Chapter Text
“I just think it’s kind of a messed-up thing to do to a baby,” I said.
“You’re already messed-up,” Rocky said.
“Hey.”
“Irreparably. It’s very sad.”
“This is what I became fluent in Eridianese for?” Rocky chittered with laughter. “I’m serious! If we aim far enough back to give you enough time to save your mission, that’s—I don’t know the exact number—”
“784.64 Eridian years.”
“—okay, that number, that’s around eighty, eighty-plus Earth years. I definitely haven’t been alive that long! You’d be sending all my memories back to before I even existed! Would that even work?”
We both suddenly remembered that the poor scientist Eridian who Rocky had brought to talk to me had been standing there this whole time. Rocky translated for them, because they had no idea what weird alien noise I’d been making with my mouth hole. Then he asked, “Would that even work?”
The scientist said, with a tone that indicated we were being dumb, “You don’t have to do it together. We can aim each of you at different times.”
I looked at Rocky. Rocky did that tap-tap he does with his fourth arm when he wants to hear at something really well. (I need a verb like ‘look’ but for hearing. I still haven’t figured one out.)
“When would be the least messed-up time for a human?” Rocky asked.
So a couple decades in the past, my head exploded.
Not literally, but it sure felt like it at the time. I had just gotten sixty-plus years of memory beamed straight into my brain, and pretty much zero known life in the universe has evolved the capabilities for that kind of mental load.
My memory gets really sketchy around that point, because my brain dealt with the sudden assault by reliving the stuff that had left the biggest impact on me. Like that would make it all fit inside my head better, and allow me to process that I was actually close to seventy years old and had spent around eight years in space, followed by eighteen years on an alien planet.
So I collapsed in the middle of whatever I’d been doing, vividly hallucinated slash dreamed slash had flashbacks that the sun was dying and I was being launched into space, and woke up in a hospital.
A pediatric hospital. Because I was ten and a half.
I didn’t realize that right away. I was busy reeling from the whole thing where apparently what my brain considers to be my most important memories were all the really terrifying ones that had left me with mental and physical scars. Which in hindsight makes sense, the brain is also an organ in my physical body and that stuff was easiest for my body to remember due to the physical response it produced at the time, but it was really stressful living through it once, much less twice. It was a good few minutes before I could look down at myself and realize that the body I was seeing was not big enough.
“Rocky, what the heck,” I said, my voice high and strangled, because Rocky had been supposed to aim the whole “send memories back through time” machine for when I was sixteen.
And then my mom walked into the room.
The doctor and my parents both said I’d been completely out of it for a couple days; not necessarily unconscious, but not responding to anything around me like a normal human with functioning senses should. Apparently, I had woken up a few times and talked “complete nonsense” (I bet whatever I said would’ve made sense if anyone except me knew about the Hail Mary).
I didn’t remember any of that. I suspected that, in addition to the vivid flashbacks, my brain had defended itself while it processed the years of memories by refusing to log any more data from my nervous system until it was done.
The whole no-short-term-memory thing made everyone worried, so my parents and the hospital staff got very excited when I did super impressive stuff like recognize my doctor or read a magazine. My sixth-grade class had all signed a Get Well Soon card for me. I would’ve done that as a teacher, so I assumed one of the teachers had come up with the idea. I didn’t remember having many friends in sixth grade.
I didn’t really remember having parents, either, and I had no idea what to do with being parented.
Luckily, being in the hospital with a mysterious brain problem gave me plenty of excuses for acting weird. I’d even had amnesia once before, for extra practice with how memories could be prompted back into my active recall. In between doing basic cognitive function tests or getting MRIs done, I tried to subtly get people to tell me about my life, while not letting on that it felt like decades since I’d had a life like this.
I was also trying to do a lot of math without Mom or Dad noticing.
I’d told Rocky and the other science Eridians to aim for the day I was born; given that nothing could move faster than light, it would take about sixteen years for an Erid-based memory machine (which I still didn’t fully understand) to hit me, and I’d thought sixteen was a great age. Not too early, so I would already be treated basically like an adult, but not too late to make sure I still got my doctorate, in case Rocky stepped on a butterfly and caused me to change my college major to, I don’t know, applied trombone acoustics. I needed to be a molecular biologist again.
I needed to write that paper and get laughed out of academia again.
I didn’t know what kind of mistake could have happened on Erid’s end; the difference between sixteen and ten and a half in Eridian years was too weird a number to be a rounding error or a typo with their units of time. Maybe the machine had just missed, like Rocky—or, well, whoever on Erid did it—was actually aiming some kind of projectile into the past and their aim was off.
I didn’t technically need to know the answer—I was here, it had worked—but I sure would’ve liked to, because I wanted to know whether or not Rocky had gone back to the right time.
Whatever had gone wrong on Erid’s end, if they’d hit Rocky early, too, that meant Rocky was already out there. He’d left Erid for Tau Ceti around 1975, Earth time. He would have brought back the knowledge of relativity and radiation that should have kept any of his crew from dying this time, and he already knew to look for Taumoeba and prepare a way to get a sample from the breeding altitude of Adrian.
I got the math done eventually without letting anyone see it, and with how long it took an all-Eridian crew to get between Erid and Tau Ceti in not-aboard-the-ship time, Rocky could be back home already right now, with 40 Eridani on its way back to full luminosity.
But what if something had gone wrong? What if he hadn’t made it home? What if he was floating around Tau Ceti right now, stuck on an empty ship and waiting for me to show up?
What if, like me, he’d only just remembered?
It was really nice to be in a hospital and have basically nothing wrong with me. On Erid, I’d had something wrong with me pretty much constantly. Turns out having every single nutritional deficiency at once makes aging much worse, even after being cured. My bones sucked, my joints sucked, and even the canes Rocky built for me couldn’t prevent me from struggling under the gravity every single day.
I’d been too sick to risk making the trip back to Earth, when Erid started offering to take me back. That was why Rocky had found me the craziest scientist Erid had to offer. We were both luckier than seemed possible that said crazy scientist was legit.
I felt lucky. I got to be back on Earth again.
I kept getting yelled at by nurses for opening the window to lean out of it, but I couldn’t have obeyed them for a million dollars. It smelled like rain outside, or like asphalt, and there was wind! Sometimes the wind was chilly! I hadn’t been chilly or smelled rain in decades.
The first time I opened a window I cried. I had to pretend I was just scared of being in the hospital, because my Dad freaked the heck out when I did. To be fair, I had started straight-up sobbing at the sight of clouds, which no one is prepared for a ten-year-old to do. When I finally got discharged, Dad held my hand so tightly while we walked out the door, like he was afraid I was going to collapse again if I saw grass.
I really wanted to go to the playground across the street from the children’s hospital, but I didn’t know how to ask. I just knew it was going to be rad as heck to be able to throw myself around a jungle gym again.
But I was now simultaneously ten and about seventy years old, and my parents had died when I was in grad school. I had no idea how to talk to them like a ten-year-old. They knew what they expected me to be like, and I didn’t. Just walking into my own bedroom felt like walking into a new enclosure the Eridians had built for me and somehow managed to fill with Earth stuff I liked. It was fun and I was happy enough with it, but I wasn’t the person who’d put all this here.
It was easier to stay up late and avoid interacting with my parents at all.
Anyway, I had plans to make. I needed to get through seven years of regular school, instead of the expected two, before I could really buckle down and start preparing everything I’d need.
I almost started doing the math for if I had enough food left to make it that long.
That didn’t matter now. I had as much food as I could eat and more. But it would matter when I had to get back on the Hail Mary.
The thought made me a little weak in the knees (did I mention the literal days of flashbacks to everything that had gone wrong at Tau Ceti?). But I had to do it. If I didn’t volunteer and make absolutely sure I was the primary science specialist when Stratt showed up to recruit me again, I would never see Rocky again.
And Yáo and Ilyukhina were going to die. Even if they didn’t, they wouldn’t know about Taumoeba. They wouldn’t be able to speak Eridian. I had to be the one to go.
And I had five extra years to psych myself up for it.
When I finally fell asleep I had a screaming nightmare, and both my parents burst in to try and calm me down to sleep again.