A contrail cleaved across the sky, partitioning it into two equal halves. Then another, at a 45 degree angle to the first, and another, and another, until the sky was diced and chopped into a multitude of angular pieces, like a glass pane dropped on concrete. Before today, there'd been, at most, one a week. Why did it have to be every fucking planet?, she wondered, picking herself up from the wet grass. This wasn't the first sign it was coming - she'd saw the newspapers, heard the muttering, had the displeasure of encountering the scammers capitalizing on it. It'd happened too many times now. There'd be some backwater planet, water (or what passed for it) glittering, an utterly unique native ecosystem thriving, a community of colonists fresh off the generation ships, living peacefully - and then some fucker just had to discover some precious resource in the water, some mineral deep underground, some novel element in the atmosphere, and suddenly the corporations and the speculators and the scientists stormed in, ransacked the place, and refused to leave until whatever it was was gone. Maybe thirty, forty years of ransacking, pillaging, of "jobs", of "investment", of whatever it was they pasted over shop-windows and wrapped on trains and wrote in their 'impartial columns' in the newspapers. It wasn't usually the colonists, shockingly enough. The colonists numbered 20k at most, and generally had hindsight of the flaws of Earth with the technology to make what they dreamt. They usually ended up with compact little towns with very good trams, or canals, or whatever specific thing they'd decided was utterly necessary in the ~150 years of isolation on board the ships. It didn't matter, though. Where there was money...

The back of her shirt was wet with dew, her pants too. I just gotta remember to look forward when I leave, it'll be okay. Not that it mattered, it's not like they'd be seeing her again. The sadness was buried so far down that it barely even felt real, like a terminal disease that was, for now, only a diagnosis. The tram to the downtown was quick from where she was - they'd erected a small station this far out from the town, in the southern prairies, even though only one road lead to it. It was only a basic shelter, a rough assemblage of sheet metal and wood embedded into a rough concrete foundation. Every inch of every vertical surface (and many of the horizontal ones as well) was covered in paper - posters, articles, drawings, adverts for a play or some sort of concert. The corporate flyers had not yet made it out here.

By the time she made it back to her apartment, there was already a gray-suited foreigner (or, more accurately, newcomer - when a place had existed so short, there was scarcely such a thing as a foreigner) waiting in the hallway outside her door with a clipboard in his right hand and a augtracker in his left, tapping his cheap faux-suede shoes against the floor. He stood there, almost static, a rock as a stream of people flowed past him, muttering and pointing and staring. The first, most obvious sign he was an offworlder was his red face (the air here had a composition that took some weeks to get used to), but the cheap corporate suit and the shoes that were, inexplicably, a pink and orange gradient did not help matters. She eyed him suspiciously as she slowly approached. A recruiter or a collector? As she approached, he hurriedly stowed the augtracker in his pocket (it responded with a furious array of beeps) and rearranged his face into a vaguely agreeable expression. His face had utterly no distinguishing features - you could run your eyes over it a hundred times and never find anything to be stuck on. He stuck his left hand out awkwardly. "I'm from Anscom." A second later, and a booted foot hurtled towards his face - another second later, and she was gone. How nice of him to warn me.

She paced around a small prepaid storage unit in the city outskirts, made even smaller by the fact that half of the space was taken up by a colossal machine, so densely packed one could hardly tell what it was. Its joints had been folded in on itself so tightly it appeared they were going to snap, its springs and suspension compressed until it bottomed out. It was terrifying, as if the slightest brush would cause it all to unravel, to burst outwards and tear through the concrete walls and ceiling. She knew it wouldn't - it had survived months of space travel, of bumping and denting and weight, shoved carelessly in a cargo hold. Nevertheless, she kept a safe distance out of superstition. Taking up half of the remaining space was a small metal box, about the size of a twin-bed, powder-coated safety orange. It was plastered in safety stickers, medical warnings, a long spiel about human rights and combat casualties covering its front. It was almost overwhelming to look at, so dotted in bright colors and symbols and text. She made sure that it was entirely out of her field of vision while pacing. So, all said, she had about one and a half square meters of space to pace in. She had, at this point, covered every single centimeter in her pacing at least 3 times over. "Maybe it will be different this time?" It never is. It always ends the same. "What if I can help fight it?" And what, get yourself captured again? Her chest felt heavy and hot, like a cannonball in the process of being forged. "Maybe I can leave before it starts?" They already have 50 aug trackers. Even if you could hide it, there's no way you'll be able to bring the " cargo ". The euphemism tugged at the edges of her brain. She felt the ball growing, pushing aside organs, cracking ribs. The familiar anger and hopelessness rising. "And so what, so I fucking run away again? Become fucking rip van winkle and go in the fucking freeze tube and wait til they don't notice? Til the planet becomes a fucking husk and I can leave?" There was no stopping it at this point. "It's a fucking grinding machine, churning up everyone and everything until there's nothing left." At this point, she was shouting at loud. "I can run from it, over and over again, ensure there's always a slower prey. Like I've done for a hundred fucking years. " Or fucking what? Beat your hands against it til they bleed? You can run or you can punch against a brick wall and that's it. She almost walked into a wall. "At least I'll have fucking tried." Do you really still believe it? That someday they'll all fucking rise up and wipe out the corpos? "No - no. But I can't fucking not believe it. I can't. There has to be some hope to the anger." The ball had grown larger and heavier, weighing her down and igniting her veins, becoming so dense it produced a gravitational field. "I need to fucking rest." It collapsed into a tiny dot, a pinprick of pain, weight, and heat. She resigned herself to it, ran her hands through her hair. The storage unit had been pre-paid for 45 years, and she didnt have anyone here to miss (or to miss her.) There was no obstacle but herself.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

There was something about freezing yourself that was innately enjoyable, in the same way that rotting in bed til your legs were weak was, as going on a chatroom and joining the dogpile was, as lying down in muck and letting yourself sink was. It was the erasure of the line seperating you and everything else, the bursting of that tight container that kept you tightly in and the universe tightly out. At some point (around -175c), the body and the container ceased to have different temperatures, ceased to require liquid nitrogen to be pumped through the veins by wheezing bellows. It was an organic state of homeostasis. No more differentiation. The routine was familiar - she'd done it countless times before. It was designed to be simple: the 'intended' use of single-use cryopods was either keeping survivors of some disaster in a stable state til they reached the hospital, or allowing rich fucks to skip the ~6-10 month travel time of interstellar travel by simply freezing them. Either way, it had to be approachable. She'd set the timer already. 36 years and change - the rated maximum time of the pod. You're procrastinating. She relented and hit the button - a surprisingly pathetic microswitch under a small silicone sheath - and lay back as the coldness spread, cell by cell, like a drop of water on a paper towel. The body shut down before the mind did - it was a single moment, stretched to what felt like an hour. The muscles stiffening and contracting, the skin crackling like crepe paper as the water changed its density (she'd already prepared the moisturizer for when she exited, a shelf-stable solution to last the years), the deep hum of the body (the one you hear only in those very unfortunate moments when your heart stops) slowly come to a halt. And then she fell into the abyss.

When she awoke, it was... warm. A vaguely fungal smell pervaded. Her mind skipped along, skimming off consciousness - - - before finally diving into it. She was aware, all of a sudden, of how much she hated it - hated her skin cracked and wrinkly like a sunburnt elephant, hated the way the contents of her stomach were still frozen and weighed there heavily, hated the way her muscles felt brittle like unvulcanized rubber. The distant rumbling of artillery shook the room - she barely even noticed. It was too familiar after so many years. Finally, after applying a copious amount of moisturizer and performing a series of increasingly outlandish stretches, she pulled the door in towards her - only to be faced with a literal brick wall. Evidently, the 45 year deposit guaranteed only that the contents of the unit were safe, not that there'd be a way to get to them. Ah. Well. Time to use the cargo.