Awakening

The deafening silence consumed me. Consumed my world, which at present was the realm between my body and the thin layer that separated me from oblivion. A realm that was nothing more than a few hours of air.

I calmed my breathing, remembering back when they trained me. They told me to do exactly that whenever I needed to don the suit and exit the ship, so I did.

The Embryonic Vanguard Expedition, Project E.V.E., was on a mission to save humanity. Aboard the UN Flagship Xochiquetzal, everything needed to seed distant star systems with the life of our failed planet. A planned million-year mission to save a species that hadn’t even made it a fraction of a percent of that time without ending itself.

The memories came back to me. Earth. Home. Family.

My breathing began to pick up again as I remembered. The sound of my panicked panting filled the helmet. Filling the void. Then came the drums echoing in my ears with every thud of my heart against my chest. It wanted to escape. To free itself from my ribs and become one with the void. Turn back to the stardust we drifted through.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

“Heart rate elevated.” The robotic voice of the automated message split the silence like an intrusive thought. “Reduce breathing pace. Time until carbon dioxide saturation. One hour. Thirty-seven minutes.”

I did as instructed, closing my eyes and counting to myself. Turning myself forward, I looked away from the void of space and back down the length of the ship. A mile ahead of me was the Aegis, the massive whipple shield protecting the future of humanity. A disk of ice, metal, and heavy water that acted as a battering ram for any dust and micro meteors we cut through. More than that, the protective liquid within gave us the fuel necessary to fire the fusion reactor that powered everything from the engines to the embryonic cryostasis.

I watched as thick clouds of dust and stellar gases caught the edges of the magnetized shield, igniting like sparks from a firework. They danced a dangerous waltz before us as we cut through the nebula that hadn’t been there when the mission began all those years ago.

“Range until atmospheric anomaly.” The voice spoke again. Unfeeling. Uncaring of my thoughts or attempts at tranquillity. “One hundred meters.”

My job was to keep the Xochiquetzal going. Part engineer. Part geneticist. I slept in my cryotube until I was needed to fix something critical that the numerous redundancies hadn’t accounted for. The weight of humanity on a single human’s shoulders.

I still remembered their words. ‘Genius.’ ‘Best among us.’ ‘Hero.’ ‘Saviour.’ After all, for me it was practically yesterday. According to the ship’s logs, we had been travelling for ten thousand years. Yet, for me, I’d been awake less than a year.

I tried not to think about what that meant as I marched forward, eventually reaching the damaged section of the hull I had been called from my hibernation to remediate. A micrometeor impact, travelling perpendicular to our trajectory, had struck one of the life support lines. We were venting atmosphere and water at a rate of a hundredth of a percent per day, a relatively minuscule amount, but with how long we travelled, it was truly problematic.

Unfortunately, there was nothing that could be done about fixing the hull damage. That fell outside my specialty. Luckily, that wasn’t my job. I was called to reroute the life support systems and stabilize the atmospheric conditions of the Xochiquetzal.

To do this, I located the nearest shutoff valve. Hidden beneath a bulkhead and a three-runged ladder were all the pipes and cables I needed to make what I needed to do happen. With a little work, the leaking pipe was shut off and rerouted through another branching nexus of pipes that could handle the additional pressure.

“There we go—“ I muttered, slipping my spanner back into place before beginning my ascent up the ladder.

My body suddenly began to tumble forward. The bulky boot of my space suit had become caught on the top rung of the bypass hatch's ladder. The next thing I remembered was my helmet connecting with the hull, and, a moment later, my head thudded against the inside of the visor. My foot dislodged at that moment, before my grip slipped free of the support, and I felt my body beginning to drift.

Swinging my hands wildly, I attempted to grab the cable that tethered me to Xochiquetzal, but as my world spun, I struggled to focus. Eventually, my body snapped to a halt violently at the cord’s limit. I was caught sixty feet from the ship’s hull, hanging on by a thread of aramid cabling.

I could feel something dripping from my forehead. Instinctively, I reached for it, my gloved hand hitting the visor and returning me to the reality I lived in. A reality where I was drifting at the edge of oblivion with droplets of blood floating before my face. Watching for a moment as more droplets appeared before my face, merging in zero gravity, a realization hit me. If I didn’t return to the ship soon, the accumulation of fluids in the helmet would drown me.

Death by bloody fishbowl.

My world still spinning, I began to reel myself back to the ship. Hand over hand, I drew closer until, finally, within range of the hull, I latched my life-saving tether to the guiderail that would return me to the airlock.

Slow your breathing. I reminded myself as the automated system warned of ‘dangerous fluid-accumulation in the helmet’ and ‘elevated heart rate.’

By the time the airlock had cycled and I was able to remove the helmet from my head, the blood had begun to become problematic. It had settled in my eyes, painting the world a murky red and making it hard for me to see as I fumbled around the utility node beyond the heavy doors.

The sound of my racing heart echoed in my ears as I reached for my locker. Fiddling with the lever, I flipped the latch open and grabbed the towel that I kept within.

My vision cleared as I soaked up the blood and exhaled a relieved sigh. The panic didn’t subside immediately, taking me several minutes to breathe through it as I held a hand to the wall to stabilize myself against the spinning world. Eventually, as the spinning slowed and reality stabilized, I was ready to doff the cumbersome suit, a process that always took a fair bit of time in the best scenarios. But at least, I wasn’t alone.

Staring at the locker, I looked at the photo that I had brought from home. A home long gone, likely burned and buried under the ash of nuclear fire. People, long forgotten by all except one. I stared at the smiling faces. A happy couple under the shade of a willow. A child with a technicoloured propeller hat, their teeth split with a gap. It was a memory of before, resting in my mind and filling my heart.

I sighed, finishing my task of putting away the suit before touching the photo one final time. I knew I’d see it again. See them again. But when? And how long would it be? That I couldn’t answer. For me. It would be tomorrow. For them, a hundred years? A thousand?

The walk to the cryobay was short and uninteresting in comparison to my space stroll. It was just before Embryonics Bay Seven, the real reason I had joined the mission. While I was trained to handle everything on the ship myself, it was the oversight of the embryos used to birth the settlers who landed on new worlds that brought me joy. So, before my long sleep, I stopped in to check up on the kids.

Embryonics wasn’t a large room by any means. It was rather small, no more than an insemination and gestation chamber for a few hundred lifeforms. Most of the raw materials for the process were located deeper in the ship, closer to the reactor, to guarantee adequate power to maintain their cryogenic stasis. But from any of the Embryonic Bays, it was possible to connect with the main storage and check in on the system.

Scanning the data, I was pleased to see that they were well within the accepted parameters for prolonged storage. I had been worried that the life support issue could have affected oxygen distribution, but the levels were steady. So, with another sigh, I began to close out the systems.

Clank. Tink. Tank. Tank.

My heart leapt into my throat as I reflexively jumped at the sudden sound from the hallway. Peeking my head out, I looked up and down the passage suspiciously. Down the hall in the direction I had come, I could see the spanner of my suit on the ground. The hall light above the utility node had turned on again, sensing the object’s movement.

“Shit.” I groaned, realizing that due to my anxiety post-spacewalk, I hadn’t properly stowed my suit.

Taking another hour tightening straps and binding the suit, I eventually made my way back to my cryobay. Yet another hour passed as I logged my mission report before finally inputting the commands for the standby protocol. In fifteen minutes, my cryopod would lock me back into a dreamless sleep until the ship needed me once again. In the meantime, the vessel would enter a semi-dormant state to conserve resources as it continued its journey through the lifeless vacuum.

Resting into a comfortable position, I began the mental exercises that calmed me down before every deep freeze. A few seconds of breathing in. A few seconds of breathing out.

Clank. Tink. Tank. Tank.

I flinched, my racing heart settling in my throat once again as I sat up in the pod. Groaning at the prospect of the equipment falling, I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to deal with it upon awakening. So I lay back down, beginning my breathing once more. I closed my eyes and prepared for the pod to close until–

In the distance, a child began to cry.

My eyes opened wide at this as I leapt from the bed with a start and rushed to the door. The sound was close and continued loudly. That familiar sound I had heard before, of a newborn coming out of flash gestation. Looking towards Embryonics, the light was on before the doorway and revealed something. Something in the hall. A multicoloured hat with a propeller atop it.

My heart raced as I stared at it. The cry came again, this time from the opposite direction. I turned to face it. But nothing was there. And as I looked back towards Embryonics, the lights had faded, and the hat was gone.

“What the hell?”

“Entering standby mode.” I heard the computer system announce as the cryopod hissed to a close behind me.

“Shit! No. No. No.” I cursed, rushing back to my stasis chamber only to watch it close tight and seal.

There was a hiss of air as the glass panel froze over, and within minutes, the computers of the room began to shut off. Air systems quieted, and dull thuds and clanks of the ship entering its own slumber replaced them.

I had missed my window of stasis. And now, I would be trapped on the wrong side of the deep freeze until I could figure it out.