stream ego renegade boy

LAMB DANCE

Beatles come to Earth, humanity learns about taumoeba and discovers that they accidentally made first contact! With friendly rock-spider aliens! They have a little English-Eridian vocabulary, great new material, coordinates of their planet and the best fuel for spaceships, so why not make the second contact?

It takes time, but finally four or five astronauts in coma (scientists found the reason for Yao's and Ilyukhina's deaths) go to Erid.

And upon arrival they discover that Eridians' English is muuuch better than they thought and that their idol, the Earth's hero, the savior of humanity Ryland Grace is still alive!

Wtf??? He has no food??? We have posthumous memorials???

And they decide to meet with him and suddenly he:

had been eating nothing but space unicellular slime for four years,

lives in some weird place that's half zoo, half science center,

now eats human flesh burgers (his own flesh but...),

hasn't interacted with another human being in almost 30 years

hasn't had sex in over 30 years (dude, are you asexual???)

spends his days teaching little blind rock-spider aliens physics and human science and experimenting with astrophage and eridian things...

and he is totally happy about it!

He doesn't want to go back to Earth. All that he wants is to grow some of their plants on Erid! They tell him about his heroic status, about memorials and statues, and he is HORRIFIED. Ok, he saved Earth, but statues???

Crazy man.

Then they ask him how he and Rocky didn't kill each other on the way back. Like... Soviet experiments, you know?

And he looks at them as if they're the ones eating human flesh burgers and starts to list for like an hour what you can do with your best rock-spider friend and a computer with all Earth media ever created.

Bonus: Grace is autistic. It's okay, but after almost 30 years without any human contact he doesn't mask. It takes time for poor astronauts to realize that his oddities didn't caused by Erid. He's just like that.