On the day Matthew had gone into cryostasis the technician told him that he wouldn’t feel anything, that going into the freeze would be painless, and that he wouldn’t dream—that he’d experience the light-years in cryostasis as lost time.
The technician had lied.
Matthew may have been frozen in cryostasis, but his mind was awake—awake and dreaming. While his body slept, images and memories of Earth, of his family, of his past, drifted through his mind like movies he had no choice but to watch, playing on a never-ending loop.
Matthew squinted into the sunlight. Wisps of cloud curled their fingers across the sky, broke, and reformed on the wind. At the edges of his vision, black birds perched on the bare fingers of the trees, squawking tentatively into the bright day, their voices confused and afraid.
“Is it brighter than usual?” Matthew’s mother asked. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe we shouldn’t be out here.”
“It’s fine. A little sun never hurt anyone,” Matthew’s father said.
Matthew looked down from the blinding white sky and met his father’s eyes. They all sat together on a blanket in the backyard of their old house, the one they lived in before everything went bad and they had to move into the compound at the edge of the city. His father looked back at Matthew and nodded, as though Matthew had asked him a question.
“We’re fine. Everything’s fine. Go on, eat your sandwich.”
Matthew took a bite, even though he wasn’t hungry. His father had made his turkey sandwich the wrong way, put mayonnaise on it instead of butter, added mustard, which Matthew didn’t like at all, and hadn’t cut off the crusts, as his mother always did. But Matthew knew not to complain. He’d sensed something forced in the way his father had come home from work with a wild smile plastered on his face and announced, his voice buoyant and just a little too loud, that they were going to have a picnic.
Matthew chewed, swallowed, and looked at his mother, who was taking small, nervous bites of her own sandwich. She saw him looking and smiled thinly.
“It’s fine,” she said. “We’re fine.”
But then Matthew’s father stood up and strode to where Sophie, only two years old, was playing in the dirt, and Matthew saw for the first time as he walked away the redness on the back of his neck.
“Mom, why—,” he began, meaning to ask why his father’s skin had turned so red, but something in his mother’s eyes told him to stop. “Why is the grass so brown?” he asked instead.
“I don’t know, honey,” his mother said. “I guess we just haven’t watered it in so long. What with the rationing and all.”
Matthew finished his sandwich while his father crouched and scooped up Sophie by the armpits, threw her squealing into the air and caught her again. He spun her around in a circle, laughing his wild laugh.
Then he collapsed into the dirt, Sophie still cradled in his arms.
Matthew’s mother gasped and ran to his father, put her hands lightly on his body just underneath his neck, patted him to feel for a pulse. She ignored Sophie, who’d had the wind knocked out of her when she fell to the ground and was taking a series of shuddering breaths, preparing to scream. Matthew walked to his sister and touched her shoulder, and at once Sophie cut the air with a wail.
“Dale,” his mother said, still ignoring both of them. “Dale, wake up!”
Matthew began to cry along with Sophie.
His mother’s eyes snapped up. “Stop crying,” she said. “You have to help me move him. You have to help me get him inside.”
There was a hole in Matthew’s memory between the backyard and the house—even in cryosleep, his mind couldn’t recall how he and his mother managed to get both his father and Sophie back inside. The next thing he remembered was sitting on the couch, his sister’s warm body pressed up next to his. All cried out, Sophie was now whimpering quietly. Across the room, the TV was on—their mother had turned it on and put them in front of it to keep them quiet while she attended to their father in the next room. But in her rush, she hadn’t taken the time to find a show Matthew and Sophie might like to watch, so it was the news on the screen, talking heads speaking sentences the two children were too young to understand.
“… reporting that the self-replicating nanites created to combat the effects of global warming backfired instead, eating through the atmosphere’s delicate ozone layer … ”
From the hallway came the sound of water running. Their mother drawing their father a cold bath.
“Goddammit, Dale, what the hell were you thinking?” Their mother was trying to whisper, but in her anger her hiss was loud enough for Matthew to hear in the living room.
“Just got a little lightheaded,” their father mumbled, awake now. “It’s nothing. Nothing to be worried about.”
“… a deadly convergence of rapid global heating and an alarming spike in levels of solar radiation … ”
“We’re moving,” their mother said. “That’s it. We’re moving.”
“What, to one of those … those compounds? You honestly think we can afford to buy our way into one of those?”
Sophie squeezed up closer to Matthew. The place on Matthew’s body where she pressed against him was hot and sweaty, but he put his arm around his sister and pulled her tight anyway.
“I’ve heard of some where you can pay by working,” their mother said. “Corporate-owned.”
“… Government sources advising people to stay inside unless absolutely necessary …”
“Those places are traps,” their father said. “Sign one of those contracts and they own you for life. It’s modern-day slavery.”
“You’d rather keep working construction? You’d rather work outside? You’ll die, Dale.”
“I won’t,” their father said.
Under Matthew’s arm, Sophie turned from the TV. Matthew looked down and met her gaze. Her eyes so big, so brown.
“Daddy okay?” Sophie asked.
“… the death of all life on planet Earth …”
Matthew felt himself beginning to cry again but fought the tears back, tried to be strong for his little sister.
“He’ll be fine,” Matthew said. “We’re fine. Everything’s fine.”
But everything wasn’t fine. Their father did die, one of the first victims of a new disease that would come to be known as “sun poisoning.” It was an affliction suffered by those who spent long hours outside, before radiation suits became commonplace. Their bodies unable to handle the extreme heat and solar radiation, victims of sun poisoning simply dropped dead—severely burned, dehydrated, organs failing.
And Matthew’s mother did, in spite of her husband’s objections, sign a contract with a company called Cheminex, a manufacturer of industrial solvents. The contract allowed her, Sophie, and Matthew to live in a company-owned compound at the edge of the city that was equal parts factory, apartment building, and shopping mall. Inside was a school for Matthew and Sophie, walking trails, stores, and indoor parks with fake grass where people threw balls for their dogs to fetch and pretended that everything was normal.
The only price for all this was that their mother had to work ten hours every day with toxic chemicals—and that Matthew and Sophie had to do their best to pretend they didn’t smell the chemicals on her when she came home at the end of the day and made them dinner.
Now Matthew’s dreaming skipped ahead in time, to the day that their mother revealed to them that she had cancer. She and Sophie sat together on the couch—Sophie crying, their mother sitting silent, rubbing his sister’s back in a small circle—while Matthew paced the room thinking, Not again, not again, not this again.
“It’s those chemicals,” Matthew said finally. “Those goddamn chemicals you work with every day.”
“Watch your language,” his mother said. “And besides, it’s not the chemicals. The bosses told me it’s not. My work is perfectly safe. This is just something that happens.”
“Cancer isn’t just something that happens,” Matthew said.
“Well, getting angry about it won’t help,” their mother said.
Matthew ignored her. “What we need is a plan. Time. If we can’t afford the treatments then maybe we can just slow the cancer down while we save up our money.”
“And how do you propose doing that?” their mother asked.
“I don’t know,” Matthew said. “Maybe …”
Another jump, and now Matthew was sitting in an examining room, holding his mother’s thin hand. He looked down at the hand and thought about how dry and cold and frail it felt, wondering if it would shatter to pieces in his if he squeezed it too hard. Sophie on the other side, propping their mother up, sniffling.
The technician on the other side of the room, busying himself at a metal table, then turning, holding a syringe aloft, tapping at the shaft with his latexed fingernail. The cryochamber waiting behind him.
Matthew squeezed his mother’s hand.
“We’ll get you out,” he said. “I promise. I don’t know how yet, but we’ll get you out.”
All the while, as these memories played through Matthew’s mind in a never-ending loop, his body lay in a cryochamber, sleeping beneath layers of blue ice. To either side, two more cryochambers lay horizontal, like coffins in a crypt—Dunne and Sam sleeping inside and dreaming their own dreams, perhaps, of the lives they’d left behind on Earth.
And meanwhile, just beyond the thin membrane of the hull, stars and nebulae and clouds of luminous space dust flew by in a blur as the ship’s lightspeed drive propelled them across the galaxy and toward their destination.