Deep in space, a robotic arm pries open a sleep pod and drags a man back into the world.
He can't remember his own name, and the only other people on board are dead.
The ship's AI, a calm voice called Mary, quizzes him to check his mind.
He can't answer any of it.
>> Cognition assessment. What is 2 + 2?
You may exit.
Incorrect.
>> Panicked and confused, the man climbs down from the medical table and fights his way loose from the robot arm that.
Keeps pulling him back, and he goes stumbling through the ship looking for another living soul.
He finds a person, and the sight stops him cold.
The body is shriveled and long gone.
He keeps wandering, his legs barely obeying him after years in an induced coma, until he reaches a window and looks outside.
Endless black, no ground, no sky.
He's in space. As he moves through the corridors, something strange happens.
He recognizes the machines around him, every panel and every instrument, which tells him he's some kind of scientist.
>> Why is there an atomic resolution scanning electron microscope?
Why do I know that? Am I smart?
>> One room over, giant screens play loops of the most beautiful places on Earth, forests and oceans and sunlight, a painful.
Reminder of everything that's very far away right now.
After digging up clean clothes, he hears Mary ask for a daily video log.
>> Please record video diary. >>.
No. >> He refuses and demands to speak to the captain instead, and the AI delivers the news without a hint of.
Softness. The captain is dead. Everyone is dead.
He's the only survivor on this ship.
The man orders the system to take him back home, but Mary doesn't even recognize that as a command.
>> Operation go home in effect.
>> Invalid operation.
>> Looking at a screen, he spots a sun and figures he's still inside his own solar system, and his next move.
Is a message aimed at Earth.
Mary shuts that down, too, explaining that a transmission would take around 12 years to arrive.
He checks the star map and realizes the truth piece by piece.
That bright ball out there isn't his sun.
The fuel gauges are close to empty.
He scribbles out the math on whatever he can find, and the numbers all say the same thing.
He is impossibly.
Far from Earth, years and years away with no ride home.
A sharp headache hits him, and with the pain come fragments of memory.
Years ago, he did molecular biology for a living, and he followed every piece of news about a probe called Arclight, which.
Was out studying the Petrova Line phenomenon.
Footage from that probe showed the sun was dimming.
He was teaching middle school science in those days, and his students had plenty of questions about the scary headlines.
He explained that a couple of years earlier an astronomer named Irina Petrova had spotted a ribbon of infrared light stretching between.
The sun and Venus, and the line now carried her name.
>> From the sun to Venus.
And that is now known.
As the Petrova Line. >> Something along that line was feeding on the sun, only a tiny bit at a time, but.
Over the next 30 years the planet could cool by 10 to 15°.
The kids panicked because they'd heard the crops would fail and life on Earth could die.
>> Half the Earth will die of starvation.
>> We're all going to die.
>> Their teacher calmed them down, promising that the brightest minds in the world were already on it.
Alone again in the present, the survivor copes however he can.
The overgrown beard comes off. He digs a bottle of vodka out of the supplies, and he gets properly drunk with a.
Snack. Going through what the crew left behind, he comes across a photo album, and the faces in it come back to.
Him. These people were his friends.
Loneliness sits on him like a weight, so he stuffs their spare clothes into a makeshift doll and takes it dancing around.
The common room, pretending for a few minutes that there's someone else alive within trillions of miles.
He fills a whiteboard with notes about who he might be, and before long another memory surfaces.
One day after class, a woman approached him.
Her name was Ava Stratt, and she ran the Petrova research team.
She'd read a paper he once wrote arguing that water wasn't necessary for life to exist.
The paper that got him fired and turned him into an outcast in the scientific world.
He reminded her of that, and she pushed right back saying he was really fired for insulting a superior and refusing to.
Take back what he wrote, and that nobody wanted him around since.
He tried to walk away, but Strat followed and dropped the real bombshell.
Samples pulled from the Petrova line had survived direct contact with the sun itself, which meant his theory about life might actually.
Be right. When she confirmed the sun really was dying, he agreed to come with her.
>> The sun's really dying, isn't it?
>>.
Yeah. >> In a secure lab with important leaders from around the world watching, the biologist ran test after test on the.
Samples. The little dots could move, though movement alone proved nothing, and each one was a tiny black void that no instrument.
Could see into. Regular light did nothing.
X-rays did nothing. He kept throwing techniques at the problem until he finally managed to lighten one up, and there it was,.
A tiny alien cell, actual life from outside Earth.
The test cost the cell its life, but a dead cell can be taken apart, and the analysis showed the things were.
Made mostly of water, plain old carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
That result sent him into a rage, hurling stuff around the lab, because it meant the one original idea of his life.
Was wrong. There was more though.
The cells gave off infrared light whenever they moved, at a wavelength matching the Petrova line exactly.
>> They give off infrared light when they move.
>> They were drinking the sun's energy and spitting it back out to push themselves through space.
Afterward, Strat told him to go home, since she had hundreds of other biologists to call.
>> I have 347.
Other biologists in 21 countries mobilizing as we speak.
I'm glad you didn't die. >> Let's pack this up.
>> He refused to be brushed off.
The stakes were personal now, and he pushed to stay on and help save the world, so she let him keep three.
Of the cells for further study.
One question kept bugging him. Why did these things travel to Venus and skip Mercury, which was closer?
To test an idea, he raided a hardware store a pile of basic supplies with Carl, the security officer assigned to him,.
Covering the bill on the government's dime.
He set a smaller box inside a bigger one rigged to give off the same infrared signature as the atmosphere of Venus,.
Heavy on carbon dioxide.
If the cells chased it, that meant they needed the gas.
The moment he switched the light on, the cells vanished from their dish.
Theory confirmed, but now three alien organisms were loose inside the box, and opening it in a lit room meant losing them.
To the nearest light source. With help from the guards, he sealed himself in the lab, killed the lights, and opened the.
Box. The escapees were easy to find by their faint glow, and the count floored him.
Four now, not three. Given light and carbon dioxide, they reproduced.
That was the whole reason they went to Venus.
He put them back in a dish, turned the lights on, and called Strat with the news.
The military came for him in a fighter jet, and the ride terrified him so badly, he knocked himself out with sleeping.
Medicine. He came to aboard an aircraft carrier, then vomited the moment he stepped off the jet.
Strat walked him into a gathering of the planet's top scientists and leaders, and he stumbled through their questions.
They had already reproduced his experiment with identical results, and the new organism got an official name, astrophage.
What came next made no sense to him at first.
They wanted to produce 2 million kilograms of the stuff.
>> On Earth would you need that much astrophage?
>> Strat granted him top secret clearance to the whole project.
>> I hereby grant you top secret clearance to all information pertaining to Project Hail Mary.
>> And the full picture landed on him at once.
Earth's sun wasn't the only star dying.
The same infection was spreading across the galaxy, and a single nearby star remained untouched,.
Tau Ceti, almost 12 light-years away.
Nobody could say why that star stayed healthy, and the plan called for building a ship, flying there, and finding out.
The problem had always been fuel for a trip that long, and astrophage, with all that stored energy, was the answer.
He noted that a stockpile that size could vaporize a place the size of California, and Stratt agreed, which was exactly why.
The whole operation floated far out at sea.
Even with all that fuel, the trip only went one direction.
The findings would be fired back to Earth in small probes, and the crew would die out there.
>> Die in space?
Yes. >> They'd spend most of the journey in a coma, and the mission needed just three people: a pilot, an engineer,.
And one scientist. With odds that thin, the whole thing got named after a desperate last-second pass, Project Hail Mary.
With those memories back, the survivor finishes trimming his hair and puts himself together.
His name is Ryland Grace, and there's work waiting for him.
He returns to his dead crewmates and grieves for them properly this time, cleaning up the bodies and tucking their photographs into.
Their pockets. Through tears, he gives a short speech thanking them for their sacrifice.
And promises to give everything he has to finish what they started.
One by one, the bodies go out into space.
Sometime later, Mary announces that they're approaching Tau Ceti, and the engines shut down.
Gravity vanishes with them, and Grace goes floating through the cabin.
When he steadies himself and looks outside, he sees something that shouldn't be possible.
A Petrova line hangs off this star, too, yet it isn't dimming at all.
And that's when the second impossible thing shows up.
There is another ship out there.
The strange vessel closes in, and Grace scrambles into the pilot seat and flies away like a student driver, clumsy and panicked.
Wherever he runs, the visitor matches him move for move, patient and persistent.
After a while, it fires something at his hull, and he braces for a bomb, refusing to touch it.
The thing just bounces off and drifts away.
A second object comes over at a much slower speed, clearly meant to be caught, so he decides to go get it.
It's his first spacewalk ever, and after speed-reading the instructions, he flops out of the airlock in the least graceful exit in.
The history of space travel. After a lot of flailing, he times one big jump and snags the canister.
Back inside, he can't get the container open no matter what he tries.
A scan claims it's made of xenon, which is nonsense since xenon is a gas.
While puzzling over it, he remembers the centrifuge system built into the ship.
So, he sets the vessel spinning and gets his gravity back.
With weight under his feet, the lid finally twists off and Mary warns that something foreign is in the room with him.
He rushes the object into a sealed glove box and pulls out a strange sphere covered in lines.
Under another lid sits a smaller sphere with little rods that jumps out of his hand and stands upright on its own.
Comparing it against a star chart, he gets it.
This is a map. The alien is showing him where it came from.
A system even farther from here than Earth.
Grace rearranges the rods to mark Earth's position and sends the whole thing back.
The answer arrives fast. A new object shaped like a tunnel.
Taking the hint, he brings his ship in close and the alien vessel builds an actual tunnel between the two airlocks right.
On the spot. Suited up, he crosses it slowly until he reaches a window into the other ship.
Behind the glass, something shifts and he's so startled that he goes tumbling back into the tunnel, catching a wall at the.
Last second. When he works up the nerve to return, an alien hand is moving at the window.
It holds up little toys it made, a tiny figure of Grace himself and a miniature of his ship, and uses them.
To ask him to go back home for now.
He does. The tunnel detaches and the alien craft starts rotating just like the Hail Mary, matching its gravity.
When the passage reconnects and Grace opens the door, a wall of pressure hits him and this time there's weight under his.
Feet, gravity inside the tunnel itself.
He strings up lights on the way across and at the window, he presents his own gift, a model of the alien.
Ship built out of noodles. The creature comes close enough to see at last and the thing resembles a boulder that learned.
To walk. When he says hello, it opens its mouth and lets out a sound so harsh that he screams and waves.
A tool around to protect himself, and the alien flinches away in fear.
He apologizes,.
And something clicks between them. Every time he moves an arm or strikes a pose, the creature copies him, right down to.
His laugh. And soon the two of them are mirroring silly moves through the glass like a pair of kids.
The alien starts poking at the window, and it takes Grace a minute to catch on.
His neighbor is directing his attention backward at another delivery waiting in the tunnel.
Inside, he finds.
Collar, and through gestures, the creature keeps gesturing for the helmet to come off.
He refuses, and with the lights starting to fail, he turns to leave.
That's when he really looks at the collar.
Two rings of eight. Eight, as in the atomic number of oxygen.
The message is that the tunnel holds breathable air.
He hesitates, weighing the risk, and finally pulls the helmet off.
Air fills his lungs, clean and easy.
Later, on his own ship, Grace studies the very first object the stranger sent and realizes the shape is the Petrova line.
Itself. The alien crossed space for the same reason as him.
Its star is dying, too. Back at the window, he proposes teaming up.
Though first, they need a real way to talk.
Math should be the universal language, so he starts with a measuring tape.
The creature treats it like a toy.
A clock gets no reaction at all.
Watching it fumble, Grace notices the alien ship is pitch dark inside, and the being has nothing like a face.
And he lands on the answer.
It's blind, sensing the world through sound the way bats do.
Since it resembles a pile of living stone, he names his new neighbor Rocky.
He rebuilds the clock so the numbers physically pop out where they can be felt, and when Rocky finally reads them, it.
Does a happy little dance. Grace demonstrates a thumbs up, but the alien's arm is built so it can only manage a.
Thumbs down, which becomes their thing.
Rocky disappears and returns with a rotating device covered in symbols, its own version of a clock.
From there, Grace hauls in a laptop and a microphone, points at numbers and objects for hours, and records Rocky naming each.
One, slowly building a translator for a language made of chords and vibrations.
>> Is Grace.
What's your word for my name?
>> He records all of it for Earth.
The alien builds its gadgets from an unknown solid material, and since the scanner keeps calling it Xenon, Grace names the stuff.
Xenonite. One day, he brings out an astrophage sample for Rocky, and the reaction is instant.
Rocky knows exactly what it is and calls it very bad.
They really are chasing the same enemy.
The Eridian shares that it once had a crew of 23,.
And every one of them died, leaving it alone in orbit.
And it admits how glad it is to have company again.
The two of them agree to save their stars together, and Grace teaches his new partner the fist bump to seal it.
As the translator grows, they go over all the data using models, and Grace cycles through the software's voice options until Rocky.
Picks a favorite. When Grace announces he's going to sleep, Rocky takes it as an announcement of death, so he has to.
Explain the concept. The Eridian translates it into its own language and explains that on its world, no one sleeps alone because.
A sleeper is defenseless, and someone has to stand guard.
It wants to watch over him, which strikes Grace as too weird until the alien admits it watched its own crew go.
To sleep once, and not one of them ever stirred again.
That lands. He drags some bedding over, and the two of them fall asleep on opposite sides of the window.
Another flashback surfaces. Back on Earth, Stratt brought him face-to-face.
With the crew picked for the flight: Commander Yao, Engineer Iluka Kina, and the science specialist.
They spoke calmly about wanting an option on board to end things on their own terms once the mission was done, since.
Starving in deep space would take too long.
He walked them through the engine demonstration,.
Where less than a gram of astrophage melted a full ton of metal within seconds.
In the present, Grace is sorting through his patchy memories when a noise pulls him up.
Behind one of the doors, he finds Rocky inside his ship, rolling around in a small pressurized bubble that works as a.
Personal space suit. The alien tours the whole vessel admiring human technology and scolding him for the mess.
And when Grace suggests they work separately in their own ships, Rocky ignores that entirely and claims a room of its own.
>> Where is my bedroom? >> just show up in a space ball unannounced and move into someone else's spaceship.
Life with a roommate turns out to be an adjustment.
Rocky is bossy about every project.
Watching it eat is disgusting.
And since the Eridian can hear everything and sense straight through walls, privacy stops existing.
Grace whispers complaints into his video journal at the lowest possible volume and Rocky hears every word.
>> You can hear this? >> Yes.
Great.
Yes. >> Oh my god. Look at this.
Look how far away he is.
>> Talking through the technology on both ships, Grace picks up on something alarming.
Eridians have no concept of radiation.
Their science never found it. He works out what that means and explains it to his friend.
Radiation killed Rocky's crew and Rocky only survived because its workshop sat right next to the Astrophage fuel tanks and the Astrophage.
Soaked up the exposure like shielding.
The next step is getting Astrophage samples from the source.
So the two ships separate and the Hail Mary heads for the nearby planet where the organisms breed.
The trip takes 11 days and Grace fills the time playing Earth footage for his friend.
Everything from nature to entertainment. Rocky opens up about missing its mate back home.
And when Grace asks the name, the answer is a long rolling wave of sound no human mouth could copy.
>> Name is.
It's beautiful.
>> Asked the same question, Grace admits he had someone once, but the relationship fell apart because his head was always somewhere.
Else. And she wasn't wrong. Rocky mentions it has been with its mate for 186.
Years and doesn't consider that nearly long enough.
Another memory floats up from the past.
Back on the carrier, the whole team was at the bar and Grace felt so out of place that he slipped out.
Running into Stratt on the way.
He admitted how odd it felt watching people laugh and celebrate when they were about to fly to their deaths.
And she explained that camaraderie is how crews carry the ugly side of the job.
When he asked whether she believed they'd actually pull it off, all she offered was that it was in God's hands.
>> You believe in God? >> It's the antonym of day.
>> The two of them went back inside, and Stratt shocked the whole room by grabbing the microphone and belting out a.
Karaoke version of Sign of the Times.
In the present, they finally arrive, and the planet's colors amaze him.
On a spacewalk,.
Grace uses a machine to switch on a light that draws in thousands of Astrophage,.
Wrapping the ship in a glow.
Since they're the first ones here, they get naming rights, and Rocky proposes something that translates roughly as a circle planet with.
A medium rough texture. So, Grace counters that a name should feel personal and christens it Adrian, which Rocky approves.
Back inside, the sample tests produce a result that makes no sense at first.
The same amount of the organism arrives at the planet as leaves it, which shouldn't happen at a breeding ground where the.
Population should be exploding. A closer test explains it.
There are other microbes mixed in with the Astrophage.
This planet is home to living things.
Rocky puts the pieces together with growing excitement.
Something down there prays on the stuff, killing it off and keeping the population in check, which is why this star never.
Dims. If they can catch that predator and carry it home, both of their worlds are saved.
The predators should be riding the clouds where the breeding happens, but the Hail Mary was never built to survive in atmosphere.
Rocky has an answer for that, too.
It can build a chain of any length and dangle a collector down into the clouds, which Grace immediately compares to fishing.
Since he's been improvising as a pilot this whole time, he drills the maneuvers over and over so he won't dip the.
Ship too deep. While he practices,.
Rocky records video messages for Earth, believing it's broadcasting live.
So, Grace explains that everything goes back later in a probe.
Rocky asks the obvious question, why not just explain it all in person when he gets home?
Grace tells the truth. He isn't going home.
There's no fuel for a return trip.
He has food for a couple of years, and after that, it ends out here.
He claims he's made peace with it.
Rocky flat-out refuses to accept that and offers a share of its own fuel reserves, 2 million kilograms of astrophage, even though.
Giving it up means Rocky's own trip home gets 6 years longer.
It watched its whole crew die once and will not watch a friend die again.
Grace breaks down, admits he never actually made peace with anything, and wraps his arms around Rocky's bubble.
And after a startled moment, the alien learns to hug back.
One more fragment from the past.
Three days before the scheduled launch, Grace was chatting with Stratt when an explosion tore through the lab and the whole building.
Went up in flames. In the present, the fishing run begins.
Grace eases the ship down toward Adrian, hugging the edge of the atmosphere, and feeds out the chain with the collector swinging.
Below. The device fills up with samples, and he heads out on a spacewalk.
It back in. But the ship is taking damage from the heat the longer it lingers, and part of the hull starts.
To burn. A loose piece of metal slams into him and knocks him out cold.
He comes to quickly and finds the collector dangling from its chain beneath the ship while the temperature keeps climbing.
Rocky begs him to get back inside and try again another time, insisting it isn't worth his life, but Grace is sure.
No second chance is coming. He jumps for the collector, gets hit by more debris, and ends up tangled in his tether.
With no options left, he cuts the line with a knife, swings by his hands along the hull, and drags himself and.
The sample back through the airlock.
The ship claws its way clear, but the hull keeps tearing, and the whole thing threatens to come apart.
So, he pushes the engines as hard as they'll go.
Once they're clear of Adrian, he cuts power, but the Hail Mary won't stop moving.
It's locked in an uncontrollable.
Spin. He works out that a fuel tank has been holed, and two containers are bleeding astrophage into space.
And the only fix is to eject them.
Fighting the shaking and the G-forces, he manages to hit the buttons.
The ruined tanks fall away and the ship levels out, but the whiplash knocks both of them senseless.
Grace comes to just long enough to reach for the centrifuge control before blacking out again.
Rocky comes around and tries to talk to him, but the translator is down.
Desperate, the Iridian does the unthinkable.
And climbs out of its protective bubble into an atmosphere that's poison to it.
It works the controls itself, studies everything, restores the gravity, and hauls its un conscious friend to the medical bay.
Its own body breaking down the entire time.
As the medical systems take over Grace's care, Rocky collapses.
While he's under, the last locked door in his memory swings open.
The lab explosion was caused by a mistake in handling the astrophage.
And it killed the mission science specialist along with his backup.
There was no time to train a replacement and every eye in the room turned to Grace.
He said no. He wasn't an astronaut.
He wasn't brave and he wasn't ready to die.
Strat answered that she didn't need an astronaut.
She needed an astro phage expert who was mission ready.
And the argument turned ugly when she pointed out that he had no family, no friends, not even a pet waiting for.
Him. She gave him 3 hours to decide.
Grace opens his eyes in the med bay and follows a trail of stains across the floor, marks left by Rocky's ruined.
Body. He finds his friend back inside its bubble locked in a deep healing sleep and he settles in beside the bubble.
The way they always slept, side by side.
On the computer, Rocky has left him a message.
Whatever happens, save both their homes.
So he works, he con firms that the microbes from Adrian really do hunt and eat astrophage.
And he names the predator Tomoba.
He sets up a breeding farm inside xenonic tanks and pushes the organism generation by generation until he's bred a strain tough.
Enough to survive the atmosphere of Venus.
All the while, he worries because Rocky isn't waking up.
He talks to the silent bubble and tapes encouraging drawings to the outside.
One day, a noise startles him out of a nap and there's Rocky, awake and healthy.
Grace hugs the bubble on the spot.
Together, they inspect the Tomuiba farm, which has grown a serious supply of the predator, and the meaning sinks in for both.
Of them. The road home is finally open.
They celebrate with fireworks footage on the big screens.
Rocky wraps its limbs in Xenonite as formal party wear, and Grace makes paper hats.
He gives his friend a laptop loaded with human knowledge and a little squishy toy ball to remember him by.
Rocky feels terrible about having nothing to give in return, so Grace asks for the one gift he actually wants, a tour.
Of the Iridian ship. Wearing a suit built from Xenonite, he follows his friend through an interior unlike anything human, marveling at.
The technology. And in the middle of that wonder, the final memory hits.
When the 3 hours were up, he told Strat he wasn't going.
She talked about the greater good one more time, and when he still refused, she called in her men.
He ran. The guards chased him down, tackled him, and put him under with a sedative.
He never volunteered for this mission.
He was drugged and loaded onto the ship by force.
Once the memory lets him go, Rocky is there helping repair the damage to the Hail Mary, and there's nothing left to.
Do but leave. The goodbye in the tunnel is long and hard.
Two friends running through their silly mirrored moves one last time before walking away in opposite directions.
The ships separate, each showing the other a final thumbs up, and Grace settles in for a trip of about 4 years,.
Learning all over again how to be alone.
He doesn't get far. Mary reports contamination on board, and he kills the engines to check it out.
The Tomuiba has eaten through the Xenonite tank holding it.
The organism evolved, and the one material that was supposed to contain it is now food.
He transfers the farm into a sealed container and stops the outbreak before it reaches his fuel.
And that's when the real horror lands on him.
Every inch of Rocky's ship is Xenonite.
The predator will already be chewing through it straight into the fuel lines.
And when the astrophage is gone, his friend will be stranded in the dark with failing life support, waiting for a slow.
Death. He runs the numbers every way he can, and the answer never changes: home or his friend.
There's no version of this where he gets both, so he makes his choice.
He packs every log, every discovery, and a full Tömöba farm with instructions into the probes, names them after the Beatles, and.
Fires humanity's salvation toward Earth. After that, he swings the ship onto a new course.
Days later, he finds the Iridian vessel drifting, goes out on a spacewalk, and hammers on the window until a familiar shape.
Appears out of the darkness and lets him in.
The two friends hold onto each other.
Years later, the probes reach a freezing Earth, Stratt opens them and finds the samples, the research, the instructions, and the recordings,.
Including her first look at Rocky.
Humanity finally has the weapon it sent a dying man to find, and in time, the Tömöba does its work, and the.
Sun burns bright again. Rocky's world gets saved, too.
Grace starts his mornings in a home of his own on Arid, where the locals built him a special dome with Earth-like.
Conditions, complete with a beach. He's learned the Iridian language well enough to talk with Rocky without any translator, and his friend,.
Wearing an upgraded Xenonite suit, comes by with news.
The scientists of Arid have prepared a ship that can finally carry him back to Earth.
Grace says he'll think about it.
For now, he walks into a cave by the sea and starts his lesson, because he's a teacher again, and his classroom.
Is full of curious little Iridian kids.
So, here's the question that stuck with me after this one.
Stratt stole a man's whole life to save the world, and the coward she shipped out against his will turned out to.
Be the best of us anyway.
Does the ending prove she was right to do it, or did Grace become a hero in spite of her?
Drop your take in the comments, because I want to hear where you land on that one.
And if you're up for another story about ordinary people dragged into impossible missions, that next one's already sitting right there on.
Your screen, waiting for you.