“Brayden Cofey?”
I blinked myself out of my reverie as I heard my name being called, I got up, my head swimming as I did so, and steadied myself against the wall. The nurse nodded at me and held the door open.
“Right this way, room fourteen.”
I made my way, slowly, hand on the wall, to the room, my stomach dropping down and to infinity as I made those final steps.
After I made it to the room the nurses were a buzz around me, taking various readings and getting me into a medical gown. Then all of a sudden it was just me, in a medical gown on a bed as the doctor came in.
“Brayden Cofey?”
I nodded.
“Do you know why you are here?” The doctor, a kindly old woman, said.
“I'm dying.”
“That's what we're hoping to prevent. The congenital issues in your brain, exacerbated by the stress of your job and the accident... we don't have the medical expertise to treat it without killing you. What we can do is put you in stasis until we can. Even if we can't prolonged stasis has been shown to reduce swelling in cases like yours, even allowing the brain to heal otherwise irreparable damage.”
“How long.”I asked.
“Until a procedure is developed to help you... I don't know. But theoretically, if we kept you in stasis for a prolonged duration... it could heal on it's own. At least bring you back to your baseline.”
“So just occasional blinding pain from migraines.”
The doctor shrugged. “If you are in long enough it could regress to how it was when you were a teenager, only occasional headaches. Hopefully by that point we will have a treatment that can keep it at that level.”
“And how long would that take.”
The doctor was silent.
“How long doctor.”
the doctor sighed.
“Anywhere between fifty years and a century. I am sorry.”
images of my parents came to mind, my friends, flashing before my eyes. I imagined this was what it was like when they talked about your life flashing before your eyes before death.
“But it probably won't be that long. It's likely our medical technology will have advanced leaps and bounds long before then!”
Her optimism was beginning to grate on me.
“...So... are we ready?” I asked, at this point wanting to get it over with as another spike of pain lanced through my skull.
The doctor turned to me with a sad look in her eyes.
“Yes. We are. Follow me.”
She got up and stood at the door, waiting for me to follow. A nurse stood ready with a wheelchair but I waved her off. The nurse made a noise to protest but the doctor held up her hand and shook her head.
I was glad of this one little favor. If I was to face my end, the end of everything and everyone I knew and everything I had worked for in my life, I wanted to at least face it on my own two feet.
My own two feet and the wall, that is, as I reached out and leaned on it to keep myself from falling as another spike of pain and vertigo lanced through me.
The walk felt like it took forever, the hallway tilting back and forth in my vision, until finally we entered the room. There was a large upright pod, with two massive thick transparent doors open. In the back was a padded upright table in the shape of a human body, obviously where I was supposed to stand. I made my way over to it, almost falling as I did so, and took up my position against the table in the pod.
Nurses swarmed around me, stripping off my hospital gown, leaving me fully naked, and connecting me up to a number of machines, ports in the pod trailing lines of fluid were hooked up to my arms and neck, my head was shaved as electrodes and little needles were inserted into my skull.
I probably would have cried from the pain if I hadn't been hit with another spike of agony and vertigo right at that moment. I would have flinched if they had not already strapped me down.
The doctor appeared before me “Brayden, I need you to stay calm, and when the pod closes, I need you to take a deep breathe, in and out, just listen to my voice, and keep breathing.”
The pod closed around me, the transparent doors still managing to significantly dim the inside of the pod.
The doctor's voice came over the speakers. “Just breathe Brayden, listen to my voice, I am going to count backwards from 10, 9, 8..” As she started counting my vision narrowed, till all I could see was her.
I blacked out before she hit seven.
***********************************************************************************
I awoke in darkness, not like 'oh I can barely see the wall darkness' I mean I literally could not see my body, or anything around me. For a moment I thought I had gone blind.
I opened my mouth to call out, but all that came out was a squeak, my vocal chords constricting and letting out only a brief gust of air before closing up completel
I calmed down, breathed in and out, and then tried to speak at a lower volume.
“H... Hello?” My voice came out as a rasp.
“Is anyone there?”
I could hear muffled clangs around me, as if some machine was moving things around and running into metallic walls.
All of a sudden I felt motion, like the capsule I was in was being picked up and moved around. I was still strapped down, so there was little I could do to brace myself.
I was moving somewhere swiftly, stopping and starting constantly as I changed direction. It felt like I was on some kind of rail system.
All of a sudden I felt weightless, as if I was drifting, and I realised the pod was drifting as well.
Then an impact, the sound of shearing metal, and blackness.
***********************************************************************************
I blinked myself awake, now I was free of the restrains, and lying on what felt like curved glass, likely the inside of my pod
I heard banging on the outside, and what I think was shouting, an argument.
“Hello? Is anyone there?” I called out, my voice stronger now, almost like something had been jolted free by the impact.
There was a pause in the argument outside, then a voice returned, questioning.
I slammed my fists against the inside of the pod.
“Hello? Help! I think my pods offline!” I called out.
I knew from the 6 months leading up to being inserted into the pod that it being offline was a very bad thing. It was supposed to have multiple self contained power sources inside as a redundancy. Seeing as how any disruption in the power could leave someone still in stasis a vegetable.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
It was actually lucky he had woken up before his pod lost total power, he could already feel the air getting a bit thin inside.
He heard pounding on the outside of his pod, and unintelligible speech being shouted.
He pounded on the inside of his pod again in response.
“Help! It's getting hard to breathe!”
The whole pod shifted, sending me rolling into the table that I had been strapped to, as the sound of tearing metal began to fill the pod.
Light appeared through a small crack as whatever cover had been fitted over my pod was levered out of the way. At first I thought it was some sort of jaws of life, or that they had jammed in multiple crowbars, but as my eyes adjusted to the new light I realised that they were fingers jammed in the gap... fingers that gleamed like chrome.
With a final metal scream a quarter of the shell that surrounded me was ripped away
And I came face to face with my saviors.
I was taken aback, to say the least.
I don't know what I was expecting... but people with more chrome and wiring than skin showing was not it.
One was a woman with a pixie cut, however her face frm just above her left cheek, to over her right eye, were metal, stretching back into her hairline. It was segmented, and moved, mimicing what a real face would do, but it still seemed artificial, if somewhat charming. Her left eye's sclera resembled burnished steel, with the iris being some sort of camera.
The man beside her was even more... augmented? His entire face was the color of chrome, his eyes were matt black, with only the faint shine of camera's sparkling from inside his iris. His mouth was replaced by some kind of mask or grill, that seemed built into his jaw.
What really made him seem different was the fact that his arms were entirely some kind of segmented metal. These were what I had mistaken for the jaws of life that had pried open my pod. There was still a solid sheet of glass between us though.
“Hello?” I asked
They looked at eachother and said something back and forth in a language I didn't understand for a minute before they turned to me.
“Can you understand me?” The woman asked, her voice high pitched but muffled from the glass.
“Yes! Yes I can understand you!”I said before a coughing fit left me gasping. The air was getting really thin in the pod.
“Who are you? Why are you awake? These pods should have power for another century...”
I pounded a fist against the glass, but I was getting weaker.
“Need... Air...” I gasped, as my vision started to tunnel.
The woman looked at the heavily cyberized man, who raised both of his hands in a stance to smash the glass, but the woman stopped him.
“If you shatter the glass the shrapnel could kill him.”
Brayden couldn't make out any more of the conversation as he slid once more into unconciousness.
***********************************************************************************
A cool gust of air blew over my face and I gasped, blinking as I tried to get my vision back.
“Easy, easy. You're alright, we got you out of there before you were unconscious for more than a minute. Just breathe.” The woman said, this time her voice unfettered by the pods glass doors.
I followed the advice of the voice and just focused on breathing, filling my lungs with the air that was... admittedly a little bit stale.
“What...” I gasped out, and felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Shhh...”
It took a few minutes before my head cleared and I could see properly again.
I blinked my eyes and sat up, seeing myself to be in some kind of large bay.
“Where am I?”
Both the woman with the quarter chrome face and the man with the cyber-arms were hovering near me, the woman kneeling and the man crouching down on what I now realized were also mechanical legs. They both looked at eachother.
“You are on the sleeper ship Svalbard.”
“Sleeper ship? Svalbard? Like the seedbank?”
“I don't know anything about a seedbank, but yeah, a sleeper ship.”
“Like a cruise ship? Where you sleep on it?”
The man shook his head. “No no, a colony ship.”
I just was not understanding.
“Where is there left to colonize? Antarctica?”
Again the two cybered up individuals looked at eachother.
“Could you tell us what you last remember?”
“I was going in to the hospital, I have a neurological issue that was getting worse with time. Inoperable. They... Stasis was a new thing, but they were hopeful if they put me in there it would bring the swelling down, then with new developments hopefully they'd be able to take care of it.”
“What year did you go under?”
“Uh, 2025?”
“Oh shit that would've been a first generation stasis unit. No wonder it's backup's failed after five hundred years.”
“FIVE HUNDRED YEARS!” I exclaimed.
“Yeah, that's about what I expected.” The woman said, rubbing her ears.
“Told you you should have gotten the earwork done, can auto-adjust volume.” The man said to her.
“I've been out five hundred years? Why? The doctor said it would just be a few decades at most, maybe a century for the swelling to go down completely.”
“A LOT happened while you were down.”
I sputtered at them, but the woman held up a hand.
“Before we answer your questions, how about we get somewhere more comfortable, let's go to the mess, get some food, maybe something to drink, and then you can ask all the questions you like. You just got out of stasis and the adrenaline is fading, so your body is going to be screaming at you about a lot of things real soon.”I nodded and stood up, once I was upright I marveled at the lack of vertigo, and stared down at my feet.
“This is... amazing!”
“What?”
“I can stand! Without help! And I don't feel like my head is about to split open! I know that's probably weird for you guys to hear but I've spent the last half of my life in extreme pain and either holdign myself up with whatever walls or tables were nearby or else been confined to a wheelchair. This is great! I guess five hundred years in a box was just what I needed.”
The girl just slowly nodded, but the man's metallic face smirked, the metal... bands? That ran horizontally across it sliding up and into eachother to make a very expressive display. “I completely understand how you feel. I was paralyzed before I got augmented. I'm Joe. Follow me.”
The man started walking to the edge of the bay, towards a hatch in the... bulkhead?
The woman took up a position next to me, hovering like one of the nurses five hundred years ago.
I started following the man, Joe, and looked over at the woman.
“And what's your name?”
“Oh, uh, my name is...” a stream of sound that seemed more akin to what a dying modem would sound like than any real name emitted from one of the implants, likely a part that was covered by her hair.
Joe called back. “She was born COG, she doesen't really have a meatname like you or me.”
“Meatname?”
“Like Joe or Phil or Brayden. Her handle translates as... Iron Bait twenty... the numbers arent important just a lot of metadata and stuff like her parents, her subnet address... It'll make more sense once you get augmented.”
“Joe! He might not want to be.”
Joe snorted.
“Augmented? Like the implants you both have?”
“Ah! Glad I don't have to explain it.”
“I mean the last few years before I went to sleep I couldn't do much, played a lot of games. It's kindof a big part of fiction. Or at least it was.”
“Good to know way back then people were still looking forward. Unlike the empire..”
“Empire?”
“Later, let's get some food in you.”