343,568 days since she went into stasis.
987,432 colonists, now all centuries-dead.
8.2 trillion miles between her and Earth.
The numbers fell short of the reality.
The desert felt too large. The crowd felt too close. She broke out in a cold sweat, and sand clung to her exposed skin.
“I need to get out of here,” she gasped.
“Certz . . .” Zhade said. “There’s . . . not many spaces to peace to . . .” He looked around, as if something would suddenly appear.
Andra pushed past him. Her heart was racing, and blackness crowded her vision. Despite the frenzy happening in her mind, her brain seemed ultra-focused, dissecting and analyzing her new situation with brutal clarity. She ran across the ground of a desert planet, surrounded by people who thought she was a goddess, a millennium after her family had lived and died without her.
“Wait!” Zhade called, but she didn’t listen. She had a singular focus: getting away from the gawking crowd and the stranger who’d woken her. Running from the ’bot that just told her that her family was dead, had been for a thousand years, and that Andra was alone.
She was halfway back to the hut when a glimpse of something stopped her. Up on a hill, overlooking the village, was Andra’s empty cryo’tank.
* * *
It wasn’t so much a hill as it was a dune, and it took all of Andra’s remaining strength to climb it. The sand was dark orange in the late-evening light, and the sky stretched in a cloudless expanse. She collapsed next to her empty cryo’tank, which had been left in a puddle of ’protectant residue, the tubing and life-support systems lying in tangles, spilled intestines of a complex machine reduced to its basic parts. She hauled herself up, examining the open ’tank, running her fingers over the now-warm glass casing.
She touched it almost reverently. It had held her for nearly a thousand years. That was fifty times the longest human trials. Ten times longer than her family had been in stasis. Longer than her family had been dead.
In the distance, children squealed and shrieked as they chased an animal that looked like a cross between a fox and a dog. Colonists’ descendants playing with a space desert fox/dog in a society who worshipped her as a goddess.
She wiped the sweat beneath her eyes and tried to puzzle out what had happened, but she didn’t have enough pieces to create a whole picture. The Lacuna Athenaeum Corporation had put together a plan to begin colonizing other planets. More specifically, Dr. Alberta Griffin, the founder of LAC and certified tech genius, had instigated everything: from cryonics to shuttles to generation ships to terraforming. To the ’bots and AI that would oversee it all. She was everything Andra wasn’t. Tall, thin, blonde, intimidating, goal-oriented. Mom had introduced Andra to her boss a dozen times, and Dr. Griffin had been impressed with Andra’s natural abilities in STEM disciplines. She was less than impressed with Andra’s disinterest in them.
Words. That’s what Andra wanted to study. Words.
Sweat trickled down her back, the heat suffocating, each breath sticking in her throat, right above her sternum.
She was utterly alone—there was no one to tell her what to do, or even explain what was happening. She couldn’t rely on her mom to take care of everything, or even Acadia to boss her around. Because they’re dead, she thought. She couldn’t fix this; she could only understand, and there was only one place she could think to get any answers.
She bent over the data’screen at the head of her ’tank. If it had kept her alive for the last thousand years, surely it would still have all its data files intact as well. She fought the urge to use her currently useless neural’implant and instead lifted the shield panel that protected the ’display. It blinked to life, and the Lacuna Athenaeum Corporation’s infinite double-helix swirled on the screen. Andra tapped the controls until she found the holo’display. Everything was recorded when it came to cryonics. A person in stasis was practically dead, completely dependent on the cryo’techs, which scared people enough to pass legislation that every cryonics company had to keep records of every moment spent in stasis. So there had to be recordings of what happened to the ’tank over the last thousand years.
What happened to Andra over the last thousand years.
The records folder was easy enough to find. She filtered through the time stamps, skimming through October 2161, but there, the files abruptly stopped. No records after the month she’d been put into stasis. There weren’t even any spaces where the recordings had been. It was like they had never existed in the first place.
The squeals of the playing children faded, and a buzzing took its place. Andra stared at the empty folder long enough for the ’screen to blank and the now-holographic LAC logo to take its place.
Not that any of it mattered—the missing files, the broken ’tank. It wouldn’t change the fact that she’d overslept, that she was abandoned on a desert planet in the future, that her family was dead. Had they lived long, happy lives without her? Had Acadia gotten five degrees and ruled the world? Had Oz grown up to become a drone racer?
Andra had to take deep breaths to steady herself. None of this should have happened. There was no way she shouldn’t have woken up with the others, and it was next to impossible for there to be no record of what happened embedded into her ’tank. There were redundancies built into the system, checks and balances, fail-safes, protocols for every contingency.
Except, apparently, for this. Whatever this was.
She’d gone into stasis, flown across the galaxy, arrived at Holymyth, and then . . . what? Something had happened.
The sun was getting low on the horizon. The shadows lengthened. It was still hot. There was a scuffle of sand behind her as Zhade’s friend, the one with the kind eyes, made his way up the hill. When he reached her, he sat, cocking his knees and resting his arms on them. She thought she could wait him out, ignore him until he went away. But he sat in silence, watching the children play.
“I never wanted to come,” she said, surprised the words were leaving her mouth, that she was divulging this truth to a stranger. “Mom and I had a huge fight about it, and I was tempted to just not go through with the process. What could she do? I’d be dead by the time they found out. And instead, they—”
She cut off, holding back tears.
She’d argued with her mother countless times over joining the colony. To Isla, it was a given. Of course they would go to Holymyth. It was, after all, her life’s work. But it wasn’t Andra’s.
She wasn’t sure what her life’s work would be, but it felt tied to Earth. When she told her mother this, Isla had rolled her eyes. Andra’s place was where Isla told her it was. They were a family, and they would stick together. Andra couldn’t help but think her mom’s adamance was less out of motherly affection and more about her need for control.