The man with the lab coat led them to a bright, sterile hallway and instructed them to each find a room. Matthew picked a door and went inside. An empty cryochamber sat waiting.
A white-coated cryotechnician walked in and instructed him to sit on the examining table. Matthew hoisted himself up. The technician checked his vitals.
“Everything seems normal,” the tech said. “Though you’re a little dehydrated.”
Matthew cleared his throat. “I had a few drinks last night.”
The tech chuckled. “Can’t blame you there.”
He prepared a syringe of clear red liquid.
“What’s that?” Matthew asked.
“It prepares you for the freezing process. Changes the molecular makeup of your cells. Freezing live tissue isn’t easy, you know. At low enough temperatures, the cells have the tendency to break down, sustain damage.” He tapped the syringe with his forefinger. “This protects you. Helps your cells make it through the freezing process intact.”
Without rolling up Matthew’s sleeve, the technician injected the liquid into Matthew’s arm. Afterward, Matthew studied the place where the liquid had entered his body, flexed and unflexed his hand.
“I don’t feel any different.”
“You’re not supposed to. That’s the point: your body functions exactly the same—only now we can freeze you.”
He guided Matthew away from the examining table and led him to the cryochamber. Matthew lay down inside, and the technician began attaching biostat lines to his chest and arms.
“Okay. Now. What’s going to happen is, I’m going to sedate you. Then I’m going to fill the pod with cryoliquid. It’s a high-nutrient mix, that’s what’ll preserve you while you’re in stasis. The suit will conduct the liquid directly to your skin and help you absorb nutrients.”
“Will I feel anything?”
The tech’s chin flattened and he shook his head. “Nah. Not after I sedate you. You won’t dream, either. Next thing you know, you’ll be up and orbiting at your destination. Got it?”
Matthew nodded. The technician disappeared for a moment, and Matthew squinted at the bright lights pointing down at him. When the technician returned, he was holding another syringe, and Matthew’s heart took a leap in his chest.
Time was running out, Matthew’s future disappearing into the point of that needle like water down a drain, light into a black hole. As soon as the syringe pierced his skin, it would be over. There’d be no turning back. He’d never see his mother or his sister, never hang out with Silas or Adam, never set foot on Earth again.
“Wait!” he said.
“Sorry,” the technician said, already squeezing the plunger to send the sedative surging into Matthew’s arm.
Matthew’s heart slowed, and the bright lights in the room began to fade. His eyes slid closed.
He fell into a blackness so deep it was as though he was swimming through oil. Then, slowly, he became aware of sensations—sights, sounds, smells, feelings. He sensed them through a long distance, as if he had a second body, a second skin, a second set of eyes and ears lying in the cryochamber.
Strange. Hadn’t the technician just told him he shouldn’t be able to feel anything?
Matthew heard a hissing sound as the chamber closed. Liquid streamed into the pod and began to lap at his fingers, his thighs, the sides of his head. Filling the pod, it streamed over Matthew’s shut eyelids and pooled coolly in his nostrils.
Matthew heard a beeping sound and the liquid started growing colder around him, first gradually, then quickly. The cold pricked at his skin. Then it stabbed. He felt like screaming, like jerking his limbs and clawing his way out of the cryochamber, but his body wouldn’t listen to him. The pain grew worse and worse—but at the moment when it became unbearable, it began to subside. The pain receded like a flashlight becoming dim in a vast dark tunnel, then shrunk to nothing.
He slept.