Chapter Text
here and now (you and me)
I think if I’d woken up alone on a spaceship with amnesia and two dead bodies, I might’ve gone crazy right there and then. But the good thing about being alive is that you’re never alone.
Phrosie’s the first thing I feel when the computer’s voice harasses me back into consciousness. She’s a warm solid weight on my chest, more familiar than my own heartbeat. She keeps snoozing as I dazedly blink and try to get my bearings, even when I kinda start shrieking and flailing at the crazy robot arms that are waving all over me. When I roll off the hospital bed (?) that I was zipped inside (??) for an induced coma (?!?!), my arms automatically come up to hold her sleeping body.
I scrabble away from the robot arms and look down at what I’m holding. A red fox, smaller than average, who’s starting to twitch her little nose the way she always does before waking up. Phrosie. Euphrosyne. My daemon, my own soul.
I might not know what the heck is going on or where I am, but I know her.
Wait, do I know who I am?
…nope. Not even a little. Okay. That’s not great.
But I’m not panicking. Not even when I find the two dead bodies, cold and daemonless for god knows how many lightyears, that I’ve been sharing a spaceship (!!!!!!!!) with. Because as I press my hands to the glass holding back the starry void I’m lost in, Phrosie finally wakes up.
“Grace,” she mutters sleepily, scrabbling for purchase on my shoulders and nosing into my ear. Then she freezes and looks around. I feel her fur bristling as she takes everything in: spaceship, stars, shared amnesia. “Wait, what the fuck?”
“Hey, language,” I chide her without thinking about it, and then realise – Grace. That’s my name. Ryland Grace. Dr Ryland Grace.
My daemon and I stare at each other for a long moment. Then we stare at the universe outside.
“I think something bad’s happened,” Phrosie whispers.
there and then (dots and dust)
One of the great things about being a middle school teacher is getting to see kids’ daemons in their final stages of development. They’re almost all still shifting, but they’re starting to zero in on forms that feel right to them, as they really figure out who they are. For the kids whose daemons did settle early – like quiet Regina, who I knew from the school counselor was having a pretty rough go of it – I always made sure to compliment their final forms and drop a few relevant cool animal facts. Hey, if telling Regina that her wombat daemon’s animal counterparts poop in cubes is what makes her smile, then the extra hours of animal trivia-hunting after school are totally worth it.
Of course, the other side of teaching preadolescent kids with mostly unsettled daemons is that their daemons are still pretty bad at hiding their emotions. Which was abundantly clear as I explained the Petrova problem to my kids in class. A roomful of goggle-eyed preteens with daemons all trying to shift into the tiniest shapes they could to hide from the future looming over them.
“Mr Grace, how come they have Dust?” Olivia whispered as we all watched the ArcLight probe’s video of wiggling black dots projected on the whiteboard.
“We…don’t know,” I admitted. “I mean, we can tell that they’re carrying Dust with them along the Petrova line. The probe’s filters were able to pick up that much. But we don’t really know yet what these guys are, or if they’re even alive, or all the ways they’re going to affect–”
“I heard that all the crops will die, the economy will free-fall, and half the earth will die of starvation,” Rekha blurted out, to a chorus of worried moans and daemon squeaks. Her own daemon, appropriately, had shifted into a raven the size of her head. Olivia’s usual songbird became a tiny fieldmouse and dove up her sleeve to hide.
I stared out at my kids and swallowed a throatful of bile. Phrosie curled up into a tight, tiny ball underneath my desk.
My kids were going to spend the rest of their lives under a dying sun. No matter how much confidence I tried to project to them, we were on the precipice of the sixth great extinction. The world would already be falling apart before half of their daemons had even settled.
My kids and their vulnerable young souls. A roomful of them, all staring up at me like I had some kind of answer to give them. And in thirty years, half of them could be dead or dust.
here and now (golden records)
“Grace. Ryyyyland. Grace, come on, get up.”
“Go ‘way,” I mutter at my daemon from within the little cave of misery and booze I’ve constructed for myself. She even whipped out the Ryland, jeez, she really must be mad. Ninety-nine percent of the time, she just calls me Grace like God – or at least everybody on Earth except my parents – intended. It’s punny and all. I’m Grace, and she’s named after one of the Graces. Get it? Funny, right? That’s why she’s named after the Grace of merriment and joy, because she’s such a delight, even when I’m trying my darndest to drink until I forget that we’re going to die alone in space.
Phrosie keeps pawing at me when I just want to make the most of my third bag of vodka. Her movements are sloppy, thanks to my drunkenness, but she’s still managed to scoot around the entirety of the ship while I lay here a self-pitying lump of existential dread.
This ship is so small, we realised early on, that there’s almost no discomfort when Phrosie and I at opposite ends of it. She got sick of my pity party early on and went to sulk somewhere else. I could almost pretend that I was completely alone here. That Phrosie wasn’t going to die as soon as I did out here, a corpse and a scattering of Dust sailing on forever through the unfamiliar stars.
“Get up, asshole,” Phrosie was growling at me. She took a mouthful of Ilyukhina’s stolen skirt from around my waist and tugged. “Y’gotta see this. C’mon.”
I didn’t even have the energy to tell her off for her language (why did I have to have a daemon with a sailor mouth when years of teaching kids had made ‘heck’ feel like a dirty word?), let alone to protest. Mumbling and groaning, I let Phrosie drag me by the skirt all the way to a far wall of the Hail Mary I hadn’t examined before.
A wall of plaques. Golden records.
I knew what I was looking at instantly, just like I knew that it wasn’t there for me. These emblems of the Earth were for the time after. In case anyone out there someday found this empty ship floating through the cosmos, long after I was gone. In case there was anyone to find it, and to know that once there was an Earth, not a frozen planet orb iting an eaten star but a bright and living world, whose people had looked up at this ship with the hope that somebody might save them.
I didn’t say anything for a long time. I understood why Phrosie had brought me here.
Her little nose nudged up against my hand. I sniffled and looked down at the object she’d mouthed to shove into my palm.
My little Earth beanbag. Lava.
My daemon put the world in my hand. I felt her twine around my ankles as I stared at the child’s profile carved onto the golden plaque. There was a little songbird daemon perched on their shoulder.
“Okay,” I told Phrosie slowly. “Okay. We’ll do this.”
there and then (victory)
I knew I’d like Carl the second I saw him. Even when he kinda rejected my handshake that one time. It was impossible not to like a guy with a giant boa constrictor daemon draped around his shoulders at all times. Like the world’s most kick-butt feather boa.
“Her name’s Andronika,” Carl said casually after absolutely devastating me in our best-of-three game of duct-tape bowling. Andronika herself had spent this whole hardware store trip snoozing with her head tucked under Carl’s coat collar, but I gave her a little wave anyways.
“Hi, Andronika,” I said, and then the Greek root words section of my brain caught up with the situation. “Wait. Wait a second. Victory of man? Is that actually her name?”
Carl just shrugged as he picked up the aluminum foil packets and tossed them into the cart without even looking back. I gazed after him in awe.
“You are literally the coolest person who ever lived.”
there and then (water-based)
“Just one thing – the entire room is filled with argon, so try not to rip your suit or kink your daemon’s airline. If either of you breath argon–”
“We’ll suffocate without even knowing it’s happening. Yeah, okay,” I grumbled over Phrosie’s indignant yips from within the little pressurized dome she was stuck in. It had been a long time since I’d done labwork requiring this level of PPE, and she was not appreciating revisiting the experience.
Getting to make first contact with alien life took the edge off, though. At least until we found out what the stupid little dots were made out of.
After, I moped over a thermos of ramen in the tunnel while Phrosie ran in around in angry little circles.
“We could still be right,” she argued. “Just because this alien is almost entirely composed of water–”
“Would you just give it up already?” I groaned. “We were wrong, okay? We were wrong and everyone else was right and it sucks.”
Phrosie reared up on her back paws and placed her front legs on my raised knees. “You can’t know that for sure. You saw how similar those little cells are to Earth life. Too similar to be unrelated.”
“So what?”
“So there could still be other life out there that proves us right,” my daemon told me with a feral little grin.
It was an idea that sunk itself deep in my head and stayed there, even after Stratt came into the tunnel to discuss my findings (and admit she was glad I didn’t die, yay!). Even after I joined the Project and my entire life turned into the study of these (ugh) water-based alien lifeforms, Phrosie’s words kept me wondering: what else could be out there? What other life might exist that didn’t conform to our Earth-based expectations?
I thought it was a shame I’d never get a chance to find out.