big fan of the idea of the changling myth essentially being the fae doing bird-like nest parasitism on humans. the fae are simply too wily and free spirited to raise their own young so theyve evolved to mimic human young instead. its evolution babey.
the system relies on changeling children eventually being rejected by their human parents and fleeing into the wilds. unfortunately a lot of modern humans are WAY too ready to raise their weird unruly kid and write off their quirks as "neurodivergence" so consequently the fae parents are desperately standing on the outskirts of the village like "johnny please come back. youre destined to rejoin the fae. no stop playing with your nintendo. johnny please."
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I think we are focusing on the wrong thing when talking about mainstream romantasy adult books, instead of shaming straight cis women for reading kinky books, we should tralk about how most of the newer books aimed at that demographic are just conservative propoganda, rebranding patriarchy as a kink.
There's nothing inherently wrong about liking the types of kinks that are present, control, power imbalance, dark themes, but when you really look at the top performing novels (which they are mass prodicing at questionable speeds) it's hard to ignore the ever present morally grey man, who's posessive over the heroine who starts off as otherworldly different from the 'regular woman' aka damsel in distress), is cruel to everyone except her, and the fantasy world revolves around the control of women, especially when it comes to forced pregnancy.
I'm seeing a lot of responses to this saying "this is why I read queer stories" but you're missing the point! You can relate to queer media because you're queer, cis straight women should also have material that aren't turning their opression into kinks in almost every. single. book. If they want to choose to read those stories, that's absolutely fine, again nothing wrong with exploring those dynamics, but the concerning part is how fast they're being made with the rise of booktok, and the looming threat to women's autonomy.
Remember when all mlm stories were borderine assault stories in the early 90s-2000s? and how long it took for other queer stories to be made? we all used our voices to make a change, it didn't magically stop we fought for it to not be the only type of story.
And the solution to this, for people who are wondering, isn't to try to suppress romantasy books because they're not "good for women." That's an old, old game and never goes anywhere good. The solution is not less kink and less porn. The solution is more kink and more porn.
Because when you think about it, the problem isn't that you can go to your chosen bookseller and find a story where Sparklia Special gets semi-forced to have babies for Broody McDarkenfay (it's okay, she's into it). The problem is that it is unnecessarily difficult to look a little further down the shelf and find a vampire princess domming the hell out of the hunter who knows he shouldn't love her. Reducing people's choices always serves the reactionary agenda one way or another. Expanding choices. That's where it's at.
(If this sounds like I am making a pitch that we should write porn to defeat fascism, that'sâŚnot entirely a mischaracterization. I mean, of course it won't defeat fascism, but I do feel that while we work to defeat fascism, we should at least have diverse and satisfying porn.)
ID: a reddit post in the subreddit "mtf" by user @.apotatomassacre. "My 84 year old Navajo grandmother gave me one of her bracelets (that my silversmith grandfather made for her in the 50s) after seeing me as myself for the first time. It was one of the pinnacle moments of my transition and definitely made me cry.
i came out to my grandma at the beginning of the year over the phone. She really didn't (and I knew) know what transgender was or anything but this past weekend, we were able to see each other in person for the first time since i started my transition. For being 84 years old, the chat went as great as it could have gone! She caught me as I was leaving and she gave me a silver bracelet with turquoise and coral stones. She told me that this style is what Navajo women wear.
I was speechless as she barely learned what transgender was just minutes earlier. I cried for the entire drive home." End ID
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Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.
It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.
The above is doubly true if the content of the email is something that will be important to the person receiving - especially something that affects them negatively. They see that this thing that affected them so much didn't matter enough to you to write it yourself. I was a bystander to such a thing not long ago and it was just awful.
If I may offer the lecturer's perspective on this idea:
Currently, it's marking season for us in the UK. I have an exam board in four hours, in fact, which is where we all go over every profile of every student on our courses, see what results they've achieved, and work out their "decision" - if all is well, the decision is to let them continue the course, or the final degree grade calculated if they're in final year. If it hasn't gone well, the decision is about whether they get to rework the pieces that failed, resit exams, repeat the whole year, or be required to withdraw.
And, as has been the case for the last two years, the profiles are now littered with plagiarism investigations. Every one of those - every single one - will have come in as an assignment that the lecturer received, and started reading, and then with a sinking feeling thought "This isn't your work." Every one had to go to an academic misconduct hearing. Every one is an enormous draw on time and resources, including the emotional reserves of the lecturer.
And I know that's not the main issue! I know in the grand scheme of things, our feelings aren't the most important part of this equation! But as we're talking about rudeness, let me explain:
Firstly, the work itself. You begin reading, you see it's AI. Contractually, we have to read it anyway, and give feedback on why it's shit, and what makes it bad, and that is absolutely fucking soul destroying. Most students who use AI are doing so because they've managed to train their brains to find reading something boring abhorrent, and they want to skip that part; but a ChatGPT-generated report is bland, vague, and utterly devoid of any passion, insight or personality. In short, it's boring. You simply passed your boredom on to us.
Secondly, regardless of your personal feelings about the assignment, it at least had a purpose. It was there to stretch you, and make you think about the topic so you could learn about it, and to test that learning so we can all make sure you have actually learned what you need to. But the slop you handed in, that I now have to mark? What's the point? Literally what is the fucking point of me marking it? You didn't even write it. None of the feedback I'm obligated to give means anything to you. I'm marking ChatGPT, and it can't read.
Which means, not only is it fucking boring, it's actively pointless. Ask anyone in the world what a boring but pointless obligatory task does to your mood. Imagine that.
Thirdly, the misconduct hearing. Because listen, again, the lecturer's feelings here are, once again, not the main point. Students who cheat like this aren't doing so because life is hunky dory. They're stressed and overwhelmed and struggling, and they think they've found a magic way out, and so being pulled into a misconduct hearing - where the best they can hope for is to have to redo the whole piece for a capped mark, on top of all the rest of the work they have (functionally, a bonus assignment), and the worst is expulsion - is a mental breakdown-inducing experience. That, obviously, is the biggest issue.
But, the lecturers know all that, which means we know what we're triggering if we do report it. I cannot tell you how upsetting it is to receive a slop assignment, realise what it is, and then have to make the call to report it. I know damn well how upsetting that's going to be for you. I know how stressful and painful that's going to be. I know this might mean you're going to be thrown out of university. In some cases, I know it means you will be.
I know I could look the other way to spare you that
And oh, that gets tempting. When things are really bad for you, and I see you struggling, and this is your third strike; fuck me but it's tempting to pretend that I can't tell.
I cannot do that.
Which brings me to number four: the soul-bleachingly fucking horrible ordeal that is the misconduct hearing itself. Most people are non-confrontational; I'm no exception. I also simply do not enjoy a sobbing, panicking student sitting in front of me, telling me about how stressed and scared they are and how they're terrified they're going to fail. But that's how these things go.
Our most recent example is an international Masters student. I don't know the particulars for him; but I do know it's not uncommon in his part of the world for families to go into obscene debt, often to loan sharks, to send their kids to UK universities. Failure means more than just academia for him. Having to sit through him turning white and quietly begging us to give him another chance before he left in tears he tried to hide from us was, obviously, much worse for him than us; but it was honestly traumatic. Even now, two weeks later, I can't get it out of my head. There's nothing we can do; but, I feel guilty anyway. I could have looked the other way.
(It wouldn't have passed anyway. It was terrible. But at least he'd probably be allowed a resit - we're still waiting on the outcome of this one, but he may well be withdrawn)
To bring this back to the point of the post:
I know my feelings aren't really the ones that matter here. I do know that. But, every time a student chooses to use AI to write an assignment, all that is what happens behind the scenes. My job nosedives into being shit. Whether it's reading the boring slop, having to write pointless feedback, or making the upsetting decisions to report it when I know what the consequences will be and then having to deal with the guilt, my job that I love suddenly becomes shit. And that, actually, among the many other things it is, is fucking rude.
So many good points here, but the most important is in the tags. A lot of students get confused or overwhelmed and donât know what to do which is when they turn to AI in desperation. It never even seems to occur to them to ask for help. Ask for help! Ask for clarification! Itâs not a weakness. I have office hours twice a week just for you to ask for help and no one ever comes. I love giving help! Itâs not a burden to me; itâs literally what Iâm here to do. And I wonât think less of you. In fact, Iâll think more highly of you because it shows that you care enough to try. These are also the students who I get to know as people instead of just faces.
If you have social anxiety, psych yourself up and ask for help anyway. I know itâs hard, but every time you do it, your anxiety lessens a little bit. Every time you donât, it gets worse and it will be that much harder to try the next time. Some professors are dicks, but consider it a learning experience because youâre going to have to deal with dicks throughout your life and at least youâll know that you tried, which is good for your self esteem. If you want agency in your life - if you donât want to be a passive victim of your own fears and insecurities - you have to learn to ask for help when you need it.
AI may feel like a torch in the darkness, but it will burn you eventually. Trust yourself to get help from a real person when you need it.
I dropped out of high school. The year I left I earned all Aâs and Bâs, except for one D in biology because I missed a lesson and never asked to be taught what I had missed, and did terribly on the test.
When my younger brothers went to the same high school, my dad said that one of them was staying after class to receive help from a teacher, and why didnât I do that? I was floored. There are hundreds of students, I had assumed that a teacher has their own life theyâre ready to get back to, and they canât spend time after hours helping a bunch of kids. But more importantly, at the time I was enrolled, it hadnât occurred to me to ask. It just⌠wasnât part of the schedule, and I followed rules with a rigidity.
Slightly away from the topic of academia but still relevant, it's really important that you're clear with the person reading whatever you've sent/submitted as to whether you actually understand it, and this is where AI is a nightmare for many professional services, not just academic institutions.
When I was teaching, if a kid turned something in that they obviously hadn't written, and I quizzed them on it and found they didn't understand what they'd written, it was a disciplinary issue, but not usually one which had lasting consequences beyond a slap on the wrist. Granted I left teaching in 2022 when the problem was far less widespread than it is today.
But after about a year as a money adviser I realised there was a major disconnect between the way some clients presented, and the content of their emails. When they wrote to me it seemed like they understood what they were getting themselves in for, but when I spoke to them face to face it was clear that they didn't.
It was only when I asked one client if she was receiving help writing emails (she disclosed having dyslexia, but there were never any typos) that she admitted she often used AI because she didn't always understand the info I sent, so would ask Chat GPT to read it for her and write a response.
Obviously I felt like I wasn't doing my job properly that she should be put in that position, and have since spent a lot more time explaining things to clients with low-level literacy or who are easily overwhelmed by text-heavy resources, but when I spoke to colleagues or those working for other advice services it was clear that it wasn't just me.
So I cannot stress enough, if you don't understand something your money adviser/financial planner/solicitor/accountant or any medical professional involved in your care has sent, DO NOT use AI to respond, ask them for clarification. They need to know they have your informed consent to do things on your behalf.
In finance in particular, capability is always assumed, until institution taking your money is told otherwise. If you ask AI to respond to an email with serious financial implications, you may end up agreeing to something you shouldn't, because AI is pre-programmed to try and be as agreeable as possible (to the point it make stuff up to appease you)
The most common excuse for AI in correspondence among grown adults who ought to know better is 'but I didn't want to look like an idiot by not knowing what you were on about', my dude, I'm doing everything in my power to make complex financial decisions accessible to you, please just ask for clarification if you're still not sure. AI will only make you look like a bigger idiot further down the line when we meet in person and I ask you how that draft IVA termination request is coming along and you're like 'whut?'
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 authorâs 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 wouldnât plausibly need explained. he learns an alien language in a week. heâs a scientist but heâs too good for animal testing. heâs the smartest guy alive but heâs conveniently told this by every other character so he doesnât ever have to think it. there is no other word for it, itâs 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 âstudyâ 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, Iâve 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 donât 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 canât have cake anymore.
Iâm a lot less proud of that one.
I think Iâm a bad friend.
Itâs 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 hadnât 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, Iâd come from an Earth that was having the same problems. I didnât think theyâd 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 wouldnât kill me. But what that meant was slime for breakfast and slime for lunch, every day, and the lunch slime was filling but it wasnât 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 wasnât any and never would be again.
I slumped down on the floor.
âGrace?â Rocky called from the other room.
âJust deciding on dinner,â I said.
âFrom the floor, question?â
âYeah.â
Ilyukhina had wanted chocolate cake.
The memories still keep filtering up, though by now they feel more like remembering things normally that I just hadnât been thinking about before. Ilyukhinaâs 39th birthday was a few months before launch, and she was making the most of it.
âCake, champagne, and zakuski should have eggplant, I like the eggplant,â 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. âSmoked 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.â
That actually earned a brief but real smile from Stratt. âWe are not importing a⌠bouncy castle⌠onto the ship.â
âWill be my last birthday party ever,â Ilyukhina said. âAnd I have never seen a bouncy castle in real life.â
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 Ilyukhinaâs party and cookies stolen from the mess hall. If Iâd known it would be my last birthday party ever, maybe I would have tried to do something more special. There wasnât even cake.
Rocky rolled up in his xenonite ball. He was working on a more articulated suit, but hadnât 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 didnât really need to do in order to make things easier on me and feeling weird that soon he wouldnât even need me for the one thing I could do that he couldnât. 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. âSomething is wrong with the food, question?â
âNo, itâs fine,â I said. âItâs just that Iâm out of the one that I wanted.â
âOther ones are not good, question?â
âYou donât taste flavors, or, I donât know, maybe you do, but sometimes humans want specific things,â I said. Rocky still didnât love talking about eating, so I wasnât entirely positive if Eridians had any equivalent to sense of taste or not, but Iâd definitely gotten that there was a lot less variety of things Eridians ate than humans did. âAnd right now the thing I want is chocolate cake.â
âDonât know that word.â
âItâs a type of food. Itâs a dessert. We eat it at parties. It tastes really good and⌠I mean, itâs really meant for sharing. Itâs kind of sad to eat cake alone.â
Rocky made a sound that was kind of like a laugh and kind of like a disbelieving snort. âHuman social eating. Strange strange strange. Humans are weird perverts.â
It wasnât anything new, it was a running joke, but it was not what I wanted to hear right then. âI canât help it if eating food together is the basic unit of human socializing, okay? Eridians are the weird perverts for getting weird about it! Itâs important to me even if you think itâs stupid! Iâm allowed to miss it!â
I didnât mean to snap that forcefully, but I just wasnât in the mood to be patient. Rocky was quiet, then when he responded, his tone was clipped. âI 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 donât know this.â
âAll I want to talk about is food anymore because Iâm afraid of starving, Rock. Even Eridians have to worry about that!â
âI know!â The whistle in his tone was frustrated. He made a noise kind of like âughâ then said, âWas trying to make joke. Was not trying to insult.â
I had the presence of mind not to say âwell, you did,â but what I did say was more like, âMmh.â I got up and rifled through the food packets again. I paused over the babaganoush. That was eggplant, right? Weâd has something like that at Ilyukhinaâs 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 Iâd ever faced.
Maybe even if I was still on Earth, Iâd be worrying about having enough food. But at least everyone else would be, too, and theyâd be willing to commiserate.
That wasnât 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 wasnât dying even as I had no idea if that was true or not.
âMy turn to choose the movie tonight,â I said, as I mixed water into the babaganoush to rehydrate it. âThe Great British Bake-Off.â
âDonât know two of those words,â said Rocky.
âItâs relaxing. Humans like watching it because itâs calming. And I still miss cake.â
It was not relaxing or calming to Rocky. I could tell he was on edge the whole time. âGrace didnât say it was food show,â he said accusingly.
âLike I said. Eating food together is the basic unit of human socializing.â
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 hadnât consciously remembered until I chose it. Three square meals of slime today. It didnât even really leave me feeling full, and after I finished it, I couldnât 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 couldnât eat would probably have pushed me over the edge.
âGrace feeling relaxed and calm now, question?â Rocky asked.
âIâm still hungry,â I grumbled. It wasnât Rockyâs fault that he had 220 yearsâ 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.
âCan eat taumoebaââ
âI donât want taumoeba!â I was acting like a child and I didnât care. I think I was also crying. âI want to go home.â
Rocky rolled his ball closer to me. âWhat can I do that would make Grace feel more like home?â
âYou canât,â I said. âThatâs the problem. You canât. The Hail Mary isnât home and neither of us know whatâs going to happen on Erid, if Iâll just die or whatââ
âErid will be Graceâs home! Grace wonât die!â
âIt wonât be, and you donât know that!â And now I was yelling, which Rocky didnât deserve, butââNobody there knows me, nobody there will know or care what humans do, even youâyou donât really get it, and nobody ever will again and Iâm going to feel like this foreverââ
âI have been TRYING!â Rockyâs 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. âTrying 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 doesnât 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 donât have to do them all, because I canât make more food for you! Donât know what else I can do!â
âYou canât!â I said. âAnd I didnât ask you to do any of that! You canât fix whatâs actually wrong!â
âI know!â Rocky hissed steam out of his vents, then said, in a tone so measured it was almost insulting, âRocky canât 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.â 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 didnât even exist anymore and it was making me feel awful about everything. âI want to go home,â I said. âThatâs whatâs wrong. And that canât be fixed, because Iâm gonna be eating taumoeba soup alone on Erid forever and that was the stupid choice I made. I wish Iâd never turned around.â
Rocky was quiet at that.
I should have apologized. I should have said I didnât mean it. The problem was, right then, I did.
Stratt once told me I was a good man. Sheâs not wrong often but I think she was wrong on that one.
Then Rocky rolled forward and bumped his xenonite ball against me roughly. âGrace is being stupid. Grace sleep now.â
âIâm not tired.â I tried to shove his ball. Obviously it didnât move because he weighs about three hundred pounds.
âDonât care. Humans can choose when sleep. So Grace sleep now. Statement.â
It wasnât like I had anything better to do. Neither could I come up with anything to say to Rocky that would make what Iâd 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 hadnât actually just left while I was sleeping. But he had.
It hurt way, way more than I expected.
âScrew you,â I mumbled into the pillow. And then felt bad.
Down the hall in Rockyâs half of the ship, I heard the muffled rush of escaping air Iâd 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 couldnât 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 wasnât even convinced he would still love me by the time we got there. Definitely not if I was going to act like this.
It wasnât his fault that he was going home and I wasnât. It wasnât 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 anyoneâs 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 wasnât anybodyâs 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 âWhat? Thatâs not correctâ and âthis sentence is incoherentâ and âthis isnât the original source for this theory, you should be citing Whoever, Date.â And it would make me feel like crap every time and Iâd punch my bed and sulk and feel sorry for myself, and then take a nap because I didnât 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 donât feel like dealing with our feelings right away we can instead cry and take a nap. Eridians canât 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 Iâd come to Tau Ceti and after the taumoeba had escaped and eaten all his astrophage fuel, he couldnât 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 wasnât back. I fell asleep feeling bad and also very alone.
â
He was back when I woke up.
âOh,â I said. âHow long have you been there?â
âHours. Grace feeling less stupid, question?â
âA little.â I was actually still feeling extremely stupid, but close enough.
Rocky fidgeted with something or other in his hands. I didnât know if it was an actual project or just something to fidget with. He hummed a little, a low sound that didnât mean anything. I guess he didnât know what to say any more than I did.
âUh,â I said.
Smooth.
A few years ago, Iâd 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?
âIâm sorry I said that to you,â I said, finally. I couldnât truthfully say I hadnât 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. âI donât mean it. I donât actually wish Iâd made a different choice. I wouldnât⌠I wouldnât leave you like that.â
âI know.â
âIâm not actually mad at you,â I went on, because Rocky was being unnervingly quiet. âIâm trying to be hopeful about going to Erid. I really am. Iâm justâŚâ I didnât even know what I was trying to say.
âErid is not your home,â Rocky said.
âYeah.â
He kept fidgeting. Then he said, âWhen 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.â
âI wouldnât have even had the possibility of going back to Earth in the first place if it wasnât for you,â I said. âSo itâs a net zero change, really.â I wasnât sure I really believed that. But it was better to believe than anything else.
Rocky made a sound that indicated he didnât really believe I believed that either.
âIf it helps,â I said, âthereâs no way I would have ever been happy on Earth again if Iâd left you stranded in space.â That was true. When Iâd been facing down the choice to keep going to Earth or turn around for Rocky, even when Iâd 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 wouldnât know how to live with myself after, if Iâd just left him there to die.
Rocky slumped a little. âGoing home, or tired and hungry and restless always. No way for Grace to be happy then.â
I knew heâd been stressing about this, but I donât think Iâd realized how much heâd been stressing about this. I mean, Iâd been stressing about this, but that was because I was going to have to live it. âIâm trying,â I said. âI really am.â
âIâm trying too.â
âI know.â
I think sleeping did make me feel better, at least a little bit. I didnât feel as hopeless about the future as I did last night. âAnd hey,â I said, âIf I had to be trapped in a tiny spaceship for four years on the way to a brand new planet with anybody, Iâm glad itâs you.â
That earned a little laugh equivalent from Rocky. âWe save stars together. We can do anything.â
âYeah. I believe in us.â I thought about it, and then added, âAlthough, just so you know, when Iâm feeling sad about missing Earth and hungry for Earth food, thatâs not a good time to make fun of human eating habits, okay?â
âUnderstand. Sorry sorry sorry. Didnât mean to hurt. Wouldnât hurt on purpose.â Rocky clicked his fingers against the bottom of the ball. Then he said, sounding cautious, âAlso. 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.â
âRegentâoh. Yeah. The Denethor scene is supposed to be disturbing, even to humans.â
âIt worked.â
âI can do that, yeah. Springing Bake-Off on you last night was mean.â
âIt was. I was trying to help and felt like you were punishing me.â
âI kind of was. I was being a jerk.â I sighed. âI think⌠I donât know. It feels stupid to say it isnât fair. But. I think thatâs it, isnât it? It isnât fair.â
âIsnât fair,â Rocky agreed.
âAnd if it canât be fixed, it just⌠feels better to know that you know it isnât fair and canât be fixed, you know? Rather than try to fix it.â
âNot really.â
âWell. It does.â
âWill try. Well. Try to not fix unless you want.â
âThanks.â
I sat cross-legged on my bed in silence for a couple seconds. Then, because sitting in silence has never been a thing Iâve been particularly good at, I asked, âAre you mad at me?â
âNot mad now,â Rocky said. âFrustrated. But mostly frustrated because it isnât fair and canât be fixed and donât know what to do.â
âYeah. Same here.â
I didnât really know what to go from there, because I was already exhausted from trying to talk about my feelings and my next thought was âIâm hungryâ which probably would not be a welcome topic of conversation right now. (It was coma slurry time. Wonderful.)
âGrace wants to see body suit progress, question?â Rocky asked.
âOh,â I said. âSure, yeah.â 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 didnât 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 âbedroomâ area. âHey! Thatâs impressive.â
âStill needs work on usage flexibility and use-length,â Rocky said. âMore flexibility means less air inside, which means harder temperature regulation, so can only wear it safely for 36 minutes. Not good for spacewalks yet.â
âItâs cool that you can walk around in it, though,â I said. âAnd you can operate the controls on my side of Mary. Thatâs gotta be useful.â I was selfishly glad it wasnât 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 wasnât ready to be wholly useless yet.
âCan also do this,â Rocky said. âGet down.â
âWhat?â
âGet down. On floor.â
âUm, okay,â 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.
âWhatâoh!â
âCan give Grace hug like this.â
âOh,â I said, suddenly blinking back tears. âOh. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, you can.â
âIs this good?â
I shifted position so I could hug him back. The xenonite was gently warm. âYeah. It is.â
âSorry upset Grace.â
âItâs okay,â I said. âIâm the one who was an ass.â
âDonât know word.â
âItâs an English swearword. It means jerk, except ruder. It refers to the human backside.â
Rocky yipped in delight. Itâs not like he hasnât picked up words from movies, but I donât usually define them.
âOkay to tease about leaking?â Rocky asked.
I sniffed. âYeah. Thatâs fine.â
âGrace is leaking all over fancy new suit.â
âYouâre bringing me home with you, buddy, you have to get used to it.â
âThink I will,â Rocky said. I really, really hoped so. Even with the stiffness of the suit, it still felt completely different from hugging the hamster ball.
âFeeling hug over yet?â
âNope.â
Rocky made a fond-exasperated noise but let the hug keep going. After a few moments, he said, âI want Grace to be happy on Erid.â
