David Ryker - Escape

T hey say you dont dream in stasis.

They say the process cuts off all mental activity, shutting down the conscious and unconscious mind until the body is revived again at its destination years or decades later.

They say that after you are put under, your first glimmerings of brain activity dont occur until the timer reaches zero, sending an impulse to the autohypos to inject you with the chemical cocktail that washes out the previous chemicals that has held you inanimate. Slowly, over the course of ten minutes, you wake up.

Until then, they say, you are as unthinking and as unfeeling as a corpse.

Like with everything else, they were wrong.

You do dream in stasis, or at least I did.

I dreamt of the Greenhouse Museum.

The Greenhouse Museum stands at the heart of the North American East Coast Megalopolis, a conglomeration of what used to be New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Toronto, and several smaller cities whose names are known only to historians.

It stands on a high hill to get above the worst of the smog. If youre lucky enough to get a ticket, you enter through a broad gate of green glass sculpted to look like vines, and enter an echoing front hall painted in soothing greens and blues. Men and women separate to go to the locker rooms, where everyone showers and puts on the clean garments offered by the museum staff. All dirt and stink from the city is left behind. In the Greenhouse Museum, everyone is clean and pure.

People gather in the second hall and are allowed inside the greenhouse in small groups. No rushing crowds like at concerts or art exhibitions. Here everything is placid, unhurried. Your ticket lasts the entire day.

You pass out of the second hall through a double set of doors and into paradise.

Its the only way I can describe it.

Sensations washed over me like a tidal wave. A confusion of greens and reds and yellows, a heavy humidity, and a deep breath of moist, clean air. I had never breathed so deeply in my life.

The woman and I stopped and stared, holding each others hands. The entrance area is a broad open space that can hold lots of people. They designed it that way because everyone who comes in stops and stares. For several minutes none of the visitors stepped onto any of the paths.

A sign told us this was the ecozone called jungle. It took some time for our eyes to adjust to the overwhelming sensations. After a while, I could make out individual plants, things called vines and ferns and flowers. I had seen these things before, of course, in pictures or in sad little pots in office buildings, but seeing them come out of rich, dark soil in such abundance made them unrecognizable at first.

At last, we stepped onto one of the paths, moving slowly, looking all around us. To this day I cant really describe my feelings from that morninga strange mixture of awe and sadness. This stuff had once grown across half of South America and large swathes of Africa and Asia? It was hard to believe. We walked for a long time along the meandering paths, but the aweand the sadnessdid not fade.

There were other ecozones toodesert and prairie, tundra and coniferous forest. I loved them all, but we both found ourselves going back to the jungle for another look.

In my stasis dream I couldnt remember her name. Now in my waking state I cant either. Just some chick I took out to impress with my big bankroll and connections. You needed both to get into the Greenhouse Museum.

My original plan was to make a move in some isolated spot. Lots of couples did that. But all that nature, after a lifetime of living in cramped apartments and breathing badly filtered air in a megalopolis, made me forget. And now I cant even remember the name of the person I shared the best day of my life with.

Her name doesnt matter. Shes long dead. Theyre all dead.

But I hope, more than anything else in this filthy galaxy, that the Greenhouse Museum still stands.

I dont know how long I dreamed about that wonderful place. I suppose dreams take longer in stasis. Each fragment of memory sluggishly passing through the brain to link up with other memories, slowly building up into scenes, old conversations, faces. My dream may have lasted years. Maybe I started dreaming right after they put me under, and dreamed the entire fifty years I lay in the stasis pod, moving only when the internal adjusters adjusted my position every few hours through that long voyage so I wouldnt get bed sores. Maybe I dreamed all the way through the Oort Cloud and out past the edge of the solar system, my mind reveling in lush green jungles and rich air as my ship shot into interstellar space, getting up to 20x light speed as it hurtled toward its distant destination.

I know I was still dreaming that dream when the stasis pod began to revive me. I know that because in my dream I still stood in the jungle when I began to hear gunfire.

G unfire! My mind and body kicked into action, all the old reflexes coming back.

Or at least they tried to.

I wanted to spring out of my stasis pod and throw myself down onto the floor in order to get some shelter between my pod and the one next to it, and then look around to get a handle on the situation.

Instead I just flailed around like an epileptic, my hand thumping against the top of the pod as it opened with a hiss and lifted.

I could barely see it. My eyes, opening for the first time in fifty years at least according to the readout on the stasis pod blinked at the cold white light of the stasis hall. Everything was blurry. My hand a mass of flesh-colored fuzz, the top of the stasis pod barely seen.

More gunfire, closer this time. I had to get my shit together. Fast.

I tried to rub my eyes. One hand hit my forehead. The other missed my face completely. I blinked, willing my vision to focus.

At last it did, and I was able to get my arms and legs organized enough to turn and get up on one elbow. I nearly faceplanted into the side of the stasis pod, but I managed it.

My pod stood in a large hall set off an even larger one. In both, hundreds of stasis pods, sleek steel coffins with domed glassteel tops, stood in orderly rows beneath a low metal ceiling. Mine was the only one open in this hall, the section reserved for security personnel and soldiers. From what I could see of the larger hall, the one for colonists and low-level techs, several were open.

Another burst of fire. Someone cheered. Another voice laughed, long and loud and sadistic.

Several figures rushed into the room. As my eyes tried to focus on them, they spread out around my hall. They were all dressed in the uniform jumpsuits of the crew of the Ark Ship Nansen. Some wore the red of technicians. Others had on the green of scientists. Others wore the khaki of colonists.

Colonists? Whod woken them up so soon?

Who woke me up?

A man in a red technicians jumpsuit, the badge on his shoulder showing him to be an electrician first class, rushed up to me.

Comrade! So good to see we infiltrated security, too. Let me help you.

He grabbed me under the shoulders and started hauling me out of the pod.

My mind raced. Comrade? Was he a rebel?

The high-pitched buzz of a flechette gun made me look over my shoulder. A man in a green scientists jumpsuit was pouring fire through the glassteel top of a stasis pod nearby, the titanium spikes punching through the thin cover and pulping the face underneath. The diagnostic panel on the side of the pod went haywire, showing bars of red. I saw his name: Captain Thomas Briggs. One of the other security officers. Id gone through orientation with him. Loved volleyball. Not anymore.