I Scream About Whatever Pops Into My ADHD Brain

Annie Shapiro bet on her lover Martin DuBois, going by the logic that he would need a truly epic rebound fling to get over her, and clearly nothing less than some kind of fantastical alien succubus would do. Martin obligingly bet on Annie in return.

No one wanted to bet on Yáo Li-Jie at first, thinking it would be disrespectful to his living wife, who would effectively become a widow as soon as the Hail Mary launched. This lasted until the first of only two times that Stratt permitted the primary crew's family to visit the Vat, when Yáo's wife somehow found out about the betting pools and wagered a decent sum on her husband, declaring that she knew of no one else whose bravery and fortitude would be better suited to such an adventurous endeavor.

Olesya Ilyukhina bet on herself, and pestered many of her countrymen aboard the Vat to do the same. She feigned incredulous offense when Dimitri Komorov elected to bet on DuBois instead (on the grounds that Komorov estimated DuBois' general range of preferences in a partner to be wider than Ilyukhina's or Yáo's).

Bob Redell put down smaller bets on all three of the primary crew, as well as some even smaller bets on the members of the backup crew. He claimed that he had carefully calculated the amount of each bet so as to best play the odds.

Steve Hatch put down a joke bet (at least, everyone assumed it was a joke) that an alien would fall in passionate star-crossed love with one of his beetle probes, and be left weeping in despair when it eventually departed for Earth along with its three compatriots.

The official pot did not contain any bets labeled as coming from Eva Stratt. She may have placed one under someone else's name as a proxy, but no one would have dared ask her.

Ryland Grace, Dr. Lokken, and Dr. Lamai were the longest holdouts who refused to bet in this particular pool for a good while. Lokken eventually gave in and followed Hatch's example, betting a paltry sum that some alien would propose a passionate affair with the Hail Mary herself (drawn in, no doubt, by her irresistible centrifugal gravity).

Dr. Grace and Dr. Lamai stayed stubborn about it for a little longer, but eventually they decided together that placing nominal bets would be a small price to pay in order to get the rest of the Vat to stop pestering them on the subject. Grace jokingly suggested that Lamai should bet that an alien would get a crush on her mechanical nannybot, only for Lamai to fix him with a indignant stare and declare that her distinguished protégé would certainly not engage in such an unprofessional relationship with a being who might well become its patient at some point.

"Whatever," Grace sighed, truly done with discussing this topic. "Why don't we just bet on each other. It's not like anybody in this betting pool is ever going to actually collect."

And so they did.

(Many years later, shortly after the long-awaited beetle probes had been caught and immediately hustled to some deeply-classified location, Dr. Lamai found an unexpected envelope in her mail. When she opened it, she found a small sum of American currency and a brief handwritten note. The note was not signed, but after a moment, she recognized Eva Stratt's severe, tidy cursive: