Date: 2016-10-24 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction
Description: A Caretaker Chronicles short story. After twenty-four years trapped in a nightmare en-route to the planet Minea, Taiver wakes up from stasis to find himself trapped in a malfunctioning pod, submerged in liquid, and unable to move. The ship’s lone caretaker, Hannah, tells Taiver that the sedatives no longer work on him, she can’t get him out of his stasis chamber, and Minea is still thirty years away. Taiver can’t even escape back to his nightmares, and his only companion may be the reason he had them in the first place. Stasis Dreams is a short story set in the universe of the bestselling Care

Stasis Dreams

Josi Russell

Future House Publishing

Future Worlds

Future House Publishing

Cover image copyright: Shutterstock.com. Used under license.

Text © 2016 Josi Russell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Future House Publishing at rights@futurehousepublishing.com.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover image adaptation by Jeff Harvey

Interior design by Emma Hoggan

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HE DIDN’T KNOW how many stasis dreams he’d had. They blurred together, merging and meshing like the confluence of the rivers he’d grown up next to, back on Earth. The bright images of his life before and the dark shadows of his fears flowed together, pulling him from one stasis dream to the next. He didn’t know exactly when one ended and the next began, or where he was in the current of them, but he knew, most of the time, that they were dreams. His consciousness told him so.

He knew this was a dream: that the wolves snapping at his outstretched hands were relics from a trip to the zoo when he was a child, where he’d seen a pack of the animals feeding on a recently delivered deer carcass. It was the only time he’d ever seen them, and now they’d come for him. But even with the gleam of their teeth and the snap of their jaws, he knew they weren’t real. He willed them to fade, let himself slip away from them as he could only do in a dream, and eased into a heavy darkness. Now he was floating. But this, too, quickly turned into a nightmare as he realized he was submerged.

Taiver fought for breath, tried to pull it in, but his mouth and nose and lungs were full of water. His belly was full of it. He tried to look around, but his eyes wouldn’t open. Something thick and heavy held his lids closed. He couldn’t orient himself, couldn’t remember how and why he had plunged into the water. Couldn’t remember jumping or sinking, couldn’t remember diving.

He tried to raise his hands, to wipe the sticky substance from his eyes, but his arms were still. He could feel them hanging there, heavy and useless.

His heart hammered. He could make no intentional movements. He opened his mouth to scream, but felt the weight of water in his throat. There was no pushing air through his vocal cords.

Immobilized, drowning, he tried to slip away from this dream. He tried to pull back from it as he had learned to do, but the sensations remained, imprisoning him with a constancy that began to unsettle him. He pulled his mind away from the weight on his body, tried to imagine himself flying or swinging or fishing or singing, but the paralysis didn’t dissipate.

His fingers twitched. He felt them, and felt resistance to their movement. And then he knew. This was not a nightmare. He couldn’t retreat from it because it was real. He was awake. Taiver tried to move his head, tried to kick or strike out, but his body only jerked spasmodically.

Taiver focused. As he did in the long hours in the operating room back home, he pushed his fear away and focused on a single thing. His fingers. He sent all his energy into curling his index finger, then his middle, his ring, his pinky. He made a fist, and he squeezed it until his knuckles burned with the strain.

You know where you are, he told himself. This is your stasis chamber. You’re going to Minea. You’re waking up. Waking up. Awake already in his mind, but his body still under the influence of the sedatives that had frozen him in time for, what, fifty years now?

The fire in his knuckles seeped up his arm. He could rotate his wrist now, bend his elbow. He channeled all his effort into one spasmodic movement. Lifting his hand, he felt his fingertips against his face.

Only they felt blunted and sticky, and his face felt hard and smooth.

The wax. He remembered now. He had seen the passengers who were already in stasis coated with a waxy substance to protect their skin from being too long in the stasis fluid. His face and hands and feet were still coated in it. It held his eyelids closed.

But to be awake and unable to open his eyes was unbearable, intolerable. He dragged his clumsy fingers across his left eye, then his right, feeling the wax shift and slide against itself. He dug at them, clawing until he felt the wax loosen. A hazy strip of pink light sliced into his consciousness as his left eye began to open, then caught halfway, the lashes still pasted together.

Taiver scraped and peeled, and as his lid sprang free, he suddenly felt the sting of the thick stasis fluid in his open eye. He felt the glob of wax float downward, out of his line of sight. He blinked furiously, working at his other eye. He stripped the wax from it and flicked it from his fingers, still blinking.

As his eyes cleared, he realized that he was staring through the crystalline fluid and through the front of the chamber at the delicate girl in her stasis chamber directly across from his, on the other side of the aisle.

He remembered seeing her, when he stepped into his stasis chamber. She was already asleep then, and her peaceful repose had given him courage. He watched her now, though his vision was wavy from the fluid and the curved glass doors. She was not struggling. She was still peacefully sleeping.

Taiver tried to get used to not breathing. Tried to stop panicking. But as he glanced at the few other passengers he could see along the row across from him, and as he focused his attention on those to the right and left of him, he saw that they were all still sleeping. Something was wrong. He was sure that this was not how awakening was supposed to feel.

And then, there she was. A soldier in a sharp grey uniform that was creased and pressed. He remembered seeing her. She was the Caretaker of this ship. A woman nearly his own age, stepping brusquely down the aisle. She didn’t look around at the passengers, just walked past on her way to somewhere else.

He tried to cry out, but he had no voice.

Taiver screamed silently a single word: Help.

***

When he realized that she wasn’t coming back, Taiver’s muscles loosened in despair. His hand, held rigid by his face for several minutes, spasmed and then drifted back down through the fluid to rest at his side. He stopped fighting the paralysis, stopped straining to make his body move. He simply floated, heavy and immobile, watching the pink light from below play through the crystal fluid around him.

He felt the slow rolling of hours passing. He worked intermittently on gaining more control over his hand and arm. Everything else was still immobilized.

When she came by again, Taiver barely had time to react. He saw her crossing his field of vision, like a reflection moving through a still pool, and he reached out to her convulsively. His palm thudded against the slick front of the chamber, and he heard its reverberation dully, rippling through the fluid.

She stopped. He strained, pulling his clumsy hand across the glass.

As her eyes met his, her detached expression shattered. He heard her speaking, but her voice was muffled.

“Computer,” she said, never taking her eyes off Taiver’s, “increase sedation in chamber two seven four one by three percent.” She gave a code, a string of numbers that meant nothing to Taiver.

He heard a small click above him and drops of orange liquid fell through the clear stasis fluid and dissipated around him. For a moment, the fluid tasted intensely bitter in his mouth, and he gagged involuntarily. Her eyes darted down to his palm, still pressed frantically to the glass.

“It’s okay.” She placed her hand on the other side of the glass, against his. “You’ve just awakened a bit early. You’re going to start feeling sleepy, then you’ll be back to sleep before you know it. We’ve still got a long trip ahead. You don’t want to wake up yet.”

But Taiver did. He wanted out. What he didn’t want was to sink back into the current of his endless dreams. He could not face that pressing darkness. He tried to speak again, forgetting that he was filled with fluid. He fixed his eyes on hers and mouthed the one word that kept streaking through his mind: Out.

The soldier shook her head quickly. “Not yet.”

She glanced at a screen hovering beside her, and Taiver recognized a look of puzzlement. He knew that look. It was his own look when a patient perplexed him. She spoke again.

“Are you sleepy?” she asked.

Taiver tried to shake his head, felt only a slight twitch in his neck, and mouthed No.

“Computer, increase sedation in chamber two-seven-four-one by an additional three percent.”

“Sedation at a maximum, Ms. Spence.”

“How can that be?” She kept one hand on the glass, and used her free hand to scroll through a few screens. Taiver’s arm muscles, aching, began to tremble. He wouldn’t be able to hold his hand up much longer.

When her eyes found his again, there was an apology in them. “I’m sorry—” she glanced back at the screen, reading his name. “—Taiver. Listen, my name is Hannah. I’m the caretaker here. It seems you’ve developed a tolerance for the sedative. To all three kinds of liquid sedative on board, actually.”

He felt his face contort in bewilderment. He wanted to be glad that his facial muscles could move now, but he could only think about what she had just said. He tried to communicate his question with his eyes.

“What does that mean?” She looked away. “I’m sorry. It means that there’s no way to put you back to sleep.”

Taiver felt relief wash over him. At least he would get out now. In fact, she was typing a code into the keypad on his chamber now.

The chamber clicked and he heard the voice of the computer as it spoke to her outside. “Access denied.”

“What do you mean?” the soldier barked. “Initiate awakening sequence in chamber two-seven-four-one immediately.”

“Awakening sequence cannot be initiated within eight hours of sedation,” the computer said.

Eight hours. He would be here, submerged, for eight hours? He twitched his neck again, trying to shake his head. His arm gave out and his hand sank once again to his side.

When he had contemplated traveling to Minea in one of these chambers, he had hated the idea of being asleep underwater for so long. He had no idea then how much worse it would be to be awake underwater.

She didn’t give up. She pulled a little pry bar from her pocket and tapped the seal here and there, trying again to initiate the awakening sequence. But the computer overrode her every time.

Finally, she turned away and strode several paces down the aisle, out of Taiver’s sight. She couldn’t, couldn’t leave now. He felt his powerlessness wash over him again.

But she didn’t stay away long.

“It’s going to be fine,” she said, kindly. “We’ll just have to wait a little while, then we’ll get you right out.”

Taiver closed his eyes against the finality of it. The weight in his chest and the ever-present pressure of the fluid was disorienting. Though he knew that the fluid carried oxygen directly into his body, he felt acutely the absence of his breath. His mind rebelled, and he felt his body twitching more strongly, then twisting.

His paralysis was lifting. He moved with increasing intensity. He stretched, then began to pitch and thrash. As his muscles regained their strength, he struck out at the front of the chamber, pounding it with his fists, kicking at it with his bare feet. They slipped against it, still slick with their wax coating, and he clawed and peeled more of the thick covering off his face and neck.

Fine bubbles rose around him as he churned in the fluid, and he became, finally, aware of a pounding on the glass that was not his own. He stilled, and as the bubbles cleared, he saw the soldier, clamoring for his attention, shouting at him.

“Stop!” she cried. “If you damage this, it could shut down completely. Do you want to drown yourself?”

I am already drowning, he mouthed, relishing the flexibility of his face, the ability to form the complex words with his mouth, even if there was still no sound.

She was sharp. “Not like you will be if you damage the chamber. Right now you still have enough oxygen to throw your little tantrum. That’s not going to be true if you rip the caps off the aeration ducts.” She gestured downward, to several ports that clicked open and shut at intervals.

Taiver calmed, but kept his joints bending and twisting, trying to shake off the weight of the water and the years of sleep.

“You’re just going to have to calm down,” she said, her voice commanding. “I know it’s not comfortable, but you’re alive and you’re safe as long as you let the machine continue to do its job.”

I can’t stay here. His anger was gone, replaced by desperation. Please.

She understood what he was saying and she looked at him a long moment. He saw in her eyes compassion. “Listen, I’ll get you out as soon as I can.”

He saw that she was leaving, and he pounded the glass frantically. She turned back and he pressed both palms to the glass. Don’t go.

She pressed her hands to the other side of the door, then leaned down, peering at the door handle, and fidgeting with it. Taiver heard a scraping sound as she tested the handle. She straightened. “I have to go report this. Maybe they can give me some idea of how to get you out faster.”

Who?

“UEG headquarters. We have a brand new Real-Time Communications system on board, and I think I can get us some answers. But you’re going to have to be patient. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

He wanted to beg, wanted to keep her here, but if she could find out a way to shorten this torture, then a few minutes alone would be worth it. He nodded his assent.

After she left, Taiver turned completely around in his chamber, to face the padded backing. He braced his feet against it, pressing his back against the door, and used all his power trying to push the door open.

His muscles burned as he pushed. He was elated as he felt the door begin to shift. A loud thud shook the fluid around him and the door slid slightly sideways, but as he turned to inspect it he saw the seal around it remained intact. A ratcheting sound initiated in the area of the handle, as if it were trying to open, but couldn’t. Maybe he had jammed it. After several loud pops, the door went silent and remained sealed.

Taiver sank to the bottom, pulling his knees up to his chest to make room to sit on the floor. Here he heard the thrum of the chamber’s fans and the hiss of various compounds releasing into the fluid.

His skin had started to burn slightly, and he began to wonder if he shouldn’t have removed the wax. He closed his eyes.

***

Taiver had no idea what a minute felt like anymore. Without the natural rhythm of his breath, he couldn’t determine how much time was passing. He grasped the mechanical rhythms around him, trying to reorient himself.

He began to grow used to the sequence: over the steady hum of the lights, the ports clicked in succession. They were followed by the whoosh of the fresh fluid entering from the top of the chamber and the whir of the fans at the bottom pulling the fluid out into the cleaning system. And then the cycle repeated. He found himself counting the cycles: ports, new fluid, fans; ports, new fluid, fans. The repetition was calming. He tipped his head back against the side of the chamber, eyes closed, listening.

He first heard the hesitation during the eightieth cycle, and it interrupted his counting. It was just a slight deceleration in the sound of one fan. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been focusing on them for so long. On the next cycle it sounded fine, but the next it paused again, longer this time. And on the next, it stalled completely. The smooth whir turned into a whine as the fan strained to spin. Taiver scooted away from it, hoping he wasn’t blocking something important. He looked at the grate covering the outtake and saw the problem.

There, smeared across the fine bars that covered the opening and trailing into the duct, was the thick wax he’d peeled off. The fan whined, and Taiver knew it was overheating. He grabbed at the wax, clearing it as best he could from the grate. But it had been drawn down into the system now, and the fan sputtered from it.

Taiver pushed off from the bottom, straightening into a standing position as he floated up. He looked up and down the row, but he couldn’t see Hannah.

The whine of the fan grew more intense, and the whoosh of fluid began to be erratic. The ports began clicking in a random order. He heard, through the softening of the fluid, the sound of an alarm somewhere outside his chamber. The pink light shifted to red.

Taiver began pushing on the door more fervently. He didn’t know what would happen when that fan stopped for good, and he didn’t want to find out.

“Critical failure,” the muffled voice of the computer proclaimed. “Chamber two seven four one. Waking sequence initiated.”

Taiver paused. He heard a pop. Looking down, Taiver saw a small drain slide open beneath his feet. Taiver looked up. The fluid which had filled the chamber was draining, leaving a small gap of open air at the top that both exhilarated and frightened him.

Taiver tried to remind himself that the chamber was made to do this. He watched as the top of the fluid reached his hair, and he stood very still as it began to drop to his forehead. Taiver began to feel heavier.

There was a new sound in the chamber, a hissing coming from above him. Fresh air was being pumped into the chamber. As the fluid dropped past his eyes, Taiver blinked rapidly. His vision cleared.

The sudden weight of his head left him dizzy, and he leaned against the soft backing of the chamber. The first convulsive cough surprised him as the fluid dropped below his chin and began running out his nose and mouth. His chest burned, and tears ran down his face.

He felt intense pressure in his ears. As he looked up, he saw Hannah outside the chamber.

“It’s the compression sequence,” she called. “It’s meant to get your lungs clear and help you breathe normally again.”

He couldn’t respond. He coughed again and again, and the pressure in the chamber increased like a fist, squeezing the liquid from his lungs in conjunction with the coughing. It was excruciating. It felt, to him, more like drowning than being submerged had felt. He was being crushed, and he closed his eyes against the compression.

Gradually, the pressure lessened, and he tried to gasp, but only succeeded in coughing. He felt the weight of the fluid still in his lungs. He couldn’t inhale. His mind went foggy from the lack of oxygen, and he was grateful when he felt the pressure of the chamber increasing again and forcing more fluid from his lungs.

Taiver was trembling, collapsed against the backing, his energy spent from coughing. But on the fourth compression cycle, as the furious grip of the chamber relaxed, he drew in his first convulsive breath. His lungs stretched to capacity, and he felt exhilarated.

He drank the air, gulped it, made himself sick on it, and rid his belly of more fluid. He breathed more steadily then, but didn’t lose the delicious feeling of breathing.

The chamber warmed as the liquid continued to drain. He felt the remaining wax melting and sliding off his skin. Heated, it mixed with the fluid and ran harmlessly out of the vents. He heard the fan run smooth again.

As the last of the fluid gurgled away beneath his feet, a cool mist filled the chamber. Taiver’s ears finally adjusted and he heard Hannah’s voice with startling clarity.

“That’s the moisturizer,” she called from outside. “It’s nearly the last step in the awakening sequence. The chamber will dry you next, and circulate the air to clear the airborne sedative—which hasn’t worked on you, either—and then it will release the door. Hang on.”

Taiver’s body was weakened. He could barely support himself. He looked out the curved glass front into Hannah’s eyes. Her concern was evident.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You were supposed to be asleep through all of that.”

Taiver shook his head. He couldn’t yet find his voice, and he didn’t have the energy to try. He glanced down at the door handle.

Hannah followed his gaze.

“It should be ready to open any minute,” she said encouragingly.

There was nothing more to say, and Taiver got the feeling that she didn’t speak without a reason. Was that a product of being alone on the ship all these years? Or maybe it was her military training? Either way, he was grateful for her steadying presence now.

Taiver heard the tap of the lock as it began to disengage. But his excitement was soon curbed as he heard the familiar grind of the ratcheting sound that it had made before.

Hannah crouched and peered at it, punching a code in. Nothing happened. She ran her fingers around the seal and looked at him. “The door’s shifted. It’s jammed the seal release.”

Taiver reached for the seal and explored it hoping for a breach. It was solid. He clawed at it and pushed on it. Hannah pulled on the door handle. Their combined strength did nothing.

He pounded the door with his fists. Maybe he could break out.

“That’s no good,” she said impatiently. “These chambers are made to withstand almost anything. They’ll remain intact if the ship crashes and they’re spread across the face of a planet. They’ll float in space for centuries without compromising. We’ve got to think of a way to break the seal, not the chamber.”

Taiver felt the word rising, felt his mouth forming it. He was unprepared, though, for the pain he felt in his throat as he spoke it. It came out in a gravelly whisper, through vocal cords unused for decades: “How?”

Hannah blinked in surprise at the sound. “I’m not sure. But we’ll figure it out. And I just talked to headquarters. They have teams circulating among the remaining ships, converting them to the new chip drives. I’ve put in a request to be moved up on that list. We’ll get you out, and they’ll be here to do the conversion, and then we’ll be to Minea almost thirty years ahead of schedule!” She was trying to cheer him, but realizing that they weren’t even halfway yet had the opposite effect.

He swallowed and croaked, “How long have we traveled?”

“About twenty-four years.”

“It seemed longer,” he said. His voice was gaining strength, and the splitting pain had dulled to an ache.

“You don’t have to tell me about that,” she said, a hint of bitterness in her voice. Taiver looked at her. Of course, hers had been the rougher journey by far. She had been awake all this time.

“Sorry,” he said.

She smiled and shook her head. “You don’t have to be. I was well-compensated, and I’ve done a lot of research that I would never have been able to do without all this time. I’m amazed at what I’ve accomplished. In a way, it’s a gift: a whole lifetime free of distractions.”

Taiver had never thought of it that way. The door ceased its grinding, and the lock lay silent between them. Hannah summoned the computer and initiated a troubleshooting sequence.

“It will take a few minutes to process,” she said, “but it can probably override the lock.”

Taiver was breathing easily now. This wasn’t such a bad way to spend his first few minutes awake. He glanced around at the other sleeping passengers. They would have so many more dreams to live through before they reached Minea. But these drives sounded interesting.

“The drives?” he managed.

“Right. Apparently they’ve done some innovations on Minea and made some discoveries. It’s changing the way we look at travel—the way we look at the whole universe, really. And they say their first priority is to retrofit all the ships that are on their way, to get us there more quickly.”

Fewer years. Fewer dreams. That, Taiver thought, was a very good thing.

***

A full day had passed, and Taiver’s body was weary. There were only three positions he could take in the chamber—standing, kneeling, or sitting with his knees drawn up—and he had moved through all three multiple times.

He found he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t bring himself to close his eyes. And he was ravenously hungry.

Hannah had stayed outside his chamber except to check on her experiments and to communicate with headquarters on how to get the chamber open.

Now, she was kneeling outside the chamber, trying to shift the door back with a small pry bar.

Taiver sat slumped against the back of the chamber, watching her.

“It’s not going to budge,” she said, sitting back with a defeated look on her face.

Taiver was tired of thinking about it. He was tired of the cycle of hope and disappointment that had followed every plan they’d concocted. He looked at her. How tired must she be, after twenty-four years in the confines of her own prison?

“Is it awful?” he asked. “Being on your own for so long?”

Her eyes met his. She had an open, direct gaze. “I’ve always been on my own, Taiver. It didn’t begin when I stepped on this ship.” There was the ghost of sadness in her voice. “My parents were so caught up in VR that they barely knew I was around. I was taken away from them when I was five because they hadn’t fed me for three days.” She shrugged. “I was raised by the state and joined the military when I was sixteen. Honestly, I was the perfect fit for this job.”

She sat and leaned against the door. Taiver moved to that side of the chamber, leaning against the glass beside her. He knew loneliness. Since Steph had left, he’d had some rough days. His whole trip to Minea was an attempt to leave that emptiness behind and fill his life with something new.

“You weren’t afraid?” he asked, remembering his own apprehension about boarding this ship.

She gestured around. “Afraid of what? The ship’s a safe place. Warm. Food on demand. Plenty of entertainment. It’s not like there are wolves waiting to attack around every corner.” She laughed.

“Sure, but—” Taiver stopped and looked at her. That was an odd image to select.

“Wait, wolves?” he asked.

She bit her lip and looked away. So it wasn’t his imagination.

“How do you know about the wolves?” Taiver leaned away from the glass and studied her more closely for a moment.

“You might as well know,” she said as she met his gaze. “I’ve seen your dreams, Taiver.”

He didn’t respond. It seemed not only impossible but also repugnant.

She must have seen the shock in his eyes, because she spoke quickly, pushing her pale hair out of her eyes. “Don’t worry. We just scan brainwaves and monitor vitals. It doesn’t hurt the subjects at all.”

“Subjects?” He glanced around. “You mean the passengers?”

“Passengers,” she corrected. “It doesn’t hurt them.”

“What doesn’t hurt them?”

“The study. We’ve learned so much already. I’m not actually that excited for the new drive, because I’m seeing some really interesting patterns, and I’d love to know if they continue.”

“You watch people’s dreams?” he asked. “How?”

“Brain waves, I said.” She, too, sat away from the glass, and her shoulders straightened.

“You can’t see pictures with brain waves.”

“We have some high-tech equipment. There are new psychodiodes that transmit what the brain is seeing. It’s really fascinating.”

“Why?”

“Because this is a study ship, Taiver. Because we had fifty years of uninterrupted observation to unlock the magic of sleep. We could find out how the body repairs itself during sleep, how the brain processes trauma, and how it stores memories. If it is possible to learn in stasis. We could find more reliable information in five years on this ship than we could in a hundred working with waking subjects.”

“But they don’t know you’re watching.”

“There was a clause in the paperwork. Everyone signed it.”

“But that document is eighty pages long. And I don’t remember the word ‘spying’ in it anywhere.”

She rose and walked around in a tight circle in front of the chamber. “It’s not spying. Anymore than a doctor who takes an EKG is ‘spying’ on your heart. It’s observing. It’s cataloging. It’s study.”

Taiver rose, too, though the effort winded him. “You’ve seen all my dreams, then?”

Her cheeks colored. She knew what he meant. “I don’t watch them all,” she said. “I’ve only seen yours because I was reviewing your case to find out what might have made you wake up early, how you developed the tolerance for the sedative. Mostly the computer analyzes and categorizes the dream data, and all I see are conclusions.”

Taiver was a doctor. He knew what the process of discovery looked like. “And what do you do with the conclusions?” he asked pointedly.

“I replicate them. I try to challenge them. I adjust things and observe some more.” She stepped up to the glass to face him. “Look, I’m not going to justify the program to you. It’s legal, and it’s valuable.”

“But is it ethical?” He felt the words snarl from him, in the same tone he’d used when he’d asked himself that question two months before he’d given up his position and applied to go to Minea.

She turned and walked away, leaving him seething in the chill of his empty stasis chamber.

***

Taiver could no longer stand. He was weakened and dehydrated. His head felt heavy against the cool glass, and he barely had strength to open his eyes when he heard the screech of metal above him.

Hannah was standing on a crate outside the door, using the prybar to remove the panel above his chamber. Beside her, on the floor just outside his door, he could see a small pile of supplies.

He fixed his eyes on a pouch of water, like a clear bubble. He reached for it, but his hand bumped the glass.

“I’m going to try to pull out the air hose and drop a couple of these things through the vent to you,” Hannah said, her eyes full of concern.

He tried to find the indignation he’d been nursing since she left yesterday, but it had dissipated in the glare of his thirst and hunger. He nodded. “Thanks,” he said. The gravel was back in his voice, and his mouth felt dry and rough.

The panel clanged to the ground outside, and he saw her rip the pipe free. Looking directly above him, he saw her fingers as she reached inside and the shining tips of a spreader tool as she bent the rods of the grate, making an oblong opening.

She jumped down, snatched up the water, and dropped it through the hole.

Taiver reached up just in time to catch the pouch clumsily against his chest. Without pausing, he jammed the opening into his mouth and greedily drank it.

It was pure and cold, and the taste of it revived him just a little.

Hannah was smiling outside, and she dropped in another water pouch and a pouch of cherry-red gelatin. It was a nutrition supplement that he gave his patients back home, and he was glad to see it. He slurped it from the pouch gratefully.

The food and water gave Taiver strength. More than that, they gave him hope. This was no life, being imprisoned here, but it was a chance at survival, which was more than he’d had an hour ago.

“Thanks, Hannah,” he said, sincerely.

She nodded. “I know how it is to be hungry.”

He wondered about her, tried to imagine her as a child, as a young adult, tried to imagine the two decades she’d spent here. But that drew him back to her research, and he found new fuel for his anger.

“Do you induce the dreams?” he asked, unable to restrain his question.

Hannah’s expression hardened. “Sometimes,” she admitted. She wasn’t deceptive. He gave her credit for that.

“How?”

“With different compounds, released into the fluid.”

“You drug them. Have you stopped since our conversation?” Part of him hoped she had, that he had helped her see she couldn’t do this to people.

“Listen, Taiver, I just got word that the refurbishment team is coming to do the drive. My fifty-three year study just got cut in half. I have spent twenty years on this research, and I’m not stopping now just because you try to guilt me into abandoning it. I have less time than I thought. I have to work twice as hard to get the last data—as much of it as I can—before they get here.”

Taiver felt sick, and he was sure it wasn’t just the reintroduction of semi-solid nutrition, though that would take some getting used to as well. For the first time in several hours, Taiver looked past Hannah to the sleeping girl across the aisle. Her face was contorted into a grimace. She flinched involuntarily, and her mouth opened and closed as if she were crying out for help.

Then he looked at the others. They were all twitching, shifting, tormented.

He turned a burning gaze to Hannah. “Stop this.”

She shook her head. “They’re just dreams, Taiver. The passengers will barely remember them when they awaken.” Her eyes were pleading, and she knelt beside the glass, pressing her hands against it. “There’s so much at stake, Taiver. So much good that can come of this.”

“What good?” he asked, pushing himself to his knees and meeting her eyes. “What good?”

“I’m on the verge, Taiver, of figuring out how the brain processes trauma. If I can work out the last synaptic response, I’ll know how to induce the process that allows us to file and forget the pain we’ve experienced. I’ll be able to erase painful memories from people’s minds as easily as they forget a particularly disturbing nightmare. We can be free of it almost as soon as it happens.”

Her slip into the first person was not lost on him, and he saw, then, the seed of personal investment that lay behind her research. She wanted her own pain gone, and she saw these people as the river that would carry it away. Every researcher knew that fire, the fear or pain or love or anger that drove them through the most challenging research. And as he saw it in her, he knew that he could not talk her into abandoning the project. It was too personal to her. She would not stop the experiments willingly. The only way to help these people was to find the controls and manually end their nightmares. And he couldn’t do that from in here.

She knew that, too. He saw it in her eyes. She turned and gathered several more pouches, then stepped quickly onto the crate and pushed them in. They fell behind him, and he remained kneeling on the ground, looking up at her. For the second time since they’d met, he begged her.

“Please, Hannah. Don’t do this. Don’t make them go through this.” She was moving away now. “Please. Look at them.” But she moved down the row as she had the first time he’d seen her, looking straight ahead, on her way to somewhere else.

***

Taiver didn’t see her again, not for days. When she returned to feed him, he spent the encounter pleading, then raging. When she went away, his hands hurt from beating at the door.

He had regained strength, and other than the muscle cramps that came from being confined, he felt good. He had tried using the rigid straw ends of the pouches to pry underneath the seal, but that only left him with a pile of broken pouches. As he worked, he kept his eyes averted from the other passengers, whose torturous and fitful sleep, he was sure, would haunt him for the rest of his life.

And it was not just their faces he saw. It was, too, the faces of his own patients, the Alpha group of Caretakers, whose training he had overseen, back at the Callisto Base on Earth. His imprisonment in this chamber was, he knew, fitting recompense for the isolation training he had designed to ready them for their work of watching over the passengers on the stasis ships.

At first, his design for the training had been theoretical, an enjoyable brain-game that he’d published in a journal as pure speculation. How would such conditions effect a human being? And when the UEG had come to him and asked him if he would create it in detail at their training facility, his ego had overruled his ethics.

He had long argued that it was effective. That regardless of how the method looked from the outside, it created Caretakers with the mental fortitude to endure half a century alone in space.

But Steph had seen it: the cruelty of it. She had met the recruits who hadn’t made it through the training, the ones who had broken down and carried with them the paranoias and rages that the training had given them. Steph had seen it, and when she had seen what he had done, she couldn’t stay with him. Her leaving made him see it, too.

At what cost, then, came all of humanity’s achievements? For every gain a loss, for every victory a price. And who was qualified to weigh those, to decide which direction the scale should tip?

***

When the heavy boots sounded through the passenger hold, Taiver was standing with his hand through the bent grate at the top of the chamber, feeling around to find any hope of releasing the seal.

Surprise crossed the features of the UEG engineering team that discovered Taiver. He knew that they had been sent, but hadn’t known what they were meant to do.

“You’re awake?” a broad-faced kid asked, his tawny hair falling into his eyes. “How?”

“It’s a long story,” Taiver said. “Can you guys get me out of here?”

“Good thing we showed up,” the kid said, opening a kit filled with tools. “I’m Reese.” He called up the screen and read for a moment. He ran a hand around the seal, then stopped and leaned close to the chamber’s handle.

“Here’s your problem,” he said, reaching down. There was a scraping sound, and Taiver staggered backwards as the door suddenly swung open. In front of him, framed by the dark seal of the gaping door, the young engineer stood holding up Hannah’s little pry bar.

“Where’s the soldier that was here? Hannah?”

Reese looked puzzled. “She’s gone. Went to UEG headquarters on Minea a couple hours ago. But don’t worry, we’re staying with you, and once we have the chip drive online, we’ll be at Minea before you know it.”

So she had taken her research and fled, then. Taiver stumbled out of the chamber, reveling in the broad expanse of space around him. The young engineer braced him up with a hand under his elbow. Taiver looked directly, for the first time in days, at the writhing forms of the other passengers.

“Do you know how to fix their fluid mixture?” he asked urgently. “It’s been tampered with.”

“Well, sure.” The kid nodded.

“We need to do it. Now.”

“Sir, we can’t—”

“Check it,” he barked, his breath coming fast and hard. “It’s been tampered with.”

Reese turned back to the screen and glanced sideways at Taiver. “You’re right.” The kid tapped his comm link. “Sir, I’m in the passenger hold, and the fluid’s all messed up. We need to get it back to spec.”

There ensued a cross check, followed by the order to reset the system.

As ribbons of new fluid began to circulate around the sleepers in their chambers, Taiver felt his heart begin to slow. The passengers down the row calmed and hung motionless, sleeping peacefully, as he was used to seeing them. They would awaken. Minea was close. And someday, somewhere, Hannah would learn, as he had, the great price of her new knowledge.

Taiver didn’t know why he glanced over. He didn’t know why, in the heady excitement of his freedom and in the moment that things were being put right, he let his gaze settle on the girl across the aisle. But there, through the crystalline stasis fluid, he saw her deep brown eyes, open wide and terrified.

This story comes from the world of the bestselling Caretaker Chronicles. If you liked it, get the book that started it all here.

Fifty years in space—alone.

Ethan Bryant was supposed to fall asleep on a ship leaving Earth and wake up fifty years later with his family on the planet Minea. Instead, after the ship’s caretaker—the lone human in charge of monitoring the ship’s vital systems—suddenly died, the ship’s computer locked Ethan out of his stasis chamber and gave him the job. That was five years ago. Five years of checking to make sure everything runs smoothly on a ship Ethan knows almost nothing about.

Who wouldn’t dread the years ahead? Who wouldn’t long for their once-bright future now stolen away?

Ethan is resigned to his fate, until the ship suddenly wakes up another passenger: a beautiful engineer who, along with Ethan, soon discovers a horrible secret—a navigation room hidden from even the ship’s computer. The ship is not bound for Minea—but to somewhere far more dangerous.

With the ship nearing its sinister destination, Ethan soon learns he is the only one who holds the key to saving all 4,000 passengers from a highly-advanced, hostile alien race.

Before You Go

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About the Author

Josi Russell’s science fiction novels explore familiar human relationships in unfamiliar contexts. She is captivated by the fields of linguistics, mathematics, and medicine, by the vast unknown beyond our atmosphere, and by the whole adventure of being human.