hugs make the world a better place

The person inside is in... rough shape.

Even weirder, he's human? Or at least he sure seems to be human. On the one hand this is fortunate, because Erid's scientists have been studying a human for a while now with a particular focus on finding ways to potentially intervene for medical emergencies, and boy howdy is this guy a medical emergency. On the other hand, you are at a loss to explain how this happened, and it turns out that the whole warping situation might have been interacting with space and time in ways you did not previously account for.

Anyways, somewhat miraculously, this dude does not die. It also turns out that the blood pool in your enclosure has the initial composition of human blood (baffling? neat?) but also contains a multitude of other microorganisms, and basically is itself an alien life-form that has infected your new emergency house guest, as well as his submersible. Vessel? It's fascinating, the whole thing is coming apart so even though your guest isn't consciousness enough to ask for permission, ultimately everyone determines that there's no salvaging it so you all might as well study it before the blood-pool finishes, uh, eating it?

Samples are taken, with care. Exposure to the pool is minimized. Rocky hovers because he doesn't trust you not to fall in, even though you're not going to fall in, everyone's built some pretty great scaffolding and you know not to touch the weird lightly irradiated not-human blood with your bare hands, Rocky.

Anyway, the blood pool seems to mimic back sounds fairly often, sometimes screaming, talking with various voices, or echoing Eridani language that it picks up. It doesn't seem to have the actual cognitive ability to be processing language, but since you can't figure out how it's doing most of what it's doing, there's no ruling anything out. It's creepy, so the scientists on Erid build you a temporary barrier that seals you off from it, both as a genuine safety precaution but also so that you can sleep at night without hearing the screams of the damned. You coat it in a thin layer of astrophage as an extra precaution against potential radiation leaks.

The guy who was in the submersible also seems to be human, but badly infected by the stuff from the blood pool. However, you can't rule out that this infection isn't actually part of his own natural systems either, given that the blood also seems to be sort-of-human but sort-of-not. Coordinating with some experts on Earth, and doing a lot more medical experimentation than you ever anticipated, everyone concludes that whatever the case with this guy is, some of the not-human factors in his physiology are the only reason he's still alive. So trying to get rid of it would probably be a bad idea.

Instead you work together and make a lot of less-than-ideal "best guesses" and eventually get him stable. After the dust has settled, the man is a triple-amputee with significant facial scarring, and mostly comatose. But sometimes he sings, screams, and pleads with somewhat religious-sounding prayers before dipping back under again. He seems to speak English. You have so many questions for him. You talk to him while he's unconscious, asking some of them, speculating, or even just narrating what you're doing. Sometimes when he seems distressed, you just ramble soothing nonsense, the kind of comforting non-comments offered to distressed kids sobbing over scraped knees and sprained wrists.

When he finally wakes up, he's confused. Wary. You think he might have reflexively lashed out if he could, but he's hooked up to several monitors and is, again, a triple amputee, so his singular flail is not very threatening to you, Dr. Ryland Grace, who sometimes gets the zoomies and scales the cliffs of your enclosure, and does quite a bit of routine heavy lifting these days.

The man doesn't really seem to be violent, anyway. Just startled and disoriented. You ask his name, and he hesitates, looking around like he's waiting for a trap to be sprung, or an illusion to fall apart. When it doesn't, he tentatively introduces himself as Simon. He has some trouble speaking, due to the facial scarring, and also probably the coma. But he can speak, and he can count backwards and forwards, can track objects with his eyes and recite the letters of the alphabet, the days of the week.

He asks what station he's on. You tell him he's not on a station, he's on a planet, Erid. He says that's impossible. You open the windows to show him the sky, and he stares for a long time. You understand, even if you don't know the particulars of his situation. If, somehow, Simon is from a part of the cosmos that was going dark, then he probably cherishes the sight of a healthy sun even more than everyone else in the known universe does.

You try and get him to answer some of your questions, but he tires quickly and you have to shelve them for now. Having another human around is doing a number on you, you gotta say, whether he's conscious or not, injured or not. You love the Eridians and you wouldn't trade Rocky for anything, but there is something to this after so much time spent without anyone else that's difficult to put into words.

While Simon slowly recovers, you work on some mobility aids for him. Luckily some projects were already in the works to help you safely navigate more of Erid beyond your enclosure, so it only takes some modifications to a few those designs to get a few basic necessities hammered out -- a mobile chair, a walking exosuit, a prosthetic arm based on designs that were initially meant to help you safely interact with volatile objects, and so on.

Day by day, Simon spends a little more time awake. Everyone's anxious to get more information out of him, but you're the barrier to entry, the one who gets to actually make those calls as the only other human on Erid, and you decide to take it slow. There's no impending catastrophe that you can see, just curiosity an apprehension. The warping projects have been scaled back in case there's some unseen detrimental effect. Most of the taumoeba that can be distributed elsewhere has been, too.

Simon eventually starts to answer your questions, and responds with some more of his own. He seems to think that he's dead, and it's difficult to talk him out of it. He regards his lost limbs and scarred reflection mournfully, weeps and asks if this is punishment, if the fact that it's 'not so bad' is mercy. You call on everything you ever learned about talking to traumatized people to try and explain that it's neither, it's just a result of his grave injuries, and of you kind of accidentally warping him to Erid from wherever he had been. You explain what you can, breaking things down in their simplest versions to describe astrophage, taumoeba, the Hail Mary, the Eridians, Rocky, and your own one-way trip to try and save the stars.

That gets him.

"They sent you to die?" Simon (still no last name) asks.

"Yeah. They did," you say, because it's true.

"Did you volunteer?"

You laugh, rueful.

"I wish I could say I was that brave, but uh. No. I didn't. The project lead had me drugged and dragged onto the ship."

Simon doesn't seem disappointed. He thinks about it, nods, and looks at you a bit different after that. Not in a bad way, thankfully. If anything he seems to become more relaxed, more trusting. He also seems to decide that he's in purgatory of some kind, not punished but not redeemed, a place for men whose sins and virtues alike are too innumerable for even God to judge.

He tells you that where he comes from, the stars went completely dark. What humanity remained survived on space stations that were already built to withstand the void, but even they couldn't operate indefinitely without food from their worlds or light from their stars. There was disagreement, he said, on whether the stars had truly gone dark, or if somehow the stations had been dragged into some other lightless place.

Your first instinct is to think that the stars did go dark. The astrophage got them, infestation reaching a critical point where they dimmed the stars completely. But, you don't actually know. You don't know where Simon comes from relative to the known universe. For all you could tell, he might indeed have been from some dark layer of existence that was folded open by warping physics. The fact that he seems to be from some far-future Earth, that he's mostly human and mostly speaks English and can mostly understand references to a lot of human culture, definitely implies that some alternate reality situation is afoot.

You pass along all of Simon's comments to the interested researchers assigned to this project, even though you wince to consider the reception some of it will get. The Eridians handle it a bit better than what you hear from Earth, for them it's probably less creepy overall, but there is definitely an upswing in wild speculation on both worlds.

Apart from the science, what you can focus on is helping Simon adjust to the realities of his new situation, so that's what you do. Once his health seems to be about as stable as anyone can determine, you set him up in the walking chair. He doesn't want to see the blood pool, so you get permission and take him outside into Erid instead, traveling in your exosuit while Simon reclines in a dome-topped, four-legged sedan chair with a lantern hanging from it. Eridian cities are fun to look at. In some places they're virtually impossible for a human to navigate, gas or shadows too thick to see past and terrain too uneven to traverse. But in others they are a wonderland of towering structures and natural features, colors the Eridians can't perceive contrasting in dramatic mineral formations, light passing through clouds in rare spears of unimpeded brilliance and reflecting off of smooth structures in dizzying, boundless splendor.

"Like we can glimpse the gates of heaven," Simon says, as he tips his head up towards the sky. Not an unfair description, to be honest.

Simon's not a picky eater, which given the previous living situation he described isn't a surprise. Just eating until he's full is a luxury to him. He perks up more over time, reading books, watching movies, talking about little things. He confesses aspects of his life to you which you opt not to forward to the researchers. They don't seem like they would change anything, and he gets anxious at the prospect of being reviled.

"I didn't know the camera would do that," he insists to you one night, after waking in a panic. Sometimes he sleeps better in the dark, unaccustomed to light, and sometimes he has episodes. Tonight's an episode.

You tentatively offer him your hand. He reaches, fumbles, and then clasps it tightly.

"What camera?" you ask.

"On the Iron Lung," Simon tells you, which you know is the name of his vessel. He hasn't said much about what it was doing, or why he was on it. But you do know that it had a pretty strong x-ray camera on it. The Eridians had to be strenuously warned about the radiation. And you do know that however he got into it, someone must have welded him in from the outside.

"I didn't know it would do that, I just wanted them to listen to me. They weren't... they weren't listening."

You squeeze his hand. There are scars on the back of it. Pockmarks, like someone dripped acid onto it.

"So you hit the camera to get their attention," you surmise.

"I didn't know," Simon repeats, insistently.

"Why didn't they tell you?"

He barks a laugh at that. It's not funny, it's a broken, battered sound that's barely removed from a sob. He shrugs. The stump of his other arm moves, gesturing with the hand he doesn't have anymore.

"Pick a reason. Maybe they thought a convict like me would irradiate them on purpose. Maybe it never occurred to them that anyone would use the camera like that. Maybe they just sank so many other poor bastards down there that they forgot which ones they'd told what. Which answer is worse?"

Convict. He's mentioned that before, although never with context. You've been deciding not to ask, and you definitely haven't been mentioning it to anyone else. Rocky's picked up on it, but you don't think he's said anything either.

"So they sent you down in this thing, on this moon, into this ocean of blood, and they didn't even tell you what the equipment could do?" you ask.

Simon lets go of your hand to scratch at some of his scars. You halt him with a touch to his wrist, crane around and grab the ointment that some of the Eridians figured out for you instead. It doesn't do much except moisturize, but it'll help more than Simon's nails will.

He swallows, and lets you apply it.

"I'm sorry."

"All's forgiven, buddy. The past is past," you say, because you've found that's worked better than any other response. You tried telling him he had nothing to apologize for in the beginning, but it just seemed to make him spiral worse.

"I pressed the camera. Everyone in that room got hit by the radiation. The person nearest worst of all," Simon tells you. "I really... I wasn't trying to hurt anybody. I just needed them to stop."

"I know."

To be honest, while you wouldn't say that anyone deserves that kind of thing, you think it's their own fault. They could have put a chimp in that Iron Lung and run the risk of some ignorant button-smashing irradiating them, let alone an uninformed, panicking man whose concerns they were ignoring.

Maybe one day that will be the right thing to say to Simon, but right now you don't think it is. He's too lost in his head, so you keep it simple, just nod and shake your head at the right parts. What you hope are the right parts.

"It's like the station," he says. "No one believes me. I'm the Butcher, why would they believe me? But it wasn't supposed to happen like that."

You don't know what he's talking about, but you squeeze his hand a little tighter anyway.

"I believe you," you say. You do. Simon really just doesn't strike you as a man who would deny doing something he intended to.

It's not that it hasn't occurred to you that a guy who sometimes refers to himself as 'the Butcher' and 'a convict' might have done some serious crimes in the past. Frankly, you spent enough time working on the mission to become acquainted with a fair number of people who had done shady shit, up to and including killing. As things around the world started to worsen, violent crimes went up as well. Desperation is not a good look on anyone.

Erid's not that different. The Eridians are less prone to some types of violence and more prone to others, but they've also got concepts like 'desperate times call for desperate measures' and that what a person does when they're in a harsh survival situation, is not generally indicative of what they do otherwise.

"Grace," Simon murmurs.

"Yeah?"

You pause, then apply some ointment to the problem areas on his cheek. Simon's eyes close, and he doesn't answer or offer any further clarification.

You watch him sleep for a while. A habit you've picked up from Rocky, but Simon doesn't seem to mind.

Eventually, Simon starts joining you for your classes. The pebbles are fascinated by him, jumping up and down and clamoring to ask about why he's a different shape from you, why he's not from Earth if he's human, what colors he thinks they are (a fascination of theirs, that there's some unique feature they have that they can't perceive) and how this aligns with your statements on the subject, what Simon knows about physics, and so on. You intervene when you have to, but keeping things pretty straightforward seems to work best. Eridians understand the concept of lost limbs and trauma, Simon is bemused but does tell the pebbles what colors they are, and while he's not a scientist or engineer he knows enough about physics to participate in the class experiment.

The blood pool has been sectioned off from your home and the classroom, the beach reduced to a mere sliver. Simon stays well clear of it at first, but after a while he starts to venture closer. Your offer to let him go see it. For a long while he declines outright, before tentatively agreeing to it under the stipulation that both of you wear exosuits. You put on the one Rocky made for you, and lift Simon into his newly completed mobility aid version, that lets him walk around more or less steadily now.

His arm curls around you to help distribute his weight. You feel him lean into it, rest his head against your shoulder, let out something suspiciously close to a sigh. But he's leaning back as soon as you have him seated in the suit, arranging himself to keep the pressure off of the wrong parts of him.

You go in and pick up your usual tasks in studying the pool. The mysterious thing has long since eaten away the last of the Iron Lung, raising the overall iron levels in the pool and altering aspects of its composition, but you got plenty of samples and inspected and salvaged some parts before it finished the process. There are Eridian-made models of the Iron Lung all around the walkways. You've warned Simon that sometimes the pool distorts the surface into shapes that can resemble faces made of iron, and that sometimes they seem to scream, although there's no indication that the sound is actually originating from the mouths made of blood.

It's pretty freaky, of course, but you're compartmentalizing it. By the sounds of it a lot of people died in that blood ocean, and it's inclined to mimicry, so it's probably copying and distorting shapes from the only living beings it's had physical contact with. The Eridians use xenonite tools to interact and copious astrophage shielding to keep the radiation contained, so none of them have interacted directly with the materials of it.

Simon doesn't stick around for long, but you don't press him about it. Honestly, you're fine with him avoiding the blood pool forever if he wants to, you don't really need him to interact with it for anything that's more important than his own recovery. It's just that it's eating up a chunk of your enclosure and no one's figured out how to safely move it somewhere else yet, and it's kind of a shame to limit Simon's ability to go places.

The Eridian researchers take advantage of Simon's lack of scientific credentials to involve him in studying or questioning other things, like human psychology, the ways in which he seems to differ from you and from most other humans, and what insights he can offer about space station technology and living conditions.

You also involve Simon, at least on some levels, with your other big project: trying to trace back his point of origin, and warp some astrophage and taumoeba to his people, along with a message about what they can do and what the risks are. From what Simon has described, wherever he's come from is experiencing a degree of desperation that merits whatever intervention can be managed. Taumoeba can make food, and astrophage can provide power, and together they can be used to keep each other in check. Simon knows the interstellar coordinates of every space station in his people's records, but that's only potentially useful if they can find out how to reach his point of origin and warp things in relation to that, since it's possibly (probably?) a different parallel universe.

Honestly even you aren't sure what you're trying to do half the time, but damn if you're not trying to do it anyway.

"I think maybe I was in Hell," Simon tells you one morning. "But now I'm in purgatory. I have to cross this last hurdle, and then I'll be able to rest with you. I have to help you save everyone else. I just don't know if I can do it."

You're only half-listening, because he often says these kinds of things, and you're not wholly sure how to approach the subject.

"We're not dead, and you're doing just fine. All you've gotta do is focus on recovery, buddy. Everyone is doing so much science, we'll figure it out," you assure him for the umpteenth time, and reach over to pat his shoulder. He doesn't sound distressed, just thoughtful as he savors his glass of water, and eats his breakfast.

He tells you he wants to go see the blood pool. You ask if he's sure, but he seems determined. You and Rocky help him into his exosuit. He smiles, and then before you close him in, he reaches out with his hand and settles it onto the back of your neck. He tugs you in to press your foreheads together. The touch is close, intimate but solidly affectionate in a way that halts your breath. You don't think you've actually ever done this kind of gesture with anyone before, this sort of masculine, comrade-like near-embrace, close enough for your breaths to mingle. Simon is handsome, and he'd probably be kind of beautiful to you just for the sheer humanity of him, but you're not usually effected by those kinds of things.

'Not usually' isn't 'never', though.

Rocky interrupts.

"Simon hugging, question?"

Simon gives the back of your neck a squeeze, then lets go. You let out a shaky, kind of nervous breath of your own.

"Sort of," you say, since Simon doesn't seem inclined to answer.

"Good," Rocky decides. "Contact important for human skin, hug more."

You clear your throat.

"Uh we'll take that under advisement," you decide.

You head in to what you've started to think of as the Pool Room, even though it's still just a cordoned off section of the enclosure that's separated by a semi-transparent wall of xenonite.

So you're Dr. Ryland Grace, right, and the thing is that you often have trouble anticipating the actions of the people you care about. Like Stratt drugging you, like Rocky almost dying for you, and right now, like Simon just walking full-on into the radioactive blood pool that he's spent the past year or so visibly terrified of.

"Simon?!"

You nearly charge after him. It's thoughtless, not brave. Rocky stops you, exclaiming so fast that the translator can't pick up on it. Your ever-increasing Eridian linguistic comprehension tells you it's about what you would expect, though, several expletive-heavy variations on 'what the heck?!' and 'bad bad bad!'

The pool goes eerily still. The Eridians on the walkways watch, vibrating with confusion and uncertainty. Simon keeps going, ignoring your calls, heading into the pool like he's heading in for a baptism. The blood rises, swelling into a singular wave. You bolt for the mechanical arm that some of the researchers set up to pull bits off of the Iron Lung, some unformed half-idea that you could grab Simon's exosuit with it clamoring in your mind, but by the time you get there the pool has risen up and crested over Simon, and swallowed him up completely.

It flattens again.

No no no, you think, irrationally, trying to act anyway.

But there's nothing. The water has gone still and empty, and not only is there no sign of Simon or his exosuit, there's no sign of the blood, either. No traces of the Iron Lung. Just water, the same as it was before your warp experiment touched something it wasn't supposed to and once again dramatically reshaped the context of the universe.

No one is certain what to make of it, obviously. Speculation runs rampant.

Your house is quiet.

You sit on the beach, listening to the perfectly ordinary waves crash, the picture of some forlorn figure out of tragedy. Then you throw yourself back into it.

Not the water, obviously. The science. Whatever way Simon and his blood pool arrived by, that's probably the same way it all went back. Which means it's connected to your warping experiments, which means...

You get another signal.