Project Hail Mary

Chapter 4

Okay.

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.

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 姚—the same character I saw in the Hail Mary mission crest. It’s pronounced Yáo.

How do I know—? Of course I know. Commander Yáo. 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 Yáo was, Ilyukhina was casual. They butted heads about it from time to time, but even Yáo 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 Yáo to the airlock. I set him inside, seal it, and jettison his remains in the same way.

“Yáo 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.

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.