Chapter Text
Isolation was something Ryland Grace has long believed he was accustomed to. He was used to that feeling he got when kids would turn away from him and ask to be partnered up “with anyone else”, and later on, that same feeling when he was shunned and ostracized for his paper. An Analysis of Water Based Assumptions and Recalibrations of Expectations for Evolutionary Models. He never really understood why people reacted so strongly to his idea. Shouldn’t science and discovery be all about pushing the boundaries of what they knew?
Apparently not.
Apparently curiosity was only praiseworthy right up until it became uncomfortable and started to tread on scientists’ fragile pride.
He’d had Linda and his students, until he couldn’t give her what she needed. Then he just had his kids. And he’d thought they should have been enough for him to stay. That they were enough for him to stay. But not to Stratt. Not to Stratt, not to Carl, not to anyone, and especially not to the fate of the entire Earth. Now, he was 11.9 light years away from Earth, and he was alone.
Though, alone probably wasn’t the right word. Nor was isolation, for that matter. Nothing would compare to the deep-seated dread he’d felt when he woke up from his coma, completely and utterly alone, farther from home than he ever could have imagined going. After all, Rocky was here, and Grace loved Rocky. He was his best friend in the whole universe, and Grace didn’t think anyone else would ever understand him the way Rocky did. But it was a long way to Erid, and he missed human touch. He would never regret going back to save Rocky. There was absolutely no way he could have ever forgiven himself if he went back to Earth and left Rocky to die, alone and afraid. Grace loved Rocky, and Rocky loved him. But he knew that the version of himself that Rocky loved was a lie. He was a coward, through and through. And he knew, above all else, that he was terrified about what the future held. Because he already missed human touch. It wasn’t enough to hug Rocky’s xenonite ball close to his chest, though he’d let Rocky believe it.
Four long years to Erid, and then years upon years after that as the only human for light years.
Grace slowly shifts in bed, trying to muster up the energy to face a long day of rationing his leftover ramen and burritos and attempting to find a way to survive after they are gone. There’s also the coma slurry, but he doesn’t want to think about that. A tapping noise from nearby jolts him out of his thoughts.
“Grace awake now question?” Grace lets out a long sigh, followed by a vague mumble as he rolls over onto his stomach.
“No no no no sleep for Grace. Grace eat now statement. Grace eat now and then Grace Rocky start make food for Grace so that Grace no die. Grace. Grace. Grace. Grace. Grace—” Grace rolls back over with a huff.
“You’re so needy.”
“Rocky not needy. Grace sleep too long. Need eat. Grace always need eat. Human body so—”
“—Inefficient, we sleep too long, we eat too much. I know Rocky.” Grace looks over at him, sitting in his xenonite tube, and softens. His limbs are all tensed up, and even though he doesn’t have a face, Grace can tell he’s nervous. “I’m okay, Rocks. Just a bit tired.” He doesn’t have the heart to tell him that he is exhausted in a way that sleep can’t ever fix.
“Grace sleep long time. Rocky always watch but Rocky worried about Grace. Normal human sleep is 28,880 seconds. Grace sleep for 39,600 seconds. Give and take little.”
“It’s give or take a few, buddy.” Grace pushes himself up to a seated position, swinging his legs over to sit on the edge of the bed.
“So, what’s on the agenda today, Rocks?”
Rocky is silent for a few beats, most likely assessing if he should keep asking about why he had slept so long. Grace tries to sound like he’s perfectly fine, and keeps his breathing steady. It probably doesn’t work, since Rocky’s basically a human lie detector, but Grace didn’t want to put him under any more stress. Rocky must decide that it wasn’t worth trying to get anything out of him now, since he immediately starts heading toward the lab, yelling: “Agenda is Grace Rocky go to lab, start make Grace food!”
“Be right there, just gotta freshen up a bit,” Grace mutters, slowly putting on his glasses.
“Yes yes yes Grace needs fresh right now Grace dirty dirty dirty.”
“Hey!” Grace hears the sound of Rocky’s laughter as he goes further down the corridor, and smiles to himself.
After getting ready for the day, Grace makes his way over to the lab, where Rocky is impatiently waiting for him to get started. Yesterday, after seeing the dwindling amounts of food he had remaining, they’d decided to start trying to find a way to convert the taumoeba into sustainable food for him. Anything to avoid the coma slurry.
Rocky perks up when he sees Grace enter the room. “What Grace need eat question?” Grace stretches his arms out and focuses his mind on the science. “Humans have a bunch of essential nutrients that we need, or else we’ll start starving. If I just start eating the taumoeba by itself, best case it has everything I need, worst case it’s poisonous and I die.”
“Grace no die. Bad bad bad.”
“Yep, very bad bad bad. I’m thinking we just try to find out what’s in the taumoeba, see if it has the proper nutrients, go from there?”
“Yes good idea find nutrients fast. Then Grace have food.”
Grace puts his gloves on and quickly prepares a taumoeba sample slide, placing it under the microscope. They look wrong. Perfectly in line with what he’s been seeing from the taumoeba so far, but so unlike anything he’d encountered on Earth. It was clearly alive, but the cell shapes, and the way it moved and clustered, were so far removed from microbial movement on Earth.
“Okay,” he mutters, slowly adjusting the microscope. “Step one. Find out what the heck this is made of.” Having confirmed that the sample was alive, he reaches for the spectrometer.
“What Grace doing now?” Rocky’s intently watching — listening? — over his shoulder.
“I’ve just made sure that the sample of taumoeba we have is alive. Now, I’m going to put it into the spectrometer to see what compounds are in it.”
“Need word.”
“The spectrometer? It’s this thing right here.” Grace taps the side of the machine in front of him. “It’s basically a really fancy… light translator. Everything in the universe interacts with light differently, and gives off different light signatures. This machine reads those signatures and tells us what something’s made of. So each atom — oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, xenon — will interact with this light—” He hits the switch. “—differently. Like they each have their own fingerprint.”
Rocky tilts his carapace to the side. “What is fingerprint?”
“Oh yeah, I guess we haven’t really talked much about anatomy. Besides my apparent disgusting eating and digestion.”
“Not apparent. Is just disgusting.”
Grace finishes loading the sample. “Yeah yeah.” He holds up his hand in front of Rocky and wiggles his fingers. “Every human has unique fingerprints that they’re born with. On each of our fingers, we have different patterns that separate us from each other and make us easier to identify.”
“Like Rocky 🎵🎵🎶!” He points to some of the markings scattered all over his body. “These not from birth, but as Rocky grow, Rocky get mark for accomplishment and job. This mark here for engineer, this for when Rocky 🎶🎵. When Rocky become adult.”
“Oh, so they’re like tattoos! Some humans get similar markings, but I don’t have any.”
“Yes, like tattoo.” Rocky pauses, curling in on himself. “This here for Adrian.” He points to the green markings scattered all over his carapace.
Grace places his hand on the xenonite separating them. “We’re gonna get you back to Adrian. I know that they’re waiting for you.”
“Rocky knows. Rocky still misses.” It’s silent for a few more beats.
“And Adrian also waiting for Grace. All of Erid waiting for Grace too.” The reminder makes Grace’s breath hitch a little. “Yeah,” he whispers. “Me too.”
Grace takes a few moments to get his emotions under control, then claps his hands together. “Science! So, each type of atom has unique fingerprints, which show up like different peaks and valleys.” He waits a few more seconds for the spectrometer to finish, then turns to the screen. “See the squiggly line here? That’s the entire fingerprint from the taumoeba. All I have to do is break it down into smaller parts, and then I’ll be able to tell what elements are in this thing.”
“Amaze amaze amaze! Then Grace know if safe for eat?”
Grace lets out a small chuckle. “Not quite, bud, but it’s a really good starting point.” He looks at the results. “Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorous…” He continues to read off the results, then smiles and turns to Rocky. “Okay, this is good so far! The compounds I just read off are all organic, and compatible with human consumption.”
“What next question?”
“Next, I run a few more experiments: chromatography, NMR, chiral chromatography.”
“Grace go go go fast!” Rocky excitedly taps on the xenonite and Grace just laughs and gets started. The rest of the experiments go by in a blur, and as the chiral chromatography was running, they take a quick break for food. Or at least Grace does. Rocky just repeats “disgust disgust disgust” as he chokes down a burrito.
They get back to the screen as the chirality results show up.
“Oh.”
Rocky jolts. “Oh bad. What mean Oh? Grace explain Oh?!”
“It’s… not the worst things could be. All the compounds I need are pretty much here, but most of them are mirrored wrong.”
“What mean mirrored wrong?”
“The nutrients I need… are in a different form than I can use them. If I eat it, could just cause indigestion. Or could be toxic.”
“How Grace Rocky fix?”
“We can fix this. It’s not an impossible problem.”
“So Grace get food?”
“Yeah buddy, I get food.”
Rocky chitters and starts jumping around inside his tube, joyfully yelling out “amaze amaze amaze!” Grace slumps down into his chair and starts laughing. It’s a roadblock, but it isn’t a failure. Just work. A lot of work. For the first time in a long time, he doesn’t feel completely hopeless about the future. He finally has a problem that he can work on. And then—
The ship shudders.
Hard.
The lights flicker once.
There’s a pressure on Grace’s chest, and his limbs feel like they’re being stretched in a million different directions, even though he hasn’t moved a muscle.
Everything stops. He just stares at Rocky. For five seconds, nothing happens. Then—
The alarm goes off.
“Position cannot be computed. Position cannot be computed. Position cannot be computed.”
Mary repeats those four words over and over again.
Grace feels his hands go cold.
“That’s not. That’s not something that happens—” he starts, already rushing to the cockpit. “That’s not something that just—” He cuts himself off as they reach the cockpit.
The navigation display is already open. It’s been turned off. The star map is gone. Grace steps closer and realizes, with increasing dread, that it isn’t off or broken. It’s just blank.
“Did something go wrong with the display? We’ve been on the same course for weeks! Why would it just—”
Grace looks up at the window and freezes. His stomach drops like a stone. Cold and sudden. He can’t breathe. The air feels too thin.
“R-Rocky. Rocky.” He can barely whisper his name.
“Grace find out what wrong? Tell Rocky.”
“Look outside.”
Rocky stops moving and takes in the sensations around him. He’s completely silent, frozen, as if trying to search for something that isn’t there. Grace is doing the same.
He tilts toward the glass. “Rocky… Rocky does not understand.” he says.
Grace doesn’t either.
Because before him, he doesn’t see the billions of stars they’d been travelling across.
Instead, there is nothing.
No light. No stars.