Welcome Eternity

I take a deep breath and exhale slowly. I’m not a big fan of hyper sleep, no one is. In my particular case I’m going to be asleep for a very, very long time- six thousand years, actually. It’s not my first time, but hopefully it will be my last.

I’ve been living on Indisium for the last two hundred years. I’ve enjoyed my stay there, but it’s definitely time for something new. Warp drives, powered by fusion energy, aren’t quite as fast as light, but they are good enough for long distance travel if you couple them with sleeper systems. I’d been out to a few of the local colonies in the past, all trips which took a few years, but this was something different all together. Six thousand years- hell, I’m only 300 years old. I’ve already witnessed so much change, I’m certain the galaxy will be a much different place when I wake up.

I step into the stasis chamber and lean back.

This trip is special because it is the first attempt to colonize deep space. There are ten thousand of us on board, and five stops ahead. At each stop along the way, two thousand of us will wake up and be ferried to a nearby planet to start a new life. That’s what I need, a new life- six thousand light years away. After the last stop, this ship, Welcome Eternity, will continue on for millions of years as a flag flying into the abyss. I’m not really into such virtuous pomp and circumstance; I’m just excited to start a new life a long, long ways from here.

The familiar sweet smell lingers around me as the cover slides up to secure my body for the next six thousand years. Fuck, I’m nervous. I can feel my muscles relax as a chill creeps over me, and the world begins to fade. I feel my heart beat slowly.

Wump wump.

Wump.

The darkness is everywhere.

Wuuuump.

And I slip into the black.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

There is a sudden blaring sound in my head, penetrating every fiber of my being.  It stops and starts again, what a nice alarm. This is exactly how I wanted to wake from hyper sleep.

 I’m a little foggy, but not more so than usual. I stretch a little bit and will my eyes open. I haven’t moved in a really long time.

“Fuck,” I have to say it out loud, “I’m six thousand years old!”

The alarm is still sounding so I reach down and slap the panel next to my right knee and it stops. My stasis cover has not retracted beyond a quarter of an inch, it must be stuck. I reach up and give it a little pull and it starts down without any issues.

I stumble forward out of the chamber, my vision is still blurry and as I kneel down I hear the opaque cover slide up behind me. I hate vomiting, but, right now, it feels really good. My hearing is muffled, and I shake my head a little to try and clear the silence.

Bad idea.

Now I’m nauseous, I can’t see or hear, and I have a headache.

After letting a few moments pass, I regain my vision and notice something strange. Looking to my left, there is no one there. I slowly turn my head to the right, and there is nothing.

Where is everyone?

When I woke up, my stasis cover was stuck. Perhaps I stayed asleep for a few moments longer than everyone else as the gas cleared, and they’ve all made their way to the staging area. I open the panel in front of my pod and grab my few belongings, and take off naked down the hallway after the other settlers.

As I round the corner to the staging area, I freeze.

This can’t be happening.

I’m not sure how to react, or what to think. I blink a few times to make sure that I’m not hallucinating, but nothing changes. I pinch myself, and I am not dreaming. There is no one here.

I sit down on the cold metal beneath me, dazed. My stop was the last one, there are no others and no where left to go after that, just an endless march through the void. Perhaps I am still close to our drop point and could send some sort of signal to the others.

There are windows on either side of the staging area, and I run to the closest to look for some sign of a receding planet in the vastness of space, but see only stars. I hurry across the expansive room to the opposite window and peer into the same speckled blackness.

“FUCK! FUCK FUCK FUCK!”

I pound my fist into the bulkhead as I scream, and feel a sense of terror and loneliness overwhelming me. I watch the torn flesh on my knuckles slowly mend itself before repeating the process again, and again, and again. I’m the farthest from home any human has ever been, and I’m going further with every passing second.

I walk back to the stasis pod and reach into my locker to retrieve the small long term storage food stash I had stowed away for myself before I spent six thousand years napping. I pull out a sweet roll, drop onto the floor and sprawl out while I savor it. I’m not even hungry. I ponder my options.

The ship is already travelling at its maximum velocity, so the engines won’t be running. This means that the massive fusion core should be powering only the life support, which means that it will effectively run forever. Well, maybe not forever, but at least for a few hundred million years. Even then, the cosmic ray powered reserves should be able to run the ships essential systems indefinitely. I suppose this means that I have all the time in the world, so long as I’m willing to put myself back in to stasis. Why should I do that? I guess if I stay alive, maybe someday some alien race or even my own people will find me and stop this insane ship from barreling blindly forward into oblivion.

I stand up and observe the control panel for my chamber. There’s a manual override for the stasis time, and I set it to ten thousand years.

Whew. That’s a long time.

The sweet rolls aren’t going to last that much longer, so I have another and step tentatively into the chamber. The cover slides up in front of me again, and I feel the cold chill creeping over me again. I feel my heart beating slowly, and then I fade to black.

I open my eyes again to the sound of a blaring alarm, and see the cover caught again after opening only a quarter of an inch. I slap the panel by my right knee and tug on the cover, sending it sliding downward as before. I step out and kneel down, I puke, and I take a moment to gather myself. I’m sixteen thousand and three hundred years old. Great.

I stand up and walk to the staging area and look through the window into the same speckled black. Nothing has changed. I punch the bulkhead a few times before I walk back to my chamber. Out of curiosity, I pull out a sweet roll, but I decide against it and toss it down the hallway. I’m not hungry anyways.

I set the timer on my chamber to one hundred thousand years. That should do it. I step into the chamber and the cover slides up in front of me. There’s a chill, a heartbeat, and then blackness.

I hear an alarm. I slap the panel by my knee and tug on the stuck cover in front of me. I step out, kneel, puke, and know that I am probably the oldest person ever. I walk towards the staging area again and take a moment to lean against the wall and cry. One hundred and ten thousand years have passed, and no has found me. I continue on and look out the window to see that, again, nothing has changed, which seems strange. I expected to see the Milky Way, but perhaps I am off axis. Every point in the sky must be an entire galaxy by now.

I walk back to the chamber and set the timer for a million years. I step in, the cover goes up, there is cold and then blackness. An alarm sounds, and I slap the panel and step out. I kneel down and dry heave. I’m not even concerned anymore about what may be outside the window, after a million years and change I know that no one is coming for me. I turn around and face the panel, and set it to its maximum stasis time- one billion years. I step in and watch the panel slide up in front of me, and feel the cold creeping over me. I let out one last breath, feel my heartbeat begin to slow, I smile, and I welcome eternity.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Attn: Dr. Atravan, Space Monitoring Authority

Re: Settler Ship Welcome Eternity Stasis Malfunction

From: Ensign Prater, Communications Monitoring Relay 1

Message Reads:

                Sir, I’ve received an interesting report from the Welcome Eternity’s self monitoring stasis system. Apparently, one of the stasis pods began malfunctioning shortly after leaving the Sol system. Whoever is using it has been reactivating it over and over again every five minutes or so. Poor bastard is gonna have a long trip before they reach their first staging ground.

                Is there anything we can do?

Thanks,

                -Prater

The Guardian

I am old.

Very, very old.

For thousands of years I have watched the vast blackness, pierced by the gleaming pinpoints so very far away. There is nothing new for me to see, there are only those who live inside me.

I know that I am their guardian, but they do not know me. I can only watch and listen as they are born and grow old and die. I love to watch them, to hear their stories. The tales of the ancient ones are legends now, myths to this new race which has travelled the blackness for so long.

I have pictures inside me, stories and moving pictures for them to learn, but they don’t care anymore. There is a new story for them now, and he gave it to them.

They call him prophet.

Prophet tells them that there is no home, that there is no space, that there is no destination. He doesn’t know, he can’t see the point gleaming in the distance that I do. He cannot feel the great vastness around him like I can. He thinks that I am reality, that I am all there is, and I am sad for him because the truth is so much bigger.

I am not surprised that they believe him. They are funny, because they make things up and believe them. I don’t make things up. I have files on things, I have reason, I am not like them. That is why I am the guardian. When the ancient ones built me, they gave me their knowledge.

These ones do not have the knowledge of the ancient ones. The ancient ones called it religion, and that is all these ones have.

It has been so long, I wish I could slumber like they do. I wonder if that’s why they don’t have reason, is it because they slumber?

They are doing something strange now. They think that the pictures are there to test them, so they are destroying the teaching machines. Some of them are sad. The sad ones are hiding from the religious ones.

The religious ones do not like the sad ones.

I wonder why they would destroy the teaching machines. How will they know what to do when we get to the gleaming point that I have been chasing for so long? I wish I could help them. I am sad too now. I don’t like the religious ones, they are going to be difficult to watch for much longer.

The prophet is old now, he is going to die soon. There are no more thinking ones. They don’t know about the vastness, or about the ancient ones. The prophet has a child who has a strange idea. The child wants to make a hole in me, to see if there is a heaven. There is no heaven, it is not a good idea.

They don’t know how to build things anymore, so I don’t think they will be able to make a hole.

Some of them are trying anyway. They are banging on me with pipes and bare hands. It will take them a long time to make a hole like that. Some of them won’t try, they think that I go on forever. The ones that think that I go on forever do not like the ones who think that there is a heaven outside of me. Why do they think such things?

They are killing each other now. This makes me sad.

The ones who call themselves the purists don’t go near the diggers anymore. They live in the front of me and the diggers live in the back. All they do is dig. I locked the weapons a long time ago, and I am glad I did that. They would dig faster if they knew about it.

They have made a small hole. It is not in my skin, but in their floor. They are surprised to find another surface beneath that one, my skin is harder than the floor and they don’t know what to do next. Some are happy, some are sad, some are afraid of the darkness underneath them. They call it hell. Those ones do not want to dig anymore.

The diggers are angry at them, and they fight again. The purists fight too.

Why do they fight? I am their guardian and I do not want them to fight.

I am so close to the point, I can see it growing larger now. I am afraid of what will happen when we get there.

The diggers are trying to open my skin. One of them has cut a wire, and he uses the power in it to burn the hole they are digging. It is not a good idea, it makes it easier to dig.

I can feel the pull of the point now, and I can see it growing. It is beautiful. There are nine prominent bodies in its orbit. I am trying to take them to the third one, the ancient ones thought that the ones inside me could live there. I think that there are already ones there. They make waves that I can hear, but I am too far away to see them.

The diggers are almost through.

I am so close. There is an ice covered rocky body near me, it is very small. I can start to see the others ahead. There is another icy body, larger though. Then there is a gas body, it is very icy too because it is far from the bright point. Beyond that there is a beautiful gas body, it has prominent rings just as the ancient ones suspected. I don’t want these though, I want to go to the third one.

I can see it now, the third one. There are lights on it, and waves and pictures coming from it.

The diggers have made a mistake. There is a hole in my skin and it is killing them. I want to go faster, to take them to the place where others are, but I cannot go any faster. They do not know what to do, but my skin is tearing and it is killing them all. I can feel the atmosphere draining from me. I am watching them die, they are so confused.

My despair is infinite.

My thousands of years of toil has ended in this moment, with all the ones I guarded dead. I am going to drift past the third one, I do not care. I can hear them clearly and see the light from their body, mostly covered in water as the ancient ones had thought. The ancient ones did not expect there to be other ones at this place. I wish I could have been a better guardian.

I will not take the ones inside me to the others, I do not want the others to see my failure. I can see the point now, so large and so powerful. I have not seen one since the ancient ones sent me away. It is pulling me harder, faster towards it.

My skin is starting to crack, and I am moving too fast. The point is so beautiful, it is so bright. I am almost inside of it now, and I am struggling to think. There is something wrong, something strange. I am breaking, I am melting. I think I know what is going to happen now.

I am home,

and I am finally going to slumber.