Across the Universe Read Free Page B

colors—mostly reds and yellows, but sometimes blues or greens. And, seeing them all, I feel closer to planet-landing than I ever have before. I can see it: the ship disembarking for the first time, at night, with no moon or clouds, and before we set out to build our new world, we all stop and stare at the stars above.
    “Access override,” the computer says in its still-pleasant voice. “Screen lowering.”
    Screen lowering? What?
    Above me, the stars glow brightly.
    And then the window to the universe breaks. A thin line cracks right at the center of the window, splitting open, wider and wider.
    Frex. Frex!
    A rumbling sound fills the Great Room. My head whips left and right, and left and right again, looking for something to hold on to, but there’s nothing here—the Great Room is just a wide-open floor. Why did I never notice how useless it is to have a room with nothing to hold on to? It’s huge, sure, but there’s nothing here except the vast floor and the walls and the doors—nothing that can save me from a broken window that exposes me to space. And what then? The ship will rip apart? And me? I’ll explode or implode or something. I can’t remember which, but it doesn’t matter. The end result will still be the same. My tunic weighs heavily on my shoulders, sticking to my sweat, but all I can think about is how thin the material is against the ravages of space.
    I’m going to die.
    I’m going to be sucked out into space.
    Implosion.
    Death.
    And then another thought hits me: the rest of the ship. If the Keeper Level is exposed, space won’t just suck me out—it will rip through the Keeper Level, into the Shipper Level and the Feeder Level below it. They’ll all die. Everyone. Every single person aboard the ship.
    My feet slip on the tiled floor as I tear across the room. (For one tiny moment, my feet try to turn to the hatch door, the door that leads to life and freedom, but I ignore my feet. They’re just trying to keep me alive; they don’t care about the rest of the ship.) I throw myself at the big red lockdown button over the hatch. The floor shakes as the Keeper Level closes itself off from the rest of the ship. There’s no going back now.
    I turn toward the ceiling, toward the exposed universe.
    Toward death.

3
    AMY
    THE PRESIDENT CALLED IT THE “EPITOME OF THE AMERICAN dream.”
    Daddy called it the “unholy alliance of business and government.”
    But all it really was, was America giving up. Bailing out in order to join the Financial Resource Exchange. A multinational alliance focused on one thing: profit. Fund global medical care to monopolize vaccines. Back unified currency to collect planet-wide interest.
    And provide the resources needed for a select group of scientists and military personnel to embark on the first trip across the universe in a quest to find more natural resources—more profit.
    The answer to my parents’ dreams.
    And my worst nightmare.
     
    And I know something about nightmares, seeing as how I’ve been sleeping longer than I’ve been alive.
     
    I hope. What if this is just a part of a long dream dreamt in the short time between when Ed locked the cryo door and Hassan pushed the button to freeze me? What if?
     
    It’s a strange sort of sleep, this. Never really waking up, but becoming aware of consciousness inside a too-still body.
     
    The dreams weave in and out of memories.
    The only thing keeping the nightmares from engulfing me is the hope that there couldn’t possibly be a hundred more years before I wake up.
     
    Not a hundred years. Not three hundred. Not three hundred and one. Please, God, no.
     
    Sometimes it feels like a thousand years have passed; sometimes it feels as if I’ve only been sleeping a few moments. I feel most like I’m in that weird state of half-asleep, half-awake I get when I’ve tried to sleep past noon, when I know I should get up, but my mind starts wandering and I’m sure I can never get back to sleep. Even if I do slip