Daddy called it the “unholy alliance of business and government. ”
But all it really was, was America giving up. Bailing out in order to join the Financial Resource Exchange. A multinational alliance focused on one thing: profit. Fund global medical care to monopolize vaccines. Back unified currency to collect planet-wide interest.
And provide the resources needed for a select group of scientists and military personnel to embark on the first trip across the universe in a quest to find more natural resources—more profit.
The answer to my parents’ dreams.
And my worst nightmare.
And I know something about nightmares, seeing as how I’ve been sleeping longer than I’ve been alive.
I hope. What if this is just a part of a long dream dreamt in the short time between when Ed locked the cryo door and Hassan pushed the button to freeze me? What if?
It’s a strange sort of sleep, this. Never really waking up, but becoming aware of consciousness inside a too-still body.
The dreams weave in and out of memories.
The only thing keeping the nightmares from engulfing me is the hope that there couldn’t possibly be a hundred more years before I wake up.
Not a hundred years. Not three hundred. Not three hundred and one. Please, God, no.
Sometimes it feels like a thousand years have passed; sometimes it feels as if I’ve only been sleeping a few moments. I feel most like I’m in that weird state of half-asleep, half-awake I get when I’ve tried to sleep past noon, when I know I should get up, but my mind starts wandering and I’m sure I can never get back to sleep. Even if I do slip back into a dream for a few moments, I’m mostly just awake with my eyes shut.
Yeah. Cryo sleep is like that.
Sometimes I think there’s something wrong. I shouldn’t be so aware. But then I realize I’m only aware for a moment, and then, as I’m realizing it, I slip into another dream.
Mostly, I dream of Earth. I think that’s because I didn’t want to leave it.
A field of flowers; smells of dirt and rain. A breeze . . . But not really a breeze, a memory of a breeze, a memory made into a dream that tries to drown out my frozen mind.
Earth. I hold on to my thoughts of Earth. I don’t like the dreamtime. The dreamtime is too much like dying. They are dreams, but I’m too out of control, I lose myself in them, and I’ve already lost too much to let them take over.
Pressure on my pinky where Daddy wrapped his finger around mine, and a whisper of his words promising me I could stay with my aunt and uncle. The heaviness in my chest, where I thought about it, where I really thought about it. I push the dream-memory down. That happened centuries ago, and it’s too late for regrets now. Because all my parents ever wanted was to be a part of the first manned interstellar exploratory mission, and all I ever wanted was to be with them.
And I guess it doesn’t matter that I had a life on Earth, and that I loved Earth, and that by now, my friends have all lived and gotten old and died, and I’ve just been lying here in frozen sleep. That Jason lived and got old and maybe he married and had kids and everything, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s dead now. God, his great-grandchildren might be my age.
A splatter of rain on my skin, but it’s bright and sunny under the blue sky. And Jason’s there, and we almost kiss, but then everything changes and we’re at that party where we met because dreams are like that: they go in and out of memories and scenes, but they’re never real. They’re never real, and I hate them because they aren’t.
4
ELDER
A CRANKING NOISE MAKES ME LIFT MY FACE UP TO THE broken window, where the glass has split evenly in two. Why am I not dead yet?
Glass doesn’t break like that, not in a perfectly straight line.
And . . . that’s not the black emptiness of space beyond the glass.
That’s metal. A metal ceiling behind the window?
The two halves of the window slide down, down, and the stars go with them. But that’s . . . impossible. The stars are supposed to stay in place, not move with the window.
Wait . . . it’s . . . it’s not a window. It’s, well, I’m not sure what it is. The Great Room’s ceiling is domed, and the metal covering has folded up along the edge of the room at about chest hei
ght. The window—the thing I thought was a window—is really two halves of a giant glass and metal screen sprinkled with sparkling lights, held up by hydraulic arms that hiss and moan at me. The two folded halves rest on either side of the domed room at about shoulder height, and behind them is the real ceiling of the Keeper Level, more metal. More blank, empty, starless metal.
The stars, the beautiful shining stars, aren’t stars at all. It’s just glass and lightbulbs made to twinkle like stars. Fake stars on a screen sandwiched between two metal ceilings.