Chapter Text
10 minutes to the first period bell, Grace booted up the PC and considered his not-insignificant collection of flash drives. Humble antiques of a bygone era of popular conference swag, some with frankly shocking storage capacities - 32gbs, 64bgs, a terabyte? Who needs a USB jump drive with a terabyte of storage in this day and age? He fished his finger around the transparent teal Spacemaker - even more antique than the flash drives - until he located the drive he needed by sensation of its’ cold, brushed-aluminum swivel case. A strip of pink gaff tape covered over the scuffed UNESCO logo and read, ‘POS. CULTURES’.
Upon plugging it in, the drive partition automatically popped up. He jostled the mouse to click any file, which prompted the media player - God’s own Winamp, with his coveted MilkDrop visualizer plug-in - to materialize on the overhead, casting the white board at his back in a chromatic oscilloscope. From the corner of his eye, he could see Henry flinch at his desk. He leaned over to the soundbar and adjusted the volume knob to mitigate the sudden kick of Lady Gaga coming through sharp enough to rattle his dental fillings.
The whole folder was filled with whatever songs the kids requested - this drive was specifically pop - but not before assembling a playlist for review. What kind of educator would he be if he allowed an errant Thong Song to slip through? Grace couldn’t let the administrators know he knew who Sisqo was. He knew that they knew who Sisqo was. But his gen alpha students for sure did not. They had enough ancillary musical knowledge to know who Taylor Swift was, and that his classroom was a Taylor Swift free zone.
He was doing the music teachers a favor, really.
By this point, Henry had resettled, and was having an animated conversation with Vincent and Finley about Legos. Or Bat-Man. Did he say Lego Bat-Man? He had no clue what that could possibly mean. 5 minutes to the first period bell and the classroom was filling in with his homeroom. Isla was still out with a cold, and he had received an email half an hour ago from Solana’s mother about an orthodontist appointment. He bounced to the rhythm of Abracadabra as he filled in his attendance roster.
He picked the mic up off his desk and flicked the power switch, bringing it up and letting his lips muffle the sound as he mashed his mouth against the grille.
“Good morning, Chat!” He called out, slipping a pair of sunglasses over his normal glasses. Natalie, front row to his antics, laughed. Good, she had been down lately about her dog passing. “Welcome back to my channel!”
“Good Morning Mr. Dr. D.J. Grace!” A clustered chorus of seventeen 12 year olds replied. Almost everyone had arrived. The Winamp shifted into the last song for the morning, yet another Gaga track. Maybe he had been heavy handed with the Gaga.
“Lady Gaga is so brat mother slay,” He sighed, slipping a second pair of sunglasses onto his face, “Can I get a skibidi, my little sigmas?”
“No, Mr. Grace!” They cried. They could fill their insulated tumblers with their tears. Gaga was indeed brat mother slay.
“Very aesthetic. Aura-coded. The glow up is giving light work, fam.”
“Stoop!”
He clicked the box next to Quinn’s name as they rushed to their seat, completing his roster of nineteen for the day. He cued up the day's Cymatics presentation - homeroom would go straight into Earth Science - and started to bring the students to attention.
“Two minutes to the bell, slime farmers. You know what that means - who's got a science question?”
“How do magnets work?” Aliyah called out from the back, her hand in the air.
“Nice try; no one knows. What else?”
“What’s heavier - a pound of bricks or a pound of feathers?” Finley tried.
“They fall the same in a vacuum, Fin. Galileo Galilei was the O.G. GOATmax. You’ll learn about him in Physics next year.”
“Mr. Grace, do you have a girlfriend?” Aria called out, which resulted in a cascade of laughter and jeering. Grace, despite four years of practice, was blindsided by this blow and floundered to come up with a rejoinder.
“Uh,” He gurgled into the microphone, an idiot wearing three pairs of glasses, “No, I do not.”
This was wildly insufficient, as a tide of laughter and complaint surged again, threatening to push him into the whiteboard - a fate he welcomed. Maybe he would get swallowed by his beloved MilkDrop. Lady Gaga screamed ‘death or love’. He was for sure choosing death.
“Why not.” Aliyah demanded. He was pretty sure she was an only child.
“Oh, uh, I’m too busy teaching you guys.” He attempted, surging for the knob on the soundbar to slowly turn the song down.
“Ms. Kim has a girlfriend and she teaches math.”
“What inferences are you making about math and science?” He murmured into the microphone.
“Math is hard.”
The bell rang.
“Did you hear that, Chat?” He announced, “Math is hard.”
“Math is hard!” The children chorused.
“And science is easy.” He nodded and held out the mic.
“YES!”
Every once in a while, Grace thought himself capable of being a little wicked. With a click, he cued up a different slideshow and said, “Looks like Chats asking for… a pop quiz.”
-
Grace did not believe in ghosts, but he knew he was haunted by the spectre of his former life. His time on the team that had discovered the sun-eating algae and amoeba that kept that same population in check has been revolutionary. Breathtaking even - if breathtaking was a tidy euphemism for endless months of nerve-frying anxiety and exhaustion, occasionally punctuated by dazzling invention and revelation.
They couldn’t strip him of his accomplishments but they could, and certainly had, put him under an anti-trust suite to ensure that he couldn’t pick up his hard-earned knowledge and take it with him to another, less inquisitive institution.
Blackballed out of academia and unemployed on the edge of 40 was Dr. Ryland Grace, the villain of the UNESCO General Session.
He put his life into that team and the head of the program fired him without review. He didn’t have money or the emotional bandwidth for a lawsuit so he tucked his tail and dove for the next fox hole. He found unexpected joy in teaching middle schoolers. It was so rewarding but some days he couldn't help but feel the phantom limb of his old life.
He wasn’t having a pity party.
He was having an awesome party, with telescopes and science!
The little balcony of his third story apartment had just enough standing room for him and his not-so-little Celestron given to him by his former team when they learned the astromicrobiologist was rawdogging it with a pair of binoculars and a Nikon. It now stood sentinel in his living room next to a vintage tanker desk and pair of filing cabinets where a couch should ideally be.
When the sun sank below the horizon, Grace carefully plunked the tripod into place and fiddled with the remote to get a look at Venus. Low on the eastern horizon and scintillating like a violet diamond, its surface teeming with astrophage and killer-amoeba. He turned to the interface set up to his camera, flickered the shutter for infrared function and snapped a photo. The whole surface illuminated in a shower of glittering red. The incredible truth of alien life right there, just beyond the visible light spectrum. He deleted the photo and repositioned the barrel.
With an apparent magnitude of 3.73, Epsilon Eridani was the third closest individual star and easily seen with the naked eye. The limiting magnitude of the telescope (a not inconsiderable max of 14) captured its light readily, but the inner asteroid belt had eluded him for weeks. He had an endless list of obstacles to account for - atmospheric interference, light pollution, the weather, diffusion from clouds of radioactive interstellar medium, light bent by magnetic fields from stars or blackholes, or even just the blurry grit of cosmic dust. Grace fiddled with the remote, adjusting the barrel by incremental degrees, carefully fishing for field factor.
Brittany Spears was an obvious choice for accompaniment. Oops!... I Did it Again was an evergreen album in his opinion, and he had been considering sprinkling it into the pre-test pump up playlists. So he was a sucker for self-empowerment - everyone loved Brittany Spears! His kids were going to be pop music cognoscentes by the end of the year.
A breeze rustled through the nearby trees, sending a delighted shiver down his back as he bent over his viewfinder and crawled his way through the Eridanis constellation. The ‘everything Brittany’ playlist shifted to another track and Grace sighed against the sudden influx of bittersweet emotion it bubbled up.
His loneliness wasn’t killing him, but it was a little heavy sometimes.
Okay, so maybe this was a pity party.
He could multitask.
Grace leaned over to skip the song and turned his head when a flash of light caught his eye. His apartment complex butted up to a residential neighborhood of small, single family homes. He would occasionally see people walking their dogs in the early morning or late afternoons, or a child bouncing on a netted trampoline. The house closest to his building was a quaint ranch home with a diagonally-laid deck dotted with picturesque potted plants. The flash was the light behind the glass sliding door turning on, which illuminated the figure of a man stepping out of his kitchen and onto the deck. Grace blinked down at the figure, watching without purpose. He was being nosy but he had lived in the same unit for nearly three years and never seen the houses’ occupant.
The man was reasonably tall, and dressed in a boiler suit. He carried with him a watering can which he proceeded to use to tend to his plants. Grace wondered what the plants were. He wondered if the man, given his wardrobe, had built the deck himself. If he angled the nine-inch barrel of his telescope down and re-adjusted the focal depth, he could probably see the brand tag on his coveralls or the color of his eyes.
Grace banished the intrusive thought as readily as it had presented itself to him. Turning a telescope on your neighbor was what perverts did.
Just as he had resolved to get back to his search for an interstellar asteroid belt, the man looked at him.
Grace stared back in abject horror, caught in his terrible act of mutual observation.
He was the worst kind of nosy neighbor, a telescope pervert, a police report away from a restraining order that would look absolutely fantastic plastered over the inch-thick lawsuit that got him here in the first place.
Brittany cheered him on in the background, full of teenaged optimism in G-sharp major.
Then the man waved at him.
“I need to be normal,” Grace whispered to himself and lifted his hand to wave back. It was too dark to see if the man smiled, backlit as he was in the warm light of his kitchen, but his body language seemed happy enough.
Then, inconceivably, the man pointed directly at him.
“Oh my god.” He murmured, at a loss of what to do. He jerked a thumb at the telescope - the four-foot tall, five-thousand dollar piece of equipment that could both capture the planetary disk of Titan and make even the most well-meaning middle grade science teachers look like the neighborhood reprobate. Maybe he was curious about that. Who, in the interest of their privacy, wouldn’t be? “Do you mean this? Are you worried about this?”
The man shook his head, leaned down and grasped his own pantleg, shook it, and pointed at him again.
Grace squinted back. What about his pant leg was so important? He must have taken too long to respond because the man held up a finger in a large gesture and disappeared into his house. After a minute, he returned and held up his hand again. Grace leaned over the rail and squinted, adjusting his glasses as they slid down his nose. He was holding something.
At which point, that man reared back and threw it.
Grace panicked as he watched the arc of the mystery cylinder - it was a cylinder, which meant it was improbably a bomb, but there was always a chance - and, despite his imagined reputation as a pervert, he reached out over the rail and caught it with both hands.
The man threw his hands up and cheered - too far away to hear what he said, but loud enough to know he said something. Grace held up the object in reflected victory - cold, a little wet - it was a can of soda.
Glancing at it, it proved to be a can of soda water specially, and unflavored at that. Beneath his hand was a piece of 2-inch, green masking tape, across which was written in neat hand-writing, ‘You’re not wearing pants”.
Grace had already experienced the end of his life. The abrupt conclusion of his academic career had resulted in a brief yet profound spiral into oblivion. Despite this, Grace was sure that in this moment, he had truly reached rock bottom. He glanced down at his legs - at his bare legs, at his green boxer briefs that would have been undetectable beneath a pair of sweatpants that were lying across his bedspread and not on his body - and then back up at his 200 millimeter aperture telescope and at his cellphone where Brittany Spears announced, “This is a story about a girl named Lucky,”.
When he glanced back up, the man had disappeared and the kitchen light was off.
-