Project Hail Mary

by Andy Weir

Time to get a look at my fellow patients. I don’t know who I am or why I’m here, but at least I’m not alone—aaaand they’re dead.

I know Liberia uses imperial units but I don’t know my own name. That’s irritating.

So I’m a single man in my thirties, who lives alone in a small apartment, I don’t have any kids, but I like kids a lot. I don’t like where this is going… A teacher! I’m a schoolteacher! I remember it now! Oh, thank God. I’m a teacher.

Wow. I’m sitting here in a spaceship in the Tau Ceti system waiting for the intelligent aliens I just met to continue our conversation…and I’m bored. Human beings have a remarkable ability to accept the abnormal and make it normal.

No one ever talks about the really hard parts of first contact with intelligent alien life: pronouns.

Broadly speaking, the human brain is a collection of software hacks compiled into a single, somehow-functional unit. Each “feature” was added as a random mutation that solved some specific problem to increase our odds of survival. In short, the human brain is a mess.