“What’s two plus two?”
The voice is that of a computer aboard a spaceship. You know the type: like the one on Star Trek addressed simply as “computer.” Or, well, that other more famous talking computer who turns psycho and fails to kill Dave Bowman. This one is more like the computer aboard the Starship Enterprise in at least one respect: the computerized voice is feminized. Even so, its fundamental personality is not terribly far removed from the H.A.L. 9000 in that it is determined to pursue the mission regardless of what the puny human wants. The puny human wants just wants to drift back to sleep, but the computer presses on with its query, constantly replying “Incorrect” when the protagonist of the novel fails to respond properly. But give the guy a break: he’s got amnesia and has trouble remembering a lot of things.
Far more interesting than those numbers is the diagram below them. It shows what I assume is the Hail Mary. My first real overview of what this ship looks like.
The top of the ship is a cylinder with a nose cone at the front. That’s a rocket shape if ever I saw one. Judging by the tapered, conical walls of the control room, this must be the very front of the ship. Beneath me is the lab. On the diagram that room is labeled “Lab.” Below that is the room I woke up in.
The one with my dead friends.
The protagonist—the guy who can’t seem to provide a proper response to the query coming from the computer (which turns out to be four by the way for anyone who might be interested)—is introduced within the context of a flash-forward to the future in which he comes awakens out of unconsciousness during a case of temporary amnesia. He is aboard a spaceship called the Hail Mary, so there’s your title explanation. The “dead friends” are the two other members of the small crew aboard the ship who have died. Between the opening lines and these lines are three chapters in their entirety—roughly thirty or so pages—in which Ryland Grace struggles to come to terms with his amnesia which includes very slowly progressing from remembering how much two plus two is to figuring out that he is aboard a vessel traveling through outer space. But don’t despair because the amnesia is, like a girl in trouble, only a temporary thing. The pace picks up soon enough.
Okay, now what? Rocky told me to go back into my ship. So I did.
I feel kind of stupid. There’s a whole bunch of science I should be doing, right?
The protagonist has just made first contact between humans and an unknown alien species that is kind of rock-looking so he names it Rocky. He also decides to refer to Rocky using male pronouns because he doesn’t really know what the gender status is, but calling Rocky an “it” seems rude. What Daffy Duck might refer to as “pronoun trouble” is what Grace terms “the really hard part of first contact with intelligent alien life.” Who knew, right? One might well have come up with at least a dozen other aspects of first contact that might be given the supremacy of being the really hard part, but now you know. Those same foolish mortals might well read his narrative and think of at least a dozen science-type things that he should have done instead of just sort of symbolically shrugging responsibility off with the self-deprecating bit of Captain Obvious ruminating over feeling stupid. But then that’s the story being given here: another example of how the world must depend on people who seem to be utterly out of their depth being given jobs that would seem to rightfully have been handed to any of an infinite number of alternative candidates.
