The Future We Wish We Had

Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t this. Not cheerful pink walls, decorated with the sort of inspirational posters that turn most office buildings into veritable madhouses of positive thinking.

There were children flying kites and women running atop gently sloped hills against improbably sunny skies. Sitting on the sofa upholstered in a white fabric, I read all the posters. Sleep away your cares. Gone today; back tomorrow. The future is better.

“Mr. Smith?” a pale blond woman with sweet features called. I got up.

She shook my hand. “I’m Elizabeth Ryes, your counselor,” she said, and in the adjoining office-painted in pale blue and furnished with two chairs upholstered in robin’s-egg blue-she proceeded to question me. “You will pardon me,” she said. “But you seem too young and healthy to be doing this.”

“I thought it was volitional,” I said. “Provided one had the money to pay for the sleep-and I do-and wanted to sleep, one was allowed to.”

She smiled, the smile of an angel faced with a mad-man. “It is that,” she said. “But the sanctuary doesn’t wish to be exposed to lawsuits. So I verify that you’re not doing this on the spur of the moment and for no good cause.”

“Lawsuits?”

“Your mom, your dad, your girlfriend, any of them could sue us.”

It hit too close to home. I sucked in breath like a man drowning and then I said, “They’re all dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Accident? Recently?”

“My parents died in the Tycho accident in sixty-eight,” I said.

“And your girlfriend?” She had the blank look of someone too young for the Tycho accident to mean anything. The hundreds of people dead when the dome cracked, the public mourning, all of it would have happened when she was still in diapers. More than twenty-five years ago. Ancient history.

Which is what I was counting on.

And in the next second, she looked up, looked at my face as though seeing it for the first time, and her hand went up to cover her mouth. “Juliette Jones,” she said. “You’re her fiance. That’s why you looked familiar.”

I nodded. It was then very easy to explain why I couldn’t stay in this time. How the emotional wound was a half of it; the other half the fact that it would blight my whole life.

She signed all the papers and accompanied me to the first step of the procedure-to the room where they anesthetized me, preparing my body to sleep for fifty years-to be on the safe side.

I was holding her hand as the IV started dripping soporific into my veins, and my eyes weighed down. I took the image of her blonde loveliness with me into sleep. When I woke up, that little oval face, looking down at me with sympathetic anguish, would be lined and sagging. She would be a grandmother.

The first question I asked when they woke me-after the long period in which I couldn’t talk at all-was, “Do you remember Juliette Jones?”

The slim, dark-haired young woman who had been massaging my shoulders-while I lay on my stomach on the heated bed, enduring one of the many days of conditioning that would be needed before I was restored to normal life-wrinkled her pretty forehead and said, “Who?” Then, after about thirty seconds, “Isn’t she that new sensie star? Didn’t she play Margaret in Vina Does Venus?”

And I knew I was safe. I endured the next two weeks in quiet calm. Oh, sleeping away fifty years didn’t make the memory of Juliette more distant, or make me miss her less. Only now, no one around me knew who she was.

I mean, she was in the history books as first female to walk on Mars. I checked. But she was not the first human-that distinction belonged to Joseph McDonald-and if she came up at all it was as the bonus credit question on a test, or a bit of interesting trivia.

I would be able to heal here. I would be able to survive. I received subconscious updating for society manners and morals, read the medical journals voraciously, and prepared to return to college to learn the other stuff they’d discovered while I slept.

There were colonies on Mars now. And not one but two artificial cities in space, one orbiting the Earth and one orbiting the moon. You could call the moon using some technology I didn’t understand, and you wouldn’t know you weren’t talking to your aunt upstate.

It was a brave new world, and I was dying to discover it.

The day I was discharged, they handed me my personal effects-my suit, now fifty years out of date but, if I was lucky at all, perhaps retro chic, and my ATM card, which gave me access to an account that had grown wildly as I slept. And a letter. Sealed.

My heart flopped in my chest at the handwriting. My name on the front. Hers on the back. Juliette Jones.

It was a mistake. It had to be a mistake. Perhaps a letter she’d written me before leaving for Mars? Or a letter she’d left with her mother, in case something happened.

But the first line of the letter disabused me. Dear Romeo, it said. The sanctuary won’t tell me how long you signed up to sleep. I only managed to trace the sanctuary and that you signed up for sleep with the help of a detective. They wouldn’t even admit to that. They cite privacy rules. You’re probably very surprised to read this. I know we were declared dead and were publicly mourned for two weeks before it was found out the sensors were wrong. We came down blind and without instruments, it’s true, but we didn’t sink. And we managed to get out and swim to a nearby island. Which only made it harder to find us.

I wish I could be mad at you, but I heard what it was like-with the entire country wallowing in a grief fest. I understand what that must have been like after all the public mourning for your parents.

And yet, the fact remains that I can’t marry you while you’re in cold sleep. And I really don’t want to marry anyone else. So, when I finish writing this, I’m going to go in and sign up for cold sleep for a hundred years. I figure you won’t have chosen to sleep that long, but when you wake they’ll give you this letter. And then you can go in for however long your need to wake up at the same time I do. And then we can get married.

She’d signed with a little heart. But my own heart sank. Another fifty years before I could see her.

And yet, if I went back in, I could sleep those years away as though they were nothing.

Without bothering to put my suit back on, still in the hospital gown-and how come fifty years later the hospital gowns still left your behind uncovered?-I trudged out one door and around the building to the front again.

The diner across the street was still going, I saw. I wondered if the clientele was still of the same type, but I had no wish to check it out.

Inside the sanctuary the decor had changed. The front room now had been painted in bright yellow and was upholstered in something dun that looked like beanbag chairs but which-from what I’d seen in the sensies from my recovery bed-was actually a biological chair of some sort. It was supposed to warm you and accommodate you.

I wasn’t prepared to sit on living things, so I stood, moving from foot to foot.

Some things don’t change, not in fifty years. Possibly never. Another blond counselor-who could be the other woman’s granddaughter-came out to meet me, led me gently inside and demanded to know why I’d sign up to sleep again, right after being awakened.

I showed her Juliette’s letter. “She was presumed dead when I went to sleep,” I said. “That’s why I went to sleep. Till people stopped talking about it.”

She tilted her head sideways. “I see. And you’re sure you want to cold sleep again till she wakes?”

“Of course,” I said. “Of course.” The idea of Juliette being awakened and my being an old, wrinkled man was unbearable. Even worse, the idea of my trying to live a normal life, trying to marry and raise a family while I knew that Juliette was asleep and waiting for me was ridiculous.

“I want to be awakened when she is,” I said.

“Well, that is a problem,” the counselor answered. She’d been fidgeting with a computer while she spoke and now frowned at the screen. “You see, she didn’t leave us permission to tell anyone when she’d wake. It’s possible she didn’t know, or considering that there seems to have been a media furor around her at that time, she might have thought someone would be here the day she woke up. So we don’t know when exactly she’ll wake.”

It didn’t matter. Two or three days either way didn’t make a difference. Or two or three months. That much we could afford to lose. I thought I’d sleep another fifty years, but add another six months, as she had. On the principle that she would get a note from me when she woke, and then know when to wait for me.

I calculated the date painstakingly and wrote a note, which I sealed and handed to the counselor. Juliette would get my note when she woke up. And she would know exactly the date when I’d wake.

She could be there waiting for me.

I fell asleep feeling much better than I had last time.

And woke up alone.

Through the almost twenty-four hours when I couldn’t talk, I chomped at the bit, wondering where Juliette was. Had I miscalculated? Or had she changed her mind?

In a fever of expectation I waited, till I could ask, “Isn’t there a lady waiting for me? A Juliette Jones?”

The nurse who’d been adjusting my IV shook her head. Then she gasped, and her hand went to her mouth. “Juliette?” she asked. “Jones?”

She touched something on the side of my bed, and images-3D images-formed at the foot, floating in midair.

It was like a TV screen without the TV or the screen. And it was showing a blue vehicle erupting into flames.

“It was the first extrasolar expedition,” the nurse said. “They think the quantum engine malfunctioned on return to the solar system. It… exploded.”

I felt as if I were living a nightmare. They said you didn’t dream in cold sleep, but I wondered if it was true. This could not be happening again. Juliette could not be dead-again.

“Everyone died?” I asked, with a sinking feeling.

“Oh, no,” the nurse said. “Oh, no. They saved them all. But the injuries… You know, we don’t think they’ll be able to live till the regeneration of tissues is more advanced. It’s still in its infancy, just now.”

“So they’ll die.”

She looked at me as if I were insane. She had eyes the same molten-chocolate color as Juliette’s. “Of course not. They’ve been put into cold sleep till the technology can be developed.”

Ah. Cold sleep. “And how long do you think that will be?” I asked.