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The President called it the __pitome of the American dream._ Daddy called it the __nholy alliance of business and government._ But all it really was, was America giving up. Bailing out in order to join the Financial Resource Exchange. A multinational alliance focused on one thing: profit. Fund global medical care to monopolize vaccines. Back unified currency to collect planet-wide interest. And provide the resources needed for a select group of scientists and military personnel to embark on the first trip across the universe in a quest to find more natural resources__ore profit. The answer to my parents_ dreams. And my worst nightmare. And I know something about nightmares, seeing as how I__e been sleeping longer than I__e been alive. I hope. What if this is just a part of a long dream dreamt in the short time between when Ed locked the cryo door and Hassan pushed the button to freeze me? What if? It__ a strange sort of sleep, this. Never really waking up, but becoming aware of consciousness inside a too-still body. The dreams weave in and out of memories. The only thing keeping the nightmares from engulfing me is the hope that there couldn__ possibly be a hundred more years before I wake up. Not a hundred years. Not three hundred. Not three hundred and one. Please, God, no. Sometimes it feels like a thousand years have passed; sometimes it feels as if I__e only been sleeping a few moments. I feel most like I__ in that weird state of half-asleep, half-awake I get when I__e tried to sleep past noon, when I know I should get up, but my mind starts wandering and I__ sure I can never get back to sleep. Even if I do slip back into a dream for a few moments, I__ mostly just awake with my eyes shut. Yeah. Cryo sleep is like that. Sometimes I think there__ something wrong. I shouldn__ be so aware. But then I realize I__ only aware for a moment, and then, as I__ realizing it, I slip into another dream. Mostly, I dream of Earth. I think that__ because I didn__ want to leave it. A field of flowers; smells of dirt and rain. A breeze ... But not really a breeze, a memory of a breeze, a memory made into a dream that tries to drown out my frozen mind. Earth. I hold on to my thoughts of Earth. I don__ like the dreamtime. The dreamtime is too much like dying. They are dreams, but I__ too out of control, I lose myself in them, and I__e already lost too much to let them take over. I push the dream-memory down. That happened centuries ago, and it__ too late for regrets now. Because all my parents ever wanted was to be a part of the first manned interstellar exploratory mission, and all I ever wanted was to be with them. And I guess it doesn__ matter that I had a life on Earth, and that I loved Earth, and that by now, my friends have all lived and gotten old and died, and I__e just been lying here in frozen sleep.