there's just something about the tragedy of eva stratt that makes me want to strap myself to the hail mary and launch that thing into tau ceti;
you are eva stratt, and you are earning a history degree. you love humans so much. you study them for years, you read and write and breathe the stories of humans creating art and loving each other and saving each other. you study how humans have survived for so long by refusing to let each other die. you study the stubborn determination of the human spirit despite wars and genocides and famines and disasters.
you are eva stratt, and you land an administrative job at the european space agency. you learned in school about how humanity has been reaching for the stars for as long as they could see them, and you love putting your passion for humanity behind this mission to touch the stars, to maybe find something up there that can explain all the suffering and pain and death, to maybe find a trace of the god you have decided is real, because you know believing he is somewhere up there is better than the alternative.
you are eva stratt, and irina petrova says that the sun is dying. you are horrified, and scared, and you know that humanity will not roll over and die, you just don't know what the vicious fight it will put up on its way out will look like.
you are eva stratt, and the united nations has asked you to save the world. you know they aren't asking. and you know that what they're really telling you that you will become. you know that you couldn't ever say no. you love humanity, you spent years of your life in dark libraries poring over books older than the cities they were kept in, writing papers until obscene hours in the morning, because you love humanity so much. and now you will lose yourself for it. you will gladly lose yourself for it. you get to work.
you are eva stratt, and you studied too hard for far too long to not understand what a glass cliff is, to not understand why you have been chosen. you know that whatever you have to do in order to save humanity will condemn you forever. you know that there are male colleagues of yours who would have been able to get the job done almost as well, but would have been harder to massacre after.
you are eva stratt, and you are forced to make horrible decisions to escape an even more horrible reality. you order a nuclear strike on antarctica, and a part of you cracks along with the ice. you pave over the sahara desert, and you remember an archaeology class you took during your undergraduate studies. you remember that you are destroying the art lovingly painted onto the rocks in the ennedi massif in chad.
you are eva stratt, and you have to send the sweetest woman you've ever met to a starry grave. she greets you with a hug and tells you she's ready to die.
you are eva stratt, and you are the world's whipping boy. you know this, but ryland grace does not, cannot seem to understand it until you say it to his face. it is because he does not understand that you have to keep him at arm's length. because you cannot implicate him. you cannot take away his future, cannot let him rot next to you in a jail cell. you cannot doom him to a life of isolation, you cannot send him to a lonely death.
you are eva stratt, and you have to send ryland grace to a lonely death. he screams that you're murdering him. you hear his screams in your sleep for the rest of your life, and you know they were true.
you are eva stratt, and you spend decades of your life in prison. the immunity was quick to be revoked, and the retribution for saving humanity even quicker to be rained down upon you. you stare at the cinderblock wall in your cell, the collar of your jumpsuit scratching an abrasion into the back of your neck, and you think about how much you hate the ink they marked your skin with. you think about the man who could have been your friend. you hope that he notices that you got his coffee order right. you hope he does what you know he's capable of.
you are eva stratt, and you watch the earth freeze. you watch forests and children and foxes die.
you are eva stratt, and you love humanity. you are eva stratt, and you had to murder your best friend. you are eva stratt, and you will never forgive yourself, because there is nothing to forgive.
you are eva stratt, and when the probes touch down, the world tells you to get back to work and finish saving them. you swap your cell for a boat and your jumpsuit for a sweater your mother knit you. the movement of the ship on the water brings with it memories that you have run through in your head thousands of times. you see phantoms of them in the halls, the brilliant people you killed, the ones that left after everything was done, the ones that died as the world collapsed. you hear olesya's laugh in the boiler room. you wake up one morning and watch the shadow of dmitri's footsteps pass by your door.
you are eva stratt, and ryland grace tells you, tells the world, that he's not coming home. that he's going back for his friend. he tells you goodbye. you get back to work.
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