Recidivision

The frosty clink of chains echoed through the freezer storage.

CJ rattled along between two guards, his hands cuffed in plastic against his waist, his feet shackled in metal a six-inch shuffle apart, so he had to step double time just to keep up, like a toddler hustling after his impatient parent.

His last hustle. CJ enjoyed a silent chuckle with himself, letting out a puff of breath that crystallized ahead of him. One of the guards glanced aside at him, probably wondering what could be so funny, then shook her head. Probably cracking already. CJ could imagine her thoughts. Another prisoner about to break down before the freezer.

And CJ would admit she might be partly right. Excitement and nervousness jittered through his chest in equal parts, despite the long planning he’d done to make this work.

This would be CJ’s boldest heist.

Incidentally, also his coldest heist. And maybe his most risky. But if a lifetime of conning Martian elitists and wannabe lunar influencers had taught CJ anything, it took risk to gain. 

The guards prodded CJ around a corner into a wide aisle, the third in the room. The walls stretched an impressive two hundred feet tall, but aside from the clanking of CJ’s chains and the steps rebounding off the back wall, only the hum of refrigerant storage kept it from complete quiet. 

“This one,” said the female guard, to the male guard. CJ hadn’t bothered to learn their names. They’d both be dead when he woke up. 

A chill of anticipation ran through his fingers, the same feeling he used to get when he saw something he knew he was going to steal. The guards had stopped at the bottom unit in a column of towering lockers, one of perhaps two hundred in this aisle. 

“Bottom row,” said one of them. “Fitting.”

CJ smiled at him, which seemed to unnerve the guard. He faced the locker and input a code onto the front, not bothering to conceal the numbers. CJ watched with interest. Not that he had any plans to break out. Getting frozen was the whole point.

The great part was he didn’t actually have to do anything. In fact, he didn’t know why he hadn’t hatched this scheme years ago. He could have shaken his head at his younger self. All those years of hustling fake Martian designer clothes and sneaking past security drones to ride free on the Intersolar Express Line. Small time stuff.

The locker opened, a heavy steel door with a network of cables on the flip side. Inside the box, a layer of frost coated a deflated lining that resembled a PVC shower curtain. 

The second guard divested CJ of the chains on his feet. 

“Get in,” said the first guard. Her breath made an even bigger cloud here than it had by the door. 

CJ reached out a finger and swiped at the edge of the PVC that tucked into the top edge of the box, leaving a clear trail in the frost. Ice crystals briefly piled and then melted under his nail.

“Come on,” said the guard, reaching for the taser on her belt.

“That won’t be necessary,” said CJ, stepping into the locker and settling comfortably against the back wall. “I’m quite ready.”

The guard’s face twisted in some kind of disgust meeting confusion, but she quickly got over it, snapping two connectors to the plastic cuffs from either side of the box. “Prisoner secured,” she said. “Initiate injection sequence.”

A sharp prick touched CJ’s inner wrist, somewhere inside the cuff, and something icy cold trickled into his veins. It sort of itched and stung a little, and he pulled a face, but the sting quickly faded. He relaxed. The guards watched him.

“Is it working?” said the male guard. 

The woman was watching some display on the door that CJ couldn’t see. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s on.”

“They usually go down faster.”

“It’s been thirty seconds. He’s got plenty of time.” She held the door, watching CJ for a moment. “One hundred and sixty-two years,” she said. “I hope it was worth it.”

“It will be,” said CJ pleasantly.

“Geez.” The male guard shook his head. “Sick bastard.”

The door shut, and the lining began to fill, inflating with coolant liquid to cushion securely around him.

CJ drew in a breath that suddenly took twice as long as it should have to get half as much air, the drug in his body already working to reduce his metabolic process to a negligible function. Although his lungs grew tight and reluctant to move, he sensed no increased urgency for oxygen. Already his limbs were going numb, even as the lining expanded to encompass his face and cut off his vision in a cool soft darkness. 

He’d expected the claustrophobia, but years of sleeping honeycombed in tiny pod hostels with a hundred other travelers had trained him to tolerate the panic that came with tiny enclosed spaces. The modern brain hadn’t evolved past fear, but it had adapted, by necessity of a galaxy that seemed to be filling up as fast as it was expanding. 

That population boom, of course, had birthed CJ’s plan, a plan he felt was as naturally incubated as a new life in its mother’s womb. Urban overcrowding, poverty, and human nature being what they were, crime had become rampant in certain parts of the galaxy, especially given that the Solar Union slapped down new laws at a rate even faster than fresh territories were settled. Prison, however, was expensive, and so was allocating scant extra-terrestrial resources to inmates. Cryo-internment, once physically feasible, quickly became a legal, if not socially approved, way to cut costs. 

The downside of simply freezing inmates, aside from the pesky tendency of them to lose a few digits or occasionally die due to poor environmental regulation, was that they emerged in essentially the same state they went under. Biologically (except for those who died) they were the same age, regardless of their sentence. And mentally (except for those who inexplicably lost their minds) they were the same. But the high recidivism rates weren’t as much of an issue when the solution was so cheap. Just rinse, freeze, and repeat. And statistically speaking, more inmates died in traditional, “live” prisons due to abuse and violence, so it was okay. The technology improved, and consciences were appeased, or at least, newer stories claimed public attention and only the most dogged showed up to the anti-cryo campaigns. 

And even those had mostly given up. Orbiting cryo-prisons where nothing ever happened wasn’t exactly sexy. Also, argued the proponents, when the worst offenders finished their sentences many years in the future, there would be new solutions to old problems. There would be futuristic programs to help people start new lives. They were probably doing criminals a favor.

CJ agreed. He’d never lacked the nerve to go after everything life had to offer, and even now at fifty-five, he had plenty of tricks left. But in this time, he felt like he’d exhausted his options. He’d done his share of bootlegging, scamming, and schmoozing his way across the universe, and he’d gotten a decent return, but it had never put him ahead. So he hatched a plan, so simple and elegant and insane that it might work. He divided up his resources, put in some reliable investments, and prepared to go legitimate. 

That was it. He’d reap the returns of the upper echelon. He, ever the taker, would become an investor. 

He would emerge eminently wealthy, reborn into an even more comfortable and exploitable world, and none the worse for the wear. 

All he needed was time. 

But not a couple years’ checkout time. A long time. Hard time.

As hard as ice.

So what he had done—well, getting a hundred and sixty-two year sentence wasn’t pretty. Even CJ still felt a twinge of disturbia in his quickly numbing stomach when he recalled it. But cryo-interment didn’t come cheap, and he had been willing to pay dearly for the return. Anyway, it was past now, and he had only the future to consider. Call it a midlife crisis.

Well, maybe a quarter life crisis, now. 

CJ settled back for a comfortable hundred years’ slumber. In a moment the cold would succumb to the sweet sleep of future affluence.

He waited. 

He waited. 

He waited.

A sharp pain crooked through his right index finger like a cramp. CJ frowned. He definitely didn’t remember this. You weren’t supposed to feel the cold for this long.

How long had it been?

Another shooting pain, this time in his left toes, all of his toes. CJ imagined it was the icy spike of crystals forming in his veins. Panic pushed at his brainstem, but it couldn’t travel through blood made sluggish by the cold, couldn't compel movement.

The next pain hit in his eye. CJ might have screamed. If he could scream. He didn’t lose consciousness. Something had gone terribly wrong. He wasn’t freezing properly. He writhed in his mind, flailing a motionless signal. Which of course did nothing. He’d been wrong. He was dying. Pain suffused everything, icicles impaling every part of him from the inside out.

And then, the pain stopped. Numb relief seeped from his bleeding fingertips all the way up to his stinging nostrils, and he felt nothing. The panic faded. He’d been right after all, of course. Nobody talked about the freezing process because probably, after months or years of incarceration, nobody remembered it. And everybody probably experienced cryostasis differently. How silly of him to think he was dying.

Come to think of it, he shouldn’t be able to think for this long. 

How long had it been?

Divided from sensation, he suddenly—or slowly—had no perception of time. The realization might have taken a moment or ten years. But it was definitely conscious. Disembodied, but fully present. 

Suspended. Trapped.

For a hundred and sixty-two years.