Broken Worlds: The Awakening (A Sci-Fi Mystery)

by Jasper T. Scott

  “Of course, but if I were you, I wouldn’t tell her very much right now. There’s no sense in worrying her over something that’s probably nothing. I’m sure you’ll agree that discretion is a virtue in these types of situations.”

  Darius smiled thinly. “Absolutely. I’ll see you in your office, Doctor.”

  Alliston nodded, and Darius watched him go. He still felt like his world was falling apart, like the air was too thick and he couldn’t breathe, but now he had hope. Now his daughter would have a future, and he’d be around to see it. Darius blinked and something hot and wet fell to his cheeks. He wiped it away and smiled. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  How long would it take to find a cure for his daughter’s cancer? Fifty years sounded about right. What kind of world would they wake up to in fifty years?

  Despite the seriousness of the situation, Darius felt a giddy thrill of anticipation just thinking about it. In a way they were lucky, they were going to get to see things that other people could only dream about. It was ironic that the disease which had robbed Cassandra of her future was now giving it back to her.

  To the future, he thought, nodding to himself as he turned to re-enter his daughter’s room.

  Part One - The Awakening

  Chapter 1

  Awareness returned to Darius in glimmers and fragments, like sunlight flickering through a dark forest. He felt hot and cold all at the same time. Every nerve ending in his body sparked and sang with fire.

  “Malfunction detected. Emergency wake-up sequence in progress. Please remain calm. Someone will be along to orient you soon.”

  Darius nodded slowly, but his head felt like it didn’t belong to him. “Malfunction?” he echoed. “What year is it?”

  But no answer came. He blinked to clear a blurry film from his eyes, and tried not to contemplate the restricted, coffin-like confines of his cryo pod. Instead, he focused on taking deep, slow breaths. He rolled his ankles and wrists, and slowly curled and uncurled his fingers and toes, just to make sure that he still could.

  The air inside Darius’s pod grew warm, and then there came a sharp hiss, followed by a pneumatic groan. Darius’s ears popped. Here we go... he thought. The front of his cryo pod swung slowly open—and frigid, foul-smelling air swirled in.

  Darius gasped and choked. It was like a punch to the gut. His eyes flew wide open and flashed around the cryo storage room, trying to get his bearings, but the room was cloaked in utter darkness. The air was so cold that it seared his exposed skin and made his nostrils stick together. He hugged his shoulders and shivered in the dark, thankful at least that his pod had interior light strips so he could see his hands in front of his face.

  What happened? He remembered going into cryo with his daughter, Cassandra. They’d been taken to a secure facility below the hospital. The fact that he’d awoken in darkness meant that there must have been some kind of power failure. Was that what caused the malfunction? The doctors had explained to him before he’d gone into cryo that the pods had independent backup power to keep people frozen in case of a power failure, but Darius supposed that if the power outage had lasted long enough, his pod would have to wake him. If a power failure was responsible for the malfunction, then Cassandra would be waking up now, too.

  “Cass?” he called out in a reedy whisper. He cleared his throat and tried again, “Cassy?”

  But no reply came.

  Maybe her pod hasn’t opened yet.

  Just then, he heard a muffled hiss, followed by the pneumatic groan of another pod opening.

  “Hello?” a woman called out. “Is anyone there?”

  Darius’s heart rate sped up with excitement, then slowed. Not Cassandra’s voice, but at least I’m not alone.

  “Hey!” Darius called back. “I’m here.”

  “Who are you?” the voice returned. “Why did I wake up?”

  “I’m Darius Drake. I think we woke up because the power failed.”

  “Well, why’s it so cold?! This is Florida!”

  Darius shivered violently at the reminder of the temperature in the room. He felt heat radiating from grilles in the side of his pod, and he pressed his arms and feet up against them. It was definitely below zero beyond his pod. The woman made a good point: why was it so cold? Even in winter, Jacksonville didn’t get this cold.

  Maybe they make the cryo room cold to help keep everyone frozen?

  “Hello? Are you there?” the woman asked.

  “Yeah. I don’t know anything more than you. I just woke up, too. Hang on, I’m going to try to get to you.”

  “I’d prefer that you didn’t.... I’m naked.”

  “Me too,” Darius replied. “Everyone goes into cryo naked.”

  “Well, maybe we should just wait for someone to find us?”

  Darius pushed himself halfway out of his pod to get a better look around, even though he still couldn’t see a damn thing.

  Something felt wrong as he moved. His stomach lurched uneasily, and his head felt light. His sense of balance was all wrong. He twisted around to look back inside his pod. It was a beacon of light and warmth in the frigid darkness of the storage facility. The heaters inside the pod radiated warm air, beckoning him back inside.

  Another hiss sounded, followed by the telltale groan of a pod opening.

  “Hello?” came a new voice. A familiar voice.

  “Cass!” Darius twisted back around, his eyes straining to peer through the impenetrable darkness.

  “Dad? Why... why’s it so d-dark?” she asked, shivering audibly.

  Her shivers got him going too, but he forced himself to be still. “I’m here, honey. Just hang on, okay? I’m going to try to get to you.”

  “O-k-kay,” Cassandra replied.

  Another pod hissed open, and then another, and two new voices joined theirs—a man and another woman. The latter sounded like she was far away.

  “Hello?” that woman called out. “Hey!”

  “What’s going on?” the man replied.

  “Who are you?” the woman returned. “Why did we wake up at the same time?”

  The first woman interjected, “I don’t know!”

  “The p-power’s down,” Darius explained. “Our pods must have woken us before their r-reserves ran out.”

  “Makes sense,” the man replied. “I guess we should go find out what’s going on.”

  Just as he said that, a pulsing crimson light swelled all around them, revealing their surroundings in ruddy hues.

  “Hey, you there! Where on Earth are we?” the woman who was farther away asked. “Hey! Hello! Are you even listening?” Then she screamed. “They’re not moving!”

  “What? Who’s not moving? Who are you talking to?” the man asked.

  “Them! All of them! They’re just standing there staring at me!”

  “Them who?”

  This time her reply was indistinct, muffled by what might have been the sound of her sobbing.

  Probably having some kind of panic attack, Darius decided. “Just calm down. We’ll get to you soon.”

  “Dad... I’m scared,” Cassandra said.

  “It’s okay, honey.” Darius peered down, and his hands instinctively tightened on the sides of his pod. The floor lay far below, and the walls were stacked all the way to the ceiling with hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of cryo pods—six rows deep. Darius’s pod was at the top, up near the ceiling. That meant he was at least six stories up! Facing him, dozens of pods were open, dark and empty, while the majority remained shut, presumably with their patients still inside.

  Why had some of the pods opened and others not? he wondered. That implied that each of the pods had different reserves of emergency power. Maybe we woke up together because we all went into cryo at the same time. Darius nodded to himself. That made some sense. Down near the floor on the far side of the room he spied an illuminated pod. That had to belong to the hysterical woman.

  Darius blinked. His breath came in ragged gasps, and his heart
pounded furiously as he tried to make sense of where he was. This was not the cryo storage facility he’d gone into back in Jacksonville. In that facility, the pods had all been lying down, and there hadn’t been more than a dozen of them in the room with him and Cassandra. Here they were stacked vertically, by the hundreds, and somehow anchored to the walls of a massive room.

  Freezing air caressed Darius’s front with icy tentacles as he considered the implications of that. He supposed it was possible the Mayo Clinic had moved their cryo facility away from Florida for some reason. Maybe that explained the temperature. If they were in some other part of the country that got colder than Florida did in the winter, and if the power had been down long enough, then the temperature in the facility could definitely drop below freezing.

  The heaters in Darius’s pod continued warming his backside, tempting him to stop leaning out of the pod. He heard the woman who’d woken up right after him arguing with the unidentified man, but he was too distracted by his own thoughts to pay any attention to their discussion.

  On the floor below, between the stacks of cryo pods, he spotted some kind of... vehicle. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before. Vague, people-like shapes stood all around it, but none of them were moving. Icy dread sliced through Darius at the sight of them. Maybe that woman’s not so hysterical, after all, he thought, glancing back at her pod on the far side of the room.

  But that didn’t add up. If those were people, and they hadn’t moved in the past few minutes, then they were dead—and the dead people don’t stand around like statues.

  Must be something else—more pods, standing on their ends? Darius looked up with a grimace and put the matter from his mind. “Cass? Where are you?”

  “I’m here, Dad,” she said. He looked around and saw her hand waving from an open pod a few rows down and to his right. Her head poked around the rim of the pod, and she peered up at him. “Can you see me?”

  He leaned out farther and waved back. “I see you.” He also saw two more open pods near hers, both illuminated from within.

  Darius shivered again, and this time he didn’t stop. He couldn’t feel his ears, or his nose, or his... he glanced down with a grimace. He was slowly turning back into a human ice cube.

  “I’m going to try to get down and find some help, okay? Stay right there, and try to stay warm!”

  “Okay.”

  Darius hurriedly scanned his surroundings once more. He couldn’t see any ladders or any way down, but he could probably climb down the cryo pods themselves, assuming he didn’t slip and fall to his death in the process. And he’d have to be fast. Based on the freezing temperature of the air, whatever handholds and footholds he could find on the metal and glass surfaces of the pods would turn his hands and feet to nerveless blocks of ice in a matter of seconds. How was he supposed to climb like that?

  “Hey, shut up for a minute!” the man said to the woman he was arguing with. “Is anyone else feeling strange? I think something’s wrong with me. I don’t feel right.”

  Darius shook his head, wondering what the man was talking about, but even as he did so, he felt that same light-headedness from before. His stomach flipped queasily with that sensation, and he frowned. “We’re probably just disoriented...” He groped the sides of his pod, looking for handholds to begin climbing down, but his hand grazed one of the outside surfaces and he yelped, recoiling as the frozen metal scalded his hand. This was not going to be easy. He eyed the floor below, trying to decide how long it would take for him to get down there.

  It seemed like an impossible task, but he had to try. Darius braced himself and started down, this time being careful to hold onto the inner edges and surfaces of his pod.

  But as he started down, Darius realized what that man was talking about. Something was wrong with him too. Very wrong. His body felt like it didn’t belong to him.

  As he sought footholds on the pod below his, frozen metal grazed his bare feet, and he screamed, recoiling once more. He lost his grip, but didn’t fall.

  Darius drifted and spun, floating in mid-air. His eyes bulged as he realized what that meant.

  Chapter 2

  No gravity. How is that possible?! Darius wondered as he floated in the frigid air.

  “Dad? Are you okay?”

  “I’m...”

  “What the...?” the man trailed off.

  Darius squeezed his eyes shut and sucked in an icy breath. His teeth chattered, but he clamped down on them. Earth has gravity. Planets have gravity. Even the moon has gravity! Darius cracked his eyes open to check and saw that he was still floating and spinning in the same spot as before.

  “Well, that’s a twist,” the man said slowly. “We woke up in space.”

  “Space?!” the woman yelled.

  Darius shivered violently, and he realized that he couldn’t feel his extremities. I have to stay warm. He waited until he spun to face the inside of his pod, and then grabbed the heater grilles to pull himself back inside. He held himself there and warmed his hands and feet in front of the pod’s heaters. Pins and needles prickled as his fingers and toes came back to life, and his shivering gradually subsided.

  “Space,” he said, nodding. “At least that explains why it’s so damn cold. Space is plenty cold.”

  “It would take time for the internal temperature to drop that much,” the man said. “Space is also a good insulator. So how long has the power been down?”

  “It must have been down for a while already, or we wouldn’t have woken up,” Darius replied.

  “What are we doing in space?” the nearest of the two women asked.

  “Maybe something happened to Earth,” Darius suggested.

  “Something? Like what?” the woman shrieked.

  “I don’t know, an asteroid impact, or a war, or...” Darius trailed off. None of those things would really explain relocating cryo patients to space.

  “No,” the other man said. “Waking up in space because of a disaster on Earth makes no sense, unless we were among the only survivors and Earth is uninhabitable.”

  That was a chilling thought. “Well, we can figure out the answers later,” Darius said. “Right now we need to focus on staying warm and finding help.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s home,” the other man said.

  “Then who turned the power back on? We woke up in darkness, remember? Someone must be working on the problem.”

  “Good point. So how are we going to get down from here in zero-G?”

  “Maybe we should just wait for them to find us,” the woman said.

  Darius shook his head. “We don’t know how long that will take, and we also don’t know how long the heaters in our pods will last. Our pods must be close to running out of power, or else they wouldn’t have woken us up.”

  “More good points,” the man said. “I think I can get down with a push in the right direction,” he said.

  “Yeah. That should work. I’ll go first,” Darius said.

  “You sure?”

  Darius’s thoughts went to his daughter. He wasn’t going to entrust her survival to someone else. “I’m sure,” he said.

  “All right. Good luck.”

  “Be careful,” Cassandra added.

  “Thanks, and I will.”

  Darius risked leaning out of his pod again to get another look at the cavernous cryo storage room. Once he left the warmth of his pod, he wouldn’t have long to find clothes before frostbite and hypothermia set in. On the left side of the room, down by the floor, he spotted a break in the stacks of cryo pods. It looked like there was an open door there.

  He focused on it, trying to gauge the right angle to push off, and how much force he’d need to use. Too much and he’d bounce off on impact, too little, and he’d lose valuable time drifting down.

  Darius gripped the sides of his pod and braced himself. “Here goes... one... two...”

  He pushed off, diving head-first with his hands outstretched. I’m superman, he thought, smirking to hims
elf as he floated down. The awful smell he’d noticed upon waking grew steadily worse as he fell. His nose twitched furiously, and he gagged, wondering how anything could smell so bad at sub-zero temperatures.

  As he neared the floor, what he’d thought were more cryo pods standing on their ends resolved into far more disturbing shapes.

  They were people, all standing up at odd angles, all of them unmoving. The hysterical woman came to mind, and suddenly he realized what she’d been going on about. Her words echoed through his head—

  They’re not moving... they’re just standing there, staring at me!

  Darius shook his head. “What the hell happened here?” he wondered aloud. “Hello?” he tried as he floated over the heads of a group of four people.

  “Who are you talking to?” the man called out behind him, sounding far away now.

  Darius looked around quickly. There were dozens of them, all statuesque and mysteriously standing on the deck. Horror wormed in Darius’s gut as realization dawned. “There are people down here!” he called back. “They’re...” he trailed off, not wanting to scare his daughter. Too late now, he thought with a grimace.

  “Well, why aren’t they doing anything?” the man replied.

  “I think they’re dead,” Darius said. Their feet were probably pinned to the deck by their magnetic boots, and without gravity, they wouldn’t have fallen down when they died. But what killed them?

  “Dead?” the less hysterical of the two women asked. “This can’t be happening. It isn’t happening. I’m dreaming. I’m going to wake up. I’m going to wake up. I’m still in cryo... None of this is real...”

  “Nobody dreams in cryo, lady,” the man snapped. “Can you see what killed them?”

  “No. It’s t-too dark,” Darius replied, shivering again. “I need to f-find s-some way to w-warm up before I do anything else.” Darius’s pulse thundered in his ears as he shivered uncontrollably. He looked up to see the open door looming large before him.

  He hit just above the door. Cold metal seared his skin, drawing a strangled cry from his lips, but he managed to grab hold of the door frame before he bounced away.