by Piers Platt
They had coffee together that afternoon, and then dinner that evening. Rath picked Jaymy up from her apartment carrying a rose. After dinner, they took a walk through the city, and then Jaymy invited Rath up to her apartment. They talked for a while, sharing a bottle of wine, and Rath did his best to steer the conversation away from him and his thin cover story as a police officer discharged for post-traumatic stress. Then Jaymy kissed him again. She was tentative and shy in the bedroom, but Rath found it a welcome change from Rebecca’s programmed persona.
Afterward, Rath watched her as she slept, and wondered what a future with Jaymy might be like. He was about to reach out to caress her hair, but stopped himself.
You’re starting to like her. Stay objective.
But later, when he woke up in a sweat from another nightmare, Jaymy stroked his back, and he fell asleep and did not dream for the rest of the night. It was the best sleep he had enjoyed in years.
They spent the rest of the weekend together, and took a day trip out to Scapa’s famous Rainbow Desert, where the chemicals in ancient volcanic eruptions had created dunes streaked with different hues of sand – pinks, yellows, even greens and blues. The sand reminded Rath of Selection Phase. They paid for a camel ride, and Jaymy shrieked when their animal first stood up, grabbing Rath around the waist and laughing. After, they ate a picnic dinner under the stars, wrapping themselves in a thermal blanket as the temperature dropped.
* * *
Jaymy’s chest rose and fell with each gentle breath, the bed sheet moving subtly over the slight curves of her breasts. On the night stand beyond her, the alarm clock showed that it was just past four in the morning. Rath was awake, as usual. He found himself watching her sleep again – it was relaxing, somehow.
She’s not much to look at, really.
A tangle of sandy brown curls, a slightly upturned nose, flatter in the chest and wider in the hips than Rebecca and the various guises she typically assumed in Rath’s simulator. But somehow Jaymy’s quirky nose had grown on him. He grimaced at the realization. Despite his efforts to stay distant, he’d grown fond of her.
No, it’s more than that.
All in all, the past two weeks had been the best of his life, even when Jaymy was up in orbit and he was waiting for her to return.
And now it’s all over.
Rath rolled over and stared at the wall, rehearsing his speech in his head.
I lied to you. I wasn’t medically discharged, I’m still a cop. And I need your help. Suspensys is harboring a criminal, and they don’t know it. The man disguised himself before going into suspended animation, and he’s going to stay there until the statute of limitations passes on his crimes. I can’t prove he’s hiding there, so I need you to get me a blood sample, so I can get a warrant to wake him up and arrest him.
It was certainly a complex story, but Rath was somewhat proud of it. Aside from the entire thing being another lie, he was leaving out a critical detail, of course – that the syringe would be tipped with a deadly toxin.
She’ll find that out for herself when she tries to take the sample. If she agrees to get me the sample.
He dozed uneasily until the sun came up, filtering in through the slatted blinds of Jaymy’s apartment. Jaymy was still asleep, so Rath rose quietly and made his way into the kitchen. Minutes later, his ear implants picked up the sound of her bare feet on the kitchen tiles, but he could tell she was tiptoeing in, so he pretended not to notice. She hugged him suddenly from behind, nuzzling her nose into his back.
“Morning.” Rath grinned.
“Mmmff. You never sleep enough.” She gave him a squeeze.
“You keep me up all night,” Rath kidded her.
“Do I snore?”
“No … you know what I mean,” Rath said.
She giggled. “Fine, I guess we’ll just stop doing that, then. You made breakfast?”
“Almost done,” Rath said.
“Smells good.” She kissed his back and then walked over to the beverage machine, sliding a mug into the tray and punching in an order for a latte. Rath split the scrambled eggs between two plates, pulled two slices of toast from the toaster, and put the plates on the kitchen’s island. Jaymy sat down on the stool across from him and blew on her coffee.
“I don’t know how many times I have to adjust the temperature setting – the coffee always comes out too hot,” she observed.
Jaymy liked to read the news on her datascroll in the mornings, so they ate in silence for a time. Then Rath steeled himself. He reached under his stool and placed a small jewelry box on the table. Under the closed lid was a crystal necklace, the beads made with sand from the Rainbow Desert, each crystal a different hue. Jaymy noticed the box and arched an eyebrow at him.
“I got you something,” Rath told her.
“What is it?” she asked, smiling. She slid her hand across the table and pulled the box over to her.
“A surprise – but don’t open it yet. First … I need to tell you something.”
The flicker of a frown crossed her face. “… okay?”
“I haven’t been totally honest with you,” Rath said, looking down. Jaymy took her hand off the box. “I wasn’t discharged, I’m still a cop.”
“Okay …,” she said. “Why did you lie to me?”
“I had to,” he told her.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“I’m … on a special assignment, we needed someone with access to Suspensys’ patients. There’s a criminal hiding up there. Before I could tell you, I needed to know I could trust you.”
Her nostrils flared at that. “But now you know you can trust me? Now that we’ve slept together. Now that you told me you loved me.”
“I do,” he said, and he wasn’t sure it was a lie. The words he had rehearsed were in his head, but he found he couldn’t say them.
I don’t want to ask her to do it. I don’t want her to go to jail for me.
“Was it all a lie?” she asked. She was crying now, heavy tears rolling down her cheeks. The pain in her eyes twisted his gut into a knot.
“What? No ….”
“It was, wasn’t it? All you saw was an employee, from that first night. You picked me, not my friend, and then you … seduced me. You made me care about you.”
His heart skipped a beat thinking that she might still care for him. “That’s not … I didn’t ever want to hurt you.” Jaymy had her face in her hands now, and he could see her shoulders shaking. Rath rubbed his eyes, sighing.
I need to get this conversation back to the mission, and not our relationship.
“Look, it started that way, yes, but I … fell for you. Jaymy, I love you, I do.”
She looked up, and this time her face was a mask of anger. “No, you don’t get to say that to me, ever again. You should go.” She pushed the box back across the table.
“No, wait … I need to explain.”
“No, you need to go. Please go,” she took a deep, sobbing breath. “Please.”
Out in the hall, Rath stood, holding a bundle of his clothes and looking at her door. He was still carrying the jewelry box, and he considered leaving it behind, but then slipped it into his pocket.
I need you. But not for the mission. I’ll do it myself, I don’t care anymore. And when I finish my last mission, I’ll come back for you.
27
“Our company was founded nearly two hundred years ago,” the sales rep noted, flashing Rath a disarming smile. “That was back during the big suspended animation boom, before hemobots were approved for widespread use. So, we here at Suspensys have a rich heritage of customer service, but our technology has always been cutting edge.”
Rath remembered reading that exact phrase in one of the company’s digital pamphlets, but he just smiled back at her, his wrinkled face creasing. The Suspensys visitor lobby was as pristine as a laboratory, covered in tiles that glowed a gentle white, but the plush couches and soft piano music gave it a comforting, welcoming aspect.
“Shall we begin our tour?” she asked.
“Yes, that would be wonderful,” Rath said. He stood slowly, pushing himself up off the edge of the couch and carefully straightening with a sigh.
“Would you like to leave your backpack with our receptionist?” the rep asked.
“No,” he told her. “It’s not a backpack, it’s ….” He broke into a fit of coughing. When it eased, he set the Forge on the couch, and withdrew a face mask, which was connected to the pack via a clear plastic tube. Rath slipped the mask on over the wispy strands of grey hair atop his head, settling it over his nose and mouth, and breathing deeply.
“Oh, I see,” the rep said, embarrassed. “It’s a kind of ventilator.”
Rath nodded, “It dispenses medicine, too. It’s for my lung condition.”
“Of course,” she said. “I should just warn you that our security team will be scanning it up ahead, when we enter the restricted area of the facility. Can I get you anything to eat or drink?”
Rath shook his head, so she turned and showed him through a set of gleaming white doors. In the vestibule beyond, there was a one-way mirror and, Rath knew, a full-spectrum scanner mounted in the wall. The tour guide smiled apologetically as they waited, and then a green light came on over the next set of white doors.
They took a few seconds longer this time.
“As you can see, we take the security of our guests very seriously,” she told him. “Access to the Suspension Levels is very carefully controlled, and this space station is continuously manned by a team of armed guards.”
Twenty-six of them.
Rath suppressed a grimace.
“We have a number of other security measures, but for obvious reasons, we don’t like to go into those in too much detail.”
“Of course,” Rath agreed, hoping his mission planning had identified all of those additional security procedures. Farther down the hall a side door opened, and a security guard wearing an auto-pistol on his hip emerged, waiting. Rath followed the tour guide toward a large viewing window at the end of the hall, and as they passed the security guard, he fell in step behind them. Rath looked over his shoulder and smiled at him.
“Joining us?” Rath asked.
“Yes, sir.” The man had close-cropped hair and an ugly scar down his left cheek. He did not return Rath’s smile.
I wonder if they know Jaymy.
He had timed the mission for one of her weekends off, when she would not be on board the station, but he couldn’t help but feel somehow closer to her here.
“Our guards like to accompany tours from time to time, as a routine procedure,” the tour guide assured Rath.
Whenever anyone brings a Forge inside.
Rath stifled a yawn.
“Space lag?” the tour guide guessed. “What time zone does your body feel like it’s in?”
Rath rubbed at a bloodshot eye. “I’m not sure, honestly. But at my age, I never sleep very well anyways.”
She nodded sympathetically. “I’m sorry to hear it. May I ask what got you interested in suspended animation?” she asked, returning to what Rath assumed was her sales playbook.
Rath shrugged. “I was a few systems over visiting friends. My wife keeps bugging me about it. She saw a segment about it on the news, so I decided to stop by.”
“What appeals to you about the program?”
“Longevity,” he replied, with a grunt. “They keep figuring out more and more about human mortality. But until they know for sure, I don’t want to let too much time pass. Hemobots can keep me alive a while longer. But they can’t make me young again.”
She smiled knowingly. “It would be hard to enjoy immortality without the health and energy of youth. When Suspensys first started, suspended animation was mainly a way for people with terminal conditions to stay healthy while they waited for a cure. However, with the advent of embedded nanobot systems, there are very few incurable conditions, as you know. We still have a handful of clients who fit that category, but over the last few decades, our clients are more ‘Recreational Suspenders,’ as we call them. They tend to have many different reasons for using suspended animation, from wanting to meet their great-grandchildren, to letting their investments build equity for a period of time, so that they can leave suspended animation and afford a higher standard of living. But with all the recent press about human immortality being just over the horizon, we’re seeing more and more customers like yourself. Well, here it is.”
She stopped in front of the viewing window, resting her fingertips on a handrail along the wall. Below them, spreading up in gradually widening circles, Rath saw row upon row of suspension pods. Rath could make out the forms of men and women propped upright inside the pods, wrapped in insulating suits and monitoring wires. At the center of the circular tiers, a massive conduit of pipes and hoses descended from the ceiling all the way to the floor, dozens of levels below. Above, where the pipes met the ceiling, a wide circle of windows gave a view out onto the stars outside the orbiting station. Except for the utility column in the center, Rath felt like he was looking down into a sports stadium.
A sports stadium full of spectators sleeping in metal coffins.
“Wow,” he said appreciatively.
It is impressive, even on second viewing.
“How many pods?”
“One thousand, two hundred and forty-two,” she said. “Of those, about two-thirds are in use right now. We’re filling up fast!”
“Have you ever had any accidents?”
“Accidents? No, sir. We have full redundancy on all life support systems, and we’ve never, ever lost a patient here.”
“Redundancy?” Rath asked.
“Yes, sir. Each tier of pods is supplied with power, nutrients, and oxygen from the utility column you see in the center. Each pod then has its own built-in power cell and life support ecosystem, as a backup. The backup system is designed to keep the patient alive for up to two weeks. That’s just in case the whole station loses climate controls, or power, or anything like that. But we never have,” she added, hastily. Rath wondered if she would bring up the cyber-security breach he had hired C4ble to conduct, but she did not.
“Can we go in?” he asked, though he knew what the answer would be.
The security guard cleared his throat, but the tour guide pretended not to notice. “No, I’m afraid not. There’s actually no gravity in there – we only keep the artificial gravity on out here. But we have a demo pod right this way for you to see up close …?”
Rath followed her into a small room across the hallway, where a suspension pod lay on a raised platform at waist height. A small set of stairs led up the side of the platform to the pod. The glass cover was open, the plush interior lit by a soft golden glow. As the security guard watched impassively, the tour guide smiled at Rath, and motioned for him to climb into the pod. Rath held his Forge against his chest and clambered awkwardly in, lying down.
“The entire pod is made from a reinforced titanium alloy, and the glass cover is military-grade as well. During the design phase, our engineers had some fun testing the pod’s strength – the rumor is that they dropped one several thousand feet underwater before it was finally crushed by the pressure, and they actually tried to blow one up using some explosives, but the pod was just fine! The locking system on the hatch is also very sophisticated – the only people with access codes are the doctors and suspension technicians who perform routine checks on each patient every three months. Anyway, all of that is just to say these things are built like spacecraft – they’re very hard to break into, and nearly indestructible.”
I hope so.
Rath had spent hours researching the pod’s design looking for weaknesses, and had finally come to the conclusion that it had none.
And so we come to Plan C. C, as in “Crazy.” But maybe Plan D as in “Desperate” is more accurate.
/> Nearly a month had passed since Jaymy had thrown him out of her apartment, and though Rath had not been idle during that time, last week he had received a second sternly-worded warning message from the Group. His mission timeframe was nearly expired, and the client was not pleased. At his wit’s end, Rath had come to the sudden realization that the pods might just be the solution to all of his problems, rather than an obstacle.
The tour guide had finished her spiel about the comfort of the pods, and so Rath climbed out, and followed her back out to the main corridor and the viewing window looking out over the tiers of pods. He took a deep breath, steadying himself, forcing his heart beat under control.
Now or never.
“Mind if I take a photo? Of the pods? My wife will want to see it.”
The tour guide nodded, smiling, so Rath pulled the camera out of his backpack. Rath shifted to his right, ostensibly to get a better angle on the photo, but it also brought him a step closer to the security guard. Then he checked the viewfinder, and pressed the shutter button.
His “camera” did two things simultaneously: first, the device’s speaker emitted a blast of ultrasonic sound waves, specifically tuned to the resonance frequency of the glass in the viewing window. The glass rippled, and then shattered inwards. At the same time, the camera discharged a shockingly bright flash of light, bright enough that even with his eyelids closed and his eye implants correcting for it, Rath felt a surge of pain. The flash blinded the tour guide, who fell to her knees with a shriek of pain. Rath was already covering the remaining three feet toward the security guard, who was holding a hand to one eye, and reaching for his pistol with the other hand.