Your post about domesticated coyotes and the problems that arise with the idea includes a specific phrase that I *could* look up myself, but I feel like you could phrase it very interestingly.
"Re"-domestication of cheetahs?
With reference to This Post
In ancient Egypt, Cheetahs were sometimes used as hunting animals like greyhounds, and kept as housepets by the royal family and later, many wealthy households.
Now, there's an argument about how "domesticated" these cheetahs were- the majority of them were captured from the wild as adults and tamed/trained to tolerate humans and obey hunting commands, mostly because back then and still today, cheetahs are extremely hard to breed in captivity. Some were bred and raised from cubs, and there was not a shortage of cheetahs living in and around human habitation for them to replace stock with.
Even today, cheetahs are... weirdly comfortable around humans, if those humans know how to mind their manners. Game wardens in Kruger National Park sometimes sleep next to young cheetahs they are re-introducing into the wild, or have had female cheetahs who are familiar with them drop their cubs off on their feet to 'babysit' while she goes hunting.
Here's a pair of San hunters from the Naankuse Wildlife Reserve in Namibia bow-hunting while a wild local male cheetah hangs out with them (the angle makes him look much bigger and closer to the men than he is, but he's still VERY close). The male's name is Aiko, and is well-known to these men- they're not worried about his presence because they know how to respect his space and he knows not to go after game they've downed. Game they miss is free for him to run down, and game he flushes from the bushes are much easier to shoot- a mutually beneficial partnership. It's extremely similar to how the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea hunt with their dogs, some of the most recently domesticated and most similar to ancient 'proto-dogs' alive today.
So, cheetahs aren't domesticated the way dogs and housecats are- they haven't been selectively bred for generations, they're not dependent on humans, and they can and will attack people that bother them.
But like Coyotes, the remaining cheetahs we have are VERY habituated to humans, arguably even moreso than coyotes are, and we've made a lot of progress in getting them to breed in captivity- Ironically by pairing them up with highly domesticated dogs, who teach them domesticated animal behaviors like "not worrying about everything".
With Coyotes, the obstacle to domestication are mostly practical matters like "getting a coyote farm funded, zoned, built and insured.", whereas with cheetahs the problem is "there are almost no cheetahs left to practice domestication on and the ones we do have are already inbred". There IS a lot of commercial interest in domesticated cheetahs, so I think a good way to get the funding for species conservation and genetic re-diversification of cheetahs would be to frame it as a prerequisite to "Re-Domestication" and pet cheetahs.
We've done much larger and more complicated things before.
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the movie solves the central flaw of book ryland grace, which is that he feels so much like the author’s special boy. he never really worked in his field but everyone agrees he would have been the best. he makes simple discoveries individually before anyone else in the world does. people are always relying on him to explain things they wouldn’t plausibly need explained. he learns an alien language in a week. he’s a scientist but he’s too good for animal testing. he’s the smartest guy alive but he’s conveniently told this by every other character so he doesn’t ever have to think it. there is no other word for it, it’s cringe. thank god they made him ryan gosling, who gives grace an inherent failure energy which 100% fixes him
look even if you arent into grace/rocky you just HAVE to admit they explored each others bodies on the journey to erid. just to see whats up. the scientific boundary-crossing is already canon. and you wanna tell me those two intellectually curious guys trapped in a tin can for 3-4 years didnt at least get up to some weird shit for enrichment? dont make me laugh
#i know this post is supposed to have a sexual connotation but imo they're getting weirder than that#rocky lets grace observe his entire digestive process with an adapted x-ray machine#they make some slapdash endoscopy equipment so rocky can look down grace's esophagus and stomach#grace lets rocky pull a tooth for study because he's fascinated by the human body producing something that's similarly sturdy#to himself (also he wants to have it professionally embedded into his carapace as soon as they get to erid but shhhh)#rocky chips off pieces from his own mantle (his deformed legs are already brittler than the rest of him so it's not like it's hard)#also for “study” but is internally debating himself on how to ask grace if he's ever considered subdermal piercings#grace gives himself multiple surgicial lacerations so rocky can get a better view of his sinew and muscle#and document the (from his mostly inorganic perspective) insane restorative ability of human skin#maybe grace even lets some of them get infected on purpose so he can show off his immune system#anyways that being said#rocky is not a biologist and probably doesn't know the exact chemical make-up of his internal tissue.#so they're definitely shoving a heat protected spectrometer up his cloaca
no no @ecobanshee youre right on the money. its definitely also about all of that.
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Thinking about the first time Grace & Rocky inevitably get into a big argument on the journey to Erid. Because, like, they are obviously inseparable queerplatonic besties, but Grace is slowly getting more and more irritable as he, you know, dies of starvation, and Rocky started this trip with decades worth of survivor's guilt and PTSD and is now adding a hefty dose of caretaker fatigue on top of that.
It probably starts as a misunderstanding--they still don't even perfectly speak each others' languages, and there's plenty of room for cultural differences to get in the way, too. They're both on-edge and living in extremely close quarters and for whatever reason it explodes.
And neither of them know what to do with that.
Rocky ends up feeling hurt and guilty all at the same time, frustrated with Grace but also with himself, because he knows his friend is going through a hard time, it's just also terrible to have to watch and he doesn't know how to fix that. Grace probably finds a corner to cry in, convinced he's doomed himself by making Rocky angry because how is he going to convince everyone else on Erid to care about saving his life if he can't even stay on good terms with his friend?
Eventually they get over it. They talk about what happened and get to a less shaky place. It's still a scary couple of hours for both of them, and they know it could happen again. But they still care about each other so, so much, and that makes it worth it.
So maybe I haven't been able to stop turning this over in my head and wrote this today instead of my job applications. 4400 words, be warned :')
---
Since being sent to space, I’ve done a lot of human firsts: first human interstellar traveler, first human to visit an exoplanet, first human contact with an intelligent alien species, first human to eat a different alien species (unless Dmitri and Ilyukhina were serious about doing astrophage shots. I don’t think they were. But they might have been).
I think I might also be the first human to tell my best friend that I wished he and his whole species were dead because I can’t have cake anymore.
I’m a lot less proud of that one.
I think I’m a bad friend.
It’s embarrassing to be upset about little things, because it makes you feel stupid, and feeling stupid makes you feel more upset, and feeling upset about that makes you feel more stupid, in a spiral of feeling bad about everything. Being upset that I was going to die in space? That was normal. Anyone would be upset about that. But about two years into the journey to Erid I realized I had eaten the last of the freeze-dried meals with the chocolate cake yesterday and now I was never going to have chocolate or cake ever again, and I hadn’t even appreciated it.
I stood at the food storage compartments, staring stupidly at them, trying not to either cry or throw something. I was in the third week of my new meal regimen: coma slurry for breakfast, taumoeba slime for lunch, and then real food for dinner, to end on a high note. Intercutting real food with taumoeba was my idea, and I was mad at myself for doing it. I had enough real food to last until Erid, but it was dwindling scarily fast. Rocky was insistent that Eridian scientists would drop everything and figure out how to make food that would keep me alive as their first priority, but… well, I’d come from an Earth that was having the same problems. I didn’t think they’d want to drop everything they were doing to save their own planet to invent a whole new technological infrastructure to keep one alien alive. So I wanted to make sure what I had would stretch out long enough for them to figure out something I could eat that wouldn’t kill me. But what that meant was slime for breakfast and slime for lunch, every day, and the lunch slime was filling but it wasn’t energizing. By dinner time I was always cranky. And this was going to be how every day was going to go for at least the next two years and probably the next rest of my life. And all I wanted was something with chocolate in it and there wasn’t any and never would be again.
I slumped down on the floor.
“Grace?” Rocky called from the other room.
“Just deciding on dinner,” I said.
“From the floor, question?”
“Yeah.”
Ilyukhina had wanted chocolate cake.
The memories still keep filtering up, though by now they feel more like remembering things normally that I just hadn’t been thinking about before. Ilyukhina’s 39th birthday was a few months before launch, and she was making the most of it.
“Cake, champagne, and zakuski should have eggplant, I like the eggplant,” she said, counting off on her fingers the things she wanted for her big birthday bash. Stratt listened with the kind of patience she rarely had time for anymore, but Ilyukhina was good at making you want to listen to her. “Smoked salmon on rye bread. Music, dancing. Flowers. Everyone brings me a little card that says nice things about how much you all love me and how much you all will miss me. Also I want bouncy castle from American movies.”
That actually earned a brief but real smile from Stratt. “We are not importing a… bouncy castle… onto the ship.”
“Will be my last birthday party ever,” Ilyukhina said. “And I have never seen a bouncy castle in real life.”
Stratt held firm on nixing the bouncy castle, but Ilyukhina did get her party with music, dancing, lots of champagne and vodka, eggplant, smoked salmon, and everybody on the ship making toasts about how great she was. There was also a chocolate cake.
My last birthday ever was a month later and was mostly DuBois and Shapiro ambushing me as I left the lab with leftover champagne from Ilyukhina’s party and cookies stolen from the mess hall. If I’d known it would be my last birthday party ever, maybe I would have tried to do something more special. There wasn’t even cake.
Rocky rolled up in his xenonite ball. He was working on a more articulated suit, but hadn’t come up with a design that worked well yet. The suit would help him interact with me and the oxygenated side of the Hail Mary better, and I was torn between feeling like it was really sweet that he would put in all that effort for something that he didn’t really need to do in order to make things easier on me and feeling weird that soon he wouldn’t even need me for the one thing I could do that he couldn’t. But for now he was still in the ball and he still needed me to interact with most things on my side of the barrier.
He nudged me with the ball. “Something is wrong with the food, question?”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “It’s just that I’m out of the one that I wanted.”
“Other ones are not good, question?”
“You don’t taste flavors, or, I don’t know, maybe you do, but sometimes humans want specific things,” I said. Rocky still didn’t love talking about eating, so I wasn’t entirely positive if Eridians had any equivalent to sense of taste or not, but I’d definitely gotten that there was a lot less variety of things Eridians ate than humans did. “And right now the thing I want is chocolate cake.”
“Don’t know that word.”
“It’s a type of food. It’s a dessert. We eat it at parties. It tastes really good and… I mean, it’s really meant for sharing. It’s kind of sad to eat cake alone.”
Rocky made a sound that was kind of like a laugh and kind of like a disbelieving snort. “Human social eating. Strange strange strange. Humans are weird perverts.”
It wasn’t anything new, it was a running joke, but it was not what I wanted to hear right then. “I can’t help it if eating food together is the basic unit of human socializing, okay? Eridians are the weird perverts for getting weird about it! It’s important to me even if you think it’s stupid! I’m allowed to miss it!”
I didn’t mean to snap that forcefully, but I just wasn’t in the mood to be patient. Rocky was quiet, then when he responded, his tone was clipped. “I know. All you want to talk about is food anymore. I sit with Grace while eat because it makes you sad not to. You think I don’t know this.”
“All I want to talk about is food anymore because I’m afraid of starving, Rock. Even Eridians have to worry about that!”
“I know!” The whistle in his tone was frustrated. He made a noise kind of like “ugh” then said, “Was trying to make joke. Was not trying to insult.”
I had the presence of mind not to say “well, you did,” but what I did say was more like, “Mmh.” I got up and rifled through the food packets again. I paused over the babaganoush. That was eggplant, right? We’d has something like that at Ilyukhina’s party, back when I was on Earth and worrying about food was something abstract for me. Something I knew was a real problem in the world, but not one I’d ever faced.
Maybe even if I was still on Earth, I’d be worrying about having enough food. But at least everyone else would be, too, and they’d be willing to commiserate.
That wasn’t fair. I knew Rocky was worried about me. He spent a lot of time fretting over my health and my safety and if I was sleeping enough and if I had enough food and if I was feeling restless or bored and he freaked out a lot the first time I threw up the taumoeba slime because he was afraid his suggestion had killed me. I had to reassure him that I was fine and I wasn’t dying even as I had no idea if that was true or not.
“My turn to choose the movie tonight,” I said, as I mixed water into the babaganoush to rehydrate it. “The Great British Bake-Off.”
“Don’t know two of those words,” said Rocky.
“It’s relaxing. Humans like watching it because it’s calming. And I still miss cake.”
It was not relaxing or calming to Rocky. I could tell he was on edge the whole time. “Grace didn’t say it was food show,” he said accusingly.
“Like I said. Eating food together is the basic unit of human socializing.”
Rocky bunched up his arms around his carapace in a way I could tell was an expression of discomfort, and as much as it made me feel like a total jerk, it was also kind of satisfying. I was feeling like crap, watching this show while eating rehydrated chemical-infused babaganoush was making me feel like crap, and maybe I had decided to do that because I wanted Rocky to join me in feeling like crap. Also, babaganoush is a slime, which I hadn’t consciously remembered until I chose it. Three square meals of slime today. It didn’t even really leave me feeling full, and after I finished it, I couldn’t just heat up another one, because I had a ration schedule. I could eat more taumoeba, but eating taumoeba while watching polite and friendly British bakers in their cute sunny kitchens and green grassy lawns make cake I couldn’t eat would probably have pushed me over the edge.
“Grace feeling relaxed and calm now, question?” Rocky asked.
“I’m still hungry,” I grumbled. It wasn’t Rocky’s fault that he had 220 years’ worth of food and I had three, but it was hard to believe that when my stomach was grumbling and I had only eaten slime all day.
“Can eat taumoeba—”
“I don’t want taumoeba!” I was acting like a child and I didn’t care. I think I was also crying. “I want to go home.”
Rocky rolled his ball closer to me. “What can I do that would make Grace feel more like home?”
“You can’t,” I said. “That’s the problem. You can’t. The Hail Mary isn’t home and neither of us know what’s going to happen on Erid, if I’ll just die or what—”
“Erid will be Grace’s home! Grace won’t die!”
“It won’t be, and you don’t know that!” And now I was yelling, which Rocky didn’t deserve, but—“Nobody there knows me, nobody there will know or care what humans do, even you—you don’t really get it, and nobody ever will again and I’m going to feel like this forever—”
“I have been TRYING!” Rocky’s pitch shot up almost past the point I could hear him, and he had to bristle and compose himself to drop his voice back into the range my weak stupid human ears could pick up. “Trying everything that I can to make you comfortable and tolerate your stupid food rules because everything is about food always and you get sad when you eat alone and get sad when you eat taumoeba and get sad when you eat coma slurry and I watch your human movies where everybody is eating together all the time and you talk about how much you want to eat the food they are eating and it doesn’t matter that I try to make the Hail Mary comfortable for you and change my voice to talk to you and make xenonite suit so I can do outside hull tasks so you don’t have to do them all, because I can’t make more food for you! Don’t know what else I can do!”
“You can’t!” I said. “And I didn’t ask you to do any of that! You can’t fix what’s actually wrong!”
“I know!” Rocky hissed steam out of his vents, then said, in a tone so measured it was almost insulting, “Rocky can’t fix what is actually wrong. So I try to fix what I can. But Grace needs to tell me what can be fixed or else I have to guess and then make Grace angry that I try.” His words were choppy again, like he needed to use small words to get the point across.
The screen still showed happy humans being nice to each other on a sunny, happy Earth that probably didn’t even exist anymore and it was making me feel awful about everything. “I want to go home,” I said. “That’s what’s wrong. And that can’t be fixed, because I’m gonna be eating taumoeba soup alone on Erid forever and that was the stupid choice I made. I wish I’d never turned around.”
Rocky was quiet at that.
I should have apologized. I should have said I didn’t mean it. The problem was, right then, I did.
Stratt once told me I was a good man. She’s not wrong often but I think she was wrong on that one.
Then Rocky rolled forward and bumped his xenonite ball against me roughly. “Grace is being stupid. Grace sleep now.”
“I’m not tired.” I tried to shove his ball. Obviously it didn’t move because he weighs about three hundred pounds.
“Don’t care. Humans can choose when sleep. So Grace sleep now. Statement.”
It wasn’t like I had anything better to do. Neither could I come up with anything to say to Rocky that would make what I’d just said not horrible.
So I acquiesced, and I went to sleep.
Or I tried to. I mean, I brushed my teeth (I was running low on toothpaste, too) and flopped into my bed and pressed my face into the pillow and pointedly kept it there.
When Rocky was confident I was actually in bed, I heard his xenonite ball roll away. I looked up from sulking into my pillow in shock, sure that he hadn’t actually just left while I was sleeping. But he had.
It hurt way, way more than I expected.
“Screw you,” I mumbled into the pillow. And then felt bad.
Down the hall in Rocky’s half of the ship, I heard the muffled rush of escaping air I’d only heard a few times before when Rocky was very, very worked up, a sound that meant he was in the other room screaming in frustration.
Me too, buddy. We both got to be mad and miserable, I guess.
Unfortunately Rocky was right that lying down in my bed was making me feel… if not better, at least more tired. It was like the anger that had been pent up inside me that had been giving me energy was gone and now I was just tired. Tired, and stupid.
Was this it? Was this really my whole future? I couldn’t even avoid pissing off and getting pissed off by Rocky, who was easily the best friend I had ever had. He was still so sure that all of Erid was going to love me and dedicate round-the-clock care to making sure I could thrive in his crushing boiling ammonia world, when I wasn’t even convinced he would still love me by the time we got there. Definitely not if I was going to act like this.
It wasn’t his fault that he was going home and I wasn’t. It wasn’t his fault we both messed up the taumoeba breeding because neither of us could have predicted that taumoeba would adapt to escape xenonite, any more than it was anyone’s fault that his crew had all died and Yao and Ilyukhina had also both died and the two of us were the ones who survived due to pure stupid luck.
It wasn’t anybody’s fault, which made it feel really bad to get mad about.
I sniffled into the pillow. It brought back memories of grad school, getting comments back from my committee on my dissertation chapters; my advisor was helpful but thorough with her commentary, rewriting so many sentences and correcting my commas and n-dashes every single time, and I had a pure Reviewer 2 type who would add comments like “What? That’s not correct” and “this sentence is incoherent” and “this isn’t the original source for this theory, you should be citing Whoever, Date.” And it would make me feel like crap every time and I’d punch my bed and sulk and feel sorry for myself, and then take a nap because I didn’t want to deal with that right then. And when I woke up from my nap I would be ready to face the files again and make the changes.
It had never occurred to me before how lucky humans are that if we don’t feel like dealing with our feelings right away we can instead cry and take a nap. Eridians can’t do either thing.
I was doing a lot of napping on the Hail Mary on my way back to Erid, ostensibly to conserve my energy and stretch out my food supply, but mostly because there were long stretches where I had nothing else to do.
When Rocky was alone on the Blip-A, before I’d come to Tau Ceti and after the taumoeba had escaped and eaten all his astrophage fuel, he couldn’t even do that.
Yeah, telling him I wished I had left him like that was a really shitty thing to do.
This was what I was supposed to be going to sleep to avoid thinking about.
Rocky still wasn’t back. I fell asleep feeling bad and also very alone.
—
He was back when I woke up.
“Oh,” I said. “How long have you been there?”
“Hours. Grace feeling less stupid, question?”
“A little.” I was actually still feeling extremely stupid, but close enough.
Rocky fidgeted with something or other in his hands. I didn’t know if it was an actual project or just something to fidget with. He hummed a little, a low sound that didn’t mean anything. I guess he didn’t know what to say any more than I did.
“Uh,” I said.
Smooth.
A few years ago, I’d had to sit a student down and have a talk about why it was inappropriate to tell your classmate you hope they die. What would I say to me if I were a seventh grader having a fight with my friend?
“I’m sorry I said that to you,” I said, finally. I couldn’t truthfully say I hadn’t meant it, because yesterday, when I said it, I did. But I felt gross at yesterday-me for feeling that way. And I had to say something. “I don’t mean it. I don’t actually wish I’d made a different choice. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t leave you like that.”
“I know.”
“I’m not actually mad at you,” I went on, because Rocky was being unnervingly quiet. “I’m trying to be hopeful about going to Erid. I really am. I’m just…” I didn’t even know what I was trying to say.
“Erid is not your home,” Rocky said.
“Yeah.”
He kept fidgeting. Then he said, “When taumoeba escaped, I thought I would die on the ship and never go home, never save Erid. Then Grace came back. Gave up everything for me. But now there is nothing I can do for you even close to what you did for me. Never will be, no matter how much I try. Because I am going home and Grace is not and there is no way to change that.”
“I wouldn’t have even had the possibility of going back to Earth in the first place if it wasn’t for you,” I said. “So it’s a net zero change, really.” I wasn’t sure I really believed that. But it was better to believe than anything else.
Rocky made a sound that indicated he didn’t really believe I believed that either.
“If it helps,” I said, “there’s no way I would have ever been happy on Earth again if I’d left you stranded in space.” That was true. When I’d been facing down the choice to keep going to Earth or turn around for Rocky, even when I’d been trying to find a way to convince myself that Rocky would be okay and I could go home… I knew deep down that I wouldn’t know how to live with myself after, if I’d just left him there to die.
Rocky slumped a little. “Going home, or tired and hungry and restless always. No way for Grace to be happy then.”
I knew he’d been stressing about this, but I don’t think I’d realized how much he’d been stressing about this. I mean, I’d been stressing about this, but that was because I was going to have to live it. “I’m trying,” I said. “I really am.”
“I’m trying too.”
“I know.”
I think sleeping did make me feel better, at least a little bit. I didn’t feel as hopeless about the future as I did last night. “And hey,” I said, “If I had to be trapped in a tiny spaceship for four years on the way to a brand new planet with anybody, I’m glad it’s you.”
That earned a little laugh equivalent from Rocky. “We save stars together. We can do anything.”
“Yeah. I believe in us.” I thought about it, and then added, “Although, just so you know, when I’m feeling sad about missing Earth and hungry for Earth food, that’s not a good time to make fun of human eating habits, okay?”
“Understand. Sorry sorry sorry. Didn’t mean to hurt. Wouldn’t hurt on purpose.” Rocky clicked his fingers against the bottom of the ball. Then he said, sounding cautious, “Also. When human movie has eating scene that will be long or gross, please tell Rocky that will happen. So many movies have them, and is uncomfortable when not expecting. Regent of the Southern Kingdom was disturbing.”
“Regent—oh. Yeah. The Denethor scene is supposed to be disturbing, even to humans.”
“It worked.”
“I can do that, yeah. Springing Bake-Off on you last night was mean.”
“It was. I was trying to help and felt like you were punishing me.”
“I kind of was. I was being a jerk.” I sighed. “I think… I don’t know. It feels stupid to say it isn’t fair. But. I think that’s it, isn’t it? It isn’t fair.”
“Isn’t fair,” Rocky agreed.
“And if it can’t be fixed, it just… feels better to know that you know it isn’t fair and can’t be fixed, you know? Rather than try to fix it.”
“Not really.”
“Well. It does.”
“Will try. Well. Try to not fix unless you want.”
“Thanks.”
I sat cross-legged on my bed in silence for a couple seconds. Then, because sitting in silence has never been a thing I’ve been particularly good at, I asked, “Are you mad at me?”
“Not mad now,” Rocky said. “Frustrated. But mostly frustrated because it isn’t fair and can’t be fixed and don’t know what to do.”
“Yeah. Same here.”
I didn’t really know what to go from there, because I was already exhausted from trying to talk about my feelings and my next thought was “I’m hungry” which probably would not be a welcome topic of conversation right now. (It was coma slurry time. Wonderful.)
“Grace wants to see body suit progress, question?” Rocky asked.
“Oh,” I said. “Sure, yeah.” Rocky showing me the stuff he was making was much more comfortable territory.
Rocky rolled away. I stretched and got up. I could sulk about it, but this was going to be my future, and I didn’t want to spend it resenting Rocky.
I had changed into new clothes and was brushing my teeth by the time Rocky came back. He stepped stiffly and awkwardly, the form-fitting xenonite suit still clearly bulkier than was comfortable.
I spit into the sink, which earned a disapproving chitter from Rocky, then rinsed my mouth out and jogged back over to the “bedroom” area. “Hey! That’s impressive.”
“Still needs work on usage flexibility and use-length,” Rocky said. “More flexibility means less air inside, which means harder temperature regulation, so can only wear it safely for 36 minutes. Not good for spacewalks yet.”
“It’s cool that you can walk around in it, though,” I said. “And you can operate the controls on my side of Mary. That’s gotta be useful.” I was selfishly glad it wasn’t great yet, though, so Rocky would still need me to do some things on my side of the ship. I was trying to be optimistic but I wasn’t ready to be wholly useless yet.
“Can also do this,” Rocky said. “Get down.”
“What?”
“Get down. On floor.”
“Um, okay,” I said, and sat down on the floor in front of Rocky.
Rocky took a minute shuffling back and forth next to me in the awkward suit. Then, once satisfied, he braced three of his legs and reached out the other two to wrap around me.
“What—oh!”
“Can give Grace hug like this.”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly blinking back tears. “Oh. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, you can.”
“Is this good?”
I shifted position so I could hug him back. The xenonite was gently warm. “Yeah. It is.”
“Sorry upset Grace.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m the one who was an ass.”
“Don’t know word.”
“It’s an English swearword. It means jerk, except ruder. It refers to the human backside.”
Rocky yipped in delight. It’s not like he hasn’t picked up words from movies, but I don’t usually define them.
“Okay to tease about leaking?” Rocky asked.
I sniffed. “Yeah. That’s fine.”
“Grace is leaking all over fancy new suit.”
“You’re bringing me home with you, buddy, you have to get used to it.”
“Think I will,” Rocky said. I really, really hoped so. Even with the stiffness of the suit, it still felt completely different from hugging the hamster ball.
“Feeling hug over yet?”
“Nope.”
Rocky made a fond-exasperated noise but let the hug keep going. After a few moments, he said, “I want Grace to be happy on Erid.”
suddenly thinking about the courtroom scene, of Stratt being accused of pirating literally everything, and Grace later having everything in the various computers aboard his ship that he gave a copy to Rocky without issue, and the beetles having such a massive memory capacity and...
Stratt was a historian. She wasn't just pirating for the sake of entertainment for the astronauts, she was doing a full historical backup of the planet. Who knows how much knowledge and communications ability, how much art and culture and history, how much niche knowledge of how to make specific pieces of modern technology or modern medicines, was lost as the wars for resources isolated everyone, as the death tolls led to the deaths of specialized trade workers and scientists, as the power grids failing across the planet (or cut off, potentially) led to all the cloud servers going dark. Stratt was facing methods of combating extinction and she did her best to ensure that if/when the Hail Mary worked, it would send back not just the hope of the future in the solution to the astrophage, but the restoration of history and culture and knowledge.
Just.... she pirated everything, and put it all on the Hail Mary.
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Grace and Rocky, giving a tour of the Hail Mary to fascinated Eridian scientists and diplomats.
Pointing at things and explaining what they are and how the ship works, lots of awed and appreciative noises are made.
Until one of the visiting Eridians points out a specific item. “And that?”
It’s a strange, circular thing, a xenonite disk mounted upright on some sort of pivot so it can spin freely, but around the edges it has… spokes? Pegs? Sticking out of it, that hit against a stiff flap that would slow down the spinning.
It is also separated into sections decorated with crude etchings of a human and an Eridian.
“Ah,” Grace says.
“That,” Rocky says.
“That’s. Um.” Grace seems somewhat embarrassed. “That’s the sacrifice wheel.”
The Eridian visitors clearly do not know what to make of that. “We think we misunderstood Savior Grace’s word,” they say, apparently hoping this is a vocabulary mix-up. “Explain (question, polite)?”
“Didn’t misunderstand,” says Rocky, sounding very sheepish. “That is sacrifice wheel.”
“So. While we were on our way to Erid, we might have gotten… anxious about each other’s well-being,” Grace says, which everyone is already very aware is a wild understatement. “And, well, you heard what happened at Tau Ceti, and after. There were a lot of unexpected dangers for the whole trip that required a lot of, at least, attempted self-sacrifice to solve. We ended up almost dying for each other several times. And we had an argument about what we’d do if another crisis like that came up. And we couldn't agree.”
“Grace argued that Grace already was unlikely to survive long-term on Erid, so he should be the one to do any potential deadly but necessary maneuvers to make sure I was able to bring taumoeba back,” Rocky says.
“Which made sense.”
“Did not make sense! Grace already sacrificed so much for me and for Erid, wouldn’t be fair to make you do it again—“ Rocky cuts himself off with a huff. They have obviously had this conversation before. “So sacrifice wheel was compromise.”
“Yeah,” Grace says. He spins it to demonstrate; it whirls around in a blur and a rattle of the flap hitting the pegs, then eventually slows down, and stops—pointing at the segment depicting a very bad but very clear image of an Eridian. “Rocky made the wheel, I spin the wheel, and whoever it lands on, that’s who gets to sacrifice themself to save the other and the other person does not get to argue. This way, we wouldn’t waste time debating who does the self-sacrifice and who survives, it’s just a plain fifty-fifty chance. Or, eighteen-eighteen chance in base six. But the point is it could be either of us and we would have to accept the outcome.”
Rocky started fidgeting while Grace was explaining. When Grace finishes, proud of the equitable solution they came up with to allow them to die for each other fairly, Rocky says, “Now that we are back and we don’t need sacrifice wheel anymore… I have confession to make. About the wheel.”
“What about the wheel?”
Rocky doesn’t answer. Grace frowns, first confused, then suspicious, and spins the wheel again.
It lands on Rocky again.
He spins the wheel again, and again, and again, and it lands on Rocky every single time.
“Rocky!”
“I weighted the wheel,” Rocky admits.
“Rocky the whole point was that it was equal, that was why we even made it—“
“Never was necessary so doesn’t matter anymore!”
“But you WOULD have!”
“And you never noticed because you were hungry and cranky and distracted and so would have done bad job on heroic self-sacrifice anyway!”
“I would not! I would have done fine!”
(The Eridian scientists and diplomats are still here watching this btw. Slowly dawning on them that 1) these two are extremely not normal about each other 2) if Erid ever does another space mission they NEED to send a therapist aboard because this is what happens when they don’t)
Baby eridians, for a good portion of their lives, are soft-shelled, as Erid likes to call it. It takes a few molts (more than a few, but for abbreviation's sake) for their shells to entirely harden, absorbing minerals from around them and through their food to develop the shell on their exterior. If you need a comparison, consider how human bones fuse and we become less flexible as we get older.
But for a few years (cough, decades, cough), a baby pebble is about as hard as a soft-shelled turtle—or a normal turtle, if they're a bit older. Disadvantages aside, there is an advantage to being able to see your offspring's internal functions. And until their vocal bladders form and they're capable of making multiple complex sounds, being able to see what is hurting is absolutely helpful.
It's a universal experience among parents to lament the day they can no longer hear their pebbles' heartbeats.
That is to say, Rocky knows Grace is an adult, okay? He isn't someone who anthropomorphizes, and he isn't going to start now. Statement.
But when he first heard Grace in all his squishy glory— heart pumping away, lungs filling and deflating, organs digesting food— his brain went full baby-fever mode. Frankly, he was white-knuckling the urge to find the nearest hypothetical cave, bundle him up into a proper nest, and wait for his skin to absorb the surrounding minerals and start hardening properly.
But because Rocky is sensible and proper and not going to infantilize his best friend (he swears to God, stupid fucking instincts, shut the fuck up!!), he won't.
But sometimes the urge to squish his best friend is overwhelming. He just pinches at him through the permeable mesh of his ball. And Grace will screw up his face (so soft) and go what’s up bud? I piss you off or something? (He learns what bruises are and sulks for half a day afterward.)
All of that aside, once again, Rocky has gotten used to Grace's heartbeat, his clumsiness, and his one-tone voice. That's his best friend, and he's smart and just as capable as any other adult. He is also the cutest fucking thing to Eridian hearing. Is he also disconcertingly alien, definitely— His size, the limbs, the head protrusion (and other protrusions), the leakiness detracted maybe. But his cluster-sibling once cooed at and brought home a pet sulphur slug because, oh my spirits, hear his squishy respiratory system and you tell me that's not the cutest thing on the planet! It blurbles, Rocky! It fucking blurbles!
So, as Erid draws closer and Rocky/Grace become more excited and stressed. (The food has yet to run out, and as good as Erid is, they need substantial help from the human side to figure out how to make proper human nutrition. And finding the right informational packs in all of human knowledge is a very big undertaking.)
Rocky dreads the ever-looming talk he’ll need to have with Grace about the fact that Erid may, in fact, possibly find him very, very adorable. And that this might hamper communication for a second while he explains no, that is not a tall baby and no you cannot squish it.
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today I was in a new location of the grocery chain I frequent and they had an entire United Kingdom section, which I am not used to. While I didn't see a haggis, they're on my mind so you get this poll:
have you ever eaten haggis?
yes (I'm from Scotland)
yes (I'm from another part of the UK)
yes (I'm from another geographic location that has a British colonial history)
yes (I'm from elsewhere in the world)
Not 'haggis' haggis, but i've eaten haggis-flavoured foods
No (but I know what haggis, the food, is)
No (and I have never heard of haggis)
this poll has weird choices and i just want to see the results
i forgot most of the parts to my desk and the adaptor that allows my tablet to connect to my computer in another state but i found a way. the bikini babe factory must continue production.
