Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Ruin

So many stories start with a waking. Disra Senkovi had been asleep for decades. Something like a lifetime passed back home while he slumbered; a fraction of a lifetime passed around his oblivious form, the timespan squeezed down the relativity gradient by his proximity to the speed of light. For him, though, there was no time, nothing but the oblivion of the cold-sleep chamber. They knew how to build them back in those days.

Senkovi chose the manner of his waking. Some of his colleaguesthose he thought of as less imaginativewould let themselves be fed crucial mission information, news from home, metrics from the ship, so they could spring from cold sleep with a mind full of data, ready to leap to their stations and steal a march on the day. Ludicrous, given the work they had ahead of them would take decades. Senkovi had always been unimpressed by most of his colleagues.

Instead, paradoxically, he woke himself with a dream.

He hung in the water of a warm, clean Coral Sea that hadnt existed in that virgin state since long before his birth. The sun filtered down through the waters like an embarrassment of sapphires. Below him, his best-guess reconstruction of the vanished Great Barrier Reef extended in multicoloured profusion, reds, purples and greens as far as the eye could see, like an alien city. Life whirled about the coral metropolis in a riot of motion, swimming, jetting, drifting, crawling. He turned gently, casting a benign and godlike gaze over his creation, half-sleeping, half-knowing, so that he felt the joy of having brought this into being yet not the pain of knowing the original had long predeceased him.

At last, one of his special friends signalled its presence, squirming its malleable body from a crevice within the rocks and undulating cautiously towards him. Eyes like and unlike his own regarded him with the sort of ersatz wisdom nature otherwise gave only to owls. Itdetermining the gender of an octopus was not a task easily performed at this removereached an arm towards him, Adam to his divinity, and he let his hand drift outwards slowly to accept that touch.

It was a good dream. Hed programmed it himself, creating a complex sequence of mental stimulation that drew on his specific memories and jumbled them into something semi-novel. It was still dream like, unreal, but that was what he was aiming for, so, fine. He also had to hack the ship computers with considerable ingenuity to make it happen, given that encounters with marine fauna were not on the -la-carte menu when choosing a wake-up sequence. The hard part had not been inserting the neurological sequence into the ships database but erasing all sign of his meddling. By then hed been in and out of the mission systems quite a lot without anyone noticing, though. Senkovi had come to the conclusion that the Terraform Initiative back home was very, very lax in its digital security, and then shrugged idly and carried on with his own personal tinkering. What, after all, was the worst that could happen?