Son of Demeter
I was always told that hypersleep was a blank, black void, absent of everything. I wouldn’t think anything, nor would I feel it. I’d wake up as if no time had passed but fifty years would have gone by. Being a colonist aboard an ark ship was sleepy work.
But I was awake.
I saw nothing, but I felt a lot. And perceived more.
The walls of the pod pressed against me. The tight underclothing we wore pressed tighter than the walls. The scent of chemicals piped into my nostrils with tubes made the whole thing feel clinical. And a still blackness consumed everything.
I tried opening my eyes, though they wouldn’t—couldn’t—open. But I knew what I would see. Or at least, I assumed I knew. Less than an inch from my face would be the glass window. Someone would be able to look in at me if they were awake and needed to check my vitals. Since I wasn’t a member of the crew, I’d be asleep the entire fifty years and then I’d be back with my daughter again. Just the two of us against the world, ready to take on anything.
Was I really awake?
Was I dreaming instead?
I tried pinching myself, but my hand didn’t respond. I was locked in my coffin-like space so tightly, I couldn’t move my hand if I wanted to.
And I wanted to.
Was that something crawling on my arm?
It felt like a spider, each of its eight legs coming up and down along my bicep. It moved upward and forced a chill I didn’t know I could experience.
I tried to shoo away the spider, but I was powerless. The phantom spider moved back down my arm with impunity and I was left to struggle with its tickle against the back of my left hand.
Something must have gone wrong.
Perhaps the chemicals they used to knock us out before the cryo-process had been mixed poorly?
There was no way I was supposed to be conscious..
I wondered what kind of spider it was. Was it something harmless? A daddy long legs? Or was it something much more deadly? A brown recluse? A black widow? Would it bite me? Would I wake in fifty years with a rotted hand from the venom of a long dead spider?
How would a spider even get through the clean area? Foreign objects were strictly forbidden in the hypersleep loading chambers. Biological creatures, doubly so. It should have been detected on the sensors and vaporized. But the twitch and tickle against my hand said otherwise. There was something in here with me.
Its gnarled teeth plunged into my hand, pumping its venom into my hand. Infecting it.
This was no dream.
I knew that.
The pounding dread ensured that I knew.
But how? Why?
If I was conscious, did that mean my body was aging? My poisoned hand wasn’t the only thing that would decay through the journey. In fifty years, they’d pull from my pod a mummified corpse, frozen and dead. Would I starve to death first? How long could I last in a fevered dream like this?
A skitter at my bare feet changed my thoughts. The presence of the spider was gone, replaced by the speed and size of a tiny rodent somewhere down below me. It ran over my toes and my instinct was to recoil, to flinch and draw my body into itself. To scream.
My god, how I tried to scream.
But, like the worst of my nightmares, nothing came out.
And no one knew I was in trouble. No one would ever know.
What had I done to deserve such treatment?
There had to be someone responsible. This doesn’t happen on an Independence-class colony starship by accident. Unless it always happens. And we’re all lied to about the nature of hypersleep. Unless this was sabotage.
I wondered where the ship might have been on its journey.
Had we left moments ago?
Or would we be arriving imminently?
Were we somewhere in the middle and there were still a couple of decades left?
The rodent stopped its marathon across my feet and finally picked a toe and began to nibble. Its teeth pierced into my small toe first, perhaps that seemed like the easiest target. As much as I wanted to cry out when the spider bit, this was worse, a hundred-fold. Its teeth gnawed nimbly into my flesh, his bones tearing down to mine.
I screamed again.
Or tried.
I was still asleep.
Or half awake.
My mouth wouldn’t open, air wouldn’t pass through my vocal cords.
The rat cut deeper with its teeth. Into my phalanges, then deeper, sucking the life from my metatarsals.
I wanted to pity whatever poor soul would be forced to open my tube and remove my bones, picked clean by the rat, but all I could feel was the pain. It shot like a laser bolt from my foot to my brain, traveling faster than I could comprehend.
Why did someone put such a creature in my pod?
I kicked, or tried to, hoping I could stop the skittering teeth across my skin, sucking the flesh and blood from me. But my leg didn’t work.
Defenseless, I tried a different tactic. Dozens of electrodes were attached to my head and my chest; if my mind screamed loud enough, then perhaps some passing technician might hear the beeps warning them of abnormal life signs. It was slim hope, but better than nothing.
The pain made it easy to conjure the mental energy to scream. The panic that I couldn’t give voice to the scream added to my urgency.
I bellowed with my mind, shrieked and screamed with every ounce of energy I could muster.
I felt it in my lungs. Just a bit. As though they knew what they were being called to do. They inflated. But, like my voice, couldn’t quite let anything out. My breath stayed there until it slowly trickled away like a pinhole in a boat. Tightness constricted inside me, as if hands were grasping at the lining of my throat.
The rat bit again, slicing into the next toe. Ravenously, as though they were long-sought delicacies.
How could I get it out?
How could I end the pain.
I wasn’t meant to die like this.
Was I?
Suddenly, the feast of feet stopped and I knew the pain was so severe that I had numbed myself to it. As if my frontal lobe suffered an overload and shunted the pain away. I’d pay for it later, but for now, my feet were nothing but dead. Maybe the rodent carried on its morbid work, or maybe it didn’t. It’s not like I could have done anything about it anyway.
I closed my mind’s eye, as though that might somehow calm me. A darker blackness shrouded me and I took in a deep breath, or tried. My lungs still wouldn’t respond the way I wanted them to. My deep breath turned into a shallow one, then tighter, as if I was being held underwater.
Drowning.
Dry, in a hypersleep pod, I felt suffocated.
Drowning.
Panic slapped me.
Beat me.
Hit me.
More.
The water level rose.
But then subsided.
I took a breath.
I didn’t want to die this way.
Don’t.
The water didn’t come back.
My breath returned.
I had to think fast.
How could I escape?
I tried mind-screaming once more. I thought I heard a beep. But I needed more than a beep to be more than a blip. I had to do something before the spider-mouse-rat transformed into something else. Something larger. Something deadlier.
This couldn’t be normal. There’s no way anyone would willingly travel this way if this was what they could expect. That left sabotage. What, or who, would do this to me?
Why would anyone forsake me?
My concentration flagged when I felt something skitter across my cheek and rest on my face just below my eye. Small, clawed feet, sandpaper rough, stopped right there on my crow’s feet.
No.
I wished I could wince and tighten my eyes shut, to protect them.
Or to shoo away whatever monstrosity stood there, over my face.
Because I knew this next part wasn’t going to be pleasant.
That’s when the claws tightened, bracing themselves for what would happen next. And without a sound, a beak pierced my eyelid and dug into my soft, seeing orb. Still, no light nor reality penetrated my mind. The blackness grew darker, red bled into it. Sparks came with every peck of the beak.
Something wasn’t right.
I wished the sharp beak would pierce further into my eye, through it, into my brain, pecking away at it. Tearing up shreds of it and eating them, just so it would end the pain. There was nothing that made me want to continue living in this dark limbo of pain and torture.
Perhaps it was poison, I wondered, as the beak sheared again into my face. I heard the slurping crack as it broke the bone around my eye socket. The pain didn’t even faze me anymore. It was just a part of this existence.
Once, twice, thrice the beak came down. It didn’t feel like anything but pressure against my face. Someone, or something, pressing the edge of a knife against my eye and feeling it press into my head and brain.
Plenty of biological agents could provide effects like these.
Because there was no way this could have been real. Had my hand really been gnarled with venom? My toes gnawed off by vermin? My eyes pecked out by a monster?
Why was I still alive? How could I be if it was real?
It was real enough.
Focus determines reality and all I could focus on was the horror.
The despair.
The pain.
Years passed. Or, at least, what felt like years. Pain came and went. It manifested itself in different ways. Spiders sometimes, crawling across my body. Stings of scorpions at my feet. A clawed monster scooping out the contents of my chest to eat like so much bloody ice cream. I don’t even want to mention what the centipedes crawling into my ears felt like, or the maggots dissolving my groin.
And more years passed this way.
And finally light pierced my gaze. Bright, white light. It hurt almost as much as the torture, blinding. But sounds returned. Sounds of activity filled my ears like the centipedes had, but for the first time the sounds weren’t coming from inside my own head.
“Wha…?” My mouth worked. My voice. I could scream again if I needed or wanted to. Or at least I felt like I could.
I shut my eyes tighter against the onslaught of light, convinced this was another trick. The blinding light was just another way to torture me, to force me to live my eternity in constant fear. They changed their tactics over many years, why wouldn’t this be some new technique in the arsenal of my pain?
“Get him to the medcenter,” a voice said.
I still couldn’t make out shapes or color. Every time I tried to crack my eyes open, I had to seal them back up for fear of being blinded by the intensity of light. Like I was staring at a cold sun.
Was this all real? If I really was going to the medcenter… How bad was the damage? Was I a decimated corpse? An emaciated skeleton picked through with just enough vitality to keep alive after such an ordeal? I couldn’t feel my flesh. My skin felt outside of me. I wore it as a jacket and my bones slid underneath it.
I couldn’t even remember what the medcenter looked like. Or how far it was from the time I’d been put down.
Down.
Out.
Hands on me, at my shoulders and legs. They propped me around and laid me down on something.
I bobbed up and down as we went.
A stretcher?
I didn’t want to get my hopes up. Life had become nothing but pain. Why would this be any different?
The bobbing stopped and I was tossed like refuse onto a bed.
“Whhha… whe… ho…” I could make sounds, but they didn’t mean anything. I couldn’t ask questions. I couldn’t communicate.
Another nightmare.
I’d been given a voice, but was unable to use it properly.
“Don’t speak,” a voice said.
Hands gripped my arm. The one that had been bloated and killed by a spider’s bite. They turned and twisted it, tapping it for something. Then a needle plunged into my arm. It bit me, and I wanted to twist and shout and scream, but I had no strength to resist. My arms flopped. Which was more than they’d been able to do in a hundred years. My dusty voice tried resisting, but coughed sand.
A moment passed.
Then another.
And I expected the needle digging into the center of my dead arm to explode or rot away from the final poison they were injecting into me.
Instead, a warmth grew from the epicenter. It radiated outward.
Medcenter.
Medicine.
How were they turning this against me?
How would this end in pain?
In my mind, I was black and white, a skeleton, dead. Death and life at once. But as the elixir of life pumped from their machine into my veins, it radiated color outward, bringing me back to my normal state. It fed up my arm and reached my heart with a warmth I hadn’t known in a lifetime. My heart worked overtime, nothing more than a machine pumping medicine to tainted blood.
One by one, life returned to my limbs, first one leg, then another. My toes wiggled, uneaten.
When the warmth of a fireplace on a winter’s day reached my head and my eyes, I dared to try opening them again. The light was bright but not blindingly so. I peeked, hoping to see what there was to see.
Three technicians stood over me.
The first people I’d seen in an eternity. Since I was knocked out. Chewed up. Spit out.
“Doctor…?” I asked.
But no one responded.
One of them brought out a pen. They clicked it and a light appeared at the end. With rubber-gloved hands, she pulled my eye open and pressed the light near me, blinding me again.
Examining.
Exploring.
Wondering.
Diagnosing.
“And the test?” One said.
“Negative,” another responded.
“As I thought,” the third stated.
But what test? Was that all this was? They’d put me through this as a test?
I growled, angry.
I didn’t like being a guinea pig.
Hadn’t they done enough to me?
They left the room. At least, I think they left the room. The bright lights turned to blackness again and I must have drifted back into sleep.
I didn’t want to sleep anymore. I’d been asleep for what felt like a thousand years, I didn’t want to go back to that place. Sleep was where hurt came. Where I was defenseless. But I couldn’t help but surrender to the color radiating from my arm.
I woke up screaming.
I don’t know how long I was out. But the second I was conscious enough to stop sleeping, I did.
The lights in the room were dim already, but brightened slightly when I woke. An alarm sounded. Not the sort of banshee shrieks and daemonic klaxons I expected after my ordeal, but a subdued pinging. Nurses entered the room. Three of them.
Two came to my side and did their best to lay me back down, the third went to the bag above my head and started to inject something… “No… Don’t…”
“Sir, please,” one nurse said.
But the other ignored them both. “Get him back down. He’s in no state—”
“No!” I roared, shoving one away from me.
But I was nothing more than a paper tiger. I’d not really gotten a good look at myself and seeing my arms flail, I realized I was loose skin wrapped around bones. Had the nurses been children, I still wouldn’t have been able to fend them off.
Their concoction hit the IV and I was sedated again. Drifting off toward pain. And sleep.
I heard them talking in my hazy stupor.
Words I didn’t quite understand.
“Affected.”
“Apologies.”
“Aggravate.”
Who was apologizing? What was happening. I was definitely affected. But by what? I was definitely aggravated.
Though I fought against it, trying to think through what was happening, sleep took me again. I couldn’t fight very hard against anything.
I woke again.
Less screaming.
Less panic.
They must have put something in that cocktail dangling above me to keep me sedated, because I wanted to worry. I just couldn’t muster the energy. Or maybe I was just tired.
Then sleep took me once more.
I didn’t struggle against it so hard this time.
It felt more peaceful.
Restful.
Easy.
“Wake up, Mr. Garcia,” a voice said through the void.
I hadn’t had a voice do that before. In my decades of torture, the only discernible voice I heard was my own.
“Mr. Garcia,” the voice said again. “Please, wake up.”
My eyes fluttered easily, taking in the bright light around me. I flinched, but only barely.
“Where am I?” I asked, my voice dragged across broken glass to speak.
But I could see I was in a hospital room of some type, with silver bulkhead walls and no windows. There was a doctor, or who I presumed to be a doctor in front of me. She looked groggy, as though she’d been woken up early, too.
“You’re in the infirmary, Mr. Garcia. And I’m Dr. Broadnax.”
“You’re who?” Speaking was difficult and it hurt, but it hurt more to be silenced.
“Dr. Broadnax. We need to discuss your options.”
“Options?”
“Yes. Well, you see, you’re in a very unusual situation.”
“Someone… was trying to kill me,” I said.
She smiled. “About that… That’s what we need to talk to you about.”
“Yes, I want to… press charges…”
“Well, it’s…” The doctor took a breath. Unsure of how to speak, of what to say. She looked to the side and scrunched her nose in thought. Then the words came to her. “Why don’t we start with where you are, shall we?”
“Okay.”
“You’re aboard the Space-Ark Demeter.”
“Yes…”
“And we’re currently about three hundred thousand miles from Earth.”
“From… Earth?”
“Yes, we’ve just broken Lunar orbit for our first slingshot into the stars.”
“But that means…”
“Yes. We’re only a few days into our fifty year voyage.”
I gasped. I’d been tortured for centuries. At the very least, I hoped I’d just wake up in my new home and the agony would be over and I’d never have to endure such a thing again.
“So, this is why we need to talk about choices. You see, we ran some tests and discovered that your psychometric and biological profiles had an error in them. We ran some tests and we’ve found that you’re mildly allergic to the agents used to induce hypersleep comas.”
“Mildly?”
“Yes. Despite your elevated vital signs and internal perception, you’re no worse for wear. So we have two options.”
Bile filled my stomach and threatened to erupt.
“What about my daughter? Is she like this, too?”
The doctor flipped through a few screens on her pad and continued confidently, “We’ve monitored her since your tests came back. She’s had no signs of these effects and is hibernating normally. Though allergies can be genetic, she doesn’t seem to share this one.”
I covered my mouth with my hand. The only thing worse than enduring a lifetime of this agony was thinking my daughter would have to as well. My voice grew hoarse and my vision blurred with tears. “What are the options?”
The doctor took in a sharp breath, “We can put you back to sleep and you can endure the rest of the journey as you have been so far. When you wake, you’ll be reunited with your daughter. We’re wary of that option, though. The psychological stress might be irreversible after a week, let alone fifty years.”
The blood ran from my face and I felt like I would pass out considering such a thing. “And the other?”
“The other option is that you can live out your remaining days here aboard the Demeter. We can look into resynthesizing the coma agent in a way you’re not allergic to, but I’ll be frank: the chances aren’t good for that, given our limited medical capabilities and access to new materials here on the ship.”
My future flashed before my eyes. Growing old aboard a starship. What would that look like? Would I become a burden? How would I deal with social interaction? The ship rotated its crew every year. I’d be saying goodbye to everyone I’d ever known with an alarming regularity. The next time they’d see me would be during their second rotation twenty-five years later.
And I’d have already said goodbye to my daughter for the last time.
Or I could endure torture? A hundred thousand years of mind-numbing, mind-destroying agony just to see her smile once more.
“Can’t you just turn around? Send us back? We’re still close to Earth…”
“Unfortunately, we’ve already begun our slingshot maneuver. The window for aborting the mission has closed. I’m sorry.”
I had to make a choice.
It was really no choice at all.
I looked down to my hand, which seemed much more solid than it had the last time I had fallen asleep. Even wasting away had been an illusion of the drugs. “My name is Santiago Garcia, Doctor,” I said, trying not to cry while extending my hand to shake hers. “And I’d like you to put me back to sleep…”