by Jordan Rivet
She stopped mere steps from the nearest early-riser tank, realizing something didn’t fit with that optimistic scenario.
“The dust.” Of course. The cave-in hadn’t hit this part of the chamber, but a layer of dust and stone rested atop the Green Team’s cryo tanks. They hadn’t been opened since the cave-in happened.
Joanna took the final step.
She reached Theresa’s cryo tank first. She’d been one of Joanna’s first contacts in the program and one of the oldest people scheduled to enter cryosleep. Joanna had always been able to approach her during training to ask questions or to steal a few minutes of peaceful conversation in the midst of the crazy. Things had been crazy all right at the end of the world.
Now, Theresa’s body lay in the darkened tank. Cryo liquid filled it to the brim, and tubes still snaked from her mouth and nose. She looked as though she were sleeping, but the silence of the machine told the rest of the story. With no power running to the tank, the temperature wasn’t regulated, and her body wasn’t receiving the oxygen and nutrients it needed to stay alive. Theresa was dead.
Joana laid a hand on the tank and squeezed her eyes shut. Her legs trembled, threatening to deposit her on the floor again. This couldn’t be real. They weren’t supposed to dream in stasis, but she must be having a terrible nightmare. No one had spent this long in cryosleep before. There could be plenty of side effects after the first century. Maybe she should just lie down until everything was all right again.
But if she did that, she would never get up.
“Not yet,” she whispered hoarsely. “Stick with the program. Follow the red arrow to the exit chamber. Don’t you dare fall apart yet.”
She opened her eyes and looked at Theresa’s peaceful face one more time. It was slightly distorted by the tank and the liquid, but she wanted to remember it. When she moved on, she left a handprint in the dust above Theresa’s heart.
The other tanks contained the bodies of the rest of the early risers. The program coordinators. The survival guides. The doctors. The people who were supposed to shepherd them into the new world. Not a single machine had kept its power long enough to allow its occupant to wake. A dull ringing filled Joanna’s head, preventing her from grasping the magnitude of what had happened. She moved along the line with a mechanical calm, checking each tank, memorizing each face. Her legs became steadier beneath her, and she repeated her mantra again and again.
“You may experience some disorientation. Don’t panic. Don’t freaking panic.”
She still struggled to understand what she was seeing. The cryo chamber had been at risk of being destroyed during the apocalyptic event that prompted its creation in the first place, of course, but Joanna got the sense that this cave-in had happened later. Maybe it was the state of the bones or the fact that the bodies in the early-riser tanks hadn’t decomposed. The cryo gel could only preserve them for so long without the temperature control apparatus, and the layer of dust didn’t seem thick enough for two hundred years. No matter when the cave-in had happened, it was a miracle Joanna’s own tank had stayed on, protected by that slab of stone.
Unless I’m dead too. She stopped short at the thought. She had never believed in ghosts, but . . . She poked her arm. Her skin looked sallow and unhealthy but not translucent. The faint sheen on it came from the cryo residue, not an unearthly radiance, and she had left a handprint in the dust. It was just as well. Being a ghost would be pretty pointless if there were no people left to haunt.
She checked the final tank, Number 1, which contained the body of Colonel Waters, the head of security—and her least favorite program official. By the time she reached him she had given up hope that anyone else was left. They were dead, just like her parents, just like all the people she’d left behind on the surface. Waters’s severe face was as unfriendly in death as it had been in life. His hands, scarred and hairy, were clenched into fists around his nutrient tubes.
Joanna turned back to look around the cryo chamber once more, numbness beginning to overtake her body. She didn’t have the strength to dig through the solid wall of rubble to the tanks above 200 right now, and not just the physical strength. It had been hard enough to see Theresa. She couldn’t bear to look at Garrett—body or bone—until she’d had time to prepare.
She scraped more cryo gel off her leotard, forcing herself to breathe. “You may experience some disorientation upon waking.” Breathe. “Don’t panic.” Breathe. “Follow the red arrows to the exit chamber.”
She breathed, spluttering and coughing when she inhaled the dust stirred up by her footsteps. She peered through a red haze as the dust billowed around the emergency lights. The broken bones seemed to glow amidst the debris.
She had to keep moving before the numbness took over completely, before she lost the will to breathe. She needed water, food, and fresh air. And answers. The cryo bunker was supposed to keep Joanna and her team safe. They were supposed to awaken to resettle the earth two hundred years after the apocalypse. They’d been humanity’s last hope. So what the hell had happened?
“You won’t get any answers if you just stand here. You spent all that time learning the program for a reason.”
She turned her back on the wreckage and followed the red arrow to the exit chamber.
Chapter Three
BEFORE
Joanna was eighteen years old when her long sleep began, more than a decade into the Cryo Revolution. The breakthrough in cryogenics had happened when she was still young enough to play with toy dinosaurs, when death was something that only happened to old people and goldfish. By the time she finished elementary school, death had become less frightening for everyone.
People with incurable diseases were the first cryo customers. Cryosleep could preserve even the most fragile lives long enough to save them. Patients would seal themselves up in tanks full of tubes and goo, leaving strict instructions to wake them as soon as their cure materialized. As shorter-term tests proved successful, cryosleep became a safe way to hit the fast-forward button on life. Doctors put themselves away so they could perform more advanced medical procedures. Science fiction fans decided to nap through a century or two in order to live their fantasies of seeing the future. People who just weren’t that happy figured they might be better off in another decade.
One bizarre case got a lot of attention in Joanna’s first year of junior high, the first time she remembered really thinking about the implications of the Cryo Revolution. A twenty-six-year-old man announced he was going to put himself to sleep until his fifteen-year-old neighbor turned twenty-two so he could date her without it being creepy. Naturally, most people thought it was pretty creepy anyway, including the girl, who ended up marrying her college sweetheart on her twentieth birthday. The press had salivated with glee at the chance to get an interview with the still-twenty-six-year-old guy when he woke up.
Joanna couldn’t stop reading about the technology after that salacious episode. She began to look forward to every live-streamed awakening and before-and-after interview. She was considering a career in the rapidly expanding cryo industry by her senior year of high school. She didn’t intend to skip any of her own life, but she couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to see the future.
And then everything changed. Or more accurately, the comet changed everything.
The news broke in January, exactly a week after Joanna’s eighteenth birthday. A comet twenty kilometers wide had been discovered hurtling toward the earth at 170,000 kilometers per hour. The facts repeated in an endless loop throughout the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the numbers hardly seeming real—170,000 kilometers per hour might as well have been 170 million as far as Joanna was concerned. The size made more sense the first time a newscaster distilled it:
“It’s twice as wide as the rock that killed the dinosaurs.”
The news anchor paused, looking directly into the camera, and took a deep breath. Joanna’s parents, with whom she watched the incessantly cycling news in the early days, rea
ched out at the same moment to grab her hands.
“It is going to hit us on the morning of September twentieth.”
The dry certainty of the statement shocked everyone into silence. What could they say in the face of the inevitable? The comet would strike the earth and send a blast of air, fire, and dust across its surface, rendering it unlivable for at least a century. Anyone who survived the initial blast and likely firestorm would starve in the impact winter to follow, the new Ice Age. Every human clinging to the crust of this little blue-and-green planet would perish.
A deafening shockwave rippled over the world at the news. Joanna and her parents watched, transfixed, as the talking heads argued over nuances and debated exactly how the disaster would play out, their predictions illustrated with slick graphics and stomach-wrenching simulations.
Live streams cropped up to follow the progress of the comet, which was dubbed Brandon—a nickname that annoyed Joanna to no end. Hastily assembled apps marked the advancing doom with blinking green lights. The comet was already too close by the time it was discovered, leaving only nine months until impact. Nine months until the end of humanity. Nine months until the inevitable.
Some came up with madcap schemes to destroy the comet, everything from the “drill ’em and nuke ’em” scenarios of old disaster movies to elaborate plans to shield the earth from the impact. But the hard truth was that any effort to destroy the rock wouldn’t be enough to stop the debris from pummeling the earth. Single round or scattershot, humanity was doomed.
At first, people looked to the long-defunct space programs around the globe to save them from Brandon. Rumors spread of a terra-forming mission to Mars. Joanna loved that idea, imagining what it would be like to blast out of an atmosphere about to become uninhabitable. But space-travel technology hadn’t advanced enough to build a long-term colony or transport enough people to preserve their species. Sidelined for decades in favor of more exciting technological developments, the space programs lacked the capability to save mankind. But that other, more exciting technology had already taken a few giant leaps of its own.
All of a sudden, the Cryo Revolution transformed from an exciting advancement to humanity’s salvation. Bunkers filled with cryo tanks were the human race’s only chance to endure the impact winter after the comet hit. The earth’s atmosphere was expected to stabilize enough for human habitation eventually. All they had to do was freeze a bunch of people with plenty of childbearing years ahead of them and set a timer until it was safe for them to wake up and rebuild.
The selection process for the future population of earth was top-secret and purportedly random. The government issued vague statements about computer-generated names, algorithms, health record checks, final screenings. It didn’t make much sense, but then what did these days? The important thing repeated over and over in official press releases was that spaces in the bunkers were strictly limited. Everyone was advised not to get their hopes up about being chosen.
But even though the odds were long, some people were chosen.
Joanna would never forget the day she got the call. She had been riding her bike home from high school in Kirkland, the Seattle suburb alongside Lake Washington where she’d lived all her life. The sky had been pure blue and sunny, a rarity in the city of perpetual cloud cover. Her parents hadn’t allowed her to go into town since the first round of riots and looting the week the news broke, but their suburb was still relatively safe. The spiral toward despair hadn’t begun in earnest yet.
The world would experience death-by-comet in a mere five months, but Joanna was thinking about homework. She still had a pile of work left on her senior project—an analysis of the media frenzies surrounding pre-comet disasters and how they differed from the current treatment of the coming apocalypse.
Joanna was one of the few members of her senior class bothering to finish out the school year. Her classmates were evenly split between those obliterating their sorrows in carnal pleasures and those wanting to experience all the natural wonders of Mother Earth in her sunset days. Most had embarked on a sordid campaign of sex, drugs, and camping trips. That was Seattle for you.
Joanna herself wanted to live her life as if it were not going to be cut short. She’d decided to finish high school, though only half a dozen teachers remained, and she was disappointed when the colleges she applied to suspended admissions given that humanity was expiring a few weeks into September. She’d have liked to know where she got in. Clinging white-knuckled to normalcy was her little way of dealing with the impending doom.
When her cell phone rang, she hauled her bike onto the sidewalk to take the call, already steeling herself for bad news. Her family and friends would only choose calling over texting in an absolute emergency—and these days something had to be really bad to qualify as an emergency.
“Joanna Murphy?”
“Yes?”
“You are the daughter of Dane and Eliza Murphy?”
Oh shit. It’s the hospital. Please tell me they didn’t decide to end it early. Too many people had in the past few months.
“That’s me.” Joanna swallowed. “What’s wrong with my parents?”
“Nothing, to my knowledge.” The voice on the other side of the line was breezy, feminine. “You are currently a senior at West Kirkland High School, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And you are still attending classes despite . . . current events?”
“I am.”
“Good, good. That’s what we like to hear.” The sound of typing was audible in the background. “Let me see, everything looks okay with your records . . . Have you had any serious health issues lately?”
“You mean besides the fact that I’m dying?”
There was silence at the other end of the line. “Hmm, I don’t see anything about that here. May I ask what you’re dying of?”
“Uh, the comet hurtling toward the planet.”
“Oh yes.” The woman chuckled nervously. “I mean apart from that. You are in good health, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Are . . . are you from the hospital?”
“Oh goodness, did I forget to introduce myself? I have a whole spiel about . . . this is the thirty-seventh call I’ve made today. My brain is a bit addled. I am Theresa Simmons, from the United States Bunker Reservation Project. You’ve heard of BRP?”
Joanna couldn’t speak for a few seconds. She most certainly had heard of BRP—called “Burp” by the bitter hopefuls. The odds of being randomly selected were so slim that she had never expected to come in contact with the hastily formed government organization. Bunker hoaxes ran rampant online, but this had to be real. Only the government would do something as archaic as call a stranger on their cell phone.
“Yes . . . I’ve heard of it,” she said at last.
“I am screening candidates for our cryo program to help repopulate the earth after the comet strike. You’ve been randomly selected for the shortlist, and our records indicate you’d be a good addition to the future of humanity.”
“Me?”
“Your name has already made it through most of the process. I’m checking that you are still alive and reasonably sane before officially offering you a spot in a cryosleep bunker.”
Reasonably sane? It occurred to Joanna that she might be hallucinating this whole conversation. A lot of people had gone a bit batty since news of the comet broke. It couldn’t be this simple. She waited for Theresa Simmons to say more, but the other line was quiet except for the tapping of computer keys.
“So . . . what do I have to do?” Joanna prompted.
“Oh! You’re in, assuming you want the spot,” Theresa said. “You sound like you’ll be a pleasant addition to the program—and your record is solid. You seem to have maintained a sense of humor and industry in the midst of everything. That’ll be important in the future.”
Joanna stared at the sidewalk, the sleepy houses—some already abandoned—and the nearby stop sign, as if they could help her make sense of
what was happening. Her heart thudded like a drum. She had mostly tried not to think about the future—or at least the real one.
“When is the future?” she blurted out.
“I beg pardon?”
“When will the Burp—I mean the BRP—participants wake up?”
“Oh. We anticipate that the earth will recover sufficiently for our emergence in two hundred years.”
“Two hundred years? Wow.”
“Yes. I can hardly imagine it myself.” Theresa sighed. “Anyway, I have more calls to make today. Shall I put you down for the program, Joanna?”
Joanna doubted anyone Theresa called was capable of processing the implications of a question like that. The risks. The potential psychological trauma. The fate of the people they’d leave behind. But she was still a human being with her survival instincts intact. What else was she going to do?
“Yes,” Joanna said. “I accept.”
“Great. You will receive the full details about your training by email. You are to report to your orientation camp at the end of May. Please keep this information confidential. It’s for your own good. Have a nice day now.”
The line went dead, leaving Joanna standing on the sidewalk, leaning on her bike for support. Just like that, she joined the tiny percentage of humanity that had been randomly selected to survive the apocalypse.
Chapter Four
The door to the exit chamber opened with a gritty squeal. Light flooded out of the opening, spilling onto the dusty floor. Joanna almost cried in relief. By some miracle, the power was on.
She entered the spacious room, which looked much as it had when she crossed it on the way to her cryo tank two hundred years ago: ratty couches, mismatched tables, assorted cupboards, doors leading to the lockers and showers. The exit chamber hadn’t suffered as much damage as the larger cavern during the cave-in. The ceiling sagged ominously, but the walls were still intact. Designed to serve as their base of operations while they established their settlement on the surface, the room had a cozy, ramshackle feeling, like the rec room of a youth center, even after all these years. Joanna and her friends had joked about how this massive government program ran out of money right before buying the furniture.
