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Dr. Theresa Cabral is thirty-nine when the beetles return to Earth.
The contents of the phone call she receives about them are less than important to her. Confidential, blah blah blah, don’t share this information with anyone, blah blah blah, potentially Earth-saving, humanity-changing, apocalypse-ending, blah blah blah. Right. Good. She’s already booking her plane ticket before she hangs up.
When a new alien life form arrives on Earth, a lot of biologists get phone calls. She has spent the last two decades making sure she would be one of them.
“Dr. Cabral,” she is greeted as she heads toward the warehouse on heavy boots, her scarf wrapped up to her nose, the jetlag making her body ache all over. The man who meets her on the landing strip is wearing a heavy brown trench coat with the collar pulled up against the wind. He makes a move to shake her hand, and their gloves rub together. He’s all smiles. “So glad to have you on board. I’m Dr. James Johannsen. You and I actually met before at the—”
“ISMB conference. Two years ago, wasn’t it?” she replies, grinning and gripping his hand a little tighter. “I remember.”
When their hands part, he goes on to chatter, “We’ve only just opened the probes and separated biological material into an enclosed environment within the last couple of hours. We haven’t gotten the go-ahead to start, as we’re still waiting for representatives from the Netherlands and China to arrive, but—”
“They’re from him, aren’t they?” Theresa asks, unable to contain herself, the lack of sleep showing plainly on her face as she walks alongside three other scientists to the remote lab where the beetles are being kept, far away from any nearby towns, just in case another massive lab explosion occurs. Live and learn and whatnot. “I mean, they’re—I was told they were the probes from the Hail Mary mission over the phone, so that’s what they are, right? They’re from the Hail Mary?”
Dr. Johannsen smiles at her with an understanding look in his eyes. It takes him a thoughtful beat to reply, “Yes. They’re from the Hail Mary.”
A hard breath catches in her throat, and she struggles for a minute to figure out how to release it, opting to touch her chest with the center of her palm to make sure she can still feel her heartbeat, even through the heaviness of her coat and glove.
Johannsen gently touches her shoulder, tilting his head. “You alright?”
“Yeah, yeah, just—” she laughs wetly, shaking her head in a dazed way— “Jetlag. Sorry. I’ve been waiting forever for this.”
He nods once and says back simply, “We all have.”
They make sure to get inside before the wind becomes too rough. As they walk down the hall, Theresa is caught up to speed on the basic facts that (1) all four probes from the Hail Mary returned to Earth and traveled 11.9 lightyears to get here with no interruption which means the mission went exactly according to plan, (2) in each beetle, there was a small jar labeled “Taumoeba Farm,” and it is about a hundred different biologists recruited from across the world’s job to determine what Taumoeba is, how it functions, and how to breed it because (3) written instructions were included explaining that Taumoeba is a natural predator of Astrophage.
Instructions. Dr. Grace wrote instructions for them.
“Can I see them?” Theresa asked, trying not to sound too desperate in front of the leading-minds of the world. “His notes or—Can I just see them?”
Did he hand-write them? Will his handwriting look the same as she remembers it? Will she be able to pull memories of what it looked like scribbled on the top of her tests and essays, when he wrote comments like So interesting! and great work!, or when he would draw a smiley face next to A grades?
“Soon,” Dr. Johannsen returns, guiding Theresa through the winding halls of the building as she carefully unloops her scarf from her throat. “We’ll get started the second everyone’s here but, in the meantime, you have a meeting scheduled.”
The other two scientists they were traveling with have broken off to go elsewhere.
Theresa cocks a brow in confusion, still trailing close to him as she wraps her scarf around her arm to keep it out of her face now that they’ve entered the heated indoors. She prompts, “A meeting? With who?”
Maybe the other researchers who are working on the extraction?
“Right down the hall here,” he says and turns the corner.
That’s not an answer.
She repeats louder, wondering if maybe he misheard her, “Who am I meeting with?”
“The head of our department,” he returns without looking over his shoulder. He takes an uneasy step and frowns thoughtfully. “The head of, uh, well, all the departments, I guess.”
Theresa scoffs in bewilderment at the phrasing, but doesn’t have much more time to reply before she’s being directed to an office door, and Dr. Johannsen is pulling it open for her to step inside. She sends him a puzzled sideways glance before stepping into the large office, still fiddling with her scarf in her hands. She starts to say, what’s this about? but, before she can even fully open her mouth to ask, an older woman with long silvery-blonde hair stands up from the desk across from her.
Theresa’s blood runs as cold as the snow blanketing the ground outside.
“Dr. Cabral,” Eva Stratt greets, gesturing to the seat in front of her desk. “It’s good to have you on board. Dr. Johannsen, you can leave us, if—”
“You.” Theresa can’t form more syllables than that. Her eyes narrow so sharply, like she’s zooming in with a microscope, and she takes a hesitating step further into the room, her stomach rolling over in repulsion. “You.”
It’s all she can think to say. It’s her. Eva Stratt. The woman that Theresa has only seen on TV, in articles, and bad dreams.
Stratt gives her a tight-lipped expression that may have been an attempt at a smile as she slowly sits back down at her desk. It takes her some effort to settle, probably due to the fact that she’s somewhere around sixty-seven now, and age isn’t kind to anyone.
Even Theresa, at thirty-nine, is starting to show signs of arthritis.
She was twenty-eight during Stratt’s trial. It’s been almost a decade.
“It’s good to finally meet you,” Stratt says, waving a hand for Theresa to come sit across from her.
Theresa steps forward but makes no move to sit down. The video is playing on a loop in her head. The sound of Dr. Grace’s voice when he said, sure feels like you’re betraying me. It’s been thirteen years since she first saw it, but it’s never left her mind, never become grainy or difficult to imagine what it looked and sounded like when Dr. Grace was sitting across from Stratt at her desk and saying no to her, and she didn’t listen. When Stratt said that having students wasn’t a good enough reason to stay… that it was insulting for him to even suggest it.
Theresa doesn’t say a word in response, too busy staring at Stratt with a haunted expression. It doesn’t feel like seeing a ghost; it feels like being confronted with a demon.
She hears the door shut behind her with a click as Johannsen leaves, trapping her and Stratt in the room alone together. How long will it take before Theresa starts climbing the bookshelf like he did?
She doesn’t take her eyes off Stratt’s face for a second, even when she winces at the sound of the door closing. It’s like looking at a snake; she doesn’t want to risk a glance away in case it decides to bite.
“I hope you know I didn’t select you for this expedition because of your connection with Dr. Grace,” Stratt says, and there’s an odd softness to her voice when she says his name and a pinch to her forehead like even speaking it out loud causes her the slightest bit of physical pain. “You’ve made yourself one of the foremost experts on astrophage, your article about—”
“Did you really want to meet with me to talk about my research?” Theresa asks.
She’s shocked by the bluntness in her voice. Over the last decade, she has imagined thousands of times what it would be like to stand in front of Eva Stratt… all the things she’d say to her… all the things that that stupid trial never said for her.
Theresa was thirty when the trial finally ended, and Eva Stratt was acquitted of all crimes. A two-year, mostly televised international trial for that. For nothing.
Unprecedented circumstances, the judge had said as reasoning. As though that excused everything she had done. Unprecedented circumstances.
Stratt is regarding her with a measured expression from where she’s seated at her desk, her hands folded over the wood. Her fingers are thin and wrinkled. She shakes her head slowly and replies, “No, there will be plenty of time for that later as you help work with the Taumeoba. I just wanted you to know it wasn’t a personal impulse that brought you here; it was of a professional capacity.” She considers it before she adds, “No one else on the team even knows about your background with Dr. Grace. In fact, I didn’t either until I started looking into your qualifications to select you for this team.”
Theresa licks her teeth and takes a steadying breath through her nose. “That means nothing to me.”
Stratt offers that flat-lipped smile again. “I didn’t expect it to.”
Theresa grinds her back teeth together, knowing tension is appearing in her cheek. “So, are we done here? Now that you’ve told me you want me here because I’m intelligent, not just because I knew a man you killed twenty years ago? Does that check all your boxes?”
Saying she just knew him, somehow, doesn’t feel like enough. It feels like it doesn’t encompass all he was. But, the truth is, she only knew him for a year. She passed him in the hallway when she was in sixth grade, saw him at the school plays, the sports games, and the assemblies… but he only taught her directly for seven months. She really only knew him for seven months. And yet, it’s been all this time and she wants to cry at the mere thought of devaluing him to just some man she knew twenty years ago.
Stratt’s face twitches again, and she says, gesturing her head to the chair in front of her desk, “Come sit down.”
“What’re you gonna do if I say no?” Theresa asks, arching her brows. “Shoot me into space?”
Stratt tilts her head to the side with a soft exhale. She says tiredly, “If you can’t maintain some level of professional behavior, you won’t be a part of this effort, I hope you realize that. I told you it wasn’t personal, and I trust someone of your academic standing to be able to recognize and respect that.”
Promptly, Theresa shuts her mouth. The thought of working beneath Stratt makes her nauseous, but the thought of not being a part of this mission makes her even sicker. Her teeth clench so tightly together that her jaw aches, and she can feel the backs of her eyes burning.
Hurriedly, she blinks the stinging sensation away and glances up at the ceiling to clear the fogginess.
She’s thirty-nine years old, for god’s sake. She isn’t a thirteen-year-old girl anymore, waiting up for a teacher to return who never will. It’s been twenty years since Dr. Grace left, and it’s been over a decade since that horrifying video was released, and eight years since the trial ended, which should have been her form of getting justice, but it wasn’t. And it’s now been less than 24 hours since the four beetles arrived on Earth as proof that Dr. Grace lived.
He lived.
The tears burn harder, painful and embarrassing, and she reaches up in a panic to smooth the heel of her palm across her eyes. She assures, “I can be professional,” which doesn’t feel very convincing when she’s actively fighting back a sob.
Dr. Grace needs her to be professional. She owes it to him to be involved in this project. She won’t ever be able to forgive herself if they take her from it just because she can’t keep her emotions in check.
“Good.” Stratt nods once. She doesn’t seem to actually believe it, but is at least giving Theresa the benefit of pretending she does, regarding the younger woman carefully, eyes slowly scanning over her. “Because now I have something personal to share.”
Theresa’s voice comes out sniffly. “What?”
Stratt turns to the computer that’s been sitting on her desk during their conversation.
“Dr. Grace sent video logs in the beetles alongside the Taumeoba,” Stratt divulges, using her mouse to scroll on her laptop to select something, typing in what Theresa assumes to be her passcode. “And I figured that you may want to see them.”
She glances up at Theresa from her desk through white eyelashes and, for the briefest of seconds, Theresa sees genuine emotion in her heavy face. It looks like pain.
Theresa wipes her cheeks again, stepping forward in a rush. “What?”
Video logs? Video logs? Of him?
Stratt turns the computer toward her, and Theresa can’t stumble into the chair in front of the desk fast enough, clutching the arms of it with white knuckles, leaning toward the screen with gigantic eyes.
The still-frame she’s currently being shown is an astronaut’s bulky red EVA suit from behind in some type of… tunnel? It looks to be made of rock but somehow more metallic, with a bumpy, rigid glass wall dissecting the middle. The astronaut’s hand is raised to knock on it like it’s a door.
“Wh—” She breathes, shaking her head back and forth in disbelief, glancing up at Stratt through red-rimmed eyes. “What is, uh—What?”
“There’s about five hours and thirty-seven minutes of video entries in total,” Stratt explains, glancing around the corner of the screen to see Dr. Grace’s back. The smallest, real smile tilts her lips up at the sight of him. “They’re a bit disjointed. It seems like he struggled to figure out when to film and when not to, but… you can piece things together for the most part.” She looks directly at Theresa. “I can give you about six hours to watch them before we need you to get to work. If you want to watch them, that is.”
Theresa lets out a hard, shuddering scoff. What a stupid fucking question. “If I want to—? Of course I want to. It’s really him, right? They’re— I mean, he really sent these?”
It’s been twenty years. It’s been twenty years since he left. Her head is spinning.
Stratt nods once. “I already watched them all. They’re him.”
Theresa’s wet eyes turn to her in surprise. They only just got the beetles, surely the Taumeoba and written instructions on how to save the world would be more of a priority for someone like Stratt than video diaries of a man she personally stranded in space?
Stratt rolls her lips and says, softly, shakily standing from her chair, “I’m sure he was an incredible teacher. I’m sure. And I…” She sucks in a breath, face firm. “I won’t apologize for the decisions I made, definitely not now. He was the right person for this. And I know his being gone caused you and… many other children grief, but he’s about to save the world. You understand that, don’t you? What he has sent us is going to save the world.” Stratt shrugs softly, walking around the corner of the desk to look at Theresa evenly. “So I give you these videos not as an apology or to atone for whatever sins or crimes you think I’ve committed, but because I want you to see him save the world. Because I think he’d want you to see.”
Theresa stares up at her with wet eyes. Acid turns over in her stomach and rises up the back of her throat. She doesn’t know what to say to that. There aren’t words for any of this. She merely watches Stratt as she turns and heads for the office door, her vision getting blurry at the corners.
“If it’s any comfort to you,” Stratt says as she goes for the door handle, just over her shoulder, in a voice that sounds like it hurts her, “I missed him too.”
She shuts the door behind her when she leaves. Theresa doesn’t know if it’s a comfort or not, to be left alone with these and she doesn’t know if it means anything to her that Stratt missed Dr. Grace.
She isn’t quite sure what she feels for Eva Stratt in this moment… if she loathes her or has found some modicum of respect for her or… what. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know how she feels about any of this. The last day hasn’t felt real. And this—the concept of videos, evidence, proof of life, that he lived—is… It’s world-shattering.
She wishes she had her phone to text someone—anyone—but all personal devices were confiscated upon entry to the building due to the confidential nature of the mission. She honestly doesn’t know who she’d text first or what she’d even say.
She stares at the computer with her breath held in the center of her chest like a knot she’s tied too tightly. She wonders at what point she holds her breath so long she gets lightheaded or passes out. She’s already lightheaded.
A hard breath leaves her mouth, and she closes her eyes, keeps them closed, sucks in a breath, lets it out, sucks in another, lets it out, counts to ten, presses play on the computer, and opens her eyes again to watch.
The first video doesn’t tell her much.
She spends about seven minutes watching the astronaut’s back, and there’s honestly no real evidence it’s Dr. Grace at all; it’s just some astronaut in some weird tunnel. There’s not even sound. Even when he turns around, there’s light reflected on his helmet, so she can’t see his face. Overall, it significantly tanks her excitement about the videos if they’re all going to be like this.
The tears slowly begin to dry, the hope wanes, and she’s left feeling angry and frustrated and, for a moment, she concocts a proposed truth in her mind where these aren’t videos of Dr. Grace at all, they’re just staged videos of astronauts to placate her and make her work more easily with Stratt. That seems like the sort of sick mind game that Stratt would play with her.
And to think, Theresa almost entertained the thought that Stratt was a person with feelings. How easily she can be tricked, she—
“Soo I met an alien.”
The camera has cut to a new day, the inside of the spaceship, and his voice comes through the computer speaker with a sing-song quality to it. Theresa’s eyes focus in on the screen so fast she feels like they might pop out of her skull.
He’s there, on screen, about three inches from the camera, wearing a yellow Blood Milk Moon t-shirt, with his wire-rim glasses slipping precariously down the bridge of his nose. His hair is messy like it always was, and he has a curious, bewildered smile on his face, like even he can’t believe what he’s saying.
Theresa can’t believe what he’s saying. She can’t believe that he’s the one saying it. It’s him. It’s really him. The only time she’s heard him speak in the last twenty years was one video of him sobbing out for help. The only association she’s had with his voice for the last decade is what he sounds like when he’s crying in fear. It’s washed over all the memories of the times he laughed during class, of all the bad jokes he made, of the tenderness he spoke to students with—it was all swept over, and the only thing she’s been able to remember for years is how he sounds when he’s crying.
But, in the video, he’s smiling. He’s smiling bright and genuine and kind as he announces, “He’s kinda growing on me! At least not growing in me, which was a concern for a while.”
The laugh that Theresa lets out is choking. It drags up from of her throat like it shocks her, and she claps a hand over her mouth to catch the sob before it falls out.
She’s so transfixed on Dr. Grace and his chattering as he goes to stand up, carrying the camera with him, that she’s having trouble processing the words he’s saying. It all sort of sounds like static, just the hum of his happy tone. He goes on eagerly, “I’m calling him Rocky because he, y’know, looks like a giant rock. My kids would’ve made fun of how unoriginal I am, but—Listen, okay, science teacher, not English.”
Theresa’s breath catches in her throat hearing him say it, and her bottom lip wobbles. His kids. They were his.
“Anyway, Rocky’s a genius engineer. And if I can’t understand what he’s saying—” he plays with a little spaceship model he’s picked up from a nearby lab table— “He puts on a little puppet show for me and my tiny brain and, y’know what?” He shrugs, still all smiles. “I don’t mind it.”
God, he looks so happy. Theresa’s flushed face is hot and wet because her eyes are finally starting to run—so much for her makeup—and she shakes her head in disbelief, still holding her hand over her mouth as she watches Dr. Grace eagerly tell her about the alien he’s met and—
Wait, what?
The alien he’s met?
Dr. Grace met an alien? A fucking alien? Like actually?
Theresa’s hand slowly starts falling from her mouth as she begins to process the words that Dr. Grace is saying, and as he shows the duct-taped computer he’s made, proudly sharing, “We have 250 words now! All the important ones like ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘bad’ and ‘good’ and ‘astrophage’ and ‘Grace dumb’ and—”
He’s met an alien, and he’s… learning how to communicate with said alien. Alien. Theresa’s brain is repeating it so many times that it’s ceased being a real word. Alien, alien, alien. Dr. Grace met an alien.
Dr. Grace is prattling excitedly about how “Rocky’s” language is a series of different tones, how one would think of music, and how he can recognize some of the words based on the series of notes Rocky peeps out. He explains that Rocky is from a different planet, with a totally different evolutionary line, but somehow, “We ended up with compatible sound ranges! How neat is that?”
Really neat.
It’s all really, really neat.
“I’ve definitely figured ‘bad’ out. And also ‘amaze.’ He likes that one. I bet I’ll be fluent in Eridian in no time,” Dr. Grace says, adjusting his glasses and setting down the duct-taped computer onto the floor. “I took piano when I was in high school, so… shouldn’t be too hard.”
Theresa can’t stop wiping her eyes, trying to collect herself, and failing miserably as her breathing gets cluttered in the office space. It feels like taking a class again. He’s explaining Rocky’s language with an excited light in his blue eyes, and his glasses are sliding down his face, so he has to keep adjusting them as he talks, and he’s teaching her. He’s teaching her again. Should she be taking notes?
“He’s wildly intelligent, he even made me a little tunnel, pressurized it for me, filled it with oxygen—He’s really very considerate.” Dr. Grace adjusts his sleeve, always needing to be moving in some way, his eyes directed to the floor so his glasses start slipping off again. “More considerate than some humans I’ve met, even.”
Theresa scowls immediately. She wonders at what point Dr. Grace is going to acknowledge what was done to him. Or did Stratt already edit out any incriminating comments he may have made?
“And, yeah, astrophage is making his sun die too so, hopefully, he and I can, uh, figure out a way together to save both our worlds.” He looks up over the edge of his lenses with a nervous smile. “It’s nice to have… someone else here.” He wets his lips, and his brow pinches together momentarily. “I’ve been sort of floating by myself in the Tau Ceti system for, uh, a month, maybe? So… it’s nice to finally have someone to bounce ideas off.”
Theresa’s throat clenches. What does he mean floating by himself? Alone? But there were two other astronauts they sent on the expedition with him, why would—
“I do feel kinda bad I didn’t start recording any messages earlier for you, but y’know, there wasn’t a lot of exciting stuff to share when it was just me, uh—When I woke up, Yao and Ilyukhina were already—And they had been for—I don’t know, it—So it’s just been me,” he starts to ramble, taking off his glasses and awkwardly wiping them clean with the hem of his shirt over and over.
Theresa stares, open-mouthed at the screen.
“And I hope their families know that their sacrifice was—It wasn’t for nothing. I’ll make sure it wasn’t for nothing,” Dr. Grace insists, still not looking at the camera, instead focusing on his glasses with a distressed pinch to his face now, and Theresa can hear his voice crack on the word nothing.
It makes a lump form in her throat.
He was alone.
He was sent into space against his will, and he woke up… all alone.
She might be sick.
“But, uh, yeah, it took a while to record because—Again, it was just me doing… Well, it got weird there for a second, I’ll admit that.” He glances up briefly with a crooked smile, like he’s expecting to hear someone laugh. “I mean, it took me a couple of days to even remember my own name. Still not quite sure why I’m here but I’ve got the name!”
Wait. He didn’t—? Holy shit, they roofied him. It all comes together at once. That’s why he’s not upset and lambasting the camera and telling Stratt to go fuck herself. He doesn’t remember.
More bile crawls up the back of Theresa’s throat because they didn’t even let him remember his own name?
He puts his glasses back on and pushes them up the bridge of his nose, now looking into the camera like he’s talking to her, directly to her, and he knows she’s listening, “It’s Ryland Grace, by the way.” He flashes a quirky smirk. “Doctor Ryland Grace. I’m a doctor. Or, well, I’m a middle school science teacher—I got that part before I got my own name, how silly is that?”
He remembered that he was a teacher before he remembered his own name. Of course he did.
“But now, I actually have something worth talking about!” he enthuses. “Alien life! Can you believe that? Intelligent alien life—More intelligent than humans, I think, it’s like Rocky’s whole brain is one big computer; he barely has to think to solve equations that would take me at least ten minutes to solve. I can’t really promise any of these videos to be coherent because—Well, I’m just gonna take them as I take them, y’know, and hopefully they all make sense!”
He rolls his lips and adjusts the way he’s sitting, his smile fading slowly.
“Tonight—or is it today? Time isn’t really normal out here because it’s sort of perpetually night and perpetually day at the same time—Rocky asked me why a school teacher was in space and I had to tell him I didn’t know because I don’t remember.” His smile isn’t really happy anymore. “Y’know how embarrassing that is? To tell the super-intelligent alien you’re saving the world with that you don’t even know why you’re in space?” He sighs. “Yeah, so… really hoping that memory comes back soon… because, right now, I mean, I’m doing my best but… yeah. I don’t really know why my best was the best that… the world wanted. I feel like there’s probably better people to, uh, save the world… than me. But, I’m the one that’s here, so… I’m the one that’s doing it.”
He presses his lips to a flat smile before he leans forward and turns off the camera.
It doesn’t even take a second for the next video to flicker on. He and Stratt were right, he really does only record when he feels like it, so Theresa tries desperately to piece together the series of events as they unfold and, also, tries to remember everything he says as he’s rattling off calculations and describing his plans and giving her an entire crash course on Eridian biology of which he is fascinated and “wishes [he] could spend his whole life studying.”
“And, y’know, I guess I will,” he tacks on, currently in the process of preparing some sort of glass dome in his ship, “seeing as how I’m going to die out here within the year.” He flashes a wide smile over his shoulder at the camera. “Yikes! What a bummer!”
Theresa’s chest hasn’t stopped feeling tight.
In the next video, it seems a bit of time has passed, and Dr. Grace is hiding in the corner wearing a shirt that says “I had potential.” He wears a lot of goofy t-shirts in these video diaries. Theresa has never seen him outside of his work attire—his cardigans and his blazers—so it feels weird to see him dressed down. She could have figured he was a lover of science puns, but it was surprising to find he was a fan of Cats the musical too.
“So. I have a new roommate now.” His glasses are already sliding down his nose. “His eating habits are… exotic. He has incredible hearing. He can see through walls. Personal space,” he hisses, “is at a premium.”
“Who is Grace talking to?” Rocky asks across the room, and Theresa can’t help but laugh aloud. Her cheeks hurt from smiling. Her heart hurts from hurting.
Dr. Grace throws his head back and groans, “There’s no way you can hear me now.”
“Can hear.”
“Can you hear this?”
“Yes. Grace say ‘can you hear this.’”
Dr. Grace whispers, “Can you hear this?”
“Yes.”
“Look at this!” Dr. Grace exclaims, shakily turning the camera around the corner, using his finger to point to Rocky in a hamster ball across the ship, “Look how far away he is! That is where he is!”
“Hello Grace,” Rocky says, “Hello Grace friend.”
Theresa keeps laughing, her heart pounding in her chest. Rocky seems sweet. He and Dr. Grace seem like they’re getting on famously, even if Dr. Grace is pretending to be annoyed. It doesn’t seem like a real annoyance. It’s not like when he would stand at the front of the classroom and roll his lips tightly and say, “I’ll wait,” when one of the boys was being particularly rowdy.
He so rarely got upset with the kids—and he certainly never yelled—so the “I’ll wait” was about as reprimanding as Dr. Grace could get, and it always stunned the whole class into silence.
Sometimes, Dr. Grace uses his Teacher Voice with Rocky. It makes Theresa smile to hear it. She’s losing track of time as she watches the videos; she never knows how many minutes are left, but she doesn’t want them to ever end. She just wants to sit in this office and watch Dr. Grace tell her about aliens and his plans to save the planet for… forever, maybe, would be good.
She’s glad he isn’t alone and that Rocky seems to care about him. Of all the aliens he could’ve met, it seems like Rocky was the best. And, Dr. Grace is right, he seems a lot better than people too.
She especially likes it when Rocky and Dr. Grace sit in front of the camera together and explain their plans, when Rocky makes fun of Grace for being a bad pilot, and that he might “kill all Rocky plural.” They bicker like best friends. She somehow finds it in herself to be surprised when Rocky tries to demand her to speak, waving at the camera with his little claw and saying, “Hello?
Dr. Grace has to tell him that no one is actually talking to them, to which Rocky seems mildly affronted, and then they scuttle off camera to talk about it together, so Dr. Grace turns the recording off.
Theresa wishes she could tell him, I’m here. I’m watching.
She wishes she could tell him about the packed room of eighth graders that all gathered together to stare at a smartboard to see the rocket take off. She wishes she could tell him about the grief counselors and the assemblies and the vigils and the college applications. Theresa, by this point in her life, is wrinkled and shaky, and she’s older now than Dr. Grace was then. She’s thirty-nine years old, watching her thirty-three-year-old teacher ramble to her about aliens and, damn if it doesn’t hurt her brain.
He was only twenty-nine when they shot him into space. She’s already gotten to live a whole extra decade on Earth that he didn’t.
Even with the videos—even with this proof of life, and proof that he saved the world—it doesn’t change the fact that… he didn’t make it home.
There is a brief thirty-minute stint in the videos where it seems like he might. Theresa knows it isn’t true because, if it was, he would be here and Stratt wouldn’t be showing her videos, she’d be showing her a thirty-seven-year-old man that is somehow both older and younger than all of the seventh graders he taught. But he’s not here which means, simply, that he didn’t live to.
For thirty minutes in the video, he says that Rocky gave him enough astrophage to go home, and they went their separate ways. He didn’t record many videos in between the plan to collect the sample from Tau Ceti and the journey home. There were only three, each only a minute or two long, and his eyes were sunken and his hair and temple were blood-stained and there was a cut on the bridge of his nose and a burn on his arm and he limped when he walked.
He spoke in short, nervous sentences, things like, “I don’t know how to get his sample back to Erid so—I really need him to wake up,” and “I think he’s doing better,” and “my back hurts so bad, I’ve been sleeping against that dome for weeks. I don’t know if he’s going to wake up.”
Theresa had started crying the second he showed up on screen covered in dried blood and fresh cuts, and she hasn’t stopped since.
There’s hope when Rocky wakes up, when they go their separate ways, when Dr. Grace starts to “head home,” even though Theresa knows he’ll never get there.
What she does not expect is the reason he doesn’t.
“Rocky’s ship is made of xenonite.”
It was for Rocky. He could have gone home. He could have returned and lived his life and gotten back the years that were taken from him—that Stratt stole from him—but he didn’t. He recorded one last video, all soft smiles and nearly healed injuries, and explained how to make the Taumeoba farm, even though the instructions were already written down, and he rubbed his forearm with his knuckles, and he said, “You were right.”
That’s how the video ends. Six hours of Dr. Grace living in space, and it ends with you were right.
He never talks about being forced into space. He never talks about his fears of death except for “yikes!” and when he realizes he has to turn around for Rocky, he says you were right.
He forgives her. Stratt. For everything she did to him, for sending him into space, how someone might euthanize a dog, for sending him to die, and he… forgives her.
Theresa doesn’t know how she can forgive him for that.
He should be angry, he should be hateful, he should be—
The end of the video is frozen on that final image of him, sitting on the ship, smiling gently with his knuckles touching his arm.
She can picture him at his desk in the classroom, grading papers, his glasses always slipping, his tie always loose by the end of the day, his hair always messy, asking her to remember to put her name on her assignment. How else will I know who did such great work? The fondness that was always displayed in the just softness of his smile.
Theresa stares blankly at the screen—at the frozen image of her teacher grinning at her for the last time. She doesn’t know what happened next. She doesn’t know if he saved Rocky or if he died trying, or what happened after… She doesn’t know what happened in the days and weeks and months and years that followed this recording. It would’ve been a decade ago, wouldn’t it? All this happened years and years ago for Dr. Grace, but she’s only just now seeing it.
She wipes mascara-smudged tears off her cheeks and barely processes the sound of the office door opening.
“Dr. Johannsen wanted to know if—” Stratt stops herself when Theresa turns around. “You might need to clean yourself up first.”
“He forgave you.”
Theresa isn’t quite sure if that’s really the first thing she wanted to say.
And yet, she repeats it, staring at Stratt in what can only be defined as sheer affront, “He forgave you for killing him.”
Stratt’s posture slacks some, and she carefully shuts the door behind her so it’s just Theresa and her and the image of Dr. Grace on the computer screen in a room together. Stratt frowns and carefully walks around the side of the desk to sit across from Theresa, settling painfully into her chair.
She says back, after some long moments of consideration, “It seems like it.”
Theresa asks, quiet and hurt, “How?”
How could he do that? It didn’t even happen to her and Theresa has spent two decades grieving and hating. How can he be the one stranded in space and end six hours of videos—which, likely, was equivalent to a year of his life—with a smile and the words, you were right about someone who killed him?
Stratt merely looks back at her with steady eyes. “I don’t know. I certainly didn’t expect him to.”
Theresa lets out a small, offended scoff and Stratt tracks her features, clearly running her line of sight down the mascara streaks on Theresa’s face.
It sounds like a confession, like the most honest thing she’s ever managed to say. “I don’t think I wanted him to.”
Theresa sucks in a shuddering breath.
“But it was bigger than him and… he knew that.” Stratt gives a small shrug as if to wonder, what else is there to say? “I don’t know if he was scared of dying as much as he was scared of… failing. But, he didn’t. He’s going to save the world. And it was one man’s life versus… everyone’s. And now we know he saved not just one world but two.”
The noise Theresa lets out borders on a sob, and she says, “I can’t thank you for this, I—I can’t. I won’t.”
Stratt doesn’t deserve her thanks, even if these videos are the most important thing that anyone’s ever given her.
Stratt says, “I know. And I also know it won’t sit well with you that these videos will all be destroyed in the next half hour.”
Theresa’s face blanches. “What? You’re going to—You can’t.”
“I have to.”
Theresa’s heart rate is going wild. She can’t be given this gift to just have it snatched away. “Why?”
“Because,” Stratt says with no emotion in her voice, “you and I both know that most of humanity is not as kind as Dr. Grace is, and not everyone would have treated Rocky like a teacher would have.”
Theresa sits back in her chair. She hates when Stratt is right. She shakes her head in a tiny, disbelieving movement. The grief is pouring back in like a faucet that was never turned off, like a dam breaking, like it all starts to drown her again all at once.
“To protect Erid, I think it’s the only viable option,” Stratt says. “And I wanted you to have the chance to see the videos before they’re gone.”
“But what about everyone else?” Theresa can’t stop herself from asking. “What about all the other students who—What about everyone else who deserves to know he lived?”
What about Trang Le, who now works in pharmaceuticals, and couldn’t say anything but what the fuck during the broadcast, and who asked if they’d ever get Dr. Grace’s body back to have a funeral?
What about Abby Meyer, who teaches 8th Grade Geology and hasn’t ridden horses for fifteen years, who said Dr. Grace was in limbo, who gave Theresa the only vocabulary that ever made sense to describe her loss?
What about Michael Whitman, who was the first one to tell everyone in their class about the video, who sat with her in her apartment during the televised trial and broke down crying when the verdict of not guilty came back? What about Michael Whitman, who died of pancreatic cancer three years ago without ever getting to know the beetles came back?
What about all the students who deserved to know that Dr. Grace lived and won’t get to?
“When the story goes public in the coming weeks,” Stratt informs, very cautiously, spelling it all out for her, “it’ll be dressed up quite a bit. No mention of Rocky and Erid. Yao and Ilyukhina families—the ones who are still living, anyway—will be told they helped save the world, and we will show the instructions Dr. Grace handwrote about the Taumeoba to the public as evidence. It will clearly show he ended up coming around and helping them on the mission after all, despite his… initial hesitations.”
Theresa looks up at her through clumpy lashes with bloodshot eyes. His initial hesitations. Like he wasn’t dragged kicking and screaming. No matter the good he did, nothing will ever change the fact that he didn’t want to go. Not to Theresa. She won’t ever be able to look past that.
“They’ll be taught about in history classes and remembered as the people who saved the world,” Stratt tells her, imploring. “Future generations will only get to live because of him. And, for that, I know I made the right decision, whether you and the world forgive me for it or not. I know what I did was right.”
Tears are running hot down Theresa’s face. She wipes her nose hurriedly with her unraveled scarf. She hates that it makes sense, even if she doesn’t want to agree. She hates the feeling of confusion and grief and hatred and acceptance all rolled in to one. She hates that, somehow, she’s placated by the knowledge that even if no one else gets to see the videos, they’ll know that Dr. Grace lived and that he’s the reason Earth will get to live.
She hates that Eva Stratt is right.
“I never needed his forgiveness either.” Stratt offers an uneasy smile and, if Theresa didn’t know better, she might say she could see Stratt’s eyes glistening. “But, still… it’s nice to have.”