Snippet Drop 03 -- Fan Fiction
This is an unofficial fan fiction piece. Project Hail Mary and all its characters are the property of Andy Weir. No copyright infringement is intended.
I've watched The Martian and Project Hail Mary more times than I care to admit over the last two months. Weir brilliantly leaves Project Hail Mary on an ending that's downright annoying in how much it refuses to answer. How does Earth manage the Taumoeba, given that humans aren't historically great about divvying up resources that matter? What becomes of Stratt's legacy, since making hard calls under existential pressure tends to get you remembered as either a monster or a hero, depending on who's writing the history? Do Earth and Erid ever establish real contact, or does the relationship fade once the crisis passes? And what does Earth do with the technology that got Grace there in the first place, now that survival isn't forcing anyone's hand?
But the question that weighs on me most is simpler. Does Ryland Grace ever make it back to Earth? And if he does, who's still there waiting for him?
If you haven't read the book or seen the film, this is your exit ramp. After this it’s 80 mph of straight spoiler interstate from here on out. If you haven’t seen it and don’t care about spoilers, here’s the short version. Grace's mission stretches him across a span of time that doesn't match up cleanly with time back on Earth, and Weir did the actual math to make it hurt. The Hail Mary accelerates at 1.5g for eight and a half months and cruises at roughly 92% of the speed of light. At that speed, an observer on Earth would clock the outbound trip at 12.9 years. Grace experiences about four of those years. By the end of the book, he's 54. Grace really needs to leave Einstein a thank you card, because without time dilation, he'd be 71. That's not a rounding error. That's a quarter of a human lifetime slipping by while Grace ages at a fraction of the rate. Whatever version of Earth exists when the mission ends, it isn't the one Grace left. People he knew have aged. Some are gone. The world kept moving without him, decades faster than he did.
Weir never tells us what that homecoming looks like. He ends the book right at its emotional peak and lets everything after stay open.
I don't think that's a gap he forgot to fill. I think it's the point. A neat homecoming would undercut everything the mission cost. Leaving it open means every reader gets to sit with their own version of what Grace lost and what he might still have waiting for him.
So, here are the versions I keep playing out in my head.
He doesn't go back at all. Maybe the life he's built by the end, the relationships and the work he's found out there, matter more to him than a return to a world he barely recognizes anymore.
He goes back and finds a stranger's Earth. A hero's welcome, debriefings, reporters. Underneath all of it, a quiet reckoning with how many people he loved are gone or have simply moved on without him. Maybe there's one person left who remembers him clearly, a former student, now old, who still tells people about the teacher who vanished one day and never came back to class.
He settles into life on Erid for barely a year before curiosity wins out. He goes back to Earth, earns the hero's welcome, and spends less than a year there before he realizes it isn't home anymore. He already chose Rocky over Earth once. Given the choice again, he makes the same call. Except this time, he doesn't go back alone. One of his former students, now in their fifties, one of the brightest kids he ever taught, someone who built an entire career in space science because a middle school teacher once made the universe feel like something worth chasing, decides to leave everything behind and go with him. Grace doesn't just return to Rocky. He brings someone from his old life along, someone who spent decades wondering what happened to the teacher who disappeared and finally gets the chance to find out for themselves.
I don't know which one is true. I don't think Weir knows either, or if he does, he isn't telling. But I couldn't stop thinking about that third version. So, I wrote it.
Last time he'd set foot on Earth, he was a middle school teacher who'd been laughed out of academia over one paper on water and evolution. Now, there was a marching band welcoming him home. Grace wasn't sure which version of himself was supposed to feel more real.
The tarmac smelled like jet fuel, which surprised him. He'd assumed astrophage, the same fuel that had carried him to Tau Ceti and back, would have been scaled down for something as ordinary as a commercial flight. Instead, the smell hit him first, before the cameras, before the crowd, and for a second it was the most familiar thing on the whole tarmac. Grace stood at the bottom of a gangway with cameras aimed at him from every angle. The ship behind him, the one that had actually made the crossing, wasn't the Hail Mary. That ship never fully recovered from what the Taumoeba had done to it, though its metal hadn't gone to waste. Eridian engineers had stripped what they could and lined the new fuel chamber with it, a precaution against a danger that wasn't even supposed to be on board this time. Grace had been adamant about what to call it. Nobody on the naming committee understood why it mattered so much to him, but he wouldn't budge. The Our Father, he told them, and left it at that.
The reception line was made up entirely of strangers. Officials. A general he didn't recognize. Someone from a space agency that hadn't existed when he left. He shook every hand, said thank you more times than he could count, and kept scanning the crowd behind the rope line without meaning to. It was reflexive more than him thinking someone he actually knew from his prior life would be there. Stratt would be well over ninety by now and if she were still alive, she would have been the first to greet him.
Instead, a face found him that was somehow both familiar and a stranger’s.
“Dr. Grace,” she yelled.
He turned, and something in the voice snagged at a memory he hadn't touched in years. A woman in her fifties stood just outside the horde of people and the ropes containing them. She was holding a badge that read Flight Dynamics like she wasn't sure she was allowed to be this close, but somehow the badge might grant her permission.
“You won’t remember me,” she continued.
“Try me.”
She tossed him a hacky sack, worn soft at the seams, an old print of Earth still faintly visible on it. “I was in your telescope club too. Tuesdays, after school.”
Grace caught it without thinking, some old reflex still intact, and felt something loosen in his chest, the kind of thing he hadn't let himself feel since before the mission started.
“Are you crazy?” he asked. “You know this is lava, right?”
Rekha laughed.
“You asked why Mars looked red through the eyepiece but orange in the photos,” he said.
Her eyes went wet, fast, like she'd been holding that moment in reserve for a long time and hadn't expected him to recall it so easily. “I work in propulsion now. Half my career, I've been trying to figure out how you actually pulled off what the mission logs say you pulled off.”
“Wondering if you were even still alive to ask.”
The crowd kept moving around them, cameras still finding him every few seconds, but for a moment neither of them moved with it.
“Dinner,” she said, before the moment could get swallowed up by everything waiting for him beyond the rope line. “When they let you out of debriefings. I want to properly catch up.”
She was the one who kept him tethered to the planet, that first stretch of months. Not the officials, not the reporters, not the agency handlers who wanted him for every panel and every closed-door meeting about what Earth should do with what he knew. Rekha showed up at his hotel a week after his arrival with a bag of takeout and thirty years of questions she'd apparently been saving since he mysteriously vanished from his students’ lives.
They fell into something that felt, for a while, like the easiest thing in his life since he'd woken up on the Hail Mary with no memory at all. Dinners. Long walks he wasn't supposed to take without security, which he took anyway. She showed him what propulsion research looked like now, decades past anything he'd contributed to, and he watched her light up over vector math the same way she must have lit up over a telescope eyepiece thirty years earlier.
“You built a whole career out of one evening with a telescope,” he told her once, half joking.
“I built a whole career out of a teacher who made it feel like the universe was worth chasing,” she said, not joking at all.
He didn't have an answer for that one.
But he felt out of place, uncomfortable in a way he hadn't expected. This was a world he barely knew anymore, and almost nobody in it remembered the life he'd had before he left. Earth wanted a hero. Earth wanted briefings and speeches and a face for what humanity had survived. Nobody on Earth wanted to hear that the man they were celebrating had already built a life somewhere else, a life that didn't include any of them.
Rocky didn't ask him to come back. Not really. Before Grace ever left Erid, Rocky had recorded something for him. It was a short video meant for the trip, something to have along the way so Grace wouldn't forget the sound of him or the particular tilt of his voice through the translator box. Grace watched it once on the trip to Earth and hadn't opened it again since, not until this stretch of feeling out of place on Earth finally pushed him to. Near the end of it, almost like an afterthought, Rocky asked the one question he'd never really asked before. “*A**re you staying, question?**”* Not a demand. Not even really a question expecting an answer, more like something Rocky needed to say out loud once, so it existed somewhere, even if Grace never heard it until long after it was recorded.
Grace rewatched the video hundreds of times in the past month, but he already knew the answer.
With dinner going cold on the table between them, Grace finally told Rekha.
“I'm going back.”
She didn't ask him to clarify which back he meant. She already knew.
“I figured,” she said. “It's all through your logs. When you were confronted with the choice of coming home and going to Rocky, you chose Rocky.”
“That's not fair.” Grace felt the old frustration rise up before he could stop it. “Earth had just forced me onto a suicide mission I never agreed to. Rocky was dying. There wasn't a choice in any way that matters. There was just the thing I had to do, and I’d do it again.”
“I know.” She turned her fork over once, twice, not eating, not really looking at him either. “I've read every page of what you sent home. I used to imagine what it would be like to actually see it. Not just the data. The place.”
“It's not the kind of place you visit.”
“I know that too.” She finally looked up. “What would it take for someone to go with you?”
The question landed somewhere Grace hadn't braced for. “You'd be giving up everything you've built here. There is nothing familiar for you there. You’d feel as out of place there as I do back here.”
“I built all of it because of you. Because you made me believe there was something worth reaching for out past what anybody else thought was possible.” She pushed her plate aside, like it was impeding her ability to get her point across. “I'm not asking because I'm bored with propulsion research, Grace, I'm asking because I've spent thirty years working on math that gets people a little closer to places I'll never actually see. I don't want to keep doing that from a desk.”
“It's not going to be easy. The gravity alone will take months to adjust to. You'll never see Earth again, not really, not in any way that matters.”
“You didn't get a choice, the first time. I do.” She said it steady, no hesitation in it at all. “I want to go.”
Grace didn't answer right away. He looked at her instead, thinking about the difference between them. He’d been asked once to go on the Tau Ceti mission, and he’d said no, too scared to say yes to something that big. Stratt hadn’t given him a second chance to change his mind, she’d made the choice for him. Rekha was standing here asking for the same kind of impossible thing, but unlike him she wasn’t running from it.
“Then let's find out what it takes,” he said. “Just be prepared. I don’t have a great track record for getting what I want from the powers that be.”
Grace felt Erid’s gravity take hold before he ever saw the planet through the viewport, its ammonia clouds thick and orange the way he remembered, thick enough that from up here you'd never guess what was living underneath them.
Rekha stood beside him at the glass, quiet for once, taking it in.
“It doesn't look like it should hold any life,” she said.
“It didn't look that way to me either. Not at first.”
The landing moved fast, procedure and pressure checks stacking one after another, Eridian voices coming through the comm system in patterns he hadn't heard in almost two years but still understood without thinking. Grace barely registered any of it. His mind was already past the door, already on the other side of it. The outer door cycled open slowly, and Grace stepped through, not walking so much as pushing forward, onto ground that pushed back against him harder than Earth ever had.
Rocky was waiting.
He hadn't changed, not in any way Grace could see. Eridians measured time on a scale that made even decades look small, and thirty-six years was nothing against a lifespan stretching past six hundred. He stood exactly where Grace remembered him standing, limbs and jazz hands already moving before Grace was even close enough to hear him. It was the same restless, animated energy Grace used to tease him about, like stillness was something Rocky had never quite figured out how to do.
“You come back, question” Rocky asked, through the translator box strapped to his side, the same halting cadence Grace had spent months teaching him.
“Did you think I wouldn’t?” Grace asked.
“You went. I did not know if the going meant staying.”
Grace liked that Rocky never dressed anything up in softer words than it deserved. “I had to see if it was still home. It wasn't. Not anymore. Not the way this is.”
Rocky's whole body shifted like a human would shiver, a motion Grace had learned to read as something between relief and the beginning of a smile, though Eridians didn't have mouths built for smiling the way humans did. “Good, good, good. Rocky did not want learn how be alone again.”
“You wouldn't have had to.”
“I know. Rocky still not want learn.”
Grace laughed as Rekha walked up to them.
Rocky turned to her next, studying her without saying anything and then turned back to Grace.
“Grace, you brought Rocky snack, question?”
Grace looked at her shocked expression, waiting for the joke to land.
Rocky turned back to her, “Rocky joke. Would not eat human. Humans are disgust,”
Grace laughed, “Yeah, he says we’re disgust but just wait until you see them eat.”
“Is beautiful!” Rocky said.
“This is Rekha. She was my student. A long time ago, and somehow, not that long ago at all.”
Rocky considered that, the particular math of it, the strange arithmetic none of them would ever fully make sense of. “Time is a hard thing here. Harder for you than for me.”
“She made peace with that before she got on the ship.” Grace said.
“Does she make peace same way Grace do?” asked Rocky. “Is she going to cry?”
Rekha stepped forward, offering the Eridian culture greeting Grace had taught her on the trip out. Rocky returned it and then gave her a thumbs down gesture.
“Don’t worry,” Grace responded. “That actually means thumbs up. You’ll get used to it.”
“Welcome,” Rocky said. “Grace does not like being alone. He built a life here. Then built one on Earth too. With you, I think, he does not have to choose between them.”
Rekha looked over at Grace, something unspoken passing between them.
“I think you might be right,” she said and gave him a thumbs down.
Rocky turned back toward the compound behind him, toward the biodome and the classroom and the years the three of them hadn't lived yet. “Then let us go inside. There is much to show you. And Grace still owes me a game of chess he has been avoiding for thirty-six years.”
I don't know if any of this is close to what actually happens after the last page. I'd love to hear what you think. If you've got your own theory about what happens to Grace, Rocky, Earth, or any of the loose threads this book leaves hanging, drop it in the comments. I'm genuinely curious what everyone else has been imagining.
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