Across the Universe Read Free

a family out. Might make the difference.”
    “What difference?” Hassan asked.
    “Difference between surviving or not. It’s not like when we were kids. Don’t care what the prez says, that Financial Act ain’t gonna be able to fix this kinda debt.”
    What are they yammering about? Who cares about national debt and jobs? Go back to that extra year!
    “A man has time to think about it anyway,” Ed continued. “Consider his options. Why’d they delay the launch again?”
    Cryo liquid splashed against my ears as my shoebox coffin filled; I lifted my head.
    Delay? What delay? I tried to speak around the tubes, but they filled my mouth, crowded my tongue, silenced my words.
    “I have no idea. Something about the fuel and feedback from the probes. But why are they making us keep all the freezing on schedule?”
    The cyro liquid was rising fast. I turned my head, so my right ear could catch their conversation.
    “Who cares?” Ed asked. “Not them—they’ll just sleep through it all. They say the ship’ll take three hundred years just to get to that other planet—what’s the difference in one more year?”
    I tried to sit up. My muscles were hard, slow, but I struggled. I tried to talk again, make a sound, any sound, but the cryo liquid was spilling over my face.
    “Just. Relax,” Ed said very loudly near my face.
    I shook my head. God, didn’t they know ? A year made the world of difference! This was one more year I could be with Jason, one more year I could live ! I signed up for three hundred years ... not three hundred and one!
    Gentle hands—Hassan’s?—pushed me under the cryo liquid. I held my breath. I tried to rise up. I wanted my year! My last year—one more year!
    “Breathe in the liquid!” Ed’s voice sounded muffled, almost indecipherable under the cryo liquid. I tried to shake my head, but as my neck muscles tensed, my lungs rebelled, and the cold, cold cryo liquid rushed down my nose, past the tubes, and into my body.
    I felt the finality of the lid trapping me inside my Snow White coffin.
    As one of them pushed at my feet, sliding me into my morgue, I imagined that my Prince Charming was just beyond my little door, that he really could come and kiss me awake and that we could have a whole year more together.
    There was a click, click, grrr of gears, and I knew the flash freezing would start in mere moments, and then my life would be nothing but a puff of white steam leaking through the cracks of my morgue door.
    And I thought: At least I’ll sleep. I will forget, for three hundred and one years, everything else.
    And then I thought: That will be nice.
    And then whoosh! The flash-freeze filled the tiny chamber. I was in ice. I was ice.
     
    I am ice.
     
    But if I’m ice, how am I conscious? I was supposed to be asleep; I was supposed to forget about Jason and life and Earth for three hundred and one years. People have been cryo frozen before me, and none of them were conscious. If the mind is frozen, it cannot be awake or aware.
    I’ve read before of coma victims who were supposed to be knocked out with anesthesia during an operation, but really they were awake and felt everything.
    I hope—I pray —that’s not me. I can’t be awake for three hundred and one years. I’ll never survive that.
    Maybe I’m dreaming now. I’ve dreamt a lifetime in a thirty-minute nap. Maybe I’m still in that space between frozen and not, and this is all a dream. Maybe we haven’t left Earth yet. Maybe I’m still in that limbo year before the ship launches, and I’m stuck, trapped in a dream I can’t wake from.
    Maybe I’ve still got three hundred and one years stretching out before me.
    Maybe I’m not even asleep yet. Not all the way.
    Maybe, maybe, maybe.
    I only know one thing for certain.
     
    I want my year back.

2
    ELDER
    THE DOOR IS LOCKED.
    “Now that, ” I say to the empty room, “is interesting.”
    See, there are hardly any locked doors on Godspeed . No need. Godspeed isn’t