Chapter Text
A blur of light and sound pulsed through Simon's senses as he faded in and out of consciousness.
He could register the faint sensations of desperate vice grip hands dragging his limp throbbing bloody body somewhere, lifting it up and landing with a thud. He couldn’t register much of anything around him. Just light, and noise. But for a brief glimpse he saw a human silhouetted by a halo of bright godly light, extending a warm hand. There were words spoken with such gentle reassurance, he knew whatever it was, it couldn’t have been the C.O.I.
Are you an Angel..? Or whatever the Eel was talking about… Salvation in the light… Some propaganda Prayer fed to him by Eden that ended up coming true…
Simon slurred even the thoughts in his head as he faded to black, the remnants of his clotted body clinging to life in ways that shouldn’t be possible… He should be dead, he shouldn’t be alive right now, he has seen so many horrifying and fantastic things that should never have been possible… How much time had passed, how in the infinite universe of dead stars did he get here…? None of this should have been possible… He should have suffocated. He should have imploded. He should have dissolved into a sea of screaming bloody souls congealing into the afterthought of an unknowable hungry god.
Yet he was somewhere else now. All that was left in Simon’s dimming form that had already surrendered to death for the sake of the cause… It seemed to brush against such a frail yet persistent feeling that was at this point all but foreign to him…
It was hope.
The next thing he knew, he was waking up on a table. Some artificial voice uttered the words, “Eye movement detected,” and asked him to do some kind of math, he wanted to tell it to piss off but there seemed to be a mask covering his mouth. His vision was blurry but gaining strength the more he blinked.
There were voices and unholy tones of what could be the Eel’s ghastly whispers or the song on the wing of a bird born unto a place so holy human minds were not built to fully understand. The tones grew more excited and desperate as more of a clatter was made.
The first sounds he could truly identify were the thudding footsteps of a rapid approach. The garbled noises sounded more human, and he was so close to the precipice of consciousness that he nearly made out words…
“..ey… aru… kay… anu ear m….” The garbled almost speech wobbled it’s way into Simon's dulled ear canals. He felt a pinch and suddenly he felt a rush of energy.
“Can you hear me? Are you okay?” The voice said much more clearly as his heart began to race.
“Ngh… hnn..” Simon wrestled with his body as he slowly began regaining control of it.
“Take it slow, I have some water if you want it,” The voice said. He could make out that it was a man’s voice. He felt whatever he was laying on slowly raise up his torso and he felt what seemed to be a straw be pressed to his bottom lip as he rapidly drank after his first taste of that beloved H2O. He only stopped when he desperately gasped for breath.
“Take it slow, it’s not going anywhere and we have plenty more where that came from,” The voice said. It seemed gentle and kind.
After Simon caught his breath all he could manage to mutter was, “Th-thank you…. Thank you… Water… Water… Thanks…” In a mumbled tone under his breath, feeling his entire body rehydrating properly, feeling moisture return to his cotton mouth, his dry blurry eyes and his gunky unused throat.
After a minute or so, his vision finally began to clear itself, and he could start making out shapes and figures… It wasn’t very similar to the places he was used to, but it was habitable and fairly spacious which he couldn’t be more grateful for.
The room had a clinical aspect to it. It was bright, mostly white but he couldn’t make out much of what all these strange machines and materials were. They were similar to the space stations and ships of Eden and the COI but it was different… Foreign somehow… How long had he been out…? Was any of what he last experienced real? Is he dead? Did the black box survive? What the hell happened?
His mind was both foggy and racing. Both delirious and desperate for answers… But more than anything else he just kept breathing, and listening to the gentle voice that spoke to him. More than the throbbing pain his battered and bruised body was in; what fell upon him next was a mantle of sheer loneliness and joy to hear a real human sounding voice. Not muffled through a speaker. Not the perverse and horrifying whisper of the Eel.
His tremulous hand began shakily searching beside him, looking for something the man could grasp onto, to make him feel sane. To remind him he wasn’t alone in this Godforsaken universe of dead stars and nightmare oceans. And what he found made stinging tears form in his eyes.
A warm hand. A gentle hand held his for a while as the man began to weep softly, as the pain of the ordeal seemed to pour out of him and something new fill him. Like surfacing from the suffocating depths and for the first time taking a big deep breath of something real. Something warm, and soft, and comforting, for the first time since who knows how long. He was comforted.
He wept like a child waking up from a nightmare for awhile. He squeezed the hand tightly, not to harm, but just out of fear that it would leave and he would wake up back in that damned submarine, never to feel the warmth of another soul again.
The hand stayed with him. It was patient and seemed in no hurry to leave him. It stayed for as long as he clung to it, before eventually the tears began to subside and the man found the courage to let it go. He caught his breath and sighed, rubbing his eyes.
“Am I… Are you real…? Am I alive…?” he managed in his raspy voice, coughing to clear his throat, and leaning back on the medical bed.
“Uh, Yeah, I’d say you’re alive,” The voice chuckled softly. “You’re talking to me aren’t you?”
“I um.. Yeah… I guess so…” Simon tried to focus. “Are you…” he tried to build a sentence but his vocabulary was failing him at that moment. “Am I in jail? Are you with them…?” His deep voice slurred his words as speech was a skill still returning to him.
“Uhhh, no?” The voice sounded confused. “This isn’t a jail. We just rescued you. You were floating out in space in some giant metal can or something. Is that your ship?”
“You could say that… I’d more refer to it as a coffin to be more accurate, but yes that was technically what you’d call a ship,” Simon said before pausing. “Wait did you say space??”
“Well yes, we were on our way back from Tau Ceti and we saw your ship just floating,” The voice said.
“Wait… We?” Simon stirred a moment. “There are more people…? Did it work? Did the blackbox get found??”
“Blackbox…? Not to my knowledge, we salvaged your ship if that’s what you’re asking,” The voice clarified. “And as for people… well…” The voice trailed off as it seemed to be trying to articulate a response.
Simon wrestled to open his heavy eyelids and strain his eyes to look in the direction where the voice came from and he was stunned.
“Am… Am I Dead…?” He stared at the face of the scientist in bewilderment. It was the haloed silhouette from earlier. This time it had a face and everything. It was beautiful. And even more importantly, it seemed real.
“No you’re not dead as far as we can tell,” the scientist scratched the back of his head and laughed. “You were in pretty rough shape though. You’ve been in a medically induced coma for months. All we could do on our ship was keep you stable until we made it back to Erid, and even then it took some time for them to build the facilities to sustain us, and even more for them to replicate my Medbay and expand its capabilities to be able to properly patch up everything you’ve got going on. Say hi, Armanda,”
(Armanda being the expanded duplicate of Arm-ando, the medical arm robot on the Hail Mary. The name was surprisingly Rocky’s idea after some time he had been studying the laptop with all of Earth’s knowledge on it, and looking at common language and naming conventions. He felt very clever about it. Grace begged to differ but appreciated his taking an interest, and even more that the Eridians had literally built an entire facility to make sure he doesn’t die in case anything happens, so he let Rocky win that one.)
The medical robot waved. “W e l c o m e, P a t i e n t_2,” A soothing feminine robotic voice came from somewhere above.
“I uh, my name is…” Simon looked and reached for what he assumed was the cup with the straw he just drank from and continued to clear his voice as his mastery of speech had finally returned. “Simon. My name is Simon,” He sighed after gulping the water gratefully.
“Nice to meet you Simon, I’m Dr. Ryland Grace,” The scientist said with a smile, before hesitating a moment and rephrasing. “Well, you can call me Grace, everyone here does, and I’m not like, a medical doctor, well I guess it is a biology degree,” He scratched his chin and thought while looking up at the ceiling as he gesticulated with his hand as he tried to articulate his point. “My specialty is more Molecular Biology- well actually I really think of myself more as a school teacher, until a lot of things happened and I had to dust off the degree- well it was a whole thing, okay? I’m sure we’ll have time to get into all that later-”
“Wait, what did you just say?” Simon looked confused.
“Yeah, yeah, why is a school teacher in space, like I said it’s a long story-” The scientist said before being cut off.
“No, no did you say Erid?” He rubbed one of his eyes. “I’ve never heard of that space station… Is that a bigger ship?”
Grace thought about how to break it to him so he just decided to come out and say it.
“So…” Grace tried to choose his words carefully as he leaned back in his chair. “Erid, is a planet. And um.. Aliens, are, uh, real,” He said the words slowly to not spook him. “But! They’re really friendly and I teamed up with one and we figured out how to save the stars so they’ll stop dying! And that should save all life back on Earth and Erid too! We got back to Erid some months ago, they built this whole biodome that’ll sustain our atmosphere so we can breathe and have space, and they built this whole medical facility to save you!”
Simon looked like gears in his head were turning but no one was home. All of the sudden he was reminded of who he was and he looked haunted.
“They built an entire building… to save… me…?” Simon’s brows knitted as moisture returned to his eyes, he looked away and wiped his tears as he breathed deeply to get his tears under control. “Th-then they really must not be human…” He finally said with a solemn expression, sniffing his nose to clear it from the threatening tears as he gazed down at his lap. Grace looked confused but let him have a moment. “Th-they must really be something better than us…” His voice was deep and bold, and yet it seemed so saturated in despair. A despair Ryland Grace felt his heart sink to hear, as a budding realization dawned on him.
He had no evidence to back up this theory, he was probably just projecting or jumping to conclusions, but something told him that reaction, and that tone of his voice… Maybe Grace wasn’t the only human out there that was sent out to die… Maybe things got much worse on Earth much faster than was predicted, and they sent out another ship… No… No that couldn’t possibly be it… Grace thought to himself. Rocky and I studied the remains of that ship for months while we were going back to Erid.
They ended up quarantining the whole tin can because they found some weird biologic goo inside and neither of them were too tempted to be in the middle of any other crisis before they managed to get the Taumoeba back to Erid and make sure everything was safe for sure. They secured the only passenger and thoroughly encased it in a field of Xenonite. That didn’t mean that they didn’t scan it and look around a little before corking the bottle though.
The engineering of the thing seemed so cobbled together. It was levels of desperation and lack of better resources that all of earth couldn’t possibly have been reduced to in just 11-15 years. All that aside, it didn’t even look to be any kind of equipped for any sort of space travel at all, just based on the propulsion system alone. It looked more like, well, a deep sea submersible than any sort of space ship. The thickness of the hull, the propulsion system, the shape, even just the size, was so small that it would never have been cleared for space travel, whoever was put in it would have gone crazy or died from that kind of barren confinement. Hell, Grace himself nearly did that on a ship that was outfitted properly, let alone that ‘coffin’ as his companion so bluntly put it.
There weren’t any provisions of any sort aside from an empty water bottle, and the size of the oxygen tanks. Which means it literally couldn’t sustain life for more than a day, maybe two or so based on circumstance.
Grace would have been lying if he had said he hadn’t been secretly obsessing over how this stranger got out there in the first place, how he got stranded, what was the goo, was he contagious, what was his purpose being out there… Still as he just had woken up he didn’t want to bombard him with questions, so he still would have to table those answers for some time to come.
“So… I take it you weren’t put in there voluntarily…” Grace finally said after the mood had dimmed, thinking about how there literally were no doors on the craft at all. They had to crudely cut it open to get him out of there. Simon fell silent and his face became careworn.
“... Well that makes two of us…” Grace finally mumbled quietly. Simon’s eyes widened as his face turned quickly toward Grace. Ava’s words echoed in his head. About how there actually might have been someone who survived. It was probably a long shot, but still.
“The COI sent you to die for some science bullshit too?” Simon asked desperately.
“COI?” Grace raised an eyebrow. “No, I’ve never heard of them. I was sent by the Astrophage Task Force, but, well, yeah basically,” He muttered with a sigh. “Although, I hate to give it to them, but they were right… And… I did actually save the universe… And because of Rocky and all the Eridians, I didn’t have to die.” Grace shrugged and knitted his brows considering how strange all that sounds after saying it out loud.
“Never heard of the COI…” Simon looked perplexed. “So.. Have you heard of Eden?”
“Eden?” The scientist questioned. “Like uh, from the Bible? The Garden of Eden?” Grace asked with a raised brow. Simon furrowed his brow.
“You know! Eden! The Quiet Rapture! Filament Station! The dying stars! You’re trying to tell me you’ve really never heard of any of this??”
“Listen I think my parents took me to church when I was really little but it never really became my thing? Sorry, I’m not really religious at all…” Grace shrugged honestly.
Well that settles it… He’s not like me after all… Simon thought to himself. That’s probably for the best at this point… It’s not like either of them was a fan of me anyway… Better for me to pivot now than end up in a jail cell before I know what the hell is going on…
“So… We’re on an alien planet?” Simon said.
“Yes. It’s kind of crazy, but, it’s true,” Grace smiled. “And the Alien’s are-”
There was an approach of thudding until it crashed into the door a couple times, creating a knock from the hall.
“Hello! Hello Grace friend!! Is patient awake!? Rocky hear new human awake say Adrian, so Rocky come and see!” A robotic voice all too familiar to grace came over the Med Bay, causing Grace to fight off a dawning grin on his face, like an inside joke just landed. S
Simon looked at him and the door with a face of bewilderment, before Grace grinned at him and said,
“Would you like to meet one?”