Stasis Dreams (Caretaker Chronicles)

  Stasis Dreams

  Josi Russell

  Future House Publishing

  Future Worlds

  Future House Publishing

  Cover image copyright: Shutterstock.com. Used under license.

  Text © 2016 Josi Russell

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Future House Publishing at rights@futurehousepublishing.com.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover image adaptation by Jeff Harvey

  Interior design by Emma Hoggan

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  HE DIDN’T KNOW how many stasis dreams he’d had. They blurred together, merging and meshing like the confluence of the rivers he’d grown up next to, back on Earth. The bright images of his life before and the dark shadows of his fears flowed together, pulling him from one stasis dream to the next. He didn’t know exactly when one ended and the next began, or where he was in the current of them, but he knew, most of the time, that they were dreams. His consciousness told him so.

  He knew this was a dream: that the wolves snapping at his outstretched hands were relics from a trip to the zoo when he was a child, where he’d seen a pack of the animals feeding on a recently delivered deer carcass. It was the only time he’d ever seen them, and now they’d come for him. But even with the gleam of their teeth and the snap of their jaws, he knew they weren’t real. He willed them to fade, let himself slip away from them as he could only do in a dream, and eased into a heavy darkness. Now he was floating. But this, too, quickly turned into a nightmare as he realized he was submerged.

  Taiver fought for breath, tried to pull it in, but his mouth and nose and lungs were full of water. His belly was full of it. He tried to look around, but his eyes wouldn’t open. Something thick and heavy held his lids closed. He couldn’t orient himself, couldn’t remember how and why he had plunged into the water. Couldn’t remember jumping or sinking, couldn’t remember diving.

  He tried to raise his hands, to wipe the sticky substance from his eyes, but his arms were still. He could feel them hanging there, heavy and useless.

  His heart hammered. He could make no intentional movements. He opened his mouth to scream, but felt the weight of water in his throat. There was no pushing air through his vocal cords.

  Immobilized, drowning, he tried to slip away from this dream. He tried to pull back from it as he had learned to do, but the sensations remained, imprisoning him with a constancy that began to unsettle him. He pulled his mind away from the weight on his body, tried to imagine himself flying or swinging or fishing or singing, but the paralysis didn’t dissipate.

  His fingers twitched. He felt them, and felt resistance to their movement. And then he knew. This was not a nightmare. He couldn’t retreat from it because it was real. He was awake. Taiver tried to move his head, tried to kick or strike out, but his body only jerked spasmodically.

  Taiver focused. As he did in the long hours in the operating room back home, he pushed his fear away and focused on a single thing. His fingers. He sent all his energy into curling his index finger, then his middle, his ring, his pinky. He made a fist, and he squeezed it until his knuckles burned with the strain.

  You know where you are, he told himself. This is your stasis chamber. You’re going to Minea. You’re waking up. Waking up. Awake already in his mind, but his body still under the influence of the sedatives that had frozen him in time for, what, fifty years now?

  The fire in his knuckles seeped up his arm. He could rotate his wrist now, bend his elbow. He channeled all his effort into one spasmodic movement. Lifting his hand, he felt his fingertips against his face.

  Only they felt blunted and sticky, and his face felt hard and smooth.

  The wax. He remembered now. He had seen the passengers who were already in stasis coated with a waxy substance to protect their skin from being too long in the stasis fluid. His face and hands and feet were still coated in it. It held his eyelids closed.

  But to be awake and unable to open his eyes was unbearable, intolerable. He dragged his clumsy fingers across his left eye, then his right, feeling the wax shift and slide against itself. He dug at them, clawing until he felt the wax loosen. A hazy strip of pink light sliced into his consciousness as his left eye began to open, then caught halfway, the lashes still pasted together.

  Taiver scraped and peeled, and as his lid sprang free, he suddenly felt the sting of the thick stasis fluid in his open eye. He felt the glob of wax float downward, out of his line of sight. He blinked furiously, working at his other eye. He stripped the wax from it and flicked it from his fingers, still blinking.

  As his eyes cleared, he realized that he was staring through the crystalline fluid and through the front of the chamber at the delicate girl in her stasis chamber directly across from his, on the other side of the aisle.

  He remembered seeing her, when he stepped into his stasis chamber. She was already asleep then, and her peaceful repose had given him courage. He watched her now, though his vision was wavy from the fluid and the curved glass doors. She was not struggling. She was still peacefully sleeping.

  Taiver tried to get used to not breathing. Tried to stop panicking. But as he glanced at the few other passengers he could see along the row across from him, and as he focused his attention on those to the right and left of him, he saw that they were all still sleeping. Something was wrong. He was sure that this was not how awakening was supposed to feel.

  And then, there she was. A soldier in a sharp grey uniform that was creased and pressed. He remembered seeing her. She was the Caretaker of this ship. A woman nearly his own age, stepping brusquely down the aisle. She didn’t look around at the passengers, just walked past on her way to somewhere else.

  He tried to cry out, but he had no voice.

  Taiver screamed silently a single word: Help.

  ***

  When he realized that she wasn’t coming back, Taiver’s muscles loosened in despair. His hand, held rigid by his face for several minutes, spasmed and then drifted back down through the fluid to rest at his side. He stopped fighting the paralysis, stopped straining to make his body move. He simply floated, heavy and immobile, watching the pink light from below play through the crystal fluid around him.

  He felt the slow rolling of hours passing. He worked intermittently on gaining more control over his hand and arm. Everything else was still immobilized.

  When she came by again, Taiver barely had time to react. He saw her crossing his field of vision, like a reflection moving through a still pool, and he reached out to her convulsively. His palm thudded against the slick front of the chamber, and he heard its reverberation dully, rippling through the fluid.

  She stopped. He strained, pulli
ng his clumsy hand across the glass.

  As her eyes met his, her detached expression shattered. He heard her speaking, but her voice was muffled.

  “Computer,” she said, never taking her eyes off Taiver’s, “increase sedation in chamber two seven four one by three percent.” She gave a code, a string of numbers that meant nothing to Taiver.

  He heard a small click above him and drops of orange liquid fell through the clear stasis fluid and dissipated around him. For a moment, the fluid tasted intensely bitter in his mouth, and he gagged involuntarily. Her eyes darted down to his palm, still pressed frantically to the glass.

  “It’s okay.” She placed her hand on the other side of the glass, against his. “You’ve just awakened a bit early. You’re going to start feeling sleepy, then you’ll be back to sleep before you know it. We’ve still got a long trip ahead. You don’t want to wake up yet.”

  But Taiver did. He wanted out. What he didn’t want was to sink back into the current of his endless dreams. He could not face that pressing darkness. He tried to speak again, forgetting that he was filled with fluid. He fixed his eyes on hers and mouthed the one word that kept streaking through his mind: Out.

  The soldier shook her head quickly. “Not yet.”

  She glanced at a screen hovering beside her, and Taiver recognized a look of puzzlement. He knew that look. It was his own look when a patient perplexed him. She spoke again.

  “Are you sleepy?” she asked.

  Taiver tried to shake his head, felt only a slight twitch in his neck, and mouthed No.

  “Computer, increase sedation in chamber two-seven-four-one by an additional three percent.”

  “Sedation at a maximum, Ms. Spence.”

  “How can that be?” She kept one hand on the glass, and used her free hand to scroll through a few screens. Taiver’s arm muscles, aching, began to tremble. He wouldn’t be able to hold his hand up much longer.

  When her eyes found his again, there was an apology in them. “I’m sorry—” she glanced back at the screen, reading his name. “—Taiver. Listen, my name is Hannah. I’m the caretaker here. It seems you’ve developed a tolerance for the sedative. To all three kinds of liquid sedative on board, actually.”

  He felt his face contort in bewilderment. He wanted to be glad that his facial muscles could move now, but he could only think about what she had just said. He tried to communicate his question with his eyes.

  “What does that mean?” She looked away. “I’m sorry. It means that there’s no way to put you back to sleep.”

  Taiver felt relief wash over him. At least he would get out now. In fact, she was typing a code into the keypad on his chamber now.

  The chamber clicked and he heard the voice of the computer as it spoke to her outside. “Access denied.”

  “What do you mean?” the soldier barked. “Initiate awakening sequence in chamber two-seven-four-one immediately.”

  “Awakening sequence cannot be initiated within eight hours of sedation,” the computer said.

  Eight hours. He would be here, submerged, for eight hours? He twitched his neck again, trying to shake his head. His arm gave out and his hand sank once again to his side.

  When he had contemplated traveling to Minea in one of these chambers, he had hated the idea of being asleep underwater for so long. He had no idea then how much worse it would be to be awake underwater.

  She didn’t give up. She pulled a little pry bar from her pocket and tapped the seal here and there, trying again to initiate the awakening sequence. But the computer overrode her every time.

  Finally, she turned away and strode several paces down the aisle, out of Taiver’s sight. She couldn’t, couldn’t leave now. He felt his powerlessness wash over him again.

  But she didn’t stay away long.

  “It’s going to be fine,” she said, kindly. “We’ll just have to wait a little while, then we’ll get you right out.”

  Taiver closed his eyes against the finality of it. The weight in his chest and the ever-present pressure of the fluid was disorienting. Though he knew that the fluid carried oxygen directly into his body, he felt acutely the absence of his breath. His mind rebelled, and he felt his body twitching more strongly, then twisting.

  His paralysis was lifting. He moved with increasing intensity. He stretched, then began to pitch and thrash. As his muscles regained their strength, he struck out at the front of the chamber, pounding it with his fists, kicking at it with his bare feet. They slipped against it, still slick with their wax coating, and he clawed and peeled more of the thick covering off his face and neck.

  Fine bubbles rose around him as he churned in the fluid, and he became, finally, aware of a pounding on the glass that was not his own. He stilled, and as the bubbles cleared, he saw the soldier, clamoring for his attention, shouting at him.

  “Stop!” she cried. “If you damage this, it could shut down completely. Do you want to drown yourself?”

  I am already drowning, he mouthed, relishing the flexibility of his face, the ability to form the complex words with his mouth, even if there was still no sound.

  She was sharp. “Not like you will be if you damage the chamber. Right now you still have enough oxygen to throw your little tantrum. That’s not going to be true if you rip the caps off the aeration ducts.” She gestured downward, to several ports that clicked open and shut at intervals.

  Taiver calmed, but kept his joints bending and twisting, trying to shake off the weight of the water and the years of sleep.

  “You’re just going to have to calm down,” she said, her voice commanding. “I know it’s not comfortable, but you’re alive and you’re safe as long as you let the machine continue to do its job.”

  I can’t stay here. His anger was gone, replaced by desperation. Please.

  She understood what he was saying and she looked at him a long moment. He saw in her eyes compassion. “Listen, I’ll get you out as soon as I can.”

  He saw that she was leaving, and he pounded the glass frantically. She turned back and he pressed both palms to the glass. Don’t go.

  She pressed her hands to the other side of the door, then leaned down, peering at the door handle, and fidgeting with it. Taiver heard a scraping sound as she tested the handle. She straightened. “I have to go report this. Maybe they can give me some idea of how to get you out faster.”

  Who?

  “UEG headquarters. We have a brand new Real-Time Communications system on board, and I think I can get us some answers. But you’re going to have to be patient. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  He wanted to beg, wanted to keep her here, but if she could find out a way to shorten this torture, then a few minutes alone would be worth it. He nodded his assent.

  After she left, Taiver turned completely around in his chamber, to face the padded backing. He braced his feet against it, pressing his back against the door, and used all his power trying to push the door open.

  His muscles burned as he pushed. He was elated as he felt the door begin to shift. A loud thud shook the fluid around him and the door slid slightly sideways, but as he turned to inspect it he saw the seal around it remained intact. A ratcheting sound initiated in the area of the handle, as if it were trying to open, but couldn’t. Maybe he had jammed it. After several loud pops, the door went silent and remained sealed.

  Taiver sank to the bottom, pulling his knees up to his chest to make room to sit on the floor. Here he heard the thrum of the chamber’s fans and the hiss of various compounds releasing into the fluid.

  His skin had started to burn slightly, and he began to wonder if he shouldn’t have removed the wax. He closed his eyes.

  ***

  Taiver had no idea what a minute felt like anymore. Without the natural rhythm of his breath, he couldn’t determine how much time was passing. He grasped the mechanical rhythms around him, trying to reorient himself.

  He began to grow used to the sequence: over the steady hum of the lights, the ports clicked in
succession. They were followed by the whoosh of the fresh fluid entering from the top of the chamber and the whir of the fans at the bottom pulling the fluid out into the cleaning system. And then the cycle repeated. He found himself counting the cycles: ports, new fluid, fans; ports, new fluid, fans. The repetition was calming. He tipped his head back against the side of the chamber, eyes closed, listening.

  He first heard the hesitation during the eightieth cycle, and it interrupted his counting. It was just a slight deceleration in the sound of one fan. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been focusing on them for so long. On the next cycle it sounded fine, but the next it paused again, longer this time. And on the next, it stalled completely. The smooth whir turned into a whine as the fan strained to spin. Taiver scooted away from it, hoping he wasn’t blocking something important. He looked at the grate covering the outtake and saw the problem.

  There, smeared across the fine bars that covered the opening and trailing into the duct, was the thick wax he’d peeled off. The fan whined, and Taiver knew it was overheating. He grabbed at the wax, clearing it as best he could from the grate. But it had been drawn down into the system now, and the fan sputtered from it.

  Taiver pushed off from the bottom, straightening into a standing position as he floated up. He looked up and down the row, but he couldn’t see Hannah.

  The whine of the fan grew more intense, and the whoosh of fluid began to be erratic. The ports began clicking in a random order. He heard, through the softening of the fluid, the sound of an alarm somewhere outside his chamber. The pink light shifted to red.

  Taiver began pushing on the door more fervently. He didn’t know what would happen when that fan stopped for good, and he didn’t want to find out.

  “Critical failure,” the muffled voice of the computer proclaimed. “Chamber two seven four one. Waking sequence initiated.”