Project Hail Mary

In the near future, middle-school science teacher and molecular biologist Dr. Ryland Grace wakes up in the dormitory of the Hail Mary interstellar spaceship. Experiencing total amnesia, Grace has no idea who or where he is and assumes he is in a high-tech hospital, as he is connected to an IV, a catheter, and many sensors. Grace feels weak and groggy but is otherwise in excellent physical condition and attempts to remove his IV. A computerized voice asks for his name, and robotic arms extend from the ceiling to reattach his IV and sedate him when he is unable to answer.

Grace regains consciousness while being tended to by the robotic arms. He rolls off the bed to escape, ripping out his catheter in the process. A “thin red line” of blood causes a memory to flash through his mind (9): While eating at a San Francisco diner, Grace gets an email from an Astronomy Curiosities message board. Russian scientist Dr. Irina Petrova has discovered a “faint but detectable line” of infrared light emission stretching in an arc from the top of the sun to Venus (10).

Grace explores the dormitory, dodging the robotic arms. He finds the desiccated corpses of a man and a woman in the other two beds, presumably long dead. Grace concludes that each of them was put into a coma and maintained by the robotic arms, but only he survived. Grace climbs to a hatch out of the dormitory but falls from the ladder with exhaustion. The robotic arms catch him and return him to bed, where he falls asleep despite sensing a “wrongness” to how he fell.

When Grace wakes up, the robotic arms bring him a tube of unexpectedly delicious food. Grace demands more, but the computer tells him that the “food allotment for this meal has been met” (14). Energized by the meal, Grace gets up and makes a toga with his bedsheet. The robotic arms allow him to climb through the hatch into a laboratory, where the bolted-down equipment reminds Grace that he is a scientist.

Grace attempts to open another hatch and continue exploring, but the computer refuses to unlock it until he confirms his name, which he can’t remember. He falls again and experiences the same sense of “wrongness” as before. Grace times how long it takes for a test tube to fall from the lab table to the floor, remembering the formula for gravity easily. The test shows that gravity is 1.5 times stronger than it should be, and Grace realizes that he is not on Earth.

A frightened Grace tries to think of other explanations for the heightened gravity. Grace makes a simple pendulum and uses physics to determine that he can’t be on Earth, on another planet, or in a centrifuge because of how large the centrifuge would have to be and how fast it would have to spin to achieve 1.5 Gs. Wondering how he knows so much about space, Grace guesses that he works for NASA and has another memory flash.

In the memory, Grace meets his friend Marissa, a government scientist, for dinner. Marissa is visibly upset and tells Grace that a Japanese solar probe has determined that the sun is getting exponentially dimmer at the same rate that the Petrova Line of infrared light emission is getting brighter. Although the probe caught the problem early, “the Petrova line is stealing energy from the sun” (25). The dimming sun will cause a new Ice Age, crop failures, and mass starvation. The US President will announce the dilemma with other world leaders the next day.

Back on the Hail Mary, Grace realizes that his mission is to solve the Petrova Problem and prevent the sun from dying. Grace sobs as he is flooded with memories of the other two crew members, now the corpses in the dormitory, and realizes that only he survived the suspended animation they were put in for the interstellar journey. The computer announces another meal time, and Grace is again comforted by the food. Grace acclimates to the ship, requesting water from the computer and finding a zero-g toilet that has been strangely modified for use in gravity.

Attempting to remember something on purpose, Grace recalls a televised NASA livestream of Project ArcLight. Funded jointly by the United States, the European Union, Russia, China, India, and Japan, Project ArcLight was developed to determine the cause of the Petrova Problem by collecting samples and data from the Petrova Line near Venus. On TV, NASA scientists receive the first data from the unmanned space probe ArcLight. The images show black dots that look and move like microbes, suggesting that the Petrova Line may comprise an alien life form.

Grace is pulled from this memory by the computer warning him of an “angular anomaly,” but in order to find the control room and solve the problem, he has to remember his name to open the hatch out of the lab. Grace combs through the NASA livestream memory for clues and realizes that he is a junior high school science teacher from San Francisco.

Grace remembers a particular day teaching his science class. He’s a popular teacher, and his students enjoy his lightning-round-style quiz. After school, Eva Stratt appears in his classroom. Formerly with the European Space Agency, Stratt now leads the Petrova Taskforce, a secret international project to solve the Petrova Problem and save humanity. Stratt has been granted absolute authority and total immunity by the United Nations.

Stratt informs Grace that he has been selected to evaluate the Petrova Line samples captured by the ArcLight probe because of a paper he wrote when he was still a molecular biologist. The paper, “An Analysis of Water-Based Assumptions and Recalibration of Expectations for Evolutionary Models” (37), challenges the widely held “Goldilocks Zone” theory, which assumes that life is dependent on liquid water and can therefore exist only within a narrow temperature range. The controversial paper cost Grace his academic funding, and he refuses the Petrova Taskforce assignment, claiming that he is happier now as a teacher.

Later, FBI agents apprehend him at home and escort him to a secret laboratory. At the lab, Stratt explains that the black dots seem to be a life form that is rapidly eating the sun and so they can’t be water-based or else they would be destroyed by the sun’s heat. Despite Grace’s rejection from the field, he is still considered by other speculative extraterrestrial biology experts to be the most qualified to examine the samples. Stratt leaves Grace to get to know his new lab and assignment.

Having finally recalled his name, Grace unlocks the hatch to the Hail Mary’s control room. The monitors show that the ship is traveling at a much higher velocity than expected, but Grace can’t determine where he is headed. He recognizes the Hail Mary mission crest, which includes the names of his crewmates: Yáo Li-Jie and Olesya Ilyukhina. Grace suppresses painful memories of his friends by trying to remember his first encounter with the Petrova Line samples instead.

In his memory, Stratt and an international military coalition watch from an observation room as Grace opens the sample capsule from the ArcLight. The sample has been transported in a sealed container of non-reactive argon for safety, and the lab is also pumped full of argon, requiring Grace to wear a hazmat suit and an oxygen tank while working. Stratt is impatient, but Grace determines very little at first. The black dots absorb x-rays, can’t be vaporized, and are unaffected by temperature. By comparing the movement of the black dots to their infrared emissions, Grace hypothesizes that they consume energy and emit light as a method of propulsion. Grace concludes that the life form is an invasive species in Earth’s solar system, consuming the sun exponentially as their population grows. Grace names the black dots “Astrophage” from the Greek for “star-eater.”

Back in the Hail Mary’s control room, Grace realizes that the star on the monitor is rotating too quickly to be Earth’s sun and that he must be in another solar system.

Grace panics at the realization that he is in another solar system until he notices a monitor in the control room labeled “Astrophage”. Grace deduces that the Hail Mary is using Astrophage as fuel and recalls another memory from the secret Petrova Taskforce lab: After days of unsuccessful experiments, Grace punctures an Astrophage cell with a microscopic needle, killing it and destroying its light-blocking properties. Grace tests the dead Astrophage and discovers that it is mostly made up of water but is able to survive by somehow maintaining a constant temperature of 96.41° Celsius.

Grace goes to the ship’s supply room to find clothing, and the embroidered names on the crew uniforms help him to remember his crewmates’ personalities: the “stern but reasonable” Commander Yáo, and Olesya Ilyukhina, the mission’s cheerful engineer. He gives Yáo and Ilyukhina a space burial via the airlock in the control room.

In flashback, Grace remembers his first day back teaching after his secret experiments in the Petrova Taskforce lab. His students ask him to explain the Petrova Problem, which has become global news. Grace is astounded at how little his students’ parents have explained to them and compares the catastrophic potential of the Astrophage infestation over the next 30 years to climate change. Grace panics as he imagines his students dying of hunger in a future that is far closer than they imagine it to be. He rushes back to the secret lab and demands to continue working with the remaining Astrophage samples, which are being divided among labs all over the world.

Back on the Hail Mary, Grace discovers four “Beetle” probes, named John, Paul, George, and Ringo, which are designed to be sent back to Earth with findings from the mission. Grace discovers that he only has enough fuel for another 40 days—not nearly enough for the four-year journey back to Earth—and that he is on a lethal, one-way mission.