we were chased

she just, appears in carl's room on the day the hail mary is launched. carl is like ??? i have. enough going on without a BABY??? WHOSE BABY IS THIS??? WE LIVE ON A CLASSIFIED RUSSIAN BLACK SITE AND STRATT IS GETTING ARRESTED TOMORROW???

SOMEONE NEEDS TO FESS UP TO THE MYSTERY BABY.

anyway in all the chaos, carl ends up smuggling the baby out of russia and home to america - specifically to death valley. he wants her to have as normal an upbringing as she can have on a cooling planet.

he calls her gracie because as far as he's concerned his friend died to save them all, and grace deserves to be remembered. (and carl deserves to be reminded every time he looks at her why he stood back and let them take grace down.)

he raises her for around four years in peace. he still doesn't know whose baby this is, but the world is changing, and he understands now how people end up abandoning children they don't know how to care for ... even if he hates whoever gracie's parents are all the same. he thinks about trying to find out, but the people on the project typically weren't the kind of people who had their dna on 23&me, and genetic genealogy is a struggling field in a world entering another ice age.

one day, gracie disappears.

carl is distraught. he tries to find her, but the systems that exist to help look for missing children are barely hanging on by a thread, let alone for a little black girl with a single father. so it's just him.

what carl does not know is that gracie just found herself aboard the hail mary, smack bang in front of a guy who just woke up from a coma.

grace is flabbergasted. WHO PUT A BABY ON THIS SPACESHIP??? who put HIM on a spaceship?? and the kid's not helping him figure that one out! she's four. she can barely explain that she's looking for her dad and she keeps crying. WAIT, HER NAME IS GRACE?

if i had a nickle for every time a confused person named grace woke up on the hail mary ...

anyway, after a day, gracie disappears again. grace puts that one down to a REALLY intense just-woke-up-from-a-coma hallucination.

gracie reappears in her room, in her house, and carl finds her straight away because she's crying, and he puts the whole thing down to kids wandering off and getting into the weirdest places.

the next day gracie disappears again.

and grace has to deal with the hallucination baby being back on his space ship. it takes a few days, but grace realises she's not a hallucination when he sees footage of her on mary's monitors. so he starts investigating** - he's able to determine she's human, yay! and then he determines. he's her biological father? nope. definitely not. contaminated a sample or something. linda? what is he saying, linda was white. and that doesn't even make sense timeline wise. how the fu-

the status quo continues for approximately two weeks ... until carl manages to get out of gracie the fact that she's met a nice man named grace (he was scary-looking at first but he showed her the little mermaid in a big circle room and he lives on a spaceship!)

so. the next time gracie is due to disappear, carl tucks a letter into her pocket, and hopes for the best.

*i've been watching physics videos on youtube for weeks about quantum entanglement and i still don't understand fuckall, we're basically doctor who style sciencing this one. aka it's basically magic.