Sweet Dreams

Why do we punish criminals? Does society lock them up to keep them out of trouble? Do they put guys away in hopes that being deprived of liberty will teach them a lesson? I guess we’re lucky that in this century, they just put us away. There used to be executions, things that’d make your skin crawl, like losing your head or stretching your neck, or frying you though with electricity. In the 21^st Century, they were still killing criminals, but considered it humane to do it with poison: you fell sweet and soft into death. But things change in 200 years. Now, the death sentence – delivered by any means – is taboo. It was on the way out for a while, but when the incumbent administration lost a global election to an opponent who dug up the General Secretary’s pro-capital punishment opinions, the big wigs knew: death was out, even for the worst ones. Even for guys like me.

I’ve been thinking about this whole criminal “justice” thing a lot.  It makes a guy reflective, knowing that he’s about to clock out for half a millennium, and come back online in a brave new world. Or a dead one. An alien one, either way. They may as well be preparing to send me to Proxima Centauri. Can you imagine that – a convict being the first manned mission to the next star system? Still, it’d be more “humane” than the death sentence, right? Well, that’s how politicians would spin it anyway, to get away with sending humans to an uncertain fate that may as well be death. Been thinking about death a lot too, in case you hadn’t noticed, even though it won’t happen to me. Not for hundreds of years, at least. 536 years, to be exact. That’s the length of my sentence. 

The sentence was pronounced at 16:37 yesterday. Less than a day has gone by since I got the news, but it feels like life since then has been longer than that. This might be more thinking than I’ve ever done all at once. I’ve had a lot of time to think; 24 hours is more time than before. There’s a paradox for you. I sound nuts. I don’t feel crazy, but maybe I’ve snapped, somewhere along the way. Maybe if I had convinced them of that, it’d be the asylum for life, and not a 536 year stint buried alive. It is being buried alive, you know. 

I don’t know what you’ve heard, what the Reformist Party has lauded as the new standards of humane, but the “stasis sentence” is a pretty way of saying buried alive. They put you in a squat, rectangular tank. Yeah, that’s right – I just described a coffin.  And then they put you deep underground. Except the occupants of these tombs are drugged up and tube-strung and soggy with preservation fluid, and they breathe through machine-monitored lungs.

But how does a guy know that the machines and medicines, and supervisors and attendant androids are taking care of him while he’s sleeping? Someone unplugs a support tube, trips over a wire and disconnect the life support, doesn’t replenish the chemicals properly...  Sleeping under that fear is supposed to be merciful? What makes this okay? Well, because no one’s dead, you see. The corpses will rise on the last day – of their sentence. But rise to what? You don’t ask the question until you’re the one who’s waiting for his turn to go down to the catacombs. I mean, imagine a guy from the 18^th century rising from his grave today. Like I said, he may as well be in another solar system. And if he showed up in the wrong place, he’d be eaten alive by mutants or the cannibal gangs, or torn apart by ‘bots, or just mugged, if he’s lucky enough to be near civilization. What mutants and cannibals and ‘bots will be waiting for me in 536 years?

Or what if I wake up, and there’s nothing? We’ve had annihilation scares before. Curing disease and colonizing the Moon, Mars, and Ganymede hasn’t really made us safer or stronger.  After all, the Green Death was from germs brought back from Mars, right? And a global government wasn’t able to stop the Missile Launch of 2198. Will we hang in there for another 536 years?

And what if it all goes off without a hitch, and I hang in there and the world hangs in there, and I step out of my sarcophagus in 2801? The longest stasis that someone has woken from was 80 years. That record is held by Victor North, a chronically ill mogul who went under until medicine could catch up to him. He woke, was cured, and lived another few decades. But the minimum for a stasis sentence is 250 years; the first man ever sentenced to stasis has another 100 years to go. Does a mind even hang on for all that time? Or do memories leak out the back somewhere, and the head is empty when 250 – or 500 years for that matter – is up?

“Mr. Waters.”

There is a black-uniformed guard and an attendant in a grey suit. My eternal day has come to an end. I suddenly feel I have not had nearly enough time.

“Approach the door please.”

I do, and my hands are crossed in front of me before he even issues the instruction to do so. As soon as the door slides open, the guard clamps cuffs on my wrists. The cuffs adjust automatically, latching in a grip that is just barely allows circulation. The attendant has a microneedle in his fingers, and gives me a shot.

“What was that?” Are they poisoning me after all?

“Nothing to worry about, Mr. Waters. This procedure requires several carefully-timed steps to prepare you for your nap--”

My nap. Drop dead.

“—this is just the first of those steps.”

We pass the Virtual Room where I had my hearings. We pass administrative offices, and the blinking screens flicker light out the oval windows. It reminds me of something… fire, that’s it. I saw fire, once. I was just a kid, on a school trip to a survival camp. The light it made, the way it was constant but wavered, was like the light of changing screens. That’s what it’s like as I pass the offices: the light of blue fires behind the doors. Will I still be able to remember fire when I wake up?

A supervisor in one of the rooms happens to look up. Our eyes meet. I hate him for the curiosity I see in his gaze. Do you want to know what it’s like? Do you want to be the guy who’s about to go out for 500 years?

We reach a sealed gate. The guard signals up to the black window far above us. Behind that dark glass, someone taps a control screen, and the doors grate open. We are in the heavy, ripe light of a low sun. I squint against the pain of brightness even as I try to open my eyes wide, see it all, remember it all. If there is nothing else left in me when I wake up, please at least let me remember this sun. And then my back is to the sun, and all I can see though bars of the transport is the cracked pavement. 

The straps they secure me with keep me from moving. The attendant in grey hovers near me with another microneedle. I try to see what he’s doing, but the securing brace they’ve lowered over my head keeps me from moving my neck, and my eyes cannot strain far enough. I can only face the transport’s wall now. It is white, and catches no sun at all. I don’t want to remember the nothingness of this white. I hope if something has to go, it’s that blank wall of the transport, and the security brace, set so tight that it’s just short of painful. 

My stomach lurches. We must have taken off. I wonder if I’ll dream. They say you don’t. They say it’s just like when you accidentally fall into a snooze – you blink and the time’s gone without you knowing. But what if they’re wrong? They were wrong about Mars, so what’s stopping them being wrong about what it’s like to go into stasis?  What if I am aware of time, even as I sleep? What if I count every day, every second of my 536 years in the ground?

I’m breathing faster, and that makes the brace worse. I don’t have enough room – I’m trying to breath, but I’m strapped so tightly, there’s no way for my lungs to expand. I’m suffocating! My throat is clogged, I can’t call for help. Will I die like this, here? My head is welling with sharp pain, and my vision is going dark. I wasn’t supposed to die today! This was supposed to be a merciful sentence! Humane, they promised! No more death sentences, no more killing, even for killers! The brace is lifted, and I breath. They help me out of the transport, and I’m having trouble finding my feet, but I can breathe, my lungs are free, my chest expands and contracts powerfully, beautifully. Is it going to be like that when I’m put under? 536 years of trapped lungs? Please, no, I would rather die. 

What a joke: It was never humane at all, was it? I can see it clearly now, the closer my time comes: I figured out why they punish us. First, they lock us away so they don’t have to deal with us. Administrations don’t have to address the morality of the death sentence, the implications of letting a murderer live, or the alternative of killing a killer. They give us sentences that allow them to live and die without having to worry about us or about their decisions. We’re the problem of whoever is on watch when we wake up. The justice system saves face, gets to laud its humaneness. The citizens feel the warm-fuzzies of living in such a civilized, reformed society. And then we, the buried living, suffer. That’s the second reason. What could be better for causing an agony beyond pain, a terror beyond death, than centuries of forced sleep? My victims were cremated and freed to the wind; I am the one to be buried with the ancient dead – but alive to know it! Punishment for my past crime and deterrence from the same act in the future – stasis is a sentence which provides both. If I had known, if I had known, I would have changed my ways, stopped myself.  Even in my most hotheaded moments, this would have stopped me, if I had just known what the steps toward a stasis lab does to a man.

I’m in a sterile room, and fluorescent lights show every edge of the stainless steel counters, every square of the tile floor, each loop in the mesh of the porthole in the door. Another microneedle. But this time it’s a different doctor. He’s older, and his face is grim. He leaves, and two guards stand at the door, silent and still as statues. Sentinels at the gates of the underworld. I’m sweating. 

The door opens. It’s another doctor, a young woman.  “Hello, Mr. Waters,” she says. 

“Hello.”

“I’m going to help you prepare for the procedure. It will be entirely painless, there’s nothing to worry about. The worst of it is the microneedles, and all those have already been administered.” 

She takes my temperature, checks my pulse, examines my eyes. I say nothing as she works. I hope I can remember her; she’s beautiful. 

“Thank you for your patience, Mr. Waters.” She is not looking at me, but tapping on the screen of her notepad. She takes a shrink-wrapped package from a cabinet. “We’ll have you put this gown on.” She turns to the guards. “Uncuff him, please.”

Their helmets reflect at each other, then back at her. “Sorry Doctor, we can’t. Not this one.”

“Really?” She sighs. Surgical scissors make quick work of my blaze-yellow jumpsuit. Its reflective strips waver at me from down by my feet and remind me of something else I’ve seen, though I can’t recall. What was it, the light dancing off the silver like that? Streetlights in the rain? LED reflecting off glass? Sun shining on chrome? No, no, no…

The gown is jerked around me, fitted roughly, and fastened at the back of my neck. It hangs around me like a poncho. I remember then. Sun on the water. I’d seen it once, when a job took me out by the shore. I’d seen the sea, and though it dazzled my eyes with the pain of brightness, I couldn’t look away from the way the light glittered on the bouncing water. I hadn’t thought about it in years. I want to remember that too.

The doctor finishes adjusting the gown. I look down at her, her face inches from mine. She really is beautiful. If we had met any day before this one, I would have had a chance. I would have turned my life around to please her. “I’m sorry.”

“No trouble at all, Mr. Waters.” Though she meets my eyes, there is a distance to the glance. Her icy smile is a disdainful mask, and I hate her for it.  “Follow me,” she says -- to the guards, not to me -- and they flank me as she leads us through a dark, narrow hall.  The next room is lit by a single light, but I can tell it’s a small room with a low ceiling. Beneath the light is an operating table, and the older doctor is waiting with two android assistants. 

“This will be quick, Mr. Waters, no worries.” He points to the slab. “Sit here, please.”

The androids help me up, since the cuffs keep me from shifting back up onto the table with my hands. An android puts a mask over my face and there’s a burst of air over my nose and mouth before the mask is pulled away. “What was that?”

“To help you relax. Lie down please.”

The table is relentlessly cold. An android lifts my head and unfastens the gown. I’m naked in the frigid, airless room. The androids and doctors are way up there, looking down on me. They’re just shadows against that glaring light. The rest of the room is darkness, close and smothering. I squint in the brightness, and tell myself to remember the sun. I feel a lightness in my arms. Can I fly? No, the cuffs, they’ve taken off the cuffs.

“Hey, Doc?” I need to ask if I’ll remember anything. And I need to know if I’ll feel all that time passing. But I can’t hear my own voice. “Doc?” I try again. 

One of them, I’m not sure who it is, leans closer. There’s the hum of conversation, and the figure is pulling away again.   No, come back! I have to know! Know what? Something they gave me, it’s making me forget! No, don’t forget, remember… remember…! Remember what? Where am I going? It has something to do with where I’m going. I’m going under the earth, that’s where. It’s dark now. Who knows how long I’ve been here, or how much longer I have.  This must be it, my sentence, the waking death. Maybe I can open the coffin! I can’t move… I can’t move at all!  It’s crushing me! The nothingness wells around me, and I see the blank wall of the transport again. I remember the tightness of the security brace, but now the suffocation is all the weight of the earth crushing down me! How long? 536. How long? Eternity. Please let me die, please let me die, please let me die….

*******

The doctor straightened up. “I’m not sure what he was saying. Well, let’s proceed.” They inserted life support tubes into the convict’s large arms and wrapped an oxygen mask around his limp head. The stasis tank was rolled in, and the androids guided the body seamlessly from the table into the fluid. The tubes were hooked in place, the tank was sealed, the readings checked, rechecked, and noted, and an android and the younger doctor rolled the tank away, to be taken to the depths of the facility.

“Spooky,” a guard muttered as they watched Mr. Waters go. “He looked dead.”

“Very much alive, officers,” the doctor assured them. “Very much alive, though out cold. I envy him, would you believe it? I envy all of them, the stasis sleepers. Who wouldn’t like to nap for a few centuries?”

The guards laughed, understanding the universal human truth of weariness. The android laughed, because it was programmed to follow social cues. 

“Mr. Water’s luck has granted him 536 years. I hope he has sweet dreams.”