Fingers of light from the gloaming sunset pushed through the small windows high atop the vast chamber. The failing light painted a golden pattern on the stark floor far below, while a slight wind outside caused the vast blue-green limbs of the Margden trees to sway so that their shadows danced across the amber lattice of sunlight like fleeting spirits. In the aqua sky above, ragged cirrus clouds seemed to stand guard, unmoving, as the sun finally disappeared below the horizon. The brief specters of light and shade fled the huge chamber as a single pale moon rose outside to claim its nightly watch. Inside the great chamber, bright lights came to life, casting stark shadows on the room’s quiet contents.
The chamber contained thousands of rows of cryochambers, all housing androids suspended in wait, made dormant to preserve precious planetary resources as the human colonists approached. Many of them had served during the terraforming process by manning orbital drop ships, observation pods, and various other orbital posts. Others had lived in the shielded cities, assisting with the bacterial atmosphere seeders, construction, and resource harvesting. The planet had been truly alive now for thousands of years, seeded with billions of species of planets and animals thriving in a carefully balanced ecosystem. Most of the original biomatter had been appropriately restructured or eradicated as required so that civilization would proceed smoothly.
The androids in these sleep chambers awaited reanimation and re-tasking. A few years before planetfall, these workers would be rotated into the planetary workforce to ensure full preparations were completed. Now, however, the only activity in the vast chamber was sleep as sound and cold as the quiet emptiness of death. The colony ship was not due to arrive for just over a system century.
Then, as if to repudiate the death-like stillness, a small panel on the side of one of the cryochambers came suddenly to life. A rapid sequence of instructions rolled across the display, and several readouts illuminated both inside and outside the unit. The temperature inside the affected chamber rose accordingly as the cryogel warmed up to something approaching livable levels. Fresh bodily fluids were injected into the unit as complex reanimation instructions were programmed directly into the android itself. Eyes twitching as if following the convoluted happenings of a nightmare, the sleeper slowly came back to the world of the living.
He awoke inside the chamber, suspended in the near-frozen gel that supported him. Disoriented, he shuddered at the thick mucous that filled his lungs and mouth and held him in its embryonic embrace. He wanted to scream, and his body convulsed reflexively to eject the substance from his lungs—but it had nowhere to go. His oversensitive eyes could see only blurred shapes framed by darkness through the cryogel and the transparent flexion window that protected him. Panic threatened. Closing his eyes once again, he strove to suppress his gag reflex.
Movement suddenly distracted him from his disorientation. The cryochamber was being mechanically raised. Relief flooded him then, as his sleep-slow mind recalled that this was part of the waking process. Something told him that he’d been awake long before—though the memories seemed distant and confused now, like it had been an entire lifetime ago. He concentrated on maintaining his self control and waited as patiently as he could for the emerge process to begin. The whole thing seemed to proceed in accordance with his admittedly fractured memories, but he felt somehow anxious.
Finally the lid-hinge opened with a brief sucking noise as the vacuum was broken He laid waiting for the attendants—images of stone-faced androids with surprisingly gentle hands invaded his thoughts—to pull him to freedom. Movement was difficult inside the gel, and he felt too weak to emerge on his own anyway. Eyes still closed, he concentrated to see if he could hear the approaching footsteps through the air-exposed gel.
After a few minutes of silence, his anxiousness turned to fear. He began to suspect that there were no attendants waiting to assist him from the unit. Something had to have gone wrong. Perhaps something was terribly wrong, and there were no attendants available. Perhaps there was an attack, or it was too dangerous to get out of the chamber. Of course, if that were the case, he should have been awakened with instructions already implemented. Instead, he felt somehow empty…but still afraid.
Fear! This was the first time he’d remembered experiencing the emotion, yet he seemed to know exactly what it was. If he’d been able to, he would have laughed. He was amused at his ambivalence about his plight: fear of the unknown, yet pleasure at having experienced a new emotion—together with the distinct impression that he was out of place, uncertain, incomplete.
After a few more minutes of waiting, he decided couldn’t wait any longer. Thinking about how his lungs were absorbing oxygen from the gel began to make his skin crawl, so he decided to take matters into his own hands. Pushing at the translucent enzyme, he began trying to free himself of the cold gel. With a considerable effort from his sleep-feeble muscles, he managed to wiggle himself onto his stomach and finally push with his hands and knees until he emerged into the air. The gel finally let go of his torso in a sudden slurping release, and he promptly threw up over the side of the unit. A spasm of coughing gripped him for many minutes as his body strove to expel the viscous substance from his lungs. Taking in air raggedly for the first time in centuries, he tore at the thick gel around his eyes and nose as if trying to fend off the hands of a strangler. Thus, gasping and spluttering, herejoined the world after centuries of sleep.
Resting against the side of his cryochamber, he allowed his lungs to taste the open air once again. He flexed his cramped arms and fingers, allowing the fluids to reanimate through his body. All the time, his eyes stayed fixed on the small display lights attached to the control arm of the chamber mechanism. They were blinking rapidly, shifting color from red to blue, red to blue, red to blue. It was meaningless to him, but the incessant blinking seemed to be a warning. He wondered again why there was nobody here to help him. Re-animation was potentially dangerous; there should have been somebody here monitoring his vitals and making him as comfortable as possible. His disorientation was almost maddening.
When he was finally able to compose himself to a state approaching normal, the awakener looked around the cavernous room. Cryochambers lined up in rows were stacked almost to the ceiling. He realized he was trembling uncontrollably from the cold of his long dormancy; he needed to get himself to the recovery room. Where were the attendants?
Naked and nearly frozen, he stepped out of the unit, the pads of his bare feet leaving gelatinous footprints behind him as he walked the length of the huge chamber to where, according to his feeble memories, the recovery facilities were located. As he walked alone in silence, his gaze wandered over the vault of his sleeping brethren. He felt like an invader in a mortuary; as if ignoring his rebirth, the rest of the androids remained lifeless in their dreamless slumber. Shivering, he reached one of the recovery room doors and stepped through. He half expected attendants to look up in surprise and rush him back to his cryochamber, citing some system error that had awakened him prematurely. The room was dark and silent, however, without even a mechanic to acknowledge his seemingly erroneous presence. One of hundreds of recovery rooms located in this part of the complex, this facility was designed to help clean up and reanimate deep-slept androids. It was a much more efficient process to place long term service androids in cryosleep than to have them reconstituted and re-grown each time. Information could be implanted into the new units, but experience had never been effectively reproduced to the satisfaction of the creators.
He walked over to one of the shower alcoves and stood in a red square outlined on the rubbery floor. After a few seconds, his cold and naked form was bombarded by several spray jets of water-solvent mix from the walls and ceiling. Reading his body temperature through his feet, the shower commenced the spray at a temperature very close to his skin temperature. As the alcove performed its automated ablutions, it gradually increased the spray temperature to aid in the warming process. He rested his arms against the wall in front of him, letting the spray’s heat wash through him like an absolution.
Momentarily the jets stopped and a rush of warm air tingled his skin. The cooling sensation vanished as the moisture evaporated, leaving him dry, clean, and warm for the first time in centuries. Exiting the alcove, he picked up his newly-made formsuit from one of the dispensing units. The biofabric felt smooth and reassuring against his skin. Donning boots and vest, he felt properly caparisoned to further investigate the mystery of his awakening. Stopping only briefly to obtain a foodbulb from another automated dispenser, he walked to the nearest communications panel so that he could contact a local administrator. As he approached the comm screen, he noticed it was already alive with data. A flashing message coded urgent priority scrolled across the display, and it took him a moment or two before the message’s content registered on his sleep-addled brain:
Security Alert. Detain and reprocess Max Haiden, Facilitator. Fatal malfunction error.
Copyright © 2004 Jay and David Steele. All rights reserved.
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