car go zoom brain go ✨wee✨

You couldn’t breathe. You physically couldn’t breathe. The breath you’d taken in before you’d realized that you could only see stars was firmly stuck in your throat, refusing to leave, and all you could do was blindly stumble back from the window.

“Yeah, that’s pretty much how I felt. Stars everywhere, no idea what the heck you’re doing out here, truly just kind of floating along,” Grace had started rambling behind you, his words starting to just whiz through your head as you began to properly spiral. His voice turned into background noise as you started cycling through the stages of grief.

Denial. Nope. No way. There was no fucking way you were in space. How could you possibly be in space? After a coma, too? This couldn’t possibly be the Hail Mary; DuBois was supposed to be on this spaceship, not Grace. And where was Ilyukhina? Where was Yao? They weren’t anywhere to be seen, at least not here, so you couldn’t be in space. 

Anger. If you were in space, who the fuck put you here? Who the fuck could’ve possibly decided that putting you in space was a good idea? Why wasn’t anyone around to properly explain this to you? There must have been an actual protocol for whatever mission you were on to explain everything to those coming out of the comas. If that was Grace’s job, he’s done a terrible job at it.

Bargaining. You must have missed something. Like the gap in your memory with your name, you must have forgotten something critical for you to end up where you were. Something must have gone deeply wrong, and you must have missed at least two months' worth of your memory. You weren’t an astronaut. You were barely out of residency, a medical professional who just happened to be politically neutral enough for Stratt to take advantage of.

Depression. The feeling of loss of that time hit like a truck. What else had you forgotten? Whom else? What if you were missing gaps of people and events that had fundamentally altered you as a human being, and now you just had no explanation for where you were or why you were the way you were? How long had it been since you’d seen your loved ones? Did anyone know where you were?

Oh god. Did anyone know where you were? Besides Grace, did anyone else know that you were quite literally in the middle of fucking nowhere? Was anyone waiting for you to come home? And again, how the fuck did you end up in space?

Questions swirled through your head, air still stuck in your lungs and refusing to move. You tried to inhale but felt like you hit a wall. You couldn’t breathe. You stumbled back another step, then another, until your back came into contact with a wall and you slid down. Your hands shook as you tried to hold onto something, anything, to tell yourself you were dreaming. But you couldn’t breathe.

“Oh crap, oh no,” Grace’s voice finally came back into focus as he crouched down in front of you. “Oh god, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, you’re the medic here, uh, um—”

Grace was grasping at straws. That was until he remembered how one of his students would have anxiety attacks before any of the tests he gave out (it’s why he stopped giving out pop quizzes and also made sure the kid’s parents got him sorted with a 504 plan with the school). But if any good came out of that, it was the school’s counselor giving him a few tips on how to handle a kid’s anxiety attack.

“Okay, hold on,” Grace whirled, and you watched him as well as you could as he scrambled around the lab. If you weren’t feeling like you were about to pass away, you would have giggled at him in his skin-tight suit, looking like a bull in a china shop as he looked for something. A moment later, a sound of satisfaction. 

“Hey, hey, here,” He slid back over to you and took your hand in his. Again, his hands were warm. Comforting, slightly calloused fingertips traced across your skin as he turned your palm skyward and dropped something into it. A beanbag. Your fingers immediately curled around it and squeezed.

“Good, good, okay, take a breath with me if you can, just look at me and watch,” Grace pointed to himself, and you followed his gesture as best you could. He inhaled slowly, and you tried desperately to follow, your breath stuttering as you did so. He held his breath, visibly mouthing the numbers as he counted, but you couldn’t quite keep up.

“It’s okay, just do the best you can. I’ve got you,” He seemed to notice the panic flash across your eyes when you couldn’t keep up with his movements. “Just breathe out as slowly as you can, and then try to hold for a couple of seconds, okay?”

He repeated the cycle over again then. Box breathing. Someone had taught him that. Good, at least he wasn’t entirely helpless on his own. It took another five or six cycles until you were able to hold your breath for at least a couple of seconds between inhales and exhales. From there, you felt like you were back in control. You shut your eyes and just focused on the woven material of the beanbag in your grip as you just breathed.

“I’m sorry, it’s a lot to take in, I know,” Grace murmured, and you opened your eyes to watch him sit down cross-legged in front of you.

“That’s putting it lightly,” You grumbled in response, but still thinking about actively getting oxygen into your lungs.

“Listen, you’re taking it better than I did.”

“What do you mean?”

“I drank four liters of vodka in two days when I woke up.”

“What?” You opened your eyes and just stared. Why in the world was there vodka on a spaceship?

"Yeah, it wasn't pretty. Danced with a mop person I made from random bits and pieces I found in Ilyukhina's and Yao's bags. It was rough…" Grace grimaced as he spoke, the tips of his ears turning a shade of light pink from embarrassment. He adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose.

Something in your brain clicked over. Not the part that was still reeling from waking up somewhere deeply wrong, not the part that was still cataloguing gaps in your memory like a tongue finding a missing tooth. The other part. The part that had been trained to hear something alarming buried in ordinary speech and immediately start pulling on the thread.

"How many liters?" You asked.

Grace blinked. "What?"

"The vodka. How many liters?"

He opened his mouth, then closed it. "...Four."

“Over two days?”

“Yeah, why?”

"Consecutive?"

"I mean, I slept some—"

"How much?"

"I don't know, a few hours here and there—"

"Did you eat?"

The look on his face answered that question before he did.

"The nanny bot. Some ramen," He started.

"The nanny bot," You repeated flatly. You shifted slightly, resettling your weight, and looked at him with the particular kind of attention that tended to make patients deeply uncomfortable. "Are you eating now?"

"Yes, I'm eating now."

"Sleeping?"

"Yes."

"How much?"

"Enough."

"That's not a number."

"Six hours, give or take," He said, with the specific tone of a man who had just realized he'd walked into something and wasn't sure how to walk back out.

"Give or take how much?"

"A couple hours."

You absorbed that. Four to eight, then, which meant probably closer to four on the bad nights. You filed it away. "And the mop person."

"I already told you about the mop—"

"I heard you. I'm asking you to tell me again." You watched him. "You named it?"

A pause. "...Yes."

"Did you talk to it?"

The tips of his ears went a shade darker. "That's — I mean, that's not — isolation does things to people, that's just a well-documented—"

"I know what isolation does to people," You said, not unkindly. "I'm not judging you. I'm asking."

Grace exhaled through his nose. "Yes. I talked to it."

You nodded slowly. Took stock of him the way you hadn't fully let yourself do since he'd walked back through that door. He looked okay, physically. Better than okay, actually, considering the circumstances — the nanny bot had clearly done its job keeping him alive and fed even when he hadn't been cooperating. His color was good. His eyes were clear. Whatever the two days of vodka had cost him, he'd largely recovered from it.

But you'd known Ryland Grace before this. Not well, not the way you'd known some of the other scientists on the Vat, but enough. He'd existed in your peripheral vision for long enough that you'd built a reasonably complete picture of him, even if he probably hadn't noticed you doing it. Brilliant, obviously. Genuinely, frustratingly brilliant in the specific way that certain people were, where the intelligence was so total it seemed to eat everything else. Absentminded. Chronically in his own head. You'd watched him walk into doorframes six times in the same hallway on several separate occasions.

Stratt's shadow, you'd thought more than once. Wherever Stratt went, Grace seemed to orbit. And while you didn't doubt for a second that he believed in the mission — you could see it on him every time he talked about the astrophage, that particular lit-up quality that took over his whole face — you'd watched him fold, more than once, when Stratt made a call that sat wrong. Just… absorb it. Redirect his energy somewhere else. Keep moving.

It had frustrated you in a way that was difficult to articulate without sounding self-righteous about it, so mostly you hadn't. You'd had your own battles with Stratt. More than a few of them loud enough that you suspected most of the Vat had heard. The coma protocol had been the worst; weeks of back and forth that had occasionally deteriorated into something that would have gotten you fired from any normal job, shouting in a hallway at the most powerful woman on the planet about informed consent and the ethics of what you were being asked to do to human beings. Stratt had listened to approximately fifteen percent of your concerns and implemented approximately eight percent of your suggestions, which was frankly more than you'd expected, and you'd signed off on the rest with the particular resignation of someone who had learned the difference between a battle and a war.

You wondered if Grace remembered any of that. You wondered if he'd even known it was happening.

Probably not. That was the thing about Stratt's shadow: you didn't always see what the light was falling on.

But here, now, with a mop person and four to eight hours of sleep and two days of vodka between him and whatever had happened before you woke up, he looked less like Stratt's anything. He looked like a man who had been profoundly, completely alone, and had done the best he could with it, and was now sitting cross-legged on the floor of a spaceship looking at you like you were the most real thing he'd seen in a very long time.

You supposed, to him, you probably were.

"Okay," You said finally. "You're not in crisis. You're depleted, but you're functional." You paused. "I'd like to do a proper assessment at some point. Bloodwork if we have the capability."

"We do," Grace said, with the faint air of someone who hadn't considered that possibility and was now genuinely relieved someone else had. You were about to push yourself from the floor when the rest of what he had said finally sank in.

Grace had said it almost in passing, buried in the embarrassed rambling about vodka and loneliness, and your brain had been moving too fast to catch it then. Random bits and pieces I found in Ilyukhina's and Yao's bags.

Found. Past tense. In their bags, not from their bags. Not borrowed or asked for. Found, the way you found things that had been left behind.

Your thumb stilled on the beanbag.

"Yao," You said quietly, not quite to him. Testing the name in your mouth, seeing what came back. Commander Yao, who had shaken your hand with both of his when you'd cleared him and told him with complete sincerity that he was ready. Ilyukhina, who had laughed at something you said during her last physical and translated it into Russian for what you could only assume was her own amusement.

You looked up at Grace.

"The pilot," Grace said quietly. "And Ilyukhina was the engineer. I don't remember much more than that." He heaved in a breath. "They, um—"

He swallowed. Ran a hand through the hair at the back of his neck.

The pieces began assembling themselves with a horrible, quiet efficiency.

You looked down at your hand. At the beanbag still nestled in your palm, your fingers had never quite let go of it, even as your breathing had steadied. Such a small, worn thing. You ran your thumb across the stitching along one of the continents, slow, automatic, the way you'd once pressed two fingers to a patient's wrist just to have something certain to hold onto while everything else was uncertain. The fabric was soft from use. Someone had carried this a long time before it ended up here. Before it ended up in your hand.

Three of the healthiest people you'd ever examined in your professional life. You'd signed off on every single one of them. Cleared them. Told them they were ready.

You'd done their last physicals yourself.

"Dr. Grace," You said quietly. Your voice came out steadier than you felt, the clinical part of your brain stepping in front of the rest of you the way it had been trained to. "What do you mean Yao and Ilyukhina were here? Is this… Is this the Hail Mary?"

Grace just nodded.

The steadiness left as quickly as it had arrived. Your heart dropped back down to your stomach, the grief moving faster than you could get ahead of it. You just stared at him for a long moment, blinking hard, like you could blink the confirmation back out of existence.

You looked back down at the beanbag Earth. At the tiny, worn replica of the place you'd left behind, sitting in the palm of your hand. The place Yao and Ilyukhina would never see again. The place you weren't sure you'd see again, either.

"Dr. Grace," You whispered, as the tears began to track silently down your cheeks. "Why are we on the Hail Mary?"

You heard him drag in a breath and then sigh.

“Oh boy…” The man in front of you, whom you now realized was Dr. Grace, the blond eccentric you often saw milling about absentmindedly on Stratt’s Vat, took in a deep breath, his placating hands falling to his sides. His eyes scanned you over, almost as though assessing one of his experiments, and you couldn’t help but stiffen beneath his gaze. Your arms went to cross in front of your chest, trying desperately to provide even a modicum more of modesty than what the silicone suit provided.

“How about we get you dressed first, huh? And then I’ll try to fill you in on everything, okay? Everything I can fill you in on, at least.”

You nodded slowly. Getting dressed was a good first step. Controllable. Good for your body heat as well, you were getting uncomfortably cold in the suit. This room was just below a comfortable room temperature — if it was meant for patients in prolonged observation, maybe you had just woken up during the rewarming of a therapeutic hypothermia procedure — maybe all this was meant to keep your brain from turning to mush after whatever it was had happened to the Vat.

Meanwhile, Dr. Grace crouched down and unzipped the duffel bag. Within it were clothes. Lots of clothes, most of them in neutral colors, along with a bright yellow jumpsuit that he seemed to set aside very deliberately. Instead, Grace handed you a grey sweater, a red and blue Costco logo embossed on the front. A pleasant nostalgia filled you at the sight of it, and you immediately shrugged it over your shoulders. Before you pushed your arms through the sleeves, you unzipped the silicone suit from beneath the hoodie, pushing it down and off your arms just enough so you could get into the sweater without it underneath. Once your arms were through, Grace handed you two more items: a pair of black sweatpants and what looked like vacuum-sealed clothing.

“I’ll step out for a second so you can change into the rest.” He stood slowly before stepping out behind the door, pulling it slightly shut behind him. You unzipped the vacuum-sealed pack, and it grew to four times its size. It was a cleverly divided plastic bag, one portion containing socks, another underwear, and the last some soft, unlined bras. You ran your hands over all the items. They were yours. You knew that much.

You decided that the sweater would suffice up top for now, but you peeled the suit off the rest of your body, pulling on the softest underwear you could find and the sweatpants he’d handed you over them. Even if you were distressed, lost, and confused, the least you could do for yourself was to guarantee being comfortable for a while. Now that you were at least dressed, you pulled on a pair of socks from the same plastic satchel, noting that more than half the ones in the pack had grippy soles. Okay, so this had to be a hospital. But why were your clothes packed away in a duffel like this? Who packed them? And why weren’t you in a medical gown when you woke up?

The bag and the silicone suit would’ve made any kind of monitoring incredibly frustrating for any nurses, and any kind of coma patient requires regular, constant monitoring. Just how long were you asleep?

Making sure all the clothes fit comfortably, you tested your voice again.

“I’m decent,” You tried to project to make sure he heard you, at least a little bit. Your voice still didn’t feel like it was going to cooperate entirely. The circular door creaked back open, Grace reappearing in that strange white jumpsuit yet again.

“Better?” He asked, stopping a few feet away.

“Much,” You released a breath you hadn’t realized was stuck in your lungs. But the frustration, and now growing anger, lingered. “Now where the fuck are we, and why the fuck can’t I remember my fucking name?”

“Jesus Christ, at least you remember how to swear like a sailor,” Grace blinked back at you.

“Listen, all I know is I went to take a nap after giving the primary team their weekly physicals.”

“Yeah, uh… we’ll get to that…” He trailed off, his voice lowering imperceptibly. If you didn’t know any better, you would’ve almost said that Grace looked like he was about to cry. You’d remembered Grace as a half-panicked, bumbling mess of a microbiologist, but not a sap. He hadn’t cried in your presence, unlike half the rest of the staff each time you were somehow reminded of your collective impending doom. 

He cleared his throat. “You remember me, you remember the primary team, so you remember the project we were all working on, right?”

“Yeah, the Hail Mary, the astrophage, I remember that.”

“But you don’t remember your name?”

“No, I don’t. There are other gaps, I’m sure, but that damn robot gave me the biggest one right away.”

“Then we’ll fill those in as we go. The biggest one we can solve very easily,” Grace perked up, the shadow that had crossed his face at the mention of the astronaut team drifting away. He crouched down, picked the duffel back up, and rotated it around so that the far side was now facing you. “Here.”

He held the bag out for you to take. For a moment, you were incredibly confused — how in the world was a duffel bag supposed to remind you what your name was? But as you took the bag in your arms, that’s when you noticed it. A rectangular patch stitched into the material on the bag on the corner on your left. One word was stitched into it. No, not a word, a last name. Your last name. The memory that came back as a result felt like a punch to the gut.

A voice shouted from down the hall of your clinic. You were only three weeks into your intern year, but you already knew that the attending you reported to was going to make your life a living hell. You glanced over at another one of your fellow interns in the internal medicine program and sighed. She just gave you a tight-lipped smile, a silent apology enveloped in the expression. The department was the dream of most of your graduating class to work in, but the regular attending had just left for a six-month sabbatical. Your cohort got stuck with Dr. Benmont, or as you and the other interns called him, Benzebub. Get it? Benmont and Beelzebub? That joke took far too long to explain to one of the residents the prior week.

It was his shrill voice that called you down the hall. You’d just sat down to get through some charting from the patients you’d attended to over the course of your twelve-hour shift, but of course, you weren’t going to be leaving anytime soon if you were getting called to a conversation with Benzebub. Now it was the sound of your full name that came floating down the hall again, noticeably harsher this time. The man just didn’t know how to use a fucking pager. You turned on your heel and marched down the hall, mentally steeling yourself for whatever sermon you were about to hear. Approaching Benmont’s office, you rapped the back of your knuckles against the door.

“Come in.”

Like nails on a chalkboard.

“You wanted to see me?” You stepped into the room, hands tugging gently on the stethoscope around your neck.

“What the fuck am I looking at?” 

Benmont rarely entertained any pleasantries. He tossed a blue folder in your direction — a patient file. Without saying anything quite yet, you picked it up and flipped through its contents. It was a patient you’d examined the previous day. A young woman, complaining of excruciating abdominal pain and severe brain fog that synced up aggressively with her menstrual cycle. The file described all the actions you took with her. You charted this particular patient up pretty quickly for a variety of reasons. A) It was open and shut; every single one of her symptoms (and lack thereof of others) indicated PMDD. B) Too many women in your life, yourself included, had spent far too long being told the pain was normal. 

Of course, you’d gone through all the appropriate diagnostic tools, including a transvaginal ultrasound, and found no anomalies that could’ve indicated anything more serious. But you also refused to send her for unnecessary imaging that would have just given her a sky-high hospital bill to deal with after her insurance got its grubby hands all over it.

“PMDD, open and shut, I sent her home with a referral to an OB-GYN and a prescription for pain meds and SSRIs.”

“Did a senior resident sign off on this?”

“Yes, I presented to Gartons, and he didn’t have any complaints.” A half-truth. You’d presented, yes, but Gartons had told you what every intern had been told. “Send your patient for imaging.”

A waste of clinical time and resources, in your mind. Plus, something about the unquestioning imaging policy really rubbed you the wrong way.

“Gartons knows better than to send patients home without imaging referrals.”

“I don’t remember him asking for imaging.”

You desperately didn’t want to throw a senior resident under the bus. It was a terrible look professionally, so you settled for another half-truth.

“You don’t remember, or Gartons said you didn’t need it?”

You simply repeated yourself. “I don’t remember him asking for imaging.”

“So you forgot,” Benmont mumbled something under his breath before the next sentence came out just a touch louder. “Fucking imbeciles for interns.” That’s when Benmont stood, your name leaving his mouth with a poisonous tone.

“Next time, send your patient for fucking imaging. I don’t want to tell you again,” He seethed. The look on his face suddenly sent a sinister shiver down your spine. Benzebub, sure, you all called him that, but for the first time, you genuinely felt fear creep into your system. Benmont was also noticeably taller than you, and he leered over you like some kind of predator.

“Yes, sir,” You grit out, fighting your every instinct to keep from taking a step back. You lost that battle after a few seconds, but then the memory faded.

“Hey, hey, are you good?” A warm hand landed on your upper arm, and you flinched, stumbling back a moment. As you blinked the memory away, Grace’s blue eyes once again occupied your field of vision.

You shook your head, as though trying to shake the memory from your body. “Uh, yeah, I’m fine, just remembered something.”

“Oh! Hey! That’s good, that’s definitely good,” Grace did a half hop, his expression immediately morphing into what you could only describe as scientific excitement. “That happened with me too, one memory leads to another sort of thing.”

“Uh, yeah, good. Remembering is good.”

Something about that statement didn’t feel entirely true as you said it out loud. While Grace seemed thrilled that you were getting your metaphorical memory feet back, you couldn’t deny the feeling that something was still deeply and utterly wrong.

“Dr. Grace, what the fuck happened? Did something happen to the Vat?”

That question wiped the smile right off his face. He inhaled, almost like the weight of the world sat on his shoulders.

“I think it’s better if I just show you,” He huffed quietly, then took the duffel from your arms and set it on the bunk beside where you were standing. “Follow me.”

Grace took a few steps before looking back, making sure you were trailing behind him. You’d tucked your hands firmly in the front pocket of the hoodie and carefully followed behind. You didn’t trust your feet quite yet.

Grace led you down a corridor lined with panels that all definitely seemed to have something behind them — it reminded you of the data center that Stratt had built at the land facility you’d spent some time on — panels upon panels that whirred quietly, blinking lights, and the soft humming of cooling fans behind them. Strange. Why would a medical facility have a data center anywhere near patients, let alone in the corridor outside?

Grace kept walking, so you just followed. The corridor led into a cylindrical room with two other entrances, one on your left and one straight ahead. Grace stood for a moment, considering, and then took a left.

“I’m going to need you to take a nice deep breath, okay?” He’d gotten to the center of what looked like a laboratory. It didn’t look like one; it was one. You glanced around. On one side of the room was a glove box, a table with pipettes, slides, and all the standard chemical and biology equipment you’d see in a college science lab. On the other side of the room was noticeably higher-end equipment: expensive microscopes, thermal readers, a computer, and what looked like several shelves of various small plants.

“What am I taking a deep breath for?” You asked. Okay, this was just getting stranger. Sure, every medical facility had laboratories for testing; that was nothing new, but plants? That was unusual. 

“You should look out the window.”

Grace gestured to a small room that branched off from the far end of the lab. Your eyes followed where he pointed, then glanced back at him. Without really taking your eyes off him, trying desperately to analyze the expression on his face, you took a few steps toward that room. The lights were all on in the lab, so you expected it to be dark outside as you approached the window. You could see stars twinkling, but that wasn’t unusual. Stratt’s land-based facilities were always in the middle of nowhere. If you were on the edge of the base, you were more likely than not to see the Milky Way from the window of one of the buildings.

The stars were brighter than usual, though. And they weren’t just above you. You took one final step, now surrounded by glass in what you realized was an observation deck of sorts. The stars. They were everywhere. Grace's voice floated in from behind you.

“Eye movement: detected,” A quiet, soothing British accent spoke, not something you expected to hear when you started waking up from the nap you’d decided to take after the most recent physical exams you’d conducted for the Project Hail Mary astronauts. Yao, Ilyukhina, and DuBois were the ultimate pictures of health, so it was really just a routine check-up to make sure there were no potential problems that could rear their ugly heads during their prolonged comas. You’d trudged back to your bunk on Stratt’s Vat, still incredulous about how, within your third year of residency, you’d somehow gotten recruited by probably the most powerful woman on the planet at the time. To be fair, just like most people on this ship, you’d pissed off some pretty important people through statements you’d made when you were younger, and dumber, and far more stubborn.

However, you’d stand by your decision that led to Eva Stratt taking note of your existence. If it kept more people from experiencing what you did, then doubly so. When your head hit your pillow in your bunk, it took all of three seconds before it was complete lights out for you — you were running on maybe a grand total of four hours of sleep in the last forty-eight, and your body took the liberty of seizing the first chance it got at any kind of rest.

“Cognition assessment: What is two plus two?” The voice came back as you blinked your eyes open. It was ridiculously bright in here, brighter than you remembered your bunk being. Cognition assessment? What in the world? And this voice was completely unrecognizable to you. It wasn’t Stratt, it wasn’t the nurse you’d worked alongside, unless he’d somehow gotten very good at imitating a female British TV presenter in the few hours you’d been napping.

“What is two plus two?” The voice repeated, and finally, your vision began to clear. A white robot-looking contraption floated directly in your line of sight, a four-pronged silicone claw with a camera directly in the center staring right at you. All you wanted to do was lift your arms to rub the sleep from your eyes, when you found that your body couldn’t go anywhere. It wasn’t that you were paralyzed, no, for some reason, you were cocooned in a sleeping-bag-like sack, your arms constricted to your sides as a result.

“What is two plus two?” 

“Shut the fuck up, go away.”

Was what you tried to tell it. What came out sounded more like a collection of gurgling and mumbling, and then promptly followed by coughing as you felt a tube get dragged out of your windpipe. What the hell? Who in their right mind would let a patient wake up still intubated? And why the hell were you intubated? More questions than answers began to surface as you finally caught your breath.

“Incorrect. What is two plus two?”

“Fucking leave me alone,” You wriggled as much as you could in the bag, pulling an arm out and just barely getting enough momentum behind the movement to swat at the silicone monster above you.

It just rotated back to float above you again. “Incorrect. What is two plus two?”

“I said, fuck off.” Your muscles were coming back to the land of the living with every millisecond that ticked by, and you started shimmying your way into a seated position, pulling your second arm out of the sack as well.

“Incorrect. Alternate cognition assessment. What is your name?”

You went to reply to what you’d now decided was the most annoying medical contraption you’d ever seen, but paused. Name. What was your name? It was on the tip of your tongue, a series of syllables that should have come as second nature, that should have been a completely instinctual response, but for some reason got stuck in the back of your throat — almost like the intubation tube had dragged it out of your body with it. You were about to fail a cognition assessment based on your own name. Something was deeply wrong.

“No, no, ask me the other question again,” You mumbled as you began to shift yourself off the slab in the stark white room, your legs now hanging off the table.

“Incorrect. What is your name?”

“No, ask me what two plus two is! Ask me the other one!” You began to shout as you finally escaped from the silicone or latex or whatever it was, shaking your legs out and pulling the dozens of electrodes scattered across your body from your skin.

“Incorrect.”

You’d had enough. You needed to get away from this stupid robot, out of this stupid room, find that stupid nurse, and have someone explain this stupid situation to you. Once out of the bag, you found yourself in a thin, silicone suit, the electrodes you’d pried off your skin dangling limply from various holes. The only things protecting your modesty were strips of slightly more opaque latex around your chest and hips, but that wasn’t something you wanted to think about at that moment. Instead, you finally detached yourself from all the beeping machines, which you now recognized as life support systems, and tried to orient yourself.

Okay. Life support. A talking robot. Cognition assessments. White walls. This was some kind of medical room, likely meant for long-term observation. So what the fuck were you doing there? All you did was go take a nap after another long day aiding the dozens of medical professionals on Stratt’s Vat. So what was this? A hospital of some kind? How long were you out? Did something happen to the Vat? Was there some astrophage-related accident? Did everyone’s worst nightmare come true and somehow the stockpile went up in flames? If that happened, how the fuck were you alive?

Okay, one thing at a time. First thing to figure out: Where were you? That meant detangling yourself from the mess of wires, so that’s exactly what you did — systematically pulling them out, one-by-one, from the holes in the silicone suit. Once you finished with that, you looked around. A door, you needed a door to figure out exactly what facility you were in so you could figure out, at the very least, what country you’d ended up in. There was a large circular door at the very end of a long hall. Great. Hall. Door. All you needed to do was make your way over to it.

You looked down at your unsteady feet. One step at a time. You spread your arms out to keep yourself balanced, one hand pressed against the padded wall beside you. You pulled in a breath and then picked up your left foot. It cooperated, then came to a clean, stable halt on the floor. Right foot next. It did the same. Step by careful step, you made your way to the door. In a few moments, you were only a few yards away.

Clunk. Clunk. Hiss. The door in front of you suddenly swung open, and you froze. A quiet muttering came from behind the door, before a figure, bright white with thin interlacing tubing woven throughout what looked like a second skin, emerged from behind the door. You held your breath, the flight part of your fight-or-flight kicking in but your muscles refusing to cooperate entirely. The figure walked in while staring at the floor, walking as gingerly as you did, before looking up as it heard you take in a sharp inhale.

Your eyes met two bright blue ones staring directly at you.

“Nope.” 

And the door shut, the figure disappearing behind it. You froze, barely daring to let the air in your lungs escape back out. With just a door in your field of vision, your brain had a chance to catch up to what your eyes had just seen. A person. Another person. But that person didn’t seem to want to see you? Or was just surprised you were there? Maybe they just woke up too. 

Those eyes, though, they were strangely familiar. You blinked hard, trying to get your brain to cooperate. The feeling of knowing that person was there, but you couldn’t seem to conjure the exact details. It was a man — the figure had short hair, and while initially you didn’t think you got all that great a look at him, you did. You saw the outline of his body fairly well, and you could make out a toned figure with all the characteristics of a man: broad shoulders, well-toned arms, a slight taper toward his waist but not dramatic enough for that of a woman’s, and, well… everything else. You got the idea.

Okay, a man with a short haircut and piercing blue eyes. Where did you know him from? You knew him, and well. Well enough to realize that his reaction was well and truly in character for a situation like this. “G”. The letter “G” made its way to the front of your mind and you tried to focus, tried to will your tongue to get ahead of your train of thought and summon who he was as if you were casting some spell. But that didn’t work. Instead, before you could come up with any particular answer for who he was, the door creaked back open. Instead of him walking through confidently like he had before, instead just the tip of his hair appeared first, followed by his face, and then ultimately, the rest of him.

“Are you a ghost?” He muttered quietly to himself. “I hope you’re not a ghost, oh God… Holy crap, you’re awake!”

He burst through the door fully this time, darting over to you, his hands suddenly on your shoulders, shaking you gently. His hands were warm, solid, enveloping your shoulders with gentle pressure. All you could do was blink and stare at him. An absurdly broad smile radiated across his face. If you weren’t so terrified by everything going on around you, it would’ve been impossibly contagious.

“Oh my God, you’re awake…”

You could feel the excitement radiating off of him, but all you could really do was stare incredulously at him. It took him a moment, but he quickly realized that maybe grabbing you by the shoulders wasn’t actually doing much good.

“Crap, sorry, sorry about that, I shouldn’t have, um, wait, here, let’s see,” He began to ramble, taking a step back and looking around the room as if he were missing something. You watched him lock onto one of the bunks, the second one from the door, and he meandered towards it before reaching inside.

He reemerged with a large duffel in his arms and set it down on the ground. He stood back up and locked eyes with you again as you took a minuscule step back. Strange man. Strange bag. Strange place. This was a recipe for disaster.

“Okay, first things first,” He spoke, raising his hands as though to placate and calm you down. “Deep breath. Do you remember your name?”

Ryland Grace had been awake for six days, fourteen hours, twelve minutes, and twenty-three seconds. Twenty-four. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. He spun slowly in space, staring at the analog clock in the lab, watching the seconds tick by as he waited for the ridiculously hot cylinder he’d just brought inside from the strange alien spacecraft just a few hundred meters away to finally cool enough for him to play around with. First contact with intelligent alien life was just sitting in an air-locked container, floating, waiting for him six feet away. Time couldn’t go by quickly enough. After all, he spent the first three days after he woke up in a half-drunken stupor, not even knowing his own name. Drowning his sorrows in Ilyukhina’s vodka didn’t work as well as he wanted it to, not with the nanny bot trying to shove blended food and water down his throat every time it recognized slurring in his speech pattern.

There was also the fact that, for all intents and purposes, he was, technically, still alone. Having commended two of his three space-faring crewmates to the stars, it took him approximately another two days after those events to come to terms with the fact that his third crewmate might not wake up. And that was a problem that, as a microbiologist, he just didn’t know how to solve. So when he’d gotten to Tau Ceti, and found not just a Petrova line but another intelligent life form that was not only trying to communicate but trying to accommodate Grace’s puny human brain in those attempts, Ryland thought that maybe the best course of action was to completely sink himself into a problem he could solve: figuring out what the aliens wanted from him and from Tau Ceti.

He tapped his foot against the lab floor as he floated toward it a few times, then lifted it. He tapped his foot against the edge of the table in front of him, and after he got sick of doing that, pushed himself away from the table and back toward the glove box, this time with a laser thermal reader to see if he could finally play with the incredibly alluring mystery right in front of him. 50°C. He could work with that. 

Ryland rotated as fast as he could, items clattering behind him as his feet made contact with some of the magnetic things previously attached to the lab table. Tossing the thermal reader to the side, he opened up the glove box and grabbed the cylinder from where it spun in free air. Pulling himself back to the table, he examined it more closely. Definitely still warm to the touch, enough for him to switch hands every few moments as he held it, but he was too impatient to wait any longer. Maybe this cylinder held something inside? He tried prying it open — just pulling the top off. Nothing. It didn’t budge. Didn’t even make a noise. Right-tighty, lefty-loosey? Nope. Nothing again. He smacked it against a few surfaces as hard as he could, the momentum sending him flying through the lab more than once.

Maybe the material it was made out of was too hard for him to open with his bare hands? After all, alien life equaled alien planet, and who knew what kind of metal-like compounds these aliens could be working with. After rummaging through some more cupboards and drawers, Ryland found what he wanted: a spectrometer. He floated back over, turned on the handheld, and scanned the cylinder.

What the… Ryland’s brows furrowed, his glasses moving along his nose from the motion. 

“Xenon’s a gas… I think this thing’s broken,” He shouted to no one in particular, by this point already getting frustrated with nothing going quite the way he wanted it to. He tossed the spectrometer aside, and it clunked against the table as he did so. He crossed his arms, staring at the cylinder as it slowly spun in front of him. He huffed. Wait a second. He was floating. Zero G’s weren’t conducive to 99% of lab equipment; it just wouldn’t work in a non-gravitational environment. Maybe the spectrometer was one of those pieces of equipment. There was gravity on the Hail Mary when he woke up, likely a result of the rapid deceleration he was experiencing while approaching Tau Ceti. He’d even made sure his last remaining living crewmate was tucked in appropriately once he’d gotten comfortable with the lack of gravity when Mary had entered Tau Ceti’s orbit.

A memory flooded his mind at that very moment. This was happening more and more often, almost like exponential patching of his neural network was occurring — with each new memory, at least three more were right behind these days. He was spinning in his chair, chewing on a red vine as he mulled over the latest biological anomaly they had discovered about the astrophage. This time it was the neutrinos. As he spun, he heard two sets of footsteps approaching. He lifted his head to see one of the many other scientists he’d been working with come past him, Eva Stratt, ever the authoritative presence, close behind. They were arguing, no, debating something. While he’d wheeled forward to let them walk behind him, he zeroed in on their conversation. They were discussing lab equipment.

“And we have a team to develop and build zero-gravity versions of this equipment,” Stratt stated matter-of-factly. That was the only way she ever said anything, actually. 

“We would need years for that,” The other scientist told her. “And we have months.”

“What’s the alternative?” Stratt asked, leaning against a lab table behind her.

“We make gravity.”

Ryland couldn’t help himself; he floated over to the doorway in front of the lab room where the two were speaking. “Centrifuge?” He asked, gesturing to his colleague with the half-chewed red vine.

“Centrifuge,” She repeated back to him, pointing emphatically. 

“They used them to make butter during the Civil War, actually,” Ryland blurted out, one of his “certified teacher moments”, as you would call them. “That’s a fun… fun fact…” He trailed off, his forehead coming to meet the doorframe with an embarrassed thud.

As you would call them. While his brain had been conveniently remembering scientific knowledge and mission-relevant information throughout his days awake on the Hail Mary, that was the first glimpse he had of you. A warmth flooded his chest at the memory. You were friends, at least — good enough friends to tease and mock occasionally, the phrase coming into his head with a lilting tone, followed usually by a subdued giggle from you and a burning sensation in his ears for him. You’d enjoyed embarrassing him, just a little bit.

Grace snapped back to the cylinder in front of him. A centrifuge. That meant the Hail Mary could produce gravity through centrifugal force. He clapped, the sound echoing through the lab, the solution now clearly before him.

Ryland scrambled. He propelled himself as quickly as he could back toward the control room and began hovering his hands over all the controls. Centrifuge, centrifuge, centrifuge, and there it was: two large orange switches, concealing a handle that would engage the systems necessary to produce artificial gravity. After making sure there was nothing he could press on that panel that would spell instant death, Ryland went through the process, following the manual that now floated beside his head.

Once he pulled the lever, it felt like he began to tilt, or no, the whole room was tilting, he wasn’t moving. It was then that he began to hear rattling coming from the lab, objects that were previously in continuous non-gravitational free-fall began to make contact with the walls and the floor. He half-floated, half-crawled back into the laboratory, collecting and depositing items in safer places as he went. By the time he was fully back in the lab, Mary had completed the centrifugal process, and he straightened out, watching his feet meet the floor. For a split second, he just stood, flexing his hands and feeling the pressure of his body weight return to him, waking up all of his muscles as they engaged to keep him upright once more. He took one step, then another, and then another, to test his stability.