PART ONE
RESURRECTION
en you first awaken, expect some disorientation, sore muscles, shortness of breath, dimmed eyesight, and depression. These symptoms are usually mild. However, due to time constraints, no human trial has lasted the hundred years you will be in stasis. Symptoms may be aggravated by the extended length of time, as well as Mid-Stasis Relocation Disorientation (hereafter referred to as MSRD). Cryo’technicians and med’bots will be available to assist you after your unprecedented journey. Congratulations. You are making history.
—Holymyth Colonist Handbook, page 23, sponsored by the Lacuna Athenaeum Corporation
ONE
wake, n. or v.
Etymology: Anglo-Saxon wacan, “to be born”; possible adoption from Icelandic vök, meaning “an opening in the ice.”
Definition:
to be roused from sleep; to revive, reanimate; to return to life.
the consequences of a body in movement.
a vigil by the body of the dead.
When andromeda woke, she was drowning.
They’d warned her this would happen—that her lungs would burn and her eyes would sting and she’d have to fight for that first breath. But you must take it, they said. If you don’t, your lungs will collapse and we’ll have to put you in a coma and just hope for the best.
Okay, maybe those weren’t their exact words.
She pulled in a breath, just like they told her. It burned. It stung. She fought. Water flooded her lungs, and the bitter taste of saline filled her mouth. Something was wrong. Something she couldn’t quite place.
Her fist shot out, grasping for help, but it slammed into something solid. There it was—the wrongness. Ten-inch-thick metallic glass enforced with veins of diamond dust. Latched together with hinges of a tantalum-tungsten alloy. Supposed to be yawning open when she woke. But it wasn’t. It was still closed, cocooning her in cold metal and melting cryo’protectant.
Calculations fired in her brain, searching for missing information, evaluating variables, solving for X. She’d just been put to sleep, and now she was drowning. No. It only felt like she’d just been put to sleep. It had actually been a hundred years. And now, she was waking up and (oh god) naked, but her chamber was still closed.
Something was definitely wrong.
They’d prepared her for this possibility—waking too early or crisis aborts or faulty latches—but it was hard to remember emergency plans in the middle of an emergency.
There was a button somewhere . . .
. . . or a switch?
She was too lightheaded. Her hands didn’t work. Her brain was shutting down, synapses sparking, sending a single message:
air air air air air
She struck the glass again. It didn’t even crack. It was meant to last centuries, meant to withstand zero gravity and a thousand times atmospheric pressure and two thousand degrees kelvin and zero degrees kelvin. But she kept pounding, each hit a bit weaker, a bit quieter.
She hit the glass until her strength gave out. Her arms fell to her sides. Just before her eyes slid shut, she saw a face above her. No one she recognized. There was no bright light. No life flashing before her eyes. No air. Just water and drowning and dying and water.
Then nothing.
* * *
When she woke the second time, she was coughing up saline. This was an improvement.
Her throat was sore. It ached down into the recesses of her chest. She didn’t want to breathe. It hurt too much. But she had to.
Just as soon as she coughed all the water out of her lungs.
At first, her senses didn’t extend past pain. Then she heard shouts. Murmurs. Whispers. Syllables that weren’t words. Words without meaning. Strong arms held her, a rough hand patted her back. Not the cryo’tech—they weren’t allowed to touch. Not her mom either—she didn’t coddle.
The water was gone now, but the sting remained, the compulsion to cough. She gasped in a breath, and it dragged through her lungs, her throat, catching and tearing as it went. But it kept her alive, so she pulled in another.
And another.
Shivering. Shaking off flecks of ice.
So. Cold.
She thought about opening her eyes, but decided against it. Too much work. So she breathed, and then she slept, and then, for the first time in a hundred years, she dreamed.
Will I dream? she asked.
No, you’ll be sleeping too deeply. Like a computer shutting down.
Will I know time is passing?
When they wake you, it’ll feel like seconds from now.
When will they wake me?
When you reach the new planet.
So. You’re the last person I’ll ever speak to on Earth.
Don’t be so morbid.
* * *
The third time, Andra woke to the tinny whirring of a fan. A blast of air hit her right cheek and shoulder, alleviating some of the oppressive heat. Sticky globs of residual cryo’protectant clung to her skin. She shivered and opened her eyes.
She was awake. She jerked into a half-sitting position. This was a new planet. A hundred years had passed. She had to find her family. She had to tell her mom she was sorry. She—
was in the dirtiest room known to man.
The floors were dirt, the walls crusted with something she hoped was dirt. It was like a cave, a single shaft of light filtering in through a high, thin window with no glass or holo’screen, and a plume of sand puffed in on an arid gust of wind.
The room was empty except for the bed she was sitting on, a metal table, and, on top of that, the fan—which looked like it was running on some sort of kinetic energy. It spluttered to a stop, leaving the room silent and stale.
This was no place for medical tests and routines, for purgative baths and reanimation therapy. Andra hadn’t bothered to read the manual, but her mother had droned on about it enough that she knew the reanimation procedures by heart: once they arrived on the new planet, robots would wake the head LAC scientists—like Andra’s mother—and a skeleton crew of cryo’techs. They wouldn’t wake the colonists until mech’bots had constructed the hospitals and everything was organized and sanitary. Then, after resurrection, there would be sight tests, vocal tests, muscle tests, preliminary physical therapy, a nice hot bath, and finally: reconnecting with family.