You wake to a soft but insistent rumbling.
The vibrations ripple away from the center of your back and along the underside of your prone left arm, in case you had forgotten which way to turn to find the currently disengaged ID sticker. Among all their other prods at morale and procedure, at least three Producers had reiterated to you that applying your ID was the essential first task. You can see the monitor—a broad panel of gloss on your otherwise matte walls—from where you’re still tucked into bed, although it might be more accurate to say swaddled. The bulk of your suit is gone, and you’re tucked flat, arms two inches from your sides, in the techs’ arrangement. Tight creases run between your knees under the bedspread, pressure against the tips of your toes, and the swaddling sensation starts slipping closer to constriction. You had seen a picture of a tree once in a biology textbook that felt like this. Figure A: a baby sapling attached to a shiny metal support; Figure B: no longer a sapling, bark oozing roughly around the rusted hoop. The sudden creep down your spine this image gives you tugs your left hand out from under the stretched sheets and towards the release lever for your ID with more urgency than any directional vibrations could have inspired. A few sappy electrode patches tug at your skin, but not enough to stop you.
The flange juts right where you know it should, though the memory of yanking it back with your whole hand during training isn’t matching up with the moderate pressure you’re presently using to
the mechanism up and out of its housing. And there’s your ID. Perfectly clean and perfectly intact. You resist the urge to slap it on as quickly as you can, instead following the Producers’ direction to carefully align the central porous square with the almost-invisible circular scar on the inside of your wrist. Finally,
Buzzy numbness spreads through your hand and forearm, almost-but-not-quite letting you forget about the microneedles at work threading all its various tubings and wirings into your newly shared system. Some tiny valve must release, as blood finally rushes in to transform the semi-translucent casing into a perfect tone-match for your skin. It’s like your ID isn’t even there, except for a fading tingle in your skin and the soft purple pulse of its (your?) arterially powered battery.
While you wait for your ID to finish integrating, you work on disentangling yourself from the sheet, and then from the rest of the tubing and patching and wiring that supported your semi-stasis. Their chemical slurry should have tapered off at least 200 hours ago, and waking up was the sign for the safe removal period. At least, that’s what you remember hearing a few minutes ago. Decades ago? Time is starting to feel like a bit of a mess, so you peel the last exercise-simulating electrode from your thigh, close your eyes, and keep waiting for the tremor you know should come soon.
This time you feel the vibration bone-deep in your wrist. When your eyes blink open, the monitor is on, bathing your small room in the pastel sky-blue you’ve been dreaming of. Something snags in your chest.
the screen reads for the few seconds it takes you to dismiss the message, right thumb
the requisite three seconds of pressure against your left wrist. Just like training. The nerves that made you scramble to get untangled have settled back down, heavy in your stomach for the few more seconds it takes you to
the wall on your right from matte to mirrored. Nervous or not, your body is standing in front of it without a second or even a first thought. It shouldn’t be surprising; one of the few Producers to visit the colony early on in training had shown you your predictive models. You had been given time to get used to what you should look like, but it’s still a headrush to actually see yourself for the first time. Your way way too adult self. The size medium white smock-and-shorts uniform actually fits, reddish-pink CORA-L insignia still embroidered high on your shoulder. Your eyes start to sting from the lack of blinking. Training never explained how you were supposed to feel when you woke up, but everyone made it seem like it should be exciting. Is a heavy, heavy stomach a symptom of excitement? You decide it must be and
the mirror back to matte. But not before
a quick screen capture of the entire wall.
Two short vibrations buzz your wrist, and when you turn back to the monitor, it’s already automatically attached the image to your wake-up confirmation message, which you
as directed. With that out of the way, you
your social feed on the left wall, the usual advertisements and PSAs slightly distorted by the rounded corners of your room. You brush through the main page, looking at model-generated image after model-generated image “posted” by your old hubmates. There’s no way to shake the uneasy knowledge that these are only statistical guesses at what happened in the ten years after your launch. There wasn’t enough energy to maintain passenger stasis and to keep flinging unexceptional updates across space. But the math can’t have gotten too much wrong. Surely people from hub 100 have kissed, have gotten married, have left on other missions, completed research, been promoted.
Died.
Everyone should be 23 now, just like you are (are you?). That’s why the Producers loaded up this file for you. If they should have been happy like this, you can be too. The models are saying this is right. Don’t think about how your cells have been sloughing and multiplying at a twentieth of natural speed. Don’t think of them left behind, graying, added to the swirls of grit on rubber.
Two short buzzes. It gives your eyes the excuse they need to flick away from the feed and back to the central monitor as it adjusts the lighting from mood-stability blue to the standard soft white. You figure your ID must have decided that your vitals were consistent enough by now to proceed with onboarding. It doesn’t feel that way to you yet, but what does a human know? A hidden latch, like a bigger version of the ID housing, clicks out from the wall underneath the monitor. Moving your left hand closer makes a bent-kneed stick figure sitting atop an L-shaped mass glow dimly where it is etched onto the handle’s side. You pull cautiously, letting the air cushion billow out and inflate at an easy pace before clambering onto it and leaning back, facing the monitor. You’re still trying not to think too hard about your body, but getting yourself situated is an exercise in awkwardness. Nausea doesn’t seem like the right name for this feeling. You should have pushed that down already. Is it excitement for Earth that’s so hot in the back of your throat?
With a
the instructions you knew to expect start to pop up.
Of all the materials and programs and interfaces that Production would test and re-test, this evidently wasn’t one of them. It really shouldn’t be surprising; your model files were always named with just your ID anyway.
You’re ready, you think. Another handle and then a shelf slips out from beneath the monitor, making way for a laser projection keyboard to fill the space. The user pip on your side of the monitor is online, and so is your partner’s. They must have already been waiting.