Lyon

Lyon is the birthplace and formative home of Dr. François Leclerc, the climatologist whom Eva Stratt placed in charge of tracking, understanding, and ameliorating the climate effects of Astrophage. Leclerc's personal history in Lyon shaped his identity as an unapologetic environmental activist and antiwar crusader, a background that made his later role in ordering a nuclear strike on Antarctica deeply conflicted.

Identity and Background

Leclerc was born in Lyon and spent his childhood there before attending university in Paris. He describes himself as having spent his entire life as an unapologetic hippie, a tree-hugging antiwar throwback to a bygone era of protest politics. This identity, rooted in his Lyon upbringing, defined his career choice: he became a climatologist specifically to help save the world from the environmental catastrophe he saw humanity sinking into.

Role in Project Hail Mary

Stratt brought Leclerc into the project because his climate-prediction models had been proven true over and over again for the previous twenty years, making him the only expert she could find with that track record. When Stratt demanded tangible numbers rather than vague predictions, Leclerc delivered a devastating estimate: nineteen years from that moment, half the people then alive—3.5 billion humans—would be dead. He explained that the math of famine was straightforward: take all the calories the world creates with farming per day, divide by about fifteen hundred, and the human population cannot exceed that number for long. Global staple crops—wheat, barley, millet, potatoes, soy, and most critically rice—would fail as temperatures dropped, weather patterns shifted, and humidity brought fungal parasites.

The Antarctica Decision

When Stratt asked for a way to buy time, Leclerc proposed releasing methane from Antarctica's ice to create a greenhouse-gas blanket that would insulate Earth. He stood on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier off the coast of western Antarctica, checking his tablet and counting down to the detonation of 241 nuclear weapons buried fifty meters deep along a fissure at three-kilometer intervals. As a lifelong environmental activist from Lyon, he found the act morally devastating. He told Ryland Grace that he wished to God this wasn't on his shoulders, and that he had become a climatologist to stop the nightmarish environmental catastrophe, not to order a nuclear strike. When the nukes detonated, he buried his face in his hands and cried. Stratt put her hand on his shoulder and told him he had done what he had to do.

Aftermath and Consequences

Leclerc understood that the methane release was a stopgap at best. Dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere would keep warmth in the air, but the disruption to the ecosystem would still be massive—horrific and unpredictable weather, crop failures, and biome annihilation. He knew that after the Hail Mary launched, Stratt's authority would end and she would probably be put on trial by a bunch of pissed-off governments for abuse of power. He told her he would be in the cell next to hers. Stratt replied that when the alternative is death to your entire species, things are very easy: no moral dilemmas, no weighing what's best for whom, just a single-minded focus on getting the project working. Leclerc echoed that sentiment, telling himself the same thing as he pressed the detonation button.