Then, when the Exo Project came along, Matthew knew it was the solution: The reward money for the families of chosen volunteers was almost exactly the amount needed for his mother’s cancer treatments.
He could save his mother’s life—by sacrificing his own.
“Hi, Mom,” Matthew said now, his voice barely above a whisper. “How’s it going in there?”
It was no use—the cryotechnicians had told him that she was unconscious and couldn’t hear anything—but every time he visited his mother, he spoke to her frozen body all the same.
“Something’s happening tomorrow, Mom,” Matthew said. “Tomorrow I’m going into the freeze, like you. Then I’m going to get on a spaceship and be launched across the galaxy.”
Matthew bowed his head, looked at his hands. He smiled.
“I know if you were awake right now, you’d probably be yelling at me for making such a dumb decision. Honestly, I wish you were awake to try to talk me out of it. Not that I’m changing my mind, it’s just …”
Matthew’s voice thickened, choked. He pressed his lips together and was silent a few breaths before going on.
“I just wish you were here, is all. I can’t raise Sophie by myself. She’s thirteen now, you believe that? A teenager. She needs you, Mom—that’s why it has to be this way. I’ve tried my best to take care of her, but I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to raise a girl. She needs her mother.”
Matthew put his hands on the cryochamber, felt the cold of the ice through the glass.
“Don’t cry, okay?” he said, tears coming to his eyes now. “I know when you wake up and Sophie tells you what’s going on that you’re going to be upset, you’re going to blame yourself—but don’t, all right? This isn’t your fault. None of it. This was my choice. It’s not like there’s much left to live for here on Earth anyway. Who knows? Maybe I’ll find a habitable planet, then when everyone else comes, I can meet Sophie’s great-grandkids or something.”
He smiled.
“And if not …”
The smile left his face. He swallowed, cleared his throat.
“If not, I guess I’ll see you on the other side.”
Matthew straightened up, took his hands off the cryochamber.
“Good-bye, Mom,” he said. “I love you.”
Matthew hit the button to send his mother back into the wall with a hiss. He turned and walked down the corridor, then through the waiting room and out into the hot, dark night.
5
Matthew got back home long after midnight. He and his sister Sophie lived in a massive compound owned by a company where employees and their families could live and work away from the harsh sun. Before going into cryostasis, Matthew’s mother had worked for the company; Matthew himself had been enrolled in the company’s employee training program until he was chosen for the Exo Project.
Matthew threaded his way through the corridors of the compound to their apartment. Inside, it was mostly dark except for a single yellow light coming from Sophie’s bedroom. Matthew crept up to the door and peeked inside.
Sophie was asleep on top of her covers, and a reading light was on. Next to Sophie on the bed was a tablet screen.
Matthew crept to the bed and sat down. He picked up the tablet and turned it on to look at what Sophie had been reading before going to sleep.
A web article came to the screen; it was titled, “Will Any of the Exo Project Recruits Survive? Scientists Weigh In.”
Matthew tapped at the screen to look at Sophie’s search history. Her previous search queries included “dangers of space travel,” “death in space,” and “odds of exoplanets supporting life.”
Next to him Sophie began to stir and talk in her sleep.
“No,” she murmured. Then her voice got louder and louder, until she was almost shouting. “No, don’t. Don’t go. Come back!”
Sophie’s body twisted back and forth on the bed, her arms jerking. Matthew leaned over her and tried to hold her still.
“Sophie,” he said softly, then a little bit louder: “Sophie.”
Her eyes came half-open as she came out of the nightmare without completely waking. Her gaze touched glancingly on Matthew’s face, then she gave a sigh and her eyes slid shut again.
“It’s you,” she mumbled dreamily. “But you were … you were dying.”
“It was just a dream,” Matthew whispered. He set a hand on the side of her head, brushed her bangs sideways with a sweep of his thumb. “I’m not dying. I’m here. I’m right here. Go back to sleep.”
Sophie smacked her lips together and rolled onto her side, clasping both hands under her cheek and drawing her knees up toward her chest.
“But you’re leaving me,” she mumbled as she sank again into deep sleep, “… leaving me.”
“Shhh,” Matthew said, rubbing his hand in a small circle on her back. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
Matthew sat there a few moments, until he was sure that Sophie was fully asleep, breathing heavily, and not bothered by another nightmare. Then he eased himself off of the bed, flipped the switch, and crept to the door. He went down the hallway and collapsed into his own bed.
The next morning, Matthew woke up to discover a small cake on the kitchen table, a gleaming squat cylinder of chocolate frosting with a single lit candle in the middle.
“Happy birthday, Matthew!” Sophie said. She was smiling but her eyes were wet and gleaming, and Matthew knew that she was already holding back tears.
“Wow,” Matthew said, putting on a smile he didn’t feel.
“All the ingredients are real,” she said. “Nothing synthetic. I saved up for eggs, flour, cocoa. I hope you like it.”
Matthew bit his lip. Since Earth’s crops had started failing, real food was hard to come by. In the compound, they mostly lived on synthetic foods made in factories: fake vegetables, fake meat, and fake milk bought with the ration chits they were given every day. To get real ingredients like eggs and cocoa, Sophie would have to have been saving up her chits for weeks, skipping meals and going hungry. Suddenly, Matthew noticed how thin his sister had become, how perilously twig-like her wrists looked. He felt a pang in his stomach. How had he not noticed sooner? What kind of brother was he?
“Sophie, you shouldn’t have done this,” he said. “This is too much.”
“But I wanted to,” Sophie said. “This is the last birthday we’ll ever celebrate together.”
She went silent, her eyes growing glassy as she realized what she’d said.
“Well, thank you,” Matthew said to cover up the silence. He gave her a peck on the cheek. “You’re the best sister a guy could ask for.”
Sophie smiled. “Go on, blow out the candle.”
Matthew closed his eyes and snuffed the single candle.
“Did you make a wish?” Sophie asked once he’d opened his eyes. “Don’t tell me what it is—then it won’t come true.”
He hadn’t—he couldn’t think of anything to wish for. Wishes required hope, and hope was something Matthew didn’t have much of at the moment. But he couldn’t say that, so instead he simply lied.
“I did. Don’t worry, I won’t tell.”
Matthew wasn’t particularly hungry—his stomach was a ball of jangling nerves—but he forced himself to eat a few bites anyway, then cajoled Sophie into eating the rest.
“It was delicious, Soph—really. Chocolate cake for breakfast. It’s a perfect going-away present.”
Then he glanced at the clock.
“You don’t have to go yet, do you?” Sophie asked.
Matthew nodded. “I do.”
He began to rise from the table, and before he’d stood up fully Sophie seized him in a hug that nearly caused him to lose his balance and fall back into the chair. She was pressed tight to his chest. After a moment, he sighed and set his chin against the crown of her head. Her body began to shake against his as she sobbed into the fabric of his shirt.
“Don’t go,” she pleaded. “P
lease, don’t leave me.”
“I have to, Soph,” he said. “But don’t worry—I asked Silas and Adam to take turns checking in on you until Mom gets out of the freeze. The money should come through soon, and then you can get her the treatments. It’ll all be fine.”
“It won’t be fine, though,” she cried. “Without you here it will never be fine.”
“Hey, come on.” Matthew pulled his head back and looked down at his sister.
She gazed up at him, eyes so huge and brown they nearly broke Matthew’s heart.
“I know it seems bad now,” he said. “But you’ll get used to it—you will. Remember when Dad died? Remember how awful that was? But then it started to feel a little better, and a little better, until it was almost normal, not having him around. Until we could think of him and remember him and smile. That’s what it’ll be like for you. Someday you’ll barely even think of me anymore—and when you do, you’ll just smile, remembering your stupid big brother who flew off into space.”
Sophie sniffled. “You think so?”
Matthew nodded. “I know so. But for right now you’re going to have to be strong, okay? Not for me—for Mom. If you’re sad about me when she wakes up, if you cry, then she’ll cry too—she’ll blame herself. But you can’t let her do that. You need to tell her that it’s not her fault. That this was my choice. Can you do that?”
Sophie nodded. She bit her lower lip, stepped back, and wiped her eyes.
“And give her a hug for me, would you?” Matthew asked. “Tell her I love her. I didn’t say it enough, when she was around. I’d say it every day if I had the chance, if I could go back.”
“I know,” Sophie said. “Me too.”
Matthew turned and left the kitchen, walked to the door where his radiation suit was hanging. He felt Sophie’s eyes follow him, and he willed her not to start crying again. If she started up again, he didn’t think he’d be able to leave. Didn’t think he’d have the strength to do what needed to be done.
“Matthew,” came her voice from behind him.
He cringed and turned to face her—but she wasn’t crying. She stood in the doorway to the kitchen, fixing him from across the room with an intense, urgent look.
“I love you,” she said.
He nodded, smiled. “I love you too, sis.”
And then he left.
6
Matthew returned to the city, returned to the cryostation. As he approached the front desk, he searched inside himself for any trace of emotion—but there was nothing. He was empty. After saying good-bye to Sophie, he had nothing left. He felt completely numb.
He gave his name to the woman at the front desk—a different woman than the one who’d been there last night.
“There’s a locker room that way,” the woman said, nodding toward a corridor and sliding a piece of paper across the desk. “After you’ve changed, report to this room number.”
Matthew walked down the hall and came into a room where a handful of men were changing out of their clothes and into identical blue suits. Matthew found his locker and opened it to see his cryosuit hanging inside.
A female voice hummed in the background, pre-recorded, piped in from the ceiling through speakers.
“Please disrobe completely before putting on your cryosuit. Remove all rings, necklaces, and watches. No foreign objects may be brought into the cryochamber.”
Matthew stripped naked and quickly slipped into the suit. It was a little big, but a few seconds after he’d zipped it up the fabric began to contract. Matthew held out his arms and studied the suit as it melded to the contours of his body, sucking so tight against his limbs that it may as well have been a second skin.
Matthew glanced up and caught the gaze of another Exo Project participant—a man in his forties with stubble on his chin. The man grinned and shrugged.
“Wild, huh?” he said. “Can you believe this is really happening?”
Matthew nodded, but didn’t say anything. He looked away. He didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Soon he’d be in the freeze and he’d never see this man again. Why bother? He didn’t want to spend his last moments on Earth making small talk with a stranger, pretending that what was happening to them was some weird lark, something they’d laugh about together someday.
Trying not to meet anyone else’s gaze, Matthew slipped out of the locker room and back into the hallway. He glanced at his slip of paper and began picking his way through the corridors, trying to find the right door. Eventually he found it and opened the door to a small gray cube of a room. Inside, the other members of Matthew’s mission sat waiting.
Each Exo Project team had three people. Matthew’s team consisted of him, a boy his age named Sam, and a black woman in her sixties who’d introduced herself by her last name, Dunne.
Matthew had met them both a month earlier when they’d reported for mission training. Their training had consisted of virtual reality simulations showing them how to operate their ship, what to do when they came out of the freeze at their destination, and what to do when they landed on the planet.
Each of them had a unique role in the mission, for which they’d received special training. Matthew was the communications officer, responsible for talking with Mission Control back home. For this task, he’d had to learn how to use a quantum transceiver, a device that communicated instantly over huge distances using the phenomenon of quantum entanglement.
Dunne was the science officer for the mission, responsible for taking readings on the planet’s surface to determine if it was livable or not. It wasn’t a difficult job—all she had to do was learn how to operate and read the sensor equipment—but in talking with her Matthew discovered that she did have a science background. In school, she’d nearly gotten a degree in particle physics before deciding that what she wanted to do with her life was help people. So she’d gone back and started over pre-med, then went to medical school to become a pediatrician. Dunne was more qualified than science officers for other teams were likely to be—more qualified, perhaps, than the mission needed her to be.
Dunne’s expertise and professionalism put Matthew at ease. She took the training seriously. Watching her, talking with her, Matthew could almost make himself believe that their mission would be a success—that the likeliest outcome wasn’t for them to die on the surface of the planet right after they landed.
If Dunne put Matthew at ease, though, Sam put him on edge. Sam’s black hair was pointy and unkempt, his cheeks and chin were perpetually rough with stubble, and he always seemed to be holding his body tense as a piece of wire wound tight, ready to spring or snap at any moment.
Sam was the mission’s equipment specialist, responsible for keeping their equipment running properly. He didn’t talk much during training—unless it was to badger the trainers about the way the mission had been designed. He seemed to regret signing up for the Exo Project in the first place. Matthew guessed that there were a lot of people like Sam: people who’d put their name in the lottery without thinking through the consequences, thinking that they’d never be selected.
Now, as Matthew came into the room, Sam and Dunne both raised their heads. Dunne stood and smiled at him, but Sam just grunted and returned his gaze to where it had been when Matthew walked in, staring at a corner of the floor.
Matthew met Dunne’s eyes. “What’s going on?” he asked. “I thought we’d go straight into the freeze when we got here.”
“There’s some kind of briefing,” Dunne said. “We’re just waiting here until they come get us to join all the other teams.”
“A briefing?” Matthew said. “What more could they have to tell us? We’ve already been trained.”
“I heard some people talking in the locker room when I was getting my cryosuit on,” Sam said. “Sounds like they’re bringing in some guy, some bigwig, from the Exo Project to give us a pep talk. Get us pumped up before they send us out there to die.”
Sam stood from his chair and walked toward Matthew. The look in his e
yes was unnerving.
“What are you going to do?” Matthew asked. “You’re going to say something to him, aren’t you?”
Sam looked away. “None of your business,” he said. “I can take care of myself.”
“Look, Sam—I know you’re scared. I’m scared too, but—”
Sam whirled around and put a finger in Matthew’s face.
“I’m not scared!” he shouted. “Don’t you dare say that I’m scared! But I’m not going to go quietly, either, okay? I’m not going to go like some dumb animal being led to the slaughterhouse. Not like you two.”
At that moment, the door opened and a young woman in a uniform walked into the room.
“What’s going on?” she said. “I heard yelling.”
Dunne stepped forward. “Nothing,” she said. “Are you here to take us to the briefing?”
The young woman gave Matthew and Sam a suspicious look.
“Yes,” she said. “Come with me.”
7
Dozens of other Exo Project participants were already in the briefing room, seated in chairs facing a lectern. Matthew surveyed the crowd. Most of the people were Dunne’s age or older. Some were so old they looked close to dying already; one elderly woman pulled an oxygen tank on wheels behind her as she shuffled, hunched, to her seat.
The seats toward the back of the room were already taken, so Matthew, Sam, and Dunne sat down near the front. As soon as they settled into their seats, the door opened behind them and a hush came over the room. The young woman who had escorted them walked to the front of the room and spoke to the crowd.
“Good morning, everyone,” she began. “Thank you all for being here on this historic day.”
“Like we had a choice,” Sam muttered.
“Today, Exo Project volunteers are preparing for their expeditions at cryostations just like this one, all across the planet. But we’ve got a special treat. OmniCore has been kind enough to send one of the masterminds of the Exo Project to speak to us.”
The Exo Project Page 2