Project Hail Mary is living rent free in my head
The story, the fanart, the fan theories, the headcannons...
Since it's constantly rattling around in my head, tonight as i'm cooking my dinner i'm thinking, yeah, Grace has statues back on earth. Of course he does, he saved our world.
And Rocky does too.
Of course Rocky has statues on earth. How could they not? Some standing with Grace, some of their own... Of course they do. Because the videos are out there. I'm betting everything that the fact that Grace was an "unwilling" savior is kept well and truly under wraps. That isn't allowed to break containment. But why wouldn't all that time in a coma mess with your memory? Of course the videos we saw would have him learning what happened, figuring things out.
And we know, we KNOW, what being out there on the edge of everything alone can do to a person. The other astronauts were dead. Grace had no one. He was more alone than any human has ever been. And what were the chances he could have ever accomplished all that he did on his own?
Rocky fucking saved us. They made the chain and the collection module. They made the containers to breed the Taumeoba. And they kept Grace ALIVE. Not just when the ship nearly came apart and he was injured, but every day. Talking. Bouncing ideas off each other. Keeping Grace's brain active! We know what being out there on the edge alone can do. What it must have already been doing to Rocky, stuck by themselves for DECADES.
Rocky has statues. We'd need them desperately. Look at what humanity had just come through! Decades of so much death and not knowing if it was coming for all of us or not. So much anger and struggle and war, and you know we're not coming out of that with a sense of global togetherness. Hell no.
We'd NEED those statues. We'd need to see those two incomprehensibly different beings up there who had overcome language, culture, danger, the fact that our very air was deadly to each other - and despite all that had saved us. Saved each other.
And look at us here, in the real world, obsessively studying screenshots to make our drawings and our plushies and our own wee custom puppets as absolutely right as possible. You think we as a people would be any less gloriously neurotic about getting the details right for a statue of our rescuer? Those statues would have every tattoo and detail humanly possible to portray.
A Rocky as real as possible, who is able to stand in our air and feel the breeze in safety.
And on the plaques, the history of who these two were - metal formed into raised letters that is readable by both human and Eridian. Not just the words in English or Japanese or Swahili. But the best translation we can manage of spoken Eridian too, transcribed into musical notation. And generations of people who can sight read would stand there and try to hum or whistle those words, and wonder if they could, in some small way, be understood by the figure they stood in front of if they were really there.
Maybe the statue itself was made in such a way that when the wind blew just right, it whistled back.
And yeah, i just about broke down crying and may have overcooked a quesadilla just thinking about it.
