Chapter Text
Simon’s mother had loved to read.
He didn’t remember a lot from before Eden; he remembered the Martian sky, usually a pale yellow, sometimes shot through with a dusty blue halo just around the sun when it brushed the horizon. He thought he remembered the smell of regolith, and the achy way his lungs felt because of it, because of the failing scrubbers at the edges of the colony. He vaguely remembered someone, an older male relative, smiling at him and pinching his cheek.
Most of all, he remembered his mother reading. Reading, alone; also, reading aloud to Simon. He remembered some of the stories. His favorite was set in a place on Earth called Africa, which had great big jungles, wet places with unimaginable, towering trees and deluges of rain. Simon loved those stories, because he liked to think of the jungles. The stories followed a mischievous spider named Anansi, who was always playing mean pranks on the other animals. His mother had drawn him a spider when he had asked what they looked like. Simon’s mother had never been to Earth, either, but she had seen pictures when she was a child. He remembered something about Anansi sneaking ants into a fancy suit and giving it to a monkey (his mother had told him that ants were a little like spiders). The monkey was sophisticated, and it made Anansi jealous. The monkey donned the suit, and the ants, surrounding his body, bit, and bit, and bit. That’s why monkeys were so foolish, and moved in such funny ways. Simon asked his mother to draw him a monkey, too, but she didn’t know what they looked like at all.
When his mother got ill, when she began to cough all the time and breathe shallowly, she’d tell Simon that it felt like those ants were in her lungs. Simon felt, now, like Monkey, too; fire ants all inside him, outside of him, angry, molten, alive, swarming. Stinging. Had Monkey drowned in the ants? Simon was drowning.
He thought of Anansi again, and the ants. He thought of jungles in Africa, and wished for rain. He’d never seen rain. He wondered if Africa and jungles were ever really real places, or if they were as imaginary as talking spiders.
He wanted his mother.
Mom, did I do it? Did you keep it safe for me?
And then there was light.
Space was crazy. Space was amazing. Before Ryland had ever gone to space or ever considered that he could go to space, barring a very unlikely rehashing of the Teacher in Space program, he watched the livestreams of manned space missions and thought, how are they not freaking out up there, all the time, from amazement? Every second must be so exciting!
The truth is, though, in consideration of how the Teacher in Space program went, maybe space didn’t really like schoolteachers, and maybe also when you were roughly three years into a four-year journey to an alien planet you’d be stuck on with no human contact for God knew how long surviving on a diet of bitter mush and alien amoebas, space got old fast.
Yes. Ryland was bored. He’d written his papers on Eridian biology. He’d played Tetris, and Minesweeper, and read every book that was the opposite of sci-fi that reminded him of his childhood. He taught Rocky about human culture, and the two of them exchanged stories and exercised together, and Rocky fretted over his worsening physical health. And Ryland was so, so bored. Absolutely used to nothing happening.
That’s why, when Ryland was learning the rules to chess on Stratt’s database and heard the Mary beeping her alarm, he sat bolt upright and almost bodied his laptop. Which would have been unfortunate. He had just gotten to the good part (castling). In the tunnels beside him, Rocky was sleeping. Ryland winced. God. He’d never had to move from watching Rocky before. His skin itched just at the thought of it. But:
DIRECT COLLISION COURSE. AUTOMATIC ENGINE SHUTDOWN COMMENCING.
With one last guilty glance at his friend, Ryland scrambled to his feet and clambered up the ladder into the cockpit. He hoisted himself into the chair as the pilot interface flickered on. “Okay, Mary, so we’re going to hit something?! Some uncharted star?!”
Apparently, that was something the Mary could do: sense big stuff in the way. He vaguely remembered it from the flight operations manual. In space, it was highly unlikely you would hit anything; indeed, the logs indicated that the Mary had made it all the way to Tau Ceti without having to test out its automatic course-correction program, and he and Rocky hadn’t had to stop yet either. Moving at ninety-seven percent the speed of light meant that asteroids and comets didn’t matter; even on the astronomically unlikely chance that one was directly in the Hail Mary’s path, their speed would mean that they would plow right through it with no issue. This meant that there was something huge in their path: the long-range detection system was looking for something starlike or planetlike.
The ship whirred as it rapidly decelerated. Ten, nine, eight, Mary began, as Ryland hastily strapped himself into his chair, four, three, two, one.
Zero gravity. Ryland was proud of himself. He only felt a little nauseous this time.
He hastily peeked out the window.
Nothing.
“Mary?” Ryland said nervously. “Um, there’s supposed to be a star here, right?” he squinted at the screens, the various detectors. Nothing. He quickly activated the Petrovascope in normal-spectrum light and peered through the lens.
Crickets. Actually, no. Less than crickets. Just distant pinpricks. No planets. No quasars. No Death Stars.
He went to the Mary’s logs of the shutdown. The object had been bright, and huge. Bigger and more luminous than the sun, giving off X-rays and gamma rays. Mary, as per her protocol, had shut down before she would have gotten messed up by its orbit.
Was it a black hole? No, there would be a visible accretion disc, right? And if not, how the heck would the Mary detect it?!
“Okay. Okay, think, Ryland,” he muttered to himself. Maybe it was instrument failure? The Mary was never meant to travel for this long, and even with the astrophage slurry running around the ship for blocking off radiation, the actual detector that handled the collision and functions would have components exposed to space. Maybe a stray cosmic ray had struck it and produced a false positive?!
He wished Rocky was awake. He would make a model, and figure out something obvious that Ryland overlooked (because Ryland wasn’t a freaking astrophysicist, okay?!) and everything would be okay.
Well. Maybe he should just… continue along their path at a reduced speed, unless he saw something? Cautiously, he pushed the ship along with the joystick, heading towards where the heart of the thing should have been.
Ten minutes into silence later, the whole time of which Ryland was thinking, I’m definitely doing something stupid, I should wait for Rocky to wake up, the Mary spoke up again:
BLIP C DETECTED.
Oh! His eyes went to the proximity tracker. Something was there! He slowed the ship on its path and looked out the Petrovascope in its direction.
At first, he thought it was an asteroid. It was smooth, grey metal, with surface artifacts, gently drifting towards the Hail Mary. As it approached, Ryland thought – okay, cool. So I’m dreaming. Wake up, Ryland! Pretty sure you were actually watching Rocky when you fell asleep, and it’s kind of the whole point that you’re supposed to take shifts about that kind of thing.
Because, roughly seventeen-and-a-half light years from Earth, there was a submarine, gently tumbling end-over-end in the starry space like a mirage.
EAT. EAT. EAT. EAT. EAT. E
I just want to live. Is that so wrong?
AT EAT E
Why doesn’t anybody else want that? Everyone in Eden, just… giving up. You know, no one at Eden wants to think this way.
A A A A AAAAAAAA A A AAA A
A
A
A
A TTT
Ryland did not wake up. It was not a dream.
Rocky’s sleep cycle would be ending soon. Which was good. It was good, because Ryland was not dreaming, which meant he was going insane, and he needed Rocky to figure out how to fix him. He’d put the Mary on a gentle path alongside the submarine for the time being; no prolonged spin drive use required, just an initial thrust along the same velocity as the sub.
His best friend’s carapace stirred. What a sentence. Because, yes. His best friend had a carapace. Maybe he’d been going insane for a while, and everything since he’d woken up in Tau Ceti was just some dream sparkling in a dying man’s brain.
Rocky was immediately hip to the jive. Mary’s thrusters being off was obvious to his Eridian everywhere-ears. Suddenly taking in the zero-gravity, his legs swung about wildly, like he felt like he was falling. With a shriek, he managed to grab on to his tunnel’s handlebars and perked to attention. “Grace. Why ship not moving, question?” What a weird experience that must have been for Rocky: for him, falling asleep was like skipping time. In his perspective, one second he was comfortingly pressed to the ground, and the next, he was sideways, gently bumping against the wall as he drifted through the air.
“The ship detected that we were going to hit something really bright and big, so it shut down. This is going to sound crazy, but there was nothing there! So, I kept going, at a kind of slow speed, and– ugh. There’s something really weird outside. I need you to tell me it’s not a submarine and then tell me to go to sleep so I can heal whatever is fudgeing up my brain.”
“What is word, question?” Rocky was nervously quivering already.
“Um. A submarine is an Earth ship that is made for the sea. Like, water, in our oceans. I looked in the Petrovascope and I saw an Earth ship made for the water floating outside our spaceship. Which means I’m going crazy.”
Rocky paused. He was taking in, Ryland was sure, Ryland’s wild, twitchy eyes, the perspiration on his brow, the way his hair stood up when he ran his hands through it too many times in distress. His friend pressed his body up to the edge of the xenonite and trilled comfortingly. It was something he’d started to do after Ryland showed him cat videos in the Don’t-Go-Crazy-Room and cried because he missed cat purring (Marissa had owned a cat named Hippo that Ryland missed almost as much as he missed Marissa). Ryland pressed up to the xenonite in response, feeling the reverberation and relaxing his shoulders.
“My word for you Earth water ship is 🎵🎵🎶🎶. You calm down, put new word in database, and I go look with texture-screen.”
SPIT IT. BACK OUT. SPIT OUT. NEXT. NEXT. AGAIN. AGAIN. THIS ONE… TRIED. SPIT IT OUT! NEED IT? BUT NEED IT? WHERE IS IT? WHERE DID IT GO? NEED IT, N
But, what’s more likely?
…That every planet and star disappeared, or that a few space stations disappeared?
Isn’t it easier to believe that they’re still there wondering where all of us went?
Getting Rocky to look through the Petrovascope was always an exercise in patience, for the both of them. Rocky’s xenonite tunnels couldn’t be built directly under the viewpoint, obviously, or else Ryland could never see into it. Also, Ryland couldn’t lift Rocky’s ball onto his chair, because he was too heavy, and it was too high up for Rocky to roll up there. Therefore, Rocky had to slowly and carefully brace himself at the closest point in one of his tunnels just so and position his camera-to-texture-display-device (Which Ryland had coined a CTTDD) in one shaking arm.
Grace leaned forward on his chair. He watched the texture display shift. It looked like a submarine. Great.
“Look like vessel… long shape. Round corners. Window.”
“Oh, God.” Ryland wheezed. “You can see it too.”
Rocky let his body relax out of its uncomfortable twist. “Maybe it just look like submarine,” he said in a placating tone.
“Exactly like a submarine? It’s got propellers! I mean, it’s got the things that move it through water! And no propulsion, from what I can see. It’s dead out there, just floating.”
The thing was, it wasn’t like a submarine couldn't have been sent to space by some rich idiot. Ryland vaguely remembered that some CEO of a car company shot one of his cars into space for no reason once. The thing was, that there would be no way for a submarine, with no propulsion at all, to make it to Tau Ceti before the discovery of astrophage. It just couldn’t be there. It just couldn’t. It was impossible. He remembered his own words from years ago:
“How can there be a sudden change in the sun? It’s a star, for cripes’ sake. Things just don’t happen this fast for stars. Changes take millions of years, not dozens. Come on, you know that.” Then, Marissa’s pained look. The impossible and unthinkable sure liked to become real and present itself as obnoxiously as possible in Ryland’s life.
Ryland pulled the Petrovascope display to himself again and stared at it some more. The submarine spun around, and Ryland caught something with his eye, before it completed its revolution:
SM-13, painted, in stark black, on the hull.
Holy. Shit.
No. No way. No.
Ryland pulled himself away from the viewfinder. “Rocky.”
“What, question?” Rocky twittered, crowding closer against his tunnel.
“There are human letters and numbers on the side of that thing. SM-13. It. It probably means submarine thirteen. That. That means it is a human vessel. It must be. There’s no possible way that another race could convergently evolve human letters.”
“Unless have very big telescope it point at Earth, copy Earth.”
Ryland squinted. “That would be… um… a really big telescope, Rock.”
Rocky shrugged. “Could happen. Anyway, If human ship… could Earth have sent more humans, question?”
And.
That was exactly what Ryland was thinking, his stomach turning in horror. Maybe relativity didn’t actually work the way they thought it did. Maybe Ryland had been in space for decades. Or centuries. Maybe the submarine wasn’t a submarine at all, but a kind of probe, or a separated part of a larger ship that actually had engines; or, maybe the engines of this thing had fallen off of it, a pre-meditated stage of its journey. Maybe its designer had liked old Earth submarines.
Maybe everyone on Earth was already dead, and it was a part of a last-ditch Hail Mary 2. Ryland’s stomach was cramping.
“Maybe. Maybe it’s been too long, and they figured out a way to send out a ship faster. Maybe things got… really, really bad on Earth.” All their work and sacrifice, useless… the kids, starving in an unstoppable winter… no, he couldn’t think about that.
Rocky trilled anxiously. “Bad, bad, bad.”
Ryland furiously shook his head, trying to shake off the way his palms were sweating and his heart was pounding. “But why would it be here? Not in Tau Ceti, but… on our path? What are the chances? Its trajectory is… towards us, which is towards Tau Ceti. It’s coming from away from Earth. None of this makes any sense.”
They sat in befuddlement for a few more moments.
Rocky broke the silence. “If Earth vessel… something important inside maybe, we look?”
Grace swallowed. Well. “Can we risk it? Can we risk whatever danger might present itself? Erid is relying on us, and we can’t mess that up.”
Rocky was doing that thing with his fingers that he always did when he thought deeply, tapping them all together in sequence like a crab clicking its pincers. “Sent one Beetle to Erid already.”
That was the truth. Before going back for Rocky, Ryland had sent three taumeboa-equipped Beetles to Earth and one to Erid. Even then, he felt a little selfish for Erid’s sake; what if he couldn’t find Rocky? What if the one on its way to Erid failed, and he couldn’t locate Eridani-40 on his own, and Eridani-40 died because of him? What if the one Beetle going to Eridani-40 wasn’t intercepted correctly by the Eridians, or they accidentally destroyed it when taking it into their own living conditions, the pressure, the heat? But then he found Rocky, and felt better about the whole three-to-one split. Surely, one of the Earth-bound Beetles would be intercepted, and even if the Erid-bound Beetle failed, Rocky and Ryland were on their way with a whole host of taumoeba in their lab. If looking into this mysterious submarine sabotaged the mission in any way…
“Still. We’re already relying on a lot of ifs, here.”
“Ifs, question?”
Ryland sighed, pressing his fingers to his temple. “Yeah. For example. Earth will be okay if one of the Beetles makes it back to Earth. If they intercept it. If the taumeboa survives the journey. If they don’t kill it when they get it. If they can breed enough to balance out Venus’ population of astrophage. If they can send it to Venus in time. Same goes for Erid, but the chances there are even more tenuous…”
“Word mean what, question?”
“Tenuous?” Ryland asked. Rocky tilted his carapace up and down in a nod. Another example of their pidgin-of-two.
“As in, um, unlikely to work out, I guess? Tenuous. Eridians have even more chances to fumble the Beetle. They’re not expecting a Beetle back like Earth is. They have to get my instructions out of the Beetle… which I sent without you, so it’s in simple Rocky Talky or its sister copy in complex English… if they can understand the simple instructions or decipher the English instructions with the small amount of translations we’ve figured out. They have to not destroy it in their lab. We have to hope that your memory of Threeworld’s atmospheric conditions was correct, or that they can breed a strain that works. You know? I don’t want to mess up Erid’s chances by taking unnecessary risks. It’s a lot easier for us to get taumoeba to Threeworld if we deliver it ourselves.”
Rocky thought about that for a second. Click, click, click. “But this submarine is human vessel, you think. I think, yes, statement, must be human. With human writing.”
Ryland nodded.
“What if Earth message? Necessary Earth message? About astrophage, and we miss? What if energy object in way was wormhole or some new method of transport, question?”
Okay. Yes. That was true. That was true. Why in the form of a submarine, Ryland wasn’t sure, but… Rocky was right. It could be a message. The fact that it had shown up with that huge flash, exactly along their path, was also notable.
Of course, he wanted to look inside the thing. If they didn’t look, he was sure that he would wake up in a cold sweat in his cozy bed the Eridians would hopefully make him, every night, and think, why was there a fucking submarine in space halfway to Eridani 40 from Tau Ceti.
Jeez louise. The fudgeing left him, in his fervour. Incredible stuff. “Okay. Okay, let’s do it.”
Rocky looked at him (which was another way of saying, shifting his limbs and torso in a specific configuration that let him hear Ryland better). He let out a determined trill. “Grace Rocky must try!”
… …___________-_____—_;;;....................
Isn’t that more likely?
If it happened, why can’t it happen again?
.--. .-.. .- -. - -- .- - - . .-. -... .-.. --- -.-. -.- ……. . . . .
It took Rocky around an hour to assemble the tunnel to the submarine. The ship. The ship-that-looked-like-a-submarine-but-couldn’t-possibly-be-a-submarine. As it turned out, the ship didn’t have an airlock. It had a port, at its top, just like a submarine, but it had been welded shut in a rudimentary, messy way. The realization had made Ryland’s stomach sink. Because when people welded shut giant metal containers and sent them out into space, it generally meant that what was inside was either immensely important or immensely dangerous, or both, like that Egyptian mummy tomb that supposedly cursed all the archeologists who opened it. Despite his surname, Ryland was clumsy at the best of times, and did not trust himself with important items. He also already had enough curses to overcome, thank you very much.
Out of an abundance of caution, and very much in the spirit of Stratt, he and Rocky were safely in the lab watching the progress of Rocky’s hull robot. It was adhered to the tunnel, and they could see its activity through several venues: a camera feed playing on one of Mary’s TVs, a CTTDD, and an Eridian microphone. The microphone was more useful for Rocky’s understanding of the three-dimensional space than the CTTDD; the CTTDD was there as a backup in case the atmosphere got too thin to transmit sound waves when they broke through the hull. The microphone transmitted the sound to speakers back on the Hail Mary in ways more layered and complex than the average human audio recorder. It was surround-sound, Rocky had explained, as he got Ryland to attach the speakers to different points on the outside of his ball.
These devices were positioned on the head of the robot. The robot was equipped with a belt that had, hanging from it, a barometer, a thermometer, a Geiger counter, and a Fourier transform infrared spectrophotometer. A second camera was pointing to their displays (the tunnel was well-lit). Ryland’s job was to monitor these as Rocky cut through the hull of the sub with one of his Eridian tools, a xenonite handsaw. The hull robot had been adhered to the tunnel, behind a doubly-reinforced xenonite panel.
The plan was as follows: the space where the robot was, between that xenonite wall and the sub’s hull, was filled with oxygen. That way, if there really was, somehow, due to some crazy, insane stroke of twisted luck, a human being inside, they would not be immediately killed. It was also a thin area, lesser than the volume of the sub, so if another alien was inside, the addition of oxygen to their atmosphere would hopefully just dilute in non-toxic amounts into the sub. If there was some kind of radiation or explosion that whoever had sealed the sub had created to be triggered as its hull was breached, then the xenonite part of the barrier would prevent it from impacting the Hail Mary, and they could just cut the tunnel off at the side with the xenonite and get the hell out of there, bidding Rocky’s robot a somber farewell.
Sheesh. Ryland was really starting to feel like Stratt. Except that Rocky’s hull robot didn’t have, you know, emotions, and feelings, or fear, or a class of middle school students relying on it. Did he mention fear?
Rocky was expertly piloting the robot, its little Eridian-like fingers cutting clean lines into the sub. Even with the texture display and the speakers, it took about ten minutes and a lot of new words from Rocky– undoubtedly swear words he had been cheekily refusing to translate for Ryland – until the panel popped away, falling into the sub, into the darkness within.
The spectrophotometer displayed: oxygen. Nitrogen. Sulphur, small amounts. The barometer displayed the pressure remaining fairly consistent. No huge spikes or drops. The thermometer climbed to an abnormally warm eighty degrees Fahrenheit. The Geiger counter didn’t spike; it just continued its little constant ticking that was always about ten percent faster when out of the Mary and only shielded by xenonite. Ryland narrated these observations aloud, breaking the tense silence.
For a second, nothing happened. Rocky and Ryland were frozen, listening and looking in strained concentration.
Then, Rocky made a noise of shock.
“What?” Ryland gasped. He didn’t see anything.
“Quiet.” Rocky snapped. Ryland tried not to breathe.
Rocky waited, his carapace pressed against the speaker. “Human heart sound.” he said, his tone betraying disbelief.
Ryland could have fainted. He stared in shock at the screen. Rocky made the hull robot hit the metal of the sub to create more sound. He shook in his ball. “One human floating in submarine. Human have three limbs. Missing upper limb.”
“Oh. Oh, God. Oh, God.” Ryland breathed. And then he sobbed. “Oh, God.”
Simon was dreaming of the ocean.
Not the blood ocean, no; he dreamt of the ocean from his mother’s stories, the one on Earth. Or the ones, plural. Some of her stories referenced seven seas. In all of the pictures he’d seen of Earth, though, it was mostly water, and all of it seemed connected. He didn’t know why they were blue, either, in the pictures. Water wasn’t blue. It was clear.
But this ocean was not clear. It was shiny and reflective, bouncing the color of a pale white foggy sky off of it. He was floating in it, and it was cool, a reprieve from the boiling blood he’d just been in. Cool and salty, floating. He looked towards the shore. Someone was walking down towards the waves. They looked familiar. One of their arms was missing.
Simon closed his eyes as the cool water washed over his head, and he faded away again.
It was a mad scramble after that. They pressurized the tunnel, flooding the whole thing with oxygen, and Rocky’s robot made quick work of disassembling the barrier (it was hard for Rocky to do much of anything himself in his ball in zero gravity; he had made a magnetic channel on the tunnel so that he could roll in a straight line, but it was hard to be handy when your hands were enclosed in a hamster ball). Then, heart pounding, Ryland, flashlight in hand, faced the hole. He was still in his EVA suit, because there could be pathogens within the ship. He awkwardly grabbed onto the sides of the hole to lower himself down to it and shine his flashlight inside, being extremely careful not to cut his EVA suit gloves with the metal’s edges.
He stared into the darkness. His eyes began to adjust. His helmet’s light illuminated: a leg.
There was, indeed, a person floating around in there.
He gasped. Rocky rolled closer behind him, bumping into his shoe. “Holy fudge,” Ryland breathed, “You were right. There’s– I see their leg. There’s a leg. Hello? Hey, can you hear me? Hello!”
Rocky trilled insistently from behind him.
The leg didn’t move.
“Hello?” he tried again. “你好? Uh, привет, hola, こんにちは?” Nothing. He turned to Rocky, instinctively, grasping for familiar support.
Rocky clambered to the edge of his ball in suspense, tapping to hear better. “Human unconscious, I hear. One eye covering missing, but one intact and closed. R.E.M. sleep, working eye moving behind lids. Go inside and get human, question? Good idea, you think, question?”
His. The human was male, according to Rocky. Or Rocky had just defaulted to the pronoun Ryland had used for him and used for himself. And, fudge, a missing eyelid? Ryland steeled himself. A missing arm and a missing eyelid. He really hoped he didn’t throw up in his suit. “Um. I… I guess so. Okay. Yeah! Yeah, I’m going in!”
They both floated in silence for a second. “Grace not moving,” Rocky pointed out helpfully.
He grit his teeth. “Give me a second, buddy. I’m grounding myself.”
“Grace Rocky in zero gravity, statement. Grace cannot ground self. Grace is stalling. Grace think bad idea? If bad idea, you stay here. Please, statement.”
Ryland let out a shaky breath. “No, Rock, it’s fine, I’m just. Okay. No, I’m going in. It’s fine. You stay back there.” He clipped a rope attached to his belt to a part of the hull robot’s torso, and did his best to squeeze through the hull without scraping his suit too much.
The submarine, he processed quickly, looked like… well, a submarine. Rudimentary controls. About as small as a trailer, or smaller. Pipes, valves, one single, covered porthole; a chair. A few screens, a map, a terminal.
And, in the center of the room, a man, floating.
Holy guacamole.
The man was undoubtedly human. The thought made Ryland want to fall to his feet and sob. And he was, Ryland was fairly certain, a man. He was Asian, long-haired, and dishevelled. He was missing his left arm, but it looked to be an old injury, the arm ending just below his shoulder. His worn clothes were soaked through with sweat. Most of his shirt and pants had been ripped off… or, burned off? No, melted?! It almost looked like that one time Ryland accidentally had acid drip onto and melt through his lab coat sleeve. Yikes. New Guy’s chest and legs were blistered and scarred. All of his visible skin was covered in scars, actually. It almost looked like a bunch of jellyfish with thick tentacles had entangled him. Or, like roots, like tree roots had burrowed into his flesh, been ripped out, and healed, alongside the remnants of boils. Ew.
And his face.
His face was messed-up.
Ryland didn’t want to be rude in his head, but just, like, objectively. The guy’s missing arm and scars didn’t make him feel queasy, because they weren’t new injuries, but this… this was something else. He didn’t know if he could describe it as a new injury or not; the whole left side of his face was blotchy and red, some of the upper skin missing. Around his left eye, there was a deep abscess into his tissue. It almost looked like a figure from an anatomy textbook, an artistic diagram showing the skin peeled away to reveal muscle… but it wasn’t muscle, either. It looked like the crimson flesh of something else was growing underneath the man’s and revealing itself in injury. It was also a bit chromatic, like the skin of a fish. His eyeball was completely bare, bloodshot, and staring, frozen, ahead; his iris was a sickly pink, his pupil covered in a cloudy blue sheen. And.
Just on the left side, where all the horror was, his skin was missing over his teeth, which were huge, and pointy—- oh, fuck, what the fuck. Ryland stared, frozen.
“Grace okay, question? You heart beating fast. Is new human okay, question? He is still sleeping." Rocky chirped anxiously from the tunnel. It came through on the radio in his helmet, too.
“Um. Yes. I… he has some weird-looking injuries. Mutations? He has some mutations, or… body modifications? On top of his missing limb and scars. God.” He shook his head. Maybe this was a part of some weird ritual? Maybe some doomsday religion had developed on Earth? Maybe the man was a sacrifice? Maybe they experimented on him, to the end of unlocking human potential, or something? Or– aliens! What if aliens had done this to him? Like some messed-up Star Trek episode? He felt sick.
Don’t throw up, Ryland. Don’t throw up, he thought, getting queasier by the second. Please. Not in the helmet.
“Rocky can hear that Grace is going to vomit soon. Grace should close eyes and take deep breaths, statement."
Okay, double ew. He didn’t like that Rocky could not only reliably sense that he was about to puke from hearing his gut activity, and also that he’d apparently barfed enough around Rocky for him to be right on the money. He shook himself. “I’m good, Rock.” He pushed himself closer to the man. Freaky-looking or not, he needed help. Jesus, he needed help. Ryland hesitantly reached out and brushed his shoulder.
Cheese and crackers! He was touching another human! One that wasn’t dead! A real human. He couldn’t feel temperature with the EVA suit gloves on, but his brain was still telling him that he could feel the warmth under his fingertips. Isolation from other humans was, apparently, actually getting to him.
He shook New Guy gently. “Hello. Hi? Wake up? Please? Don’t be afraid, we’re going to help you.”
The guy’s intact eyelid fluttered. The eye listlessly rolled in its socket. For a moment, his gaze settled on Ryland. The eye widened and then shuttered closed again, his body’s brief tension slackening again, drifting back into unconsciousness.
“Human woke for second!” Rocky chimed excitedly.
“Yeah, and then passed out again. He must be really out of it. I…” he glanced to the man’s right hand, where he noticed: a circular sample disc? Or a pendant, a glass pendant, attached to a leather cord wrapped around his wrist. It was cracked. Holy cow. Maybe he was a scientist, too.
Then, the man’s eye flew open again, and he gasped. Ryland was startled, sending himself rotating ungracefully backwards, letting go of New Guy’s shoulders. His normal-looking eye, dark and wild, found Ryland, and he let out a haunted shout, registering the zero-gravity and flailing much like Rocky had done when he awoke. Desperately, he kicked the ground, flying backwards and pressing himself against the wall of the sub. He then seemed to notice his missing arm and whimpered, full of horror and pain and confusion.
Ryland was reminded, very faintly, of a kid he had in his class once, Danny, who had severe autism and CPTSD from abuse. He would sometimes freak out and forget who he was, where he was, brought on by a certain sound. Ryland tried the same tactic as he did with Danny; hunching unthreateningly and talking quietly.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay. It’s okay. You’re okay, we’re going to help you. Don’t be afraid. I’m Grace. You’re okay. We’re here to help you.”
“Yes,” Rocky chimed in from the tunnel, “Help.” His voice was high with the tension of the situation. “We will help you!” Ryland wished he’d had the presence of mind to take the dictation translator with him; the poor guy wouldn’t understand that the weird music echoing into the sub was a promise of help.
Help. Because– because if you were in a submarine dead in space, sealed in – fuck, welded in, what kind of psychopath had put this guy in here? - with no oxygen tanks and a disability, you were probably in trouble, right?
Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. What if he had a new kind of disease, that caused his deformities, and that’s why he was put in the sub? As quarantine? Oh, fuck. Ryland was very glad he was wearing his EVA suit.
The man stared at Ryland, chest still heaving. He looked around the submarine. He looked at the hole, leading to the tunnel. He looked at his arm stub again. Then, his fist went up to his damaged eye. He gently prodded at it, in panic. Almost like… like his deformities were news to him. Cripes.
“Yeah, um, your eye is… um… something is wrong with it.” Ryland said, stomach churning. “Sorry.”
The man halfway-faded, slumping a little; he fought it. He grasped wildly for a pipe on the edge of the sub’s wall. “What.” he croaked. English! Ryland could have cried. His voice was gravelly and deep, and it came out all strange through the ruined lips on his left side “What. Where. The blood. Where is the, the, blood. Why is the tree gone, not in me.” His single good eye was huge. “The blood. It came in the ship. It was burning. It burned me. I. I died.” he shook his head. “I died.”
Blood. Burning blood? What?
“And why the hell am I— floating?!” he sputtered, “What the fucking fuck! Fuck, fuck!!” he was shaking, flailing. After a retch and a choked sob, he hugged the pipe tighter. Squeezing his eyes shut, he said: “Are you. Are you… do you know Ava? David? Whaaaat– Whatshipareyoufrom?” it all ran together. His speech was choppy, slurred, lispy from his missing lip. He sounded drunk. Maybe he had a concussion… or the ship was low on oxygen?
“I don’t know those people. My ship is the Hail Mary. That’s where we came from, through a tunnel we made to your ship. We saw your ship, and we were confused, and we wanted to know what was inside, so we came in.”
His eye went wide again. “You saw my ship?”
“Yes?”
He looked sick. “You– you don’t– God, they didn’t tell you either– God, fuck! The cameras they gave us, they have, they’re X-ray cameras. You just– shot me with radiation.” he took a deep shuddering breath. “Not that it matters. They’re not gonna get us out of here. They’re gonna leave us down here. Fuck, I can't see outta my left eye, fuck.”
Ryland blinked in confusion. His stomach was really starting to hurt from anxiety.
“Radiation? What is he talking about?” Rocky hissed from the tunnel.
Ryland shrugged helplessly. “We didn’t use an X-ray camera to look at you. We used a regular camera.”
The man laughed bitterly. “No. No, it turns out that the only fucking cameras that work in this goddamn hellhole are X-rays. They’re the only thing that can see through the blood.”
“Blood?” Ryland echoed weakly. “What do you mean when you say, um, blood?”
He stumbled to his feet as best he could in the zero-gravity. “The ocean of blood we’re in, fuck! Oh, God, whyamIfloating.”
Ocean of blood. Oh, dear. The only human that Ryland would probably ever see again, and he was bonkers. “You’re floating because we’re in space. We’re not in an, um, ocean of blood.”
The guy’s eye went huge. “What?!” He retched again. “There’s no– I felt myself die, I– you’re lying, you, oh fuck me, what the hell is going– oh, fuck, that hurts, fuck it, fuck this, fuck, fuckfuck.” And with that lovely sentence, he spun himself around roughly with leverage from the pipe, maneuvering himself in rage to slam his foot into a button on the wall so hard that the contact shook the whole sub with a creak that made Ryland anxious for the glue of the tunnel to the Mary.
A whirr sounded. Ryland heard the Gieger counter back on the hull robot spiking insistently. The screen over the console displayed: Stars. A whole smattering of stars, and distant hot galaxies, in white pinpricks. The man stared. The Gieger counter calmed down. He was frozen.
“What the fuck.”
“Yeah, man. I told you. We’re in space. That’s an X-ray camera?” Ryland asked.
The man didn’t respond. He just kept staring.
“Huh. Okay. You probably shouldn’t do that anymore. I mean, even if it’s pointing away from us, it’s clearly gonna be irradiating us a little bit every time. Rocky, how high was that dose? Was that bad?”
“Not enough for bad, bad, bad, but scary! Do not let New Human do that again!” Rocky screeched from the tunnel.
New Guy – or, as Rocky had called him, New Human – still wasn’t responding. Oh, his head was drooping, his whole body slumping down. Slowly, the guy faded out of consciousness once more.
Ryland waited cautiously, in case he stirred again. New Human kept floating, unconscious, slowly drifting off his grip of the pipe.
“Rocky, do you think we can make this guy an isolation chamber?”
Eye movement detected, a feminine voice said.
Simon was no longer floating. It was bright. He struggled.
What is two plus two? The voice asked.
“Urghph,” Simon grunted, groggy.
Incorrect. What is two plus two?
Something was moving over him. Just like when he was in the ocean earlier, it was bright, away from darkness. He couldn’t see out of his left eye.
“Ffffour,” Simon responded, as his eye adjusted. There was no more blood. All the blood was gone, the stench of iron completely gone. He really was cool. How was it so cool? He was breathing good oxygen. The last thing he remembered was… blood. Drowning in blood, hearing the SM-13’s walls cave in around him, the pain of being crushed; then, a light, and then floating in the ocean… and then… something else.
Correct, the voice said. Dr. Grace, New Human is awake. Dr. Grace, New Human is awake. Dr. Grace… and so on, ad nauseum.
New human? Simon, through his right eye, suddenly registered that the thing moving over him was a robot. He thrashed again. “Fuck! What the fuck?!” He gasped. He looked down and shouted in alarm. His left arm was missing. His whole body ached.
Head movement detected. Remain still to avoid disrupting your IV. The robot said calmly.
Oh, yeah. His fucking arm was missing because he tore it off. But it was… it was… not bleeding, not anymore. It, and his right arm, and his entire chest, were covered in the scars of the Last Tree. What? How had the roots gotten out of him? Unsettlingly, his right arm had a needle stuck in it that was pumping something into him. In a panicked movement, he brought the crook of his elbow up to his mouth and pulled it out with his teeth.
New Human, your IV has become dislodged. Please remain still so I can re-administer it, the robot crooned. What the fuck was an IV? The needle?
“Fuck, no!” Simon coughed. “Get away!” His throat was raw. His words came out strange, unformed. Something was really wrong with his face. His whole body felt weird. Weird, like… like…
The needle was floating. Simon gasped.
He was in zero gravity. He was in space, on a spaceship. Or a station without artificial gravity. Somehow, Simon was in space. Someone had found him, and brought him to space. He wasn’t on the blood moon anymore— oh, shit.
Suddenly, it came back to him, in blurry impressions: A man, a glowing halo around his face. Floating in the SM-13. Strange, beautiful music. The stars in the X-ray camera. Don’t be afraid, he’d said.
Please hold still, New Human, the robot said again, reaching for the needle. Simon grabbed it before the robot could and ripped it off the tube, brandishing it like a weapon. The liquid blobbed out into the air.
Someone barreled into the room, down a hatch in the ceiling, almost slamming to the ground in their zero-gravity path, grabbing on to a ladder rung at the last second.
A man. The man he’d seen in the SM-13, Grace. He was in a red jumpsuit halfway unzipped and tied at his waist, with some blisteringly clean white shirt with symbols on it underneath. He was looking at Simon from behind a clear wall. The whole room around his bed was lined in the glass. It was weird glass. Wavery, almost organic-looking, held in pentagonal metal frames.
Simon cowered.
“Hi! Hi, I’m sorry about Arma- uh, the robot. Armando, sleep mode, please.”
The robot above him whirred and folded up.
Simon’s hand grew slippery around the needle. So, this guy was… C.O.I.? But the room was so clean. Maybe this is what all C.O.I. stations looked like when you weren’t in prison? Who the fuck had the resources to produce a kind of room like this? And why the fuck weren’t they sharing it? Filament station didn’t even have a prison sector, and it had been just as shabby as Bandwith Station Jail.
Simon kept his mouth shut, eyes trained on the man. He looked a little older than Simon, his eyes just a touch crinkly around the edges, deep worry lines in his forehead as he raised his eyebrows in trepidation. His hair was greasy, blond, and sticking straight up. And, a shock: he was wearing eyeglasses. Simon only knew one Brother who wore eyeglasses, and they were passed down over generations, so it was a surprise to see that they were haphazardly balanced under his chin, clinging on to the corner of one ear for dear life.
“Hi again. Nice to meet you when you’re not trapped in some weird submarine.” He said, kicking off the ladder to bump against the glass. “Sorry about the xen- uh, this enclosure. It’s an isolation chamber. We’re working out whether or not you have any pathogens before we take it down, which maybe you could help me figure out?”
Simon’s grogginess was clearing up, just a touch. Okay. What kind of fucking game was this? He looked down at his bare chest. How was he not in more pain? His wounds were ugly, but healed. How had he survived long enough to heal that much? His body ached, and he was still nauseous, and his head was pounding, but he wasn’t bleeding out in that submarine anymore. He wasn’t crushed in the jaws of that monster or subsumed by the roots of the Last Tree, choking on blood. Where the hell was he? His heart was beating impossibly fast.
He studied the man silently. The room was humming with distant movement, machinery. It smelled clean, just a touch like space. He was seeing only through his right eye. His left-side vision was gone. He grimly quashed the horrible feeling of loss and grief that surged through him at that fact. It was only typical. Only typical.
“What’s my name?” he tested.
Grace’s face fell. “You don’t remember?”
Simon kept his jaw shut tight, waiting to see what he did with that.
Grace grimaced. “Ah. I guess memory loss does make sense. According to Armando, you have a concussion, radiation poisoning, and carbon dioxide poisoning… and Rocky told me that your ribs had broken in multiple places, recently healed, and… well, I mean, whatever happened to you in there… Jiminy Crickets, you probably feel terrible.”
…Jiminy Crickets? What? “Uh-huh,” Simon said through gritted teeth. “Where the hell am I?”
“You’re on board the Hail Mary. My ship. We’re about a year away from Eridani-40, and about three years out from Tau Ceti.”
“...What? I don’t… what are those stations? They’re not C.O.I.”
Grace faltered, paused. He shook his head. “Those aren’t stations. Do you mean space stations? Anyway, Tau Ceti and Eridani-40 are stars.”
Simon barked out a laugh. “Right. Right, okay. You think I’m stupid?” he tried to get up, but a wave of dizziness washed over him and he went still, breathing heavily, trying not to nod off again.
“No,” Grace squeaked. “I know it sounds like a big distance, but we’re using this thing called astrophage as fuel, which means we can go ninety-seven percent the speed of light, and-”
Simon cut him off. “All of the fucking stars are fucking gone,” he heaved out. He gagged again. Fuck, he felt so nauseous. What the fuck! “You can’t travel between them.” A fuel source that could make you travel so fast… maybe Grace and whoever he was working for had found something in the blood ocean? Maybe astrophage was something powered by the Light? Was he …a pirate? Was he… he must have been apart from the C.O.I. Some new organization that Simon had never heard of. Hidden. Hoarding. Simon hated him and this clean room. Were him and his people just living in luxury like this, while everyone else starved and killed each other?
Grace stilled. “Your star is gone? My star isn’t gone. But we should have the same star. Yours got dimmed? I– you’re human. You are human, right?”
“What?” Holy shit, this guy was insane. “Yes, I’m human.”
Grace cleared his throat. “I mean. There are definitely… stars. You saw them. The stars. When you took the picture. Unless you don’t remember that.”
“Okay. You don’t think I’m stupid. You’re stupid. That was ghostlight. Because the stars are so fucking far away, their light is still here. It was X-ray ghostlight, or… fuck, I don’t know how that shit works– are X-rays– you know what, it doesn’t matter. The actual stars are gone. Hello? Ever heard of the Quiet Rapture?”
Grace opened his mouth and then closed it, seemingly at a loss for words. Then, he said, “X-rays travel the same speed as visible light. It’s electromagnetic radiation, too. And, no. I’ve never heard of the Quiet Rapture.”
Then: music. The same beautiful, slightly dissonant music he’d heard in the sub. It was coming from the ceiling. Simon looked up. There was a parallel hatch in the ceiling to the one that Grace had travelled down, which Simon hadn’t noticed before. It was hard to notice through the glass, because it met a tunnel made of the same glass as the chamber they’d put Simon in, and the waveriness of the panels obscured each other.
“Uh oh,” Grace said.
He’d told Rocky to see if he could come in in five minutes. He needed to break the whole alien thing to New Human without freaking him out, and he’d severely underestimated the amount of time he’d need for that.
“Okay, Rocky, wait just a second!” Ryland called. He turned back to the guy. “My friend Rocky… he’s going to come in here. He also wants to ask you questions. But I have to warn you, he’s, uh, not human.”
New Human’s remaining eye went wide. “What?!”
Rocky chirped back. “Uh-oh, why uh-oh, question? You said wait five minutes! Too soon, question?”
New Human stared at the unopened hatch in shock. “That’s an alien?”
“Yeah,” Ryland said nervously.
“Fuck that.” the guy said. He squeezed his eye shut.
“He’s a nice alien, though! And he’s cute! He’s not scary at all, I promise. He looks like a bunch of rocks. Which is why I call him Rocky. He’s my best friend.”
“Why, thank you,” Rocky said amusedly. “You cute too."
“Gee, thanks.”
“Are you talking to it?”
“Yes. Oh! Yes! You’ll need a translator. I don’t remember where I put that thing…”
A clamouring, skittering sound echoed through the room as Rocky ambulated down the tunnel and into the room. The man stiffened. Rocky waved. “Hello, new Human!” Shit. Ryland really needed to find his translator.
“It’s like a spider,” the guy blurted. “A talking spider.” He put his head in his hand, like he was hiding from the world. “This can’t be real. This can’t be fucking real.”
Ryland exchanged a nervous glance with Rocky (well, he looked at Rocky, and Rocky didn’t move at all or indicate that he was looking at Ryland, but somehow, Ryland knew that he was in Nervous-Glance-Sharing-Posture). Ryland stepped up to the glass. “I don’t know what happened to you on that submarine, or how you got there, or… anything. But I do know that… we’re the only two humans around. Me and Rocky are on a really important mission, and it can’t go wrong. We can help you, but we… I just need you to trust me, okay?”
New Human’s eye snapped to Grace. He suddenly became another man. Horrified. Shaking. Mad. He was frozen in something sick. “That’s what Ava told me, when she wasn’t Ava. ‘Trust me,’ but it couldn’t have been her. My radio was broken. Oh, God, this isn’t real. I’m so fucking stupid, I can’t believe I thought I was out of there, fuck.”
Ryland blinked. “Huh?”
The man laughed bitterly. “You think I’m falling for this? You think you can trick me? That I’m here now, with the stars?” He glanced at Rocky. “Are you both a mirage? Are you the guy, or the – fucking – spider? Or both? Well fuck you. Fuck you. I may be dying, or, or turning into one of those things,” he took a shuffling breath, pointing to the wall, or maybe just trying to gesture to the outside, “out there, but I will not let you fool me. I won’t live in this fucking soul prison as your sheep. I won’t lure others into your fucking light!”
Okay, thought Ryland, so he is crazy. Awesome. “Hey, buddy…”
Rocky tapped at the tunnel wall nervously. “Human crazy, question?”
Ryland nodded. “Yessss. Yes, Rocky, I think so. I think our new friend is confused. Hey, man, who exactly do you think I am?”
The guy stood up abruptly from his bed– and then promptly passed out again, collapsing into the air.
Ryland sighed. “...Armando, on.”
Simon awoke to the sound of Grace’s voice and the musical overlay of the alien having a rapid-fire conversation.
He was in pain, now. A lot more pain than before. He didn’t know if it was adrenaline protecting him before, but now, his entire body hurt. It itched and burned, the scars flaring like hot brands. The worst thing, though, wasn’t the scars, or his ribs, or the nausea, or the headache. No, actually. No. It was his missing arm, a horrific dull pain that seemed to be coming from where the absent limb was.
He lay there in shock, slowly adjusting to the fact that, no, he did not imagine that, and no, he still wasn’t dead, and that, yes, he was still trapped in Grace’s ship.
No.
That thing trapped him. The monster. Or, the ocean. The SM-13 itself. The Eye. He didn’t know. He didn’t know. Everything was against him. He could hope that this enemy was mundane; that this was some C.O.I. psychological experiment on an Eden cult escapee. But, more likely, it was that thing. The madness. The ultimate hunger. The light. Because he’d died. He’d died. There wasn’t even blood stained on his ripped clothing in this strange vision. The submarine had been intact, even though the Monster had bitten it. It was all a hallucination, a simulation.
Grace was saying: “I’m telling you, it’s time travel.” Then, a flurry of notes from the alien, shot back. “Well, maybe we were wrong about that! Maybe you can travel back in time!” Notes. “Okay, well, do you have any better ideas?” Notes. “I’m just saying, it makes perfect sense. He’s from the future, a future where all the stars have been eaten, a future where we failed. He was in some ocean… and maybe blood is slang for something, maybe some kind of liquid on whatever planet he was on… then… oh, he’s awake! Armando, sleep mode!”
Simon shrunk away from Grace as he peered over him. Over him? The glass was gone. Grace was still the same; a man with kind, crinkly blue eyes, a messed-up haircut, and a complexion and a hollowing out to his cheekbones that made it clear that he was not eating very well. The needle was still in his arm. “Hi. Good news! I’ve been up in the lab, working with your blood samples, and you don’t seem to be contagious of what you were infected by, so I took the isolation chamber down. Your condition seems stable, too.”
Simon shot bolt upright, flinging his body against the back of the wall. Pain shot through him at the movement.
Grace flinched away, stepping backwards. Oh, stepping on the floor. They’d fixed the gravity on the ship. Were they travelling? Was it a centrifuge?
What the hell was he thinking? None of this was real.
“This thing you’re showing me isn’t gonna work.” Simon spat. “I know you’re gonna bait me. You’re gonna taunt me and then take it all away, show me I’m one of those fucking fish. Or is it the Tree? Why’d the blood make it grow? Am I that?”
Grace stared, eyes gone wide. “What?!”
A musical chime from the alien. Grace narrowed his eyes at it. “If you keep saying stuff like that I’m not turning your translator on for him to hear.” He turned back to Simon and nervously scratched the back of his head. His glasses were still really stupidly hanging off his ear. “Again… who do you think I am? We are?”
“I’m not entertaining you.” He felt an aching pain every time he spoke. The lack of lips was starting to feel really gross, his mouth really dry. His missing eye ached. Everything hurt. He just wanted to sleep. The alien was still in the tunnel along the wall, fiddling with something made out of metal. Grace had been scribbling on a whiteboard. He caught some of the words:
SUBMARINE? THIRTEEN OF THEM??
DEFINITELY HUMAN
FROM FUTURE? < ROCKY SAYS STUPID
WHAT IS “BLOOD?????”
DAVID AND AVA, CREW MEMBERS?
XENONITE PROTHESTIC < ROCKY SAYS EASY TO MAKE
TRAPPED - WHY? SCIENTIST? PRISONER? BECAUSE HE’S INSANE?
LOOK UP PSYCHOTHERAPY TECHNIQUES???
CHECK OUT DOWNLOADED STUFF FROM SUB
TYPE OF PLANT MATTER
-MAPLE
The alien made a noise. Ryland nodded. “So. If you’re not going to tell me who you think we are, then I’ll just tell you who I am. I’m Dr. Ryland Grace. I’m a molecular biologist. I’m from California. When Earth’s sun started dying, I was chosen to go on a mission to the solar system Tau Ceti. I-”
Simon snorted. “Yeah, okay. You left Earth. Right."
"I did. Seven years ago. Or- seven years for me, about twenty years for everyone else given time dilation. What's funny about that? You don't believe me about the astrophage thing, or what?"
Simon rolled his eyes "Earth is gone. It’s been gone. For twenty-five years. Your math is off if you wanted me to think you were on Earth after then.”
Grace’s face washed with horror. “What? No. No, it– it can’t be.”
Simon watched his oddly realistic expression. It was strange, how well the Monster seemed to be able to physically emulate a human being Simon had never met. Maybe Grace’s appearance had been modelled after one of the members of the SM-8 crew. “It’s been gone since 357. But you know that already. It's probably gone because of you, you fish-fuck.”
Grace, stock-still, chest curled up with horror, shook his head minutely. “Three-hundred and fifty-seven?”
Simon chuckled darkly. “Oh, what? Do alien mindfucks use the Interstellar Martial Calendar? Fine, you piece of shit. Then it happened in 189. Ringing a bell now?”
Grace’s eyes went wide, and he grinned and turned to Rocky as if to say, I told you so. “It’s 2040.”
“In EIC?”
“No. No, AD. As in, after death. Of Jesus. Or, I guess some people call it CE or Common Era.”
Simon just shook his head. Jesus. Of the heretic’s religion. After the death of Jesus? When did Jesus die? He was ancient, wasn’t he? He was pretty sure 2040 would be in the past. Way in the past, but he wasn’t sure if the exact conversion in his head. Because… the EIC calendar started in… what, the 1990s AD? Or was it the 1890s? So… fuck, he couldn’t do math with his head like this.
Grace was fidgeting like a little kid, suddenly energized. Rocky was, too, rapt with attention but all the same still working on some metallic device with its odd three-fingered hands. “What year are you from?”
Simon frowned. This was the Monster talking. Why was he talking back? This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t…
But couldn’t it, Simon?
He grit his teeth. He didn’t want to to play along. He was tired of it toying with him, showing him things that weren’t real.
But… what if that – his death – had been the hallucination? What if the alcohol and lack of oxygen had caused him to imagine the Monster? What if Grace and the alien were real? What if he’d travelled backwards in time, somehow, to when Earth still existed? Was it really so impossible?
…But he’d died. He couldn’t get past that. He’d been torn apart. Time travel or not, he’d died.
Was that a hallucination, too?
Playing could tell him about the Monster, or whatever this was, the Eye. About possible ways to end his misery. So, why not play along? Why not get further into the mirage? See what it was all about?
“In my calendar, it’s 381. Uh, in the EIC. In your old calendar, I don’t know the conversion. I don’t know.” It hurt to speak. He winced.
A musical flurry. Grace shifted nervously. “Yeah, Rocky, I see it too. You’re in pain. Do you want painkillers?”
“Painkillers?”
“You don’t know what painkillers are?” Grace squeaked.
Simon shook his head.
Grace wiped the nervous perspiration from his brow. His glasses were now on the brink of disaster, slipping further and further off his ear. Simon wanted to push them onto his face. “Painkillers are drugs that make you not feel pain.”
“Okay.” Simon said quickly. “Yeah. Okay.”
Grace nodded. He prepared a syringe. “You might get sleepy afterwards.”
Simon didn’t say anything.
“I’m going to put it in now.”
Simon nodded. A pinch, and then, a rush of numbness along his arm.
“Do you want water?”
Simon nodded. Holy shit. The Monster was being so nice. Was this mercy, before death? He felt like crying. He knew it would end soon.
“Computer, water,” he said. The white-limbed robot produced a clear plastic sac of water. Grace gingerly handed it over.
Simon took it and ripped the top off with his teeth. He drank the whole thing as fast as he could, trying his best not to let any of the water spill out from where his lips were missing.
He was crying then. The bed was so comfortable, and his head felt loopy. Grace was wavering. No, his vision was. He knew God wouldn’t forgive him, and he was too weak to fight it, to come back to reality on his own terms. He would take whatever nice thing the Monster gave him. He would hide in it.
He closed his eye and dreamt of Martian sunsets and talking spiders singing at him from within the regolith.
The man was asleep.
Ryland and Rocky were huddled together in the lab. Before they’d turned on the centrifuge to examine the guy’s blood, Ryland had gone inside the man’s submarine again and looked for information (because they had to detach the submarine from the Hail Mary before starting the centrifuge, and would therefore lose the tunnel). They found a terminal, in which certain entries gave certain outputs. From these files, the man seemed to be from the future (!) and from an alternate timeline (!) as far as they could understand from the dates, history, and a human colony on Mars in 1992.
“Might really be time travel.” Rocky sang quietly.
Ryland grinned cheekily. “What was that? I don’t think I heard you…”
“Grace taking the piss. You were right. Shut up,” Rocky tittered. Taking the piss. One of Rocky’s favorite human phrases, which meant absolutely nothing like it did in Rocky Talky. In Rocky Talky, Rocky had decided, taking the piss was the closest to making me gurgle the stomach. A very obscene concept for Rocky’s people.
“You sure that… things can really work like… alternate universe? Different from us? Or wrong information about past space stations on Earth in submarine database, question? In that case, New Human from our future. Meaning in our future astrophage eat all stars.”
Ryland sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know, Rocky. But… the terminal’s logs implied that the planets and the stars disappeared. Not that they dwindled out. That they actually disappeared. Like, mass, vanished. I think that’s probably a different thing from astrophage infection, right? That's something else.”
“Like what, question? Should be impossible.”
Ryland shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe there are stars, and they’re just lying to this guy. He doesn’t even know what painkillers are.”
“Yes, could be big lie. He is prisoner. Maybe they tell him this to keep him scared. Maybe all this information is faked. Some religion false tales.”
That was another thing. This man was a prisoner. He was being “realized,” meaning: he had been sent to a blood ocean – which couldn’t mean actual blood, right? – to find resources on a rouge moon. No wonder he yelled at Ryland. That sounded terrifying. Plus, he was a convict. Ryland was well aware of the flaws that prison systems could produce, and this future was so horrific-sounding that it no doubt produced some pretty messed-up structural issues, and therefore, messed-up prisoners.
“If real, this future bad bad bad. I do not like. I hope New Human all right. Bad bad bad injury.” Rocky was extremely worried about the man. At first, he had not wanted to leave his side while he slept, insisting on watching him; however, Ryland had eventually convinced him to settle for watching through a microphone, worried that if the guy woke up and saw Rocky first thing, he would freak out. Now, like a nervous mother with a baby monitor, Rocky kept pressing against where the speakers were set up in his ball to focus on New Human sleeping, zoning Ryland out.
“Yeah,” Ryland said softly. “Maybe if you make him that prosthetic he’ll warm up to us.”
“Not think so. Not yet. Crazy, scared. Crazy take more time.”
Ryland shrugged. “Maybe he’s not crazy. Maybe he was just hallucinating. His oxygen supply had completely run out. Maybe he was carbon-dioxide-poisoned. Maybe he thinks the things he saw are still true, that they still happened. Maybe they did.”
“Maybe,” Rocky said, in tones of voice that indicated he was not convinced.
“Also, one of the entries… made by somebody sneaking an entry into the database, probably another convict… makes reference of planetary life on the blood-ocean moons. Do you think that means there were other aliens in the oceans?”
Rocky twirled his carapace thoughtfully. “Or other human also crazy.”
Grace sighed. “Yeah.”
“What next, question?”
“Okay, that was all the terminal files…” he clicked out of the file. He had downloaded all the data off the submarine terminal and photo banks into his computer. As it turned out, in the year 2370, they still used USB ports, and Ryland wasn’t going to unnecessarily spend his time in space in a creepy alternate-dimension submarine.
He opened the first photo. “The photos he took.”
“With radiation,” Rocky grumbled, “That human shot us with.”
“Only a little, Rock, we’ll be fine.” he soothed. The first image was the one New Human had taken of the stars. He clicked backwards to the next most recent photo.
And then he jumped, his stomach torpedoing.
It was an eye.
A huge, wet-looking eye.
“Woah.” he whispered. He felt a little sick, looking at it. It was just… creepy.
“What is, question?” Rocky asked. He was looking through his texture display, but the shape must have been to abstract, too iterative; a low-dimensional representation of a grainy picture.
“It’s an eye. An eye.”
Rocky shuddered. “Alien eye in blood ocean?”
“I guess. Holy shit. No wonder this guy went crazy. That’s so scary.”
He clicked to the next image.
Oh. God.
Simon woke up crying.
He wasn’t in pain anymore. That was good. He did, however, feel extremely loopy.
He sat up further. The damn needle was back in his arm. He hesitated to pull it out. He carefully scanned his surroundings.
Head movement detected. Remain still to avoid disrupting your IV.
Simon glared up at the robot. “Armando, sleep mode.” he tried.
The robot folded up above him. Ha.
Oh, shit. The alien was watching him in its tunnel. It stood up, noticing him waking – how, Simon didn’t know, because it didn’t have eyes – and clambered closer along the tunnel.
“New Human, hello! New friend. Grace found translator. Now you can hear me. Hello!” It shook its odd body back and forth. Rocky. An apt name. It really did look like it was made of rock; it was dark brown, and speckled with a rough texture, different carvings set into its rough skin. It was wearing a dark green… shirt? Around its pentagonal body, it had a belt full of tools. Five legs, three fingers on each.
Simon winced wearily as it clambered closer.
“My species watch others sleep in our culture. To keep safe. I know humans not do this. Sorry if uncomfortable. New Human feel bad still, question?”
He didn’t respond. He stared at the thing, half expecting it to morph into the monster’s face.
It did not. It twittered thoughtfully, “Okay if New Human not want to talk. Been through much. Understand. Grace Rocky go through submarine files. If you files correct, Grace Rocky figure out that New Human is from three-hundred-and-nine years future. Also probably other timeline, other dimension.”
Simon was no longer feeling like rolling over and accepting whatever mind-bending thing the Monster was trying to do to him. “Weird angle. This is a weird angle. It’s not gonna work.” He dipped his head down. He was so tired. Why couldn’t he just live? Or die, one of the two. Not whatever this was.
“Angle meaning two lines that meet at point, question? What New Human mean, question?”
Simon laughed weakly, his forehead pressing against his knees, his torn pants. “Because I’m still in that ocean. I’ve been smashed to a pulp by you. I’m in my head right now, while I turn into you.” he raised his head. Rocky was still watching him curiously.
Fuck this. Fuck this. Simon pulled out the needle with his teeth again. Rocky let out an apparently untranslatable string of beeps, and then, “That gives New Human nutrients that help!”
“Don’t care,” he grunted, hauling himself out of the bed. He swayed on his feet. He had the distinct impression that he should be in immense pain. He couldn’t feel it. He stumbled and leaned heavily against the wall. There were two other beds in the room, pushed into the wall in pods. “Where’s the fuckin’ doctor?”
Rocky perked up. “Oh! Yes yes yes, Grace waiting outside, up in lab. Grace told me to tell you that you can sponge-bath and wear new clothes. Just ask computer for sponge-bath, bathroom. Clothes there.” He pointed to a pile of neatly folded clothes on the floor. “After sponge-bath we bring New Human food and show ship!”
Simon registered, then, that he really fucking had to pee. His clothes were also barely-there tatters. His harness was hanging on, but everything else– scraps. He looked up at the alien, standing still as a… rock.
“So, what? You’re just gonna watch me take a bath?”
Rocky shrunk a little. “Apology. Forgot. Grace not care so much about Rocky in room anymore when change. I not have eyes. My species use echolocation. Sound waves travel through walls. I see Grace and New Human even if I leave room. Right now Grace in lab looking over your medical report more. Is talking to himself. Is saying makes no sense, makes no sense. Now he itching his nose. Now he sneeze. What I say mean that no difference if Rocky leave room.”
Simon closed his eyes. Okay. Great. Perfect. Whatever. It’s not like he got much more privacy in Bandwith Jail. “The difference is that I won’t be able to see you lurking like a little freak in the corner while I get naked.”
The alien took the hint and scurried up its tunnel.
He was horrific.
After he’d undressed and pissed, he’d asked for the sponge-bath, and it, like the toilet, had whisked out from beyond the wall a little zone with a sink, stocked with soap and sponges. The sponge bath wasn’t too different to how it was on Eden, which made him uneasy.
There was also a mirror in the zone.
Simon flinched when he saw his face. His body scars were already disgusting to look at, the twisting, angry things covering every plane of his skin, but this– this was–
He looked like it.
He looked like that monster, that alien fish fuck that was in his head, in the grainy X-rays, morphed, ten degrees from human, twisted and sick. His dud eye was pink-irised, missing a lid. His skin was deteriorated away, showing red beneath, just a thin layer of unfamiliar tissue between it and his skull. Long, pointed teeth, just like the monster’s, protruded from his jaw on the left. The skin was missing on his lips.
He was turning into it. He would be like the crew of the SM–8, soon.
He stared. He shook. He turned away, bracing himself on the counter. Pray you stay dead, it had told him. And he’d resisted. He’d wanted to live. To try to save everyone. He’d listened to Ava– was it even Ava – when she’d said, this is bigger than us.
He knew. It was inevitable.
The torment would soon begin.