Chapter Text
It started innocently enough, as do all things.
“Why Grace twitch so much when sleep, question?”
Grace raised his head from his impromptu nap at the taumoeba breeding station, face smushed into the side of his arm and feeling vaguely hot around the collar as his dream – shifting shapes, brown, red heat in the dark – slipped away. They were a few months into the long journey to Erid, and Grace was facing the unfortunate reality of his food running out approximately two years before they reached the surface. Which would render him approximately dead if they didn’t do something about it. Predictably, manufacturing anything edible on a spaceship designed to remain entirely sterile for a maximum of ten years, after which Stratt evidently did not care what happened to it and its inhabitants, was posing somewhat of a conundrum.
Grace had never been more thankful to be wrong in his no-water-necessary hypothesis. After all, if the astrophage wasn’t mostly comprised of water, it’s natural predator wouldn’t be either, and there would be no cellulose or ribosomes or any of the other familiar patchworks of life from which Grace could draw energy. He’d be staring down the barrel of several years of slow starvation, eked out by his remaining food and coma slurry on board. Moving with less and less energy inside a weightless coffin whilst Rocky could do nothing but watch him die. To say the least, yikes.
Luckily, he and Rocky had worked out that with some tweaks, they should be able to synthesise a Grace-edible version of taumoeba. It won’t cover all of his nutritional needs, which means he will likely be both anaemic and deficient in several vitamins when they arrive. A fun puzzle for the inevitably bewildered Eridian doctors who are going to have a whole new leaky space blob, as Rocky puts it, to keep alive. The taumoeba also has a vanishingly small chance of being palatable, given it is literal space goo they scraped off of a planet’s atmosphere under less-than-advisable conditions. But! All of that pales in comparison to, you know, starving to death in space. Rocky had made it clear that in the grand scheme of their mission, Grace not liking the flavour of something was not of particular importance. Rude.
“Grace. Grace focus now.” Rocky tapped his front left arm twice against the interior of his ball, a movement he was fond of using whenever he wanted Grace’s immediate attention and didn’t feel like waiting.
“Huh? Sorry bud, you’re gonna have to repeat the question. I’m just returning from noddy land.” Grace rubbed his eyes underneath his glasses. The semi-constant state of panic in which he had lived when blasting the engines to get back to Rocky’s ship had slowly dissipated. Once they had been able to secure the pesky taumoeba from wiggling through xenonite (by shutting it all very hurriedly into plastic and hoping for the best), things had calmed down. Now they lived in comfortable companionship, hurtling back towards Rocky’s home with a miracle cure for astrophage on board. Perhaps sometimes too comfortable, Grace mused.
“Need word. What is ♫♩♪♫ land, question?”
“Uh - it’s a human saying. A metaphor for where we go when we sleep.”
“Human phrase stupid. Humans stay in same place when sleep. Grace twitch when sleep but not go anywhere. Rocky watch Grace for hours. Grace limbs move all over and Grace brain continue to fire synapses very fast. Grace heart speed up and slow down with synapse electricity. What Grace body doing when sleep, question? Associated with human concept of ‘night’, question?”
Grace blinked. The Hail Mary cycled through human days and nights in a circadian rhythm meant to emulate Earth, and yet he never truly felt like ‘day’ or ‘night’ strictly applied in space. Something about the stars being ever-visible broke the illusion of an arbitrary time measurement. A strange hypothesis to associate his sleeping movements with time, but understandable, Grace supposed, given that there was no visible change between night and day on Erid for beings that lived in total darkness and communicated through sound.
“Do you always… scan me so thoroughly? I know you can see through walls and stuff with your superior smell-o-vision, but isn’t it a little invasive to be rooting through my defenceless, squishy grey matter?”
Rocky reared back in his ball, shaking his carapace.
“Disgust. Grace try to distract Rocky on purpose. Rocky not choose to scan Grace; Grace body is loud at all times.” He shuddered a little, somehow managing to inject a sense of haughtiness in his automated tones underlaid with musical chitters. “Grace body always gurgle and squish and beat and trickle.”
“Good lord. I don’t remember teaching you that many descriptive verbs.” Grace grinned at the textured section of Rocky’s carapace he had come to associate with his face. It was certainly the epicentre of Rocky, the way he faced ‘forward’ (if such a thing exists for a being with no eyes), and what he used to express the human mannerisms he had picked up. Like shaking his head, or pressing into one of Grace’s hugs. Currently, he was using it to vibrate with annoyance at Grace’s withholding.
“Grace body loud and doing unknown activities while Grace sleep, statement. Eridians not do this. What is Grace doing, question?” He again tapped his front arm emphatically and, in Grace’s opinion, a bit impatiently.
“Well,” Grace mused, stretching his arms up above his head and rolling his neck to loosen the stiffness from his kip on the table. “I suppose it makes sense that Eridians don’t move. You’re not conscious at all during sleep, which is why you need to watch each other. Humans are a lot more… awake, I guess, during sleep?”
Rocky clicked and shuffled within the ball. “Rocky not understand.”
“I’m not explaining it well. There’s a word we haven’t used yet, which may not have an Eridian equivalent at all. Dream.”
Rocky repeated some confused-sounding musical chimes back at him, which Grace dutifully tapped in as ‘dream’ on the translation software.
“Yeah, I’m not sure you’d even have a true translation for it. When humans sleep, our brains don’t switch off completely. Sleep is important for restoring us physically, but it’s also really important for the brain. It’s when we do a lot of our subconscious processing - moving short-term memory into long-term, making sense of our day, et cetera… we don’t really know why it happens, but we dream. It’s like… little films that play in our heads.”
Rocky chittered, shifting three of his legs to work on stitching together what looked like tiny sections of xenonite he had brought into his ball.
“Grace see day again when sleep, question? What point of this, question? You see day first time. No need to see again. Stupid.”
Grace chuckled, shifting on his stool to lean back against the table. Evidently, Rocky wasn’t happy with yet another human idiosyncrasy.
“It’s not usually a play by play of our day. It’s generally a lot more fantastical than that. Anything can happen in a dream. You might be flying, or robbing a bank, or chatting to the Queen of England whilst entirely naked. It all seems really normal when it’s happening in the dream - so real and present. But when you wake up you realise pretty quickly that it was a dream. Things that made perfect sense become ridiculous a few seconds after you open your eyes.”
Rocky stilled a little before returning to his work on his tiny panels.
“So Grace can dream of anything, question? Grace dream of answers to taumoeba breeding problem to make human-food.”
Grace smiled fondly. Rocky was always so resourceful - as anxious as Grace himself to make sure they were getting the taumoeba process right, checking in constantly. Grace had even caught him attempting to burrow into the food stores in his ball to personally count the remaining packets, in case there were any more to be found.
“It’s not something we can control, Rock. You can’t choose to use the time productively. You can’t really control the dream at all. It just… happens to you. And you think it’s all well and good, riding a horse naked through the streets of Mumbai, until you wake up and realise how weird it was.”
Rocky’s body hunched in a little, his trunk reflexively pushing closer to his arms in what Grace was privately referring to as ‘the frustrated scrunch’.
“But… but Grace meant to rest when sleep, statement.” Rocky argued, seeming almost offended. “Grace brain stupid. Why spend more energy watching sleep film? Real film exist for this purpose when awake.’
Grace once again thanked Stratt internally for including literally the entire archive of human art on the hard drives. The Hail Mary’s laptop came with any film Grace could think of to show Rocky in their few sections of free time when the taumoeba were quietly doing their thing and nothing on the ship was actively catching on fire. So far, they had worked through some of the greats, in Grace’s humble opinion, though Rocky did not always agree.
“Many human films are based on dreams, or at least the subconscious. Remember Mulholland Drive? The strange atmosphere, non-linear events, open-ending… very dream-like.”
Rocky’s scrunch became decidedly more frustrated. Grace grinned. He loved winding him up.
“Mulholland Drive stupid. Why main characters not end up together as nest mates? Should be happy together. So good to each other. Bad film. Sad sad sad.”
Grace snorted, before Rocky tilted his carapace forward questioningly.
“So Grace dream like Mulholland Drive, question? Dream of meeting nest mate and love?”
Grace’s chuckle died a short death in his throat. The trajectory of this conversation was becoming imminently clear and it was suddenly a lot less amusing. He felt a blush rising in his cheeks and coughed, ducking his head back towards the taumoeba.
“Uh… no, bud. My dreams are nowhere near as, um, sexual as that.” He hoped to God Rocky wouldn’t pick up on the slight quaver in his voice. Liar, a traitorous voice whispered in the back of his mind. Grace shoved it ruthlessly away.
It had been an interesting few minutes when they had reached the obviously sexual section of Mulholland Drive. They’d had to pause it so Rocky could fire off several embarrassing questions about human sexuality, what he called ‘mating rituals’, types of human sexual interaction, all of which had left Grace’s cheeks fire-engine red. There were times he was thankful that Rocky couldn’t reliably discern colours yet.
“What Grace dream about, question?”
Perhaps an inevitable question. Grace steeled himself, leaning away to get a closer and entirely unnecessary look at the taumoeba tubes, which were very unhelpfully doing absolutely nothing interesting.
“I don’t dream a lot, Rock.”
Rocky tilted again, claws still weaving away at his xenonite.
“Grace just give many example of dream. Two of being naked in dream. Grace brain synapse fire fast fast fast when Grace sleep. Grace murmur words and move. Grace dream. Statement.”
Hmm. Tough to get out of that one.
“Well, then, I don’t remember it after the fact. Humans forget what they dream about all the time when they wake up. I forget.” Liar, liar, pants on fire, that same horrific voice trilled in Grace’s brain.
Rocky chittered and set his project at his feet, using three arms to push his ball closer to where Grace’s legs were resting on the stool.
“Rocky think Grace lying. Grace blood vessels in face enlarge and Grace heart beat quick. Grace look away fast even though taumoeba not change. Grace lying, statement.”
“God, am I on trial here? I didn’t realise you were a lawyer in your spare time. Can’t a man have a little privacy in his own brain?” Grace hedged, estimating a 99% chance that his deflection would not work.
“No.” Rocky stated, smugly.
Ah, well. There goes the 1% hope.
“Tell Rocky what Grace dream about. Tell Rocky, tell Rocky, tell Rocky…” He was continually shoving his ball forward into Grace’s legs and then rolling back to do it again, hitting the hard edge of the welded xenonite into Grace’s poor, defenceless shins.
“Ow! Okay stop, stop, Jesus Christ.” Grace reached down to rub the tender lines now etched into his skin courtesy of Rocky’s bullying. “You’re impossible. I really don’t remember, Rock, honestly, but… if I dream again, I promise to tell you what I dreamed about when I wake up. How does that sound?”
Rocky tilted his carapace to the other side, clearly calculating the benefit of attempting to bully more information out of Grace via various methods of bodily harm, before trilling excitedly.
“Agreed. Grace tell Rocky each morning.”
“Happy now? God, it’s like living with an evil Labrador trying to extort me.”
Rocky turned around snootily, picking his tiny panels back up and beginning to stitch them into some complex shape Grace couldn’t discern.
“Rocky going to get more xenonite. Grace get ready for bed soon soon soon!”
“It’s only 6pm!” Grace hollered at Rocky’s rapidly retreating back as he scuttled into another room. A knot of dread was rapidly forming at the base of his stomach. How does one lie to a being that can hear his heartbeat betray him?