“This is amazing!” said Nate, “do you know what we could do with this kind of technology! We could travel space, we fly to Pluto in less than a year, hell we could fly to other worlds in interstellar ships!”
“Wait? Pluto in a year? The daemons are near Saturn, that means we are going to be in space how long?” asked Todd, who looked like he was turning read most likely ready to barf again.
“Don’t worry about that, you’ll all be asleep most of the voyage. Gonna knock you all out once we make it to the Perseverance. Makes it easier for the ship to do it’s thing. Especially given how fast we are going to be going. If you stayed awake the whole trip there would be nothing left of you to fight the daemons. Best if we all sleep through it,” said Ed.
“So stasis, how big is the Perseverance if it’s going to house how many of us?” I asked.
“Pretty damn big but too be honest you’ll probably never see it on the outside. Michael was right. The part of the ship that will house us looked like a large sphere that turns and creates gravity but that’s buried inside another larger area with several dozen engines on one end and a few hundred guns on the other. A giant ion canon is attached at the front. In a way it looked similar to the VTOL we’re in just blown up to the size of a battle cruiser. There actually won’t be a thousand of us onboard. We worked with the Chinese to build a second warship. We call it the the ‘Moon Rabbit’,” said Ed.
“So half of us on the Perseverance and the other half on the ‘Moon Rabbit’,?” I asked.
“Each ship can carry a thousand total, five hundred soldiers and five hundred stasis pods,” said Ed smiling.
“How the hell did we manage to build something so big and so quickly, why haven’t we ever done anything like this before?” asked Nate.
“Money, time, politics. No real good reason. When we learned about the demons we had NASA and every government and private space corporation you could imagine sharing everything we had. We already had theories on the EmDrive. We just lacked serious enough motivation. Well when the whole world discovers that daemons are real and they are coming for us and then two thirds of the Earth’s population refuse to wake up we find ourselves really motivated,” smirked Ed.
“Yeah but it’s only been a few years a project like this should take several decades at least, not to mention lots and lots of testing,” said Nate.
“You forget some of you like Todd here has the power to manipulate matter, we have a few others like him we used to some of the pieces together. We 3D printed the rest… here let me show you,” Ed then held out in front of himself and towards Todd a tablet with a diagram on it. The diagram was of a rifle and several different forms of ammunition.
“Show ‘em what you got kid, just like we practiced.” Ed then floated upwards and took out several cubes of lead, plastic, and carbon fiber. Within less than two minutes of Todd staring at the diagram and the cubes he had created the weapon Ed had shown him along with several fully loaded cartridges. He held it in his hand like a trophy looking it up and down.
“That’s my design!” shouted Nate.
“Damn straight, and Todd here now knows exactly how to make it from scratch,” smiled Ed. It was like magic. Todd had torn apart the cubes and put them together piece by piece to form a new weapon.
“Why can’t we just have him rip apart the daemon ship?” asked Michael.
“Look at him,” Ed said pointing towards Todd who now looked pale with grey lines under his eyes.“He’ll be fine in an hour but each and every time he manipulates matter it takes a toll on his body. Took us forever to get to this stage. Not to mention we have no idea if it will work on whatever material their ship is made of,” Ed finished.
Nearly twelve hours passed. We had reached the moon but we missed matching speeds with the Perseverance several times and couldn’t board. I wanted so bad to see what the Perseverance actually looked like hoping to one day be able to describe it to you in detail but that wasn’t possible. I didn’t even get to see the moon or Earth. Going to space wasn’t the trip I thought it was going to be. We were stuck inside a small box together floating. It was fun for a few hours but soon after we were all ready to strangle one another. When we finally reached the inner sanctum of the Perseverance we floated inside a large spherical chamber filled with a thousand smaller spheres that jutted out from the wall. Half of them were filled with the bodies of sleepers. We were greeted by the Captain of the ship. A female officer named Lacuna. She didn’t say much to us. She had her job and we had ours. This was the second flight the Perseverance would take. The first she had gone to Mars and back. The official test flight. I knew we were in good hands especially when the room started spinning and gravity began to kick in. I asked if I could seek you out and I was given permission to go anywhere I wanted to go and move anywhere I wanted to move.
The room was insanely large. I got dizzy several times looking around. Searching for you felt like it was taking forever. Michael and I went in different directions. At one point I could look up and see him waving down towards me directly above me. When I finally found you I wanted to break down and cry. This whole thing felt surreal.
Did you know that the ‘moon rabbit’ in Chinese folklore was the companion of the Moon goddess Chang’e. The moon rabbit would constantly pound at the elixir of life that for her (or rice cake depending who you ask). Han Dynasty poets call the rabbit on the Moon the "Jade Rabbit" (玉兔) or the "Gold Rabbit" (金兔). Nate was the one that filled me in with the history. Aside from being super smart he was full of an entire encyclopedia’s worth of useless information. You would think with such a great name and meaning the moon rabbit would have better luck. It was more a curse for them. For us too. For when nine months passed and we finally reached the daemons the inertia dampeners on the moon rabbit wouldn’t stop. It wouldn’t stop beating that elixir of life. Not even in the end nine months later when it rammed the daemons vessel in the sky above Titan. We felt it only mere moments after we woke up. When we were all still feeling sick from waking up out of stasis. When we tried to fire our ion canon and nothing happened. When we tried to launch our missiles and nothing happened. When the lights and power around us flickered on and off and on and off again. When we began making our way towards our shuttle gravity came and went as we ran. We knew exactly what was happening. Everything that could go wrong was. The plan was failing and we had to resort to plan B. Too soon. It felt too soon. We should have been more prepared. The moon rabbit was lost and the Perseverance was close behind her even before we started to slow down and ready our assault the daemons had already began to attack.
Stasis
“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?”
- John Lennon
Nine months in stasis felt like a nightmare. A living breathing sleeping hell. Honestly the whole nine months felt like a nightmare that I remember vividly. Moments upon awakening I remember it all. It felt like a vision like someone was playing a game with my mind. It began with a feeling like I was drowning. I’m sorry. I’m not sure how to explain it any better then that. In the dream I had I was in your body. Just as beautiful as you had always been but you were older. Your head had been shaved down. You had a short dark mohawk. There were scars across your face like you had been in some kind of viking battle. You were wearing armor similar to what I was wearing now. Holding a rifle similar to the one I held. You were onboard a ship. Something called the Houyi, named for a mythological Chinese god of archery. You were a part of an exodus. The daemons had made their way to Earth and humanity was using the EmDrives to escape. Even now I can still remember every detail like I was some kind of shadow following you…
A guard dressed in military garb held a rifle slung around his shoulder. He was far from being alert. You had to ask him three times to help guide you to your stasis pod. It was there
that you gave him a kiss. It wasn’t the same kind of kiss you would give me. It was empty and hollow. You smiled. He smiled. He said you were lucky. Given a second chance. You smiled and said that his kiss was the end of an old life.
He left the room and you stripped. You put on a body suit courtesy of a company called Genesis. I knew the name because it was inscribed on the suit in several places. After that I remember seeing you floating inside a bubble with white walls surrounding you. Not even the tiniest hint of dust or dirt. You fell asleep closing your eyes as the bubble transformed into a dark brown cocoon around you.
Some call stasis the deep sleep, others cryo. I was back in my body for a moment. I felt the door in front of me open and close. I felt like I was frozen inside some French Noir film. A still of a movie. A single frame. The only real color I could see was white with a hint of blue like some kind of weird lens had flared across my eyes. Back to my dream. I could smell lavender in the air. I could feel the tension and anxiety dissipate from my body as I floated there. The ship was launching. I knew once the Houyi entered deep space I and the rest of the crew would be on our own. Dying in space it seemed would be better then dying back home. Humanity had lost the war. Europe was the first to fall. Followed quickly by Asia and North America. I felt like something was feeding me this information. Like I was remembering things that hadn’t happened. I knew that somehow you were awake and that you had been fighting on the front line. That humanity had begun building more and more ships and that others with powers had began to appear. I also knew that the daemons were winning and exterminating human life as they took control of the planet. I knew that they were infecting the atmosphere with sulfur as their ships descended from the torn red sky. I knew that they were transforming our world polluting it - that animals and plants had began mutating as if they had become infected by a virus. The world was withering away. It was like I watching you dream.
You - I woke up in the dream feeling cold. Surrounded by dust. I had shed skin while I slept. The thought terrified me as you, the girl in my dream. I felt what you felt. Thought what you thought. How old was I now? How long had the Houyi floated in deep space. This ship was meant to travel to another planet. You knew that it could drift for centuries. The whole point of genesis was too slow the effects of aging. Years could pass but for the cells in your body (and the cells in mine) it would be as if only a few hours had passed. The walls were no longer white like they had been. The lavender smell was still there but there was a stale taste in the air. A musty smell that it hid behind. I felt like I had entered a dream within a dream. I wanted you to pinch yourself and wake up but nothing happened. I had never been any good at lucid dreaming. If I was I would have pictured us on a beach or traveling across Europe. Road trips had always been our favorite. Like I said before. This was a nightmare and top that off in reality I was deep inside stasis. There was no waking up.
Blood poured from a cut on the right side of my ribs which felt bruised and broken. It felt like my body - your body had been thrown across the room. A the same time I felt week. Like waking up from a coma. The mind raced with a thousand thoughts. What century was this? Where was I? Was there an emergency? Why was no one there to wake me up?
You moved towards the door and pried it open. The air pressure changed. You felt your eyes pop several times. Blood rushed to your head and a migraine came on. A stabbing sensation in your forehead. I remember in reality you use to get those all the time. Your ears had always been sensitive to the air pressure around you and occasionally if you stared at a screen or phone too long your eyes would hurt right before.
Ironic enough you said that you must be dreaming. Your black garb had faded to grey so with no one around you slipped it off and walked naked towards the nearest medical bay. Something you remembered during your first tour of the ship. The medical bay was a mess. Bottles of broken glass lay scattered across the floor. You must have cut yourself more walking toward a pack of unopened bandages and bled more from your feet then your mysterious wound. A few minutes passed. Maybe they were hours. Since I was asleep in stasis perhaps they were days or weeks. Dreaming is such a strange thing.
You wrapped your ribs and feet. You sat in the corner of the medical bay behind a bloody table. Something bad had happened there. Some surgery gone wrong. How many had woken before you? The Houyi was a seed ship. A vessel that housed thousands of rooms and pods like the one you had fallen asleep in. The Houyi I imagined must have had a similar design to the Perseverance only ten times larger. All in all it was probably the size of New York City.
From the doorway you could hear someone breathing. The faint cry of another woman. Her breath heavy as you heard glass crack under the weight of her skin. The air smelt like rotting meat the closer she came to you. She was a withered. Covered in blood and torn clothing. You could always tell by the eyes. There was something missing from the look in a withered’s eyes like their soul had been stolen from them. Perhaps that was exactly what the daemons had done. She looked like your mother for a moment but only at first. Her face seemed to transform as if my mind couldn’t find any features with which to identify her with. When you began to move towards her she held up her hand and put her finger over her mouth as if to tell you you needed to whisper. You and your mother had never been very close. In fact I had only met her once and it was at your father’s funeral. Another parental figure you were never very close too. When you acknowledged the withered’s gesture she signaled for you to move backwards. You complied.
You slid into the shadows and heard more voices. They were deep. Various men. You grabbed a piece of broken glass and gripped it like a small knife. You knew as well as I did that if these were good men they would understand your need to protect yourself and that they wouldn’t feel threatened by it. There were too many monsters in the world. If they were bad, if the men were like the monsters that had once preyed upon you even before the daemons came then they would have everything to fear.
They were monsters. The withered moved towards them grabbing glass from the ground and throwing it at them as if it was sand. They gunned her down. I am not sure if they were human. What I saw seemed to defy everything I had ever known, as if the rules of the universe were no longer clear, the lines between life and death blurred into a storm inside a ship full of madness. I felt like I was walking the streets of London after the invasion. Bodies lined up on the street. The smell of rotting flesh in the air as if it was just as natural as the smell of spring. I could see the grim reapers, the daemons fighting others in the distance. Why did they want to do this to our world? What was this all for? I felt the ship’s floor beneath my feet swallow me whole and I was in another room. A laboratory filled with human and daemon hybrids melded together inside tubes of yellow liquid. I tried to imagine I was somewhere else. To lucid dream. To not be where you were now. I wanted to save you.
I could feel my heart pumping fast against my chest. You were back in your combat armor. You looked around in fear and began screaming firing at the tanks that surrounded you and then there was a flicker of light. Your armor fell apart turning to dust. You were still holding your rifle. The same type of rifle Nate had designed and Todd had once constructed before my very eyes. The woman from earlier stood in front of you. She was unharmed. Unwithered. She was human again and crying. She looked up at you and her eyes turned black right before she picked up a piece of glass and slit her own wrists. You fell backwards into the shadows. The silhouette of a man, half daemon wearing the skin of another dead passenger walked into the room. He mounted the bleeding woman on the floor as she was dying. He ran his hips into her and grunted like an animal in front of you. Unhinged and feral you shot without thinking. Perhaps you were. Perhaps you knew the sound of a gunshot would bring others to the room.
Covered in the blood of your prey you made your way through the hollow decks of the ship. All round you could see clearly now. The half daemon half human men fell before you as you stumbled from cover to cover. You move
d towards the control room of the Houyi. This was a one way trip. You knew there would be no help coming. The Houyi was one of many that humanity had used to escape into the stars. Escape from the daemons to seed new worlds. This ship was meant to be salvation. The last arrow shot from a dying world. A part of you wanted to believe that stasis had mutated them. That the half daemon half human creatures that stalked you now could be saved. I would have wanted the same thing. I did want the same thing when Michael and I were forced to kill withered. You knew though, the truth was you were alive inside a tomb. Infinitely lost. For a moment you thought you saw a three legged crow out of the corner of your eye followed by a small blinding light and then a cardinal. I felt like I heard you whisper my name. That you were somehow sorry for what had happened and everything that was happening. That didn’t matter. You fought your way to the control room. No one could find this ship. No one could survive. No one. You had to be sure that there would be nothing left.
I woke up just as you began the self destruct sequence. Like I said nine months of stasis was like a nightmare. Felt just like waking up from one too. At first I was so disoriented I had no idea where I was. It wasn’t like waking up in bed or even a hospital. I was surrounded by others. Doctors who had been monitoring me. Doctors that were there to help me orient myself so I could fulfill my mission as a suicide soldier against an army of demonic forces. I noticed one of them was wearing a shirt that said Genesis on it. Perhaps that was where I had seen the name. Dreams have a funny way of filling in blanks. Perhaps even now my memories are out of synch and I am only substituting Genesis with Khione because of that single instance. I thought about asking him about it but I was too sick and weak to speak. I felt like my lungs were on fire. I sat there in silence for a few minutes as the doctors moved on to the next chamber waking Michael. That was when we felt the ship shake. Alarms sounded. Word spread quick that the moon rabbit couldn’t stop and rammed the daemon vessel. We were told to get to the VTOL as quickly as possible and that was when I saw it. A daemon ship flew into the hangar and opened fire. The trial had began.
Sleepers (Convergence Book 1) Page 5