The Beef Mom

When Ryland Grace woke up on the—what, approximately 120th day?—of being at Tau Ceti, he was first aware of how strangely sore his throat felt. Swallowing hurt, just a little, in the same way it would hurt the next day after a concert or party where you’d spent hours scream-talking over the ambient sound. He rolled over to face the little light box “window” in the sleeping room that was programmed on some kind of schedule to let him know it was supposed to be daytime. 

He sat up and cleared his throat. “Computer: coffee?” 

The ship was currently set in artificial gravity, and had been for the past week, so it gave him a mug rather than a bag. A little metal mug, like a camping mug. It was sufficiently hot. It felt very good on his throat. 

“Good morning,” Rocky chirped from his xenonite tubing above. He had set up extensive tubing in the sleeping room, considering how much “boring, wasted” time Grace spent in there, Rocky’s words. (Though he still hassled Grace to go to bed once he’d been up for more than about 22 hours consecutively.)

“Goooood morning,” Grace replied, stretching out his arms in the process. His shoulders popped. Then he paused in thought. “Do joints popping sound gross to you? Or weird? Or, like, neutral?” 

“Most your body sounds are weird to me. Not gross. Weird.” 

“Cool.” 

“Voice weird today.” 

“What?” 

“Yes. Sound different.” 

“I am shocked you can hear a difference,” Grace muttered, almost just to himself. “I can’t even hear a difference. Yeah, my throat feels scratchy today. Hurts a little.” 

“Why question?” 

“Don’t know. Probably the dry air, or maybe dehydration. I don’t think I had enough water yesterday. It should go away soon.” 

Rocky made a little trill of acknowledgement. Then he was off towards the lab, with Grace expected to follow right behind in tow. 

Rocky was always immediately ready to go the moment Grace woke up. Which he couldn’t blame him for. Who wouldn’t be a little antsy to get moving when you’ve just sat still for hours as someone else slept? 

Eridians additionally didn’t seem to have much of a wake-up period. They were either awake or asleep, and if there was any grogginess in-between, it was so abbreviated that Grace didn’t really notice it. He had to explain a few times to Rocky that it was pretty normal for many people to feel tired and sluggish in the hour or two after they wake up every morning. This seemed to earnestly be a concept he had a little trouble relating to or understanding. He never complained after that if Grace was a little slow to join him, though. 

Grace knocked back a big swig of his coffee and dutifully followed Rocky into the lab. They were mostly working on breeding up the Taumeoba to the correct atmospheric nitrogen levels. And, concurrently, Grace was doing his best to scrub the fuel tanks completely clean of the escaped ones that had managed to chew through the entire volume of Astrophage in there in a matter of days. It was only half-working. Despite multiple attempts, two of the tanks seemingly would not get clean. The ship itself was still running perfectly fine on Rocky’s generator, though. And Rocky was spending time working on a second generator as a backup in case the first failed for some reason. Grace was a big fan of Rocky’s love of redundancies. Scientist and engineer solidarity, he supposed. 

Annoyingly, as they worked that morning, the sore throat didn’t go away. Once he finished the coffee, the relief that the warmth had temporarily given him faded. He switched to water. He couldn’t lie. He had definitely not been drinking enough water lately, considering he was also sweating more than usual trying to repeatedly scrub out those extremely stubborn fuel tanks. 

But the water seemed to not help much either—and the next morning was worse. 

He woke up coughing. It startled both him and Rocky up. 

“Grace okay, question?” 

He caught his breath. “I’m okay, yeah—wow, something’s really up with my throat.” It felt far drier than yesterday, more raw and painful, with a tickle of what seemed like congestion in the back. Like drainage, or something, was causing him to cough. 

Rocky looked visibly anxious. He was slightly opening and closing his claws. “Chest sound weird, today. Chest sound weird while you sleep, too.” 

“Chest sounds weird?” He sat up straighter. “Like what, what does it sound like?” 

Rocky seemed at a loss for the precise words to use to describe it. He moved closer to Grace. Angled his carapace back and forth a little. 

“Like whistling tube, and—no, I have no words. Sound like this.”

And then he actually mimicked it. He was well-equipped to do that, considering his vocal anatomy was all just whistling tubes and valves anyway. Grace reckoned it sounded almost perfectly identical to what you might hear through a stethoscope held up to a chest, which would be extremely cool, if not for the circumstances. 

He made a sound comparable to air being blown through thin rubber piping to clear it out. Then he made a distinct rhythmic crunching sound—what sounded like someone walking on fine gravel. 

“That was awesome.” 

“Normal noise for chest, question?” 

“Uh, no.” 

“Med bay, statement.” Fair enough. 

He sat down on the edge of the bed, in preparation of whatever the Medbot was about to do. He opened his arms wide and said “What’s wrong with me?” 

It proceeded to snake some basic medical equipment onto him: a blood pressure cuff. A combined pulse monitor and oximiter. It hooked a strange-looking thermometer with a thin plastic covering into his mouth, and he sat still, letting it. The least enjoyable part was the needle it stuck into the crook of his arm to take a blood sample. He had to try and look away from that one while also sitting as still as he could manage so as to not disturb any of the other equipment attached to him. 

It took a while to spit out the final reading. It was a marvel, but it could not work magic and make a blood test come back instantaneously. Probably 20 minutes passed before the final output: Blood pressure low, 86/55. Tachycardia, 121 bpm. Febrile, 38.1C/100.6F. Oxygen saturation normal. White blood cell count high. ~17000 cells/µL. Possible infection. Antibiotic treatment recommended. Proceed? 

Well, alright, then. “Yes, proceed.” 

He started puzzling on this. With few exceptions, pathogens cannot survive on surfaces for long without a host, and certainly not for over ten years. He would be shocked if the infection came from somewhere in the ship itself. Equipment and surfaces would’ve been heavily sterilized, anyway. Whatever it was, it probably came from his own body. Something on his skin, or in his lungs, or guts—shoot. That’s bad news. 

It’s bad news because it means his immune system is totally shot. Space travel is not exactly easy on the body, even without the added stress that a years-long induced coma probably puts on it. 

The ship’s system is probably right in reaching for an antibiotic. Most people think of Staph or Strep or E. coli as external pathogens you can occasionally pick up from somewhere else, somewhere dirty or infected—but like many bacteria species, they’re also just on you all the time. Most people have these on their skin, in their nose, in their mucous membranes, in their intestines. They live peacefully every day with the other 90% of your microbiome. Unless the “other 90%” of your microbiome has become more like the “other 50%.” Then they can and will over-colonize. 

He doesn’t know exactly what’s causing the issue, of course. The ship’s system could certainly be wrong. There are also plenty of viruses that most human beings on Earth have in their bodies that stay latent for as long as the person infected has a normal functioning immune system. Fungi, too, even. 

He would need to run tests more advanced than what the Medbot alone can do in order to actually check what it is. And while he does have a little PCR machine among his lab equipment, he does not have the right assays to do anything with the DNA or RNA fragments he’d have amplified with it. If it’s viral, there’s no way to tell what he’s up against. 

And, in all honesty, it wouldn’t be worth the effort anyways. What would he do with the information that some specific latent virus had re-infected him out here alone in deep space? It’s not like he could treat it. 

The bot gave him a little round white pill and a cup of water. He took it and carried on with his day. He had caught that the system said he had a fever, but it was a very low-grade one—and Grace didn’t really even feel it—so he wasn’t pressed to take anything else for that. 

This choice turned out to be a mistake. The low-grade fever and occasional coughing progressed throughout the day to what felt like a full-blown fever and persistent coughing, even after he had gone back to take some meds. It was probably annoying the everloving heck out of Rocky to be around him, honestly. But Rocky stuck nearby anyway. 

At around what Grace estimated to be “evening” to his body, he had to put his head down on his desk from the sheer exhaustion from doing a very average number of tasks that day. Rocky stopped what he was doing, too, and started interrogating. 

“Grace shaking. Why Grace shaking?” 

“I’m just not feeling great right now, bud. It’s the fever.” He mumbled. “I’ll be okay.” 

“Fever hurt you, question?” 

“No, not hurting me—but it makes me feel terrible. It’s kind of a human thing. You have something similar, don’t you? Burn out the germs?” 

“Yes yes, but does not make Eridian feel bad.” 

Which Grace supposes makes sense. If you lack an immune system and the only defense is temporarily upping your temperature, and you are also an organism that has adapted to live in some very extreme temperatures naturally—they’re basically a multicellular thermophile—why would you have ever evolved the trait of feeling sick from your species’ version of a fever? There’s probably not even a benefit to resting while you have one. 

“Sounds nicer,” Grace said into the desk. He really could use that thick quilted blanket back in his room right about now, but he didn’t feel like getting up for it. 

“Yes.” 

“We don’t really have a body equipped to have its internal temperature change. Our proteins and enzymes and stuff do poorly with really high fevers.” 

“Describe really high.” 

“Ah, usually past 103 or 104 is when you should start to worry.” 

“Understand.” 

Guess he’d probably remember that one. And probably get anxious over the idea that Grace’s body might be too far beyond its delicate 5-degree window of safety. So Grace added: “That doesn’t happen often, though.” This seemed to satisfy. 

The problem with having said this, however, is that the next day it happened. 

Grace didn’t actually know it had happened right away—he just knew halfway through the day that he felt absolutely horrible. He was back at trying to scrub the tanks, and there came a point where he physically could not push himself to continue working anymore. Every few minutes he was coughing relentlessly—rough, congested coughs. He felt dizzy and concerningly weak. A little nauseous, too, which was probably a lovely side effect of not having much of an appetite. He was running on mostly coffee and water. He could hardly concentrate anymore between it all. 

He had to call it quits, at least temporarily.

He trudged back from the tanks to his desk at the center atrium of the ship, where Rocky sat in his walled-off tunnel beside it, working on creating parts. 

“Hey, I’m going to lay down for a bit,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few.” 

“Grace sleep question?” Rocky asked. 

“No, not sleeping. Just laying down. I need to take a bit of a break. Do you need a break? We’ve been working for hours.” 

“No,” Rocky said. “Will be here. You rest.” 

He worried, briefly, that he was unintentionally lying to Rocky back there. That once he laid down, he would quickly fall asleep from the sheer exhaustion he had throughout his body. But nope—he felt too horrible to sleep. He couldn’t even get close to it. So, not a liar after all, hooray. 

Instead he tossed around on the bunk for about 30 minutes under two thick layers of blankets, shaking like a leaf, and feeling increasingly sick to his stomach despite the attempt he made to take some fever reducers. 

During one particularly rough bout of coughing, he coughed ‘til he puked into a trash bin he had in the room. It wasn’t pleasant. It was the sort of deep, wet coughing where you couldn’t stop, couldn’t stifle it, and could hardly catch a breath, and it set his nausea over the edge. 

Rocky, who could certainly hear every little detail of Grace’s “resting” going on in here, came hurrying through the xenonite tubing after his friend in fear. He started immediately asking Grace what exactly was happening. 

Except, one issue: the translator laptop was still in the lab on the workbench. 

Grace hadn’t brought the laptop into the bedroom with him, but he knew enough Eridian to get the gist by this point. The really fragmented gist. He heard the sound for “Grace” quite a few times in the heightened register that indicated panic or anxiety, and he caught “okay,” “wrong,” “breathe,” “sound,” and “hurt,” as well as the tapping for “question,” of course. 

“Hold on, wait, Rocky, I’m alright,” Grace said. “The computer, I left it in the lab—give me a moment.” 

Grace paused, sitting on the edge of his bed, and he shut his eyes. He rode out another wave of nausea and lightheadedness in silence. Rocky had gone silent too. Then he slowly stood and made his way to the lab, once he felt like he could. Rocky made it there before he did. The computer screen lit up with text. 

“What was that, question? Horrible horrible horrible sound.” 

Grace sat down hard in the lab chair. “I’m alright, I promise, I just couldn’t stop coughing. It made me sick.” 

“What Grace temperature?” 

“I don’t know, I haven’t checked—hold on.” 

He didn’t have a handheld thermometer; it seemed like the Medbot was the only source of a thermometer on the ship. But he had the next best thing. 

Grace tossed open a few of his workbench drawers looking for a tool he had spotted in there a while ago: a little handheld IR light temperature gun. It was built for engineering applications, but it provided an accurate enough reading. It would have to do. He pointed it at himself. Then he turned the little read-out screen back around to face him. 

“Shoooot.” He said. 

“What say?”

“Uh, 103.2.” 

This immediately made Rocky trill in alarm. Grace put his hands up. “It’s fine! It’s okay. This isn’t dangerous unless it lasts for, like, a day. Or it gets higher.” Rocky still swayed nervously, but did not say anything back. So Grace added more.

“And, hey, listen, I’ve only been on treatment for two days. It’ll start clearing up soon.” 

“Understand. How do I make you feel better now, question?” 

“Ugh, I don’t know. Rest? The thickest blanket on this ship? A movie? I could do a movie.” 

“You put on movie. I bring parts to room to work on.” 

Another day went by. Then two, then three. He did not feel any better whatsoever. He was spending every day now working through a feverish, painful, exhausted haze. It had dramatically slowed down the work on the process of breeding up the Taumoeba and purging the fuel tanks of every last escapee. Especially the latter part. No matter what he tried, he just could not get two of the fuel tanks clean. 

The stress was killing him. Rocky could tell. 

In one particularly embarrassing moment, Grace, at the end of his rope, threw his little homemade scraper-spatula and scrubbrush across the room and slid down the wall to sulk crouched on the ground. Rocky saw the whole ordeal. 

“Grace, stop. Need break.” 

“How? I can’t—I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Nothing I try works. There must be a place that I can’t access that I need to clean—what, do I have to start sawing this whole ship open?” 

“Grace, breathe.” 

He was, in fact, running out of breath. He was panting on his words. He tried to suck a full chest of air in, and then promptly started coughing. 

When he spoke again, his voice was quiet and hoarse. “We’re so close, Rock. And I could lose it at the finish line. I’m—” He put his hands over his face. “I just want to go home.” 

“We will make it. I make plan, you rest. Grace need rest badly.” 

“I do, bud,” Grace said. “I really do.” 

They sat in silence for a little while longer. Grace still slumped on the floor, Rocky fidgeting anxiously and observing him from the nearest-running tunnel. 

“Rest now, question? Get up?” 

Insistent guy. Grace stood slowly to avoid the head rush. It still happened anyway. 

Rocky followed him to the dormitory while Grace wordlessly spun on his own thoughts. It was amazing how simultaneously exhausted and anxious the human body could be at the same time. Then, right before he got to the bedroom, a thought struck him. 

“Wait,” he said, stopping still.

“No, no wait. Bed. Now.” 

“No, hold on—do you think they packed agar plate medium on this thing? I mean, most of them can be stored as powders. Why not?” 

Rocky waved his claw in exasperation. “Look for powder later. What powder for, question?” 

“I can grow cultures of bacteria in it. If I’m infected with a bacteria, I might be able to figure out what it is—though I don’t know if that would help me treat myself or anything. I don’t know, I’m out of ideas otherwise.” 

“Two hours. Then look for powder.” 

“Deal.” 

The knowledge that he at least had something to try when he got back up again, however potentially unhelpful, was relieving enough that he fell asleep quickly once he had laid down. Heaving chest, horrible congestion, and fever be damned—he was more tired than he could ever remember being. He was out within five. 

He woke up to the sound of Rocky gently tapping the panels of his xenonite ball. A very mild, pleasant wake-up alarm. 

“Grace feel better?” 

Grace took stock of himself. Still super congested, still achy, and probably still running a decent temperature, but far less foggy in the head. “A bit, yeah.” 

“Let you sleep three hours, not two.” 

“You’re forgiven, I probably needed it. What were you working on while I was out?” 

Rocky trilled just slightly in excitement. “Make new scraper. Bendable, very long, precise controls at handle. Can fit in small engine tubes. Grace try clean tanks again with this.” 

Grace sat up quickly. Too quickly; his vision rocked a little. “Oh, that’s—that’s perfect! It’s like an ultra-powerful drain snake! Xenonite can bend?” 

“Take effort to make, but yes.” 

“You’re the best,” Grace said, putting a fist up to the ball. Rocky returned the gesture. “Okay. Okay, that leaves—whatever’s wrong with me. Okay. Agar powder hunt first, tank cleaning second.” 

The agar powder hunt was a success, after a substantial amount of digging through drawers, storage chests, hatches, and bags. 

Nothing was clearly labeled or predictably stored in this ship. It was all just packed where it could fit, and where it would be safest. Jeez, he thinks, it’s almost like there were supposed to be trained individuals onboard who would’ve known the layout and all tools like the back of their hands, and I was not one of them. Isn’t that a pickle. 

But there they were—flat stacks of vacuum-sealed powders, only about a pound in weight each. All with familiar names: Neomycin agar. Luria Bertani agar. MacConkey agar. Blood agar. Chocolate agar. Quite a few more, too. He wondered for the first time in his life if he could eat any of this, and if it would provide any nutritional value whatsoever. The component makeup of the powders wasn’t listed, the bags just had a simple name label. That would be a question for another time, though. 

Barring the ones that would be obviously unhelpful in trying to diagnose an infection, he created petri dishes for every single one of these powders. Two petri dishes per type of powder, specifically, for redundancy. It took a while. He only had a small autoclave for sterilizing all his tools, and sterilizing the agar medium itself. 

When that part was done, it wasn’t exactly hard to get a sample for swabbing the completed dishes with. He had been consistently coughing nasty-looking gunk for several days now. One by one, he went down the line and swabbed every plate, delicately, with some disgusting goop he had coughed up into a sterilized dish for the task. Then he just stacked them all into the mini-incubator onboard. Set to 37C—or 98.6F, perfect human body temperature for them to go wild in. 

He was amazingly wiped-out by the time he’d finished all this. Though, to be fair, he was probably working into what his body considered to be “1 AM” or something around there. The day had been weird. He was as sick as a dog. The prospect of crawling into his fuel tanks again to drain-snake the whole system right then and there felt daunting beyond belief. And like it might make him throw up, or pass out, or both to try and do right now. 

“I need a break,” Grace said. 

Rocky spoke up immediately. “Yes, yes. Long break. Grace heartbeat fast. You are tired, very not well. Shaking much more.” 

It was true, he couldn’t lie. 

When the colonies formed to a visible size, only 18 or so hours later from the time he had swabbed them, Grace was encouraged by what he saw. It didn’t grow on anything but the blood agar and chocolate agar, which narrowed down his choices of what it could be very significantly. Moreover, the little transparent colonies looked weird: they all had a faint, discolored brown-green ring around them. 

It only took a little bit of time spent browsing through files of blood agar colonies to find the one that closely resembled his. Streptococcus pneumoniae, the bastard. His own body had infected him with strep, and it had escaped down into his lungs. 

Except… the antibiotics should be taking care of that. Easily. 

Which means the issue could go far beyond the strep itself—what, is his body just falling apart? Can’t keep up with the basic demands of maintaining immune system function, or keeping bacteria in check? Does he have irreparable chemical damage to his lungs from Rocky’s atmosphere, or something? Or—the antibiotic in fact wasn’t taking care of it. 

Grace stood and scrubbed his face with his hands, tired and dizzy and foggy-headed. He went back to the dormitory and asked for another antibiotic dose from the Medbot. It just gave it to him, apparently lacking the time block of the pain meds for his arm. Then he went back to the lab and dropped it into one of the petri dishes. 

“Grace panicking.” 

“Maybe a little.” It wasn’t exactly easy to hide it from him. 

“Slow down. Calm. Generator will hold. Taumoeba farm will hold. We have time.” 

He really wanted to argue with this and say: “hey, honestly, I don’t know if I have any time whatsoever, because I don’t know what’s wrong with me and it appears to just be rapidly getting worse.” Instead he said “Okay. Okay.” 

He didn’t sleep well that night. He hadn’t been sleeping well already for the past few days, occasionally jolting awake to cough and feel his body trying to painfully suck more air into his lungs than he was physically able to. The added rumination just made it almost impossible to fall and stay asleep. He estimates he only got about two hours of actually being unconscious during the whole night. As some sort of a silver lining, Rocky was always there in the room to provide conversation when Grace needed it to pass the time. 

He felt deeply homesick and scared and ill, but at the very least he did not feel alone. 

In the morning he skipped over getting his coffee, electing to go directly back into the central lab room. He peered at the little bacterial colonies. 

“Oh, God. Oh my goodness...” He sat down and put his head in his hands, which was partly from exasperation, and partly because the room was spinning a little and his chest was heaving from the effort of simply getting up and walking here and he would really like that to stop. 

“What you find, question?” Rocky fiddled with the tools he had wrapped around his fingers. 

There was no clean, clear ring around the pill he had put in the dish, as he had hoped for. The agar was still full of a perfectly healthy little colony of bacteria, doubled in size from what it was yesterday. The antibiotic didn’t kill any of it. 

Grace took a deep, steadying breath in. Or at least as deep as he could manage. “It’s resistant to whatever antibiotic they have here on board. I’ve been getting worse for a week because this hasn’t been doing anything. Oh my God, I might as well have been taking a sugar pill.” 

Honestly, this is the point where he would immediately hospitalize himself for this, if he weren’t roughly 70 trillion miles away from the nearest one. 

The Medbot was smart enough, but it didn’t have much adaptability or reasoning programmed into it. It couldn’t be proactive about knowing that an antibiotic wasn’t working, apparently. Grace speculates that it would’ve just kept throwing the same first-line antibiotic at him for another week until he deteriorated enough and it tried other interventions. He dreads to think how bad it might’ve gotten. 

He rushed—or rushed as quickly as he was capable of—into the med bay. 

“What is this antibiotic I’ve been taking?” He asked the system. He was a little mad at it, irrationally. His tone was demanding. Which obviously didn’t mean anything to the bot. 

500mg azithromycin. 

“Great. What else do you have?” 

The list was short. Three other broad, first-line antibiotics. Evidently, they did not expect that there would be one guy left tasked with saving two worlds and that guy would be so comically unlucky to come down with a particular strain of antibiotic-resistant strep pneumonia from his own body. His video diaries to earth might quickly become a complaint-fest before he dies out here in space. 

“Dispense one of each.” 

It dutifully did just that. Grace took the three pills and dropped them into the extra petri dish colony. He scribbled the names of each antibiotic on the lid above them to keep track. No way he would just continue to try his luck with one of these without knowing for sure that it would do something. 

As for today: from everything he could read, his choice of antibiotic that seemed most likely to actually function was amoxicillin. So he started on that in the meantime. In the end it wouldn’t have mattered all that much which one he chose. The next morning, each little pill ended up creating a ring around it where it had killed off the strep. Just eyeballing it, though, he felt like the amoxicillin ring looked biggest anyhow. Whatever. 

The next few days were basically pure bedrest, both because Grace didn’t have the stamina to do much of anything and because Rocky was forcing him. They had found out the problem, Rocky argued. Now his only job was to wait for the solution to start working. 

They watched many more movies. Grace didn’t tend to stay awake for the duration of any of them, but neither of them were gonna complain. They played some computer games—Rocky knew how to play Tetris now,  and actually really enjoyed it. Grace could now add “first person to show an alien a video game” on his CV. He maybe should’ve started with Pong just for the tradition of it, but he knew Rocky would’ve probably described it as “boring as hell, statement.” He described some Eridian games back to Grace, and Grace was a little morose that he’d never get to play them for himself. 

Regardless, the actually-functioning antibiotic did its job blissfully fast in the grand scheme of things. It took only about two days until Grace had started feeling noticeably better, and by the fourth day, he was mostly at normal functioning. If still more tired than usual. 

He was back in the tanks, crouched down using Rocky’s little precise xenonite drain snake through the engine’s tubes, when Rocky spoke up. 

“Chest sound much much much better.” 

“Really?” The relief in Grace’s voice was apparent. He was hoping this meant minimal-to-zero long-term damage. 

“Yes. Sound like—” he made a low, even wooshing noise. Quiet. Not completely smooth, but certainly smoother than the first time they went through this exercise.