Gingers

Even before I opened my eyes, I knew something was wrong. I was warm, and there was a smell – a musty, old, organic smell – in a place of glass, tile, and metal. It was damp. Something had gone horribly, unthinkably wrong.

I tried to climb out of my berth, but only managed to slither through a crack at the side, and then toppled with a thud to the floor. For some reason my berth was ‘standing’ foot end down – it should have been prone, keeping me on my back, cushioned by support foam. I tried to move, but my muscles wouldn’t respond. I grew dizzy, and may have blacked out for a time. I became conscious of my breathing; it was shallow and rapid. I forced myself to take deep, slow breaths. Slowly, my heart stopped racing and my head cleared, and I became aware of my surroundings.

I was in the clean room – in the inner chamber. The floor was covered in mud – damp mud, showing thousands and thousands of strange footprints. Most of them looked human. Emergency lighting was in place and working, so I could see in the red glow of the exit track lights that the entire pod of berths had been smashed to pieces and piled into the corner; with skeletons stacked neatly beside them. All the berths, that is, save mine. Mine had been propped up to stand vertically, with the shield facing out, towards the room. Everything in the room was covered in mud except that clear shield – it was spotlessly clean, and as clear as the day it was made. The rest of the berth had been painted with letters – or characters – symbols of things I didn’t recognize. I also noticed that it had been roped off with some type of thick woven cord. I didn’t know why.

I sat up, slowly. My arms and legs were shaking, but seemed to be nominally under my control. I tried to stand, but my legs felt rubbery and odd, so I crawled on my hands and knees to the control panel – really just a keypad, covered with a gray metal door, halfway up the wall. Security, temperature, lighting, music, entertainment, food and drink, computer, comm. – all were controlled through a central unit. The keypad should allow access. I hoped it still worked, but in order to use it, I’d have to stand up. That’s when I looked down and saw my legs.

They were bent – curved. Both knees pointed out at roughly forty-five degree angles, and my lower legs – shins – were bowed outward. On the right side, this meant that the side of my foot was facing down, and the heel facing left; on the left, my foot seemed to line up more or less normally with the ground.

I managed to get my left leg under me, and inched up the wall until I was standing on my left foot. I used the right for balance, but didn’t trust it with any weight – I was afraid the ankle wouldn’t hold. I reached over to wrestle the control panel cover open, and it cracked, dissolving and falling to the floor in a pile of scale and rust. The keypad was still there. It was still lit – so I took a deep breath and punched the computer button and brought it up on the comm. The comm began to crackle with static.

“Computer … how… how long was I in stasis?”

743 Years, 3 months, 12 days.

“What happened to the others… the other berths?”

No data.

“Who did this? Who destroyed them?”

No data.

I took in a gasping breath.

“Is there food?”

Final nutrients pumped into unit 23 two point six hours ago. Nutrient vats empty.

Sleep cycle terminated.

Reality caught up with me, then. I slid down the wall and sat and wept. My head was spinning – probably from shock, and sleep sickness. I looked at my legs and understood – I’d been standing inside my berth, perhaps for hundreds of years. “On display,” I thought, as I looked over at the rope that surrounded my berth. I buried my face in my hands, and fought for calm. I needed a plan, but I couldn’t think. I was too tired.

Eventually, I slept.

I dreamed of the day we were scheduled for stasis. Each of us had been selected and screened for talent, ability, intelligence, stability – we represented mankind’s hope in the face of the worst-case scenario. If the pathogen – metavirus c-22 – managed to wipe out all mankind then we would be there, in our clean room, held in stasis – one hundred and sixty seven of us. It was estimated that decades – perhaps five would be needed before the virus ran out of victims; ten more years after that the environment might be safe again. Barring some mutation – some rare natural immunity already in the population, there would be no survivors. The weapon had been used so quickly that there had been no time for testing, no time to develop an antivirus. Sixty years. In sixty years we’d be ready, or whenever sensors determined that the virus was gone. Otherwise, we’d be held in stasis until the nutrients and water ran out. We knew we could do it. We didn’t doubt that we could save the species. We embraced before climbing into our berths. Some were still singing as their blood was removed, and the infusion was pumped in that would prevent ice from forming in their tissues. Then the berths were pressurized as gas was rapidly piped in – that was my last sight; the clear shield fogging, the room beyond growing insubstantial, ethereal, and the feeling of time slowing as each heart beat grew farther and farther apart.

I awoke with rough hands at my wrists, and caught a quick glimpse of a pallid, unhealthy face – a distinctly human face – before a rag was stuffed into my mouth, and a hood drawn over my head. Lifted and placed on some kind of stretcher, I was then quickly borne off – my captors’ feet making wet slapping and dragging sounds on the slick floor as they marched.

The shelter had been more than half a mile underground. And that was seven hundred and forty three years ago, I thought. It took a very long time to reach the surface. I think I slept again – perhaps more than once, because the next thing I remember is feeling warmth on my skin, and smelling fresh air. Even through the musty fabric of the hood it was sweet, beautiful to breathe. There was scent on the air – salt? I thought I must be near the ocean; because there was also low murmur echoing all around me that sounded something like the sea. I felt the hood being lifted from my head, and the murmuring sound became a huge sigh – like a great outpouring of grief, or love or, perhaps – both.

I squinted in the sunlight, blinking. My cheeks felt hot. A minute or so later, once my eyes had adapted to the brightness and I could focus, I looked around me. My captors were six large men – each with very pale skin and reddish hair, and they were rocking back and forth in some kind of shuffling stance, as if dancing. I looked at them each in turn, but not one would meet my eyes – they kept their gazes fixed forward, incurious and unseeing, but I saw that they were trembling and sweating freely, just the same.

I turned away from them and looked out at a flawlessly blue sky, and down, at a clearing surrounded by a dense, old forest. I seemed to be in the mouth of a cave, high on a sheer cliff’s face. Below, in the clearing that must have reached for a mile in each direction, I saw the sea I’d heard – a sea of people – tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them. The six men brought my stretcher forward, and I saw that sea move, as each face turned towards mine. Each face was pale – each head was covered in thick reddish hair, and every pair of legs was bent outward at the knees, with the left foot down, and the right foot facing in. I shaded my eyes with my palm, and looked more closely, scanning – there were young ones, children, with their legs bound in fabric, and slightly older ones -- toddlers, with their legs bound in splints. I felt a lump rise in my throat – of sickness, pity, or anger… I don’t know which.

I looked down at my own pale skin; saw the red hair that hung in limp strands before my own face. I looked at my own ruined legs, and understood. I thought of the thousands, millions of footprints – the flawless clear berth cover, the rope around it that held them back as they came year after year, decade after decade, century after century to look. To look at me. The one who slept, never changing. The one who was like them, yet not like them.

Something in the recessive genes for red hair – something must have conferred immunity. Perhaps they saw me as a protector, a guardian… and remade themselves. In my image.

I looked back out at them, smiling now -- and they gasped, tens or hundreds of thousands of them, in perfect unison.

As I raised my hands to them in greeting, and heard them begin to raise a cheer, at first soft, then growing in volume and intensity until the earth shook with the force of it, I wondered whether I’d be a benevolent goddess, or a vengeful one.

Perhaps, I thought, I might enjoy both.