Work Text:
We spend most of the trip to Erid learning about our cultures. Earth culture mostly, because we're surrounded by stuff my culture made. I'm sure Rocky would have shown me the same had we been on his ship, but once we reach Erid, he'll have the rest of the time to show me what his people are like.
I am trying to teach Rocky how to use a computer. I figure once I teach him the basics, he can look up anything he wants to know about humans and our technology himself, instead of waiting for my slow human brain to explain it to him. His words, not mine.
In Stratt's infinite wisdom while pirating everything known to mankind, she had also happened to pirate pretty much every game ever made. Why? Beats me, maybe Call of Duty had the potential of simulating astrophage reproduction, so she sent it along with us just in case. After months of spending every waking hour trying solve the astrophage problem and then the taumoeba problem, it's great to be able to kick back and relax while we wait for the ship to reach Erid.
Rocky and I play a lot of games together. We start with Mario Kart because I figured the concept of maneuvering a vehicle through space is familiar to him.
Playing against Rocky is like playing against a CPU, except you can't turn the difficulty down. Once he's memorized a course, it's over. He takes the most efficient path and I can't come close to beating him. Rainbow Road is a piece of cake to him. We move to Smash Bros, and I find out that Rocky is really good at combos.
It doesn't help that I have two hands and ten fingers, while Rocky has five hands and fifteen claws. Even when he's standing on two of them, he's still got an extra hand than me.
I lose to my kids at video games all the time. That's okay, because they're my kids and my job as a teacher is to encourage them. I can't keep losing to Rocky, though, because I'm actually trying and he isn't trying at all. Earth should have sent someone else to represent them in the interstellar E-sports league.
I decide to try a sandbox game this time. Collaborative games are a good idea, because then we can work together, and I won't get my butt handed to me for the umpteenth time. I browse through the collection of Statt's pirated games, and to my delight, I locate a copy of Minecraft.
Rocky is an engineer. He would love building.
"Rocky!" I exclaim, "We have Minecraft! I can show you Earth!"
"Earth! I want to see real Earth!" he says back, because Rainbow Road wasn't exactly a great representation of it.
We do a LAN server. Human technology is amazing. We're hurtling through space at 0.92 times the speed of light and I can still host a LAN party. This really takes me back to college.
I open the game on my laptop and walk Rocky through opening the game up on his. The computer I had gifted Rocky sits outside of his enclosure. A xenonite-shielded cable connects it to his equipment. He has an Eridian version of a keyboard that he repurposed from one of the old Blip-A control panels. For a mouse, he is using the joystick of the xenonite-coated controller that he had used to play Mario Kart and Smash with me.
After fumbling around a bit to launch the game without an account (nice try, Microsoft), we load into a shared world. The sky is blue and a square sun shines overhead. For a moment, I miss Earth. Even this blocky and square recreation of it is enough to make me feel a pang of homesickness.
The presence of a human figure next to me almost makes me jump, but it's just Rocky in the default player avatar. I watch him strafe back and forth as he figures out the controls.
"How's it feel walking on two legs, buddy?"
"Is strange." Rocky turns in game and looks at me. After having played Mario Kart and Smash, he's already gotten past the concept that humans only see things in a very limited field of view. "Why everything cubes, question?"
"Humans like cubes," I say. Supposedly, the most popular games in the world are Tetris and Minecraft. I know this because I'm a middle school teacher.
I run up to a blocky Minecraft tree and point at it. "Look, Rocky! This is a tree!"
He follows at a more sedate pace. His avatar has a funny habit of walking in a direction that he is not facing in. Rocky eventually swings his character's head around towards me once he realizes he won't be able to see anything unless he points directly at it. He looks up at the sky peeking through the blocky leaves. "Amaze. Tree is cube on stick, question?"
"Well, they don't all look like this."
I've shown him trees in the screen room before, but those were flat, 2D objects. He gets a better sense of them now that we're able to stand under one. I show him how to punch a block to break it, and then how to place it.
"Amaze," Rocky says, breaking a block. He watches it drop as a small floating item. His avatar automatically picks it up, and it reappears in his hand again. "Amaze amaze amaze!" He starts running around, placing dirt blocks everywhere.
Rocky is like a living 3D printer. Of course when given a game that allows you to build anything block-by-block, he goes ham. It probably feels like home to him.
He abruptly stops mid dirt placing spree. Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he ran out of blocks. He spins around to face me. "Where third arm?" he says.
I laugh. "Humans only have two arms, remember?"
"Two arms bad," Rocky comments. He waves two of them at me in real life. He's set his carapace down on the floor so he can use his keyboard with four claws. The fifth operates the joystick on his xenon-coated controller. "Humans so inefficient."
I show him some more blocks and how to open up his inventory. It's a bit hard to explain crafting to him at first, because it relies on human knowledge of materials. He doesn't know what wood is, let alone a pickaxe, let alone why you would use a pickaxe to break stone. When I explain it more in terms of making xenonite by combining its two liquid components, he gets it, but doesn't seem all that interested.
I tell him about the health bar, and accidentally make the mistake of eating an apple in front of him.
"Humans eat in game, question!?" he squawks, aghast. He turns in-game and starts running away. "Humans always eating!"
"It's not real eating!" I yell as I run after his player character. "Think about it as filling up a fuel tank!" Oh boy, I'm going to have to watch out for this one. Knowing Rocky, he's going to space his meals out Eridian-style and then die from his hunger bar running out. Maybe I can find a way to remove hunger.
As night falls, I set up two beds in a dirt hut. There are monsters spawning outside, and I've forgotten how to change the difficulty setting.
"Both of us need to sleep," I tell Rocky. "It's how we skip the night."
"You sleep, I watch," he says.
"No, both of us need to sleep, or it won't work."
"I watch," he insists.
"It's not like how Eridians sleep," I try to reassure him, "You sleep for five seconds, then you wake up. You don't need people to watch."
Rocky stomps one of his claws on the ground. "I watch."
Okay, that's fine. I'll figure out some way to make the game pass the night with only one player sleeping. Might as well, since I already plan to figure out how to remove the hunger bar. I have the entirety of Wikipedia. I also have the entirety of the Minecraft wiki. I can figure this out.
We spend the night digging down into the floor of the hut, so I can show Rocky more blocks and ores. I realize that Minecraft is the perfect game for us to play together. Rocks and minerals are familiar to Eridians, given the nature of their world and their physical appearance.
We resurface when the night passes and I show him the forests, the flowers. It's been a while since I've played this game. I rush over to the river and peer inside of it. The rivers are now full of fish! Blocky, pixelated fish, but fish regardless. "Oh my gosh, Rocky! There's fish in the rivers!"
He comes running over as well. "Fish, question?"
"These are fish!" I exclaim excitedly, pointing. "We can go fishing!"
"Amaze!"
Rocky likes caves. He tells me that Eridian people lived in caves before they developed architecture. I tell him humans did that too. He's wandered off into one while I place a crafting bench down next to the river. Maybe we can build a base here.
"Humans put Eridians in game, question?" he asks.
"No?" I say. I'm trying to make a fishing rod. I'm going to take Rocky fishing.
"I see Eridian," Rocky says.
"You mean, like a spider?" I ask. "Are you seeing a spider?" I'm distracted. Was it two string and three sticks, or three string and two sticks?
"Not spider," Rocky says. "Four legs. Tall carapace."
"What color is it?"
"Middle-rough."
Middle-rough. That's Eridian for green.
"Strange sound," Rocky comments.
The creeper explodes.
Rocky lets out a flood of notes, kind of like if you pressed down on all the keys of a pipe organ at the same time. He sounds like a combination of a steam train and a harmonica.
My ability to translate Eridian falls flat on its face.
He's definitely made those sounds before, when he's frustrated or surprised. He won't tell me what they mean, but I'm pretty sure they're Eridian curse words. Rocky swears like a sailor. For that reason I've neglected to teach him human swears. I'm sure he'd find those himself once he discovers Urban Dictionary.
He scuttles up the side of his room and waves three of his claws in the air at me. "Why so much fire in human world, question?"
He's still upset about that time my atmosphere set him on fire.
"That was a creeper, Rocky. They're green and they blow up."
"Middle-rough Eridians go boom," he says, still waving his claws in the air. "Bad bad bad."
"Yes, bad. They're hostile mobs." I can see now how he would mistake a creeper for an Eridian. They support themselves on four blocky legs and have a tall body that could be mistaken for a carapace. I guess a creeper to him is like a zombie to me. They're green, they look like him, and they're hostile.
He looks at his screen and reads the English letters. "I die?"
"You died."
"How many lives?" he asks, because I had to explain the concept of stocks to him in Smash Bros.
"Infinite."
He settles down after that and tucks his claws under him. "This is good game. I like this game."
"Me too."
Infinite tries and no consequences. If only our own journeys had been a bit more like that.
Rocky turns out to be one heck of a Minecraft player. He caves without torches. He mines without torches. Having evolved without light is such a biological advantage. Darn it, dumb human eyes!
My own dumb human eyes are stinging. I finally glance at the clock.
Oh my gosh, I've been awake for almost twenty hours. With no day-night cycle, I can quite literally play video games non-stop.
We've made enough progress that the dirt hut by the river has wooden doors and glass windows. I'm thinking of turning it into a fishing lodge. Rocky, meanwhile, has sampled all the blocks in the nearby vicinity. He's lined them up in a two-block tall wall in front of my hut, sort of like a fence.
"I'm going to sleep," I tell Rocky.
"I watch," Rocky hums, but there's something distracted about his usual chords. His face, or at least the side of him facing his textured display, is glued to the screen. But Eridians have echolocation, so he doesn't need to turn to see me. I'm certain he's still watching, just with a little less attention than what's going on in his display.
I fall sleep to the sound of Eridian claws tapping rapidly against xenonite keys.
"I sleep now," Rocky announces, about two hours after I wake up. The entire time, he had still been glued to his display. It's hard for me to see what he's been doing, since his screen is just a series of raised textures, but I imagine he's still on Minecraft. While I was off eating breakfast, he must've slunk off for a meal as well. He settles himself down on the floor of the dormitory and tucks his claws under him. "You watch."
"Yeah, I watch," I reassure him. "Get some sleep now, bud. That much screentime can't be good for your—uh. Eyes." Eridians don't have eyes. I wonder if their sound receptors can get strained.
While Rocky sleeps, I check our heading. The spin drives look good, our course is steady. I don't expect much to change in the next year or so.
After my daily housekeeping chores are done, I scour the Minecraft wiki. I find the solution to enabling single-player sleep quite quickly. Removing hunger is a bit more of an issue, but at least I can implement the single-player sleep game rule now.
I log onto the server, and my computer lags.
My computer is not bad by any means. I am quite literally playing Minecraft on a NASA computer. Stratt did not cut any corners when sending technology to space with us on the Hail Mary, so my laptop shouldn't be having trouble loading Minecraft.
At first, all I see is blue sky. Then the structure slowly loads in. My frames per second are a PowerPoint presentation. The screen flickers between blue sky and black as the computer struggles to render the new structure.
"Rocky… what?" I utter in disbelief.
The blocky trees and hills are gone, covered by a massive structure. It is angular and organic at the same time, jutting from the landscape like a jagged cluster of crystals.
Or like Rocky's ship.
So this is Eridian architecture.
It's beautiful.
It's also made out of every block imaginable.
Rocky doesn't have eyes, so obviously he can't perceive color. If I turn my color settings to black and white, I'm certain it would make a pretty pattern. For the way it is now, it's an eyesore. Dirt is placed next to leaves and sandstone is placed next to some block that looks like baked beans. Where's he even getting these things from? He's finding blocks that I've never seen before.
My little fishing hut still stands by the river. The explosion of triangles and lines curves around it, careful to not disrupt the sunlight or the trees.
I spend a long time walking through Rocky's base, admiring the way the light falls through the holes and edges. I also spend a lot of the time lighting it up with torches. While Rocky might be thrilled that some of his middle-rough Eridian buddies have taken up residence in his base, I wouldn't be so happy.
Rocky will be asleep for another five or so hours. I go around and add some additions to his base. A furnace room to smelt ores. A storage room for his blocks. I hope he doesn't mind if I move in with him, given that he's already moved into the Hail Mary with me.
I also make sure to replace all the flammable blocks with non-flammable ones.
"Grace like?" Rocky asks me, once we're both on the server again. We stand in the shadow of his towering base.
"I like very much," I tell him. "I already moved in while you were sleeping, if that's okay."
"Yes!" Rocky lifts several of his arms and does jazz hands at me. "Happy you like! Happy you like very much! Move in as much as you want!"
Rocky takes me through his base for his guided own tour, acting like some combination of an architect and a real estate agent. He shows off his build to me like it's another one of his inventions, taking me from room to room and talking about things like what textures Eridians find pleasing, or what kind of spaces they like.
He takes me through more tunnels and rooms than I can count. I find more dark patches and light them up as I go.
Rocky finishes his tour in a massive, cavern-like room, with arches holding up the ceiling almost like a human cathedral. When I try to tell him that, something freezes me in my tracks.
I hear the tell-tale hiss of a creeper. It's coming from right beside me.
"Rocky, no!" I scream. I lunge forward, trying to tackle his character away in-game, or at least shield him from the blast. I only succeed in passing right through him.
But to my surprise, nothing happens. The ground doesn't explode. I look around. There is no creeper. Just Rocky.
Beside me, in the real world, Rocky repeats the sound of a creeper's hiss again. A perfect imitation.
Eridians have photographic memory. They perceive everything and communicate everything through sound. Rocky learned my language faster than I could learn his, so of course he immediately learned what a creeper sounded like from a single encounter.
"You little rascal!" I exclaim at him. "That was you!"
If an Eridian could look smug, then Rocky was smug. "Grace is good friend," he has the gall to say. "Very brave."
This is something I would expect my middle schoolers to pull on me, not a two-hundred year old Eridian engineer. I can't believe he picked this up without having ever come into contact with the internet. "In human words, we call that trolling," I tell him.
"I troll."
"You troll."
"I troll Grace good."
"You did." I put a hand over my heart in relief. "You scared me."
"I apologize. Will not do again."
I laugh. "No, no, it's funny. It's what friends do, scare each other sometimes."
I'm glad that we can do that, now, scare each other for fun. Neither of us are in danger anymore, and neither are our planets.
"Just don't do it when we're not playing the game, okay?" I tell him, "You'll give me a heart attack."
He waves his arms at me. "I am scary middle-rough Eridian."
"Very scary."
"You still move in with me, question?" he asks, because of course that's his main concern.
"Of course I'll still move in with you, Rocky." It already goes without saying. I look around us at the interior of the Hail Mary. Rocky's xenonite tunnels weave around the living space, merging with mine. Through a series of impossible, inconceivable events, we had somehow both ended up here, together.
I am not alone anymore, and neither is he.