After Matthew, Silas, and Adam finished their beers, the man bought them a round of shots. Before Matthew could protest, a small glass of brown liquid was sitting in front of him on the bar. The man clapped him on the shoulder.
“Whiskey,” he said. “Drink up, kid. Might be your last chance.”
The whiskey tasted awful, burning as it sloshed down Matthew’s throat to his stomach. He coughed, grimaced; the man laughed and bought him another, then cajoled him into drinking it down. As soon as the second shot hit Matthew’s stomach, his head went fuzzy. The lights on the ceiling seemed to spin around his head like moons. His stomach lurched. Mumbling some words of apology, Matthew stood and ran out into the blinding lights of the promenade.
He staggered along the walkway, dimly aware of people clearing to the right and left as he passed. Finally he spotted a wastebin, lurched to his knees, and grabbed it with both hands as he heaved into it, the smell of his own retch wafting back up to his nose.
Still gripping the bin with pale knuckles, Matthew rested his forehead on the back of his hand and gasped. He closed his eyes and listened to the footsteps of passersby sound distantly around him as if echoing through layers of water.
The taste of bile coated Matthew’s tongue. He lay sprawled in the promenade, his back propped against the wall and his arm still hooked over the edge of the wastebin in case his stomach heaved again. He took deep breaths, willing his gut to be still. Soon, his head cleared, and he opened his eyes to the harsh light. People glared at him and wrinkled their noses in disgust as they passed by.
Dripping with sweat and shame, Matthew dragged himself to his feet. He walked back toward the bar and stopped just outside, looking in the door. At the bar, Silas and Adam bellowed drunkenly at some joke the man was telling while he ordered yet another round of shots. They clinked their glasses together and threw their heads back in unison.
Matthew turned and walked away from the bar as fast as his feet would take him. He didn’t know where he was going. All he knew was that he wanted to be somewhere, anywhere else.
Let Silas and Adam have their fun. His friends would be better off without him.
Matthew’s stumbling feet took him nearer and nearer to the heart of the city, weaving through the network of indoor tunnels and windowed walkways. Gradually Matthew realized that he was walking to the cryocenter, the place where he would go to be frozen tomorrow.
The glass doors of the cryocenter opened with a hiss and let Matthew into a massive, abandoned waiting room. The only person there was a bored-looking woman sitting behind a curved metallic desk.
Matthew walked to the desk and held out his arm for scanning. The woman frowned at her screen.
“You’re not due until tomorrow. It really would be better to wait. Especially in your … state.” She wrinkled her nose as she caught the scent of alcohol and bile on Matthew’s breath. “Hangovers are never pleasant, but after a decade or two in the freeze, they’re apocalyptic.”
“I’m not here for that,” Matthew said. “I’m here to see someone.” He gave her the name.
The woman checked her computer, then stood. She led Matthew out of the reception room through a small metal door and into a long, fluorescent-lit corridor. The walls of the corridor were lined with white square compartments, each with a silver button set in the center. Each compartment was labelled with a name.
“You don’t have to show me,” Matthew said. “I’ve been here before.”
The woman returned to the waiting room, and Matthew kept walking down the corridor. The compartments on his left were arranged alphabetically by last name; he kept going and going until he reached the Ts.
Tilson, Abigail.
Matthew stopped in front of the compartment and pressed the button. With a hiss and a burst of cold steam, the cryochamber came open and extended into the corridor in front of him. He looked down at the person lying inside.
A woman. His mother.
The indicator panels on her cryochamber blinked green and yellow. Matthew gazed at her face through glass and clear blue cryoliquid. It looked exactly as it had a year ago when he and his sister put her in the freeze—gently wrinkled, laugh lines fanning out from the corners of her eyes and mouth, thin lips, tufts of gray in the hair at her temples.
Here, laid out in front of him, was Matthew’s reason for signing up for the Exo Project. Months before the Project had been announced, his mother had been diagnosed with cancer. It was everywhere; her body was riddled with it. The cure was simple. Just a short course of nanotreatments to get rid of the tumors. But the cure was also expensive: nearly one million units. They didn’t have the money. So they put her in cryostasis instead, to halt the spread of the disease.
Then, when the Exo Project came along, Matthew knew it was the solution: The reward money for the families of chosen volunteers was almost exactly the amount needed for his mother’s cancer treatments.
He could save his mother’s life—by sacrificing his own.
“Hi, Mom,” Matthew said now, his voice barely above a whisper. “How’s it going in there?”
It was no use—the cryotechnicians had told him that she was unconscious and couldn’t hear anything—but every time he visited his mother, he spoke to her frozen body all the same.
“Something’s happening tomorrow, Mom,” Matthew said. “Tomorrow I’m going into the freeze, like you. Then I’m going to get on a spaceship and be launched across the galaxy.”
Matthew bowed his head, looked at his hands. He smiled.
“I know if you were awake right now, you’d probably be yelling at me for making such a dumb decision. Honestly, I wish you were awake to try to talk me out of it. Not that I’m changing my mind, it’s just …”
Matthew’s voice thickened, choked. He pressed his lips together and was silent a few breaths before going on.
“I just wish you were here, is all. I can’t raise Sophie by myself. She’s thirteen now, you believe that? A teenager. She needs you, Mom—that’s why it has to be this way. I’ve tried my best to take care of her, but I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to raise a girl. She needs her mother.”
Matthew put his hands on the cryochamber, felt the cold of the ice through the glass.
“Don’t cry, okay?” he said, tears coming to his eyes now. “I know when you wake up and Sophie tells you what’s going on that you’re going to be upset, you’re going to blame yourself—but don’t, all right? This isn’t your fault. None of it. This was my choice. It’s not like there’s much left to live for here on Earth anyway. Who knows? Maybe I’ll find a habitable planet, then when everyone else comes, I can meet Sophie’s great-grandkids or something.”
He smiled.
“And if not …”
The smile left his face. He swallowed, cleared his throat.
“If not, I guess I’ll see you on the other side.”
Matthew straightened up, took his hands off the cryochamber.
“Good-bye, Mom,” he said. “I love you.”
Matthew hit the button to send his mother back into the wall with a hiss. He turned and walked down the corridor, then through the waiting room and out into the hot, dark night.