beth-revis

I__e heard that when you__e in a life-or-death situation, like a car accident or a gunfight, all your senses shoot up to almost superhuman level, everything slows down, and you__e hyper-aware of what__ happening around you.As the shuttle careens toward the earth, the exact opposite is true for me.Everything silences, even the screams and shouts from the people on the other side of the metal door, the crashes that I pray aren__ bodies, the hissing of rockets, Elder__ cursing, my pounding heartbeat.I feel nothing__ot the seat belt biting into my flesh, not my clenching jaw, nothing. My whole body is numb.Scent and taste disappear.The only thing about my body that works is my eyes,and they are filled with the image before them. The ground seems to leap up at us as we hurtle toward it. Through the blurry image of the world below us, I see the outline of land__ continent. And at once, my heart lurches with the desire to know this world, to make it our home. My eyes drink up the image of the planet__nd my stomach sinks with the knowledge that this is a coastline I__e never seen before. I could spin a globe of Earth around and still be able to recognize the way Spain and Portugal reach into the Atlantic, the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, the pointy end of India. But this continent__t dips and curves in ways I don__ recognize, swirls into an unknown sea, creating peninsulas in shapes I do not know, scattering out islands in a pattern I cannot connect.And it__ not until I see this that I realize: this world may one day become our home,but it will never be the home I left behind.

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.

I feel alone.I don't mean i feel lonely; I mean i feel alone, the same way i feel the blanket resting on my body, or the feathers of my pillow under my head, or the tight string of my sleep pants twisted up around my waist. I feel alone as if it were an actual thing, seeping throughout this whole level like mist blanketing a field, reaching into all the hidden corners of my room and finding nothing living but me. It's a cold sort of feeling, this.

And I look at Harley, and the billions of stars are in his eyes, and he's drinking them up, pouring them into his soul.