someone approach, a presence leaning over me, and I pry my eyes back open to squint at a Chinese man, probably about a decade older than myself, dressed in a strange jumpsuit with patches embroidered on the shoulder and collar that my blurred vision can’t decipher at the moment.
Do I wear glasses? Wait, why don’t I know the answer to that?
“Good morning, Dr. Grace!”
“Buh?” I answer.
The man’s face folds into a slight frown, and he glances behind him, “Ilyukhina, has he completed the cognition test, yet?”
“Test is easy.” I can hear her shrugging through the tone of her voice.
The man, who I’m guessing must be the Yao that she called for earlier, sighs deeply. “Run the cognition test.”
“What’s two plus two?” the robotic voice repeats.
Yao looks at me expectantly. Ilyukhina comes closer, so I can see her from where I’m lying on an oblong shaped shelf that could pass for a bed in a weird sci-fi futuristic society.
Okay, that’s an important question: where the heck am I?
I’m gonna get right on asking that. Right after I cough up my lungs in my first attempt to speak.
“What’s two plus two?”
Stupid robot.
“F-four,” I wheeze out.
“State your full name.”
Geez, how many questions are there in this dang cognition test?
I open my mouth to answer, then slowly press my lips back together. I do my best to keep my expression and outward appearance calm, what with two people I don’t know studying me.
Why don’t I know my name? A creeping dread spreads from my shoulders across my chest, constricting my lungs until each breath feels like an arduous task.
“Uh—” my mind is racing, but stuck in a pit of molasses simultaneously, “Dr. Grace.” I say finally, remembering how Yao had addressed me.
Yao looks very still and calm. Ilyukhina looks vaguely bored.
“Are you just repeating from what I called you?” Yao asks me suspiciously.
Ilyukhina no longer looks bored. In fact, she looks pretty alarmed.
“No…?”
My response doesn’t really calm anyone down.
~~~
Amnesia.
Okay. Alright. I have amnesia.
It’s a side effect of the four-year-long coma that I had just woken up from.
Why were you in a four-year-long coma, you ask?
Ah. Well.
“It’s called astrophage,” Yao says, handing me a small vial where I’m sitting half-upright in my bed in the dormitory. There’s a tiny amount of black viscous liquid in the bottom of the vial.
“Scientists discovered it was travelling between the Sun and Venus, dimming the Sun in the process.” Ilyukhina chimes in.
I look up, alarmed. They couldn’t let me be excited about the existence of alien life for even a moment, could they?
“But that could have a devastating impact on Earth’s climate—?”
Yao nods grimly, “Over half the world’s population dead in 30 years, was the popular projection.”
I fidget with the vial, watching the astrophage shift with the movement.
I clear my throat, glancing up at Yao and Ilyukhina’s matching sympathetic expressions before quickly shifting to stare at the wall. “Okay. Alien life, world ending threat— but where are we?”
“On a spacecraft named Hail Mary. We are going to Tau Ceti, because it is the only infected sun that is not dimming. We will find out why and send the solution back to Earth.”
We’re in space? Like outer space? We—what?
“But Tau Ceti is lightyears away! We’ll never get there in time to save Earth!” I realise.
“Actually, we are nine days away from arrival.” Yao says helpfully.
Okay. Okay, okay, okay.
After some more explanations, and not-swearing from me, I think I have a handle on the situation. Astrophage as fuel, comas, amnesia. I drink down a liquefied breakfast that is part of the process of adjusting to not-being-in-a-coma.
This is all just so insane.
“Astrophage is like the most basic name for a lifeform that feeds off the sun,” I remark to Ilyukhina, who is babysitting me while Yao checks our trajectory and flight path up in the cockpit. “It sounds like something I’d come up with.”
“You did.” Ilyukhina shrugs.
Riiiight.
Okay.
So. Apparently, I, Dr. Ryland Grace, was one of the leading experts on astrophage, despite most of my snatches of memory that are slowly filtering in pertaining to my career as a middle school science teacher.
Ilyukhina lets me process in silence for a little while. She looks apprehensive when I open my mouth again.
“Hey, are we gonna be in a coma for the trip back home, as well?”
Ilyukhina blanches, her face paling.
“This is conversation for Yao.”
“What? Why?”
Ilyukhina moves, but I grab her forearm before she can get out of reach, “Dr. Grace, it is not a nice thing to hear, and I’m not good at wording things nice.”
My heart is pounding. The robot arms that cared for us during our comas shifts unhappily, trying to get me to lay down flat.
“Ilyukhina, please. Just tell me.” I beg, even though I don’t want her to. I don’t want to know this terrible thing, which is already growing in my mind like a weed as my brain whirs to figure it out without my permission.
“We will not go home,” she spits out, “We die in space. Is suicide mission.”
Right. So, turns out I don’t have a handle on the situation in the slightest.
I think it may be finest accomplishment, the fact that I manage not to throw up.
I spend the next couple of hours furiously searching my tattered memory for an explanation to how the heck I ended up here.
“Why was I chosen for this mission? I’m not an astronaut? Am I an astronaut?” I ask.
“No, you’re not. There was an explosion, killing the scientist for this crew and backup. You were very brave to step up, you knew everything because Stratt had kept you close.”
Stratt was the spearhead of Project Hail Mary, they’d explained to me earlier.
I don’t think anyone has ever called me brave before. Maybe when I published that paper that got me kicked out of academics, but I’m pretty sure it was more of an insult that time.
Figures that my bravery brought me and big brain onto a mission to save the entire world, only for me to wake up with my head empty.
Oh, goodie, I’m panicking again.
“I made the wrong decision! I’ve got amnesia, I don’t know anything, so I’m useless!”
“Your memories will come back.” She sounds so sure.
“What if they don’t?” I demand.
“They will. It’s time for lunch, are you hungry?”
I take a deep breath, blow it out in a whoosh.
“Yippee, more sludge.” I say, with zero enthusiasm.
“That’s the spirit!” Ilyukhina pats me on the head.
~~~
Ilyukhina is right. My memory does start to come back, piece by jagged piece.
She would say that she’s always right, but that’s definitely not true. She was very confidently wrong on the name of the actor who starred in La La Land. Just because I have coma amnesia, doesn’t mean I don’t know my stuff.
“Why don’t you try remembering something useful instead of more American pop culture?” Ilyukhina suggests snidely.
She’s just a sore loser. I stick my tongue out at her.
“Ow, don’t hit me! I’m recovering from a coma, lady!”
“I woke up barely a day before you!”
The nine days until we arrive at Tau Ceti go by very slowly. The coma was probably a good idea.
I remember about the beetles that are onboard the Hail Mary, ready for us to send the solution back to Earth. It’s a sombre thought that gets me to go and sulk in the lab for a while, until my questioning why they’re named after the Beatles causes Yao to start singing the band’s greatest hits in such a terrible off-key warble, that Ilyukhina and I can barely hold back tears of laughter.
I do manage to regain some memories pertinent to the mission, as well. The early days of my astrophage experiments slowly come back to me. The day I became a father (by breeding the astrophage and simultaneously almost losing them). The day I poked an astrophage with a stick and it died. Something about nuking the arctic? My memory’s still pretty fuzzy, to be completely honest.
I brush up on all the science equipment in the lab, which thankfully all clicks into place with muscle memory. I stare at the model of the Petrova line that connects Venus and the Sun for a while, until Yao drags me down to the dormitory for dinner.
“We arrive tomorrow afternoon,” Yao says between mouthfuls, “Are we all ready?”
Ilyukhina nods, “Everything is in working order. We won’t know the functionality of the Petrovascope until we’re in zero g, but it appears to be undamaged from the journey.”
Yao turns to me.
I flash him two thumbs up, continuing to eat. The fried rice is one of my favourite meals.
“Dr. Grace, do you need to do any more preparations?”
“Nah. I’m good. We’ll take a look at Tau Ceti’s Petrova line, then grab a sample of it. And then I’ll examine it.”
“That’s it?” Ilyukhina says dryly, “That’s the whole plan?”
“It’s a brilliant plant, shut it.”