Searching for Sun Chapter Three

Three

Memory is just an illusion to your kind Cloey. It is whatever you retain, or whatever we give you to remember.

—Heidi Mist

 Cloey’s JPV

Eight years later, Resolute time

Space, Resolute, Date: 2348

 “Status?” Heidi asked the nurses. It would be another four years and eight rounds of de-freeze before the children being grown onboard the ship were old enough to begin running it themselves. Until then, the original batches of Growth children cycled in and out of freeze.

“Final stages of de-freeze, ma’am.”

Heidi looked down at the list of names on her board. Eight years ago, these had been her very first children, back when they had begun with small numbers, small batches. The names circled through her mind, calling back her first triumphs. Ace Gerry, she had engineered his profile herself. Focus oriented and good with math, a born pilot. Sam Rundle, a promising engineer. Kelsey Hackinson . . . Asami Hadano—she frowned, the name jumping from the text like an unpleasant memory.

It had been so long; she had begun to relax. In some ways, Asami was . . . well, not a masterpiece, but less trouble than she had anticipated, and each year between Earth and the Resolute made the girl more normal by the count and less Heidi’s concern. She relaxed her tense shoulders. Asami was just another G.P. kid now.

Heidi paused on the name Maxi Lisk. The girl had been engineered as a leader—smart, competent, organized, and direct. She was driven, competitive, and had joined the crew under protest, stating the project was immoral; Heidi wouldn’t punish her for that, she needed Maxi to feel these things. Maxi’s anger was Heidi’s greatest achievement. Creating a human’s psyche was bound to be an imperfect process in the beginning trials. Maxi could be seen as a bit of a misfire, but not unsalvageable. Very few knew how carefully Heidi had crafted that friction, the disdain for authority—but not too much, and not too soon.

She sighed heavily.

Something about the names bothered her. Surnames were no longer given. A reminder of when each child born felt like another miracle. There had been so many children now they had begun to go through naming books alphabetically. She felt a small throb of guilt as she allowed herself to empathize with the sleepers. She had known each very well, but now it was like looking back through a fog. They would remember her, younger, milder, more personable.

She didn’t allow her mind to go further. Her fingers made a quick decision on the tablet as she erased their surnames. The group would now be numbered by relation to which batch they had been born out of, as all the batches since had been. She would have her assistant rename the rest of the Earth batches.

As a psychologist, she knew this would cause distress, but in the long term, it might prevent division in the class systems of the Growth kids. She tried to tell herself it wasn’t for her own sake that she did this; her eye unable to avoid one name in particular—a name that she was ready to burry after all these years. It really was for the best. She had to say goodbye to the ghost of Hadano.

She stayed to watch the first freeze patient breathe again. Steam from his breath melted the ice from his lips and nose.

“Send them up when they’re ready.” Heidi thought she had about twenty minutes before the first wakened knocked on her door.

Soft thuds woke Asami, the steps of her heartbeat returning to use. It was a slow organ now, struggling to beat and pump the ice from her veins. Her ears began to fill with the hum of a generator and warm heat fell across her face, melting gel and ice. White gloves picked gel from Asami’s ears and neck. Her face felt wet, but her arms weren’t free to wipe away the condensation. Her eyes struggled to focus without the orientation of sound. She was in a world of vapor.

“Asami?” a nurse asked.

She looked down. Bright, coffee-colored eyes in a paled, deep-brown face looked up at her. She felt very far away.

“You’re coming out of freeze,” the nurse said.

Asami didn’t want to wake. The world was heavy, consciousness a burden. She was aware that her hands were free now, but she didn’t immediately know what to do with arms. They were cumbersome when it came to sleep.

Hands kept peeling the warm gel from her neck and ears. Noises stabbed at her, a sharp beep that echoed the softer thud of her heart, her own heavy breath rasping, and the crunch of ice beneath a boot. The light was worse. Fingers pushed at her eyelids, flashing a light inside her brain.

She stepped from the tube at the nurse’s insistence, her legs watery. The texture of the grate imprinted onto her numb feet. She stood, clasped the side of her freeze tube, and waited to acclimate as her ears cleared. The sound of her heart was lost now in the echo of voices bouncing off metal pipes. A blanket was wrapped around her shoulders, and she drank something amber that burned down her throat into her belly. But the heat in her stomach only made her more aware of the prickling numbness of her back and feet.

Her legs were coated in strings of gel. She stared at her feet as the nurse left her to help the next freeze patient from the tube. It looked as though she had stepped in three inches of blue gelatin.

“You’re doing fine. Try to remember why you’re here. You’re on the Resolute, a spaceship. We’ve come eight years across space.”

Asami had done the math before freeze, and the numbers swam back to her fuzzily. With the factor of time dilution, it had been eight years for those aboard the ship but sixteen for anyone’s friends or family on Earth. If they had traveled just over half the speed of light, time had warped around them. It had been explained to her, but she had never really grasped the concept. Time had always seemed inescapable. Nor did it seem that motion should slow time down. But the math said what her human mind could not feel to be true. She had thought, perhaps, once she experienced time slowing, she could understand it better, but it seemed time moved the same inside the bubble.

Asami watched with interest as the nurse scrubbed gel from her legs, beads of her own dead skin rolled up her calves and feet. Her hair and nails were also longer, though not remarkably, but enough that the nurse clipped half an inch from her fingers. She hadn’t been cared for so completely since she was a child, back when her caretaking android, Cloey, had only existed to clean and watch her. Asami looked down at the debris that was her. Hair clumps, nails, skin, dust.

She saw two other freeze patients walk back and forth as a nurse directed them. She stared at one. He was thin and his posture was curved forward like taut bow string. He was arguing with his nurse, his black hair wet and sticking to his neck. He had never let it grow past his ears, but it suited his face.

“Sam?” Asami’s voice came out hoarse and muted; she felt a tickle in her esophagus. She lifted a hand to her throat and coughed. There was a spider crawling up towards her tongue. Or maybe just cobwebs—dust and webs. She half expected to see particles as she breathed out. She coughed the webbing out, spitting into her palm. A chunk of white throat lining quivered in a pool of her thick saliva. Lovely.

Sam glanced her way and she tried to smile, but her eyes were watering. Adorable, she moaned to herself. Not like he was falling all over himself to reach her anyways. She shook the blob discreetly into the pile of her other debris.

Sam’s sunken eyes sparked at her, gold washers in his irises, but his look was glazed and distant. Was he sick?

The world snapped back into focus.

The noise, that had been muffled, became a roar. Asami covered her ears. Sam was yelling at his nurse. Asami had never seen him yell. His face was somehow mean, the tendons down his arm tightening. The nurse’s lips flattened into brownish red strips. If Sam was trying to convince her of something, it wasn’t working.

Asami’s ears adjusted until the roar became words echoing from different conversations around the room.

She approached him and wondered if her own face looked as haggard and thin. Sam had always been trim, but she had never noticed his cheeks being so hollow. His movements were twitches, his gaze a waver.

“Sit down Samuel, not another word,” his nurse glowered and waited until Sam sat.

“It’s just Sam,” he called after her, “and I want to see Heidi.” He glared at his nurse’s back.

“Why is everyone so dusted thick?” he rasped to Asami.

The nurse turned a sharp black eye on him, sucking her tongue across her teeth.

Asami wished now that she hadn’t approached him. He was in a mood to rip off heads and tear out throats. He wouldn’t even look at her, his gaze roamed. But the nurse was definitely looking at her, lumping them together. Trouble.

“You go nowhere, hear me?” The nurse gave Sam another long look before walking a few steps away to talk with the doctor whose gaze wandered from Sam to the nurse again.

“Prickly much?” Asami asked lightly. Sam had always walked a thin line with the elders. He had actually coined the phrase “elders” for the adults. They’d told the children to call them by their names, but Sam’s term named the difference between their makers and watchers and those born through the Growth Project.

Sam didn’t acknowledge her.

The warmth of that night on the roof felt very distant—vaporized even—as if it had never been. It was stupid to let herself believe in that distance; they had been friends since she could walk after him, and maybe something more on and off, more so in the past month since he had been dusted hard by his last crush. The freeze had left her brain sluggish and witty was beyond her. With Sam preoccupied, she was left to take stock of her own physical adjustments. Asami stretched her legs out. She was tight all over.

“Don’t get the chip,” Sam said under his breath.

“What?” Now he wants to talk?

Sam didn’t glance her way. He had helped her decide to wait on getting a chip until she knew she really wanted one. He had decided against it, though he never told her his reasons. She was frightened that the chip would erode the little of herself she felt was truly her own. It would computerize her brain. On Earth, at least three-fourths of the population didn’t have a chip, some couldn’t afford it, some thought it an abomination, an invasion of their privacy, some were waiting to see the side effects, whether those with chips died or if their brains rotted in twenty years. But within the Growth Project, only a few didn’t get the chip. Heidi had gotten a free supply from the government and offered a free implantation. Those chips had run out and Asami sometimes wondered if she had been a fool to reject the expensive procedure.

“Are you okay?” Asami asked. What she really wanted to say shelved with some other colorful and un-useful expletives.

Sam ripped at his overgrown thumbnail. The nurse should have clipped it for him.

“Sam?” she reached out to touch him, “are you sick?”

“Aster dust!” He pulled away.

His face was pale and thinned, his eyes overly bright. Something was wrong. He was trembling slightly as if in pain. Though he had been released from freeze before her, his body clean of gel, he seemed to be recovering less quickly.

He didn’t look at her again, his eyes intensely focused on some point in the ground.

“Sorry,” he dragged both hands down his face.

“It’s ok. My brain’s still de-thawing.” She felt her joke flow off him and wanted to sink through the floor with it.

“Just, don’t let them chip you, okay?”

“Why?” she pressed. She hated when he gave her vague dismissals, as though she were too thick to grasp the why—even if he was asking something of her.

He grabbed her hand from the bench between them and squeezed it, looking at her fingers instead of meeting her eyes. “Please.” He closed his eyes.

 Please Asami, Sam’s voice said in her mind.

Asami startled. Sam’s mouth hadn’t moved. Her brain must still be frosty.

“Please?” he asked, looking at her this time. She squirmed a little at the intensity of his look, those green eyes that made her think of cool ponds with rich moss, bright soft lichen on towering trees.

“Yeah.” Asami looked away, squeezing his hand back. Whatever was happening, she would always be on his side. She cleared her throat looking around uncomfortably.

The freeze chamber had been so orderly when they had arrived, a marching line put away into tubes. Now the room looked chaotic. Freeze patients milled about, nurses darting back and forth putting out emotional fires that erupted with each pod that popped open.

“Don’t mind me, you two,” Asami’s nurse began to massage her legs, rubbing lavender-scented hot oil onto her calves. Asami hadn’t noticed that they were aching until the nurse’s massage released the pain. Sam dropped her hand and stood.

“I need to talk to Heidi.” He turned away from her and scratched at his arms.

Asami was surprised to see his nurse leave the room, sending him a final, deadeye glare. Sam made his way towards the stairs, following her.

Asami itched to chase him but waited until her own nurse was busy with the head doctor before slipping out of the room. The nurses wanted them to mingle and remember who they were. There were enough milling bodies to disappear, at least for a moment.

There wasn’t far to go. The Resolute grew more polished as she left the freeze chambers further behind but there were few doors. She had gotten a tour of the ship before they stored her in freeze. It was a tiered vessel, a viewing deck at the top, then the living quarters, a mass room in the center surrounded by cantinas and bars, and then as the ship expanded even larger as the levels progressed downwards there was the hospital, the holo room, the herbarium, offices, and under it all, the freeze rooms. Asami knew one floor up was where Heidi would be.

She came to an elevator but took the stairs. She’d have better luck sneaking around by the stairwell than stopping the elevator. The elevator was shaped almost like a freeze pod. She didn’t want to be in a capsule anymore. Though her legs felt unsteady, she wanted to use them.

Asami acclimated to the feeling of walking, the grinding of bones and ligaments, the texture of the cold, glassy floor. Her feet left smudges on the white surface of the smooth stair, but they faded, like hot breath on glass. She used the rails for extra support in case her muscles forgot how to coordinate with her brain.

Her ears were still plugged, but she thought she heard a crash overhead. Shouts sounded in the hall above. Someone cried out, a gasping breath that filled the whole hall, echoing into the stairwell. Asami strained to listen, alarmed as footfalls thudded past.

“Listen, please,” Sam’s voice choked, “we have to go back.”

Asami stumbled out onto the landing in time to see two security officers in black vests barrel past, a blur of light brown and orange hair. There was another crash. A woman was screeching. She followed into the hall, peering around the corner of a flung open door.

Heidi’s desk was shoved at an off-angle, her coffee mug splattered across the white floor. Heidi’s back was within arm's distance, she could almost have reached out to touch her, but the security guards stood between them, their backs tall and wide. Sam’s nurse was wiping at her white uniform.

Huddled against the desk, Sam shuddered, his eyes looking through Asami. She stepped forward but he seemed to shake his head, glaring at her. She clenched her fists angrily. What was he doing?

“I told you he was unstable, doctor,” Sam’s nurse complained. “He’s burned me, I’m sure.”

 “Millicent, he’s sick,” Heidi said to the nurse. “Get him to the hospital, I’ll talk with him later,” she motioned to the guards tiredly.

Sam shook his head, his words running into one another, “No, no we are all in danger if we don’t turn around!”

An officer shot him with a sleep gun. The tranquilizer jerked his shoulders back into the desk with a thud. His head shaking before it lolled down against his chest.

Asami flinched, clutching at her own shoulder and darted back out of sight. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. Sam had been weak enough to manage, the force was excessive. The Growth kids had always been discouraged from physical altercations, unless strictly observed in a class. Though Sam was a prankster, he had never been violent.

Asami hadn’t been born with as much control. When she was eight, other girls had scrapped their android caretakers for taller, more sophisticated friend models. Asami had used all her credits to upgrade her original model, something her android, Cloey, wasn’t designed for. Maxi had made fun of Cloey’s childish appearance and Asami had knocked her to the floor. The elder in charge, Ms. Clamps, made Asami scrub toilets for a week, an android's job. Still, it had been worth it.

Asami backed down the hall into the stairwell. She wanted to walk out and make Sam tell her what he was thinking, what he was hiding from her. What could he even be hiding? He’d been in freeze with her the past eight years! But he knew something or thought he did, and that doubt had reduced her to hiding in a stairwell from Heidi as if she was all of twelve years old and they were out after curfew stealing from the kitchen. Heidi wouldn’t hurt him though, would she?

Asami almost pinched herself for paranoia, but the image of Sam shaking his head at her, of his shoulder jerking into the desk, kept replaying in her mind. It would be ok, she told herself, Heidi would fix him, and then he would explain it all. She tried to stamp out the sliver of doubt remaining.

Her spiking adrenaline had pumped out any lethargy left in her system as she retreated out of sight, around the curve in the stairwell, but her legs still felt weak. The heavy thud of her heartbeat pulsed in the palms of her hands and each finger. She growled to herself, moon-addled Sam, she was going to beat him senseless when he was better.

 “Get the stretcher.”

The officer’s voice sounded close. Asami held her breath and backed down another step, grateful for her silent bare feet until she slipped. Her foot caught the step awkwardly as she walked backwards, as if her legs forgot how to move, and she half fell into the wall twisting her ankle and bashing her elbow against the metal rail, which let out a hollow bong.

She froze, not even breathing, listening for a pause in the conversation above.

“Think I’d throw the coffee if she was my nurse too,” one of the guards chuckled. “Voice like a raven,” he cawed.

“Shut it.”

Down the hall Millicent rasped, “Something has to be done about that boy, I won’t treat him without help.”

“I’ll be taking over his treatments,” Heidi said, and there was a click that might have been her door closing.

Treat him for what? If she emerged from the elevator maybe Heidi wouldn’t question what she had seen. Asami turned and let her feet slap down the stairs, ignoring the sting in her ankle as she looked for the elevator door. She whacked at the elevator button, praying Sam wasn’t gone by the time it carried her up.

Her ears strained for sounds, but once in the elevator she was encapsulated in stagnant silence. It lifted gently, paused, and opened to the sound of watery breathing. Sam’s limp body was laid out on the stretcher, face waxy with sweat, his eyes rolled up.

Asami stepped past the guard, flinching as the older man gripped her shoulder with a hairy red hand. She was startled by the heat in the man’s hand, his breath hot and sour. He was so large he made Sam look like a child. She had never seen these men in the G.P. before.

“Where’s your nurse?”

“What’s wrong with him?” Asami held tight to Sam’s shirt. His hand was flushed on the inside of his thumb. He smelled like coffee.

“He’s crazy,” Millicent snapped, stomping down the hall towards them. Asami saw a coffee stain had spread over the woman’s rounded abdomen, but it was still no larger than a handprint.

“You need to step back,” the guard insisted.

“Asami,” Heidi’s quick clicking heals approached from behind, “come with me.”

Asami’s brain stuttered. It needed to stop doing that to her. She struggled to reconcile the two images of Heidi in her mind. The elapse of time had altered the youthful woman. Heidi’s reddish-brown hair still had a crackle in it and her blue eyes still sparkled, but she had aged. Eight more years of frowns and smiles had formed creases down her mouth and webs around her eyes. While Asami had slept, preserved in a cupboard, Heidi had spent the trip awake to raise batches of children aboard the Resolute.

The guards pulled Sam into the elevator, and Asami was too stunned to stop them.