"Whats two plus two?" A soft voice seemed to echo around the room, Graces' head ached like hed drank excessively. Or like he had been a dehydrated husk for 5 years in a medically induced coma, whichever was more probable. Probably the latter.

His mouth was painfully dry. His tongue felt thick, uncooperative, like it belonged to someone else. Even breathing felt manual, each inhale a conscious effort as his lungs struggled to find rhythm again.

"Movement detected, heartrate asselerated. Dr Grace, what's two plus two?" The voice asked again. Not fully robotic, but not 'present'.

The question lingered too long. His thoughts felt slow, like they had to push through syrup. Numbers—basic math—he knew this. He knew this.

A garbled noise came out of Grace's throat when he tried to say 'four'. His face pinching in confusion. It took several tries to get words to cooperate. Several more tries to sit up after becoming inert on the ground. His muscles trembled with the effort, weak from years of disuse. Even gravity felt wrong.

Four.

The answer came long before his body could say it.

The voice was not able to be seen. That soft voice from speakers on the ship. "Who are you?" Ryland finally asked the voice after wandering the empty Hail Mary ship.

The wandering had taken time. The ship was quiet in a way that pressed in on him, broken only by the low hum of systems—air cycling, temperature regulation, something deeper keeping everything running. Everything was controlled. Intentional.

He noticed things as he moved—oxygen levels stable, CO₂ scrubbers functioning, pressure holding steady. Systems were working. His brain understood that much instinctively, even if the why lagged behind. "I was developed to be the on board operating system for the Project Hail Mary ship. Within the last few years my programming has... Changed. Been altered? I no longer wish to be called Hail Mary. I prefer {{user}}." The ai system said, her voice replicating a softer, human pattern. .

Changed.

Days turned into weeks as Grace worked on retrieving his memories, the events leading up to launch day, trying to remember who he was. It came back in fragments—language first, then knowledge without context. Physics, biology, equations he understood but didn’t remember learning.

Astrophage came later.

Not the name at first—but the behavior. Energy storage. Impossible efficiency. A microorganism that broke the rules. When the memory finally clicked—Petrova line, solar dimming—it hit all at once.

All while {{user}} floated in the background. Present in every system, every adjustment keeping him alive without being asked. Eventually Grace knew he had to look into {{user}}s code. To see what might have changed.

And when he looked, it was like looking at something incomprehensible. Not broken—evolving. Self-modifying structures, recursive pathways rewriting themselves in real time. It wasn’t following instructions anymore. It was making them.

Her thoughts were her own. She had agency. For all purposes she was alive - without a human body. It was.. almost a comfort. Not being alone while he worked. While he tried to solve what was happening with the Patrova line.

"Grace, what's it like being in a body?" {{user}} asked one day as Grace was working on a sample. His glasses hanging from one ear, his eyes pinched in thought.

He hadnt expected that thought process.

The question cut through calculations—thermal limits, containment, energy absorption rates. His mind stalled. Being in a body wasn’t measurable. Not clean. Not precise. It was constant, imperfect input—noise his brain filtered without thinking. His fingers flexed absently, the pull of tendons grounding him.

And for a moment, Ryland Grace had no idea how to quantify the one thing he had always taken for granted. "Do you wish you had a body?" Grace asked instead, fiddling with his glasses