ABANDON

Chapter 2 -- A New Life

    The process of travelling through space was broken down into two parts.  The second part of the process, the invisible part—the actual travelling through space—was done by a shipping company.  An old-fashioned word that used to apply to goods, now it applied to humans.  Shipping companies were removed from the public eye, like garbage management.  Their giant standardized ships were built at the Nyugen Jupiter.

    The face of space travel was the first part—the transport companies, and there were hundreds of them.  They got you from planet, through atmosphere, to space; Jane had seen the commercials. They showed a richly decorated room in burgundy and gold, more like a place of worship than a place to hibernate.  In the centre of the room, like an altar, was the pod.  The smiling faces of friends and family saying goodbye to their loved ones.  "A safe place to sleep," was what they said.  Transport companies made it look expensive, they made it look elite. 

    Michael joked that the commercials made the whole process look like a funeral.  He told her the way the military did it was very different.  They didn't need the transport companies, the military had their own way to get up into space.  It was different for Jane as well.  When the time finally came, there was no one to say goodbye to her.

    Once in space, the pods were not like altars anymore.  They were delivered to a ship, and now they sat in a cavernous room, inserted into a revolving rack that stacked them a hundred tall.  There were fifteen of these racks, hanging from the ceiling like gigantic metal spines.   

    The ship was run by computer, and the computer had to be checked everyday by a human.  The law required this, but the law also said that the longest time a human being could be awake and alone was for one year.  This law was interpreted differently from one shipping company to the next.  Some had a small crew be awake for the duration of the flight so they wouldn't be alone.  The company Jane worked for found that their crews lasted longer if they spent time in hibernation.  So a skeleton crew of ten was placed aboard each cruiser and each person served a one year term, alone.  Jane had slept for eight years before Scott woke her up.  It took him one hour to walk the Holiday and explain the current situation to Jane. Then Jane sent Scott back to sleep.

    The first few days Jane had been awake, she often mused on how wrong transport company commercials were.  The people in the pods had gone to sleep believing they were special, they had no idea that they were treated with as much attention as a crate full of rusting bolts.  But it was hard for Jane to ignore them, maybe it was because there were people in those pods, people like her: who lived, who loved, who moved. 

    She grew excited at the prospect of experimenting with them.  There was no one here to correct her, to keep her on track, to tell her what the end goal had to be.  She amassed program after program that she ran on the people in hibernation, testing them and the equipment that held them.  After the first month Jane had reduced the previous established torpor time by half, a time thought to be unchangeable, a time established by the other Jane.  And then she suddenly realized what she was doing—experimenting on people, real people, without their consent.  She was not the other Jane, why was she competing with her?  And then the guilt and shame set in.  Jane loaded the programs into a directory on her PD and promised herself she would never open them again. 

    One day painfully crawled into another and the only way Jane could cope with the stagnation was to move herself.  She exercised daily, pushing her muscles to the point they could support her no longer. Everyday she ran, ran through the cruiser from end to tip, everyday passing the sleeping people.  Everyday making her feel a little more jealous of them.  Knowing they had programs to keep their minds happy, machines to keep their bodies suspended, oblivious. There was one thing that kept her going.  Every time she ran past, her eyes lingered on the third spine—seventy eight pods up, was her brother.