It’s stupid. It doesn’t make sense. And it’s currently happening to him in the most inconvenient way possible. Did he mention that it was stupid? Because it was.
Next time Rocky and the science team decide to mess with causality or space-time, sign him the fudge out. Look, he understood wanting to crack the hard nut that was quantum physics, but when the answers started adding up to one big shrug and a your guess is as good as mine, you took a step back and reevaluated your life choices. Unless, of course, you wanted to go the sort of crazy you only saw in Lovecraft stories before the narrator got eaten by—or, in the more fun ones, turned into—the eldritch horror of the week.
Yeah, no. Leave him to his pipettes and squishy microorganisms.
What was he talking about? Right. Time travel. Which he was now experiencing. Because Grace was a sucker for supporting his friends, and learning that Rocky was the head engineer on the Hadron Collider 2.0— but for black holes— had made him want to attend the opening.
God, he was dumb. Why did the universe hate him so much? Could he go, like, a decade without universe-shattering crap happening? Evidently not. Because stupid, darn time travel, that's why.
And it’s not even the day of the launch. Not even reawakening in the Hail Mary. Not even the day Stratt waltzes into his life and upends it in the efficient stampede she calls pure willpower and the backing of every nation’s government, complete with an I do what I want letter in her pocket. No. Little old Dr. Ryland Grace had landed three years in the past. Before Astrophage. Before any of it.
And he was actually going to go crazy at this rate.
He had the equivalent of knowledge about the time, date, and process of the end of the world, and he still had to pay taxes and keep writing apology emails to parents after teaching their children that the Earth wasn’t flat.
He felt like Cassandra, except if he tried to say anything about it, the world could end anyway—just worse this time around.
And call him selfish. Call him a coward. But he wanted to see his best friend again. And that would only happen if he became the titular scientist for the Hail Mary Project. So he had to wait. And slowly go stir-crazy from not being able to scream into the faces of random people on the street that aliens were real and they were coming to eat the Sun.
Did he mention he had time-traveled and it was stupid? Because it was. And he hated it.
He misses two lunch dates with Marissa while stewing in his apartment, and it’s a good stew, he says so himself. Not quite first-weeks-on-the-Hail-Mary levels of lamenting, but definitely up there.
Eventually she barges into his apartment, gasping at the state of things as if she isn’t the one who burglarized her way in, and shoves him toward the shower while informing him not to come out until he no longer smells like the back of a years-old fridge sitting in a dump.
Which is mean, but fair. Once they’re curled up on the couch with steaming cups of hot chocolate in hand, and Grace is looking and smelling significantly less like a homeless man, Marissa asks the hot-button question everyone wants answered. Why is he isolating himself for all of spring break? Was it a girl? Was it a boy.
Which— ew, no and wait.
He hasn’t had the revelations about himself yet. Three years with nothing to do and unfettered internet access had led him and Rocky down some interesting rabbit holes and quite a bit of self-reflection that Grace had been putting off and was sorely in need of. Sexuality crisis aside, though, that would have been a good excuse.
A man does not randomly self-isolate for two weeks without a reason.
He needs something. Anything plausible.
Something other than time travel and oh God, the world’s going to end and my platonic soulmate is currently alone in space surrounded by the corpses of his friends, and if I think about it too hard I start bawling.
Go, social brain. Create believable lie.
“I miss writing papers.”
…You have failed me, social brain.
Which, okay, was technically true.
He’d gotten into the habit on the trip to Erid. Partly for documentation, partly because he was bored out of his ever-loving mind. There are only so many games of solitaire a person can play before wanting to claw their eyes out.
And once the starvation set in, writing became a way to deal with the pain. A way to take his mind off everything happening and simply exist. Something that felt like contributing without pushing himself to the point of damage.
So yeah, weirdly enough, he’d Pavlov’d himself into craving writing papers. Maybe four or five. Maybe he’d already started one called ‘Here’s Why Time Travel Is Stupid and Why I Can’t Tell People Shit Even Though I Really Want To.’
It was a working title.
And Marissa, who had seen him through some of his worst moments in college— yikes— after college, and after the conference—bigger yikes—that time he got high, climbed a tree to rescue a kite, got tangled in both the tree and the kite, and had to have the fire department called to get him down...
She’d been there through all of it.
She knew he was actually having a breakdown over this. Obviously. And being the great friend she was, she offered him some grace. (Ha.)
She pointed out that he could always go back. She knew how he felt about academia now, but writing one paper wouldn’t kill him. He could dip his toes back in without committing to the whole thing.
And whoops. Hadn’t they already had this conversation? Grace felt like amnesia was one hell of a drug. Or maybe it was the other way around.
Either way, Marissa had definitely suggested this before. More than once. Encouraged him to return. Encouraged him to write. And every time he’d refused. Always the coward.
Always the turtle retreating back into his shell.
Because he was scared. Because he didn’t want to apologize for being a prick. Because some of the things he’d yelled had been objectively hilarious but also completely undeserved.
The thing was, despite being eccentric and wildly out of left field, Dr. Ryland Grace absolutely could have stayed in academia. But he was an egoist. And a coward. So he ran. And when they closed the door behind him, he’d treated it as both martyrdom and a devastating blow to his self-esteem.
And, annoyingly, Marissa had a point. As always. But what would he write. Maybe a speculative paper on, Astrophage; that would really freak some people out later in the game. Or maybe theorize Xenonite. Ha. That would be funny. Or— Holy shit.
Marissa, he would kiss you if you weren’t a lesbian and his best friend. Currently. (Sorry, Rocky.) And if he weren’t very asexual.
Holy shit, an answer to his problem. For the last two weeks he’d been living in a bubble of woe is me and an overwhelming urge to scream from the treetops that the sky was falling and somebody, anybody, should start building pillars before it was too late.
But he’d been terrified people would think he’d finally snapped. If he wrote papers, though? Maybe networked through Marissa? Maybe nudged people in the right direction? Maybe he could help the world prepare for the coming famine and winter.
Maybe he could even get the Hail Mary into orbit sooner. Maybe it would work. Maybe he’d get laughed out of the room again.
But he’d stared down death more times than he could count. He’d seen an entire planet stretch out before him and tell him he was a thimble in the universe’s current. He had a best friend whose idea of conversation was roasting him every other sentence.
What were a few nasty comments compared to that?
"Okay, sugar honey iced tea. Fine. I accept."
His answer genuinely surprises Marissa because she immediately chokes on her hot cocoa mid-sip.
And while frantically patting her back, he has to hurriedly add that he will not be leaving his job and that this is absolutely just a side thing. Marissa nods.
Then she hugs him so hard it feels like she’s trying to squeeze the air from his lungs. And for the first time since waking up two years before the apocalypse, Ryland thinks that maybe—just maybe—he’s found something he can actually do.
What’s the worst that could happen?
