i think there is a difference between a knowingly flawed character and a thematically uncomfortable character and knowing the difference is half the battle
knowingly flawed character: this character has traits that the author deliberately put in to show they have nuance and aren't perfect as a person. this will put them at odds with some readers and endear them to others, depending on them as people, and that's good!
thematically uncomfortable character: oh boy the author has some Beliefs
basically the best thing any character can do is decide they don't want to be afraid anymore - in fact they never want to be afraid of anything ever again - and take action so drastic they fail to realise that this too is a decision motivated by fear. or to account for the Consequences of that.
[with obvious perverted intent] hey. don't you want to release the safety catches on that character. don't you want to flip off all the switches holding them back and let the control rods go.
This took a stupid number of cosmetic mods to achieve. Trying to figure out what sort of horrible mishmash of a build I'll have to do to represent her mechanically, because the typical divination wizard sit-back-and-CC playstyle doesn't quite feel like it fits. It's a pity there is no way to get int-based dissonant whispers.
(Yes this is all extended prep for Mortal Chains but redone as a comic. Written form was not getting across what I wanted it too, and I decided if I was doing that I might as well have a real playthrough to base it off of.)
We reach the part where I have to decide how I'm doing dialogue stuff.
Obviously, I'm going to have to avoid picking anything that's overtly untrue. I think I'll try to avoid things with the deception tag, too, though in this case I did go with option 1 (as a player I feel really, really bad about attacking refugee tieflings under basically any circumstances). I will attempt to have more resolve in the future doing this 100% brutal honesty run!
Okay, back on this run. After spending far too much time thinking about this, I think I have settled on how I am going to get an appropriate build within the base BG3 game.
It's going to be some mix of GOOlock, divination wizard, and shadow sorcerer. Damage spells will be limited to ones that deal psychic or necrotic only, unless it is some sort of retaliation spell (think armor of agathys, hellish rebuke). Really, what I want to do is get to a point of being able to spam twinned dissonant whispers in fights.
This is all on honor mode, despite the (mostly cosmetic) mods, so I do want things to be reasonably optimized. I might respec the other party members to follow more powerful builds that still kinda align with their characterizations, like doing an overall psychic damage comp that uses the resonance stone. We'll see how far I can get.
Imagine saying this to the Robin Hobb who published her first book while financially struggling as a waitress and post lady with 4 children to take care of alone because her husband was an offshore fisherman in Alaska
Covers are a signal about what the book will contain. Sure you can cheaply make a cover with AI, and it might technically hit all the points a cover is supposed to have, like the title, author name, and some sort of representative art, but it will very likely come across as cheap. Coming at this from a marketing perspective -- is that what you want to associate your brand with?
ok but rocky being the sole survivor of the radiation bc of how much time he spent by the astrophage kinda implies just how much time he spent alone even before his crew died
I've been playing Slay the Princess lately, and there's some visual elements in there that make me really think of Victoria Dallon from Ward. So, have a fusion crossover snippet.
--
You're in a grimy alley, full of dumpsters and fire exits. A breeze flows through, carrying the tang of nearby saltwater. It makes the white cape on your shoulders flutter.
On your left ear, something crackles to life. A headset. "You're in Brockton Bay. At the end of the street is a warehouse. And in the warehouse is a villain. You're en route to kill her. If you don't, it will be the end of the world."
That sounds important. "Which villain?" you ask.
"She calls herself Damsel of Distress," the voice says. It's warm and personable, soothing to listen to. You decide it must be your handler.
"What's the rundown on her power?"
"She'll end the world if you let her. The less you know, the better off you'll be."
"That's not a rating," you note.
"You don't need a rating for what you're going to do. Which is killing her, by the way."
"It'll make me feel a lot better," you insist.
"Fine. She's a blaster 7 mover 2. Does that make you feel better?"
It does. And yet --
"That's pretty low for someone who can end the world. Are you sure she needs to be killed?"
"Yes. She's a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine. The PRT has put a kill order on her. Do you think you know better than the PRT?"
You've had your disagreements with them, but not for something at this level. If the PRT says she's a villain so dangerous that it would be self defense to kill her on sight, then it must be so.
I absolutely 100% without question believe in the power of betas, and I advocate for getting one as much as possible, and I think they are amazing. The only problem is dealing with beta feedback without crushing despair and endless self-doubt. How the heck do I take critique gracefully and build something better without lying face down on the floor for three days first? (PS you are amazing, thank you!)
If this is your actual reaction to critique and not hyperbole to get your point across, you might want to read up on Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria and see if that’s something you’d like to talk about with your doctor. This level of a reaction to beta comments feels extreme and might be a sign of something else going on, whether that’s RSD or something else.
If that’s just hyperbole and you feel a sense of disappointment or dejection as a result of hearing critique then you might just need to talk to your beta reader about how you want that critique to come at you. Do you want a negative to be balanced out with a positive? Do you want a critique to come with a plan for how to fix the problem? Do you want it phrased as a question rather than as a statement?
We all have preferences when it comes to receiving feedback, and we all respond differently to different styles. If you’re receiving feedback in a form that doesn’t work for you, then try a different form and see if that works better.
Another thing that’s important to remember is that these comments are not about you as a person, they’re about your writing. The person who is giving you this feedback is invested in making your writing better. They want you to succeed and they want you to tell the best version of your story possible, and their focus is on helping you do that.
Nothing that we write is ever going to be perfect, and a first draft is even rougher. There’s no shame at all in needing to improve. If there’s nothing to work on, then there’s nothing to learn. Accepting critique means accepting an opportunity to do better next time, to learn a new technique or concept. Doing something badly means that you’re doing something that’s hard for you, and it’s only by working beyond our capabilities that we can improve.
Be proud of your mistakes. They prove that you’re willing to take a risk. You’re striving and reaching and pushing yourself to do more. Keep reaching, anon. You’ll get there. 💕
It sounds like someone has convinced you that the only way to improve is having a beta, or that the only way to write ‘good’ fanfic is to have a beta.
But the thing is - if having a beta is not something you enjoy, don’t.
You don’t owe anyone any particular way of doing things. I think it is very important to keep in mind that fanfic is a hobby - something you should enjoy doing. Don’t do it in a way you don’t enjoy.
No matter if you have a beta or not, if you get comments or not - just the act of writing does make your writing better.
I don’t generally use a beta, because I know it would be stressful and un-empowering for me. I write the way I enjoy writing, and I think you need to step back and consider what are the reasons you enjoy writing? What do you get out of it?
Of course - if you write with a goal of commercial success for your Original Novel, and you write fanfic to prepare for that, then it might be different. Maybe you do need to face your growing pains. But do reflect over the purpose of your writing.
YES. I love having a beta reader and there are still fics where I do not get a beta. Either because it’s not the style or fandom of anyone I’d usually ask to beta, or because it’s good enough and I just want to post it, or because the content is personal enough that I know I couldn’t take any critique, or because I just plain don’t feel like it.
Having a beta reader is the most useful to me when there’s something very specific I want them to do. Maybe it’s spelling and grammar - frequently I get to the point with writing where I KNOW that one sentence just isn’t sounding right but I have no clue how to tweak it and someone else’s eyes will see what mine won’t. Maybe I’m stuck on plot and need someone to tell me where they think it’s going, or help me brainstorm. It just works a lot better for me when I can say “I’m not sure this character’s voice is right, and also I’m not sure whether I need a clearer explanation of this particular plot point, and if you see any typos let me know” instead of just an open ended “go forth and edit”. I’m most likely to get that “I need to go throw myself into the ocean now” feeling when I get feedback I’m not expecting.
And also - sometimes you need to take some time with edits. There have absolutely been times when I’ve needed to read through suggestions and then shove it in a metaphorical drawer for a week. Usually with bigger edits like plot or pacing edits, but frequently even with tiny ones. Crushing despair and endless self-doubt sucks and is definitely no fun to feel, but there’s also no need to beat yourself up over not feeling enthusiastic about feedback. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer or a bad person if it takes you a while to be ready to act on critique. Sometimes you just have to take your time.
Can I make a suggestion as someone who loves betas? Flip the beta process: ask your beta to read the story or WIP or scene cold, don’t tell them anything about it and don’t ask for any initial/overall/global response from them. Then, once they’ve read it, ask them questions.
Start with reading comprehension questions--and there is no such thing as a too dumb question! What happened in that scene you just read? Can you summarize the story or scene back to me? Then, if there are any tricky points to your story, ask about those: what did character Y do there? Did you get what was happening between Y and Z--can you narrate back to me what you read? The next level up is motivation and feelings/interpretations: Why did character Y do that, do you think? How does he feel? How did scene V make you feel about this person place or thing? When did you think X and Y first had sparks?
Do not give your poor betas any answers to these questions, or give hints as to the “right” answers--because they’re not wrong or right. YOU are either coming across or you are not coming across: if the beta isn’t picking up what you are putting down, you have to go back and fix the story so that the words in that particular order create the feeling you want in the reader. If the scene is supposed to make you cry, and the beta thinks its funny, you gotta redo it. If your brilliant plot point got missed, you were TOO SUBTLE and you have to add pointers and cues. I have been surprised btw that sometimes I have not gotten my straightforward plot points across--literally my reader doesn’t know what the hell happened, let alone why it happened or have feelings about why it happened. If they don’t know that Fred is dead, they sure won’t know who killed Fred or be sad that Fred’s dead or feel John’s pain at Fred’s untimely and tragic death!
Then here’s the thing--once you’ve done all this, then you CAN tell Beta A what you were on about and ask Beta A, like, okay, how could I have better clued you in to the fact that Fred is dead? Why didn’t you think Fred was dead? Work your way with them through Fred’s death to who did it and how you feel and all that. This beta can now be your collaborator/partner in crime. But THEN, like, sadly, you really can’t believe them really when they say the story is fixed, because now, like you, they know what they were supposed to be getting from the story. You can’t know that the words on the page alone are what’s doing the work, and that’s what writing is. So ideally you need to find someone ELSE, Beta B, and say, again, “Hey, can you read this and can I ask you some questions?” Then ask Beta B--what happened? why did it happen? Can you tell me how that scene makes you feel? Who’s right in that argument, X or Y?--and when they’re like, *sobbing,* Fred he’s dead, he deserved better, I am keysmashing my way through John’s grief, you bastard--then: post! :D
For me, this helps, because I’m not asking the beta to solve my problems and I’m also not asking for their evaluation. I can thank them totally sincerely regardless of what they say (and you should--and also make them feel comfortable summarizing back to you, cause whatever they say is good data.) I also hate this thing where you feel like a beta wants you to write a different story than the one you’re writing, or when you get contradictory advice. I’m not asking them “what they’d do.” I’m asking them to literally say back to me what they think the words are saying, and adjusting my story based on it.
I have worked with a lot of betas over the years, and in many different ways. It's always a negotiation, working with someone new, and you as the author have to let them know what you want out of them as a beta.
Generally, for example, I am not looking for spelling-and-grammar. It's great if someone can catch typos, but I am a good speller and I make stylistic choices that I am absolutely not going to change no matter how a beta feels about it.
On the other hand, I like working with betas who are willing to function as developmental editors; they're not interested in changing my style and they barely ever touch the sentences themselves. Instead they are looking for plot holes, continuity errors, character motivations, the clarity of events, timelining, flow. Often these types of betas also cheer me on and help me untangle occasional thorny rat's-nest sentences that I just can't make work; I've usually called this type of overall beta work "midwifing". (There are a lot of things I write, particularly short things, that really don't need that at all. There's a fair amount of unbeta'd fanfic in my ao3, and for the first few years I wrote, I didn't use a beta at all. And then there's stories that absolutely needed it, that never would have seen the light of day without betas.) This isn't an easy kind of author-beta relationship with the wrong person! I do not recommend this with a new beta; it should be someone with whom you are familiar and who you know you can work with, AND who you know is likely to be good at this. Sometimes you don't have that person, though, and need to find them. (I was once told by a previous beta that she couldn't work on a particular story, but that I should try a rather well-known reccer in the fandom, to whom I had never spoken. That worked out fantastically, but boy was I nervous about it.)
I have found it cannot be a passive relationship, working with a beta. You have to talk to them. You have to ask for what you think the story needs and what you need as an author, however that looks. Maybe it looks like the open-ended questions that @cesperanza suggests. Maybe it's intense developmental work. Maybe you really want a spelling-and-grammar edit and nothing else. But it won't happen by magic. It's working with someone to make your story better, without making it any less yours, and it is work. It can be amazing work -- it can be generative and fun and a wonderful part of being a fannish writer -- but it's work.
Recently finished playing Slay The Princess for the first time. Interesting game! Description of my experience below the cut for spoilers.
I got the Prisoner, the Beast, the Stranger, the Tower/Fury, and the Adversary/Eye of the Needle in that order.
Overall, being forced to attack the princess in the first chapter of my first run, and then finding a way to get her out the second run anyways despite the limitations convinced me that this was a game about working together against the interfering narrator. That conviction was only strengthened when the princess turned into the Shifting Mound for the first time, which I dubbed "the hands thing" in Discord chat.
I wanted to have a nice relationship with the princess and the Shifting Mound. I am... unsure if I managed it? That first loop with the Prisoner was the only time when it felt like the princess and I were ever properly working together. The other loops, I wanted to help her escape again, but my options for doing so were greyed out or were taken worse than I expected, because I didn't know I had to build rapport with her each loop instead of having her knowledge stay. Eventually, I was getting aggressed enough against by the princess (by my perception, at least) that I gave up and decided to give as good as I got. If the Tower demanded I kneel, then the Tower could get stabbed in the heart.
It felt a lot like being roped into unnegotiated sadomasochism. I wasn't really happy with that, but even talking to the Shifting Mound, I couldn't find a way to stop it. She seemed completely fine with it, even if I didn't like it. Probably didn't help that at some point I decided to always bring the knife with me, as a form of preemptive self defense.
Despite all that, I decided to ascend together with the Shifting Mound. I wanted to have a nice relationship with her, after all. It just felt like events kept getting in the way. I didn't learn enough about the rest of the world to really care about letting it live forever, or to engage with the choice from a moral perspective.
Based on what I've seen from reading the Reddit and TVtropes, I think my run of the game might have been bugged, since I never got to a point where all the voices I'd accumulated over the run came back on the last loop and I could talk with the princess with her knowing everything. I'm definitely planning to play again to see if I can make that happen. Also going to see if I can avoid the whole mutual murder thing by talking through the princess like we just met and I want to help her in every loop.
Like, people are telling me that the commonwealth prize is like, an actual real award that people care about, not some kind of self-publishing scam?
Because The Serpent and The Grove is just unreadably amateurish pastiche. Truly confident writers don't try to make every single sentence a "literary" metaphor.
I mean, look, I can't prove it's AI, it could just be a really bad human writer who just happens to have all the tics of the more inept AIs, but like... Come on.
"Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission."
If there's one thing I hate about a wet sack, it's the entitlement.
I genuinely cannot fathom someone who considers themselves a literary critic reading this and not, first of all, immediately clocking it as AI, and second of all immediately clocking it as an unreadably amateurish attempt to hide the most obvious cliches by using baroque, impenetrable prose.
Anthropic's AI can already write better than this! It's not even, like, state of the art AI.
Like, I would not even give this a runner up medal in a competition to generate the best AI prose.
I was gonna say, Claude can write better prose than this. And editing these cliches out doesn’t take much effort, either. Was this a troll, or some sort of performance art ala Fountain?
“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate—”
Through The Looking Glass
Lewis Carol
My personal take is that a lot of people who are fascinated by AI are people who are fascinated by the results of art but have little to no idea why a given piece of art might produce a certain result.
I think there's a particular subset of such people who are also very fascinated by the idea of being seen as an artist but do not, themselves, have much artistic judgement or capability.
And so when they outsource their decision-making to the machine, they don't really have the tools to determine whether or not the machine has made a good decision.
The Grove and The Serpent produces an effect a bit like the one Jabberwocky had on Alice up there, you are barraged with so many authoritative-sounding metaphors and similes that eventually you start to get used to just not really understanding what you are reading.
"Maybe 'wet sacking' is a farming term and I don't understand" one thinks, and when confronted with a slope that wants "rain in teeth or none at all" it is dropped in so unapologetically that you imagine that out there, somewhere, somebody probably knows exactly what that means. "Rain in teeth" is a very strange phrase but even if we assume it means, perhaps, sleet, what kind of slope wants driving sleet or drought and nothing in between?
It's just thrown out like, yeah, of course we know exactly what kind of slope that is.
And if the only thing you take away from literature is "This had phrases and metaphors that I didn't understand but they sure seemed confident!" then, well, The Grove and The Serpent also has a bunch of incomprehensible phrases and metaphors so it must be the same thing, right?
I kind of think the real scandal is that either there is some kind of graft going on here or that the judges and readers of the Commonwealth Award are absolutely lacking in what I would consider the most basic critical faculties one would expect from a reader.
Honestly seems like the big problem of generative AI and creativity is that it allows people with no respect for the craft to easily output something within it, usually of mediocre quality at best. Then because they don't have the taste to see how this compares to other works in the craft, they think it's amazing and want to get the same respect that is afforded to people at the top of the craft, and make this everyone else's problem.
No idea what's going on with this specific competition though.
I feel so many feelings about Rocky during the first contact. He wants to connect SO BADLY. Do Eridians have horror stories about scary aliens? If they do, Rocky doesn't care. He wants this alien to be friendly. He does everything he can to accommodate. Here, a little gift I'm sending your way at the speed you're comfortable with. Please be there. Here, the next gift is going right into your airlock so that it's easier for you to catch. Please don't fly away. You made a strange gesture with your limb, I'll make my robot make that gesture back. Please belive that I'm friendly. Here's a tunnel to connect us, I'll make sure you can breathe in it. Please come meet me. I'll let you choose the material for the wall separating us; I'll rebuild the whole wall if it makes you more comfortable, no trouble, just please let's talk. You're all alone on your ship, I can hear it, please come sleep here where I can watch you, it's unsafe for you to be alone. I'm alone and scared, it's been 46 years since I felt safe while sleeping, please please please watch me sleep too. I'm very vulnerable when I sleep and I trust that you won't use it against me. I want to visit your ship, am allowed, question? I'm moving in with you. Let's save the stars.
Thinking about the first time Grace & Rocky inevitably get into a big argument on the journey to Erid. Because, like, they are obviously inseparable queerplatonic besties, but Grace is slowly getting more and more irritable as he, you know, dies of starvation, and Rocky started this trip with decades worth of survivor's guilt and PTSD and is now adding a hefty dose of caretaker fatigue on top of that.
It probably starts as a misunderstanding--they still don't even perfectly speak each others' languages, and there's plenty of room for cultural differences to get in the way, too. They're both on-edge and living in extremely close quarters and for whatever reason it explodes.
And neither of them know what to do with that.
Rocky ends up feeling hurt and guilty all at the same time, frustrated with Grace but also with himself, because he knows his friend is going through a hard time, it's just also terrible to have to watch and he doesn't know how to fix that. Grace probably finds a corner to cry in, convinced he's doomed himself by making Rocky angry because how is he going to convince everyone else on Erid to care about saving his life if he can't even stay on good terms with his friend?
Eventually they get over it. They talk about what happened and get to a less shaky place. It's still a scary couple of hours for both of them, and they know it could happen again. But they still care about each other so, so much, and that makes it worth it.
So maybe I haven't been able to stop turning this over in my head and wrote this today instead of my job applications. 4400 words, be warned :')
---
Since being sent to space, I’ve done a lot of human firsts: first human interstellar traveler, first human to visit an exoplanet, first human contact with an intelligent alien species, first human to eat a different alien species (unless Dmitri and Ilyukhina were serious about doing astrophage shots. I don’t think they were. But they might have been).
I think I might also be the first human to tell my best friend that I wished he and his whole species were dead because I can’t have cake anymore.
I’m a lot less proud of that one.
I think I’m a bad friend.
It’s embarrassing to be upset about little things, because it makes you feel stupid, and feeling stupid makes you feel more upset, and feeling upset about that makes you feel more stupid, in a spiral of feeling bad about everything. Being upset that I was going to die in space? That was normal. Anyone would be upset about that. But about two years into the journey to Erid I realized I had eaten the last of the freeze-dried meals with the chocolate cake yesterday and now I was never going to have chocolate or cake ever again, and I hadn’t even appreciated it.
I stood at the food storage compartments, staring stupidly at them, trying not to either cry or throw something. I was in the third week of my new meal regimen: coma slurry for breakfast, taumoeba slime for lunch, and then real food for dinner, to end on a high note. Intercutting real food with taumoeba was my idea, and I was mad at myself for doing it. I had enough real food to last until Erid, but it was dwindling scarily fast. Rocky was insistent that Eridian scientists would drop everything and figure out how to make food that would keep me alive as their first priority, but… well, I’d come from an Earth that was having the same problems. I didn’t think they’d want to drop everything they were doing to save their own planet to invent a whole new technological infrastructure to keep one alien alive. So I wanted to make sure what I had would stretch out long enough for them to figure out something I could eat that wouldn’t kill me. But what that meant was slime for breakfast and slime for lunch, every day, and the lunch slime was filling but it wasn’t energizing. By dinner time I was always cranky. And this was going to be how every day was going to go for at least the next two years and probably the next rest of my life. And all I wanted was something with chocolate in it and there wasn’t any and never would be again.
I slumped down on the floor.
“Grace?” Rocky called from the other room.
“Just deciding on dinner,” I said.
“From the floor, question?”
“Yeah.”
Ilyukhina had wanted chocolate cake.
The memories still keep filtering up, though by now they feel more like remembering things normally that I just hadn’t been thinking about before. Ilyukhina’s 39th birthday was a few months before launch, and she was making the most of it.
“Cake, champagne, and zakuski should have eggplant, I like the eggplant,” she said, counting off on her fingers the things she wanted for her big birthday bash. Stratt listened with the kind of patience she rarely had time for anymore, but Ilyukhina was good at making you want to listen to her. “Smoked salmon on rye bread. Music, dancing. Flowers. Everyone brings me a little card that says nice things about how much you all love me and how much you all will miss me. Also I want bouncy castle from American movies.”
That actually earned a brief but real smile from Stratt. “We are not importing a… bouncy castle… onto the ship.”
“Will be my last birthday party ever,” Ilyukhina said. “And I have never seen a bouncy castle in real life.”
Stratt held firm on nixing the bouncy castle, but Ilyukhina did get her party with music, dancing, lots of champagne and vodka, eggplant, smoked salmon, and everybody on the ship making toasts about how great she was. There was also a chocolate cake.
My last birthday ever was a month later and was mostly DuBois and Shapiro ambushing me as I left the lab with leftover champagne from Ilyukhina’s party and cookies stolen from the mess hall. If I’d known it would be my last birthday party ever, maybe I would have tried to do something more special. There wasn’t even cake.
Rocky rolled up in his xenonite ball. He was working on a more articulated suit, but hadn’t come up with a design that worked well yet. The suit would help him interact with me and the oxygenated side of the Hail Mary better, and I was torn between feeling like it was really sweet that he would put in all that effort for something that he didn’t really need to do in order to make things easier on me and feeling weird that soon he wouldn’t even need me for the one thing I could do that he couldn’t. But for now he was still in the ball and he still needed me to interact with most things on my side of the barrier.
He nudged me with the ball. “Something is wrong with the food, question?”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “It’s just that I’m out of the one that I wanted.”
“Other ones are not good, question?”
“You don’t taste flavors, or, I don’t know, maybe you do, but sometimes humans want specific things,” I said. Rocky still didn’t love talking about eating, so I wasn’t entirely positive if Eridians had any equivalent to sense of taste or not, but I’d definitely gotten that there was a lot less variety of things Eridians ate than humans did. “And right now the thing I want is chocolate cake.”
“Don’t know that word.”
“It’s a type of food. It’s a dessert. We eat it at parties. It tastes really good and… I mean, it’s really meant for sharing. It’s kind of sad to eat cake alone.”
Rocky made a sound that was kind of like a laugh and kind of like a disbelieving snort. “Human social eating. Strange strange strange. Humans are weird perverts.”
It wasn’t anything new, it was a running joke, but it was not what I wanted to hear right then. “I can’t help it if eating food together is the basic unit of human socializing, okay? Eridians are the weird perverts for getting weird about it! It’s important to me even if you think it’s stupid! I’m allowed to miss it!”
I didn’t mean to snap that forcefully, but I just wasn’t in the mood to be patient. Rocky was quiet, then when he responded, his tone was clipped. “I know. All you want to talk about is food anymore. I sit with Grace while eat because it makes you sad not to. You think I don’t know this.”
“All I want to talk about is food anymore because I’m afraid of starving, Rock. Even Eridians have to worry about that!”
“I know!” The whistle in his tone was frustrated. He made a noise kind of like “ugh” then said, “Was trying to make joke. Was not trying to insult.”
I had the presence of mind not to say “well, you did,” but what I did say was more like, “Mmh.” I got up and rifled through the food packets again. I paused over the babaganoush. That was eggplant, right? We’d has something like that at Ilyukhina’s party, back when I was on Earth and worrying about food was something abstract for me. Something I knew was a real problem in the world, but not one I’d ever faced.
Maybe even if I was still on Earth, I’d be worrying about having enough food. But at least everyone else would be, too, and they’d be willing to commiserate.
That wasn’t fair. I knew Rocky was worried about me. He spent a lot of time fretting over my health and my safety and if I was sleeping enough and if I had enough food and if I was feeling restless or bored and he freaked out a lot the first time I threw up the taumoeba slime because he was afraid his suggestion had killed me. I had to reassure him that I was fine and I wasn’t dying even as I had no idea if that was true or not.
“My turn to choose the movie tonight,” I said, as I mixed water into the babaganoush to rehydrate it. “The Great British Bake-Off.”
“Don’t know two of those words,” said Rocky.
“It’s relaxing. Humans like watching it because it’s calming. And I still miss cake.”
It was not relaxing or calming to Rocky. I could tell he was on edge the whole time. “Grace didn’t say it was food show,” he said accusingly.
“Like I said. Eating food together is the basic unit of human socializing.”
Rocky bunched up his arms around his carapace in a way I could tell was an expression of discomfort, and as much as it made me feel like a total jerk, it was also kind of satisfying. I was feeling like crap, watching this show while eating rehydrated chemical-infused babaganoush was making me feel like crap, and maybe I had decided to do that because I wanted Rocky to join me in feeling like crap. Also, babaganoush is a slime, which I hadn’t consciously remembered until I chose it. Three square meals of slime today. It didn’t even really leave me feeling full, and after I finished it, I couldn’t just heat up another one, because I had a ration schedule. I could eat more taumoeba, but eating taumoeba while watching polite and friendly British bakers in their cute sunny kitchens and green grassy lawns make cake I couldn’t eat would probably have pushed me over the edge.
“Grace feeling relaxed and calm now, question?” Rocky asked.
“I’m still hungry,” I grumbled. It wasn’t Rocky’s fault that he had 220 years’ worth of food and I had three, but it was hard to believe that when my stomach was grumbling and I had only eaten slime all day.
“Can eat taumoeba—”
“I don’t want taumoeba!” I was acting like a child and I didn’t care. I think I was also crying. “I want to go home.”
Rocky rolled his ball closer to me. “What can I do that would make Grace feel more like home?”
“You can’t,” I said. “That’s the problem. You can’t. The Hail Mary isn’t home and neither of us know what’s going to happen on Erid, if I’ll just die or what—”
“Erid will be Grace’s home! Grace won’t die!”
“It won’t be, and you don’t know that!” And now I was yelling, which Rocky didn’t deserve, but—“Nobody there knows me, nobody there will know or care what humans do, even you—you don’t really get it, and nobody ever will again and I’m going to feel like this forever—”
“I have been TRYING!” Rocky’s pitch shot up almost past the point I could hear him, and he had to bristle and compose himself to drop his voice back into the range my weak stupid human ears could pick up. “Trying everything that I can to make you comfortable and tolerate your stupid food rules because everything is about food always and you get sad when you eat alone and get sad when you eat taumoeba and get sad when you eat coma slurry and I watch your human movies where everybody is eating together all the time and you talk about how much you want to eat the food they are eating and it doesn’t matter that I try to make the Hail Mary comfortable for you and change my voice to talk to you and make xenonite suit so I can do outside hull tasks so you don’t have to do them all, because I can’t make more food for you! Don’t know what else I can do!”
“You can’t!” I said. “And I didn’t ask you to do any of that! You can’t fix what’s actually wrong!”
“I know!” Rocky hissed steam out of his vents, then said, in a tone so measured it was almost insulting, “Rocky can’t fix what is actually wrong. So I try to fix what I can. But Grace needs to tell me what can be fixed or else I have to guess and then make Grace angry that I try.” His words were choppy again, like he needed to use small words to get the point across.
The screen still showed happy humans being nice to each other on a sunny, happy Earth that probably didn’t even exist anymore and it was making me feel awful about everything. “I want to go home,” I said. “That’s what’s wrong. And that can’t be fixed, because I’m gonna be eating taumoeba soup alone on Erid forever and that was the stupid choice I made. I wish I’d never turned around.”
Rocky was quiet at that.
I should have apologized. I should have said I didn’t mean it. The problem was, right then, I did.
Stratt once told me I was a good man. She’s not wrong often but I think she was wrong on that one.
Then Rocky rolled forward and bumped his xenonite ball against me roughly. “Grace is being stupid. Grace sleep now.”
“I’m not tired.” I tried to shove his ball. Obviously it didn’t move because he weighs about three hundred pounds.
“Don’t care. Humans can choose when sleep. So Grace sleep now. Statement.”
It wasn’t like I had anything better to do. Neither could I come up with anything to say to Rocky that would make what I’d just said not horrible.
So I acquiesced, and I went to sleep.
Or I tried to. I mean, I brushed my teeth (I was running low on toothpaste, too) and flopped into my bed and pressed my face into the pillow and pointedly kept it there.
When Rocky was confident I was actually in bed, I heard his xenonite ball roll away. I looked up from sulking into my pillow in shock, sure that he hadn’t actually just left while I was sleeping. But he had.
It hurt way, way more than I expected.
“Screw you,” I mumbled into the pillow. And then felt bad.
Down the hall in Rocky’s half of the ship, I heard the muffled rush of escaping air I’d only heard a few times before when Rocky was very, very worked up, a sound that meant he was in the other room screaming in frustration.
Me too, buddy. We both got to be mad and miserable, I guess.
Unfortunately Rocky was right that lying down in my bed was making me feel… if not better, at least more tired. It was like the anger that had been pent up inside me that had been giving me energy was gone and now I was just tired. Tired, and stupid.
Was this it? Was this really my whole future? I couldn’t even avoid pissing off and getting pissed off by Rocky, who was easily the best friend I had ever had. He was still so sure that all of Erid was going to love me and dedicate round-the-clock care to making sure I could thrive in his crushing boiling ammonia world, when I wasn’t even convinced he would still love me by the time we got there. Definitely not if I was going to act like this.
It wasn’t his fault that he was going home and I wasn’t. It wasn’t his fault we both messed up the taumoeba breeding because neither of us could have predicted that taumoeba would adapt to escape xenonite, any more than it was anyone’s fault that his crew had all died and Yao and Ilyukhina had also both died and the two of us were the ones who survived due to pure stupid luck.
It wasn’t anybody’s fault, which made it feel really bad to get mad about.
I sniffled into the pillow. It brought back memories of grad school, getting comments back from my committee on my dissertation chapters; my advisor was helpful but thorough with her commentary, rewriting so many sentences and correcting my commas and n-dashes every single time, and I had a pure Reviewer 2 type who would add comments like “What? That’s not correct” and “this sentence is incoherent” and “this isn’t the original source for this theory, you should be citing Whoever, Date.” And it would make me feel like crap every time and I’d punch my bed and sulk and feel sorry for myself, and then take a nap because I didn’t want to deal with that right then. And when I woke up from my nap I would be ready to face the files again and make the changes.
It had never occurred to me before how lucky humans are that if we don’t feel like dealing with our feelings right away we can instead cry and take a nap. Eridians can’t do either thing.
I was doing a lot of napping on the Hail Mary on my way back to Erid, ostensibly to conserve my energy and stretch out my food supply, but mostly because there were long stretches where I had nothing else to do.
When Rocky was alone on the Blip-A, before I’d come to Tau Ceti and after the taumoeba had escaped and eaten all his astrophage fuel, he couldn’t even do that.
Yeah, telling him I wished I had left him like that was a really shitty thing to do.
This was what I was supposed to be going to sleep to avoid thinking about.
Rocky still wasn’t back. I fell asleep feeling bad and also very alone.
—
He was back when I woke up.
“Oh,” I said. “How long have you been there?”
“Hours. Grace feeling less stupid, question?”
“A little.” I was actually still feeling extremely stupid, but close enough.
Rocky fidgeted with something or other in his hands. I didn’t know if it was an actual project or just something to fidget with. He hummed a little, a low sound that didn’t mean anything. I guess he didn’t know what to say any more than I did.
“Uh,” I said.
Smooth.
A few years ago, I’d had to sit a student down and have a talk about why it was inappropriate to tell your classmate you hope they die. What would I say to me if I were a seventh grader having a fight with my friend?
“I’m sorry I said that to you,” I said, finally. I couldn’t truthfully say I hadn’t meant it, because yesterday, when I said it, I did. But I felt gross at yesterday-me for feeling that way. And I had to say something. “I don’t mean it. I don’t actually wish I’d made a different choice. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t leave you like that.”
“I know.”
“I’m not actually mad at you,” I went on, because Rocky was being unnervingly quiet. “I’m trying to be hopeful about going to Erid. I really am. I’m just…” I didn’t even know what I was trying to say.
“Erid is not your home,” Rocky said.
“Yeah.”
He kept fidgeting. Then he said, “When taumoeba escaped, I thought I would die on the ship and never go home, never save Erid. Then Grace came back. Gave up everything for me. But now there is nothing I can do for you even close to what you did for me. Never will be, no matter how much I try. Because I am going home and Grace is not and there is no way to change that.”
“I wouldn’t have even had the possibility of going back to Earth in the first place if it wasn’t for you,” I said. “So it’s a net zero change, really.” I wasn’t sure I really believed that. But it was better to believe than anything else.
Rocky made a sound that indicated he didn’t really believe I believed that either.
“If it helps,” I said, “there’s no way I would have ever been happy on Earth again if I’d left you stranded in space.” That was true. When I’d been facing down the choice to keep going to Earth or turn around for Rocky, even when I’d been trying to find a way to convince myself that Rocky would be okay and I could go home… I knew deep down that I wouldn’t know how to live with myself after, if I’d just left him there to die.
Rocky slumped a little. “Going home, or tired and hungry and restless always. No way for Grace to be happy then.”
I knew he’d been stressing about this, but I don’t think I’d realized how much he’d been stressing about this. I mean, I’d been stressing about this, but that was because I was going to have to live it. “I’m trying,” I said. “I really am.”
“I’m trying too.”
“I know.”
I think sleeping did make me feel better, at least a little bit. I didn’t feel as hopeless about the future as I did last night. “And hey,” I said, “If I had to be trapped in a tiny spaceship for four years on the way to a brand new planet with anybody, I’m glad it’s you.”
That earned a little laugh equivalent from Rocky. “We save stars together. We can do anything.”
“Yeah. I believe in us.” I thought about it, and then added, “Although, just so you know, when I’m feeling sad about missing Earth and hungry for Earth food, that’s not a good time to make fun of human eating habits, okay?”
“Understand. Sorry sorry sorry. Didn’t mean to hurt. Wouldn’t hurt on purpose.” Rocky clicked his fingers against the bottom of the ball. Then he said, sounding cautious, “Also. When human movie has eating scene that will be long or gross, please tell Rocky that will happen. So many movies have them, and is uncomfortable when not expecting. Regent of the Southern Kingdom was disturbing.”
“Regent—oh. Yeah. The Denethor scene is supposed to be disturbing, even to humans.”
“It worked.”
“I can do that, yeah. Springing Bake-Off on you last night was mean.”
“It was. I was trying to help and felt like you were punishing me.”
“I kind of was. I was being a jerk.” I sighed. “I think… I don’t know. It feels stupid to say it isn’t fair. But. I think that’s it, isn’t it? It isn’t fair.”
“Isn’t fair,” Rocky agreed.
“And if it can’t be fixed, it just… feels better to know that you know it isn’t fair and can’t be fixed, you know? Rather than try to fix it.”
“Not really.”
“Well. It does.”
“Will try. Well. Try to not fix unless you want.”
“Thanks.”
I sat cross-legged on my bed in silence for a couple seconds. Then, because sitting in silence has never been a thing I’ve been particularly good at, I asked, “Are you mad at me?”
“Not mad now,” Rocky said. “Frustrated. But mostly frustrated because it isn’t fair and can’t be fixed and don’t know what to do.”
“Yeah. Same here.”
I didn’t really know what to go from there, because I was already exhausted from trying to talk about my feelings and my next thought was “I’m hungry” which probably would not be a welcome topic of conversation right now. (It was coma slurry time. Wonderful.)
“Grace wants to see body suit progress, question?” Rocky asked.
“Oh,” I said. “Sure, yeah.” Rocky showing me the stuff he was making was much more comfortable territory.
Rocky rolled away. I stretched and got up. I could sulk about it, but this was going to be my future, and I didn’t want to spend it resenting Rocky.
I had changed into new clothes and was brushing my teeth by the time Rocky came back. He stepped stiffly and awkwardly, the form-fitting xenonite suit still clearly bulkier than was comfortable.
I spit into the sink, which earned a disapproving chitter from Rocky, then rinsed my mouth out and jogged back over to the “bedroom” area. “Hey! That’s impressive.”
“Still needs work on usage flexibility and use-length,” Rocky said. “More flexibility means less air inside, which means harder temperature regulation, so can only wear it safely for 36 minutes. Not good for spacewalks yet.”
“It’s cool that you can walk around in it, though,” I said. “And you can operate the controls on my side of Mary. That’s gotta be useful.” I was selfishly glad it wasn’t great yet, though, so Rocky would still need me to do some things on my side of the ship. I was trying to be optimistic but I wasn’t ready to be wholly useless yet.
“Can also do this,” Rocky said. “Get down.”
“What?”
“Get down. On floor.”
“Um, okay,” I said, and sat down on the floor in front of Rocky.
Rocky took a minute shuffling back and forth next to me in the awkward suit. Then, once satisfied, he braced three of his legs and reached out the other two to wrap around me.
“What—oh!”
“Can give Grace hug like this.”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly blinking back tears. “Oh. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, you can.”
“Is this good?”
I shifted position so I could hug him back. The xenonite was gently warm. “Yeah. It is.”
“Sorry upset Grace.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m the one who was an ass.”
“Don’t know word.”
“It’s an English swearword. It means jerk, except ruder. It refers to the human backside.”
Rocky yipped in delight. It’s not like he hasn’t picked up words from movies, but I don’t usually define them.
“Okay to tease about leaking?” Rocky asked.
I sniffed. “Yeah. That’s fine.”
“Grace is leaking all over fancy new suit.”
“You’re bringing me home with you, buddy, you have to get used to it.”
“Think I will,” Rocky said. I really, really hoped so. Even with the stiffness of the suit, it still felt completely different from hugging the hamster ball.
“Feeling hug over yet?”
“Nope.”
Rocky made a fond-exasperated noise but let the hug keep going. After a few moments, he said, “I want Grace to be happy on Erid.”
Thinking about the first time Grace & Rocky inevitably get into a big argument on the journey to Erid. Because, like, they are obviously inseparable queerplatonic besties, but Grace is slowly getting more and more irritable as he, you know, dies of starvation, and Rocky started this trip with decades worth of survivor's guilt and PTSD and is now adding a hefty dose of caretaker fatigue on top of that.
It probably starts as a misunderstanding--they still don't even perfectly speak each others' languages, and there's plenty of room for cultural differences to get in the way, too. They're both on-edge and living in extremely close quarters and for whatever reason it explodes.
And neither of them know what to do with that.
Rocky ends up feeling hurt and guilty all at the same time, frustrated with Grace but also with himself, because he knows his friend is going through a hard time, it's just also terrible to have to watch and he doesn't know how to fix that. Grace probably finds a corner to cry in, convinced he's doomed himself by making Rocky angry because how is he going to convince everyone else on Erid to care about saving his life if he can't even stay on good terms with his friend?
Eventually they get over it. They talk about what happened and get to a less shaky place. It's still a scary couple of hours for both of them, and they know it could happen again. But they still care about each other so, so much, and that makes it worth it.
So maybe I haven't been able to stop turning this over in my head and wrote this today instead of my job applications. 4400 words, be warned :')
---
Since being sent to space, I’ve done a lot of human firsts: first human interstellar traveler, first human to visit an exoplanet, first human contact with an intelligent alien species, first human to eat a different alien species (unless Dmitri and Ilyukhina were serious about doing astrophage shots. I don’t think they were. But they might have been).
I think I might also be the first human to tell my best friend that I wished he and his whole species were dead because I can’t have cake anymore.
I’m a lot less proud of that one.
I think I’m a bad friend.
It’s embarrassing to be upset about little things, because it makes you feel stupid, and feeling stupid makes you feel more upset, and feeling upset about that makes you feel more stupid, in a spiral of feeling bad about everything. Being upset that I was going to die in space? That was normal. Anyone would be upset about that. But about two years into the journey to Erid I realized I had eaten the last of the freeze-dried meals with the chocolate cake yesterday and now I was never going to have chocolate or cake ever again, and I hadn’t even appreciated it.
I stood at the food storage compartments, staring stupidly at them, trying not to either cry or throw something. I was in the third week of my new meal regimen: coma slurry for breakfast, taumoeba slime for lunch, and then real food for dinner, to end on a high note. Intercutting real food with taumoeba was my idea, and I was mad at myself for doing it. I had enough real food to last until Erid, but it was dwindling scarily fast. Rocky was insistent that Eridian scientists would drop everything and figure out how to make food that would keep me alive as their first priority, but… well, I’d come from an Earth that was having the same problems. I didn’t think they’d want to drop everything they were doing to save their own planet to invent a whole new technological infrastructure to keep one alien alive. So I wanted to make sure what I had would stretch out long enough for them to figure out something I could eat that wouldn’t kill me. But what that meant was slime for breakfast and slime for lunch, every day, and the lunch slime was filling but it wasn’t energizing. By dinner time I was always cranky. And this was going to be how every day was going to go for at least the next two years and probably the next rest of my life. And all I wanted was something with chocolate in it and there wasn’t any and never would be again.
I slumped down on the floor.
“Grace?” Rocky called from the other room.
“Just deciding on dinner,” I said.
“From the floor, question?”
“Yeah.”
Ilyukhina had wanted chocolate cake.
The memories still keep filtering up, though by now they feel more like remembering things normally that I just hadn’t been thinking about before. Ilyukhina’s 39th birthday was a few months before launch, and she was making the most of it.
“Cake, champagne, and zakuski should have eggplant, I like the eggplant,” she said, counting off on her fingers the things she wanted for her big birthday bash. Stratt listened with the kind of patience she rarely had time for anymore, but Ilyukhina was good at making you want to listen to her. “Smoked salmon on rye bread. Music, dancing. Flowers. Everyone brings me a little card that says nice things about how much you all love me and how much you all will miss me. Also I want bouncy castle from American movies.”
That actually earned a brief but real smile from Stratt. “We are not importing a… bouncy castle… onto the ship.”
“Will be my last birthday party ever,” Ilyukhina said. “And I have never seen a bouncy castle in real life.”
Stratt held firm on nixing the bouncy castle, but Ilyukhina did get her party with music, dancing, lots of champagne and vodka, eggplant, smoked salmon, and everybody on the ship making toasts about how great she was. There was also a chocolate cake.
My last birthday ever was a month later and was mostly DuBois and Shapiro ambushing me as I left the lab with leftover champagne from Ilyukhina’s party and cookies stolen from the mess hall. If I’d known it would be my last birthday party ever, maybe I would have tried to do something more special. There wasn’t even cake.
Rocky rolled up in his xenonite ball. He was working on a more articulated suit, but hadn’t come up with a design that worked well yet. The suit would help him interact with me and the oxygenated side of the Hail Mary better, and I was torn between feeling like it was really sweet that he would put in all that effort for something that he didn’t really need to do in order to make things easier on me and feeling weird that soon he wouldn’t even need me for the one thing I could do that he couldn’t. But for now he was still in the ball and he still needed me to interact with most things on my side of the barrier.
He nudged me with the ball. “Something is wrong with the food, question?”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “It’s just that I’m out of the one that I wanted.”
“Other ones are not good, question?”
“You don’t taste flavors, or, I don’t know, maybe you do, but sometimes humans want specific things,” I said. Rocky still didn’t love talking about eating, so I wasn’t entirely positive if Eridians had any equivalent to sense of taste or not, but I’d definitely gotten that there was a lot less variety of things Eridians ate than humans did. “And right now the thing I want is chocolate cake.”
“Don’t know that word.”
“It’s a type of food. It’s a dessert. We eat it at parties. It tastes really good and… I mean, it’s really meant for sharing. It’s kind of sad to eat cake alone.”
Rocky made a sound that was kind of like a laugh and kind of like a disbelieving snort. “Human social eating. Strange strange strange. Humans are weird perverts.”
It wasn’t anything new, it was a running joke, but it was not what I wanted to hear right then. “I can’t help it if eating food together is the basic unit of human socializing, okay? Eridians are the weird perverts for getting weird about it! It’s important to me even if you think it’s stupid! I’m allowed to miss it!”
I didn’t mean to snap that forcefully, but I just wasn’t in the mood to be patient. Rocky was quiet, then when he responded, his tone was clipped. “I know. All you want to talk about is food anymore. I sit with Grace while eat because it makes you sad not to. You think I don’t know this.”
“All I want to talk about is food anymore because I’m afraid of starving, Rock. Even Eridians have to worry about that!”
“I know!” The whistle in his tone was frustrated. He made a noise kind of like “ugh” then said, “Was trying to make joke. Was not trying to insult.”
I had the presence of mind not to say “well, you did,” but what I did say was more like, “Mmh.” I got up and rifled through the food packets again. I paused over the babaganoush. That was eggplant, right? We’d has something like that at Ilyukhina’s party, back when I was on Earth and worrying about food was something abstract for me. Something I knew was a real problem in the world, but not one I’d ever faced.
Maybe even if I was still on Earth, I’d be worrying about having enough food. But at least everyone else would be, too, and they’d be willing to commiserate.
That wasn’t fair. I knew Rocky was worried about me. He spent a lot of time fretting over my health and my safety and if I was sleeping enough and if I had enough food and if I was feeling restless or bored and he freaked out a lot the first time I threw up the taumoeba slime because he was afraid his suggestion had killed me. I had to reassure him that I was fine and I wasn’t dying even as I had no idea if that was true or not.
“My turn to choose the movie tonight,” I said, as I mixed water into the babaganoush to rehydrate it. “The Great British Bake-Off.”
“Don’t know two of those words,” said Rocky.
“It’s relaxing. Humans like watching it because it’s calming. And I still miss cake.”
It was not relaxing or calming to Rocky. I could tell he was on edge the whole time. “Grace didn’t say it was food show,” he said accusingly.
“Like I said. Eating food together is the basic unit of human socializing.”
Rocky bunched up his arms around his carapace in a way I could tell was an expression of discomfort, and as much as it made me feel like a total jerk, it was also kind of satisfying. I was feeling like crap, watching this show while eating rehydrated chemical-infused babaganoush was making me feel like crap, and maybe I had decided to do that because I wanted Rocky to join me in feeling like crap. Also, babaganoush is a slime, which I hadn’t consciously remembered until I chose it. Three square meals of slime today. It didn’t even really leave me feeling full, and after I finished it, I couldn’t just heat up another one, because I had a ration schedule. I could eat more taumoeba, but eating taumoeba while watching polite and friendly British bakers in their cute sunny kitchens and green grassy lawns make cake I couldn’t eat would probably have pushed me over the edge.
“Grace feeling relaxed and calm now, question?” Rocky asked.
“I’m still hungry,” I grumbled. It wasn’t Rocky’s fault that he had 220 years’ worth of food and I had three, but it was hard to believe that when my stomach was grumbling and I had only eaten slime all day.
“Can eat taumoeba—”
“I don’t want taumoeba!” I was acting like a child and I didn’t care. I think I was also crying. “I want to go home.”
Rocky rolled his ball closer to me. “What can I do that would make Grace feel more like home?”
“You can’t,” I said. “That’s the problem. You can’t. The Hail Mary isn’t home and neither of us know what’s going to happen on Erid, if I’ll just die or what—”
“Erid will be Grace’s home! Grace won’t die!”
“It won’t be, and you don’t know that!” And now I was yelling, which Rocky didn’t deserve, but—“Nobody there knows me, nobody there will know or care what humans do, even you—you don’t really get it, and nobody ever will again and I’m going to feel like this forever—”
“I have been TRYING!” Rocky’s pitch shot up almost past the point I could hear him, and he had to bristle and compose himself to drop his voice back into the range my weak stupid human ears could pick up. “Trying everything that I can to make you comfortable and tolerate your stupid food rules because everything is about food always and you get sad when you eat alone and get sad when you eat taumoeba and get sad when you eat coma slurry and I watch your human movies where everybody is eating together all the time and you talk about how much you want to eat the food they are eating and it doesn’t matter that I try to make the Hail Mary comfortable for you and change my voice to talk to you and make xenonite suit so I can do outside hull tasks so you don’t have to do them all, because I can’t make more food for you! Don’t know what else I can do!”
“You can’t!” I said. “And I didn’t ask you to do any of that! You can’t fix what’s actually wrong!”
“I know!” Rocky hissed steam out of his vents, then said, in a tone so measured it was almost insulting, “Rocky can’t fix what is actually wrong. So I try to fix what I can. But Grace needs to tell me what can be fixed or else I have to guess and then make Grace angry that I try.” His words were choppy again, like he needed to use small words to get the point across.
The screen still showed happy humans being nice to each other on a sunny, happy Earth that probably didn’t even exist anymore and it was making me feel awful about everything. “I want to go home,” I said. “That’s what’s wrong. And that can’t be fixed, because I’m gonna be eating taumoeba soup alone on Erid forever and that was the stupid choice I made. I wish I’d never turned around.”
Rocky was quiet at that.
I should have apologized. I should have said I didn’t mean it. The problem was, right then, I did.
Stratt once told me I was a good man. She’s not wrong often but I think she was wrong on that one.
Then Rocky rolled forward and bumped his xenonite ball against me roughly. “Grace is being stupid. Grace sleep now.”
“I’m not tired.” I tried to shove his ball. Obviously it didn’t move because he weighs about three hundred pounds.
“Don’t care. Humans can choose when sleep. So Grace sleep now. Statement.”
It wasn’t like I had anything better to do. Neither could I come up with anything to say to Rocky that would make what I’d just said not horrible.
So I acquiesced, and I went to sleep.
Or I tried to. I mean, I brushed my teeth (I was running low on toothpaste, too) and flopped into my bed and pressed my face into the pillow and pointedly kept it there.
When Rocky was confident I was actually in bed, I heard his xenonite ball roll away. I looked up from sulking into my pillow in shock, sure that he hadn’t actually just left while I was sleeping. But he had.
It hurt way, way more than I expected.
“Screw you,” I mumbled into the pillow. And then felt bad.
Down the hall in Rocky’s half of the ship, I heard the muffled rush of escaping air I’d only heard a few times before when Rocky was very, very worked up, a sound that meant he was in the other room screaming in frustration.
Me too, buddy. We both got to be mad and miserable, I guess.
Unfortunately Rocky was right that lying down in my bed was making me feel… if not better, at least more tired. It was like the anger that had been pent up inside me that had been giving me energy was gone and now I was just tired. Tired, and stupid.
Was this it? Was this really my whole future? I couldn’t even avoid pissing off and getting pissed off by Rocky, who was easily the best friend I had ever had. He was still so sure that all of Erid was going to love me and dedicate round-the-clock care to making sure I could thrive in his crushing boiling ammonia world, when I wasn’t even convinced he would still love me by the time we got there. Definitely not if I was going to act like this.
It wasn’t his fault that he was going home and I wasn’t. It wasn’t his fault we both messed up the taumoeba breeding because neither of us could have predicted that taumoeba would adapt to escape xenonite, any more than it was anyone’s fault that his crew had all died and Yao and Ilyukhina had also both died and the two of us were the ones who survived due to pure stupid luck.
It wasn’t anybody’s fault, which made it feel really bad to get mad about.
I sniffled into the pillow. It brought back memories of grad school, getting comments back from my committee on my dissertation chapters; my advisor was helpful but thorough with her commentary, rewriting so many sentences and correcting my commas and n-dashes every single time, and I had a pure Reviewer 2 type who would add comments like “What? That’s not correct” and “this sentence is incoherent” and “this isn’t the original source for this theory, you should be citing Whoever, Date.” And it would make me feel like crap every time and I’d punch my bed and sulk and feel sorry for myself, and then take a nap because I didn’t want to deal with that right then. And when I woke up from my nap I would be ready to face the files again and make the changes.
It had never occurred to me before how lucky humans are that if we don’t feel like dealing with our feelings right away we can instead cry and take a nap. Eridians can’t do either thing.
I was doing a lot of napping on the Hail Mary on my way back to Erid, ostensibly to conserve my energy and stretch out my food supply, but mostly because there were long stretches where I had nothing else to do.
When Rocky was alone on the Blip-A, before I’d come to Tau Ceti and after the taumoeba had escaped and eaten all his astrophage fuel, he couldn’t even do that.
Yeah, telling him I wished I had left him like that was a really shitty thing to do.
This was what I was supposed to be going to sleep to avoid thinking about.
Rocky still wasn’t back. I fell asleep feeling bad and also very alone.
—
He was back when I woke up.
“Oh,” I said. “How long have you been there?”
“Hours. Grace feeling less stupid, question?”
“A little.” I was actually still feeling extremely stupid, but close enough.
Rocky fidgeted with something or other in his hands. I didn’t know if it was an actual project or just something to fidget with. He hummed a little, a low sound that didn’t mean anything. I guess he didn’t know what to say any more than I did.
“Uh,” I said.
Smooth.
A few years ago, I’d had to sit a student down and have a talk about why it was inappropriate to tell your classmate you hope they die. What would I say to me if I were a seventh grader having a fight with my friend?
“I’m sorry I said that to you,” I said, finally. I couldn’t truthfully say I hadn’t meant it, because yesterday, when I said it, I did. But I felt gross at yesterday-me for feeling that way. And I had to say something. “I don’t mean it. I don’t actually wish I’d made a different choice. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t leave you like that.”
“I know.”
“I’m not actually mad at you,” I went on, because Rocky was being unnervingly quiet. “I’m trying to be hopeful about going to Erid. I really am. I’m just…” I didn’t even know what I was trying to say.
“Erid is not your home,” Rocky said.
“Yeah.”
He kept fidgeting. Then he said, “When taumoeba escaped, I thought I would die on the ship and never go home, never save Erid. Then Grace came back. Gave up everything for me. But now there is nothing I can do for you even close to what you did for me. Never will be, no matter how much I try. Because I am going home and Grace is not and there is no way to change that.”
“I wouldn’t have even had the possibility of going back to Earth in the first place if it wasn’t for you,” I said. “So it’s a net zero change, really.” I wasn’t sure I really believed that. But it was better to believe than anything else.
Rocky made a sound that indicated he didn’t really believe I believed that either.
“If it helps,” I said, “there’s no way I would have ever been happy on Earth again if I’d left you stranded in space.” That was true. When I’d been facing down the choice to keep going to Earth or turn around for Rocky, even when I’d been trying to find a way to convince myself that Rocky would be okay and I could go home… I knew deep down that I wouldn’t know how to live with myself after, if I’d just left him there to die.
Rocky slumped a little. “Going home, or tired and hungry and restless always. No way for Grace to be happy then.”
I knew he’d been stressing about this, but I don’t think I’d realized how much he’d been stressing about this. I mean, I’d been stressing about this, but that was because I was going to have to live it. “I’m trying,” I said. “I really am.”
“I’m trying too.”
“I know.”
I think sleeping did make me feel better, at least a little bit. I didn’t feel as hopeless about the future as I did last night. “And hey,” I said, “If I had to be trapped in a tiny spaceship for four years on the way to a brand new planet with anybody, I’m glad it’s you.”
That earned a little laugh equivalent from Rocky. “We save stars together. We can do anything.”
“Yeah. I believe in us.” I thought about it, and then added, “Although, just so you know, when I’m feeling sad about missing Earth and hungry for Earth food, that’s not a good time to make fun of human eating habits, okay?”
“Understand. Sorry sorry sorry. Didn’t mean to hurt. Wouldn’t hurt on purpose.” Rocky clicked his fingers against the bottom of the ball. Then he said, sounding cautious, “Also. When human movie has eating scene that will be long or gross, please tell Rocky that will happen. So many movies have them, and is uncomfortable when not expecting. Regent of the Southern Kingdom was disturbing.”
“Regent—oh. Yeah. The Denethor scene is supposed to be disturbing, even to humans.”
“It worked.”
“I can do that, yeah. Springing Bake-Off on you last night was mean.”
“It was. I was trying to help and felt like you were punishing me.”
“I kind of was. I was being a jerk.” I sighed. “I think… I don’t know. It feels stupid to say it isn’t fair. But. I think that’s it, isn’t it? It isn’t fair.”
“Isn’t fair,” Rocky agreed.
“And if it can’t be fixed, it just… feels better to know that you know it isn’t fair and can’t be fixed, you know? Rather than try to fix it.”
“Not really.”
“Well. It does.”
“Will try. Well. Try to not fix unless you want.”
“Thanks.”
I sat cross-legged on my bed in silence for a couple seconds. Then, because sitting in silence has never been a thing I’ve been particularly good at, I asked, “Are you mad at me?”
“Not mad now,” Rocky said. “Frustrated. But mostly frustrated because it isn’t fair and can’t be fixed and don’t know what to do.”
“Yeah. Same here.”
I didn’t really know what to go from there, because I was already exhausted from trying to talk about my feelings and my next thought was “I’m hungry” which probably would not be a welcome topic of conversation right now. (It was coma slurry time. Wonderful.)
“Grace wants to see body suit progress, question?” Rocky asked.
“Oh,” I said. “Sure, yeah.” Rocky showing me the stuff he was making was much more comfortable territory.
Rocky rolled away. I stretched and got up. I could sulk about it, but this was going to be my future, and I didn’t want to spend it resenting Rocky.
I had changed into new clothes and was brushing my teeth by the time Rocky came back. He stepped stiffly and awkwardly, the form-fitting xenonite suit still clearly bulkier than was comfortable.
I spit into the sink, which earned a disapproving chitter from Rocky, then rinsed my mouth out and jogged back over to the “bedroom” area. “Hey! That’s impressive.”
“Still needs work on usage flexibility and use-length,” Rocky said. “More flexibility means less air inside, which means harder temperature regulation, so can only wear it safely for 36 minutes. Not good for spacewalks yet.”
“It’s cool that you can walk around in it, though,” I said. “And you can operate the controls on my side of Mary. That’s gotta be useful.” I was selfishly glad it wasn’t great yet, though, so Rocky would still need me to do some things on my side of the ship. I was trying to be optimistic but I wasn’t ready to be wholly useless yet.
“Can also do this,” Rocky said. “Get down.”
“What?”
“Get down. On floor.”
“Um, okay,” I said, and sat down on the floor in front of Rocky.
Rocky took a minute shuffling back and forth next to me in the awkward suit. Then, once satisfied, he braced three of his legs and reached out the other two to wrap around me.
“What—oh!”
“Can give Grace hug like this.”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly blinking back tears. “Oh. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, you can.”
“Is this good?”
I shifted position so I could hug him back. The xenonite was gently warm. “Yeah. It is.”
“Sorry upset Grace.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m the one who was an ass.”
“Don’t know word.”
“It’s an English swearword. It means jerk, except ruder. It refers to the human backside.”
Rocky yipped in delight. It’s not like he hasn’t picked up words from movies, but I don’t usually define them.
“Okay to tease about leaking?” Rocky asked.
I sniffed. “Yeah. That’s fine.”
“Grace is leaking all over fancy new suit.”
“You’re bringing me home with you, buddy, you have to get used to it.”
“Think I will,” Rocky said. I really, really hoped so. Even with the stiffness of the suit, it still felt completely different from hugging the hamster ball.
“Feeling hug over yet?”
“Nope.”
Rocky made a fond-exasperated noise but let the hug keep going. After a few moments, he said, “I want Grace to be happy on Erid.”
“I do too,” I told him. “I’ll try.”
A gentle city ringed with spears @sunlit-skycat - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
