Chapter Text
For some unknowable reason, by the discretion of whatever power has dragged her here, Olesya is the first to awake.
Her head pounds. Only when she lifts it does she realize that the throbbing pain is originating exactly from where her forehead had been planted against the woodgrain. Ah.
She groans, mumbles some conglomeration of Russian syllables incoherent even to her own brain, and struggles to lift her head. Her face is too close to the desk for her eyes to focus right, and the blurriness of trying to look at something just before her nose is only exacerbating the headache.
For a moment, she wonders if she’d concussed. But as she eventually leans back, using her core to stiffly leverage her whole body like a board, slinging herself sluggishly toward uprightness, the pain indeed abates. Nah; she just hit her head way too hard. She can’t quite get the American trope of falling facedown into a pile of spaghetti out of her mind.
When she finally raises her gaze to examine the room she's in, her stomach drops.
She’d been prepared to see... a few things. Perhaps a handful of judgmental stares from coworkers poorly concealing unnerved, but mostly teasing laughter (she gets as good as she gives). Or, perhaps, a frantic cluster of medical personnel cramming closer to check her vitals; concerned bystanders peeking around white coats, maybe even a flicker of copper hair turning away, having finalized the task that was supervising Olesya’s medical emergency and off to put out a different fire. She imagines Stratt coldly pestering a flustered EMT while she’s wheeled away on a stretcher - Why has my astronaut to-be fainted in her spaghetti after…
…After…
…
…astronaut to-be?
But she…
Late afternoon light is casting the conference room in strips of pale light through open blinds. Documents, mugs, and laptops adorn the table, as is standard. Her feet are on the ground. Her head evidently had fallen to the table, and to raise it had been a fight against gravity. But hadn’t she already…
The air is dry and chilled. The Baikonur’s indoor heating can't combat the sheer aridity of the Kazakh Steppe.
It is a normal day. Olesya has evidently experienced some sort of anomaly, and expects a procedural, normal response. However, when she examines the contents of the room, she sees her coworkers unconscious. Collapsed, sprawled, in various states of disarray.
Coworkers she would never see again. Coworkers she should have… would have… had...
The baffled terror that overtakes her lagging mind quells her lethargy in its tracks. She whips her head to the right, suddenly frantic, and sees where Dr. Lamai is lying motionless, having fallen from her chair to the floor. Yáo has one arm hanging down and his head pillowed in the other elbow. Across the table, Dimitri’s cheek is pressed again the wood where he's slouched forward. Dr. Lokken’s head is buried in her arms.
Of course, their impossible director maintains perfect composure, even in unconsciousness. She’s reclined at the head of the table, tilted only a fraction too far back, and the sideways angle of her face has left a curtain of hair elegantly obfuscating her frozen expression.
She’s breathing, Olesya notices. They’re all breathing.
Only when she stands, heart pounding through her chest, does she see Carl’s facedown body by the door. He too, is breathing, and she lets that fact dull her panic only slightly.
She prides herself on her composure. She has always maintained excellent composure, and she knows it to be among the virtues which led to her selection. But frankly, she feels... scattered.
Gas leak, she wants to think. But she’s breathing, everyone is breathing, and each waking moment is increasing her awareness, not suppressing it. She is no science officer, but that wouldn't make sense.
Targeted attack? But to what end? As far as she can tell, nobody is injured, and nobody is missing, but…
An image strikes her, so vividly that it feels more like a memory: Every document, every mug, every swath of light from the open blinds is resting identically to how it now falls, but with Dr. Grace opposite Stratt. For a moment, she is alarmed by his absence - until with equal certainty, she thinks to herself: He is on his way.
The thought comforts her. And then distresses her twofold.
He is on his way. She knows it to be true. She knows where he will sit.
For what? What had she been doing? Why was she here?
Why was she still on Earth?
Why was she still on Earth.
She sees the Hail Mary, assembled, out the window of the ISS.
She is so scattered.
She feels the final touch she’d received from any human outside her crew - from a near stranger, at that. But he’d laughed with her, teased her, and wished her luck with not only solemnity but with profound graciousness, so she had embraced him through their thick, unmatched EVA suits before he went his way, and she went hers.
She can see the ISS, drifting away. Were they drifting, or was she? It didn’t matter. It would never matter again.
Yáo’s hand on her shoulder.
Her own lips on Grace’s forehead, for once unmarred by a furrowed brow. The most relaxed she’d ever seen him.
Goodnight.
The light of the Sun, even as clouded and dying as it is, suddenly feels blinding. Her knees feel weak. And she is standing on her own two feet like she hasn’t in months, like she hasn’t in years, like she hasn’t in the mere minutes since she’d nonsensically passed out on the conference table. Spaghetti.
She wants to sit back down. She wonders if a nap will fix the scrambled eggs in her brain, or if that’s the gas leak talking.
Instead, Carl twitches, and she is at his side in an instant.
Nobody seems especially eager to share their individual delusions with the class. Perhaps it is Yáo’s unique breadth of them, shared only by his present crewmate, which makes him more willing to speak his mind. His scattered flickers of non-chronological, impossible memories are, at the very least, confined to the plausible and immediate future.
Ilyukhina is leaning far across the table to lowly mutter to Dr. Lokken, who has only just pried herself to wakefulness and is now staring at her with wide, unseeing eyes. Dr. Lamai is unreadable as she waves a finger in front of a dazed Carl, who only by collective effort had been settled into an open chair. Dr. Komorov is resting his head on steepled hands, obscuring all but his eyes. He is squinting at the table as if it might have anything to offer him, brow creased deeply in concentration. Dr. Grace presents as nothing more than a glaring absence.
The Director is awake. She is also utterly silent.
Collective conversation had reached a pattern: it would arise, it would split off into pairs, it would reemerge as each leading official of Project Hail Mary awoke in turn, it would die into silence, and on it went. Nothing substantial was achieved or declared. Sparse speculations as to the nature and consequences of their baffling circumstances were pointed out, and promptly disproven. Throughout all of it, Stratt remains silent, eyes tracking the speaking voices far too slowly, more reminiscent of an unmanned security camera than a person.
Yáo has no way of knowing if his disclosure will be entertained. Will he be believed? Will his peers silently listen, then proceed as if he’d said nothing for their own peace of mind? Will he be promptly barred from the project on the basis of insanity? It would be reasonable - but impossible. They had just lost a third of their trained crew. And despite the competence of his secondary, Yáo knows he was chosen first by a decent margin. He will not be barred from Project Hail Mary up to and until he begins shouting obscenities and attempting to strangle his coworkers, and even then, Stratt might still turn a blind eye.
It's certainly hard to imagine Stratt doing much administration, now: she looks vacant in a way Yáo had never been prepared to witness. Although, to be fair, he had never expected to witness anything on her again. A room of bureaucracy, astronauts, and the most brilliant scientists the world had to offer, and they were all staring vacantly at each other, at their hands, at the walls, at the light beaming across the room and refracting through glass. Even Ilyukhina, the warm, playful glue that holds their team together, who brings laughter and stability through their worst trials with only her presence and unshakeable demeanor, appears - well, shaken. Truthfully, the world seemed to have turned upside-down. Both in his own non-chronological mind, and in the scene he now faces.
It is this thought, and the incomprehensibility of the reactions he observes, which finally brings words to his lips.
He loosely raises a hand - really just two fingers - but the entire room shifts to face him, desperate for anyone's insight. Into the abrupt silence, he speaks before he can question himself further.
“I am experiencing memories of boarding the Hail Mary, and of beginning our mission.”
Before silence could so much as creep into the ensuing pause, Ilyukhina has already spoken.
“Me as well.”
The look she fixes him with is indefinable. She looks alarmed, and disturbed, and overwhelmed. And perhaps Yáo is merely projecting, but he can’t help but read profound relief in the lines of her brow. All beneath a mask of rare professionalism, hanging on by a thread.
He feels all the same, and feels it echoed on his own face. He hopes she receives it.
“...I remember launching to the ISS,” she continues, slower than he’s heard her speak in months, “and not from a past launch of mine. I remember, you…” she flicks her eyes around the room in restless glances, not focusing on one person for too long. “...Many of you… being there. You saluted, Dimitri,” she adds, then seems to remember that her own glass is among those scattered across the table. "...Russian salute. Proper salute." She barely lifts her vodka to him with a nod and a quirk of a smile. It vanishes almost immediately. Dr. Komorov does not smile, but he does blink a few times, as if only just teetering into reality.
The ice cubes in her vodka are as whole and unmelted as they were then; perhaps always have been.
“...I saw you through Soyuz window,” she mumbles. Yáo is starting to feel breathless. “I did not know if you knew. That I saw.”
Finally, silence reigns. Dr. Komorov is biting his lip. If Yáo is not mistaken, it may have been trembling. He cannot blame the man. Various pointed glances seem to be going around again; Lokken to Lamai, Carl to Komorov; Communication is key, he wants to chastise. You cannot expect to get anything done without communication. Or, even more aptly, you cannot expect to get anything done by mutually indecipherable wide-eyed stares back and forth.
None of the responses observed over the last few minutes have made any sense, so Yáo finally pushes down his instinct to predict the reactions before they can come. He wants to prepare for accusations of insanity and impossibility, or for a scientific breakdown of how premonition may or may not be possible, or for a chorus of five voices in perfect unison to proclaim “Us too!” - but whatever truly happens, he knows will feel unprepared for it anyway. His agonizing is therefore moot. (He supposes that too is a new feeling to prepare for.)
It feels like minutes of silence elapse before she speaks. In reality, it is surely mere seconds. It is no less jarring to hear the voice of Eva Stratt once more.
“What is the last thing you remember?”
Ilyukhina nods at Yáo; wordlessly offers him the floor.
“I remember observing Ilyukhina’s initiation of her medically-induced coma. This was…” he feels his blurry memories actively focusing as he voices them, “...nine days post engine start. We accomplished our assigned launch tasks on schedule, including close supervision of Dr. Grace’s ongoing coma. We remained active for three more days, which was within our recommended window.
“Ilyukhina endured no complications, as recorded by me and the medical robot. Exactly twenty-four hours later, I initiated my own medical coma.”
He nods firmly, projecting what confidence he can muster: “This is what I remember. And now I am here.”
Does he remember being comatose? He doesn’t remember dreaming, or hearing, or experiencing anything at all. This was predicted by Dr. Lamai. And yet, he feels as though sharing one last hug, putting Ilyukhina to sleep, brushing her hair like he would his own daughter's… Boarding their new home and Ark and tomb, saluting the ISS astronauts as they parted… The fiery propulsion of the Soyuz, how the world of the Baikonur was engulfed within seconds by the opening expanse of the globe, carefully stabilizing Dr. Grace’s head when the restraints seemed too loose under the violent G-forces…
…It all feels like lifetimes ago. Perhaps it was. There was a vast and immaterial gap between then and now. It was transcendental and profoundly vacant, and every time he tries to turn his mind toward it, it shrinks to mere minutes, or yawns wide open like the vacuum of space into years, and years, and years, and years, and years.
“You do not remember reaching Tau Ceti.”
When Stratt speaks, it is not a question. He has never heard such a tone in her voice, and still, he lacks the ability to decipher it. It is not confusion. It is not quite disdain, nor disappointment. It is somewhere to the left of anything he could imagine her feeling.
“No.”
Ilyukhina shakes her head in silent agreement.
A ripple goes through the room. Yáo does not know why, but he feels his heart drop.
No… he knows why.
He knows the feeling before he comprehends the reality of it.
He closes his eyes. He does not lean back. He does not put his head in his hands, or whisper, or pinch the bridge of his nose like he knows his peers to be doing. He sits poised, and rigid, and clasps his hands on the table, and he closes his eyes because there is nothing more he wants to see.
None of this makes sense, no. But Yáo is not a scientist, and the current state of things is not his duty to substantiate or explain. Regardless of the impossibility of it all: The nonsense in his mind, of his peers, of this surreal room; it's coming together, and it's painting a picture. And stronger still than anything further deduction or explanation may provide, he knows the feeling in his stomach.
It feels like failure.
He has failed.
And with that, so has everyone else.
Carl had locked every memory of Project Hail Mary away in a box, and let it collect dust in the back of his mind.
Sure, some snuck out. Memories crept forth in snippets of laughter, or glimpses of unfathomable bravery, or in memories of conversations he was meant to pretend he’d never overheard.
Moments would come back to him in the shapes of petri dishes, or private jets, or rainbows.
He plugged the leaks where he could. Project Hail Mary was not the first chapter of his life he'd tucked so far away; far enough to sometimes pretend that, just maybe, he had forgotten its contents.
It wasn’t the first. It was, however, the last.
In a way, he wonders if he might have been more prepared for the onslaught of memories than anyone else in the room. Alternatively, he is perhaps uniquely unprepared. He watches Commander Yáo remember as he speaks. In real time, Carl witnesses clarity eclipse confusion across expressions throughout the room. (He is a good observer. It had been useful, once.) Even as he watches them reflect, he holds true to his pattern decades in the making, and he does his best to forget.
His head hurts. He hit it when he fell; it makes sense.
...His hip hurts.
His hip had never hurt, not before--
His hip had never hurt during his time in the Baikonur. And upon drawing unwillingly from glimpses of impossible memories he refuses to acknowledge - well, call it a guess: His hip shouldn’t be hurting like this. Not for a long time.
It's a reasonable guess. He's young enough. It doesn't need to be preternatural in nature, to know the sudden and unwarranted bone-deep aching was... wrong.
Windows shattering, the staggering force behind an expanding airbag, the sound of a deep, wet, snap, felt more than heard--
It doesn't need to be preternatural in nature.
He tries to forget, but despite his feelings on the matter, there are far too many memories emerging for him to turn away from them all. And Ilyukhina continues to speak, and every word evokes a new cascade of context he should not possess. Even without processing through the thoughts of Project Hail Mary’s after, he finds that the memories are already waiting.
The room is quiet in the wake of Yáo’s explanation.
Neither Commander Yáo Li-Jie nor Specialist Olesya Ilyukhina ever made it to Tau Ceti. He has to guess that’s what had happened. Clearly, it is what Yáo is guessing as well. His face is still, but even he in his stoicism can’t quite conceal the twitching of his eyes or jaw. Not from Carl. He watches Ilyukhina’s hand reach for her Commander’s clasped ones. When Yáo shifts to squeeze back, Carl finally averts his eyes.
He rests his head in a hand. When he shifts, his hip sends a little jolt of pain down his leg. He’d been instructed to get a replacement, but never did.
“I remember the launch of the Hail Mary, да,” Dr. Komorov breaks the silence. “I remember following years, too.” He leans back abruptly, and gestures indistinctly toward the larger room: “Is it appropriate to assume I am not alone in this?”
Vague, affirmative hums. Nods. Eye contact; averted eyes. Ilyukhina has scooted her chair up to Yáo to throw an arm around his shoulder. Yáo’s impassive decorum has been superficially restored as he watches Dr. Komorov calmly, even as Ilyukhina’s head remains bowed low. Carl doesn’t let himself think about it when he nods along in agreement, just once. Ever obedient.
Stratt’s eyes are closed. It reads as an affirmative.
He recognizes the sweater she’s wearing.
“Thank you, Dr. Komorov. Can anybody share with me the latest date they remember experiencing?” says Stratt. The ensuing quiet is blissfully contemplative, rather than haunted or awkward.
“I remember March 20th, 2052. I was in Grigorovo; is in Novgorod Oblast. I visited my daughter’s family for the Spring Solstice,” offers Komorov.
“March 30th, 2052,” says Lokken. “Total Solar Eclipse.”
Another pause. Stratt is nodding amicably, and as she turns her gaze to the rest of them, seeking answers, she appears somewhat more present than she previously had. Carl can’t help but feel vaguely relieved. When he recognizes the positive feeling, it shifts abruptly closer to nausea.
“Ah…” Dr. Lamai hesitates, and Carl can’t help but brace himself. “My nephew's birthday. His fourth. It was in December, 2048.”
The quiet that follows feels a bit like being crushed. Still, it only lasts a moment - every pair of expectant eyes has turned to him. He clears his throat. He hasn’t spoken in…
In…
“October 4th, 2044,” he says.
Dr. Komorov’s face is back in his hand. Carl does not turn to see Dr. Lamai’s face.
The corner of Stratt’s mouth twitches. Carl doubts anyone else in the room could have accurately perceived the show of emotion. There was likely only one person in the universe better than him at reading her.
As expected, her voice is only just short of impassive when she speaks again.
“I remember January 11th, 2052.”
Eva Stratt peers down at a document - and the angle of her unaged face, the light haloing her hair with painful vibrance, the imperceptible shift in sunlight that causes the glass nearest her to refract like a prism and cast a rainbow onto the surface of the table; it all coalesces in a shining and wretched moment of deja vu. And Carl wants to throw up, and he recognizes her sweater, and he recognizes the conference room as much as he had the moment he woke up here, as much as he has for every day of his abridged life since he sat here twenty years ago, and he tries to forget and he remembers and remembers.
What should be so wretched about a rainbow? He tucks the thought back in its box before it can get its footing.
She's reading off whichever file had been waiting at her place, but he doesn’t need to listen to her expositing for the ‘sake of comparison;’ he's known today's date since well before she spoke at all. Stratt at the head of the table, Lokken and Komorov to her left, Yáo, Ilyukhina and Lamai to her right. Carl had woken up by the door. The opposite head of the table is still empty, halfway pulled out like an invitation or a trap.
“Twenty years,” summarizes Yáo. “It has been twenty years since we sat in this room.”
The astronauts look disquieted. They look mournful, sorrowful, remorseful. Self-pitying, Carl thinks with uncharacteristic acrimony. They do not look haunted. They do not look repulsed or aghast. His eyes flicker around the room, evaluating. Nobody does.
For all their avid remembering, everyone surrounding Carl seems blissfully forgetful.
Do they even remember what happened here? Do they even care?
Of course not. They wouldn’t.
What should be so wretched--
His glare snaps toward Stratt, and she’s already meeting his eyes.
The conversation around them goes fuzzy. Yáo is discussing their presumed deaths in transit - discussing failure. Komorov is perhaps comforting, perhaps analyzing. Lokken is brooding and Lamai is theorizing, or apologizing, or mourning, and none of it matters.
There is emotion in Stratt's eyes. There is surely some sanctimonious attempt at nonverbal communication. None of it matters.
Despite the stipulations of his former field of work, Carl has never felt inclined toward violence.
He still hopes she's suffering.
How many times can one man forget? How many times can he remember?
“Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it--”
His hip hurts.