When: 29 hours after waking
Where: The ship’s galley/mess hall
Four years, fourteen hundred days, and over thirty three thousand hours. Back on Earth to ensure her fitness for expedition she’d gone through small periods of time under cryosleep with her functions, especially her heart, closely monitored after stimulus. Those trial runs had done little to prepare her from the reality of this. The restive edge of her muscles coming out from hibernation, her nerves sparking at random intervals as they remembered their purpose. She’d felt sick for the first twelve hours, then ravenous, and finally seemed to settle down her digestive tract. She’d read up on all the proper journals about the side effects of prolonged cryosleep but there was nothing logical or scientific about getting reacquainted with your body.
She didn’t sleep the first night. She actually spent most of it in her laboratory checking in on the long term experiments that had been running while she was asleep. The ships telescopes had been scanning passing star systems throughout the journey checking for habitable planets and moons and collecting data that she could sort and relay back to the company. Her own speciality on nanorobotic technology had been left to gestate over these years. She’d been trying to create targeted drug systems that would recognize and attack cancer the moment it developed. There was also, of course, the backlog of data coming in for Gaia. Increasingly more intricate analysis of it’s atmosphere, density, and circumference. Her next two weeks would be anything but restful.
Eventually she’d found tired her body out but not her mind. She’d come to the galley, still unprepared to fall asleep and set on a pot of coffee. She was just taking her first sips when one of the other crew members stepped in. Apparently she wasn’t the only insomniac on board. “You know for all the billions of dollars this ship cost, you’d think they’d have thought to get us better coffee.”
Nil moseyed his way into the mess hall with a bowl of half-eaten something in his hand, and a book tucked below his other arm that he dropped onto one of the little tables situated about the room. It was still a bit of a surprise to see someone else on board when the whole situation had yet to feel like reality, but rather a strange dream that he couldn’t wake from. Nil gave her a smile anyways.
She was the doctor, right? Huxley, like Brave New World. How fitting.
“If you think that’s bad you should see what they’re calling orange juice,” he said as he dropped his bowl into the sink and began to rinse out whatever mixture of foods made up the slop that they called the vegan option.
“It’s no longer for taste, so much as it is for sustenance.” He sighed. “Something I hadn’t considered before signing my life over.”
