The door of my PP closed and I felt the gentle nudge of pressure confirming the tube was properly sealed. The lights were a gentle, forest green, a colour which had been selected after months of research. Those lights mean everything is good to go. Captain Aimes appeared. I hated having to force myself to call him that, to think it. The H-Type regulator was in place and my mouth curled at the synthetic taste. With the suspension fluid glooping in around me, even if I wanted to call him by his name, I could not.
Even if I wanted to scream, I could not.
He was drunk, holding a bottle of black rum, swigging aggressively. His other hand clutched a knife, his knuckles gripped and white. I shuddered, and raised my arms up and out of the fluid rushing and rising around me. I slapped my polypropylene tube (my PP) before being completely submerged, a strangely feeble attempt to rationalise what I saw. He looked at me with wild red eyes above the chug of his rum. He wiped his mouth, and his face was terrible.
I had been the last to “bed down” as we called it – the last but one. I looked at all the crew in their own PPs. I hadn’t noticed before, but they were all staring, their eyes were fixed on some distant point of fear. Their bodies gently bobbed in induced stasis, and not one of them had closed their eyes.
We were told it was like the most relaxing bath you ever had, and then gently falling into the arms of a loved one. But their eyes, dear God. I realised that all my crew were locked into a terrible truth – they were staring, not sleeping.
The Captain knelt before me and took another swig. He had a hideous grin on his face, and tears on his stubbled cheeks. He sat down in front of me as if a child, cross-legged, the look on his face like a court jester, playing to the gallery at court. One second a mask of joy, the next a mask of pain.
“I’m so sorry, Ellie. They lied to us all. There is no sleep for us.”
He drank some more, and looked round at his crew, captured, a floating audience, and each with a front row seat for his unsettling revelation.
“I didn’t know till this morning. Headquarters had to tell me just in case something went wrong. But now I have a choice. And I’ve taken it, Ellie. And … I’m so ashamed, Ellie, so very ashamed.”
I held my left hand up, trying to coax him, cajole him somehow, clacking my wedding ring against the PP. Hearing his voice through the transducer, which was attached to the base of my skull, was an odd experience, though we had trained for it over days and days in the simulators. We had been trained to expect verbal AI communications through the aquatic transducer as we neared Proxima Centauri, and were slowly awakened. But hearing his voice was like he was whispering in my ear, as he used to.
I also knew the same apparatus behind my head was dispensing the pharma which had been measured out for each crew member. I knew I had a minute at the most before the deep, protective sleep of a century of stasis took me.
“You won’t age in there. Your body won’t age. But your mind – Jesus. Ellie! Ellie – you’re going to be conscious the whole time. And I can’t bring myself to end it. Not for you, my love.”
And then he swiveled like a little boy, holding his rum as if a prize in pass-the-parcel, to look at the rest of the crew.
“All of them, Ellie. You, and all of them. Floating, awake. For the next century. I’m so sorry to leave you. I – I just can’t face it.”
He took the ring I had given him off his finger, splashing rum on his hand. He placed it gently on the ground before me, a final offering. And then, he took the knife to his throat, across his flesh in a gouging diagonal. He staggered to his feet and pressed himself against my PP. He was hugging it (hugging me?), and his crimson blood sprayed and spilled. I swam back, reeling against the gore, and as his lifeblood pumped from him, so the pharma pumped into me, to guide me into the deep sleep we had been promised.
A hundred years to the nearest star. That’s what the pulse propulsion technology could deliver for humanity, and we were to be the first. The vanguard, the brave explorers of the unknowable cosmos: a crew of Eves and Adams.
Captain Aimes (you coward, you bastard) slid down, the jagged wound in his neck gurgling like a shucked oyster. He collapsed, dropping the bottle of rum. It rolled away, emptying its contents, just as he was emptying his.
The pharma took me over the precipice then, where I was supposed to be led to a beautiful shore; my soundtrack the calming sounds of the sea. But my mind did not take to a gentle sleep. Awful realisation dawned upon me, and I understood the horror upon the faces of the crew; why they were all wide-eyed, and staring so. They were awake. Horribly, interminably awake, awake and imprisoned.
We were, all of us, condemned to a waking nightmare. A hundred years of living inside our own minds with no retreat, no sleep, no respite, and no mercy. And when we reached our destination, who would we be? Who would we have become?
As the true horror of my journey opened before me like the dark vastness of space, I realised the only companion beyond my own imaginings would be the slowly rotting corpse of the coward – the betrayer who had fled and abandoned me, with the rest of the condemned.
The green lights dimmed.
JS won the Ringwood Publishing short story prize 2024 for his debut fiction submission, “Immersion” and has since placed dozens of short stories in journals and magazines around the world, such as the Brussels Review, Creation, the Colored Lens, Fiction on the Web, Mobius BLVD, Necessary Fiction, Tales of the Unreal and others.
Published 5/10/26