Project Hail Mary

An amnesiac scientist discovers his crewmates are mummies

A man wakes in an oval bed to a computer demanding simple math.

An amnesiac scientist discovers his crewmates are mummies

A man wakes in an oval bed to a computer demanding simple math. He can barely speak, can't open his eyes, and is threaded with tubes, IVs, and electrodes. Robot arms tend to him from above. He manages to answer the questions, regains motor control, and discovers he's in a round room with two other beds—each containing a desiccated corpse. The computer asks his name. He doesn't know it. He doesn't know anything about himself: not his profession, his nationality, or why he's here with two dead people and no door—only a ladder leading to a sealed hatch. His body is muscular despite what was clearly a long coma. The robot arms catch him when he falls. Whatever happened here, he survived it. The others did not.

A dropped test tube proves he's not on Earth

He times objects falling from a table with a stopwatch. The math is second nature—he's definitely a scientist. The result is unsettling: fifteen meters per second squared, when Earth's gravity is 9.8. He builds a pendulum to confirm, runs the same test on two different floors, and rules out a centrifuge. No sound, no vibration, no turbulence. He's experiencing genuine gravitational acceleration stronger than anything in the solar system. Earth, the moon, Mars—nowhere matches. He knows these facts automatically, the same way he knows physics equations, but can't recall his own name. His subconscious keeps feeding him fragments: an email about a mysterious infrared line stretching from the sun to Venus. A friend telling him the sun is getting dimmer. Something enormous is wrong, and he is tangled up in it.

Returning fragments reveal alien microbes devouring Earth's star

Memories surface in shards. He recalls Astrophage—his own coinage—a single-celled organism that absorbs solar energy, stores it as mass, and breeds on Venus. He discovered its life cycle: gathering energy from the sun, propelling itself to Venus for carbon dioxide, reproducing, and returning. He named it during a conversation with Eva Stratt, the Dutch administrator given absolute authority by every UN nation to solve the crisis. Stratt conscripted him to examine the first samples, treated him as a guinea pig, and watched him prove that alien life uses water—demolishing his own career's central argument. He remembers his name at last: Ryland Grace. He speaks it to the ship's computer, and a locked hatch clicks open. Three rooms now lie before him: dormitory, laboratory, and a cockpit packed with screens.