Project Hail Mary / Проект «Да здравствует Мария» (by Andy Weir, 2021) - аудиокнига на английском

“W hat’s two plus two?” Something about the question irritates me. I’m tired. I drift back to sleep. A few minutes pass, then I hear it again. “What’s two plus two?” The soft, feminine voice lacks emotion and the pronunciation is identical to the previous time she said it. It’s a computer. A computer is hassling me. I’m even more irritated now. “Lrmln,” I say. I’m surprised. I meant to say “Leave me alone”—a completely reasonable response in my opinion—but I failed to speak. “Incorrect,” says the computer. “What’s two plus two?” Time for an experiment. I’ll try to say hello. “Hlllch?” I say. “Incorrect. What’s two plus two?” What’s going on? I want to find out, but I don’t have much to work with. I can’t see. I can’t hear anything other than the computer. I can’t even feel. No, that’s not true. I feel something. I’m lying down. I’m on something soft. A bed. I think my eyes are closed. That’s not so bad. All I have to do is open them. I try, but nothing happens. Why can’t I open my eyes? Open. Aaaand…open! Open, dang it! Ooh! I felt a wiggle that time. My eyelids moved. I felt it. Open! My eyelids creep up and blinding light sears my retinas. “Glunn!” I say. I keep my eyes open with sheer force of will. Everything is white with shades of pain. “Eye movement detected,” my tormenter says. “What’s two plus two?” The whiteness lessens. My eyes are adjusting. I start to see shapes, but nothing sensible yet. Let’s see…can I move my hands? No. Feet? Also no. But I can move my mouth, right? I’ve been saying stuff. Not stuff that makes sense, but it’s something. “Fffr.” “Incorrect. What’s two plus two?” The shapes start to make sense. I’m in a bed. It’s kind of…oval-shaped. LED lights shine down on me. Cameras in the ceiling watch my every move. Creepy though that is, I’m much more concerned about the robot arms. The two brushed-steel armatures hang from the ceiling. Each has an assortment of disturbingly penetration-looking tools where hands should be. Can’t say I like the look of that. “Ffff…oooh…rrrr,” I say. Will that do? “Incorrect. What’s two plus two?” Dang it. I summon all my willpower and inner strength. Also, I’m starting to panic a little. Good. I use that too. “Fffoouurr,” I finally say. “Correct.” Thank God. I can talk. Sort of. I breathe a sigh of relief. Wait—I just controlled my breathing. I take another breath. On purpose. My mouth is sore. My throat is sore. But it’s my soreness. I have control. I’m wearing a breathing mask. It’s tight to my face and connected to a hose that goes behind my head. Can I get up? No. But I can move my head a little. I look down at my body. I’m naked and connected to more tubes than I can count. There’s one in each arm, one in each leg, one in my “gentlemen’s equipment,” and two that disappear under my thigh. I’m guessing one of them is up where the sun doesn’t shine. That can’t be good. Also, I’m covered with electrodes. The sensor-type stickers like for an EKG, but they’re all over the place. Well, at least they’re only on my skin instead of jammed into me. “Wh—” I wheeze. I try again. “Where…am…I?” “What’s the cube root of eight?” the computer asks. “Where am I?” I say again. This time it’s easier. “Incorrect. What’s the cube root of eight?” I take a deep breath and speak slowly. “Two times e to the two-i-pi.” “Incorrect. What’s the cube root of eight?” But I wasn’t incorrect. I just wanted to see how smart the computer was. Answer: not very. “Two,” I say. “Correct.” I listen for follow-up questions, but the computer seems satisfied. I’m tired. I drift off to sleep again. — I wake up. How long was I out? It must have been a while because I feel rested. I open my eyes without any effort. That’s progress. I try to move my fingers. They wiggle as instructed. All right. Now we’re getting somewhere. “Hand movement detected,” says the computer. “Remain still.” “What? Why—” The robot arms come for me. They move fast. Before I know it, they’ve removed most of the tubes from my body. I didn’t feel a thing. Though my skin is kind of numb anyway. Only three tubes remain: an IV in my arm, a tube up my butt, and a catheter. Those latter two are kind of the signature items I wanted removed, but okay. I raise my right arm and let it fall back to the bed. I do the same for my left. They feel heavy as heck. I repeat the process a few times. My arms are muscular. That doesn’t make sense. I assume I’ve had some massive medical problem and been in this bed for a while. Otherwise, why would they have me hooked up to all the stuff? Shouldn’t there be muscle atrophy? And shouldn’t there be doctors? Or maybe the sounds of a hospital? And what’s with this bed? It’s not a rectangle, it’s an oval and I think it’s mounted to the wall instead of the floor. “Take…” I trail off. Still kind of tired. “Take the tubes out….” The computer doesn’t respond. I do a few more arm lifts. I wiggle my toes. I’m definitely getting better. I tilt my ankles back and forth. They’re working. I raise my knees up. My legs are well toned too. Not bodybuilder thick, but still too healthy for someone on the verge of death. I’m not sure how thick they should be, though. I press my palms to the bed and push. My torso rises. I’m actually getting up! It takes all my strength but I soldier on. The bed rocks gently as I move. It’s not a normal bed, that’s for sure. As I raise my head higher up, I see the head and foot of the elliptical bed are attached to strong-looking wall mounts. It’s kind of a rigid hammock. Weird. Soon, I’m sitting on my butt tube. Not the most comfortable sensation, but when is a tube up your butt ever comfortable? I have a better view of things now. This is no ordinary hospital room. The walls look plastic and the whole room is round. Stark-white light comes from ceiling-mounted LED lights. There are two more hammock-like beds mounted to the walls, each with their own patient. We are arranged in a triangle and the roof-mounted Arms of Harassment are in the center of the ceiling. I guess they take care of all three of us. I can’t see much of my compatriots—they’ve sunken into their bedding like I had. There’s no door. Just a ladder on the wall leading to…a hatch? It’s round and has a wheel-handle in the center. Yeah, it’s got to be some kind of hatch. Like on a submarine. Maybe the three of us have a contagious disease? Maybe this is an airtight quarantine room? There are small vents here and there on the wall and I feel a little airflow. It could be a controlled environment. I slide one leg off over the edge of my bed, which makes it wobble. The robot arms rush toward me. I flinch, but they stop short and hover nearby. I think they’re ready to grab me if I fall. “Full-body motion detected,” the computer says. “What’s your name?” “Pfft, seriously?” I ask. “Incorrect. Attempt number two: What’s your name?” I open my mouth to answer. “Uh…” “Incorrect. Attempt number three: What’s your name?” Only now does it occur to me: I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I do. I don’t remember anything at all. “Um,” I say. “Incorrect.” A wave of fatigue grips me. It’s kind of pleasant, actually. The computer must have sedated me through the IV line. “…waaaait…” I mumble. The robot arms lay me gently back down to the bed. — I wake up again. One of the robot arms is on my face. What is it doing?! I shudder, more shocked than anything else. The arm retracts back to its home in the ceiling. I feel my face for damage. One side has stubble and the other is smooth. “You were shaving me?” “Consciousness detected,” the computer says. “What’s your name?” “I still don’t know that.” “Incorrect. Attempt number two: What’s your name?” I’m Caucasian, I’m male, and I speak English. Let’s play the odds. “J–John?” “Incorrect. Attempt number three: What’s your name?” I pull the IV out of my arm. “Bite me.” “Incorrect.” The robot arms reach for me. I roll off the bed, which is a mistake. The other tubes are still connected. The butt tube comes right out. Doesn’t even hurt. The still-inflated catheter yanks right out of my penis. And that does hurt. It’s like peeing a golf ball. I scream and writhe on the floor. “Physical distress,” says the computer. The arms give chase. I crawl along the floor to escape. I get under one of the other beds. The arms stop short, but they don’t give up. They wait. They’re run by a computer. It’s not like they’ll run out of patience. I let my head fall back and gasp for breath. After a while, the pain subsides and I wipe tears from my eyes. I have no idea what’s going on here. “Hey!” I call out. “One of you, wake up!” “What’s your name?” the computer asks. “One of you humans, wake up, please.” “Incorrect,” the computer says. My crotch hurts so bad I have to laugh. It’s just so absurd. Plus, the endorphins are kicking in and making me giddy. I look back at the catheter by my bunk. I shake my head in awe. That thing went through my urethra. Wow. And it did some damage on the way out. A little streak of blood sits on the ground. It’s just a thin red line of— — I sipped my coffee, popped the last fragment of toast into my mouth, and signaled the waitress for my check. I could have saved money by eating breakfast at home instead of going to a diner every morning. Probably would have been a good idea, considering my meager salary. But I hate cooking and I love eggs and bacon. The waitress nodded and walked over to the cash register to ring me up. But another customer came in to be seated right that moment. I checked my watch. Just past seven A.M. No rush. I liked to get in to work by seven-twenty so I could have time to prep for the day. But I didn’t actually need to be there until eight. I pulled out my phone and checked my email. TO: Astronomy Curiosities [email protected] FROM: (Irina Petrova, PhD) [email protected] SUBJECT: The Thin Red Line I frowned at the screen. I thought I’d unsubscribed from that list. I left that life a long time ago. It didn’t get a lot of volume, and what it did get, if memory served, was usually pretty interesting. Just a bunch of astronomers, astrophysicists, and other domain experts chatting about anything that struck them as odd. I glanced at the waitress—the customers had a bunch of questions about the menu. Probably asking if Sally’s Diner served gluten-free vegan grass clippings or something. The good people of San Francisco could be trying at times. With nothing better to do, I read the email. Hello, professionals. My name is Doctor Irina Petrova and I work at the Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg, Russia. I am writing to you to ask for help. For the past two years, I have been working on a theory related to infrared emissions from nebulae. As a result, I have made detailed observations in a few specific IR bands of light. And I have found something odd—not in any nebula, but here in our own solar system. There is a very faint, but detectable line in the solar system that emits infrared light at the 25.984 micron wavelength. It seems to be solely that wavelength with no variance. Attached are Excel spreadsheets with my data. I have also provided a few renders of the data as a 3-D model. You will see on the model that the line is a lopsided arc that rises straight up from the sun’s North Pole for 37 million kilometers. From there, it angles sharply down and away from the sun, toward Venus. After the arc’s apex, the cloud widens like a funnel. At Venus, the arc’s cross-section is as wide as the planet itself. The infrared glow is very faint. I was only able to detect it at all because I was using extremely sensitive detection equipment while searching for IR emissions from nebulae. But to be certain, I called in a favor from the Atacama observatory in Chile—in my opinion the best IR observatory in the world. They confirmed my findings. There are many reasons one might see IR light in interplanetary space. It could be space dust or other particles reflecting sunlight. Or some molecular compound could be absorbing energy and re-emitting it in the infrared band. That would even explain why it’s all the same wavelength. The shape of the arc is of particular interest. My first guess was that it is a collection of particles moving along magnetic field lines. But Venus has no magnetic field to speak of. No magnetosphere, no ionosphere, nothing. What forces would make particles arc toward it? And why would they glow? Any suggestions or theories would be welcome. — What the heck was that? I remembered it all at once. It just kind of showed up in my head without warning. I didn’t learn much about myself. I live in San Francisco—I remember that. And I like breakfast. Also I used to be into astronomy but now I’m not? Apparently my brain decided it was critical that I remember that email. Not trivial things like my own name. My subconscious wants to tell me something. Seeing the line of blood must have reminded me of the “Thin Red Line” title of that email. But what’s that got to do with me? I shimmy out from under the bed and sit up against the wall. The arms angle toward me, but still can’t reach. Time to get a look at my fellow patients. I don’t know who I am or why I’m here, but at least I’m not alone—aaaand they’re dead. Yes, definitely dead. The one closest to me was a woman, I think. At least, she had long hair. Other than that, she’s mostly a mummy. Desiccated skin draped over bones. There’s no smell. Nothing is actively rotting. She must have died a long time ago. The person in the other bed was a man. I think he’s been dead even longer. His skin is not only dry and leathery but also crumbling away. Okay. So I’m here with two dead people. I should be disgusted and horrified, but I’m not. They’re so far gone they don’t even look human. They look like Halloween decorations. I hope I wasn’t close friends with either of them. Or, if I was, I hope I don’t remember it. Dead people is a concern, but I’m more concerned that they’ve been here so long. Even a quarantine area would remove dead people, wouldn’t they? Whatever’s wrong must be pretty darn bad. I get to my feet. It’s slow and it takes a lot of effort. I steady myself at the edge of Ms. Mummy’s bed. It wobbles and I wobble with it, but I stay upright. The robot arms make a play for me, but I flatten myself against the wall again. I’m pretty sure I was in a coma. Yeah. The more I think of it, I was definitely in a coma. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, but if I was put here at the same time as my roommates it’s been a while. I rub my half-shaved face. Those arms are designed to manage long-term unconsciousness. More evidence I was in a coma. Maybe I can get to that hatch? I take a step. Then another. Then I sink to the floor. It’s just too much for me. I have to rest. Why am I so weak when I have these well-toned muscles? And if I was in a coma, why do I even have muscles? I should be a withered, spindly mess right now, not beach-bod buff. I have no idea what my endgame is. What should I do? Am I really sick? I mean, I feel like crud of course, but I don’t feel “sick.” I’m not nauseated. I don’t have a headache. I don’t think I have a fever. If I don’t have a disease, why was I in a coma? Physical injury? I feel around my head. No lumps or scars or bandages. The rest of my body seems pretty solid too. Better than solid. I’m ripped. I want to nod off but I resist it. Time to take another stab at this. I push myself back up. It’s like weightlifting. But it’s a little easier this time. I’m recovering more and more (I hope). I shuffle along the wall, using my back for support as much as my feet. The arms constantly reach for me but I stay out of range. I pant and wheeze. I feel like I’ve run a marathon. Maybe I have a lung infection? Maybe I’m in isolation for my own protection? I finally make it to the ladder. I stumble forward and grab one of the rungs. I’m just so weak. How am I going to climb a 10-foot ladder? Ten-foot ladder. I think in imperial units. That’s a clue. I’m probably an American. Or English. Or maybe Canadian. Canadians use feet and inches for short distances. I ask myself: How far is it from L.A. to New York? My gut answer: 3,000 miles. A Canadian would have used kilometers. So I’m English or American. Or I’m from Liberia. I know Liberia uses imperial units but I don’t know my own name. That’s irritating. I take a deep breath. I hang on to the ladder with both hands and put my foot on the bottom rung. I pull myself up. It’s a shaky process, but I get it done. Both feet are on the lower rung now. I reach up and grab the next rung. Okay, making progress. I feel like my whole body is made of lead—everything is so much effort. I try to pull myself up, but my hand just isn’t strong enough. I fall backward off the ladder. This is going to hurt. It doesn’t hurt. The robot arms catch me before I hit the ground because I fell into grabbing range. They don’t miss a beat. They return me to bed and settle me in like a mother putting her child to sleep. You know what? This is fine. I’m really tired at this point and lying down kind of works for me. The gentle rocking of the bed is comforting. Something bugs me about how I fell off the ladder. I replay it in my head. I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s just a…“wrongness” to it. Hmm. I drift off. — “Eat.” There’s a toothpaste tube on my chest. “Huh?” “Eat,” the computer says again. I lift the tube. It’s white with black text that reads DAY 1—MEAL 1. “The heck is this?” I say. “Eat.” I unscrew the cap and smell something savory. My mouth waters at the prospect. Only now do I realize how hungry I am. I squeeze the tube and disgusting-looking brown sludge comes out. “Eat.” Who am I to question a creepy robot-armed computer overlord? I cautiously lick the substance. Oh my God it’s good! It’s so good! It’s like thick gravy but not too rich. I squeeze more straight into my mouth and savor it. I swear it’s better than sex. I know what’s going on here. They say hunger is the greatest seasoning. When you’re starving, your brain rewards you handsomely for finally eating. Good job, it says, we get to not die for a while! The pieces fall into place. If I was in a coma for a long time, I must have been getting fed. I didn’t have an abdominal tube when I woke up, so it was probably feeding me with an NG tube running down my esophagus. It’s the least-intrusive way to feed a patient who can’t eat but has no digestion issues. Plus, it keeps the digestive system active and healthy. And it explains why the tube wasn’t around when I woke up. If possible, you should remove an NG tube while the patient is still unconscious. Why do I know that? Am I a doctor? I squeeze another shot of gravy-goo into my mouth. Still delicious. I gobble it down. Soon the tube is empty. I hold it up. “More of this!” “Meal complete.” “I’m still hungry! Give me another tube!” “Food allotment for this meal has been met.” It makes sense. My digestive system is getting used to semi-solid food right now. Best to take it easy. If I eat as much as I want I’ll probably get sick. The computer is doing the right thing. “Give me more food!” No one cares about the right thing when they’re hungry. “Food allotment for this meal has been met.” “Bah.” Still, I feel a ton better than I did before. The food energized me on the spot, plus I’ve had more rest. I roll out of bed, ready to make a break for the wall, but the arms don’t chase me. I guess I’m allowed out of bed now that I’ve proven I can eat. I look down at my naked body. This just doesn’t feel right. I know the only other people around are dead, but still. “Can I have some clothes?” The computer says nothing. “Fine. Be that way.” I pull the sheet off the bed and wrap it around my torso a couple of times. I pull one corner over my shoulder from behind my back and tie it to another from the front. Instant toga. “Self-ambulation detected,” says the computer. “What’s your name?” “I am Emperor Comatose. Kneel before me.” “Incorrect.” Time to see what’s up that ladder. I’m a little unsteady, but I start walking across the room. This is a victory in itself—I don’t need wobbly beds or walls to cling to. I’m on my own two feet. I make it to the ladder and grab hold. I don’t need something to hang on to, but it sure makes life easier. The hatch above looks pretty darn solid. I assume it’s airtight. And there’s every chance it’s locked. But I have to at least try. I climb up one rung. Tough, but doable. Another rung. Okay, I have the hang of this. Slow and steady. I make it to the hatch. I hang on to the ladder with one hand and turn the hatch’s circular crank with the other. It actually turns! “Holy moly!” I say. “Holy moly”? Is that my go-to expression of surprise? I mean, it’s okay, I guess. I would have expected something a little less 1950s. What kind of weirdo am I? I turn the crank three full rotations and hear a click. The hatch tilts downward and I get out of the way. It falls open, suspended by its hefty hinge. I’m free! Sort of. Beyond the hatch, there’s just darkness. A little intimidating, but at least it’s progress. I reach into the new room and pull myself up to the floor. Lights click on as soon as I enter. Presumably the computer’s doing. The room looks to be the same size and shape as the one I left—another round room. One large table—a lab table from the look of it—is mounted to the floor. Three lab stools are mounted nearby. All around the walls are pieces of lab equipment. All of it mounted to tables or benches that are bolted to the floor. It’s like the room is ready for a catastrophic earthquake. A ladder along the wall leads to another hatch in the ceiling. I’m in a well-stocked laboratory. Since when do isolation wards let patients into the lab? And this doesn’t look like a medical lab, anyway. What the fudge is going on?! Fudge? Seriously? Maybe I have young kids. Or I’m deeply religious. I stand to get a better look at things. The lab has smaller equipment bolted to the table. I see an 8000x microscope, an autoclave, a bank of test tubes, sets of supply drawers, a sample fridge, a furnace, pipettes—wait a minute. Why do I know all those terms? I look at the larger equipment along the walls. Scanning electron microscope, sub-millimeter 3-D printer, 11-axis milling machine, laser interferometer, 1-cubic-meter vacuum chamber—I know what everything is. And I know how to use it. I’m a scientist! Now we’re getting somewhere! Time for me to use science. All right, genius brain: come up with something! …I’m hungry. You have failed me, brain. Okay, well I have no idea why this lab is here or why I’m allowed in. But…onward! The hatch in the ceiling is 10 feet off the ground. It’s going to be another ladder adventure. At least I’m stronger now. I take a few deep breaths and start climbing the ladder. Same as before, this simple act is a massive effort. I may be getting better, but I’m not “well.” Good lord I’m heavy. I make it to the top, but only just. I situate myself on the uncomfortable bars and push on the hatch’s handle. It doesn’t budge. “To unlock hatch, state your name,” says the computer. “But I don’t know my name!” “Incorrect.” I smack the handle with the palm of my hand. The handle doesn’t move and now the palm of my hand hurts. So…yeah. Not fruitful. This will have to wait. Maybe I’ll remember my name soon. Or find it written somewhere. I climb back down the ladder. At least, that’s my plan. You’d think going down would be easier and safer than going up. But no. No. Instead of gracefully descending the ladder, I put my foot on the next rung down at an awkward angle, lose my grip on the hatch handle, and fall like an idiot. I flail like an angry cat, reaching out for anything I can grasp. Turns out that’s a terrible idea. I fall onto the table and smack a set of supply drawers with my shin. It hurts like a motherfluffer! I cry out, grab my shin in pain, accidentally roll off the table, and fall to the floor. No robot arms to catch me this time. I land on my back and it knocks the wind out of me. Then, adding insult to injury, the supply-drawer unit falls over, the drawers open, and lab supplies rain down upon me. The cotton swabs aren’t a problem. The test tubes just kind of hurt a little (and surprisingly don’t shatter). But the tape measure smacks me square in the forehead. More stuff clatters down, but I’m too busy holding the growing welt on my forehead to notice. How heavy is that tape measure? A 3-foot fall off a table left a bump on my head. “That. Did not work,” I say to no one. That whole experience was just ridiculous. Like something out of a Charlie Chaplin movie. Actually…it really was like that. A little too much like that. That same feeling of “wrongness” strikes me. I grab a nearby test tube and toss it into the air. It goes up and comes down like it should. But it annoys me. Something about falling objects ticks me off right now. I want to know why. What do I have to work with? Well, I have an entire laboratory and I know how to use it. But what’s readily at hand? I look around at all the junk that fell to the floor. A bunch of test tubes, sample swabs, Popsicle sticks, a digital stopwatch, pipettes, some Scotch tape, a pen… Okay, I may have what I need here. I get back to my feet and dust off my toga. There’s no dust on it—my whole world seems really clean and sterile, but I do the motions just the same. I pick up the tape measure and take a look. It’s metric. Maybe I’m in Europe? Whatever. Then I grab the stopwatch. It’s pretty sturdy, like something you’d take on a hike. It has a solid plastic shell with a hard rubber ring around it. Undoubtedly waterproof. But also dead as a doornail. The LCD screen is completely blank. I press a few buttons, but nothing happens. I turn it over to get a look at the battery compartment. Maybe I can find a drawer with batteries in it if I know what kind it needs. I spot a little red plastic ribbon coming out of the back. I give it a pull and it comes out entirely. The stopwatch beeps to life. Kind of like “batteries included” toys. The little plastic tab was there to keep the battery from running down before the owner uses it for the first time. Okay, this is a brand-spanking-new stopwatch. Honestly, everything in this lab looks brand-new. Clean, tidy, no signs of wear. Not sure what to make of that. I play with the stopwatch for a while until I understand the controls. Pretty simple, really. I use the tape measure to find out how high the table is. Anyway, the table’s underside is 91 centimeters from the floor. I pick up a test tube. It’s not glass. It may be some kind of high-density plastic or something. It certainly didn’t break when it fell 3 feet to a hard surface. Anyway, whatever it’s made of, it’s dense enough for air resistance to be negligible. I lay it on the table and ready the stopwatch. I push the test tube off the table with one hand and start the stopwatch with the other. I time how long it takes to hit the ground. I get about 0.37 seconds. That’s pretty darn fast. I hope my own reaction time isn’t skewing the results. I note the time down on my arm with the pen—I haven’t found any paper yet. I put the test tube back and repeat the test. This time I get 0.33. I do it twenty times total, noting the results, to minimize the effects of my error margin in starting and stopping the timer. Anyway, I end up with an average of 0.348 seconds. My arm looks like a math teacher’s chalkboard, but that’s okay. 0.348 seconds. Distance equals one-half acceleration times time squared. So acceleration equals two times distance over time squared. These formulas come easily to me. Second nature. I’m definitely skilled at physics. Good to know. I run the numbers and come up with an answer I don’t like. The gravity in this room is too high. It’s 15 meters per second per second when it should be 9.8. That’s why things falling “feel” wrong to me. They’re falling too fast. And that’s why I’m so weak despite these muscles. Everything weighs one and a half times as much as it should. Thing is, nothing affects gravity. You can’t increase or decrease it. Earth’s gravity is 9.8 meters per second per second. Period. And I’m experiencing more than that. There’s only one possible explanation. I’m not on Earth. O kay, take a breath. Let’s not jump to wild conclusions. Yes, the gravity is too high. Work from there and think of sensible answers. I could be in a centrifuge. It would have to be pretty big. But with Earth’s gravity providing 1 g, you could have these rooms at an angle running around a track or on the end of a long solid arm or something. Set that spinning and the aggregate centripetal force plus Earth’s gravity could be 15 meters per second per second. Why would someone make a huge centrifuge with hospital beds and a lab in it? I don’t know. Would it even be possible? How big would that radius have to be? And how fast would it go? I think I know how to find out. I need an accurate accelerometer. Dropping things off a table and timing them is all well and fine for rough estimates, but it’s only as accurate as my reaction time on hitting the stopwatch. I need something better. And only one thing will do the job: a small piece of string. I search the lab drawers. After a few minutes, I have half the drawers open and have found just about every form of lab supplies except string. I’m about to give up when I finally find a spool of nylon thread. “Yes!” I pull off a few feet of thread and cut it with my teeth. I tie a loop on one end and tie the other end around the tape measure. The tape measure will be playing the role of “dead weight” in this experiment. Now I just need something to hang it from. I look above me at the hatch over my head. I climb up the ladder (easier now than ever before) and put the loop over the main latch handle. Then I let the tape measure’s weight pull the string taut. I have a pendulum. Cool thing about pendulums: The time it takes for one to swing forward and backward—the period—won’t change, no matter how wide it swings. If it’s got a lot of energy, it’ll swing farther and faster, but the period will still be the same. This is what mechanical clocks take advantage of to keep time. That period ends up being driven by two things, and two things only: the length of the pendulum and gravity. I pull the pendulum to one side. I release it and start the timer. I count cycles as it sways back and forth. It’s not exciting. I almost want to fall asleep, but I stay at it. When I hit the ten-minute mark, the pendulum is barely moving anymore, so I decide that’s long enough. Grand total: 346 full cycles in exactly ten minutes. Onward to phase two. I measure the distance from the hatch handle to the floor. It’s just over two and a half meters. I go back downstairs to the “bedroom.” Again, the ladder is no problem. I’m feeling so much better now. That food really did the trick. “What’s your name?” the computer asks. I look down at my sheet toga. “I am the great philosopher Pendulus!” “Incorrect.” I hang the pendulum on one of the robot hands near the ceiling. I hope it’ll stay still for a while. I eyeball the distance between the robot hand and the ceiling—I’ll call it a meter. My pendulum is now four and a half meters lower than it was before. I repeat the experiment. Ten minutes on the stopwatch, and I count the total cycles. The result: 346 cycles. Same as upstairs. Golly. Thing is, in a centrifuge, the farther you get from the center, the higher the centripetal force will be. So if I were in a centrifuge, the “gravity” down here would be higher than it was upstairs. And it isn’t. At least, not enough to get a different number of pendulum cycles. But what if I’m in a really big centrifuge? One so huge that the force difference between here and the lab is so small it doesn’t change the number of cycles? Let’s see…the formula for a pendulum…and the formula for the force of a centrifuge…wait, I don’t have the actual force, just a cycle count, so there’s a one-over-x factor involved…this is actually a very instructive problem! I have a pen, but no paper. That’s okay—I have a wall. After a lot of “crazy prisoner scribbling on a wall”–type stuff, I have my answer. Let’s say I’m on Earth and in a centrifuge. That would mean the centrifuge provides some of the force with the rest being supplied by Earth. According to my math (and I showed all my work!), that centrifuge would need a 700-meter radius (which is almost half a mile) and would be spinning at 88 meters per second—almost 200 miles per hour! Hmm. I think mostly in metric when doing science stuff. Interesting. Most scientists do, though, right? Even scientists who grew up in America. Anyway, that would be the largest centrifuge ever built…and why would anyone build it? Plus, something like that would be loud as heck. Whizzing through the air at 200 miles per hour? At the very least there’d be some turbulence here and there, not to mention a lot of wind noise. I don’t hear or feel anything like that. This is getting weird. Okay, what if I’m in space? There wouldn’t be turbulence or wind resistance, but the centrifuge would have to be bigger and faster because there’s no gravity to help out. More math, more graffiti on the wall. The radius would have to be 1,280 meters—close to a mile. Nothing anywhere near that big has ever been built for space. So I’m not in a centrifuge. And I’m not on Earth. Another planet? But there isn’t any planet, moon, or asteroid in the solar system that has this much gravity. Earth is the largest solid object in the whole system. Sure, the gas giants are bigger, but unless I’m in a balloon floating around the winds of Jupiter, there’s just nowhere I could go to experience this force. How do I know all that space stuff? I just know it. It feels like second nature—information I use all the time. Maybe I’m an astronomer or a planetary scientist. Maybe I work for NASA or ESA or— — I met Marissa every Thursday night for steak and beer at Murphy’s on Gough Street. Always at six P.M., and because the staff knew us, always at the same table. We’d met almost twenty years ago in grad school. She dated my then-roommate. Their relationship (like most in grad school) was a train wreck and they broke up within three months. But she and I ended up becoming good friends. When the host saw me, he smiled and jerked his thumb toward the usual table. I made my way through the kitschy d?cor to Marissa. She had a couple of empty lowball glasses in front of her and a full one in her hand. Apparently, she’d gotten started early. “Pre-gaming, eh?” I said, sitting down. She looked down and fidgeted with her glass. “Hey, what’s wrong?” She took a sip of whiskey. “Rough day at work.” I signaled the waiter. He nodded and didn’t even come over. He knew I wanted a rib-eye, medium, mashed potatoes on the side, and a pint of Guinness. Same thing I ordered every week. “How rough could it be?” I asked. “Cushy government job with the DOE. You probably get, what, twenty days off a year? All you have to do is show up and you get paid, right?” Again, no laugh. Nothing. “Oh, come on!” I said. “Who pooped in your Rice Krispies?” She sighed. “You know about the Petrova line?” “Sure. Kind of an interesting mystery. My guess is solar radiation. Venus doesn’t have a magnetic field, but positively charged particles might be drawn there because it’s electrically neutral—” “No,” she said. “It’s something else. We don’t know exactly what. But it’s something…else. But whatever. Let’s eat steak.” I snorted. “Come on, Marissa, spill it. What the heck is wrong with you?” She mulled it over. “Why not? You’ll hear it from the president in about twelve hours anyway.” “The president?” I said. “Of the United States?” She took another gulp of whiskey. “Have you heard of Amaterasu? It’s a Japanese solar probe.” “Sure,” I said. “JAXA has been getting some great data from it. It’s really neat, actually. It’s in a solar orbit, about halfway between Mercury and Venus. It has twenty different instruments aboard that—” “Yeah, I know. Whatever,” she said. “According to their data, the sun’s output is decreasing.” I shrugged. “So? Where are we in the solar cycle?” She shook her head. “It’s not the eleven-year cycle. It’s something else. JAXA accounted for the cycle. There’s still a downward trend. They say the sun is 0.01 percent less bright than it should be.” “Okay, interesting. But hardly worth three whiskeys before dinner.” She pursed her lips. “That’s what I thought. But they’re saying that value is increasing. And the rate of the increase is increasing. It’s some sort of exponential loss that they caught very, very early thanks to their probe’s incredibly sensitive instruments.” I leaned back in the booth. “I don’t know, Marissa. Spotting an exponential progression that early seems really unlikely. But okay, let’s say the JAXA scientists are right. Where’s the energy going?” “The Petrova line.” “Huh?” “JAXA took a good long look at the Petrova line and they say it’s getting brighter at the same rate that the sun is getting dimmer. Somehow or another, whatever it is, the Petrova line is stealing energy from the sun.” She pulled a sheaf of papers from her purse and put them on the table. It looked like a bunch of graphs and charts. She shuffled through them until she found the one she wanted, then pushed it toward me. The x-axis was labeled “time” and the y-axis was labeled “luminosity loss.” The line was exponential, for sure. “This can’t be right,” I said. “It’s right,” she said. “The sun’s output will drop a full percent over the next nine years. In twenty years that figure will be five percent. This is bad. It’s really bad.” I stared at the graph. “That would mean an ice age. Like…right away. Instant ice age.” “Yeah, at the very least. And crop failures, mass starvation…I don’t even know what else.” I shook my head. “How can there be a sudden change in the sun? It’s a star, for cripes’ sake. Things just don’t happen this fast for stars. Changes take millions of years, not dozens. Come on, you know that.” “No, I don’t know that. I used to know that. Now I only know the sun’s dying,” she said. “I don’t know why and I don’t know what we could do about it. But I know it’s dying.” “How…” I furrowed my brow. She downed the rest of her drink. “President addresses the nation tomorrow morning. I think they’re coordinating with other world leaders to all announce at the same time.” The waiter dropped off my Guinness. “Here you go, sir. The steaks should be out shortly.” “I need another whiskey,” Marissa said. “Make it two,” I added. — I blink. Another flash of memory. Was it true? Or is that just a random memory of me talking to someone who got sucked into a bogus doomsday theory? No. It’s real. I’m terrified just thinking about it. And it’s not just sudden terror. It’s a cozy, comfortable terror with a permanent seat at the table. I’ve felt it for a long time. This is real. The sun is dying. And I’m tangled up in it. Not just as a fellow citizen of Earth who will die with everyone else—I’m actively involved. There’s a sense of responsibility there. I still don’t remember my own name, but I remember random bits of information about the Petrova problem. They call it the Petrova problem. I just remembered that. My subconscious has priorities. And it’s desperately telling me about this. I think my job is to solve the Petrova problem. …in a small lab, wearing a bedsheet toga, with no idea who I am, and no help other than a mindless computer and two mummified roommates. My vision blurs. I wipe my eyes. Tears. I can’t…I can’t remember their names. But…they were my friends. My comrades. Only now do I realize I’ve been facing away from them the whole time. I’ve done everything I can to keep them out of my line of sight. Scrawling on the wall like a madman with the corpses of people I cared about right behind me. But now the distraction is over. I turn to look at them. I sob. It comes without warning. I remember bits and pieces all in a rush. She was funny—always quick with a joke. He was professional and with nerves of steel. I think he was military and he was definitely our leader. I fall to the floor and put my head in my hands. I can’t hold anything back. I cry like a child. We were a lot more than friends. And “team” isn’t the right word either. It’s stronger than that. It’s… It’s on the tip of my tongue… Finally, the word slides into my conscious mind. It had to wait until I wasn’t looking to sneak in. Crew. We were a crew. And I’m all that’s left. This is a spacecraft. I know that now. I don’t know how it has gravity but it’s a spaceship. Things start to fall into place. We weren’t sick. We were in suspended animation. But these beds aren’t magical “freeze chambers” like in the movies. There’s no special technology at play here. I think we were in medically induced comas. Feeding tubes, IVs, constant medical care. Everything a body needs. Those arms probably changed sheets, kept us rotated to prevent bedsores, and did all the other things ICU nurses would normally do. And we were kept fit. Electrodes all over our bodies to stimulate muscle movement. Lots of exercise. But in the end, comas are dangerous. Extremely dangerous. Only I survived, and my brain is a pile of mush. I walk over to the woman. I actually feel better, looking at her. Maybe it’s a sense of closure, or maybe it’s just the calmness that comes after a crying jag. The mummy has no tubes attached. No monitoring equipment at all. There’s a small hole in her leathery wrist. That’s where the IV was when she died, I guess. So the hole never healed. The computer must have removed everything when she died. Waste not, want not, I guess. No point in using resources on dead people. More for the survivors. More for me, in other words. I take a deep breath and let it out. I have to be calm. I have to think clearly. I remembered a lot just then—my crew, some aspects of their personalities, that I’m on a spaceship (I’ll freak out about that later). The point is I’m getting more memories back, and they’re coming sort of when I want them instead of at random intervals. I want to focus on that, but the sadness is just so strong. “Eat,” says the computer. A panel in the center of the ceiling opens up, and a food tube drops out. One of the robot arms catches it and places it on my bed. The label reads DAY 1—MEAL 2. I’m not in the mood to eat, but my stomach growls as soon as I see the tube. Whatever my mental state may be, my body has needs. I open the tube and squirt goop into my mouth. I have to admit: It’s another incredible flavor sensation. I think it’s chicken with hints of vegetable. There’s no texture, of course—it’s basically baby food. And it’s a little thicker than my earlier meal. It’s all about getting my digestive system used to solid food again. “Water?” I say between mouthfuls. The ceiling panel opens again, this time with a metal cylinder. An arm brings it to me. Text on the shiny container reads POTABLE WATER. I unscrew the top and, sure enough, there’s water in there. I take a sip. It’s room temperature and tastes flat. It’s probably distilled and devoid of minerals. But water’s water. I finish the rest of my meal. I haven’t had to use a bathroom yet but I’ll need to eventually. I’d rather not go wee on the floor. “Toilet?” I say. A wall panel spins around to reveal a metal commode. It’s just right there in the wall, like in a prison cell. I take a closer look. It has buttons and stuff on it. I think there’s a vacuum pipe in the bowl. And there’s no water. I think this might be a zero-g toilet modified for use in gravity. Why do that? “Okay, uh…dismiss toilet.” The wall swivels around again. The toilet is gone. All right. I’m well fed. I’m feeling a little better about things. Food will do that. I need to focus on some positives. I’m alive. Whatever killed my friends, it didn’t kill me. I’m on a spaceship—I don’t know the details, but I know I’m on a ship and it seems to be working correctly. And my mental state is improving. I’m sure of it. I sit cross-legged on the floor. It’s time for a proactive step. I close my eyes and let my mind wander. I want to remember something—anything—on purpose. I don’t care what. But I want to initiate it. Let’s see what I get. I start with what makes me happy. I like science. I know it. I got a thrill from all the little experiments I’ve been doing. And I’m in space. So maybe I can think about space and science and see what I get…. — I pulled the piping-hot spaghetti TV dinner from the microwave and hustled over to my couch. I peeled the plastic off the top to let the steam escape. I unmuted the TV and listened to the live feed. Several coworkers and a few friends had invited me to watch this with them, but I didn’t want to spend the whole evening answering questions. I just wanted to watch in peace. It was the most watched event in human history. More than the moon landing. More than any World Cup Final. Every network, streaming service, news website, and local TV affiliate was showing the same thing: NASA’s live feed. A reporter stood with an older man in the gallery of a flight-control room. Beyond them, men and women in blue shirts fixed their attention on their terminals. “This is Sandra Elias,” said the reporter. “I’m here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. I’m here with Dr. Browne, who is the head of Planetary Sciences for NASA.” She turned to the scientist. “Doctor, what’s our status now?” Browne cleared his throat. “We received confirmation about ninety minutes ago that ArcLight successfully inserted into orbit around Venus. Now we’re just waiting for that first batch of data.” It had been a heck of a year since the JAXA announcement about the Petrova problem. But study after study confirmed their findings. The clock was ticking and the world needed to find out what was going on. So Project ArcLight was born. The situation was terrifying, but the project itself was awesome. My inner nerd couldn’t help but be excited. ArcLight was the most expensive unmanned spacecraft ever built. The world needed answers and didn’t have time to dillydally. Normally if you asked a space agency to send a probe to Venus in under a year, they’d laugh in your face. But it’s amazing what you can do with an unlimited budget. The United States, European Union, Russia, China, India, and Japan all helped cover costs. “Tell us about going to Venus,” the reporter said. “What makes it so hard?” “The main problem is fuel,” said Browne. “There are specific transfer windows when interplanetary travel takes the minimum amount of fuel, but we were nowhere near an Earth-Venus window. So we had to put a lot more fuel in orbit just to get ArcLight there in the first place.” “So it’s a case of bad timing, then?” the reporter asked. “I don’t think there’s ever a good time for the sun to get dimmer.” “Good point. Please go on.” “Venus moves very fast compared to Earth, which means more fuel just to catch up. Even under ideal conditions, it actually takes more fuel to get to Venus than it does to get to Mars.” “Amazing. Amazing. Now, Doctor, some people have asked, ‘Why bother with the planet? The Petrova line is huge, spanning an arc from the sun to Venus. Why not somewhere between?’ ” “Because the Petrova line is widest there—as wide as the whole planet. And we can use the planet’s gravity to help us out. ArcLight will actually orbit Venus twelve times while collecting samples of whatever material the Petrova line is made of.” “And what is that material, you think?” “We have no idea,” said Browne. “No idea at all. But we might have answers soon. Once ArcLight finishes this first orbit, it should have enough material for its onboard analysis lab.” “And what can we expect to learn tonight?” “Not much. The onboard lab is pretty basic. Just a high-magnification microscope and an x-ray spectrometer. The real mission here is sample return. It’ll be another three months for ArcLight to come home with those samples. The lab is a backup to get at least some data in case there’s a failure during the return phase.” “Good planning as always, Dr. Browne.” “It’s what we do.” A cheer erupted from behind the reporter. “I’m hearing—” She paused to let the sound die down. “I’m hearing that the first orbit is complete and the data is coming in now….” The main screen in the control room changed to a black-and-white image. The picture was mostly gray, with black dots scattered here and there. “What are we looking at, Doctor?” said the reporter’s voice. “This is from the internal microscope,” said Browne. “It’s magnified ten thousand times. Those black dots are about ten microns across.” “Are those dots what we’ve been looking for?” she asked. “We can’t be certain,” said Browne. “They could just be dust particles. Any major gravity source like a planet will have a cloud of dust surrounding—” “What the fuck?!” came a voice in the background. Several flight controllers gasped. The reporter snickered. “High spirits here at JPL. We are coming to you live, so we apologize for any—” “Oh my God!” said Browne. On the main screen, more images came through. One after another. All nearly the same. Nearly. The reporter looked at the images on-screen. “Are those particles…moving?” The images, playing in succession, showed the black dots deforming and shifting around within their environment. The reporter cleared her throat and delivered what many would call the understatement of the century: “They look a little like microbes, wouldn’t you say?” “Telemetry!” Dr. Browne called out. “Any shimmy in the probe?” “Already checked,” said someone. “No shimmy.” “Is there a consistent direction of travel?” he asked. “Something that could be explained by an external force? Magnetic, maybe? Static electricity?” The room fell silent. “Anyone?!” said Browne. I dropped my fork right into my spaghetti. Is this actually alien life? Am I really that lucky?! To be alive when humanity first discovers extraterrestrial life?! Wow! I mean—the Petrova problem is still terrifying but…wow! Aliens! This could be aliens! I couldn’t wait to talk about this with the kids tomorrow— — “Angular anomaly,” the computer says. “Darn it!” I say. “I was almost there! I almost remembered myself!” “Angular anomaly,” the computer repeats. I unfold myself and get to my feet. In my limited interactions with it, the computer seems to have some understanding of what I say. Like Siri or Alexa. So I’ll talk to it like I’d talk to one of them. “Computer, what is an angular anomaly?” “Angular anomaly: an object or body designated as critical is not at the expected location angle by at least 0.01 radians.” “What body is anomalous?” “Angular anomaly.” Not much help. I’m on a ship, so it must be a navigational issue. That can’t be good. How would I even steer this thing? I don’t see anything resembling spaceship controls—not that I really know what those look like. But all I’ve discovered so far is a “coma room” and a lab. That other hatch in the lab—the one that leads farther up—that must be important. This is like being in a video game. Explore the area until you find a locked door, then look for the key. But instead of searching bookshelves and garbage cans, I have to search my mind. Because the “key” is my own name. The computer’s not being unreasonable. If I can’t remember my own name, I probably shouldn’t be allowed into delicate areas of the ship. I climb onto my bunk and lie on my back. I keep a wary eye on the robot arms above, but they don’t move. I guess the computer is satisfied that I’m self-sufficient for now. I close my eyes and focus on that flash of memory. I can see bits and pieces of it in my mind. Like looking at an old photo that’s been damaged. I’m in my house…no…apartment. I have an apartment. It’s tidy, but small. There’s a picture of the San Francisco skyline on one wall. Not useful. I already know I lived in San Francisco. There’s a Lean Cuisine microwave meal on the coffee table in front of me. Spaghetti. The heat still hasn’t equalized yet, so there are pockets of nearly frozen noodles next to tongue-melting plasma. But I’m taking bites anyway. I must be hungry. I’m watching NASA on TV; I see all that stuff from my previous flash of memory. My first thought is…I’m elated! Could it be extraterrestrial life? I can’t wait to tell the kids! I have kids? This is a single man’s apartment with a single man eating a single man’s meal. I don’t see anything feminine at all. There’s nothing to suggest a woman in my life. Am I divorced? Gay? Either way, there’s no sign that children live here. No toys, no pictures of kids on the wall or mantel, nothing. And the place is way too clean. Kids make a mess of everything. Especially when they start chewing gum. They all go through a gum phase—at least, a lot of them do—and they leave it everywhere. How do I know that? I like kids. Huh. Just a feeling. But I like them. They’re cool. They’re fun to hang out with. So I’m a single man in my thirties, who lives alone in a small apartment, I don’t have any kids, but I like kids a lot. I don’t like where this is going… A teacher! I’m a schoolteacher! I remember it now! Oh, thank God. I’m a teacher. “A ll right,” I said, looking at the clock. “We have one minute until the bell. You know what that means!” “Lightning round!” yelled my students. Life had changed surprisingly little since the announcement about the Petrova line. The situation was dire and deadly, but it was also the norm. Londoners during the Blitz in World War II went about their day as normal, with the understanding that occasionally buildings get blown up. However desperate things were, someone still had to deliver milk. And if Mrs. McCreedy’s house got bombed in the night, well, you crossed it off the delivery list. So it was that with the apocalypse looming—possibly caused by an alien life-form—I stood in front of a bunch of kids and taught them basic science. Because what’s the point of even having a world if you’re not going to pass it on to the next generation? The kids sat in neat rows of desks, facing the front. Pretty standard stuff. But the rest of the room was like a mad scientist’s lab. I’d spent years perfecting the look. I had a Jacob’s ladder in one corner (I kept it unplugged so the kids didn’t kill themselves). Along another wall was a bookshelf full of specimen jars of animal parts in formaldehyde. One of the jars was just spaghetti and a boiled egg. The kids speculated on that one a lot. And gracing the center of the ceiling was my pride and joy—a huge mobile that was a model of the solar system. Jupiter was the size of a basketball, while wee Mercury was as small as a marble. It had taken me years to cultivate a rep as the “cool” teacher. Kids are smarter than most people think. And they can tell when a teacher actually cares about them as opposed to when they’re just going through the motions. Anyway, it was time for the lightning round! I grabbed a fistful of beanbags off my desk. “What is the actual name of the North Star?” “Polaris!” said Jeff. “Correct!” I threw a beanbag to him. Before he even caught it, I fired off the next question. “What are the three basic kinds of rocks?” “Igneous, sedentary, and metamorphic!” yelled Larry. He was excitable, to say the least. “So close!” I said. “Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic,” said Abby with a sneer. Pain in the ass, that one. But smart as a whip. “Yes!” I threw her a beanbag. “What wave do you feel first during an earthquake?” “The P-wave,” Abby said. “You again?” I threw her a beanbag. “What’s the speed of light?” “Three times ten to—” Abby began. “C!” yelled Regina from the back. She rarely spoke up. Good to see her coming out of her shell. “Sneaky, but correct!” I chucked her a beanbag. “I was answering first!” Abby complained. “But she finished her answer first,” I said. “What’s the nearest star to Earth?” “Alpha Centauri!” Abby said quickly. “Wrong!” I said. “No, I’m not!” “Yes, you are. Anyone else?” “Oh!” Larry said. “It’s the sun!” “Right!” I said. “Larry gets the beanbag! Careful with your assumptions, Abby.” She folded her arms in a huff. “Who can tell me the radius of Earth?” Trang raised his hand. “Three thousand, nine hundre—” “Trang!” Abby said. “The answer is Trang.” Trang froze in confusion. “What?” I asked. Abby preened. “You asked who could tell you the radius of Earth. Trang can tell you. I answered correctly.” Outsmarted by a thirteen-year-old. Wasn’t the first time. I dropped a beanbag on her desk just as the bell rang. The kids leapt from their chairs and collected their books and backpacks. Abby, flush with victory, took a little more time than the others. “Remember to cash in your beanbags at the end of the week for toys and other prizes!” I said to their retreating backs. Soon, the classroom was empty, and only the echoing sounds of children in the hallway suggested any evidence of life. I collected their homework assignments from my desk and slipped them into my valise. Sixth period was over. Time to hit the teachers’ lounge for a cup of coffee. Maybe I’d correct some papers before I headed home. Anything to avoid the parking lot. A fleet of helicopter moms would be descending on the school to pick up their children. And if one of them saw me, they always had some complaint or suggestion. I can’t fault someone for loving their kids, and God knows we could do with more parents being engaged in their kids’ educations, but there’s a limit. “Ryland Grace?” said a woman’s voice. I looked up with a start. I hadn’t heard her come in. She looked to be in her mid-forties, wearing a well-tailored business suit. She carried a briefcase. “Uh, yeah,” I said. “Can I help you with something?” “I think you can,” she said. She had a slight accent. Something European—I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. “My name is Eva Stratt. I’m with the Petrova Taskforce.” “The what?” “The Petrova Taskforce. It’s an international body set up to deal with the Petrova-line situation. I’ve been tasked with finding a solution. They’ve given me a certain amount of authority to get things done.” “They? Who’s they?” “Every member nation of the UN.” “Wait, what? How did—” “Unanimous secret vote. It’s complicated. I’d like to talk to you about a scientific paper you wrote.” “Secret vote? Never mind.” I shook my head. “My paper-writing days are over. Academia didn’t work well for me.” “You’re a teacher. You’re still in academia.” “Well, yeah,” I said. “But I mean, you know, academia. With scientists and peer review and—” “And assholes who get you kicked out of your university?” She raised an eyebrow. “And who got all your funding cut off and ensured you never got published again?” “Yeah. That.” She pulled a binder out of her briefcase. She opened it and read the first page. “ ‘An Analysis of Water-Based Assumptions and Recalibration of Expectations for Evolutionary Models.’ ” She looked up at me. “You wrote this paper, yes?” “I’m sorry, how did you get—” “A dull title, but very exciting content, I have to say.” I set my valise on my desk. “Look, I was in a bad place when I wrote that, okay? I’d had enough of the research world and that was sort of a ‘kiss-my-butt’ goodbye. I’m much happier now as a teacher.” She flipped a few pages. “You spent years combating the assumption that life requires liquid water. You have an entire section here called ‘The Goldilocks Zone Is for Idiots.’ You call out dozens of eminent scientists by name and berate them for believing a temperature range is a requirement.” “Yeah, but—” “Your doctorate is in molecular biology, correct? Don’t most scientists agree that liquid water is necessary for life to evolve?” “They’re wrong!” I crossed my arms. “There’s nothing magical about hydrogen and oxygen! They’re required for Earth life, sure. But another planet could have completely different conditions. All life needs is a chemical reaction that results in copies of the original catalyst. And you don’t need water for that!” I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out. “Anyway, I got mad, and I wrote that paper. Then I got a teaching credential, a new career, and started actually enjoying my life. So I’m glad no one believed me. I’m better off.” “I believe you,” she said. “Thanks,” I said. “But I have papers to grade. Can you tell me why you’re here?” She put the binder back in her briefcase. “You are aware of the ArcLight probe and the Petrova line, I assume.” “I’d be a pretty lame science teacher if I wasn’t.” “Do you think those dots are alive?” she asked. “I don’t know—they could just be dust bouncing around in magnetic fields. I guess we’ll find out when ArcLight gets back to Earth. That’s coming up, right? Just a few weeks from now?” “It returns on the twenty-third,” she said. “Roscosmos will recover it from low-Earth orbit with a dedicated Soyuz mission.” I nodded. “Then we’ll know soon enough. The most brilliant minds in the world will look at them and find out what they’re about. Who’s going to do that? Do you know?” “You,” she said. “You’re going to do it.” I stared blankly. She waved her hand in front of my face. “Hello?” “You want me to look at the dots?” I said. “Yes.” “The whole world put you in charge of solving this problem, and you came directly to a junior high school science teacher?” “Yes.” I turned and walked out the door. “You’re lying, insane, or a combination of the two. I have to get going now.” “This is not optional,” she said to my back. “Seems optional to me!” I waved goodbye. Yeah. It wasn’t optional. When I got back to my apartment, before I even got to my front door, four well-dressed men surrounded me. They showed me their FBI badges and hustled me into one of three black SUVs parked in the complex parking lot. After a twenty-minute drive where they refused to answer any of my questions or even speak to me at all, they parked and showed me into a generic-looking business-park building. My feet barely touched the ground as they led me down an empty hallway with unmarked doors every 30 feet or so. Finally, they opened a set of double doors at the end of the hall and gently nudged me inside. Unlike the rest of the abandoned building, this room was full of furniture and shiny, high-tech devices. It was the most well-stocked biology lab I’d ever seen. And right in the middle of it all was Eva Stratt. “Hello, Dr. Grace,” she said. “This is your new lab.” The FBI agents closed the doors behind me, leaving Stratt and me alone in the lab. I rubbed my shoulder where they had manhandled me a little too hard. I looked at the door behind me. “So…when you say ‘a certain amount of authority’…” “I have all of the authority.” “You have an accent. Are you even from America?” “I’m Dutch. I was an administrator at ESA. But that doesn’t matter. Now I’m in charge of this. There is no time for slow, international committees. The sun is dying. We need a solution. It’s my job to find it.” She pulled up a lab stool and sat down. “These ‘dots’ are probably a life-form. The exponential progression of solar dimming is consistent with the exponential population growth of a typical life-form.” “You think they’re…eating the sun?” “They’re eating its energy output at least,” she said. “Okay, that’s—well, terrifying. But regardless: What the heck do you want from me?” “The ArcLight probe is bringing the samples back to Earth. Some of them might still be alive. I want you to examine them and find out what you can.” “Yeah, you mentioned that earlier,” I said. “But I have to believe there are more qualified people to do this than just me.” “Scientists all over the world will be looking at them, but I want you to be the first.” “Why?” “It lives on or near the surface of the sun. Does that sound like a water-based life-form to you?” She was right. Water simply can’t exist at those temperatures. After about 3,000 degrees Celsius, the hydrogen and oxygen atoms can’t stay bound to each other anymore. The surface of the sun was 5,500 degrees Celsius. She continued. “The field of speculative extraterrestrial biology is small—only five hundred or so people in the world. And everyone I talk to—from Oxford professors to Tokyo University researchers—seems to agree that you could have led it if you hadn’t suddenly left.” “Gosh,” I said. “I didn’t leave on good terms. I’m surprised they said such nice stuff about me.” “Everyone understands the gravity of the situation. There’s no time for old grudges. But for what it’s worth, you’ll be able to show everyone you were right. You don’t need water for life. Surely that must be something you want.” “Sure,” I said. “I mean…yeah. But not like this.” She hopped off her stool and headed to the door. “It is what it is. Be here on the twenty-third at seven P.M. I’ll have the sample for you.” “Wha—” I said. “It’ll be in Russia, won’t it?” “I told Roscosmos to land their Soyuz in Saskatchewan. The Royal Canadian Air Force will recover the sample and bring it directly here to San Francisco via fighter jet. The U.S. will allow the Canadians use of the airspace.” “Saskatchewan?” “Soyuz capsules are launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome, which is at a high latitude. The safest landing locations are at that same latitude. Saskatchewan is the closest large, flat area to San Francisco that meets all the requirements.” I held up my hand. “Wait. The Russians, Canadians, and Americans all just do whatever you tell them?” “Yes. Without question.” “Are you joshing me with all this?!” “Get accommodated with your new lab, Dr. Grace. I have other things to deal with.” She walked out the door without another word. — “Yes!” I pump my fist. I jump to my feet and climb the ladder to the lab. Once there, I climb that ladder and grab hold of the Mystery Hatch. Just like last time, as soon as I touch the handle, the computer says, “To unlock hatch, state your name.” “Ryland Grace,” I say with a smug smile. “Dr. Ryland Grace.” A small click from the hatch is the only response I get. After all the meditation and introspection I did to find out my own name, I wish there’d been something more exciting. Confetti, maybe. I grab the handle and twist. It turns. My domain is about to grow by at least one new room. I push the hatch upward. Unlike the connector between the bedroom and the lab, this hatch slides to the side. This next room is pretty small, so I guess there wasn’t room for the hatch to swing in. And that next room is…um…? LED lights flick on. The room is round, like the other two, but it’s not a cylinder. The walls taper inward toward the ceiling. It’s a truncated cone. I’ve spent the last few days without much information to go on. Now information assaults me from every direction. Every surface is covered with computer monitors and touchscreens. The sheer number of blinking lights and colors is staggering. Some screens have rows of numbers, others have diagrams, and others just look black. On the edge of the conical walls is another hatch. This one is less mysterious, though. It has the word AIRLOCK stenciled across the top, and the hatch itself has a round window in it. Through the window I can see a tiny chamber—just big enough for one person—with a spacesuit inside. The far wall has another hatch. Yup. That’s an airlock. And in the center of everything is a chair. It’s perfectly positioned to be able to reach all screens and touch panels easily. I climb the rest of the way into the room and settle into the chair. It’s comfortable, kind of a bucket seat. “Pilot detected,” the computer says. “Angular anomaly.” Pilot. Okay. “Where is the anomaly?” I ask. “Angular anomaly.” HAL 9000 this computer is not. I look around at the many screens for a clue. The chair swivels easily, which is nice in this 360-degree computer pit. I spot one screen with a blinking red border. I lean in to get a better look. ANGULAR ANOMALY: RELATIVE MOTION ERROR PREDICTED VELOCITY: 11,423 KPS MEASURED VELOCITY: 11,872 KPS STATUS: AUTO-CORRECTING TRAJECTORY. NO ACTION REQUIRED. Well. That means nothing to me. Except “kps.” That might mean “kilometers per second.” Above the text is a picture of the sun. It’s jiggling around slightly. Maybe it’s a video? Like a live feed? Or is that just my imagination? On a hunch, I touch the screen with two fingers and drag them apart. Sure enough, the image zooms in. Just like using a smartphone. There are a couple of sunspots on the left side of the image. I zoom in on those until they fill the screen. The image remains amazingly clear. It’s either an extremely high-resolution photo or an extremely high-resolution solar telescope. I estimate the cluster of sunspots is about 1 percent the width of the disc. Pretty normal for sunspots. That means I’m now looking at half a degree of the sun’s circumference (very rough math here). The sun rotates about once per twenty-five days (science teachers know this sort of thing). So it should take an hour for the spots to move off the screen. I’ll check back later and see if they have. If so, it’s a live image. If not, it’s a picture. Hmm…11,872 kilometers per second. Velocity is relative. It doesn’t make any sense unless you are comparing two objects. A car on the freeway might be going 70 miles per hour compared to the ground, but compared to the car next to it, it’s moving almost 0. So what is that “measured velocity” measuring the velocity of? I think I know. I’m in a spaceship, right? I have to be. So that value is probably my velocity. But compared to what? Judging by the big ol’ picture of the sun over the text, I’m guessing it’s the sun. So I’m going 11,872 kilometers per second with respect to the sun. I catch a flicker from the text below. Did something change? ANGULAR ANOMALY: RELATIVE MOTION ERROR PREDICTED VELOCITY: 11,422 KPS MEASURED VELOCITY: 11,871 KPS STATUS: AUTO-CORRECTING TRAJECTORY. NO ACTION REQUIRED. Those numbers are different! They both went down by one. Oh wow. Hang on. I pull the stopwatch from my toga (the best ancient Greek philosophers always carried stopwatches in their togas). Then I stare at the screen for what seems like an eternity. Just before I’m about to give up, the numbers both drop by one again. I start the timer. This time, I’m ready for how long the wait will be. Again, it seems interminable, but I stand firm. Finally, the numbers both drop again and I stop the timer. Sixty-six seconds. “Measured velocity” is going down by one every sixty-six seconds. Some quick math tells me that’s an acceleration of…15 meters per second per second. That’s the same “gravity” acceleration I worked out earlier. The force I’m feeling isn’t gravity. And it’s not a centrifuge. I’m in a spaceship that is constantly accelerating in a line. Well, actually it’s decelerating—the values are going down. And that velocity…it’s a lot of velocity. Yes, it’s going down, but wow! To reach Earth orbit you only need to go 8 kps. I’m going over 11,000. That’s faster than anything in the solar system. Anything that fast will escape the sun’s gravity and go flying off into interstellar space. The readout doesn’t have anything to indicate what direction I’m going. Just a relative velocity. So now my question is: Am I barreling toward the sun, or away from it? It’s almost academic. I’m either on a collision course with the sun or on my way out to deep space with no hope of returning. Or, I might be headed in the sun’s general direction, but not on a collision course. If that’s the case, I’ll miss the sun…and then fly off into deep space with no hope of returning. Well, if the image of the sun is real-time, then the sunspot will get larger or smaller on-screen as I travel. So I just have to wait until I know if it’s real-time. That’ll take about an hour. I start the stopwatch. I acquaint myself with the million other screens in the little room. Most of them have something to say, but one of them just shows an image of a circular crest. I think it’s probably an idle screen or something. If I touch it, that computer will wake up. But that idle screen might be the most informative thing in here. It’s a mission crest. I’ve seen enough NASA documentaries to know one when I see one. The circular crest has an outer ring of blue with white text. The text reads HAIL MARY across the top and EARTH across the bottom. The name and “port of call” for this vessel. I didn’t think the ship came from somewhere other than Earth, but okay. Anyway, I guess I finally know the name of this ship I’m on. I’m aboard the Hail Mary. Not sure what to do with that information. But that’s not all the crest has to tell me. Inside the blue band, there’s a black circle with weird symbols inside: a yellow circle with a dot in the middle, a blue circle with a white cross, and a smaller yellow circle with a lowercase t. No idea what any of that is supposed to mean. Around the edge of the black area it says: “?,” “ИЛЮХИНА,” and “GRACE.” The crew. I’m “Grace,” so those other two must be the names of the mummies in the bunks downstairs. A Chinese person and a Russian person. The memory of them is almost at the surface, but I can’t quite pull it up. I think some internal defense mechanism is suppressing it. When I remember them, it’s going to hurt, so my brain refuses to remember them. Maybe. I don’t know—I’m a science teacher, not a trauma psychologist. I wipe my eyes clear. Maybe I won’t push too hard for that memory just yet. I have an hour to kill. I let my mind wander to see what else I can remember. It’s getting easier and easier. — “I’m not one hundred percent comfortable with all this,” I said. My voice was muffled by the full hazmat suit I wore. My breath fogged up the clear vinyl face-window thingy. “You’ll be fine,” said Stratt’s voice over the intercom. She watched from the other side of double-paned, very thick glass. They’d made a few upgrades to the lab. Oh, the equipment was all the same, but now the entire room was air-sealed. The walls were lined with thick plastic sheets, all held together with some kind of special tape. I saw CDC logos everywhere. Quarantine protocols. Not at all comforting. The only entry now was through a big plastic airlock. And they made me put on the hazmat suit before going in. An air line led to my suit from a spool in the ceiling. All the top-of-the-line equipment was ready for whatever I wanted to do. I’d never seen a lab so well stocked. And in the middle was a wheeled cart holding a cylindrical container. Stenciled writing on the cylinder read образец. Not deeply useful. Stratt wasn’t alone in the observation room. About twenty people in military uniforms stood with her, all looking on with interest. There were definitely some Americans, some Russians, a few Chinese officers, plus many more unique uniforms I didn’t even recognize. A large international group. None of them said a word, and by some silent agreement, they all stayed a few feet behind Stratt. I grabbed the air hose with my gloved hand and gestured to Stratt with it. “Is this really necessary?” She pressed the intercom button. “There’s a very good chance the sample in that cylinder is an alien life-form. We’re not taking any chances.” “Wait…you’re not taking any chances. But I am!” “It’s not like that.” “How is it not like that?” She paused. “Okay, it’s exactly like that.” I walked to the cylinder. “Did everyone else have to go through all this?” She looked at the military people and they shrugged at her. “What do you mean by ‘everyone else’?” “You know,” I said. “The people who transferred it to this container.” “That’s the sample container from the capsule. It’s three centimeters of lead surrounding a shell of centimeter-thick steel. It’s been sealed since it left Venus. It has fourteen latches you’ll need to open to get to the sample itself.” I looked at the cylinder, back to her, back to the cylinder, and back to her. “This is some bull-puckey.” “Look at the bright side,” she said. “You’ll be forever known as the man who made first contact with extraterrestrial life.” “If it even is life,” I mumbled. I got the fourteen latches open with some effort. Those things were tight. I vaguely wondered about how the ArcLight probe closed them in the first place. Must have been some kind of cool actuated system. The inside wasn’t impressive. I didn’t expect it to be. Just a small, clear, plastic ball that appeared to be empty. The mysterious dots were microscopic and there weren’t very many of them. “No radiation detected,” Stratt said through the intercom. I shot a glance over at her. She watched her tablet intensely. I took a good long look at the ball. “Is this under vacuum?” “No,” she said. “It’s full of argon gas at one atmosphere of pressure. The dots have been moving around the whole time the probe was returning from Venus. So it looks like the argon doesn’t affect them.” I looked all around the lab. “There’s no glove box here. I can’t just expose unknown samples to normal air.” “The entire room is full of argon,” she said. “Make sure you don’t kink your air line or rip your suit. If you breathe argon—” “I’ll suffocate and won’t even know it’s happening. Yeah, okay.” I took the ball to a tray and carefully twisted it until it came apart in two halves. I placed one half in a sealed plastic container and mopped the other half with a dry cotton swab. I scraped the swab against a slide and took it to a microscope. I thought they’d be harder to find, but there they were. Dozens of little black dots. And they were indeed wriggling around. “You recording all this?” “From thirty-six different angles,” she said. “Sample consists of many round objects,” I said. “Almost no variance in size—each appears to be approximately ten microns in diameter…” I adjusted the focus and tried various intensities of backlighting. “Samples are opaque…I can’t see inside, even at the highest available light setting….” “Are they alive?” Stratt asked. I glared at her. “I can’t just tell that at a glance. What do you expect to happen here?” “I want you to find out if they’re alive. And if so, find out how they work.” “That’s a tall order.” “Why? Biologists worked out how bacteria works. Just do the same thing they did.” “That took thousands of scientists two centuries to work out!” “Well…do it faster than that.” “Tell you what”—I pointed back to the microscope—“I’m going to get back to work now. I’ll tell you anything I work out when I work it out. Until then, you can all enjoy some quiet study time.” I spent the next six hours doing incremental tests. Over that time, the military people wandered out, eventually leaving only Stratt by herself. I had to admire her patience. She sat in the back of the observation room and worked on her tablet, sometimes looking up to see what I was doing. She perked up as I cycled my way through the airlock and into the observation room. “Got something?” she asked. I unzipped the suit and stepped out of it. “Yeah, a full bladder.” She typed on her tablet. “I hadn’t accounted for that. I’ll get a bathroom installed inside the quarantine area tonight. It’ll have to be a chemical toilet. We can’t have plumbing going in and out.” “Fine, whatever,” I said. I hustled off to the facilities to do my business. When I returned, Stratt had pulled a small table and two chairs to the center of the observation room. She sat in one of the chairs and gestured to the other. “Have a seat.” “I’m in the middle of—” “Have a seat.” I took a seat. She had a commanding presence, that’s for sure. Something about her tone of voice or her general confidence level, maybe? One way or another, when she spoke you just kind of assumed you should do what she said. “What have you found so far?” she asked. “It’s only been one afternoon,” I said. “I didn’t ask how long it’s been. I asked what you’ve found out so far.” I scratched my head. After hours in that suit, I was sweaty and presumably smelled bad. “It’s…weird. I don’t know what those dots are made of. And I’d really like to know.” “Is there some equipment you need that you don’t have?” she asked. “No, no. There’s everything a guy could hope for in there. It just…doesn’t work on these dots.” I settled back into the chair. I’d been on my feet most of the day and it was nice to relax for a moment. “First thing I tried was the x-ray spectrometer. It sends x-rays into a sample, making it emit photons and you can tell from the wavelengths of the photons what elements are present.” “And what did that tell you?” “Nothing. As far as I can tell, these dots just absorb x-rays. The x-rays go in and they never come out. Nothing comes out. That’s very odd. I can’t think of anything that does that.” “Okay.” She took some notes on her tablet. “What else can you tell me?” “Next I tried gas chromatography. That’s where you vaporize the sample and then identify the elements or compounds in the resulting gas. That didn’t work either.” “Why not?” I threw up my hands. “Because the darn things just won’t vaporize. That led me down a rabbit hole of burners, ovens, and crucible furnaces that turned up nothing. The dots are unaffected at temperatures up to two thousand degrees Celsius. Nothing.” “And that’s odd?” “It’s crazy odd,” I said. “But these things live on the sun. At least some of the time. So I guess having a high resistance to heat makes sense.” “They live on the sun?” she said. “So they’re a life-form?” “I’m pretty sure they are, yeah.” “Elaborate.” “Well, they move around. It’s plainly visible through the microscope. That alone doesn’t prove they’re alive—inert stuff moves all the time from static charge or magnetic fields or whatever. But there is something else I noticed. Something weird. And it made the pieces fall into place.” “Okay.” “I put a few dots under a vacuum and ran a spectrograph. Just a simple test to see if they emit light. And they do, of course. They give off infrared light at the 25.984 micron wavelength. That’s the Petrova frequency—the light that makes the Petrova line. I expected that. But then I noticed they only emit light when they’re moving. And boy, do they emit a lot of it. I mean, not a lot from our point of view, but for a tiny single-celled organism it’s a ton.” “And how is that relevant?” “I did some back-of-the napkin math. And I’m pretty sure that light is how they move around.” Stratt raised an eyebrow. “I don’t follow.” “Believe it or not, light has momentum,” I said. “It exerts a force. If you were out in space and you turned on a flashlight, you’d get a teeny, tiny amount of thrust from it.” “I didn’t know that.” “Now you do. And a teeny-tiny thrust on a teeny-tiny mass can be an effective form of propulsion. I measured the dots’ average mass at about twenty picograms. That took a long time, by the way, but that lab equipment is awesome. Anyway, the movement I see is consistent with the momentum of the emitted light.” She set her tablet down. I had, apparently, accomplished the rare feat of getting her undivided attention. “Is that something that happens in nature?” I shook my head. “No way. Nothing in nature has that kind of energy storage. You don’t understand how much energy these dots are emitting. It’s like…getting to the scales of mass conversion. E = mc2 kind of stuff. These tiny dots have more energy stored up in them than remotely makes sense.” “Well,” she said. “They did just come from the sun. And the sun is losing energy.” “Yeah. That’s why I think it’s a life-form,” I said. “It consumes energy, stores it in some way we don’t understand, then uses it for propulsion. That’s not a simple physical or chemical process. That’s complex and directed. Something that must have evolved.” “So the Petrova line is…tiny little rocket flares?” “Probably. And I bet we’re only seeing a small percentage of the total light coming off that area. They use it to propel themselves to Venus or to the sun. Or both. I don’t know. Point is, the light will go away from their direction of travel. Earth isn’t in that line, so we only see the light that reflects off nearby space dust.” “Why do they go to Venus?” she asked. “And how do they reproduce?” “Good questions. Ones I don’t have answers for. But if they’re single-celled stimulus/response organisms, they probably reproduce through mitosis.” I paused. “That’s when the cell splits in half to become two new cells—” “Yes, I know that much, thank you.” She looked to the ceiling. “People always assumed our first contact with alien life—if any existed—would be little green men in UFOs. We never considered the idea of a simple, unintelligent species.” “Yeah,” I said. “This isn’t Vulcans dropping by to say hi. This is…space algae.” “An invasive species. Like cane toads in Australia.” “Good analogy.” I nodded. “And the population is growing. Fast. The more of them there are, the more solar energy gets consumed.” She pinched her chin. “What would you call an organism that exists on a diet of stars?” I struggled to remember my Greek and Latin root words. “I think you’d call it ‘Astrophage.’ ” “Astrophage,” she said. She typed it into her tablet. “Okay. Get back to work. Find out how they breed.” — Astrophage! The word alone makes all my muscles clinch up. A chilling terror that hits like a lead weight. That’s the name. The thing that threatens all life on Earth. Astrophage. I glance at the monitor with my zoomed-in image of the sun. The sunspots have moved noticeably. Okay, it’s a real-time image. Good to know. Waaaaait…I don’t think they’re moving at the right speed. I check the stopwatch. I was only daydreaming for ten minutes or so. The sunspots should have moved a fraction of a degree. But they’re halfway off the screen. Way more than they should have moved. I pull the tape measure from my toga. I zoom out the image and actually measure the widths of the sun and sunspot cluster on the screen. No more rough estimates. I want real math here. The solar disc is 27 centimeters on-screen and the sunspots are 3 millimeters. And they moved half their width (1.5 millimeters) in ten minutes. Actually, it was 517 seconds, according to my stopwatch. I scribble some math on my arm. At this resolution, they’re moving 1 millimeter every 344.66 seconds. To cross the entire 27 centimeters it would take (scribble, scribble) just over 93,000 seconds. So it’ll take that long for the cluster to cross the near side of the sun. It’ll take twice that long to get all the way around. So 186,000 seconds. That’s a little over two days. Over ten times faster than the rotation should be. This star I’m looking at…it’s not the sun. I’m in a different solar system. O kay. I think it’s time I took a long gosh-darned look at these screens! How am I in another solar system?! That doesn’t even make sense! What star is that, anyway?! Oh my God, I am so going to die! I hyperventilate for a while. I remember what I tell my students: If you’re upset, take a deep breath, let it out, and count to ten. It dramatically reduced the number of tantrums in my classroom. I take a breath. “One…two…thr—this isn’t working! I’m going to die!” I hold my head in my hands. “Oh God. Where the heck am I?” I scour the monitors for anything I can make sense of. There’s no lack of information—there’s too much. Each screen has a handy label on the top. “Life Support,” “Airlock Status,” “Engines,” “Robotics,” “Astrophage,” “Generators,” “Centrifuge”—wait a minute. Astrophage? I check the Astrophage panel closely. REMAINING: 20,906 KG CONSUMPTION RATE: 6.045 G/S Far more interesting than those numbers is the diagram below them. It shows what I assume is the Hail Mary. My first real overview of what this ship looks like. The top of the ship is a cylinder with a nose cone at the front. That’s a rocket shape if ever I saw one. Judging by the tapered, conical walls of the control room, this must be the very front of the ship. Beneath me is the lab. On the diagram that room is labeled “Lab.” Below that is the room I woke up in. The one with my dead friends. I sniffle and wipe away a tear. No time for that right now. I put it out of my head and keep looking at the diagram. That room is named “Dormitory.” Okay, so this whole diagram lines up with my experiences. And it’s nice to know the official names of things. Underneath the dormitory is a much shorter room, maybe about 1 meter high, named “Storage.” Aha! There must be a panel in the floor that I missed. I make a mental note to check that out later. But there’s more. A lot more. Under the storage area, there’s an area labeled “Cable Faring.” No idea what that is or why it exists. Beneath that, the ship fans out and there appear to be three cylinders the same width as my little area. They’re all side by side. My guess is they assembled this ship in space and the largest diameter they could launch was about 4 meters. The trio of cylinders—I’d estimate they’re 75 percent of the total ship’s volume—are labeled “Fuel.” The fuel area is broken up into nine subcylinders. I tap one of them out of curiosity, and it brings up a screen for that one fuel bay. It says ASTROPHAGE: 0.000 KG. It also has a button labeled “Jettison.” Well, I’m not sure why I’m here or what these things are all about, but I definitely don’t want to hit any button labeled Jettison. It’s probably not as dramatic as it seems. These are fuel tanks. If the fuel has been spent, the ship can ditch the tank to reduce its mass and make the remaining fuel last longer. It’s the same reason rockets lifting off from Earth have multiple stages. Interesting that the ship didn’t automatically eject them as they became empty. I dismiss the window and return to the main ship map. Under each of those large fuel zones is a trapezoidal area labeled “Spin Drive.” I’ve never heard that term before, but since it’s in the back of the ship and has the word “drive” in its name, I assume it’s the propulsion system. Spin drive…spin drive…I close my eyes and try to think about it…. — Nothing happens. I can’t call up memories at will. I’m not quite there yet. I peer at the diagram more closely. Why is there 20,000 kilograms of Astrophage on this ship? I’ve got a strong suspicion. It’s the fuel. And why not? Astrophage can propel itself with light and has absurd energy-storage capability. It’s had God-knows-how-many billion years of evolution to get good at it. Just like a horse is more energy efficient than a truck, Astrophage is more energy efficient than a spaceship. Okay, that explains why there’s a buttload of Astrophage on the ship. It’s fuel. But why put a diagram of the ship on this screen? That’s like putting a blueprint of a car on its gas gauge. Interestingly, the diagram doesn’t really care about the rooms. It doesn’t even show what’s inside them—just a label for each one and that’s it. However, the diagram is very focused on the hull and the rear part of the ship. I see red pipes leading from the fuel areas to the spin drives. Probably how fuel gets to the engines. But I also see the pipes all along the hull of the ship. And they cut across the Cable Faring area. So the Astrophage fuel is mostly in the fuel tank, but also kept in a shell all around the hull. Why do that? Oh, and there are temperature readings all over the place. I guess temperature is important because the readings are every few meters along the hull. And every single one of them reads 96.415°C. Hey, I know that temperature. I know that exact temperature! What do I know it from? Come on, brain…come on… — 96.415°C, read the display. “Huh,” I said. “What is it?” Stratt said immediately. It was my second day in the lab. Stratt still insisted I be the only person to look at Astrophage—at least for the time being. She dropped her tablet on the table and came to the observation-room window. “Something new?” “Kind of. The ambient temperature of an Astrophage is 96.415 degrees Celsius.” “That’s pretty hot, isn’t it?” “Yeah, almost the boiling point of water,” I said. “For anything living on Earth it would be deadly. But for a thing that’s comfortable near the sun, who knows?” “So what’s significant about it?” “I can’t get them hotter or colder.” I pointed to the experiment I’d set up in the fume hood. “I put some Astrophage in ice-cold water for an hour. When I pulled them out, they were 96.415 degrees Celsius. Then I put some in a lab furnace at one thousand degrees. Again, after I pulled them out: 96.415 degrees.” Stratt paced next to the window. “Maybe they have extremely good insulation?” “I thought of that, so I did another experiment. I took an extremely small droplet of water and put a few Astrophage in it. After a few hours, the whole droplet was 96.415 degrees. The Astrophage heated up the water, so that means heat energy can move out of it.” “What conclusion can you draw?” she asked. I tried to scratch my head, but the vinyl suit got in the way. “Well, we know they have a huge amount of energy stored inside. I’m guessing they use it to maintain body temperature. Same way you and I do.” “A warm-blooded microorganism?” she said. I shrugged. “Looks that way. Hey, how much longer am I going to be the only person working on this?” “Until you stop discovering new stuff.” “One guy alone in a lab? That’s not how science works,” I said. “There should be hundreds of people all over the world working on this.” “You’re not alone in that thought,” she said. “I’ve had three different heads of state call me today.” “Then let other scientists in on it!” “No.” “Why not?” She looked away for a moment, then back through the window at me. “Astrophage is an alien microbe. What if it can infect humans? What if it’s deadly? What if hazmat suits and neoprene gloves aren’t enough protection?” I gasped. “Wait a minute! Am I a guinea pig? I’m a guinea pig!” “No, it’s not like that,” she said. I stared at her. She stared at me. I stared at her. “Okay, it’s exactly like that,” she said. “Dang it!” I said. “That’s just not cool!” “Don’t be dramatic,” she said. “I’m just playing it safe. Imagine what would happen if I sent Astrophage to the most brilliant minds on the planet and it killed them all. In an instant we’d lose the very people we need the most right now. I can’t risk it.” I scowled. “This isn’t some cheesy movie, Stratt. Pathogens evolve slowly over time to attack specific hosts. Astrophage has never even been on Earth before. There’s just no way it can ‘infect’ humans. Besides, it’s been a couple of days and I’m not dead. So send it out to the real scientists.” “You are a real scientist. And you’re making progress as fast as anyone else would. There’s no point in me risking other lives while you’re getting it done on your own.” “Are you kidding?” I said. “With a couple hundred minds working on this, we’d make a lot more progress on—” “Also, most deadly diseases have a minimum of least three days of incubation time.” “Ah, there it is.” She walked back to her table and picked up her tablet. “The rest of the world will have their turn in time. But for now it’s just you. At least tell me what the hell those things are made of. Then we can talk about giving it to other scientists.” She resumed reading her tablet. The conversation was over. And she’d ended it by laying down what my students would call a “sick burn.” Despite my best efforts, I still had no idea what the heck Astrophage was made of. They were opaque to every wavelength of light I threw at them. Visible, infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray, microwaves…I even put a few Astrophage in a radiation-containment vessel and exposed it to the gamma rays emitted by Cesium-137 (this lab has everything). I called it the “Bruce Banner Test.” Felt good about that name. Anyway, even gamma couldn’t penetrate the little bastards. Which is like shooting a .50-caliber round at a sheet of paper and having it bounce off. It just doesn’t make any sense. I sulked back to the microscope. The little dots hung out on the slide where they’d been for hours. This was my control set. The ones I hadn’t battered with various light sources. “Maybe I’m overthinking this…” I muttered. I poked around the lab supplies until I found what I needed: nanosyringes. They were rare and expensive, but the lab had them. Basically, they were teeny, tiny needles. Small enough and sharp enough to be used for poking microorganisms. You could pull mitochondria out of a living cell with one of those babies. Back to the microscope. “Okay, you little reprobates. You’re radiation-proof, I’ll grant you that. But how about I stab you in the face?” Normally a nanosyringe would be controlled by finely tuned equipment. But I just wanted some stabby time and didn’t care about the tool’s integrity. I grabbed the collet (where it would normally mount to the control machinery) and brought the needle into view in the microscope. They’re called nanosyringes, but they’re actually about 50 nanometers wide. Still, the needle was tiny compared to the hulking 10-micron Astrophage—only about one two-thousandth the width. I poked an Astrophage with the needle and what happened next was nothing I could have expected. First off, the needle penetrated. No doubt on that front. For all its resistance to light and heat, apparently, Astrophage was no better at dealing with sharp things than any other cell. The instant I poked a hole in it, the whole cell became translucent. No longer a featureless black dot, but a cell with organelles and everything else a microbiologist like me wants to see. Just like that. It was like flicking a switch. And then it died. The ruptured cell wall simply gave up the ghost and completely unraveled. The Astrophage went from being a cohesive roundish object to a slowly widening puddle with no outer boundary. I grabbed a normal needle from a nearby shelf and sucked up the goop. “Yes!” I said. “I killed one!” “Good for you,” Stratt said without looking up from her tablet. “First human to kill an alien. Just like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator.” “Okay, I know you’re trying to be funny, but that Predator died by deliberately setting off a bomb. The first human to actually kill a Predator was Michael Harrigan—played by Danny Glover—in Predator 2.” She stared at me through the window for a moment, then shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Point is, I can finally find out what Astrophage is made of!” “Really?” She set the tablet down. “Killing it did the trick?” “I think so. It’s not black anymore. Light is getting through. Whatever weird effect was blocking it isn’t anymore.” “How did you do it? What killed it?” “I penetrated the outer cell membrane with a nanosyringe.” “You poked it with a stick?” “No!” I said. “Well. Yes. But it was a scientific poke with a very scientific stick.” “It took you two days to think of poking it with a stick.” “You…be quiet.” I took the needle to the spectroscope and ejected the Astrophage goop onto the platform. Then I sealed the chamber and fired up the analysis. I bounced from one foot to the other like a little kid while I waited for the results. Stratt craned her neck to watch me. “So what’s this you’re doing now?” “It’s the atomic-emission spectroscope,” I said. “I told you about it earlier—it sends x-rays into a sample to excite the atoms, then watches the wavelengths that come back. Didn’t work at all when I tried it on the live Astrophage, but now that the magic light-stopping properties are gone, things should work like normal.” The machine beeped. “All right! Here we go! Time to find out what chemicals are in a life-form that doesn’t use water!” I read the LCD screen. It showed all the peaks and the elements they represented. I stared at the screen silently. “Well?” Stratt said. “Well?!” “Um. There’s carbon and nitrogen…but the vast majority of the sample is hydrogen and oxygen.” I sighed and plopped down in the chair next to the machine. “The ratio of hydrogen to oxygen is two to one.” “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What does that mean?” “It’s water. Astrophage is mostly water.” Her mouth fell open. “How? How can something that exists on the surface of the sun have water?” I shrugged. “Probably because it maintains its internal temperature at 96.415 degrees Celsius no matter what’s going on outside.” “What does this all mean?” she asked. I put my head in my hands. “It means every scientific paper I ever wrote is wrong.” — Well. That’s a kick in the pants. But I wasn’t happy in that lab anyway. And they must have brought in smarter people than me, because here I am: at another star in a ship powered by Astrophage. So why am I the one out here? All I did was prove that my lifelong belief was wrong. I guess I’ll remember that part later. For now, I want to know what star that is. And why we built a ship to bring people here. All important things, to be sure. But right now, there’s a whole area of the ship that I haven’t explored yet. Storage. Maybe I can find something other than a makeshift toga to wear. I climb down the ladder to the lab, and then farther downward into the dormitory. My friends are still there. Still dead. I try not to look at them. I scan the floor for any hint of an access panel. Nothing. So I get down on my hands and knees and crawl around. Finally, I spot it—a very thin seam marking a square directly under my male crewmate’s bunk. I can’t even wedge my fingernail into the seam it’s so thin. There were all manner of tools in the lab. I’m sure there’s a flathead screwdriver I could use to pry this open. Or… “Hey computer! Open this access panel.” “Specify aperture to open.” I point to the panel. “This. This thing. Open it.” “Specify aperture to open.” “Uh…open aperture to supply room.” “Unsealing supply room,” says the computer. There’s a click and the panel raises a couple of inches. A rubber gasket around the seam gets torn apart in the process. I couldn’t see it when the panel was closed, things were that tight. I’m glad I didn’t try to pry it open. It would have been a pain in the butt. I pull the remnants of the seal off the panel and the panel becomes loose in the opening. I jiggle it a bit before figuring out I have to rotate it. Once I rotate it 90 degrees it detaches and I set it aside. I poke my head into the room below and see a bunch of soft-sided white cubes. I guess that makes sense. Packing stuff in soft containers lets you cram more things into the room. Just as the diagram in the control room said, the storage area is about a meter high. And completely full of those soft containers. I would have to remove a bunch just to get in there—if I wanted to get in there. I guess I’ll have to eventually. It looks a bit claustrophobic, to be honest. Like the crawlspace under a house. I grab the nearest package and pull it up through the opening. The package is held together by Velcro straps. I pull them apart and the container unfolds like a Chinese takeout box. Inside are a bunch of uniforms. Jackpot! Though not really a coincidence. Whoever packed this probably did it with careful planning. And they knew the crew would want uniforms as soon as they woke up. So they’re in the first bag. There are at least a dozen uniforms in the package. They’re each in vacuum-sealed plastic bags. I open one at random. It’s a light-blue, one-piece jumpsuit. Astronaut clothes. The fabric is thin but feels comfortable. On the left shoulder is the Hail Mary mission patch. Same design I saw in the control room. Beneath that is the Chinese flag. The right shoulder has a white patch with a blue chevron triangle surrounded by a wreath design and the letters “CNSA.” I recognize it immediately, nerd that I am. It’s the Chinese National Space Agency logo. There’s a name tag over the left breast pocket. It reads ?—the same character I saw in the Hail Mary mission crest. It’s pronounced Y?o. How do I know—? Of course I know. Commander Y?o. He was our leader. I can see his face now. Young and striking, eyes full of determination. He understood the severity of the mission and the weight on his shoulders. He was ready for the task. He was stern but reasonable. And you knew—you just knew—he would give up his life in a second for the mission or his crew. I pull out another uniform. Much smaller than the commander’s. The mission patch is the same, but there’s a Russian flag beneath it. And the right shoulder has a tilted red chevron surrounded by a ring. It’s the symbol of Roscosmos—the Russian space agency. The name patch reads ИЛЮХИНА, another name from the crest. This was Ilyukhina’s uniform. Olesya Ilyukhina. She was hilarious. She could have you laughing your butt off within thirty seconds of meeting you. She just had one of those infectious and jovial personalities. As serious as Y?o was, Ilyukhina was casual. They butted heads about it from time to time, but even Y?o couldn’t resist her charms. I remember when he finally broke down and laughed at one of her jokes. You can’t be a hundred percent serious forever. I stand up and look to the bodies. No longer a stern commander; no longer a cheerful friend. Just two empty husks that once held souls but now barely looked human. They deserve more than this. They deserve a burial. The container holds multiple outfits for each crewmember. I eventually find the ones for me. They are exactly as I assumed they would be. Hail Mary mission patch with a U.S. flag underneath, a NASA logo on the right shoulder, and a name tag that says GRACE. I put on my jumpsuit. After more digging in the storage area I find footwear. They’re not shoes, really. Just thick socks with rubber soles—booties with some grip. I guess that’s all we’d need for the mission. I put them on as well. Then I go about the grim task of dressing my departed comrades. The jumpsuits don’t remotely look the right size on their thin, desiccated bodies. I even put the booties on. Why not? This is our uniform. And a traveler deserves to be buried in uniform. I start with Ilyukhina. She weighs almost nothing. I carry her over my shoulder as I climb the ladders all the way to the control room. Once there, I set her on the floor and open the airlock. The spacesuit inside is bulky and in the way. I move it, piece by piece, into the control room and set it on the pilot’s chair. Then I put Olesya into the airlock. The airlock controls are self-explanatory. The air pressure inside the airlock and even the outer door are controllable by the panel in the control room. There’s even a Jettison button. I close the door and activate the jettison process. It starts with a buzzing alarm, blinking lights inside the airlock, and a verbal countdown. There are three different blinking Abort switches inside the airlock. Anyone who finds themselves in there during a jettison can easily cancel it. Once the countdown finishes, the airlock decompresses to 10 percent of an atmosphere (according to the readouts). Then it releases the outer door. With a whoosh, Olesya is gone. And, with the constantly accelerating ship, the body simply falls away. “Olesya Ilyukhina,” I say. I don’t remember her religion or if she even had one. I don’t know what she would have wanted said. But at least I will remember her name. “I commend your body to the stars.” It seems appropriate. Maybe corny, but it makes me feel better. Next I carry Commander Y?o to the airlock. I set him inside, seal it, and jettison his remains in the same way. “Y?o Li-Jie,” I say. I don’t know how I remembered his given name. It just came to me in the moment. “I commend your body to the stars.” The airlock cycles and I am alone. I was alone all along, but now I am truly alone. The sole living human within several light-years, at least. What do I do now? — “Welcome back, Mr. Grace!” said Theresa. The kids all sat in their desks, primed for science class. “Thanks, Theresa,” I said. Michael piped in. “The substitute teacher was booooring.” “Well, I’m not,” I said. I picked up four plastic bins from the corner. “Today we’re going to look at rocks! Okay, maybe that is a little boring.” A chuckle from the kids. “You’re going to divide into four teams and each team will get a bin. You have to separate the rocks into igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. First team to finish—and get every rock correctly categorized—gets beanbags.” “Can we pick our own teams?” Trang asked excitedly. “No. That just leads to a bunch of drama. Because children are animals. Horrible, horrible animals.” Everyone laughed. “Teams will be alphabetical. So the first team is—” Abby raised her hand. “Mr. Grace, can I ask a question?” “Sure.” “What’s happening to the sun?” The whole class suddenly grew much more attentive. “My dad says it’s not a big deal,” Michael said. “My dad says it’s a government conspiracy,” said Tamora. “Okay…” I set the bins down and sat on the edge of my desk. “So…basically, you know how there’s algae in the ocean, right? Well, there’s sort of a space algae growing in the sun.” “Astrophage?” said Harrison. I almost slipped off the desk. “Wh-Where did you hear that word?” “That’s what they’re calling it now,” said Harrison. “The president called it that in a speech last night.” I’d been so isolated in that lab I didn’t even know the president had given a speech. And holy cow. I invented that word for Stratt the day before. In that time it got from her to the president to the media. Wow. “Okay, yes. Astrophage. And it’s growing on the sun. Or near it. People aren’t sure.” “So what’s the problem?” Michael asked. “Algae in the ocean doesn’t hurt us. Why would algae on the sun?” I pointed to him. “Good question. Thing is, Astrophage is starting to absorb a lot of the sun’s energy. Well, not a lot. Just a tiny percentage. But that means Earth gets a tiny bit less sunlight. And that can cause real problems.” “So it’ll be a little colder? Like a degree or two?” Abby asked. “What’s the big deal?” “You guys know about climate change, right? How our CO2 emissions have caused a lot of problems in the environment?” “My dad says that’s not real,” said Tamora. “Well, it is,” I said. “Anyway. All the environmental problems we have from climate change? They happened because the world’s average temperature went up one and a half degrees. That’s it. Just one and a half degrees.” “How much will this Astrophage stuff change Earth’s temperature?” asked Luther. I stood and paced slowly in front of the class. “We don’t know. But if it breeds like algae does, at about that same speed, climatologists are saying Earth’s temperature could drop ten to fifteen degrees.” “What’ll happen?” Luther asked. “It’ll be bad. Very bad. A lot of animals—entire species—will die out because their habitats are too cold. The ocean water will cool down, too, and it might cause an entire food-chain collapse. So even things that could survive the lower temperature will starve to death because the things they eat all die off.” The kids stared at me, awestruck. Why had their parents not explained this to them? Probably because they didn’t understand it themselves. Besides, if I had a nickel for every time I wanted to smack a kid’s parents for not teaching them even the most basic things…well…I’d have enough nickels to put in a sock and smack those parents with it. “Animals are going to die too?!” Abby asked, horrified. Abby rode horses competitively and spent most of her time at her grandfather’s dairy farm. Human suffering is often an abstract concept to kids. But animal suffering is something else entirely. “Yes, I’m sorry, but a lot of livestock will die. And it’s worse than that. On land, crops will fail. The food we eat will become scarce. When that happens, the social order often breaks down and—” I stopped myself there. These were kids. Why was I going this far? “How—” Abby began. I’d never seen her at a loss for words. “How long before this happens?” “Climatologists think it’ll happen within the next thirty years,” I said. Just like that, all the kids relaxed. “Thirty years?” Trang laughed. “That’s forever!” “It’s not that long…” I said. But to a bunch of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, thirty years may as well be a million. “Can I be on Tracy’s team for the rock-sorting assignment?” asked Michael. Thirty years. I looked out at their little faces. In thirty years they’d all be in their early forties. They would bear the brunt of it all. And it wouldn’t be easy. These kids were going to grow up in an idyllic world and be thrown into an apocalyptic nightmare. They were the generation that would experience the Sixth Extinction Event. I felt a cramp in the pit of my stomach. I was looking out at a room full of children. Happy children. And there was a good chance some of them would literally die of starvation. “I…” I stammered. “I have to go do a thing. Forget the rock assignment.” “What?” asked Luther. “Do…study hall. This is study hall for the rest of the hour. Just do homework from other classes. Stay in your seats and work quietly until the bell rings.” I left the room without another word. I almost collapsed in the hall from the shakes. I went to a nearby drinking fountain and splashed water on my face. Then I took a deep breath, got some self-control back, and jogged to the parking lot. I drove fast. Way too fast. I ran red lights. I cut people off. I never do any of that, but that day was different. That day was…I don’t even know. I screeched into the lab parking lot and left my car parked at an odd angle. Two U.S. Army soldiers were at the doors to the complex. Just as they had been the previous two days while I’d been working there. I stormed past them. “Should we have stopped him?” I heard one ask the other. I didn’t care what the response was. I stomped into the observation room. Stratt was there, of course, reading her tablet. She looked up and I caught a glimpse of genuine surprise on her face. “Dr. Grace? What are you doing here?” Past her, through the windows, I spotted four people in containment suits working in the lab. “Who are they?” I said, pointing at the window. “And what are they doing in my lab?” “Can’t say I like your tone—” she said. “I don’t care.” “And it’s not your lab. It’s my lab. Those technicians are collecting the Astrophage.” “What are you going to do with it?” She held her tablet under her arm. “Your dream is coming true. I’m dividing up the Astrophage and sending it to thirty different labs around the world. Everything from CERN to a CIA bioweapons facility.” “The CIA has a biowea—?” I began. “Never mind. I want to do more work on this.” She shook her head. “You’ve done your part. We thought it was anhydrous life. Turns out it wasn’t. You proved that. And since no alien exploded out of your chest, we can consider the guinea-pig phase over too. So you’re done.” “No, I’m not done. There’s a lot more to learn.” “Of course there is,” she said. “And I have thirty labs all eagerly waiting to get started on it.” I stepped forward. “Leave some Astrophage here. Let me work it some more.” She stepped forward as well. “No.” “Why not?!” “According to your notes, there were one hundred and seventy-four living Astrophage cells in the sample. And you killed one yesterday, so we’re down to a hundred and seventy-three.” She pointed to her tablet. “Each of these labs—huge, national labs—will get five or six cells each. That’s it. We’re down to that level of scarcity. Those cells are the one hundred and seventy-three most important things on Earth right now. Our analysis of them will determine if humanity survives.” She paused and spoke a little more softly. “I get it. You spent your whole life trying to prove that life doesn’t require water. Then, unbelievably, you get some actual extraterrestrial life and it turns out to need water. That’s rough. Shake it off and get back to your life. I’ve got it from here.” “I’m still a microbiologist who spent his career working up theoretical models for alien life. I’m a useful resource with a skill set almost no one else has.” “Dr. Grace, I don’t have the luxury of leaving samples here just to stroke your bruised ego.” “Ego?! This isn’t about my ego! It’s about my children!” “You don’t have children.” “Yes, I do! Dozens of them. They come to my class every day. And they’re all going to end up in a Mad Max nightmare world if we don’t solve this problem. Yeah, I was wrong about the water. I don’t care about that. I care about those kids. So give me some gosh-darned Astrophage!” She stepped back and pursed her lips. She looked to the side, thinking it over. Then she turned back to me. “Three. You can have three Astrophage.” I unclenched my muscles. “Okay.” I breathed a little. I didn’t realize how tense I’d been. “Okay. Three. I can work with that.” She typed on her tablet. “I’ll keep this lab open. It’s all yours. Come back in a few hours and my guys will be gone.” I was already halfway into a containment suit. “I’m getting back to work now. Tell your guys to stay out of my way.” She glared at me but didn’t say anything further. — I have to do this for my kids. I mean…they’re not my kids. But they’re my kids. I look at the screens arrayed before me. I need to think about this. My memory is spotty. Seems reliable enough, but incomplete. Instead of waiting for an epiphany where I remember everything, what can I work out right now? Earth is in trouble. The sun is infected with Astrophage. I’m in a spaceship in another solar system. This ship wasn’t easy to build and it had an international crew. We’re talking about an interstellar mission—something that should be impossible with our technology. Okay, so humanity put a lot of time and effort into this mission, and Astrophage was the missing link that enabled it. There’s only one explanation: There’s a solution to the Astrophage problem here. Or a potential solution. Something promising enough to dedicate a huge amount of resources. I scour the screens for more info. Mostly they seem to be the kinds of things you’d expect on a spaceship. Life support, navigation, that sort of thing. One screen is labeled “Beetles.” The next screen over says— Wait, beetles? Okay, I don’t know if it has anything to do with anything, but I need to find out if there are a bunch of beetles on this ship. That’s the sort of thing a guy needs to know. The screen is broken into four quadrants, each one showing nearly the same thing. A little schematic and a bunch of text information. The schematics each show a bulbous, oblong shape with a pointed head and a trapezoid on the back. If you tilt your head just right and squint, I suppose it kind of looks like a beetle. Each beetle also has a name up top: “John,” “Paul,” “George,” and “Ringo.” Yeah, I get it. I’m not laughing, but I get it. I arbitrarily pick one beetle, John, and give it a good look. John is no insect. I’m pretty sure he’s a spaceship. The trapezoid in the rear is labeled “Spin Drive,” and the entire bulbous part is labeled “Fuel.” The little head has a “Computer” label and a “Radio” label. I look a little closer. The Fuel info box says ASTROPHAGE: 120KG—TEMP: 96.415°C. The Computer box says LAST MEMORY CHECK: 3 DAYS AGO. 5 TB FUNCTIONING CORRECTLY. And the Radio info just says STATUS: 100%. It’s an unmanned probe. Something small, I guess. The entire mass of the fuel is just 120 kilograms. That’s not a lot. But a little Astrophage goes a long way. There aren’t any scientific instruments labeled. What’s the point of an unmanned ship with nothing on board? Wait…what if the 5 terabytes of storage is the point of the ship? A realization dawns on me. “Oh. Shucks,” I say. I’m out in space. I’m in another star system. I don’t know how much Astrophage it took to get here, but it was probably a lot. Sending a ship to another star probably took an absurd amount of fuel. Sending that ship to another star and bringing it back would take ten times as much fuel. I check the Astrophage panel to refresh my memory. REMAINING: 20,862 KG CONSUMPTION RATE: 6.043 G/S The consumption rate was 6.045 grams per second before. So it’s gone down a little bit. And the fuel amount went down too. Basically, as the fuel gets consumed, the total mass of the ship goes down, so it needs less fuel per second to maintain the constant acceleration. Okay, that all makes sense. I have no idea what the Hail Mary’s mass is, but to be able to shove it along at 1.5 g’s of acceleration on a few grams of fuel per second…Astrophage is amazing stuff. Anyway, I don’t know exactly how the consumption rate will change over time (I mean, I could work it out, but it’s complicated). So for now I’ll just approximate it to 6 grams per second. How long will that fuel last? It’s nice to have a jumpsuit on. It’s got pockets for all sorts of knickknacks. I still haven’t found a calculator, so I do the math with a pen and paper. Grand total, I’ll run out of fuel in about forty days. I don’t know what star that is, but it’s not the sun. And there’s just no way to get from any other star to Earth with just forty days of accelerating at 1.5 g’s. It probably took years to get here from Earth—which might be why I was in a coma. Interesting. Anyway, all this can only mean one thing: The Hail Mary isn’t going home. This is a one-way ticket. And I’m pretty sure these beetles are how I’m supposed to send information back to Earth. There’s no way I have a radio transmitter powerful enough to broadcast several light-years. I don’t know if that would even be possible to build. So instead, I have these little “beetle” ships with 5 terabytes of information each. They’ll fly back to Earth and broadcast their data. There’s four of them for redundancy. I’m probably supposed to put copies of my findings in each one and send them all home. If at least one survives the journey, Earth is saved. I’m on a suicide mission. John, Paul, George, and Ringo get to go home, but my long and winding road ends here. I must have known all this when I volunteered. But to my amnesia-riddled brain this is new information. I’m going to die out here. And I’m going to die alone. I glared at the Astrophage. “Why the heck do you go to Venus?” The microscope view was displayed on the big wall-mounted monitor. Each of the three little cells were a foot across at this magnification. I watched for any clues to their motivations, but Larry, Curly, and Moe offered no answer. I’d named them, of course. It’s a teacher thing. “What’s so special about Venus? And how do you even find it?” I crossed my arms. If Astrophage understood body language, they’d know I wasn’t messing around. “It takes a room full of really smart people at NASA to work out how to get to Venus. And you do it as a single-celled organism with no brain.” It had been two days since Stratt left me alone with the lab. The army guys were still at the doors. One was named Steve. Friendly guy. The other never spoke to me. I ran my hands through my greasy hair (I’d neglected to shower that morning). At least I didn’t have to wear the hazmat suit anymore. Scientists in Nairobi had taken a chance with one of their Astrophage and exposed it to Earth atmosphere to see what happened. It was unaffected. So, thanks to them, labs all over the world could breathe a sigh of relief and stop working in argon-filled rooms. I glanced at the pile of papers on a desk. The scientific community had moved into overdrive in a very unscientific way. Gone were the days of careful peer review and published articles. Astrophage research was a free-for-all where researchers posted their findings immediately and without proof. It led to misunderstandings and mistakes, but we just didn’t have time to do things the right way. Stratt kept me in the loop on most stuff. Not everything, I was sure. Who knows what other weird things she was up to. She seemed to have authority everywhere. A Belgian research team was able to prove that Astrophage reacts to magnetic fields, but only sometimes. Other times, it seems to ignore magnetic fields entirely, no matter how powerful. Still, the Belgians were able to (very inconsistently) steer Astrophage around by putting it in a magnetic field and changing the field’s orientation. Was that useful? No idea. At this point the world was just collecting data. A researcher in Paraguay showed that ants will get disoriented when they’re within a few centimeters of Astrophage. Was that useful? Okay, that one probably wasn’t useful. But it was interesting. Most notably, a group in Perth sacrificed one of their Astrophage and did a detailed analysis on all the organelles inside. They found DNA and mitochondria. In any other situation, this would have been the most important discovery of the century. Alien life—indisputably alien—had DNA and mitochondria! And…grumble…a bunch of water… Point is: The inside of an Astrophage wasn’t much different from the inside of any single-celled organism you’d find on Earth. It used ATP, RNA transcription, and a whole host of other extremely familiar things. Some researchers speculated that it originated on Earth. Others postulated this specific set of molecules was the only way for life to occur and Astrophage evolved it independently. And a smaller, vocal faction suggested life might not have evolved on Earth at all, and that Astrophage and terrestrial life have a common ancestor. “You know,” I told the Astrophage, “if you boys weren’t threatening all life on my planet, you’d be pretty awesome. You have mysteries within mysteries.” I leaned against a table. “You have mitochondria. Okay, so that means you use ATP as your energy storage, just like we do. But the light you use to move around requires waaaay more energy than your ATP can hold. So you have another energy-storage pathway. One we don’t understand.” One of the Astrophage on-screen darted slightly to the left. It was pretty common. Once in a while, for no real reason, they’d just wiggle. “What makes you move? Why move? And how does this random jerky motion get you from the sun to Venus? And why do you go to Venus at all?!” Lots of people were working on the internals of Astrophage. Trying to figure out what made it tick. Analyzing its DNA. Good for them. I wanted to know the basic life-cycle. That was my goal. Single-celled organisms don’t just store buttloads of energy and fly through space for no reason. There had to be something Astrophage needed from Venus or it would just stay on the sun. And it needed something from the sun, too, or it would stay on Venus. The sun part was pretty easy: It was there for the energy. Same reason plants grew leaves. Got to get that sweet, sweet energy if you’re going to be a life-form. Makes perfect sense. So what about Venus? I picked up a pen and fidgeted with it as I thought. “According to the Indian Space Research Organization, you guys get going up to 0.92 times the speed of light.” I pointed at them. “Didn’t know we could do that, did ya? Figure out your velocity? They used Doppler-shift analysis of the light you emit to work it out. And because of that, they also know you’re going both directions: to and from Venus.” I frowned. “But if you hit an atmosphere at that speed you should die. So why don’t you?” I rapped my forehead with a knuckle. “Because you can handle any amount of heat. Right. So you blast into the atmosphere, but you don’t get any hotter. Okay, but you’d have to at least slow down. So you’d just be in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Then you…what? Turn around and go back to the sun? Why?” I stared at the screen for a solid ten minutes, lost in thought. “All right, enough of this. I want to know how you find Venus.” I went to the local hardware store and bought a bunch of two-by-fours, three-quarter-inch plywood, power tools, and other stuff I’d need. Steve the army guy helped me carry a lot of it in. Jerk army guy did nothing. Over the next six hours, I built a lightproof closet with a shelf in it. It was just big enough for me to get in and out. I set the microscope on the shelf. The “door” was a plywood panel that I could remove with screws. I ran power and video lines into the closet through a little hole that I plugged up with putty to make sure no light could get in through there either. I set my IR camera up on the microscope and sealed up the closet. Out in the lab, the monitor showed the infrared light the camera saw. It was basically a frequency shift. Very low bands of IR would show up as red. Higher-energy bands would be orange, yellow, and so on up the rainbow. I could see the Astrophage cells as little red blobs, which was expected. At their constant temperature of 96.415 degrees Celsius they would naturally emit an IR wavelength of 7.8 microns or so—the low end of what I’d set the camera to look for. It was good confirmation that the setup was working. But I didn’t care about that dark-red color. I wanted to see a bright-yellow flash. That would be the Petrova frequency that Astrophage spit out to move around. If any of my Astrophages moved even the tiniest amount, I’d see a very obvious yellow flash. But it never came. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. Usually, I’d see a jerky motion from at least one of them every few seconds. But now there was nothing. “So,” I said. “You little brats have settled down, eh?” Light. Whatever their navigation system was, it was based on light. I suspected that would be the case. What else could you use in space? There’s no sound. No smell. It would have to be light, gravity, or electromagnetism. And light’s the easiest of those three to detect. At least, as far as evolution is concerned. For my next experiment, I taped a little white LED and a watch battery together. Of course, I wired it backward at first and the LED didn’t light up. That’s pretty much a rule in electronics: You never get diodes right on the first try. Anyway, I rewired it correctly and the LED lit up. I taped the whole contraption to the inside wall of the closet. I made sure to position it so the Astrophage on the sample slide would have a direct line of sight on it. Then I sealed everything up again. Now, from the Astrophage’s point of view, there was a lot of black nothingness and one shining spot of white. That’s kind of what Venus might look like if you were out in space and looking directly away from the sun. They didn’t budge. No hint of motion at all. “Hmph,” I said. To be fair, it wasn’t likely to work. If you were at the sun, looking away from it for the brightest splotch of light you could see, you’d probably zero in on Mercury, not Venus. Mercury is smaller than Venus, but it’s a lot closer so you’d see more light. “Why Venus?” I mused. But then I thought of a better question. “How do you guys identify Venus?” Why did they move randomly? My theory: By pure chance, every few seconds or so, an Astrophage thought it had spotted Venus. So it thrusted in that direction. But then the moment passed, so it stopped thrusting. The key had to be frequencies of light. My boys didn’t wiggle at all in darkness. But it wasn’t just about the sheer volume of light, or they would have gone for the LED. It had to be something about the frequency of the light. Planets don’t just reflect light. They also emit it. Everything emits light. The temperature of the object defines the wavelength of light emitted. Planets are no exception. So maybe Astrophage looked for Venus’s IR signature. It wouldn’t be as bright as Mercury’s, but it would be distinct—a different “color.” A little googling told me Venus’s average temperature was 462 degrees Celsius. I had a whole drawer full of replacement bulbs for microscopes and other lab stuff. I grabbed one and hooked it up to a variable power supply. Incandescent bulbs work by getting the filament so hot it emits visible light. That happens around 2,500 degrees Celsius. I didn’t need anything so dramatic. I just needed a measly 462 degrees. I adjusted power going through the bulb up and down, watching with an IR camera, until I got exactly the light frequency I wanted. I moved the whole contraption into my test closet, watched the monitor with my boys on it, and turned on the artificial Venus. Nothing. Absolutely no movement from the little jerks. “What do you want from me?!” I demanded. I pulled my goggles off and threw them to the ground. I drummed my fingers on the table. “If I were an astronomer, and someone showed me a blob of light, how would I know if it’s Venus?” I answered myself. “I’d look for that IR signature! But that’s not what Astrophage does. Okay, someone shows me a blob of light and says I’m not allowed to use emitted IR to work out the temperature of the body. How else could I find out if it’s Venus?” Spectroscopy. Look for carbon dioxide. I raised an eyebrow as the idea came to me. When light hits gas molecules, the electrons get all worked up. Then they calm down and re-emit the energy as light. But the frequency of the photons they emit is very specific to the molecules involved. Astronomers used this for decades to know what gases are out there far, far away. That’s what spectroscopy is all about. Venus’s atmosphere is ninety times Earth’s pressure and almost entirely carbon dioxide. Its spectroscopy signature of CO2 would be overwhelmingly strong. Mercury had no carbon dioxide at all, so the nearest competitor would be Earth. But we had a minuscule CO2 signature compared to Venus. Maybe Astrophage used emission spectra to find Venus? New plan! The lab had a seemingly infinite supply of light filters. Pick a frequency, and there’s a filter for it. I looked up the spectral signature of carbon dioxide—the peak wavelengths were 4.26 microns and 18.31 microns. I found the appropriate filters and built a little box for them. Inside I put a small white lightbulb. Now I had a box that would emit the spectral signature of carbon dioxide. I put it in the test closet and went out to watch the monitor. Larry, Curly, and Moe hung out on their slide, just like they had all day long. I flicked on the light box and watched for any reaction. The Astrophage left. They didn’t just meander toward the light. They were gone. Absolutely gone. “Um…” I had been recording the camera input, of course. I ran it back to watch frame by frame. Between two frames they simply disappeared. “Um!” Good news: Astrophage were attracted to carbon dioxide’s spectral signature! Bad news: My three irreplaceable, 10-micron-wide Astrophage had launched off somewhere—maybe at velocities approaching the speed of light—and I had no idea where they went. “Craaaaaap.” — Midnight. Darkness everywhere. The army guys changed shift to two guys I didn’t know. I missed Steve. I had aluminum foil and duct tape up over every window of the lab. I sealed the cracks around the entrances and exits with electrical tape. I turned off every piece of equipment that had a readout or LED of any kind. I put my watch in a drawer because it had glow-in-the-dark paint on the hands. I let my eyes adjust to the total darkness. If I saw so much as a single shape that wasn’t my imagination, I sought out the light leak and put tape over it. Finally, I reached a level of darkness so intense I couldn’t see anything. Opening or closing my eyes had no effect at all. The next step was my newly invented IR goggles. The lab had many things, but infrared goggles were not among them. I’d considered asking Steve the army guy if he could score some. I probably could have called Stratt and she would have had the president of Peru personally deliver them or something. But this was faster. The “goggles” were just the LCD output screen of my IR camera with a bunch of tape around them. I pressed them to my face and added more tape. Then more and more and more. I’m sure I looked ridiculous. But whatever. I fired up the camera and looked around the lab. Plenty of heat signatures. The walls were still warm from sunlight earlier that day, everything electrical had a glow, and my body shined like a beacon. I adjusted the frequency range to look for much hotter things. Specifically, things over 90 degrees Celsius. I crawled into my makeshift microscope closet and looked at the light box I’d used for the CO2 spectral emission. Astrophage are only 10 microns across. No chance I’d see something so small with the camera (or with my eyes, for that matter). But my little aliens are very hot, and they stay hot. So, if they’re not moving, they will have spent the last six hours or so slowly heating up their surroundings. That was the hope. It panned out. I immediately saw a circle of light on one of the plastic light filters. “Oh thank God,” I gasped. It was very faint but it was there. The spot was about 3 millimeters across and grew fainter and colder away from the center. The little fella had been heating up the plastic for hours. I scanned back and forth across the two plastic squares. I quickly found a second spot. My experiment worked way better than I expected. They saw what they thought was Venus and beelined for it. When they hit the light filters, they couldn’t go any farther. They probably kept pushing until I turned off the light. Anyway, if I could just confirm that all three Astrophage were present, I could bag the filters, then spend however long I needed to find and harvest the boys from them with a microscope and pipette. And there it was. The third Astrophage. “The gang’s all here!” I said. I reached into my pocket for a sample bag and got ready to very carefully pull the filter off the light box. That’s when I saw the fourth Astrophage. Just…minding its own business. A fourth cell. It was right in the same general cluster as the first three, on the filters. “Holy…” I’d been staring at these guys for a week. There’s no way I would have missed one. There could only be one explanation: One of the Astrophage divided. I’d accidentally made the Astrophage reproduce. I stared at that fourth spot of light for a full minute, taking in the magnitude of what had just happened. Breeding Astrophage meant we would have an unlimited supply for study. Kill them, poke them, take them apart, do whatever we wanted. This was a game changer. “Hello, Shemp,” I said. — I spent the next two days obsessively studying this new behavior. I didn’t even go home—I just slept in the lab. Steve the army guy brought me breakfast. Great guy. I should have shared all my findings with the rest of the science community, but I wanted to be sure. Peer review may have fallen by the wayside, but at least I could self-review. Better than nothing. The first thing that bothered me: CO2 spectral emissions are 4.26 and 18.31 microns. But Astrophage are only 10 microns across, so it couldn’t really interact with light that had a larger wavelength. How could it even see the 18.31 micron band? I repeated my earlier spectral experiment with just the 18.31 micron filter and got a result I didn’t expect. Strange things happened. First off, two of the Astrophage whipped over to the filter. They saw the light and went right for it. But how? It should be impossible for Astrophage to interact with a wavelength that big. I mean…literally impossible! Light is a funny thing. Its wavelength defines what it can and can’t interact with. Anything smaller than the wavelength is functionally nonexistent to that photon. That’s why there’s a mesh over the window of a microwave. The holes in the mesh are too small for microwaves to pass through. But visible light, with a much shorter wavelength, can go through freely. So you get to watch your food cook without melting your face off. Astrophage is smaller than 18.31 microns but somehow still absorbs light at that frequency. How? But that’s not even the strangest thing that happened. Yes, two of them took off for the filter, but the other two stayed put. They didn’t seem to care. They just hung out on the slide. Maybe they didn’t interact with the larger wavelength? So I did one more experiment. I shined the 4.26 micron light at them again. And I got the same results. The same two went right for the filter as before, and the other two just didn’t care. And there it was. I couldn’t be 100 percent certain, but I was pretty sure I’d just discovered the whole Astrophage life-cycle. It clicked in my mind like puzzle pieces finally fitting together. The two holdouts didn’t want to go to Venus anymore. They wanted to go back to the sun. Why? Because one of them just divided and created the other. Astrophage hang out on the surface of the sun gathering energy via heat. They store it internally in some way no one understands. Then, when they have enough, they migrate to Venus to breed, using that stored energy to fly through space using infrared light as a propellant. Lots of species migrate to breed. Why would Astrophage be any different? The Aussies already worked out that the inside of Astrophage wasn’t much different from Earth life. It needed carbon and oxygen to make the complex proteins required for DNA, mitochondria, and all the other fun stuff found in cells. There’s plenty of hydrogen on the sun. But the other elements just aren’t present. So Astrophage migrates to the nearest supply of carbon dioxide: Venus. First, it follows magnetic field lines and goes straight away from the sun’s North Pole. It has to do that, or the light from the sun would be too blinding to find Venus. And going straight up from the pole means the Astrophage will have a full view of Venus’s entire orbital path—no portion of it occluded by the sun. Ah, and that’s why Astrophage is so inconsistent on reacting to magnetic fields. It only cares about them at the very beginning of its journey and at no other time. Then it looks for Venus’s massive carbon dioxide spectral signature. Well, not really “looks for.” It’s probably more a simple stimulus-response thing initiated by the 4.26 and 18.31 micron light bands. Anyway, once it “sees” Venus, it goes straight to it. The path it takes—straight away from the solar pole, then sharply turning toward Venus—that’s the Petrova line. Our heroic Astrophage reaches the upper atmosphere of Venus, collects the CO2 it needs, and can finally reproduce. After that, both parent and child return to the sun and the cycle begins anew. It’s simple, really. Get energy, get resources, and make copies. It’s the same thing all life on Earth does. And that was why two of my little Stooges didn’t walk toward the light. So how does Astrophage find the sun? My guess: Look for the extremely bright thing and head that way. I separated Moe and Shemp (the sun-seekers) from Larry and Curly (the Venus-seekers). I put Larry and Curly on a different slide and put it in a light-sealed sample container. Then I set up an experiment in the dark closet for Moe and Shemp. This time, I put a bright incandescent bulb in there and turned it on. I expected them to head right toward it, but no dice. They didn’t budge. Probably not bright enough. I went to a photography store downtown (San Francisco has a lot of photography enthusiasts) and bought the largest, brightest, most powerful flash I could find. I replaced the lightbulb with the flash and did the experiment again. Moe and Shemp took the bait! I had to sit down and take a breath. I should have taken a nap—I hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. But this was too exciting. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Stratt’s number. She answered halfway through the first ring. “Dr. Grace,” she said. “Find something?” “Yeah,” I said. “I figured out how Astrophage reproduce and managed to make it happen.” Silence for a second. “You successfully bred Astrophage?” “Yes.” “Nondestructively?” she asked. “I had three cells. I now have four. They’re all alive and well.” Silence for another second. “Stay there.” She hung up. “Huh,” I said. I put the phone back in my lab coat. “Guess she’s on her way.” Steve the army guy burst into the lab. “Dr. Grace?!” “Wha…uh, yeah?” “Please come with me.” “Okay,” I said. “Let me just get my Astrophage samples put away—” “There are lab techs on the way to deal with all that. You have to come with me now.” “O-Okay…” — The next twelve hours were…unique. Steve the army guy drove me to a high school football field where a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter had already landed. Without words, they hustled me into the chopper and up we went into the sky. I tried not to look down. The chopper took me to Travis Air Force Base, about 60 miles north of the city. Did the marines often land at air force bases? I don’t know much about the military, but that seemed odd. It also seemed a bit extreme to send in the marines just to keep me from driving through a couple of hours of traffic, but okay. There was a jeep waiting for me on the tarmac where the helicopter landed, with an air force guy standing next to it. He introduced himself, I swear he did, but I don’t remember his name. He drove me across the tarmac to a waiting jet. No, not a passenger jet. And not a Learjet or anything like that. This was a fighter jet. I don’t know what kind. Like I said, I don’t know military stuff. My guide hustled me up a ladder and into the seat behind the pilot. He gave me a pill and a little paper cup of water. “Take this.” “What is it?” “It’ll keep you from puking all over our nice, clean cockpit.” “Okay.” I swallowed the pill. “And it’ll help you sleep.” “What?” Away he went, and the ground crew pulled away the ladder. The pilot didn’t say a word to me. Ten minutes later, we took off like a bat out of hell. I’d never felt acceleration like that in my life. The pill did its job. I definitely would have puked. “Where are we going?” I asked through the headset. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m not allowed to speak to you.” “This is going to be a boring trip, then.” “They usually are,” he said. I don’t know exactly when I fell asleep but it was within minutes of taking off. Thirty-six hours of mad science plus whatever was in that pill put me right into dreamland regardless of the ridiculous jet-engine noise surrounding me. I awoke in darkness to a jolt. We’d landed. “Welcome to Hawaii, sir,” said the pilot. “Hawaii? Why am I in Hawaii?” “I wasn’t given that information.” The jet taxied onto some side runway or whatever and a ground crew brought a ladder. I hadn’t gotten halfway down the ladder yet when I heard “Dr. Grace? This way, please!” It was a man in a U.S. Navy uniform. “Where the hell am I?!” I demanded. “Naval Station Pearl Harbor,” said the officer. “But not for long. Please follow me.” “Sure. Why not?” They put me in another jet with another non-talkative pilot. The only difference was that this time it was a navy jet instead of an air force jet. We flew for a long time. I lost track of the hours. Keeping track was meaningless anyway. I didn’t know how long we’d be in the air. Finally, I kid you not, we landed on an honest-to-God aircraft carrier. Next thing I knew, I was on the flight deck looking like an idiot. They gave me earmuffs and a coat and shuffled me over to a helipad. A navy chopper was waiting for me. “Will this trip…end? Like…ever?!” I asked. They ignored me and got me strapped in. The chopper took off immediately. This time, the flight wasn’t nearly so long. Just an hour or so. “This should be interesting,” said the pilot. It was the only thing he’d said the whole flight. We descended and the landing gear deployed. Below us was another aircraft carrier. I squinted at it. Something looked different. What was it…oh, right. It had a big Chinese flag flying over it. “Is that a Chinese aircraft carrier?!” I asked. “Yes, sir.” “Are we, a U.S. Navy helicopter, going to land on that Chinese aircraft carrier?” “Yes, sir.” “I see.” We landed on the carrier’s helipad and a bunch of Chinese Navy guys watched us with interest. There would be no post-flight servicing of this chopper. My pilot leered through the windows at them and they leered right back. As soon as I stepped out, he took off again. I was in China’s hands now. A navy man came forward and gestured for me to follow him. I don’t think anyone spoke English, but I got the general idea. He led me to a door in the tower structure and we went inside. We wound through passageways, stairwells, and rooms I didn’t even understand the purpose of. All the while, Chinese sailors watched me with curiosity. Finally, he stopped at a door with Chinese characters on it. He opened the door and pointed inside. I walked in and he slammed the door behind me. So much for my guide. I think it was an officer’s conference room. At least, that was my assumption based on the big table with fifteen people sitting at it. They all turned their heads to look up at me. Some were white, some were black, some were Asian. Some wore lab coats. Others wore suits. Stratt, of course, sat at the head of the table. “Dr. Grace. How was your trip?” “How was my trip?” I said. “I got dragged across the gosh-darned world without any notice—” She held up her hand. “It was just a pleasantry, Dr. Grace. I don’t actually care how your trip was.” She stood and addressed the room. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Dr. Ryland Grace from the United States. He figured out how to breed Astrophage.” Gasps came from around the table. One man shot to his feet and spoke with a thick German accent. “Are you serious? Stratt, warum haben sie—?” “Nur Englisch,” Stratt interrupted. “Why are we only hearing of this now?” the German demanded. “I wanted to confirm it first. While Dr. Grace was en route, I had technicians pack up his lab. They collected four live Astrophage from his lab. I only left him three.” An elderly man in a lab coat spoke Japanese in a calm, soothing voice. Next to him, a younger Japanese man in a charcoal suit translated. “Dr. Matsuka would like to respectfully request a detailed description of the process.” Stratt stepped aside and gestured to her chair. “Doctor, have a seat and lay it out for us.” “Hold on,” I said. “Who are these people? Why am I on a Chinese aircraft carrier? And have you ever heard of Skype?!” “This is an international body of high-level scientists and political operatives that I have assembled to spearhead Project Hail Mary.” “What’s that?” “That would take a while to explain. Everyone here is eager to hear about your Astrophage findings. Let’s start with that.” I shuffled to the front of the room and sat awkwardly at the head of the table. All eyes turned to me. So I told them. I told them all about the wooden closet experiments. I explained all my tests, what I did for each one, and how I did them. Then I explained my conclusions: I told them my hypothesis about the Astrophage life-cycle, how it works, and why. There were a few questions from the assembled scientists and politicos, but mostly they just listened and took notes. Several had translators whispering in their ear during the process. “So…yeah,” I said. “That’s pretty much everything. I mean—it’s not rigorously tested yet but it seems pretty simple.” German Guy raised his hand. “Would it be possible to breed Astrophage on a large scale?” Everyone leaned forward a little. Apparently this was a pretty important question and it was on everyone’s mind. I was taken aback by the sudden intensity of the room. Even Stratt seemed unusually interested. “Well?” she said. “Please answer Minister Voigt.” “Sure,” I said. “I mean…why not?” “How would you do it?” asked Stratt. “I guess I’d make a big elbow-shaped ceramic pipe and fill it with carbon dioxide. Make one end of it as hot as you can get it and have a bright light there. Wrap a magnetic coil around it to simulate the magnetic field of the sun. Put an IR light emitter at the other end of the elbow and have it emit light at 4.26 and 18.31 microns. Make the inside of the pipe as black as you can. That should do it.” “How does that ‘do it’?” she said. I shrugged. “The Astrophage will gather energy at the ‘sun’ side and when they’re ready to breed, they’ll follow that magnetic field to the pipe’s elbow. They’ll see the IR light at the other end and head toward it. Seeing that light and being exposed to carbon dioxide makes them breed. Then the parent and daughter cells will go back to the sun side. Simple enough.” A political-looking man raised his hand and spoke with some kind of African accent. “How much Astrophage could be made this way? How fast is the process?” “It would have a doubling time,” I said. “Like algae or bacteria. I don’t know how long it is, but considering the sun is getting dim it must be pretty quick.” A woman in a lab coat had been on her phone. She set it down, then spoke with a thick Chinese accent. “Our scientists have reproduced your results.” Minister Voigt scowled at her. “How did you even know his process? He just told us!” “Spies, presumably,” said Stratt. The German huffed. “How dare you circumvent us with—” “Shush,” said Stratt. “We’re past all that. Ms. Xi, do you have any additional information to share?” “Yes,” she said. “We estimate the doubling time to be just over eight days, under optimal conditions.” “What does that mean?” the African diplomat said. “How much can we make?” “Well.” I launched my phone’s calculator app and tapped a few buttons. “If you started with the one hundred and fifty Astrophage we have, and bred them for a year, at the end of it you’d have…about 173,000 kilograms of Astrophage.” “And would this Astrophage be at maximum energy density? Would it all be ready to reproduce?” “So you want…I guess you’d call it ‘enriched’ Astrophage?” “Yes,” he said. “That’s a perfect word for it. We want Astrophage that is holding as much energy as it can.” “Uh…I guess that could be arranged,” I said. “First, breed up the number of Astrophage you want, then expose them to lots of heat energy but don’t let them see any carbon dioxide spectral lines. They’ll collect energy and just sort of sit there waiting until they can see somewhere to get CO2.” “What if we needed two million kilograms of enriched Astrophage?” said the diplomat. “It’s doubling every eight days,” I said. “Two million kilos would be another four doublings or so. So, one month longer.” A woman leaned forward on the table, her fingers steepled. “We might just have a chance.” She had an American accent. “An outside chance,” said Voigt. “There is hope,” said the Japanese translator—presumably speaking for Dr. Matsuka. “We need to talk amongst ourselves,” said Stratt. “Go get some rest. The sailor outside will show you to a bunk.” “But I want to know about Project Hail Mary!” “Oh, you will. Believe me.” — I slept for fourteen hours. Aircraft carriers are awesome in many ways, but they aren’t five-star hotels. The Chinese had given me a clean, comfy cot in an officer’s bunkroom. I had no complaints. I could have slept on the flight deck I was so tired. I felt something weird on my forehead when I woke up. I reached up and it was a Post-it note. Someone put a Post-it on my head while I slept. I pulled it off and read it: Clean clothes and toiletries in the duffel under your bunk. Show this note to any sailor when you’ve cleaned up: ??????7?????? —Stratt “She is such a pain in my butt…” I mumbled. I stumbled out of my cot. A few officers gave me passing glances but otherwise ignored me. I found the duffel and, as promised, there were clothes and dental-hygiene stuff and soap. I glanced around the bunkroom and saw through a doorway into a locker room. I used the bathroom (or “head” I guess, because I was on a ship). Then I took a shower with three other guys. I dried off and put on the jumpsuit onesie Stratt had left me. It was bright yellow, had Chinese writing along the back, and a big red stripe down the left leg of the pants. My guess was to make sure everyone knew I was a foreign civilian and not allowed in certain places. I flagged down a passing sailor and showed him the note. He nodded and gestured for me to follow. He led me through a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, until we arrived back at the room I’d been in the previous day. I stepped in to see Stratt and some of her…teammates? A subset of the previous day’s gang. Just Minister Voigt, the Chinese scientist—I think her name was Xi—and a guy in a Russian military uniform. The Russian had been there the previous day but hadn’t said anything. They all looked deep in concentration and the table was littered with paper. They mumbled to one another here and there. I didn’t know the exact relationships going on, but Stratt was definitely at the head of the table. She looked up as I entered. “Ah. Dr. Grace. You look refreshed.” She gestured to her left. “There’s food on the credenza.” And there was! Rice, steamed buns, deep-fried dough sticks, and an urn of coffee. I rushed over and helped myself. I was hungry as heck. I sat at the conference table with a full plate and cup of coffee. “So,” I said with a mouth full of rice. “You gonna tell me why we’re on a Chinese aircraft carrier?” “I needed an aircraft carrier. The Chinese gave me one. Well, they lent it to me.” I slurped my coffee. “There was a time when something like that would surprise me. But…you know…not anymore.” “Commercial air travel takes too long and is prone to delays,” she said. “Military aircraft work on whatever schedule they want and travel supersonically. I need to be able to get experts from anywhere on Earth in the same room with no delays.” “Ms. Stratt can be extremely persuasive,” said Minister Voigt. I shoveled more food into my mouth. “Blame whoever gave her all that authority,” I said. Voigt chuckled. “I was part of that decision, actually. I am Germany’s minister of foreign affairs. The equivalent of your country’s secretary of state.” I paused my chewing. “Wow,” I managed to say. I gulped down the mouthful. “You’re the most high-ranking person I’ve ever met.” “No, I’m not.” He pointed to Stratt. She put a piece of paper in front of me. “This is what led to the Hail Mary Project.” “You’re showing him?” Voigt said. “Now? Without getting him a clearance—” Stratt put her hand on my shoulder. “Dr. Ryland Grace, I hereby grant you top-secret clearance to all information pertaining to Project Hail Mary.” “That’s not what I meant,” Voigt said. “There are processes and background checks to—” “No time,” Stratt said. “No time for any of that stuff. That’s why you put me in charge. Speed.” She turned toward me and tapped the paper: “These are readings from amateur astronomers all over the world. They show something very important.” The page had columns of numbers. I noticed the column titles: “Alpha Centauri,” “Sirius,” “Luyten 726-8,” and so on. “Stars?” I said. “These are all stars in our local cluster. And wait—did you say amateur astronomers? If you can tell the German minister of foreign affairs what to do, why don’t you have professional astronomers working for you?” “I do,” Stratt said. “But this is historical data collected over the past several years. Professional astronomers don’t study local stars. They look at faraway things. It’s the amateurs who log data on local stuff. Like train spotters. Hobbyists in their backyards. Some of them with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment.” I picked up the paper. “Okay, so what am I looking at?” “Luminosity readings. Normalized across thousands of amateur-generated data sets and corrected for known weather and visibility conditions. Supercomputers were involved. The point is this: Our sun is not the only star that’s getting dimmer.” “Really?” I said. “Ohhh! That makes perfect sense! Astrophage can travel at 0.92 times the speed of light. If it can go dormant and stay alive long enough, it could infect nearby stars. It spores! Just like mold! It spreads from star to star.” “That’s our theory, yes,” said Stratt. “This data goes back decades. It’s not deeply reliable but the trends are there. The NSA back-calculated that—” “Wait. NSA? The U.S. National Security Agency?” “They have some of the best supercomputers in the world. I needed their supercomputers and engineers to try all kinds of scenarios and propagation models for how Astrophage could get around in the galaxy. Back to the point: These local stars have been dimming for decades. And the rate of dimming increases exponentially—just like we’re seeing with the sun.” She handed me another piece of paper. It had a bunch of dots connected by lines. Above each dot was a star name. “Owing to the speed of light, our observations of the dimming had to be adjusted for the distances of the stars and whatnot, but there’s a clear pattern of ‘infection’ from star to star. We know when each star was infected and by which infected star. Our sun was infected by a star called WISE 0855–0714. That star was infected by Sirius, which was infected by Epsilon Eridani. From there, the trail goes cold.” I peered at the chart. “Huh. WISE 0855–0714 also infected Wolf 359, Lalande 21185, and Ross 128.” “Yes, every star eventually infects all of its neighbors. Judging from our data, we think Astrophage has a maximum range of just under eight light-years. Any star within that range of an infected star will eventually be infected.” I looked at the data. “Why eight light-years? Why not more? Or less?” “Our best guess is the Astrophage can only survive so long without a star and it can coast about eight light-years in that time.” “That’s sensible, from an evolution point of view,” I said. “Most stars have another star within eight light-years, so that’s as far as Astrophage had to evolve to travel while sporing.” “Probably,” Stratt said. “Nobody noticed those stars getting dimmer?” I said. “They only get to about ten percent dimmer before they stop dimming. We don’t know why. It’s not obvious to the naked eye, but—” “But if our sun dims by ten percent, we’re all dead,” I said. “Pretty much.” Xi leaned forward on the table. Her posture was extremely proper. “Ms. Stratt has not told you the most important part yet.” The Russian nodded. It was the first time I’d seen him move at all. Xi continued. “Do you know what Tau Ceti is?” “Do I know?” I said. “I mean—I know it’s a star. It’s about twelve light-years away, I think.” “Eleven point nine,” said Xi. “Very good. Most would not know that.” “I teach junior high school science,” I said. “These things come up.” Xi and the Russian shot each other surprised looks. Then they both looked at Stratt. Stratt stared them down. “There’s more to him than that.” Xi regained her composure (not that she’d lost much of it anyway). “Ahem. In any event, Tau Ceti is very much inside the cluster of infected stars. In fact, it is near the center.” “Okay,” I said. “I’m sensing there’s something special about it?” “It is not infected,” Xi said. “Every star around it is. There are two very infected stars well within eight light-years of Tau Ceti, yet it remains unaffected.” “Why?” Stratt shuffled through her papers. “That’s what we want to find out. So we’re going to make a ship and send it there.” I snorted. “You can’t just ‘make’ an interstellar ship. We don’t have the technology. We don’t have anything close to the technology.” The Russian spoke for the first time. “Actually, my friend, we do.” Stratt gestured to the Russian. “Dr. Komorov is—” “Please call me Dimitri,” he said. “Dimitri heads up the Russian Federation’s research into Astrophage,” she said. “It is pleasure to meet you,” he said. “I am happy to report that we can actually make interstellar voyage.” “No, we can’t,” I said. “Unless you’ve got an alien spaceship you never told anyone about.” “In a way, we do,” he said. “We have many alien spaceships. We call them Astrophage. You see? My group has studied the energy management of Astrophage. It is very interesting.” I suddenly forgot everything else going on in the room. “Oh God, please tell me you understand where the heat goes. I can’t figure out what the heck it’s doing with the heat energy!” “We have figured this out, yes,” said Dimitri. “With lasers. It was very illuminating experiment.” “Was that a pun?” “It was!” “Good one!” We both laughed. Stratt glared at us. Dimitri cleared his throat. “Er…yes. We pointed tight-focus one-kilowatt laser at a single Astrophage cell. As usual, it did not get hotter. But after twenty-five minutes, light starts to bounce off. Our little Astrophage is full. Good meal. It consumed 1.5 megajoules of light energy. Does not want more. But this is very much energy! Where does it put all this energy?” I’m leaning way too far forward over the table, but I can’t help myself. “Where?!” “We measure Astrophage cell before and after experiment, of course.” “Of course.” “Astrophage cell is now seventeen nanograms heavier. You can see where this goes, yes?” “No, it can’t be. It must have gained that weight from reactions with the air or something.” “No, it was in a vacuum for the test, of course.” “Oh my God.” I was giddy. “Seventeen nanograms…times nine times ten to the sixteenth…1.5 megajoules!” I flopped back into my chair. “Holy…I mean just…wow!” “This was how I felt, yes.” Mass conversion. As the great Albert Einstein once said: E = mc2. There’s an absurd amount of energy in mass. A modern nuclear plant can power an entire city for a year with the energy stored in just one kilogram of Uranium. Yes. That’s it. The entire output of a nuclear reactor for a year comes from a single kilogram of mass. Astrophage can, apparently, do this in either direction. It takes heat energy and somehow turns it into mass. Then when it wants the energy back, it turns that mass back into energy—in the form of Petrova-frequency light. And it uses that to propel itself along in space. So not only is it a perfect energy-storage medium, it’s a perfect spaceship engine. Evolution can be insanely effective when you leave it alone for a few billion years. I rub my head. “This is just crazy. In a good way, though. Is it internally producing antimatter, you think? Something like that?” “We do not know. But it definitely increases in mass. And then, after using light as thrust, it loses mass appropriate to energy released.” “That’s…! Dimitri, I want to hang out with you. Like—can we hang out? I’ll buy you a beer. Or vodka. Or anything. I bet there’s an officers’ club on this boat, right?” “It would be my pleasure.” “Glad you’re making friends,” said Stratt. “But you’ve got a lot of work to do before you start hitting the bars.” “Me? What do I have to do?” “You need to design and create an Astrophage-breeding facility.” I blinked. Then I shot to my feet. “You’re going to make an Astrophage-powered ship!” They all nodded. “Holy cow! It’s the most efficient rocket fuel ever! How much would we need to—oh. Two million kilograms, right? That’s why you wanted to know how long it would take to make that much?” “Yes,” said Xi. “For a one hundred thousand kilogram ship, we would need two million kilograms of Astrophage to get it to Tau Ceti. And, thanks to you, we now know how to activate the Astrophage and make it generate thrust at will.” I sat back down, pulled out my phone, and launched the calculator app. “This would take, like…a lot of energy. Like, more energy than the world has. It would be around ten to the twenty-third Joules. The largest nuclear reactor on Earth makes about eight gigawatts. It would take that reactor two million years to create that much energy.” “We have ideas for finding the energy,” said Stratt. “Your job is to make the breeder. Start small and get a prototype going.” “Okay, sure,” I said. “But I didn’t exactly love the ‘militaries of the world’ grand tour on the way here. Can I take a passenger jet home? Coach is fine.” “You are home,” said Stratt. “The flight hangar is empty. Just tell me what you need—including staff—and I’ll make it happen.” I looked at the others in the conference room. Xi, Voigt, and Dimitri all nodded. Yes, this was real. No, Stratt wasn’t kidding. “Why?!” I demanded. “Why the heck can’t you just be normal, Stratt?! If you want fast military transport, well, okay, but why not just work at an air base or something sane people would do?!” “Because we’ll be experimenting with a bunch of Astrophage once we breed it up. And if we accidentally activate even a couple of kilograms of that stuff, the resulting explosion will be bigger than the largest nuclear bomb ever made.” “Tsar Bomba,” said Dimitri. “Made by my country. Fifty megatons. Boom.” Stratt continued. “So we’d rather be out in the middle of the ocean where we won’t eradicate any cities.” “Oh,” I said. “And as we get more and more Astrophage, we’ll go further and further out to sea. Anyway. Head down to the hangar deck. I have carpenters building accommodations and offices as we speak. Pick some you like and lay claim.” “This is our life now,” said Dimitri. “Welcome.” O kay, if I’m going to die, it’s going to have meaning. I’m going to figure out what can be done to stop Astrophage. And then I’ll send my answers off to Earth. And then…I’ll die. There are lots of avenues for painless suicide here—from overdosing on meds to reducing the oxygen until I fall asleep and die. Cheerful thought. I eat a delicious tube of “Day 4—Meal 2.” I think it’s beef-flavored. The food is getting chunkier now. There are actually some solids in there. I think I’m chewing on a little cube of carrot. It’s nice to feel some texture in the food for a change. “More water!” I say. The NannyBot (as I’ve come to call it) quickly takes my plastic cup away and replaces it with a full one. It’s funny. Three days ago those ceiling-mounted arms were a mechanical monster that haunted me. Now they’re just…there. Part of life. I’ve found the dormitory to be a good place for thinking. Now that the dead bodies are gone, anyway. The lab doesn’t have anywhere comfortable to relax. The control room has a nice chair, but it’s cramped and has blinking lights everywhere. But the dormitory has my nice, comfortable bed I can lie back on while I think about what to do next. Plus, the bedroom is where all the food comes from. I remembered a lot over the past couple of days. Looks like Project Hail Mary was a success, because here I am, in another star system. Tau Ceti, I assume. It makes sense that I’d mistake it for the sun. Tau Ceti is very similar to the sun as stars go. Same spectral type, color, and so on. And I know why I’m here! Not just in vague terms like “Oh hey, the world’s ending. Make that not happen.” But very specifically: Find out why Tau Ceti wasn’t affected by Astrophage. Easy to say. Hard to do. Hopefully I remember more details later. A million questions run through my mind. Some of the most important are: 1.How do I scour an entire solar system for information about Astrophage? 2.What am I supposed to do? Throw some of my Astrophage fuel at Tau Ceti to see what happens? 3.How do I steer this ship anyway? 4.If I do find useful information, how do I tell Earth about it? I think that’s what the beetles are for, but how do I upload data to them? How do I aim them? How do I launch them? 5.Why would I, of all people, be part of this mission? Yes, I worked out a bunch of stuff about Astrophage, but so what? I’m a lab coat, not an astronaut. It’s not like they sent Wernher von Braun into space. Surely there were more qualified people. I decide to start small. First I have to work out what this ship can do and how to control it. They put the crew in comas. They must have known it might mess with our minds. There has to be an instruction manual somewhere. “Flight manual,” I say out loud. “Ship information can be found in the control room,” says the NannyBot. “Where?” “Ship information can be found in the control room.” “No. Where in the control room can ship information be found?” “Ship information can be found in the control room.” “You kind of suck,” I say. I make my way up to the control room and take a good long look at every screen. I spend an hour in there cataloging what each area seems to say, and make guesses as to what the functions are. What I’m really looking for is something like “Information” or “Here to save humanity? Press this button to learn more!” No such luck. After hours of poking at screens, I’ve found nothing. I guess they figured if the crew are so brain-mushy that they don’t remember how to use the ship, they’re probably not useful as scientists anyway. I did find out that any screen can show any instrument panel. They’re pretty much interchangeable. Just tap the upper-left corner and a menu shows up. Pick whatever panel you like. That’s nice. You can customize what you’re looking at. And the screen directly in front of the pilot’s seat is the largest. I decide on a more tactile approach: I’m gonna start pushing buttons! Hopefully there’s no “Blow Up the Ship” button. I think Stratt would have kept that from happening. Stratt. I wonder what she’s doing right now. Probably in a control room somewhere with the pope making her a cup of coffee. She was (is?) a really domineering person. But gosh darn it, I’m glad she was in charge of making this ship happen. Now that I’m aboard it and all. Her attention to detail and insistence on perfection are nice to have all around me. Anyway, I bring up the “Scientific Instrumentation” panel on the main screen. It’s the same panel I spent a lot of quality time with earlier—the one that currently shows an image of Tau Ceti. It has the word “Helioscope” in the upper-left corner. I hadn’t noticed that before. The left side of the screen has a bunch of icons. Other equipment, I assume. I press one at random. Tau Ceti disappears. The top-left corner changes to read “External Collection Unit.” The screen shows a diagram of a featureless rectangle. There are some controls here and there to change the angle and to “open bow side” and “open stern side.” Okay. Noted. Not sure what to do with that information. I press another icon at random. This time it changes to “Petrovascope.” Beyond that, there’s just a black screen with an error message: PETROVASCOPE CANNOT BE USED WHILE SPIN DRIVE IS ACTIVE. “Hmph,” I say. Okay, what’s a Petrovascope? Best guess: a telescope and/or camera that looks specifically for the IR light that Astrophage emit. It looks for the Petrova line via the Petrova wavelength so it’s a Petrovascope and we really need to stop putting “Petrova” in front of everything. Why can’t I use it when the spin drive is active? I don’t how a spin drive works, or why it’s called a spin drive, but I do know I have one in the back of the ship and it’s consuming Astrophage as fuel. So it’s my engine. It probably activates enriched Astrophage to use them as thrust. Ah…that would mean there’s a ridiculous amount of IR light coming out the back of the ship right now. Like…enough to vaporize a battleship or something. I’d have to do the math to know for sure but—I can’t help it, I want to do the math right now. The engines consume 6 grams of Astrophage per second. Astrophage stores energy as mass. So basically, the spin drive converts 6 grams of mass into pure energy every second and spits it out the back. Well, it’s the Astrophage doing the work, but whatever. I bring up the “Utility” panel on a smaller screen to my right. It has a bunch of familiar applications, all ready to go. One of them is a calculator. I use it to calculate the mass-conversion energy of that 6 grams…good Lord. It’s 540 trillion Joules. And the ship is emitting that much energy every second. So it’s 540 trillion watts. I can’t even fathom that amount of energy. It’s considerably more than the surface of the sun. Literally. Like…you would get hit by less energy if you were on the surface of the sun than if you were standing behind the Hail Mary at full thrust. I’m decelerating right now. Have to be. The plan is to come to rest in the Tau Ceti system. So I’m probably pointed away from the star and slowing down—having spent a really long time at near light speed during the trip. Okay, so all that light energy will hit dust particles, ions, and anything else between me at Tau Ceti as I plug along. Those poor little particles will be brutally vaporized. And that’ll scatter some IR light back at the ship. Not much compared to the engine output, but it would be blinding to the Petrovascope, which is finely tuned to look for trace amounts of that exact frequency. So no using the Petrovascope with the engine on. But man. I would love to know if Tau Ceti has a Petrova line. Theoretically, any star infected with Astrophage should have one, right? The little blighters need carbon dioxide to breed. Can’t get that from the star (unless you go way into the core, and I don’t know if even Astrophage could survive those temperatures). If I see a Petrova line, it means that Tau Ceti has an active Astrophage population that, for some reason, hasn’t grown out of control like it has everywhere else. And that line will lead to a planet that has carbon dioxide. Maybe there’s some other chemical in that atmosphere that impedes the Astrophage? Maybe the planet has a weird magnetic field that messes with their ability to navigate? Maybe the planet has a bunch of moons that the Astrophage physically collides with? Maybe Tau Ceti just doesn’t have any planets with carbon dioxide in their atmospheres. That would suck. It would mean this whole trip was for nothing and Earth is doomed. I could speculate all day. Without data, it’s just pure guesswork. And without the Petrovascope, I don’t have data. At least, not the data I want. I turn my attention to the Navigation screen. Should I mess with it? I mean—I don’t know how to fly this ship. The ship does, but I don’t. If I push the wrong button, I’ll be dead in space. Actually, it would be worse than that. I’d be hurtling toward Tau Ceti at—I check the info on-screen—7,595 kilometers per second. Wow! A couple days ago, that was over 11,000. That’s what constantly accelerating at 1.5 g’s will do for you. Or “decelerating,” I guess. From a physics standpoint it’s all the same. Point is, I’m slowing down with respect to the star. There’s a button on-screen that just says “Course.” That seems reasonable to tap, right? Famous last words. Really I should just wait until the computer feels like the trip is done. But I can’t help myself. I tap the button. The screen changes to show the Tau Ceti solar system. Tau Ceti itself sits at the center, denoted with the Greek letter tau. Ohhhh…that’s what the lowercase t is on the Hail Mary crest. It’s a tau, for “Tau Ceti.” Okay. Anyway, four planetary orbits are shown as thin white ellipses around the star. The locations of the planets themselves are shown as circles with error bars. We don’t have super-accurate information on exoplanets. If I could figure out how to get the science instruments working, I could probably get much better info on those planet locations. I’m twelve light-years closer to them than astronomers on Earth. A yellow line runs almost directly into the system from off-screen. It bends toward the star somewhere between the third and fourth planets and into a circle. There’s a yellow triangle on the line, way far away from the four planets. Pretty sure that’s me. And the yellow line is my course. Above the map is the text: TIME TO ENGINE CUTOFF: 0005:20:39:06 The final digit decrements once per second. Okay, I learned a couple of things here. First off, I have about five days left (closer to six) before the engine cuts off. Second off, the readout has four digits for days. That means this journey took at least one thousand days. Over three years. Well, it takes light twelve years to make this trip, so it should take me a long time too. Oh, right. Relativity. I have no idea how much time it took. Or, rather, I have no idea how much time I experienced. When you get going near the speed of light, you experience time dilation. More time will have gone by on Earth than I have experienced since I left Earth. Relativity is weird. Time is of the essence here. And unfortunately, while I slept, Earth experienced at least thirteen years. And even if I find a solution to the Astrophage problem right now, it would take at least thirteen years for that information to get back to Earth. So that means there’ll be an absolute minimum of twenty-six years of Astrophage misery on Earth. I can only hope they are coming up with ways to deal with it. Or at least ameliorate the damage. I mean, they wouldn’t have sent the Hail Mary out at all if they didn’t think they could survive at least twenty-six years, right? In any event, the trip took at least three years (from my point of view). Is that why we were put in comas? Was there a problem with us just being awake for the duration? I only notice the tears when the first of them drops off my face. That decision to put us in comas killed two close friends of mine. They’re gone. I don’t remember a single moment with either of them, but the feeling of loss is overwhelming. I’ll be joining them soon. There’s no way home. I’ll die out here too. But unlike them, I’ll die alone. I wipe my eyes and try to think of other things. My whole species is at stake here. Judging by the path on the map, the ship will automatically put me in a stable orbit around Tau Ceti, between the third and fourth planets. If I had to guess, I would say that’s probably 1 AU. The distance that Earth is from the sun. A nice, safe distance from the star. A slow orbit that takes about a year to complete. Probably longer, because Tau Ceti is smaller than the sun, so it probably has less mass. Less mass means less gravity and a slower orbital period at a given distance. Okay, I have five days to kill until engine cutoff. Rather than mess around with stuff, I’ll just wait it out. Once the engines are off, I’ll fire up the Petrovascope and see what’s out there. Until then, I’ll try to learn as much about the ship as I can. I’ll do just about anything right now to keep from thinking about Y?o and Ilyukhina. — Technically the carrier was named the People’s Liberation Army Navy Gansu. Why their navy has “Army” in its name I’ll never know. Regardless, people stopped calling it that and started calling it Stratt’s Vat. Despite objections from the sailors aboard, the name stuck. We wandered around the South China Sea, never getting too close to land. I’d spent a blissful week doing nothing but science. No meetings. No distractions. Just experimentation and engineering. I’d forgotten how much fun it was to get immersed in a task. My first breeder prototype had demonstrated another successful run. It wasn’t much to look at—mostly a 30-foot-long metal pipe with a bunch of ugly control equipment welded on here and there. But it did the trick. It could only generate a few micrograms of Astrophage per hour, but the concept was solid. I had a staff of twelve people—engineers from all over the world. A couple of Mongolian brothers were my best engineers. When I got a call from Stratt to meet her in the conference room, I left them in charge. I found her alone in the meeting room. The table was strewn with papers and charts, like always. Graphs and diagrams adorned all the walls—some new, some old. Stratt sat at one end of the long table, with a bottle of Dutch gin and a lowball glass. I’d never seen her drink before. “You wanted to see me?” I said. She looked up. Her eyes had bags. She hadn’t slept. “Yeah. Have a seat.” I sat in the chair next to her. “You look terrible. What’s going on?” “I have to make a decision. And it’s not easy.” “How can I help?” She offered me the gin. I shook my head. She topped off her own glass. “The Hail Mary is going to have a very small crew compartment—about 125 cubic meters.” I cocked my head. “That’s actually kind of big as spaceships go, right?” She wiggled her hand back and forth. “Big for a capsule like Soyuz or Orion. But tiny for a space station. It’s about one-tenth as big as the International Space Station’s crew compartment.” “Okay,” I said. “What’s the problem?” “The problem”—she picked up a manila folder and dropped it in front of me—“is that the crew will kill each other.” “Huh?” I opened the folder. Inside were lots of typewritten pages. Actually, they were scans of typed pages. Some were in English, some in Russian. “What is all this?” “During the Space Race, the Soviets briefly set their sights on Mars. They figured if they put people on Mars, the U.S. moon landing would be trivial in comparison.” I closed the folder. The Cyrillic writing was nonsense to me. But my guess was Stratt could read it. She always seemed to know whatever language was being used. She rested her chin on her hands. “Getting to Mars with 1970s technology would mean using a Hohmann transfer trajectory, which means the crew would have to spend just over eight months aboard a ship. So the Soviets tested out what happens when you put people together in a cramped, isolated environment for several months.” “And?” “After seventy-one days, the men inside were getting in fistfights every day. They stopped the experiment on day ninety-four because one of the subjects tried to stab another one to death with broken glass.” “How big will the crew be for the mission?” “The current plan is three,” she said. “Okay,” I said. “So you’re worried what happens when we send three astronauts on a four-year trip in a 125-cubic-meter compartment?” “It’s not just about them getting along. Each crew member would spend the whole trip knowing that they’re going to die in a few years. And that the few rooms on that ship are the only world they will know for the rest of their short lives. The psychiatrists I’ve talked to say that crushing depression is likely. And suicide is a real risk.” “Yeah, that is some rough psychology,” I said. “But what else can we do?” She picked up a stapled sheaf of papers and slid it toward me. I picked it up and read the title: “A Study of Long-Term Primate and Human Coma Patients and Detrimental Aftereffects—Srisuk et al.” “Okay. What am I looking at here?” “That’s a study by a failed company in Thailand.” She swirled the gin in her glass. “Their idea was to put cancer patients into induced comas for their chemotherapy treatments. The patient gets the chemo, but doesn’t have to be awake to suffer through the process. Wake them up when the cancer goes into remission. Or when it’s no longer treatable and it’s time for hospice. Either way, they skip a lot of misery.” “That…sounds like a great idea,” I said. She nodded. “It would be, if it wasn’t so lethal. Turns out the human body just isn’t supposed to be in a coma for a long time. Chemo lasts months, and often needs additional rounds after that. They tried various means for medically induced comas on primates, and the primates either died during the coma or came out of it with mush for brains.” “So why are we talking about it?” “Because they did more studies—this time on historical human coma patient data. They looked at humans who had come through long comas relatively unscathed and tried to see what they had in common. They found it.” Old Russian space-agency documents were a mystery to me, but scientific papers were my forte for a long time. I flipped through the paper and skimmed to the findings. “Gene markers?” I said. “Yes,” she said. “They found a collection of genes that give a human ‘coma resistance.’ That’s what they’re calling it. The sequences are in what scientists used to think was junk DNA. But apparently it’s something we evolved a long time ago for some unknown reason and still lurks in some people’s genetic code.” “Are they sure these genes cause coma resistance?” I said. “They correlate, but do they cause it?” “Yes, they’re sure. The genes are found in lower primates too. Whatever it is, it goes way back in the evolutionary tree. There’s speculation it might go all the way back to our aquatic ancestors that used to hibernate. In any event, they ran tests on primates with those genes and they survived long comas with no side effects. Every single one of them.” “Okay. I see where you’re going with this.” I put the paper down. “Do DNA tests on all applicants, and use only the people who have those coma-resistance genes. During the trip, put the crew in comas. They don’t have to experience four years of getting on each other’s nerves or introspection about their deaths.” She raised her glass to me. “It gets better. Having the crew in comas makes the food situation much easier. Powdered, nutritionally balanced slurry pumped right into their stomachs. No need for a thousand kilograms of diverse meals. Just powder and a self-contained water-recycling system.” I smiled. “This seems like a dream come true. Like suspended animation in sci-fi novels. Why are you drinking and stressed-out?” “There are a couple of catches,” she said. “First off, we’d have to develop a completely automated monitoring and action system to take care of the coma patients. If it broke down, everyone would die. There’s more to it than just monitoring vitals and pushing the right drugs through an IV. It would have to physically move and clean the patients, deal with bedsores, diagnose and treat secondary issues like inflammation and infection around the various IV and probe entry points. Stuff like that.” “Okay, but that seems like something the global medical community could work out for us,” I said. “Use your Stratt magic to boss them around or something.” She took another sip. “That’s not the main problem. The main problem is this: On average, only one in every seven thousand humans has that genetic sequence.” I sat back in my chair. “Whoa.” “Yeah. We wouldn’t be able to send the most qualified people. We’d be sending the seven-thousandth most qualified people.” “Three-thousand-five-hundredth most qualified people on average,” I said. She rolled her eyes. “Still,” I said. “One seven-thousandth of the world’s population is a million people. Think of it that way. You’d have a pool of one million people to look through for candidates. All you need are three.” “Six,” she said. “We need a primary crew and a backup crew. Can’t have the mission fail because some guy gets hit by a car crossing the street the day before launch.” “Okay, then six.” “Yeah. Six people of astronaut caliber, who have the scientific skills necessary to work out what’s going on with Astrophage at Tau Ceti, and who are willing to go on a suicide mission.” “Out of a population of a million,” I said. “A million.” She fell silent and took another sip of gin. I cleared my throat. “So you either take your chances with picking the best possible candidates and maybe they kill each other, or you take your chances on yet-to-be-developed medical technology to automatically care for a lower tier of talent.” “More or less. Either way, it’s a terrible risk. It’s the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make.” “Good thing you already made up your mind, then,” I said. She raised an eyebrow. “Huh?” “Sure,” I said. “You just wanted someone to tell you what you already know. If you leave the crew awake, there’s nothing you can do about the psychosis risk. But we’ve got years to perfect the automated-coma-bed technology.” She scowled a bit but didn’t speak. I softened my voice. “Besides. We’re already asking these people to die. We shouldn’t ask them to suffer emotional torment for four years too. Science and morality both give the same answer here, and you know it.” She nodded, almost imperceptibly. Then, she downed the rest of her gin. “All right. You can go.” She slid her laptop over and began typing. I left without another word. She had her stuff to deal with and I had mine. — The memories are coming back more smoothly now. I still can’t remember everything, but it’s no longer an epiphany when they happen. It’s just sort of…“Oh hey, I know that. Always knew it, really.” I guess I’m one of those people with coma resistance. That explains why I’m here instead of any of the far more qualified candidates that should have been sent. But Y?o and Ilyukhina probably had those genes, too, and they didn’t make it. My guess is the medical robot wasn’t perfect. They must have had some medical situation arise it couldn’t figure out. I shake off their memory. The next several days are an exercise in patience. I learn more about the ship to distract myself. I catalog the entire lab. One of the first things I find is a touchscreen computer in a pull-out drawer in the center table. It’s actually a fantastic find, because it has a bunch of research-related screens. As opposed to the panels in the control room, which are all about the ship or its instruments. I see a bunch of math and science apps—most of which are off-the-shelf that I’m familiar with. But the real boon is the library! As far as I can tell, this panel can bring up literally any scientific textbook ever written, every scientific paper ever published on any topic, and a whole lot more. There’s one directory just called “Library of Congress,” and it appears to be the entire digital catalog of everything that’s ever been copyrighted in the United States. No books about the Hail Mary, unfortunately. And the reference manuals. So many reference manuals. Data on top of data with data in between. I guess they figured solid-state hard drives are light, so there was no reason to be stingy with information. Heck, they may have just burned the data into ROMs. They gave me reference material on stuff that can’t possibly be useful. But hey, it’s nice to know that if I need the average rectal temperature of a healthy goat, I can find that out! (It’s 103.4°F / 39.7°C.) Playing with the panel leads to my next discovery: I know how I’ll report back to Earth with the beetles. I knew they’d be involved, but now I know specifics. In addition to the absurd data storage array aboard the ship, the panel also has four comparatively small external drives mounted: John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Each one of those shows 5 terabytes free. It’s not a huge leap to assume that’s the beetle’s data. So how do I launch them when the time comes? To find out, I head to the control room. I have to dig through a few layers of UI on the Beetles panel to find the launch command, but I find it. As far as I can tell, it’s just a button labeled “Launch.” I guess they orient themselves based on stars and head toward Earth on their own. The Hail Mary did the same thing to get here, so they know how to do it. No reason to introduce human error in the course selection. While I’m here, I poke around the Scientific Instrumentation screen. The first few subwindows are the helioscope, the Petrovascope, and a telescope that can see in the visible spectrum, IR spectrum, and a bunch of other bands. I play with the visible-light telescope. It’s kind of fun. I can look at the stars. I mean, there’s nothing else out there. Even Tau Ceti’s planets would just be little dots from where I am. But it’s still nice to see the outside from my confined little world. I also found a dedicated EVA screen. It has more or less what I would have expected. There are a bunch of controls for the EVA suit itself, so an operator in the control room can manage any issue with the suit during an EVA. That way, the person in the suit doesn’t have to deal with it. Plus, it looks like the ship has a complicated tethering system on the hull. Basically a bunch of tracks that the tether hook can run along. They really figured an EVA would be important. Probably to collect local Astrophage. If there is any. If Tau Ceti has a Petrova line, then there’s Astrophage to be collected. Getting ahold of some would be step one. Getting that down to the lab, and seeing if it differs from the Astrophage on Earth. Maybe it’s a less virulent strain? The next two days are, basically, me worrying about what happens next. Oh, I know what happens next—I’m just worrying about it anyway. I fidget in the control room and watch the seconds tick away. “You’re going to be in zero g,” I say. “You are not going to be falling. You will not be in danger. The acceleration of the ship will stop. But that’s okay.” I don’t like roller coasters or water slides. That dropping sensation scares the pants off me. And in a few seconds I’m going to feel that exact sensation because the “gravity” I’ve been experiencing will stop altogether. The seconds tick off. “Four…three…two…” “Here we go,” I said. “One…zero.” Right on schedule, the engines shut off. The 1.5 g’s I’ve been feeling all this time vanishes. Gravity is gone. I panic. No amount of mental preparation would have worked. I straight-up panic. I scream and flail around. I force myself to curl into a fetal position—it’s comforting and keeps me from hitting any controls or screens. I shiver and shake as I float around the control room. I should have strapped myself to the chair, but I didn’t think to. Dummy. “I’m not falling!” I scream. “I’m not falling! This is just space! Everything is fine!” It’s not fine. I feel my stomach in my throat. I’m going to puke. Puke in zero g is not okay. I don’t have a bag. I severely underprepared for this. I was stupid to think I could just talk myself out of a primal fear. I pull the collar of my jumpsuit open and tilt my head down. I’m just in the nick of time. I puke out the entirety of “Day 9—Meal 3” into my shirt. I hold the collar tight to my chest afterward. It’s disgusting, but contained. Better than letting it float around the control room and becoming a choking hazard. “Oh gosh…” I whimper. “Gosh…this is…” Can I do this? Will I be rendered completely worthless from this point on? Will humanity die because I can’t handle zero g? No. I clench my teeth. I clench my fists. I clench my butt. I clench every part of me that I know how to clench. It gives me a feeling of control. I’m doing something by aggressively doing nothing. After an eternity, the panic begins to ebb away. Human brains are amazing things. We can get used to just about anything. I’m making the adjustment. The slight reduction of fear has a feedback effect. I know I will get less afraid now. And knowing that makes the fear subside even faster. Soon, the panic dies down to fear, which diffuses into general anxiousness. I look around the control room and nothing seems right. Nothing changed, but now there’s no down. I still feel sick to my stomach. I grab my collar in case I need to puke again but it isn’t necessary. I hold it in. The feeling of warm vomit squishing between my chest and jumpsuit is disgusting. I need to change. I aim myself at the hatchway leading to the lab and kick off the bulkhead behind me. I float down and into the lab. The whole room is cluttered with random floating debris. I left things out on the table when I cataloged them. Now all that stuff is wandering around freely, wafted along by currents from the life-support air vents. “Dummy,” I say to myself. I really should have seen that coming. I continue onward to the bedroom. Not surprisingly, it’s also got junk floating everywhere. I opened most of the bins in the storage area to see what was inside. Now the bins and their contents drift to and fro. “Clean me!” I say to the arms. The arms don’t do anything. I strip down and use the jumpsuit to wipe gross stuff from my body. I found the sponge-bath zone a few days ago—just a sink with sponges that comes out of the wall. No room for a shower, I guess. Anyway, I clean up with that stuff. I’m not sure what to do with the gross, dirty stuff. “Laundry?” I say. The arms reach down and take the dirty jumpsuit from my hands. A panel in the ceiling opens and they put it in there somewhere. What happens when that fills up? No idea. I find a replacement jumpsuit in the flotsam and put it on. Putting on clothes in zero g is interesting. I wouldn’t say it’s harder, but it’s different. I do manage to get the new jumpsuit on. It’s a little tight. I check the name patch. It says ?. It’s one of Y?o’s jumpsuits. Well, it’s not too tight. And I don’t want to bounce around the bedroom all day looking for one of mine. I’ll organize it all later. For now, I’m too excited to see what’s out there. I mean, come on! I’m the first human to explore another star system! And I’m here! I launch off the floor toward the hatchway…and miss. I crash into the ceiling. At least I get my arms up in time to protect my face. I bounce off the ceiling and back to the floor. “Ow,” I mumble. I try again, this time a little more slowly, and I’m successful. I coast up through the lab, and into the control room. Getting around sure is a lot easier when there’s no gravity. I still feel queasy but I have to admit: This is pretty fun. I pull myself into the pilot’s chair and strap myself in to keep from floating away. The Navigation screen reads PRIMARY TRANSIT COMPLETE. The Spin Drive screen says THRUST: 0. But most important, the Petrovascope screen says READY. I rub my hands together, then reach for the screen. The interface is simple enough. The corner has an icon that is a toggle switch with two states: “Visible” and “Petrova.” It’s currently set to “Visible.” The rest of the screen shows a visible-light view from the ship. Seems like an ordinary camera. I poke at the screen and quickly realize I can pan, zoom in or out, rotate, and so on. All I see is stars in the distance. I guess I should pan around until I find Tau Ceti. I swipe my finger left, left, left…just generally trying to see where the star is. I don’t have a frame of reference to work with. Every few left swipes I throw in a down swipe. Just to cover all angles over time. I do finally find Tau Ceti, but it doesn’t look like it should. A few days ago, when I looked at it with the helioscope, it looked like any other star. But now it’s a solid black circle with a hazy ring of light around it. I realize why immediately. The Petrovascope is a pretty sensitive piece of equipment. It’s fine-tuned to spot even the smallest amounts of the Petrova wavelength. A star will give off absolutely obscene amounts of light at all wavelengths. It’d be like staring at the sun with binoculars. The equipment has to protect itself from the star. It probably has a physical metal plate that it keeps between its sensors and the star at all times. So I’m looking at the back of that plate. Good design. I reach up to the toggle switch. This is it. If there’s no Petrova line here, I don’t know what to do. I mean, I’ll try to figure out something. But I’ll be kind of lost. I flip the toggle. The stars disappear. The hazy ring surrounding Tau Ceti remains. That’s to be expected. It’s the star’s corona, which will be emitting plenty of light, so some of it’s bound to be the Petrova wavelength. I search the image desperately. Nothing at first, but then I see it. A beautiful dark-red arch coming out of the bottom-left portion of Tau Ceti. I clap my hands. “Yes!” The shape is unmistakable. It’s a Petrova line! Tau Ceti has a Petrova line! I do a wiggly little dance in my chair. It’s not easy in zero g but I give it my all. Now we’re getting somewhere! There are so many experiments I’ll need to do, I don’t even know where to begin. I should see where the line leads, for starters. One of the planets, obviously, but which one and what’s interesting about it? And I should get a sample of local Astrophage to see if it’s the same as what we have back on Earth. I could do that by flying into the Petrova line itself and then scraping the dust off the hull with an EVA. I could spend a week just writing up a list of experiments I want to do! I spot a flash on the screen. Just a quick blip of light. “What’s that?” I say. “Another clue?” The flash happens again. I pan and zoom in on that portion of space. It’s nowhere near the Petrova line or Tau Ceti. Maybe a reflection from a planet or asteroid? I can see how that might happen. A highly reflective asteroid could be bouncing enough light from Tau Ceti around that I see it on the Petrovascope, but it’s intermittent, so maybe it’s an irregular shape that’s rotating and— The flash becomes a solid light source. It’s just…“on” now. Nonstop. I peer at the screen. “What…what’s going on here?…” The light source becomes brighter. Not instantly. Just gradually over time. I watch for a minute. It seems to get brighter faster now. Is it an object headed toward me? An instant hypothesis pops into my mind: Maybe Astrophage are somehow attracted to other Astrophage? Maybe some subset of them saw the flare from my engines, which would be the wavelength they use, and they headed toward me. Maybe this is how they find the main migration group? So this could be a clump of Astrophage headed my way, thinking I can lead them to the planet with the carbon dioxide? Interesting theory. Nothing to back it up, though. The steady light grows brighter, brighter, brighter, and then finally disappears. “Huh,” I say. I wait a few minutes, but the light does not return. “Hmm….” I make a mental note of the anomaly. But for now there’s nothing I can do about it. Whatever it was, it’s gone now. Back to the Petrova line. The first thing I want to do is find out which planet the line leads to. I guess I’ll have to work out how to navigate the ship, but that’s another challenge. I pan back to look at the Petrova line. Something’s wrong now. Half of it is just…gone. It’s coming out of Tau Ceti, just like it was a few minutes ago, but then it stops abruptly at a seemingly arbitrary point in space. “What is going on?” Did I mess up their migration pattern, maybe? If it’s that easy, wouldn’t we have worked that out when the Hail Mary was wandering around our own solar system? I zoom in on the cutoff point. It’s just a straight line. Like someone took an X-Acto knife to the whole Petrova line and threw away the scrap. A giant line of migrating Astrophage doesn’t just disappear. I have a simpler explanation: There’s something on the camera lens. Some blob of debris. Maybe a wad of overexcitable Astrophage. That would be nice. I’d have a sample to look at right away! Maybe a visible-light view will give me a better idea of what’s going on. I press the toggle button. And that’s when I see it. There is an object blocking my view of the Petrova line. It’s right next to my ship. Maybe a few hundred meters away. It’s roughly triangle-shaped and it has gable-like protrusions along its hull. Yes. I said hull. It’s not an asteroid—the lines are too smooth; too straight. This object was made. Fabricated. Constructed. Shapes like that don’t occur in nature. It’s a ship. Another ship. There’s another ship in this system with me. Those flashes of light—those were its engines. It’s Astrophage-powered. Just like the Hail Mary. But the design, the shape—it’s nothing like any spacecraft I’ve ever seen. The whole thing is made of huge, flat surfaces—the worst possible way to make a pressure vessel. No one in their right mind would make a ship that shape. No one on Earth would, anyway. I blink a few times at what I’m seeing. I gulp. This…this is an alien spacecraft. Made by aliens. Aliens intelligent enough to make a spacecraft. Humanity isn’t alone in the universe. And I’ve just met our neighbors. “Holy fucking shit!” A flood of thoughts hit me all at the same time: We’re not alone. This is an alien. That ship is weird, how does the engineering of that work? Do they live here? Is this their star? Am I starting an interplanetary incident by wandering into alien territory?! “Breathe,” I tell myself. Okay, one thing at a time. What if this is another ship from Earth? One I don’t remember? Heck, it took me a few days to remember my name. Maybe Earth sent multiple ships with different designs? Like, for redundancy or to increase the odds that at least one of them works. Maybe that ship is the Praise Allah or the Blessings of Vishnu or something. I look all around the control room. There are screens and controls for everything, but there’s nothing for a radio. The EVA panel has some radio controls, but that’s obviously just for talking to crewmates when they’re outside. If they’d sent multiple ships, surely they would have had some radio system so we could talk to each other. Also, that ship…it’s insane. I cycle through the navigation console screens until I find the Radar panel. I’d noticed it earlier, but didn’t think much of it. I assume it’s there so I can get near asteroids or other objects and not collide with them. After a few halting attempts, I manage to turn it on. It immediately spots the other ship and sounds an alarm. The shrill noise hurts my ears. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I say. I frantically scan the panel until I see a button labeled “Mute Proximity Alert.” I press it and the noise stops. I scan the rest of the screen. There’s a lot of data here, all in a window titled “BLIP-A.” I guess if there were multiple contacts I’d get multiple windows. Whatever. It’s all just raw numbers about the reading. Nothing useful like an isometric Star Trek scan or anything. “Velocity” is zero. They have matched my velocity exactly. That can’t be a coincidence. “Range” is 217 meters. I’m assuming that’s the distance to the closest part of the other ship. Or maybe the average. No, it would be the closest part. The point of this system is probably to avoid collisions. Speaking of collisions—217 meters is a ridiculously small distance compared to the size of a solar system. There’s no way this is a coincidence. That ship positioned itself here on purpose because I’m here. Another reading, “Angular width,” is 35.44 degrees. Okay, some basic math should handle this. I bring up the Utility panel on the main screen and launch the calculator app. Something 217 meters away is occupying 35.44 degrees of the view. Presuming the radar can see in all 360 degrees (it would be a pretty cruddy radar if it couldn’t)…I type some numbers into the calculator to do an ARCTAN operation, and: The ship is 139 meters long. Roughly. I bring the Astrophage panel up on another screen. The little map there shows that the Hail Mary is just 47 meters long. So yeah. The alien ship is three times the size of mine. There’s just no way Earth sent something that big. And the shape. What is up with that shape? I turn my attention back to the Petrovascope (which is now just acting as a camera). The center of the ship is diamond-shaped—a rhombus. Well, I guess it’s an octahedron, really. Looks like it has eight faces, each triangular. That part alone is about the size of my ship. The diamond is connected by three thick rods (I don’t know what else to call them) to a wide trapezoidal base. That looks like it might be the rear. And in front of the diamond is a narrow stalk (just making up terms at this point) that has four flat panels attached parallel to the main ship axis. Maybe solar panels? The stalk continues forward to a pyramid-shaped nose cone. Nose pyramid, I guess. Every part of the hull is flat. Even the “rods” have flat faces. Why would anyone do that? Flat panels are a terrible idea. I don’t know anything about who made this, but presumably they need some kind of atmosphere inside, right? Huge, flat panels are awful at that. Maybe this is just a probe and not an actual ship. Maybe there’s no atmosphere inside because there’s nothing alive inside. I might be looking at an alien artifact instead of a ship. Still the most exciting moment in human history. So it’s Astrophage-powered. That was the steady Petrova-frequency glow I saw earlier. Interesting that they have the same propulsion tech as we do. But considering it’s the best energy-storage medium possible, that’s not a surprise. When European mariners first came across Asian mariners, no one was surprised they both used sails. But the “why.” That’s what gets me. Some entity aboard (either a computer or a crew) decided to come to my ship. How did they even know I was here? Same way I saw them, I guess. The massive IR light coming off my engines. And since the rear of my ship was pointed at Tau Ceti, that means I was shining a 540-trillion-watt flashlight in their direction. Depending on where they were at the time, I might have appeared even brighter than Tau Ceti itself. At least, in the Petrova frequency. So they can see the Petrova frequency. And so can I. I flip through the Spin Drive console screens until I find one labeled “Manual Control.” When I select it, a warning dialog pops up: MANUAL CONTROL IS RECOMMENDED ONLY FOR EMERGENCIES. ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO ENTER MANUAL CONTROL MODE? I tap “Yes.” It brings up another dialog. SECOND CONFIRMATION: TYPE “Y-E-S” TO ENTER MANUAL CONTROL MODE. I groan and type Y-E-S. The panel finally takes me to the Manual Control screen. It’s a bit scary. Not because it’s complex, but because it’s so simple. There are three sliders labeled “Drive 1,” “Drive 2,” and “Drive 3,” each presently at zero. The top of each slider is labeled “107 N.” The N must mean “Newtons”—a unit of force. I guess if I threw all three drives to maximum, it would give me 30 million Newtons. That’s about sixty times the thrust a jumbo jet’s engines produce during takeoff. Science teachers know a lot of random facts. There are a bunch more little sliders. In groups labeled “Yaw,” “Pitch,” and “Roll.” There must be little spin drives on the sides of the ship to adjust its orientation. I can definitely see why it’s a bad idea to mess with this panel. One screw-up and I’ll put the ship into a spin that tears it apart. But at least they thought of that. There’s a button in the middle of the screen labeled “Zero All Rotation.” Good. I check the Petrovascope again. Blip-A hasn’t moved. It’s on my port side, and slightly forward. I flick the Petrovascope back to Petrova-frequency mode, and the screen turns mostly black. As before, I can see the Petrova line in the background, occluded by Blip-A. “Let’s see if you have anything to say…” I mumble. Spin drive 2 is in the center of the ship. Its thrust will be along my central axis and hopefully won’t introduce attitude change. We’ll see. I set it to 0.1% power for one second, then back to 0. Even with just one engine, at one one-thousandth power, for one second, the ship drifts a bit. The “Velocity” value for Blip-A on the Radar panel shows 0.086 m/s. That tiny thrust set my ship moving about 8 centimeters per second. But I don’t care about that. I care about the other ship. I watch the Petrovascope. A bead of sweat separates from my forehead and floats away. I feel like my heart is going to beat out of my chest. Then, the rear of the ship lights up in the Petrova frequency for one second. Just like I did. “Wow!” I flick the drive on and off several times: three short bursts, a long one, and one more short one. There’s no message there. I just want to see what they do with it. They were more prepared this time. Within seconds, the other ship repeats the pattern. I gasp. And I smile. Then I wince. Then I smile again. This is a lot to take in. That was too fast for any probe to respond. If it had remote control or something, the controllers would have to be at least a few light-minutes away—there’s just nothing around here that could be housing them. There is an intelligent life-form aboard that ship. I am about 200 meters away from an honest-to-God alien! I mean…my ship is powered by aliens. But this new one is intelligent! Oh my gosh! This is it! First Contact! I’m the guy! I’m the guy who meets aliens for the first time! The Blip-A (that’s what I’m calling their ship for now) fires up its engines again briefly. I watch closely to memorize the sequence, but it’s just a single low-intensity light. They’re not signaling. They’re maneuvering. I check the Radar panel. Sure enough, the Blip-A brings itself alongside the Hail Mary and holds position at 217 meters. I flick through the Scientific panel to bring the normal telescopic cameras back up. The Petrovascope’s normal-light camera is just to orient things for the main scope itself. The telescope has much better resolution and clarity. I guess I’m too excited to think clearly because it took me until now to think of it. The image is far clearer through the main telescope. I guess it’s just an insanely high-resolution camera, because I can still zoom in and out with no loss of clarity. I have a very good view of the Blip-A now. The ship’s hull is a mottled gray and tan. The pattern seems random and smooth, like someone started mixing paint but stopped way too early. I spot motion in the corner of the screen. An irregular-shaped object slides along a track in the hull. It’s a stalk sticking up with five articulated “arms” coming out of the top. Each arm has a clamp-like “hand” on the end. It’s only now that I notice a network of the tracks all along the hull. It’s a robot. Something controlled from the inside. At least, I assume it is. It doesn’t look like a little green man, and it certainly doesn’t look like an alien EVA suit. Not that I have any idea what either of those things would look like. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s a hull-mounted robot. Space stations back at Earth have them. They’re a nice way to do stuff outside your ship without having to suit up. The robot works its way along the hull until it reaches the spot closest to the Hail Mary. One of its little clamp hands holds a cylindrical object. I don’t really have a sense of scale, but the robot is tiny compared to the ship. I feel like it’s about my size or maybe smaller, but that’s a wild guess. The robot stops, reaches toward my ship, and gently releases the cylinder into space. The cylinder moves slowly toward me. It has a slight rotation, end-over-end. Not perfect, but still a very smooth release. I check the Radar panel. The Blip-A is at velocity zero. And there’s a “Blip-B” screen now. It shows the much smaller cylinder approaching at 8.6 centimeters per second. Interesting. That’s the exact same velocity I moved the Hail Mary a moment ago while flashing the engine to say hi. That can’t be a coincidence. They want me to have that cylinder, and they want to deliver it to me at a velocity they know I’m comfortable working with. “Very considerate of you…” I say. These are smart aliens. I have to assume friendly intent at this point. I mean, they’re going out of their way to say hi and be accommodating. Besides, if there is hostile intent, what would I do about it? Die. That’s what I’d do. I’m a scientist, not Buck Rogers. Well, I mean, I guess I could point the spin drives at their ship, fire them up to full, which would vaporize—you know what? I’m just not going to think along those lines right now. Some quick math tells me the cylinder will take over forty minutes to reach me. I have that long to get in an EVA suit, go outside, and position myself on the hull for humanity’s first touchdown-pass reception with an alien quarterback. I learned a lot about the airlock when I was giving my crewmates a burial in space and— Ilyukhina would have loved this moment. She would have been absolutely bouncing around the cabin with excitement. Y?o would have been stoic and steady, but he would have cracked a smile when he thought we weren’t looking. The tears ruin my vision. Lacking gravity, they coat my eyes. It’s like trying to see underwater. I wipe them off and fling them across the control room. They splatter onto the opposite wall. I don’t have time for this. I have an alien thingy to catch. I unhook the belt on the chair and float over to the airlock. My mind is awhirl with ideas and questions. And I’m jumping to wild, unfounded conclusions left and right. Maybe this intelligent alien species invented Astrophage. Maybe they genetically engineered it specifically to “grow” spaceship fuel. The ultimate in solar power. Maybe once I explain what’s happening to Earth, they’ll have a solution. Or maybe they’ll board my ship and lay eggs in my brain. You can never be sure. I open the inner airlock door and pull out the EVA suit. So, do I have any idea how to get into this thing? Or how to safely use it? I disable the chrysalis-lock of the Orlan-MKS2 EVA suit and open the rear hatch. I activate main power by flicking a switch on the belt. The suit boots up almost immediately and the status panel attached to the chest component reads ALL SYSTEMS FUNCTIONAL—what the heck? I know everything that’s going on in here. We were probably trained on this thing extensively. I know it the same way I know physics. It’s there in my mind, but I don’t remember learning it. The Russian-made suit is a single-pressure vessel. Unlike American models where you put the top and bottom on, then a bunch of complex stuff for the helmet and gloves, the Orlan series is basically a onesie with a hatch in the back. You step into it, close the hatch, and you’re done. It’s like an insect molting in reverse. I open the back and wriggle into the suit. Zero g is a real boon here. I don’t have to fight with the suit nearly as much as I normally would. Weird. I know this is easier than other times I’ve done it, but don’t remember any other times I’ve done it. I think I have brain damage from that coma. I’m functional enough for now. I press on. I get my arms and legs into their respective holes. The jumpsuit is uncomfortable in the Orlan. I’m supposed to be wearing a special undergarment. I even know what it looks like, but it’s just for temperature regulation and bio-monitoring. I don’t have time to find it in the storage area. I have a date with a cylinder. Now in the suit, I push steadily against the airlock wall with my legs to push the open rear flap to the wall. Once it gets to within a few inches (centimeters, I should say. This is Russian-made after all), a light turns green on the chest-mounted status panel. I reach up to the panel with my thickly gloved hand and press the Autoseal button. The suit ratchets the opening closed with a series of loud clicks. With a final “clunk” the outer seal locks into place. My status board reads green and I have seven hours of life support available. Internal pressure is 400 hectopascals—about 40 percent of Earth’s atmosphere at sea level. That’s normal for spacesuits. The whole process took only five minutes. I’m ready to go outside. Interesting. I didn’t have to go through a decompression step. On space stations back home, astronauts have to spend hours in an airlock slowly acclimating to the low pressure needed for the EVA suit before they can go out. I don’t have that problem. Apparently, the entire Hail Mary is at that 40 percent pressure. Good design. The only reason space stations around Earth have a full atmosphere of pressure is in case the astronauts have to abort and return to Earth in a hurry. But for the Hail Mary crew…where would we go? May as well use the low pressure all the time. Makes things easier on the hull and lets you do rapid EVAs. I take a deep breath and let it out. A soft whir comes from somewhere behind me and cool air flows along my back and shoulders. Air conditioning. It feels nice. I grab a handhold and spin myself around. I pull the inner airlock door closed and then rotate the primary lever to begin the cycling sequence. A pump fires up. It’s louder than I would have thought. It sounds like an idling motorcycle. I keep my hand on the lever. Pushing it back to the original position will cancel the cycle and repressurize. If I see even a hint of a red light on my suit panel, I’m going to throw that lever so fast it’ll make my head spin. After a minute, the pump grows quieter. Then quieter still. It’s probably as loud as it ever was. But with the air leaving the chamber, there’s no way for the noise to get to me other than through my feet touching the Velcro pads on the floor. Finally, the pump stops. I’m in total silence aside from the fans inside the suit. The airlock controls show that the pressure inside is zero, and a yellow light turns green. I’m clear to open the outer door. I grab the hatch crank, then hesitate. “What am I doing?” I say. Is this really a good idea? I want that cylinder so badly I’m just plowing ahead without any sort of plan. Is this worth risking my life over? Yes. Unequivocally. Okay, but is it worth risking the lives of everyone on Earth over? Because if I mess up and die out there, then the whole Hail Mary Project will have been in vain. Hmm. Yes. It’s still worth it. I don’t know what these aliens are like, what they want, or what they’re planning to say. But they will have information. Any information, even stuff I’d rather not know, is better than none. I spin the handle and open the door. The empty blackness of space lies beyond. The light of Tau Ceti glistens off the door. I peek my head out and see Tau Ceti with my own eyes. At this distance, it’s a little less bright than the sun as seen from Earth. I double-check my tether to make darn sure I’m attached, then I step out into space. — I’m good at this. I must have practiced a lot. Maybe in a neutral-buoyancy tank or something. But it comes as second nature to me. I exit the airlock and clamp one of my tethers to a rail on the outside hull. Always have two tethers. And always have at least one attached. That way you’re never at risk of floating away from the ship. The Orlan-MKS2 is possibly the best EVA suit ever made, but it doesn’t have a SAFER unit like NASA’s EMU suit. At least with a SAFER unit you have minimal thrust capability to return to the ship if you fall adrift. All that information floods into my mind at once. I guess I’ve put a lot of time and thought into spacesuits. Maybe I’m our crew’s EVA specialist? I don’t know. I flip up the sun visor and peer toward the Blip-A. I wish I could glean some special insight by seeing it in person, but it’s pretty far away. The Hail Mary’s telescope gave me a much better view. Still, there’s something…unique about staring directly at an alien spacecraft. I catch a glint of the cylinder. Every now and then the flat ends of the gently tumbling cylinder reflect Taulight. I’ve decided “Taulight” is a word, by the way. Light from Tau Ceti. It’s not “sunlight.” Tau Ceti isn’t the sun. So…Taulight. I still have a good twenty minutes before the cylinder reaches the ship. I watch it for a while to guess where it’ll hit. It’d be nice to have a crewmate inside at the radar station. It’d be nice to have a crewmate at all. After five minutes, I have a good bead on the cylinder. It’s headed for roughly the center of the ship. It’s as good a place as any for aliens to aim for. I make my way across the hull. The Hail Mary is pretty big. My little pressurized area is only half its length and the back half flares out to be three times as wide. Most of that will be empty now, I guess. It used to be full of Astrophage for my one-way trip here. The hull is crisscrossed with rails and latch points for EVA tethering. Tether by tether, rail by rail, I make my way toward the center of the ship. I have to step over a thick ring. It circles the crew compartment area of the ship. It’s a good 2 feet thick. I don’t know what it is, but it must be pretty heavy. Mass is everything when it comes to spaceship design, so it must be important. I’ll speculate about that later. I continue along, one hull latch point at a time, until I’m roughly in the center of the hull. The cylinder creeps closer. I adjust my position a tad to keep up with it. After an excruciatingly long wait, it’s almost within reach. I wait. No need to get greedy. If I paw at it too early, I might knock it off course and into space. I’d have no way of recovering it. I don’t want to look dumb in front of the aliens. Because they’re surely watching me right now. Probably counting my limbs, noting my size, figuring out what part they should eat first, whatever. I let the cylinder get closer and closer. It’s moving less than 1 mile per hour. Not exactly a bullet pass. Now that it’s so close, I can estimate its size. It’s not big at all. About the size and shape of a coffee can. It’s a dull gray color with splotches of slightly darker gray randomly here and there. Similar to the Blip-A’s hull, kind of. Different color but same blotchiness. Maybe it’s a stylistic thing. Random splotches are “in” this season or something. The cylinder floats into my arms and I grab it with both hands. It has less mass than I expected. It’s probably hollow. It’s a container. There’s something inside they want me to see. I hold the cylinder under one arm and use the other to deal with tethers. I hurry back to the airlock. It’s a stupid thing to do. There’s no reason to hurry and it literally endangers my life. One slip-up and I’d be off in space. But I just can’t wait. I get back into the ship, cycle the airlock, and float into the control room with my prize in hand. I open the Orlan suit, already thinking about what tests I’ll run on the cylinder. I have a whole lab to work with! The smell hits me immediately. I gasp and cough. The cylinder is bad! No, not bad. But it smells bad. I can barely breathe. The chemical smell is familiar. What is it? Cat pee? Ammonia. It’s ammonia. “Okay,” I wheeze. “Okay. Think.” My gut instinct is to close the suit again. But that would just trap me in a small volume with the ammonia that’s already in here. Better to let the cylinder air out in the larger volume of the ship. Ammonia isn’t toxic—at least, not in small quantities. And the fact that I can still breathe at all tells me it’s a small quantity. If it weren’t, my lungs would have caustic burns and I’d be unconscious or dead now. As it is, there’s just a bad smell. I can handle a bad smell. I climb out the back of the suit while the cylinder floats in the middle of the console room. Now that it’s not a shock anymore, I can handle the ammonia. It’s no worse than using a bunch of Windex in a small room. Unpleasant but not dangerous. I grab the cylinder—and it’s hot as heck! I yelp and pull my hands away. I blow on them for a moment and check for burns. It wasn’t too bad. Not stovetop hot. But hot. Grabbing it with my bare hands was stupid. Flawed logic. I assumed that since I’d been holding it earlier it was okay to do now. But earlier I had very thick spacesuit gloves protecting my hands. “You’ve been a bad alien cylinder,” I say to it. “You need a time-out.” I pull my arm into my sleeve and wrap my hand in the cuff. I use my now-protected knuckles to nudge the cylinder into the airlock. Once it’s in, I close the door. I’ll let it be for now. It’ll cool down to ambient air temperature eventually. And while it does, I don’t want it floating randomly around my ship. I don’t think there’s anything in the airlock that can get hurt by some heat. How hot was it? Well, I had both hands on it (like an idiot) for a fraction of a second. My own reaction time was enough to keep me from getting burned. So it’s probably less than 100 degrees Celsius. I open and close my hands a few times. They don’t hurt anymore, but the memory of the pain lingers. “Where’d the heat come from?” I mumbled. The cylinder was out in space for a good forty minutes. Over that time it should have radiated heat via blackbody radiation. It should be cold, not hot. I’m about 1 AU from Tau Ceti, and Tau Ceti has half the luminosity of the sun. So I don’t think the Taulight could have heated the cylinder up much. Definitely not more than blackbody radiation would cool it down. So either it has a heater inside or it was extremely hot when it started its trip. I guess I’ll find out soon enough. It’s not very heavy, so it’s probably thin. If there’s no internal heat source, it’ll cool off very fast in the air here. The room still smells like ammonia. Yuck. I float down to the lab. I don’t know where to begin. So many things I want to do. Maybe I should start by just identifying the material the cylinder is made of? Something harmless to the Blip-A’s crew might be incredibly toxic to me and neither of us would know it. Maybe I should check for radiation. I drift down to the lab table and put out a hand to steady myself. I’m getting better at the zero-g thing. I think I remember seeing an astronaut documentary saying some people handle it fine, while others really struggle. Looks like I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m using “lucky” loosely here. I’m on a suicide mission. So…yeah. The lab is a mystery. It has been for a while. It’s clearly set up with the idea that there’ll be gravity. It has tables, chairs, test-tube trays, et cetera. There’s none of the usual stuff you would expect to see in a weightless environment. No Velcro on the walls, no computer screens at all angles. No efficient use of space. Everything assumes there will be a “floor.” The ship can accelerate just fine. For a good long time too. It had me at 1.5 g’s for probably a few years. But they can’t expect me to just leave the engines on and fly in circles to keep gravity in the lab, right? I look around at each piece of lab equipment and try to relax my mind. There has to be a reason for this. And it’s in my memory somewhere. The trick is to think about what I want to know, but not stress about it too much. It’s like falling asleep. You can’t really do it if you concentrate on it too hard. So many top-of-the-line pieces of equipment. I let my mind wander as I scan across them all….