My eyes opened slowly. I should have been waking up in the cryopod, but instead I seemed to be lying next to it. Which could mean only one thing.

I looked over, and sure enough my friend was there, looking a little older than when I last saw him. He needed a haircut, so that might have been it. The year long shifts the crew took outside of cryosleep were kind of wearing on people though. It was often a lot of work. But it's not like we could all be awake on what would be a voyage of several hundred years in this colony ship. We took turns hibernating in our cryopods in rooms filled with hundreds of sleeping crewmen. Between waking up for our year long shifts but sleeping the rest, we’d only age maybe a decade over that entire trip. But they recruited the best and brightest to be crew, and recruited them young. I’d been training since I was a kid. That’s how a young lass like me was chief engineer on a ship like this. Between my current age and a little bit of regeneration during cryosleep, I wouldn’t be too old by the time we arrived at our new home.

I raised one arm up in front of eyes that were still adjusting themselves to my profile. The arm itself was reconfiguring as well, going from generic synthetic flesh to a reasonable approximation of my own arm, imperfections and all.

I looked back to my friend. “You know, when I told you that you should make more friends… this is not what I meant.”

He rolled his eyes and looked a little embarrassed. He did need to make new friends though, given I was really the only one he had on the entire spaceship. And I wasn’t even really me.

I looked over to my cryopod. Well, hers. She was a typical tomboy, fairly cute if I do say so myself. She was deep in suspended animation. I vaguely remembered dreaming of summer days as a kid climbing trees and running everywhere with the infinite energy of youth. She was probably still having that dream, even if her thought processes were slowed from cryosleep.

It was a big deal to wake someone from cryosleep. It took a long time to wake them properly. Once they were awake, they needed to stay out of the cryosleep for at least several weeks. So unless it was a shift-change or a huge emergency, they just hooked up a synthetic blank to the cryopod, downloaded their personality to it, and they could deal with whatever issue had popped up without disturbing someone’s beauty rest. If blanks weren’t so expensive and could only hold a personality for several days, tops, they’d just have them run the ship while the people they were copied from hibernated.

Full Script Over

I spent several hours today trying to come up with a title for this script. I'm still not entirely happy with this one, but it kind of works by having both literal and less literal interpretations. If anyone has an idea for a better one, I'm all ears. I always struggle with titles, except with I come up with a clever title first, and then come up with a script to match.

Please do not tag any content makers in the comments. If they are meant to record this, they will find it on their own and make their own call.

My policy on use of my scripts is here.