Grace sat still in his chair, his palm pressed firmly over his lips, eyes fixated on the man who had just spawned into his domain. The countless IV lines running through him reminded Grace of when he first awoke on the Hail Mary. It was different this time. It would be different this time. This man would have a crew to wake up to.
Armando is a good nurse. There were still some blood stains on the man, but for the most part, he was clean where it really mattered. He’d be able to wash himself more thoroughly once he was up and moving. Armando had to put the man in a coma, so it could run diagnostics and help him recover smoothly. Who knows how long it’ll take before Grace gets to even know his name?
“What do I even call you in the meantime? Why couldn’t you come with a wallet?” The scientist mumbled out loud. He was already thinking of names for his charge. With no clothes and just a cotton sheet to keep his privacy, it was hard to get a good idea of a personality. The clothes he was wearing as he staggered out of the sub were also less than charismatic.
“You look like a Mmmmnnnnnnooo… No. I got nothing.” He sighed and leaned back in his seat, crossing his legs. Grace squinted, gazing at the patient’s dark long hair. He felt a little jealous.
“What I would give to grow hair like that…” Grace nodded to himself as he looked over the other man’s features. He was actually quite muscular, which probably means that he couldn’t have been trapped for more than a week. Maybe a few days?
“Geez… I guess a lot can happen in a few days.” Grace thought grimly.
There was some kind of gentleness to him now. He looked peaceful. Even with a giant tube down his throat and a huge oxygen mask over his face. At least he didn’t look the way he did when he was awake. So beaten and exhausted and afraid. Grace took a moment to get a better, longer look at his charge. The man had a strange, long, jagged scar that began at his left shoulder and stretched down his entire arm. It looked like tree branches. Grace hadn’t really seen anything like it before, but refrained from touching it. There was a similar scar on his left cheek that began somewhere under his jawline and reached over his eye. Damage to a specific side of the body… Grace wondered if this was a result of the radiation or some kind of electrical accident that could have caused the damage to the submarine in the first place.
Grace’s mind wandered to the vessel again, which he discovered was actually called the SM-13 because it was poorly painted on the side and also covered in blood. To think he nearly missed it! The SM-13 was in horrible condition, damages aside. Exploring it himself had been easy once he suited up in his retired EVA suit, though the spoils of the little tin can were scarce. There had been no name tags, no logs, no journals. Nothing. The interior was nearly entirely bare except for a computer, an uncomfortable and ugly looking chair, a horribly simple navigation system and what Grace discovered was an X-Ray. On one hand, awesome! He found out where all that radiation came from. On the other hand, it was all ruined!
It’s completely possible that much of the physical documents had been lost when the sub was damaged as the holes in it were quite large. At least that’s what Grace told himself. He had to believe whoever welded this guy in the sub wouldn’t just leave him with absolutely no instructions. Then again, that seems just like the type of thing someone who seals a human being inside a giant can with a highly radioactive x-ray would do.
Removing his glasses, Grace ran a hand down his face. This whole thing was an awful mystery that he didn’t know whether or not he wanted the true answers to. He hadn’t been sleeping well since the new arrival. It had been 3 days and each night Grace was constantly in and out of the infirmary to “help” watch over the new guy. Whenever he would try to sleep, he would wake up in a sweat from a nightmare he could never remember. It was probably about the blood. Grace felt like that discovery wasn’t sitting well in his subconscious.
“It’s blood. It’s human blood. Every stupid test I’ve conducted came back the same. How many people does it take to be able to submerge an entire submarine in their blood? Is that even what happened? What if the radiation contaminated the samples? Why did they weld the door?”
Questions fired through Grace’s mind like bullets. The whole who, what, when, where, why and how. Even needing to ask these questions made him uneasy. Out of every detail to mull over, the fact that this man had been trapped inside… That hit a little too close to home. This lone captain had no emergency escape, there didn’t seem to be any effective way to leave and the windows were way to small for him to be able to squeeze through. Clearly, leaving wasn’t part of the design plan. The man had nearly drowned inside. It was familiar in a way that made Grace’s heart ache.
He inhaled deeply and closed his eyes as they welled with tears. The memory of Project Hail Mary was distant. A few years distant now and still hurt to think about. Of course it was painful. Happy as he is on Erid with his new family, friends and students, being sedated and waking up in space with his crewmates… gone…Well, that was tough to say the least.
The man’s vitals came back relatively normal everytime Grace checked them, which was often. The X-ray that the radiation came from was built into the SM-13 and it was connected to an appendage that was no longer attached to where it would have been on the very front of the ship. Grace assumed it was a camera that must have broken off at some point, but why would a submarine need an X-ray like that? More importantly, why wouldn’t the people who made it protect the person operating it? Maybe Rocky was right. Maybe human technology is dumb or maybe these particular humans are just psychopaths. Alternatively, but not likely, what if it was a prototype they desperately needed to use?
Grace briefly considered that Eva would have never done something so careless. Then again, she did use him as a Guinea pig at first… a few times, but once she decided he was worth keeping around, she did everything in her power to make sure he didn’t die! Which was good?
That brought Grace to a crossroads of possible conclusions: Either the people who made it are idiots or they did not consider the operator’s life valuable enough to protect.
“Why would they directly expose you to radiation like that?” Grace asked the sleeping man. The X-ray was obviously an integral part of the vessel, there was only a small window in front of the navigation and another one on the door. Both had been caked in dried blood. It was disgusting, but anyway, that means the ship really was fully submerged at some point. He imagined there wouldn’t exactly be a clear view.
“Okay, let’s do a little digging… X-rays aren’t magic. Yours is obviously much more powerful than the average CT scan, but still not magic. By the way, sir, I’m going to make the bold claim that your x-ray is computed tomography because it’s the first one that came to mind and also, it’s the one that makes the most sense to me… for now.” That’s when Grace stood up, he began to pace back and forth from the foot of the bed to the head with his hands behind his back.
“Okay, stick with me here! I’m trying to figure out how your ship got around and why they made you roommate with a dangerous x-ray. You don’t need to say anything, I’ll figure it out eventually.” Grace rubbed his hands together, smiling at the unconscious man on the bed.
“Yeah! Let’s hear it!” Grace said in a deeper voice, trying to imitate the other man’s voice as he made a talking hand puppet gesture.
“Okay, great! So, blood isn’t exactly see-through. X-rays don’t necessarily “see through” things, though. Objects absorb them, so the more dense an object is, the better it absorbs the X-rays. How could a body of blood be so large and deep that your SM-13 could be fully submerged? Not only that, but also required a radar and seemed to be independently controlled to get around, however… your ability to navigate was fully dependent on what the x-ray could scan in front of it, right? Sooo, the easiest and safest way to get around would’ve been a live feed of your X-ray’s scans of your surroundings?” Grace stopped his pacing for a moment, huffing at this mystery that he’d just thrust upon himself to solve. As silent as his charge remained, Grace continued theorizing.
“But… If an X-ray that powerful really needed to be on at all times, given the lack of protection and no immediate cooling system from what I saw, it would have overheated and you would have probably died some horrible heat related death. No offense, but I didn’t see an AC in there.” Scratching the back of his head, Grace let out a long, deep sigh. That wouldn’t make sense.
“That doesn’t add up… If the people who designed it wanted some kind of success…You were welded inside, after all, which probably means you were probably going to be in there for an extended amount of time. Then why the heck wouldn’t they have given you more protection from the radiation?” His fingers pulled the hair at his temples in frustration. That doesn’t make sense!
Grace threw himself back on his chair, his fingers drumming along the armrest impatiently. The last theory was one Grace didn’t want to come to, but he wasn’t a stupid man, just a stubborn one. It had crossed his mind a long time ago. His charge had been sent on a one way trip to gather as much information as he could before he eventually died. Whoever sent him would probably extract the SM-13 once they stopped receiving any communication… Maybe they would have waited for his oxygen to deplete…or maybe they wouldn’t have extracted it at all.
“I guess I won’t find out until you wake up. Just… please, wake up.” Grace pleaded quietly, sinking further back into the chair.
[Kinda long. I’m sorry. Pls let me know if you liked it, if I need to be less wordy, or.. other writing tips? Idk anything about writing so :) thank you. I apologize for the paragraph spacing. I don’t have a computers. I have my notes app. The way I lost a few sentences and paragraphs after trying to edit this ON tumblr. Rip.]
