Chapter Text
I stare at the little red light. The little red light blinks back. My vision starts to tunnel around it until I can barely see it anymore. I blink. My vision clears. The little red light is still blinking.
“So…are you going to play it?”
I don’t respond. Not really on purpose, I’m not trying to ignore her. It’s just that this tiny red light has completely consumed all my mental faculties and I am not at all ready to do something impossible like respond to a yes or no question.
Ilyukhina’s face enters my periphery to my right. She still looks young and sturdy, her eyes full of light and confidence. Just like in the days before the launch.
“Grace,” she says gently. “You should really play it.”
I don’t take my eyes off the light. “Are…are we sure it’s real?” I whisper.
She barks out her boisterous laugh. “I am absolutely the wrong person to ask,” she says.
“You could always just push the button,” says Yao, who is standing to my left. “If it’s not real, nothing will happen.”
It’s a very practical thought. He’s always the practical one. I don’t move.
“Oh for crying out loud,” says a voice behind me. I wince, but I still don’t take my eyes off the light. “Just push it,” Stratt says. “Drawing it out like this is making it worse.”
“She is right, my friend,” says Dimitri, standing next to Ilyukhina. “Worst that can happen is nothing.”
The back of my mind is bugged by the fact that there is no way so many people can fit in this control room. I ignore it. I’m an expert at that.
One of my students is standing in front of me, just to the left of the screen. I don’t remember her name. I try to feel bad about it, but there’s a lot of things I don’t remember these days.
She puts her hand on mine. I don’t feel it. “What if it’s real, Mr. Grace?” she says. “What if the Eridians heard you? What if they want to save you?”
I tear my eyes away from the light and look at her. She’s smiling at me in a young, innocent way that makes my insides ache. The back of my mind tells me she shouldn’t look like this. She’s all grown up now and probably living a nightmare. If she’s even still alive. I wouldn’t know. I’ll never know.
“Can I get a minute?” I say, my voice cracking. I blink, and just like that, everyone’s gone. Well, not everyone.
I turn in my chair. Rocky sits in his bulb, like always. It’s got a hole in it, but he’s too dead to care. He says and does nothing. I stare at him for what feels like a few seconds, but could also be a few hours.
“Why am I so scared of this?” I ask. He doesn’t respond. I run my fingers through my greasy, unwashed hair. “I know I should just listen to it. If I’m imagining it, nothing will happen. Is that what I’m scared of?” I turn back to the screen. The little red light on the radio is still blinking. “No,” I say decidedly. “I’m not scared of the fact that I can’t trust my own mind anymore. And I’m definitely not scared of getting my hopes up only to lose it. I don’t…I don’t think I have enough hope left for it to be crushed.”
I turn back to Rocky. I rub my hands down my face. “So if I’m not scared that it’s not real, that must mean that I’m scared that it is.” The back of my mind acknowledges that that barely made sense. I move on. “Why am I scared of getting a response?” I ask it like it’s a scientific question. Rocky says nothing. “Maybe I want to die up here. If the Eridians find me, they’ll probably want to try to keep me alive. I’ve been fighting for a long time now, maybe I’m ready to give up.” I say it as if I’m posing a reasonable hypothesis, though my vision blurs with tears. I ignore that too, I haven’t had control over my tear ducts in years.
Rocky responds with his signature silence. I sigh. “No, that’s not it. Despite everything, I’m still absolutely terrified of dying. I want to be saved.” I wipe my face. “So what am I so afraid of?”
Rocky continues to stare at me, even without eyes. That’s all he’s ever done. He was the first one I hallucinated, just sitting in the airlock in the dormitory, watching me sleep. I was terrified at first, not wanting to accept that I’d gotten this bad. I would curl up in the corner and cry and scream at the hallucinations to go away and leave me alone. When that didn’t work, I’d just ignore them. That kinda worked, and they would go away for a while. That was when I realized that any company, imaginary or not, was preferable to none at that point. So I stopped ignoring them. Sure, there’s always this little voice in the back of my mind that is mortified at how insane I am, but I can’t find it in me to care anymore. It’s not like there’s anyone real around to judge me.
I stare back at Rocky, ignoring the back part of my mind that tells me he’s not real. I’ve never figured out why he doesn’t talk to me like the others do. A part of me has always wondered if he’s like a silent, angry ghost. It’s my fault he’s dead, after all. I mean, I can’t know for sure, but when I finally found the Blip-A after discovering that the Taumoeba can escape Xenonite, I never got a response from him. I tried everything, I was there for weeks banging on the hull and screaming into my radio. But no matter what I did, I never got a response. My guess is, whatever he did to try to prevent the Taumoeba infection went horribly wrong and killed him. I’ll never know for sure, it’s not like I could go into the Blip-A to check. But after weeks of trying and getting no response, I accepted that he was probably dead. I tried to go back to Earth, but without Rocky, there was no one else to bring Taumoeba back to the Eridians and they would all die. There’s no way I’d be able to live a happy life on Earth knowing a whole species was dying out when I could have saved them.
So now I’m here, approaching an orbit around Erid. After dropping off the Taumoeba at Threeworld, I sent out a transmission on my meager EVA radio system. I did some stuff that I hope boosted the signal a little, but I have no idea how effective it is. I wrote a program for translating English to Eridian years ago, even extrapolating what I hoped was proper grammar from the early recordings I have of Rocky’s speech. My message was pretty basic stuff. “Hi, I’m an alien from Sol, I met one of your astronauts named Rocky at Tau Ceti and we found a predator for Astrophage, Rocky could not finish the mission so now I’m here” and so on. I wasn’t really expecting a response, but the indicator light for receiving radio transmissions on the same frequency started blinking about an hour ago.
“I’m not ready to be a person again,” I say quietly. I’ve been traveling alone in space for almost four years. I read up on the psychology of solitary confinement pretty early on in the trip. Unfortunately, knowing about it did absolutely nothing to alleviate the effects. Basically, I’m a total head case. Not really the best representation of humanity. If this transmission really is a response from the Eridians, it’ll mean interacting with people. As much as every cell in my body longs for social interaction again, I just don’t know if I’m ready for it. I’ve been alone for so long…
Rocky doesn’t answer. His silence is painful in its indifference and comforting in its familiarity. I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. I turn back to the little red indicator light. It’s still there. Maybe it really is real. “Okay,” I say to no one. Not that I’m ever saying anything to anyone, the back of my mind points out.
I push the “receive” button. Everyone crowds around the screen, waiting with bated breath. There’s a crackling radio sound and my heart skips a beat. So it was real after all. Huh.
“-or saving our people. We will do everything we can to help you. This message will repeat until a response is received…Greetings, friend from Sol. This is the Unified Space Station of Erid. We received your transmission and have been tracking your ship. We have calculated a trajectory that will bring you into orbit near our station, where we can receive you. We are very eager to meet you and learn of what happened to our interstellar crew. We are indebted to you for saving our people. We will do everything we can to help you. This message will repeat until a response is received… Greetings, friend from Sol…”
The message keeps repeating, but I stop hearing it. I just stare at the screen, feeling numb. No, I’m not numb, I’m just so overwhelmed with other emotions that I can’t pick one to focus on. “Holy shit,” Ilyukhina says. Yao nods in agreement. Dimitri laughs loud and deep. My student jumps up and down in excitement. Stratt lets out a long sigh. Lamai and Lokken share a smile. Hatch pumps his fist while Riedelle slaps him on the back. Leclerc grins widely. Rocky watches, as always.
I squeeze my eyes shut. There’s way too many people in here and it hurts my head. When I open my eyes again, it’s back to the usual suspects: Ilyukhina, Yao, Stratt, Dimitri, my student, and of course, Rocky. It’s still too many, but I can make it make sense in my head, so it doesn’t hurt as much. I try to take some deep breaths, but it’s surprisingly difficult. Lamai reappears for a second to coach me through some breathing exercises. She vanishes as soon as my heart rate goes back to semi normal. I honestly hadn’t realized it had gone up.
“Are you okay?” Ilyukhina asks. I think I’ve unintentionally given all my imaginary friends different roles. It’s like all of them are a different part of my subconscious. Ilyukhina is the part of me that’s trying to care for my shattered emotional state. She’s always kind to me and is the one to coach me through most of my panic attacks.
“Yeah,” I say. “That was just…overwhelming.”
“We have to respond!” My student says excitedly. It’s a different student now, a boy with dark hair and eyes. They change periodically, but consistently hold the role of the innocent, dreamer side of me. I’m honestly surprised they’re still around. God, I wish I could remember their names.
“What do I even say?” I ask, running my fingers through my gross hair again.
“First, we should have them send their trajectory,” says Yao. “Ours is calculated just to get into orbit. Theirs will take us right to their station.” Yao is always practical and focused on the mission. He also reminds me to do the basic stuff, like eat and sleep. Sometimes, he’ll disappear for a few days and by the time he comes around again, I realize that I’m starving and exhausted. Apparently, other side effects of isolation are insomnia and lack of appetite. Yay.
“True,” I say, shutting off the still playing transmission.
“They will need some information as well,” says Dimitri. “We should send them details about the Hail Mary. Size, shape, weight. So they know what to prepare for.” Dimitri tends to be the one to give scientific input. He and sometimes Lokken help me with calculations and experiments.
“Yeah,” I agree. “Plus info about my atmosphere and airlock configuration.”
“That sounds like a lot of information for a shoddy translation software played into a weak radio transmission,” says Stratt, crossing her arms. Stratt’s role is…difficult to define. Sometimes, on really bad days, all she does is berate me. But on days when I hate myself a little less, she sort of serves as a general reality check? She says things that I don’t want to hear, but need to recognize. It’s helpful, if not super annoying.
I rub my eyes. She’s right. My translation software is mediocre at best and my only means of broadcasting it is just holding the laptop up to the radio receiver. Not the best system. My messages need to be short and precise and the Eridians need to have a general idea of what they’re getting. I need to follow their lead, wait for them to ask a question and then answer it in precise terms. Anything else could lead to miscommunication and/or confusion.
I don’t say any of that out loud, but everyone nods in agreement. That’s the nice thing about imaginary friends, they always understand you. “Okay, so a short message that acknowledges their transmission, asks them to send their trajectory, and finds out what they need from us.” I say, counting them off on my fingers. “That should be good for now, right?” Everyone nods again. Ilyukhina smiles at me.
“Everything will be okay,” she says. Something confusing and painful happens inside me, but I return her smile.
“Yeah,” I say, distantly noticing something hot and wet on my face. “Maybe it will.”