Away From Here- Chapter 19
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Chapter 19.
Stasis.
Cryogenic stasis. It sounds like something out of an old science-fiction film; something from the late twentieth century, an old prop in an old b-movie of the time, a slab of plastic and ice in the back of the shot. As though freezing the body will somehow preserve them, like a packet of frozen peas; frozen for longer lasting freshness.
It’s almost laughable in its eccentricity.
Mara isn’t sure how cryogenic stasis works in this day and age if she’s honest. She vaguely remembers someone try to explain it to her, once, long ago in a dusty old classroom by a teacher she probably hated, and the people who trained her weren't exactly forthcoming with the inner-workings of the machinery, just how not to kill yourself while inside of it.
But she finds it pretty easy not to care about any of that right now, pumped full of stasis drugs which will help to keep her unconscious for the next five years while they travel through space, barely charted by the human race. She’ll be dead to the rest of the universe while they traverse stars and nebulas, all for the planet that some are calling ‘New Eden.’
Even in Mara’s drugged up state, it’s another one of those ideas that’s laughable in the fact that it seems to unreal.
New Eden, a gift from God. A salvation for everything humans have done.
Mara would shake her head if she could move it, the box of a stasis chamber too small for her to even move her limbs, not that she really needs to, the drugs are kicking in slowly, closing off her consciousness from her, slowly pulling her into what she knows to be a start of blank death-like sleep.
There’s a pain curling in her chest, something hard and indefinable and perhaps before the needle was slipped into her skin she remembered what it was, but now it just sits, rough and uncomfortable in the pit of her stomach, as the stasis hums quietly around her, sound proofed to the racket of the machinery screeching and quick fire sounds of the start up sequence and all the other things. She can’t even feel the g-forces or the zero-g they’ve probably just passed into, but she knows that it’s still there, the drug just numbing her to everything.
Her eyes drift closed of their own accord, and she stares at her closed lids before a new kind of silence envelops her, but the hard pain still remains until she can’t feel anything anymore.
Time always passes. It’s inevitable; days always tick down on clocks, like silent little bomb displays, counting down the time you have; sand trickling through an hourglass, sliding away until there’s nothing left anymore.
Sometimes time passes so slowly you feel as through you can count down to the very millisecond, like you hear the breath of each person around you, every staccato heartbeat.
It’s a bit like that in stasis, and yet, sped up too.
Consciousness greets her like an old friend, something half forgotten, soft like cotton sheets, new and fresh like mown grass and all those other metaphors people use in their romanticism.
Everything feels foggy, light headed, like there are chunks of her brain missing, which could be why she can’t remember anything, but there’s a little voice in her head that whispers that that’s all right; it’ll come back, just a temporary side effect of the drug.
Her senses feel heightened, the humming is louder than anything she’s heard before, and the dim glow of blue that seems to emanate from nowhere in particular is blinding. She closes her eyes. She can feel the cold, sputtering drops of liquid go into her arm, just enough to keep her calm, but not enough to make her lose her awareness.
They said that was the second to last stage of stasis, comes a little voice, a different, soothing little voice, calm and collected, like an old documentary disk.
Her memory is coming back; she can remember that she’s Mara-Louise, although her last name is a bit of mystery right now, and she can feel her fingers and toes. She wiggles them experimentally and finds them stiff and awkward, as gravity presses heavily against them.
Gravity.
That can only mean one thing.
Something bubbles up in her chest; excitement, fear, unbridled joy, clustered up in her lungs, stopping her from breathing. She’s pulling in air through the clogging mix of thrilling emotions clawing their way through her, gripping her and making her want to scream and grin and jump around with the nearest person.
She’s not sure how long she’s been in this box since she woke up, minutes? Hours? Time is fickle, especially when you just spent the last five years buried so deep in your subconscious it was almost like not being anywhere at all.
Finally, there’s a hiss and the lid to the box slides down, collapsing as it hits the bottom where her feet are and a man looks down at her. She remembers him as one of the bio-techs. She grins at him.
“Morning, sleeping beauty,” he tells her, with a small smile as a return for her beaming grin. He leans over and checks the screen set into the side of her stasis pod that she’d never really noticed before. He makes a pleased sound. “Right, everything looks normal,” he says, perhaps more to himself than to her. Then he slides the needle out, slowly, making Mara wince, even though it doesn’t hurt.
He straightens back up and offers her a hand up, which she takes gratefully. She’s barely even to her feet before her limbs give out under her, stiff and unused to movement, even though she knows that there have been regular muscle programmes and stimulants used on her for the past five years, as is the case for all of them, to make sure all of their bodily functions continue perfectly, although there’s something about the stasis that stops muscle from degrading, that keeps them pretty much preserved in the way they were left when they stepped into said box, as long as the muscle stimulants are injected every so often. The man catches her without hesitating. “Whoa there, careful now, slowly, there you go.” He helps her to stand again, and shakily she steps out of the box, already feeling the power go back into her legs, she straightens up slightly in the large, seemingly endless corridor of boxes. They’re everywhere; clean white, set against the walls, across the floors, humming quietly together in perfect unison.
In hers, it had felt soothing, now it just makes her skin itch for freedom.
He releases her hand with a small smile. “You might feel a little dizzy or nauseous for a while; that’s perfectly normal. If you experience any pain in joints, or migraines, let one of the staff know.” He reels off the speech like he’s done it a hundred times and Mara nods politely. “It’s best if you go eat something, and don’t leave the spacecraft until given the go ahead. The mess hall is just down the corridor and to your left.” He points in the general direction and gives her a bright smile. She turns to leave, with a grin on her face. “Oh!” he says, and she turns slightly to look at him. “Welcome back.”
Her grin widens as she turns away and heads in the direction the man specified.
She’s halfway down the corridor, a spring in her step, beaming at everyone who’s slowly getting out, shaking their fuzzy brains back in consciousness when it happens.
All the while there had been nothing but the humming of the stasis units; the all encompassing hum that echoes though the chrome that her bare feet pad across slowly. Her legs still aching but she’s managing, and her excitement is over-powering everything else.
They made it. They really made it.
She stops in her tracks, and jumps, feeling like a five year old on Christmas day, but her happy shout is drowned out by the sound of beeping; loud and penetrating in her ears and someone shouting.
She twists around sharply, to see an open stasis unit, several members bio-techs crowded around it. People are looking in from the sidelines with open curiosity, even with their fuzzy consciousness. But the unit number sparks something in Mara’s brain, and suddenly there’s worry curling in the pit of her stomach along with a hard ball of anger that takes a minute to define.
She jumps forward, pushing through the bio-techs to be faced with the deathly pale face of Shannon Mole, her body rigid.
“Someone get her to the infirmary!” a bio-tech shouts, angry at his colleague’s incompetence and Mara stares in horror as the other woman is grabbed by several medicals and is hauled away. It all happens in a blink of an eye for Mara; her perception still clogged up by the remaining drugs, a moment feels like a lifetime and her body feels even stiffer than it did before, the anger and pain she remembers from before coil in her stomach as she watches them take her away.
One of the bio-techs looks at her, it’s the one that took her out of her unit. He looks at her in slight confusion. “Do you know her?” he asks, politely.
Mara pulls a hand through her hair and looks away, trying to force the anger away. “Yeah...” She pauses and, with a sigh, drops her hand back to her side again. “‘Least I thought I did.”
Next Chapter>>
Chapter 19.
Stasis.
Cryogenic stasis. It sounds like something out of an old science-fiction film; something from the late twentieth century, an old prop in an old b-movie of the time, a slab of plastic and ice in the back of the shot. As though freezing the body will somehow preserve them, like a packet of frozen peas; frozen for longer lasting freshness.
It’s almost laughable in its eccentricity.
Mara isn’t sure how cryogenic stasis works in this day and age if she’s honest. She vaguely remembers someone try to explain it to her, once, long ago in a dusty old classroom by a teacher she probably hated, and the people who trained her weren't exactly forthcoming with the inner-workings of the machinery, just how not to kill yourself while inside of it.
But she finds it pretty easy not to care about any of that right now, pumped full of stasis drugs which will help to keep her unconscious for the next five years while they travel through space, barely charted by the human race. She’ll be dead to the rest of the universe while they traverse stars and nebulas, all for the planet that some are calling ‘New Eden.’
Even in Mara’s drugged up state, it’s another one of those ideas that’s laughable in the fact that it seems to unreal.
New Eden, a gift from God. A salvation for everything humans have done.
Mara would shake her head if she could move it, the box of a stasis chamber too small for her to even move her limbs, not that she really needs to, the drugs are kicking in slowly, closing off her consciousness from her, slowly pulling her into what she knows to be a start of blank death-like sleep.
There’s a pain curling in her chest, something hard and indefinable and perhaps before the needle was slipped into her skin she remembered what it was, but now it just sits, rough and uncomfortable in the pit of her stomach, as the stasis hums quietly around her, sound proofed to the racket of the machinery screeching and quick fire sounds of the start up sequence and all the other things. She can’t even feel the g-forces or the zero-g they’ve probably just passed into, but she knows that it’s still there, the drug just numbing her to everything.
Her eyes drift closed of their own accord, and she stares at her closed lids before a new kind of silence envelops her, but the hard pain still remains until she can’t feel anything anymore.
Time always passes. It’s inevitable; days always tick down on clocks, like silent little bomb displays, counting down the time you have; sand trickling through an hourglass, sliding away until there’s nothing left anymore.
Sometimes time passes so slowly you feel as through you can count down to the very millisecond, like you hear the breath of each person around you, every staccato heartbeat.
It’s a bit like that in stasis, and yet, sped up too.
Consciousness greets her like an old friend, something half forgotten, soft like cotton sheets, new and fresh like mown grass and all those other metaphors people use in their romanticism.
Everything feels foggy, light headed, like there are chunks of her brain missing, which could be why she can’t remember anything, but there’s a little voice in her head that whispers that that’s all right; it’ll come back, just a temporary side effect of the drug.
Her senses feel heightened, the humming is louder than anything she’s heard before, and the dim glow of blue that seems to emanate from nowhere in particular is blinding. She closes her eyes. She can feel the cold, sputtering drops of liquid go into her arm, just enough to keep her calm, but not enough to make her lose her awareness.
They said that was the second to last stage of stasis, comes a little voice, a different, soothing little voice, calm and collected, like an old documentary disk.
Her memory is coming back; she can remember that she’s Mara-Louise, although her last name is a bit of mystery right now, and she can feel her fingers and toes. She wiggles them experimentally and finds them stiff and awkward, as gravity presses heavily against them.
Gravity.
That can only mean one thing.
Something bubbles up in her chest; excitement, fear, unbridled joy, clustered up in her lungs, stopping her from breathing. She’s pulling in air through the clogging mix of thrilling emotions clawing their way through her, gripping her and making her want to scream and grin and jump around with the nearest person.
She’s not sure how long she’s been in this box since she woke up, minutes? Hours? Time is fickle, especially when you just spent the last five years buried so deep in your subconscious it was almost like not being anywhere at all.
Finally, there’s a hiss and the lid to the box slides down, collapsing as it hits the bottom where her feet are and a man looks down at her. She remembers him as one of the bio-techs. She grins at him.
“Morning, sleeping beauty,” he tells her, with a small smile as a return for her beaming grin. He leans over and checks the screen set into the side of her stasis pod that she’d never really noticed before. He makes a pleased sound. “Right, everything looks normal,” he says, perhaps more to himself than to her. Then he slides the needle out, slowly, making Mara wince, even though it doesn’t hurt.
He straightens back up and offers her a hand up, which she takes gratefully. She’s barely even to her feet before her limbs give out under her, stiff and unused to movement, even though she knows that there have been regular muscle programmes and stimulants used on her for the past five years, as is the case for all of them, to make sure all of their bodily functions continue perfectly, although there’s something about the stasis that stops muscle from degrading, that keeps them pretty much preserved in the way they were left when they stepped into said box, as long as the muscle stimulants are injected every so often. The man catches her without hesitating. “Whoa there, careful now, slowly, there you go.” He helps her to stand again, and shakily she steps out of the box, already feeling the power go back into her legs, she straightens up slightly in the large, seemingly endless corridor of boxes. They’re everywhere; clean white, set against the walls, across the floors, humming quietly together in perfect unison.
In hers, it had felt soothing, now it just makes her skin itch for freedom.
He releases her hand with a small smile. “You might feel a little dizzy or nauseous for a while; that’s perfectly normal. If you experience any pain in joints, or migraines, let one of the staff know.” He reels off the speech like he’s done it a hundred times and Mara nods politely. “It’s best if you go eat something, and don’t leave the spacecraft until given the go ahead. The mess hall is just down the corridor and to your left.” He points in the general direction and gives her a bright smile. She turns to leave, with a grin on her face. “Oh!” he says, and she turns slightly to look at him. “Welcome back.”
Her grin widens as she turns away and heads in the direction the man specified.
She’s halfway down the corridor, a spring in her step, beaming at everyone who’s slowly getting out, shaking their fuzzy brains back in consciousness when it happens.
All the while there had been nothing but the humming of the stasis units; the all encompassing hum that echoes though the chrome that her bare feet pad across slowly. Her legs still aching but she’s managing, and her excitement is over-powering everything else.
They made it. They really made it.
She stops in her tracks, and jumps, feeling like a five year old on Christmas day, but her happy shout is drowned out by the sound of beeping; loud and penetrating in her ears and someone shouting.
She twists around sharply, to see an open stasis unit, several members bio-techs crowded around it. People are looking in from the sidelines with open curiosity, even with their fuzzy consciousness. But the unit number sparks something in Mara’s brain, and suddenly there’s worry curling in the pit of her stomach along with a hard ball of anger that takes a minute to define.
She jumps forward, pushing through the bio-techs to be faced with the deathly pale face of Shannon Mole, her body rigid.
“Someone get her to the infirmary!” a bio-tech shouts, angry at his colleague’s incompetence and Mara stares in horror as the other woman is grabbed by several medicals and is hauled away. It all happens in a blink of an eye for Mara; her perception still clogged up by the remaining drugs, a moment feels like a lifetime and her body feels even stiffer than it did before, the anger and pain she remembers from before coil in her stomach as she watches them take her away.
One of the bio-techs looks at her, it’s the one that took her out of her unit. He looks at her in slight confusion. “Do you know her?” he asks, politely.
Mara pulls a hand through her hair and looks away, trying to force the anger away. “Yeah...” She pauses and, with a sigh, drops her hand back to her side again. “‘Least I thought I did.”
Next Chapter>>