Project Hail Mary

by Andy Weir

I’m a scientist! Now we’re getting somewhere! Time for me to use science. All right, genius brain: come up with something!

Bruh

Okay, well I have no idea why this lab is here or why I’m allowed in. But…onward!

Oh gee willikers!

Kind of like “batteries included” toys. The little plastic tab was there to keep the battery from running down before the owner uses it for the first time. Okay, this is a brand-spanking-new stopwatch.

Dead battery must mean it has been used up??????!!!!!!! No shit

I run the numbers and come up with an answer I don’t like. The gravity in this room is too high. It’s 15 meters per second per second when it should be 9.8. That’s why things falling “feel” wrong to me. They’re falling too fast. And that’s why I’m so weak despite these muscles. Everything weighs one and a half times as much as it should.

Oh and my dick hang too low

Golly.

This cannot be fr

Thing is,

Thing is, ur mom deez nuts

How do I know all that space stuff? I just know it. It feels like second nature—information I use all the time.

Actual tears falling down my cheeks rn

Because what’s the point of even having a world if you’re not going to pass it on to the next generation?

Hm.

“You have an accent. Are you even from America?”

Omg

On the edge of the conical walls is another hatch. This one is less mysterious, though. It has the word AIRLOCK stenciled across the top, and the hatch itself has a round window in it. Through the window I can see a tiny chamber—just big enough for one person—with a spacesuit inside. The far wall has another hatch. Yup. That’s an airlock.

No way

Well. That means nothing to me. Except “kps.” That might mean “kilometers per second.”

Are we joking

What do I even call noble gases that react with things? Ignobles?

Why is this man's immediate concern always naming his discoveries

doohickey

Fourth time using this word in the last page btw

Yeah, I’m going to call them Eridians.

What I just said

I don’t have any xenonite (that’s what I’m calling this weird alien compound, and no one can stop me). But I do have solder and a soldering iron. I break off a little piece of

I want to bang my head against the wall

grab the doohickey,

But he couldnt have come up with any other name for this (8x btw)

But this is the interstellar equivalent of a stranger offering me candy. I want the candy (information), but I don’t know the stranger.

NO SHIT!

They smiled and made happy Russian sounds. Then Stratt said something stern in Russian.

.

Well, I say “his hand,” but maybe it’s her hand. Or some other pronoun I don’t have a word for. They might have seventeen biological sexes, for all I know. Or none. No one ever talks about the really hard parts of first contact with intelligent alien life: pronouns. I’m going to go with “he” for now, because it just seems rude to call a thinking being “it.”

Ok

My jaw drops. Yes, I’m in zero g. It still drops.

Oh my god at this point im just hate reading

He pokes the rubber blob and it sticks to his claw. He shakes it off without much trouble. Obviously the temperature doesn’t bother him. I guess it’s no different from a human shaking water off his hand.

The ball is blue. Blue is the color of the ball. I guess it's like a blue ball.

“You and what army?” Stratt asked. Five armed men in military fatigues entered the courtroom and took up station around her. “Because I have the U.S. Army,” she said. “And that’s a damn fine army.”

Am i missing something. This Is so bad

No more pantomime. It’s time to learn Eridianese. Yes, I just made up that word. No, I don’t feel bad about it. I’m doing a lot of things for the first time in human history out here and there’s a lot of stuff that needs naming. Just be glad I don’t name stuff after myself.

SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUPJUSTSHUTUP

And inside is 1 liter of water. The arms always give me water a liter at a time. You have to stay hydrated if you want to save the world.

Thank u for sharing

Nitrogen is utterly harmless and nearly inert in its gaseous state. It’s usually content to be N2, which barely wants to react with anything. Human bodies ignore the stuff despite every breath being 78 percent nitrogen. As for Erid, their atmosphere is mostly ammonia—a nitrogen compound. How could a panspermia event ever seed Earth and Erid—two nitrogen-riddled planets—if a tiny amount of nitrogen kills that life? Well, the answer to that is easy: Whatever the life-form was that caused the panspermia, it didn’t have a problem with nitrogen. Taumoeba, which evolved later, does.

Sybau

fling it out through a one-meter-wide hole in the side. Where’d the one-meter-wide hole come from? I made it.

No please tell me more Andrew

What if all heck broke loose

The actual fuck