Chapter 16 - Traveller

Hideki placed the second buring stick of incense into the ceremonial bowl just in time. The sun was just rising over the sea east of Oarai Sun Beach, and the sky was starting to lighten. The family had all been up for about an hour, as was tradition. Well, all but one.

His grandmother's cryo-sarcophagus hissed and the panel went green. Hideki called through quietly to the living room. Anna, Kat, Samu and his parents Katsumi and Yoko, all came through to the shrine room and knelt on the traditional tatami floor around the medical unit.

In centuries past, the little house shrine and its twin, a small buddhistic altar sat in one of the rooms of the house, inset into a wall, or up on a shelf so that photos of holoportraits of deceased parents or other ancestors and family could be placed there. Depending on the season, event, or festival, the family would use the shrine/altar as a focal point for private ceremonies, make little offerings of fruit, or a favourite snack or drink.

Now that the oldest of relatives could choose medical suspension, and with the longstanding Asian cultural practice of not sending relatives off to care homes like those cold, unfeeling Western families do, it had become common to place the cryo-sarcophagus next to the shrine and altar. Not all families did it this way, of course, but most did, and Kat's father enjoyed the simplicity and familiarity of doing things the "right" way.

Hideki's grandmother, or Kat's great-grandmother, preferred to have her family around her when she awoke. Many preferred to have some news application, or a holonurse be there, either because they wished to be updated more efficiently, or because they wanted their waking moments and early mind fog to be a private matter.

Shige Suzuki chose to share these moments of rebirth with her famiy, and they respected her wish. Occasionally when the mindfog was particularly bad, Hideki had called a virtual nurse, but usually it wasn't necessary.

The hood of the cryo unit lifted and they heard Shige's voice, frail but firm, and with a slight countryside accent to her Japanese "Good morning, my family!" Slowly the medical unit assisted her sitting up, the body length support sculpt moving seemlessly and intuitively to support her head, neck and back.

Shige first looked, as she always did at the shrine and altar. She saw the two freshly burning incense sticks, a few little sweet mikan oranges and an unopened can of whisky sour placed as offerings to her parents, grandparents and long deceased husband. 'Aaaaah, Hideki is a good boy, he always remembers to follow the traditions', Shige thought to herself.

She turned to her waiting family who were kneeling politely, and who bowed toward her, as was custom.

"Welcome back Hi-Baa-chan (Great Grandma)" Kat said, the first one to stand up from her bowed seiza position. Then Samu was up too, both coming to help Shige with her waking process. It normally took a few hours before Shige would be able to walk around by herself, even using technological or traditional walking supports but for the first while, she would allow herself to be pushed around in a wheelchair.

Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

"Oh! Kat my girl! You are home again!" Shige tried to say, but all she was able to annunciate clearly was "Kat-chan". It still brought a smile to everyone's faces. It was a good sign that Great-Grandma Shige would possibly have a more lucid and positive waking period this time. They were not always so lucky.

It wasn't so much due to any problem with the science or technology itself, but more like an inherent part of its operation. Heat is movement energy, when you analyse it on a sufficiently detailed scale, and so putting people into cryo-sleep meant, essentially slowing them down. Some clever scientists even argued that cryo-sleep was, functionally, mathematically actually a form of one-way time travel. Time, they argued was literaly just the fact of organised matter following entropic processes towards the heat death of the universe, so if that entropic decay was slowed or halted, then effectively, for the matter and the mind being frozen time did not pass and they were genuinely skipping ahead to a future date and missing the 'time' in between. Cryo was just the mechanism by which one-way time travel operated.

Of course, to the average person or family, the cryo unit was not used for time travel. It was seen as a medical unit. The technology came from techniques developed by military surgeons during the first Orbital War between the Western Alliance and China. A bombed containership carrying military supplies from Europe to North America was hit by a Chinese Orbital Artillery Hypervelocity mass pellet. Chinese military intelligence knew it was carrying military supplies, but hadn't known that the cargo was largely experimental armour that, when struck by a missile, underwent a controlled endothermic reaction. Early ablative armour often exploded outward when struck in an attempt to physically reduce the velocity and power of the incoming strike by pushing against it. This new variant attempted to reduce the power in the incoming strike by using an endothermic reaction to literally suck the energy, the heat and movement, out of the environment and the projectile.

The Hypervelocity Pellet arced down from orbit and passed vertically through the centre of the ship. Much to everybody's surprise, it did not pass clean through the vessel leaving a hollow column in its wake as it obliterated containers and the passed through the engine room and the out through the hull into the sea below. Instead, it struck a 12 container deep column of endothermic reactive ablative armour, experimental class 2. And it struck it with such force that the shockwaves passed through every other container in the ship. The 7000 containers near simultaneously each popped open, foam oozing out and heat and movement being sucked in from all sources. The sea froze for 200 metres in every direction, including down.

The crew also froze.

Unlike early cryo pioneers who had themselves frozen after death (well done! we can unfreeze you but there is no cure for death!), but this ship's crew were frozen in life, and now doctors, relatively unconstrained by law due to the military status of the crew, were able to attempt to revive them.

40 years later, and cryo units in homes for elderly relatives are as normal as having government ID chip implants - totally normal.

Anna made a tradition breakfast of natto, fruit, grilled fish and coffee. Shige was starting to get up out of her wheel chair and potter about, moving ornaments, puffing up cushions, getting settled back in.

It had been a few years since Kat had left for university overseas, so it was great to be home as a family again. Kat hated to ruin it, but it was now or never.

"Hi-Baa-chan" (Great Grandma) she said as everyone was finishing their meal, "The Dragon has returned and I want to fight it. I want to be a soldier."