Century

The fact of the matter is that I’m not a huge fan of personal fiction blogs. It’s not that the content is bad, it’s just that it seems like a very public forum for incomplete works. I’m an introvert every other day of the week, and my original writing is like my secret baby that I smother while I try to hide from the raiding trolls. But every now and again someone asks about it (usually well meaning family friends), and I’m caught flat-footed. I also realized that I’m being pretty stingy, since most of my original work is prose, not photography.

I’m not published outside any teeny tiny university publications, and my work is far from polished, but I decided to share this with you. It’s the first half of the introduction to “Century,” a short story I submitted this past quarter to the Writers of the Future competition. I’m a big fan of CONSTRUCTIVE criticism. If you see a place I could improve, do share. If you’re a troll, go hide under your bridge, ’cause I’m a goat and I’ll boot your butt off my blog.

I write for your enjoyment – so if you enjoy this, please let me know. If you don’t, I’ll probably shove my babies back under the pillow and leave them there.

So, with no further dragging of feet or twiddling of thumbs, here it is:

Century

Waking up was nearly as bad as falling asleep. Or maybe it was worse. Going under was like drowning, lungs thickened with stuff they were never meant to take in. Waking up was like realizing that you died; everything was cold, stiff, atrophied . Renewing the life in that cold dead flesh was the job of the Watch.

Weak heartbeats strengthened, thick blood heated and flowed again. The lid of the sleeping coffin rose with a relieved puff of hydraulics, and the fresh air rushed over tingling skin.

Samuel Sterling opened his eyes, pleased when none of his eye lashes broke off in the process. It must be a good crew. On his last trip, only the ‘important’ parts of his body had been thawed before he was woken, and his lashes had shattered. It had been a chilly greeting. The Watch crew took their duties seriously, but had clearly taken no pleasure from them. Sam didn’t understand how they could treat their life’s work so disdainfully. This was a matter far beyond the rigors of professionalism. The trip had covered over two hundred light years. Every member of the Watch aboard that ship had been born there, raised there. To not enjoy their profession was to not enjoy their lives.

It was a male Watcher who slowly swam into concrete dimensions above Samuel’s gummy eyes.

“Deep breaths,” the Watcher instructed. “If you would please give me your arm?”

Samuel obliged, giving his arm an enthusiastic twitch to demonstrate his compliance. For a few moments, he let himself relish the feel of warm human hands pressing against his skin. How long had this trip taken? One hundred years? No. One hundred and thirteen? He would check the date when he had recovered enough to join his fellow Dreamers in the ship’s common area.

The usual plethora of medical equipment was wheeled over, stabbed into veins, taped to temples. While the Watcher worked, Samuel’s eyes meandered over the other open sleeping coffins. Men and women emerged like baby birds fresh from the egg – wet, delicate, vulnerable. Gentle hands were needed to resurrect and care for such fragile things.

At least the frigid Watchers who had ruined his lashes had not taken the dark road to mutiny, like the Century Watchers, who decided it was most merciful to let the Dreamers in their care die in their frigid sleep. The vital life support systems had been disengaged, and the sleeping coffins were jettisoned. Sam shuddered, feeling the needles pull under his skin. Never before had the colloquial, overly psychoanalyzed name been more apt – sleeping coffins.

The Watchers aboard the Century waited until they docked at the station in orbit around Gliese 581 c, long enough to inform the station captain of their decision, before committing mass suicide. Even the children. All of them. They just snuffed themselves out, and no Dreamer could understand why. No Watcher would discuss it.

But that had been ages ago. Literally, ages. The Century had actually been one of the first ships to make a journey of five hundred light years or more. By the time the ship left, completed its exploratory mission and returned, it had been separated from the rest of humanity for over one thousand years. All the original data the crew acquired over the duration of the mission was still in the data banks, but the conclusions of the Watchers – usually taken, polished, and then presented by the Dreamer scientists at the end of the voyage – had been deleted. Only one cryptic sentence remained: The fathers of the gods wear chains.

It had been a sensational news story, and every member Dreamer society wanted to share his or her own opinion on at least one local news program, but the Watchers remained ominously silent on the incident. For a while there had been wild speculation that some bizarre rebellion was forming, that the Watchers would begin dumping the Dreamers they were couriering by the thousands. Despite these fears, there had been no reoccurrence of the Century tragedy. It took people a long time to risk such distant travel again, but eventually they did, and all went as planned.

It wasn’t as if fear of the Watchers was a new development. Since the first trip from Earth to its neighboring planetary systems, the regular roles of Watchers and Dreamers had caused some unease. Trusting strangers with one’s life formed strange relationships