The Red Button

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep…” The childish voice drifts towards me through the still air, sending a shiver down my spine. I spot the source a few rows over, a family knelt together in prayer next to a child-sized pod, their young daughter reciting the words from memory as she presumably would on any given night before climbing into bed. But this isn’t just any night, is it? And that’s certainly not her normal bed.

“If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” The pyjama-clad girl finishes her prayer, kisses her baby brother on the forehead, and allows her mother to lift her up and sit her on the edge of the pod behind her. I shudder. How can her parents stand hearing her speak those words at a time like this? Perhaps they are trying to make tonight as normal as possible, to offer her what little comfort they can in the form of familiar rituals, but to me, the words sound like an invitation. A tempting of fate. A challenge to God. 

I tear my eyes away from the little girl and focus instead on my own pod, a sleek cylindrical tube made of shiny metal and translucent glass. How sharply it contrasts with the wooden pew it rests on, its modern design so out of place in this holy structure built by hands that lived so long ago. But perhaps that’s the whole point of this unlikely choice of setting: the past and the future coming together. A union of what was and what will be.

My hands shake as I slowly hoist myself up and sit down on the edge of my pod, then swing my legs up and into the tube. I had imagined it would feel claustrophobic, but it doesn’t, at least not yet. It’s bigger than I thought it would be, nearly seven feet long and at least three feet wide. The inside is a deep navy in colour and I notice there are tiny stars painted on the walls around me, a child-like depiction of the Big Dipper jumping out at me on the left. I jolt at the realization that my pod must be one of the thousands repurposed from last year’s aborted Mars mission, the ones that children from all across the country submitted designs for, imagining their artwork soaring across the universe like a safety blanket wrapped around its precious human cargo. Back before the mission plans fell apart. Back before everything fell apart. Back before the government realized that the cryo-pods would be needed much closer to home. The mission was scrapped, but the children’s artwork was kept, I think. How beautiful. How beautiful and innocent and sad. 

For children were the crux of the problem, weren’t they? Well, the fact that people wouldn’t stop having them, technically. Eleven billion people and no peak in sight when the water had finally begun to run out, when major metropolitan cities had first ground to a halt without access to this most crucial of all crucial resources. It hadn’t taken long after that for the fighting to start, for powerful countries to overrun their neighbours and lay claim to what they needed. Entire nations were wiped off the map in a matter of weeks. But when the dust settled, too many people still remained, and if nothing else, the powers that be agreed on one thing at least: something needed to be done.

And just like that, without warning, Alex’s face slams into my mind like a freight train, knocking the air out of my lungs. No, I plead desperately. Not now. Not when I’ve done so well to avoid thinking of him today. But it’s too late. Now that the thought has crossed my mind there is no escaping it and I feel the hot tears begin to slide down my cheeks. I picture Alex on that last morning I ever saw him, kissing my cheek before boarding his train, promising me everything would be fine and he’d be back before I knew it. I can still feel the stubble of his chin brushing against my face, smell the deep earthy notes of his aftershave lingering on the breeze, see his green eyes flickering in the sunlight as he waved goodbye one final time.

I remember begging him not to go, pleading with him in the days leading up to his departure, telling him it was too dangerous, too unstable. But he had been a journalist for so long by then that he didn’t know how not to be one. Whispers of a major nation silently liquidating huge swaths of its own population in order to preserve dwindling resources was too major of a story for him to resist. Land borders were being closed everywhere by then, but he was confident he could find a way in. It would change his career, he had argued. Change his life. Which it had, only not in the way he’d expected.

Alex’s exposé had blown up around the world, spread like fire through a cinder block village. He hadn’t realized at the time, of course, but what he’d uncovered was just the tip of the iceberg, a tiny glimpse into a culling that was beginning to happen all around the world as nations realized they had far too many people to support and far too few resources to do so. It was like a house of cards, and Alex had unknowingly toppled a central support. It was a crime for which he could never be allowed to live. Alex’s story made its way back to me, but Alex never did.

“Welcome.” A deep baritone echoes from the front of the church and I snap out of my reverie, grateful for the distraction. Father Michael is behind the pulpit, a group of white-clad doctors behind him, somehow looking both somber and excited. How anyone could be excited for such a thing is beyond me, but then I haven’t spent the entire last year preparing for this. 

“Thank you for being here,” Father Michael says quietly, as if any of us actually have a choice about being here. As if the penalty for failing to show up at your allotted date and time is a mere slap on the wrist, not a bullet to the back of the head. “I want to assure you all that you are in the safest of hands.” The doctors begin to fan out and I wonder if he is referring to their hands or God’s. I hope it’s the former. Alex believed in God, and look at all the good it did him.

For a moment it looks as if Father Michael is going to say something more, but then thinks better of it. After all, what could he possibly say that would make this better? What hasn’t already been said? Instead, Father Michael bows his head and begins to pray.

As his smooth voice washes over me, I lay back and try to relax. I look at the tiny stars etched onto the side of my pod, my lone companions for this long sleep, and for the first time in a long time let myself think about the future. What will the world be like when I wake up, 10, 50, 100 years from now? They say it will be better- wide open spaces to run in, clear water to drink by the gallon, fresh produce to eat whenever we want. But what good is all of that, what good is any of it, if we don’t have loved ones there to share it with?

They’ve pledged to wake immediate families together, of course. Husbands and wives, parents and small children. But for someone like me, with a dead spouse and no children to speak of, such assurances mean nothing. What of my parents, my cousins, my friends? Will I ever walk the earth alongside them again? The persistent ache in my chest reminds me that no, I likely won’t. The lottery system isn’t designed that way. By that measure, my loved ones might as well be strangers.

And so, in this holiest of settings while I wait for the doctor to put me to sleep, I pray for tragedies. I pray for hurricanes and earthquakes that kill hundreds of people at once, increasing the odds that my name will be pulled in the same draw as a loved one’s, all the while cursing this system that requires someone to die in order for someone else to be awoken. One childless adult to replace another. One senior. One family. As if human lives can be reduced to numbers, as if a curved stroke of graphite is somehow equivalent to the curve of a hip, a breast, a jaw.

Of course, I should be thankful my country has chosen this method at all, that it’s putting millions of us into stasis rather than killing us outright, the way so many others have. Waking us up as population quotas permit. Taking turns with earth’s resources, as if we are children in a nursery figuring out how to share just a handful of toys. But no, I am not thankful, I acknowledge, reaching out a finger to trace a constellation near my hip. I am simply sad.

I hear a shuffle to my left and look up to see one of the white-coated doctors retrieving the paperwork affixed to the front of my pod. After a quick glance that surely can’t have told him much, he reaches for my arm and silently sets to work inserting an IV and attaching a tube to a bag of clear fluid. He doesn’t speak to me, doesn’t ask me any questions, and I wonder if that’s what he has been trained to do, a trick to help him see me as a number, not as a person. I’d almost believe he’d succeeded, if not for the tiny trickle of sweat running down his temple and the slight trembling of his fingers. He looks young. I wonder if this is his first shift.

The doctor finishes his task, reaffixes the paperwork to the front of my pod, and gestures to a large red button near my head. He doesn’t say it, but he doesn’t have to. I can read between the lines: either I can press it, or he will.

I take a deep breath, try to steady my breathing, and find myself thinking, of all things, of the prayer the little girl had been reciting moments ago. “Now I lay me down to sleep…”

Suddenly it doesn’t sound ominous to me at all, but hopeful.

“I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” How I wish I had someone to entrust my soul to, someone to watch over me as I sleep. Alex. 

Before I have a chance to lose my nerve, I reach up and press the red button. The doctor looks surprised, and I realize he hadn’t actually expected me to do it myself. Most people must not. Immediately the clear fluid begins to drain from the bag into my IV, and the pod’s open glass lid begins to lower. 

The prayer continues to run through my mind as the first trickle of fluid hits my vein and a wave of sleepiness washes over me. “If I should die before I wake…” Would that really be so bad? After all, what is really waiting for me when I awaken? Who is really waiting for me? 

“I pray the Lord my soul to take.” But here I beg to differ- my soul belongs to Alex, will always belong to Alex, and it’s him I pray to take it if I die.

The waves of drowsiness are coming faster now, and I am just lowering myself into them when I am startled by an enormous crash from the back of the church. Groggily, I try to open my eyes, which suddenly weigh a thousand pounds each, and through a sliver of vision I see a large figure racing up the aisle, struggling ferociously against someone who is attempting to block his way.

The figure draws nearer, and through my haze I sense that there is something familiar about the approaching silhouette. Something in the set of the shoulders, the purposeful gait. The sharp angle of the jawline. The lips.

I am suddenly alert, fighting the encroaching fatigue with every ounce of strength I have, fighting like I never have before. I imagine pinning my eyelids open, stabbing the thin skin into place, but gravity is winning and the light wanes, threatening blackness.

As my eyes fall shut against my will, I catch a whiff of an earthy aroma that I haven’t smelled in a year, an entire grief-ladden, hopeless, miserable year. No. It’s not possible. It can’t be him. But it is him. I know it like I have never known anything before. 

Behind my closed eyelids a memory reel is playing in full colour now, a knock on the door, officers leading me to the living room, falling to my knees as they tore my entire world apart with their words: Alex, abroad, captured, executed. Dead. Why had I believed them? Why had I trusted them, with no body to show, mere words for proof?

I cling to consciousness as the waves crash around me, threatening to pull me under at any moment. Alex. Alex Alex ALEX, I scream in my head, knowing not a sound has escaped my lips, knowing this long sleep cannot be prevented now that the red button has been pressed. What have I done? Why didn’t I hesitate?

He is close to me now, I can sense it, can feel his presence deep in my soul even as the glass lid snaps shut above my head and my senses wink out one by one. I pray he stops struggling with the guard, pray he lets himself be wrestled into a pod, injected with the same clear fluid that is now running through my veins, propelling us decades into the future to a time where the air is clean and the water is plentiful and husbands and wives are awoken together. I pray for tragedies. I pray for mercy. 

I can’t see Alex now, can’t hear him, can’t smell him. My time is up, sleep is at my door. One last thought flashes across my mind before I give in at last to the all-encompassing blackness: Something to wake up for. Someone to wake up for.

Then, darkness.