A Long, Long Sleep Page 2

  “So the tube opened, and you found Rosalinda?”

  Bren shrugged. He seemed a little uncomfortable. “Yeah.”

  I knew why he seemed uncomfortable. When he’d seen that I wasn’t waking up, he’d been afraid he’d botched the revive sequence, which was why he’d started rescue breaths, and I think he was a little embarrassed to discover they weren’t necessary.

  “When did you first realize who Rosalinda was?”

  “She told me,” Bren said. “My granddad had the hospital confirm it.”

  At this point, Guillory stepped forward and nudged Bren out of the way. “Bren contacted his grandfather, one of our top CEOs, and he brought the matter to my attention. Are there any more questions?”

  A reporter’s hand shot up. “I have a question for Rosalinda!”

  Guillory turned to me and gestured for me to stand up. I flung Bren a panicked look. His face softened sympathetically. “Go on,” he mouthed.

  I took a deep breath. I wasn’t one for cameras. Even the idea that they had been recording me sitting behind Guillory had frightened me. I didn’t want to go up there, but everyone expected it of me. . . . My mother’s voice echoed in my memory. It doesn’t always matter what you want, dear. What matters is how it looks to everyone else. I didn’t have to like it. I just had to do it. I made myself rise from my chair.

  More cameras flashed as I stood. I swallowed. One step. Two steps. Three. And then I was at the podium, and Guillory’s firm hand kept me from backing away.

  “Miss Fitzroy, how does it feel to wake up in a new century?”

  I swallowed again. I was in constant pain, weak as a kitten, and perpetually exhausted, but I didn’t think that was what she meant. In truth, I didn’t know how I felt. And I didn’t want to know. Between the shock and the pain and the stass chemicals, my emotions seemed distant, like they didn’t belong to me.

  “It’s good to be back,” I said, handing them their sound bite. Cameras flashed.

  It was a lie, but that didn’t matter. That was all they wanted to hear.

  ...

  He was covered in dust, but that didn’t affect him. He was past noticing such things. Then the name passed through the net and tickled his programming.

  “Rosalinda Fitzroy.”

  Electrodes fired that had long been dormant. Systems slipped into active mode.

  He accessed the file that had triggered the response program.

  This world was shocked last week at the discovery of the daughter of Mark and Jacqueline Fitzroy, the founders of the interplanetary corporation UniCorp.

  Apparently kept in stasis for more than sixty years, Rosalinda Fitzroy was found beneath Unicorn Estates. Today we see Rosalinda for the first time as UniCorp . . .

  His programming scanned the file. If it had only been the name, he would have let himself go dormant again. But then the voiceprint con firmed a match.

  “It’s good to be back.”

  TARGET IDENTIFIED: ROSALINDA SAMANTHA FITZROY.

  Once, his response would have been instant. Now his processors were wearing down. Slowly, after an eternity of seconds, his primary directive flickered into awareness.

  DIRECTIVE: RETURN TARGET TO PRINCIPAL.

  His directive active, he implemented a net search for the principal.

  SCANNING . . . SCANNING . . . SCANNING . . . SCANNING . . .

  It took a good twenty- four hours before his programming came up with the result.

  PRINCIPAL UNAVAILABLE.

  His programming wandered around for another eternity, and it was some minutes before it finally found its secondary directive.

  SECONDARY DIRECTIVE: TERMINATE TARGET.

  That was a dif ficult one. Pathways that had never before been implemented were suddenly called into action. The recovery pathways of his primary directive were always on the alert, but this secondary directive had never been necessary before. He put the secondary directive on standby, awaiting a second scan. The principal might become available by the time the target was acquired.

  Only then did his system begin the required status check.

  STATUS REPORT: .03 PERCENT EFFICIENCY, LOW POWER, STANDBY

  MODE.

  The report recommended a re fit, and after some painful moments of wandering, his central information processor agreed. The recharge cable was already connected to his heart, but it took him more than five hours to turn it on.

  RECHARGING. 100 PERCENT EFFICIENCY PREDICTED IN 687.4 HOURS.

  The fact that it would take him nearly a month to achieve a reliable ef ficiency rating did not bother him in the least. Time meant nothing to him.

  Systems whirred. Nanobots powered up one by one and scurried around his systems, cleaning his veins of detritus, lubricating his joints. His vision cleared as the nanos swarmed over his eyeballs, removing a heavy layer of dust.

  As he awaited the completion of his recharge, he performed another scan for the principal, a scan he would perform again and again before his directive was carried out. The secondary

  directive was not his main program. If he had had feelings, he would have said that termination made him uncomfortable. But he had no feelings. All he had were updates. STANDBY RECHARGE. STANDBY . . .

  STANDBY . . . STANDBY . . .

  – chapter 3—

  The next month was a bit of a blur. It was all too big, too dark, too terrible. I’d been ripped from my own time, and my world had died around me. Nothing belonged to me. Not the world, not my life, not even my own feelings.

  My new parents were not really mine. Barry and Patty Pipher, a pair of accountants from Uni Florida, had been called in by Guillory. Their work had been reassigned to ComUnity, and I was a replacement for their two children, who were, apparently, off at college now. Not that I ever met them. The Piphers didn’t even put up photos of them. For all that the Piphers were my new parents, children didn’t seem to be a top priority for them. Barry was friendly but distracted, seemingly unwilling to think about anything but work. He smiled easily, at everything, but it always seemed like habit more than actual pleasure. Patty was frighteningly prim, even more straitlaced than my mother had been, with skin that looked like it had been airbrushed and hair that seemed molded out of plastic.

  She made me feel about twelve.

  My home was not my home. Unicorn Estates hadn’t changed much, of course.

  Some things keep plodding along in their prescribed patterns for decades, and Unicorn Estates was like that. But Unicorn had never felt like it belonged to me. It wasn’t the kind of place that “belonged” to anyone.

  By de finition, Unicorn Estates was a condominium building, but such a one that would make regular condos weep. My parents had it built when I was seven, just after the UniCorp Building had been established and the town of ComUnity was beginning to spring up around it. In truth it was less of a condo complex than a vast mansion that housed many large and spacious apartments.

  The population boom in my childhood had made owning one’s own mansion prohibitive. Space was guarded zealously by the governments. But the wealthy still wanted their mansions, so while each apartment was self- contained, every amenity — fine chefs, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, hot tubs, saunas, billiards, ballrooms, stables and tennis courts, a gymnasium, private theaters, everything — could be had at Unicorn, without the bother of having to maintain it. Bren’s parents ran it now. Before I was stassed, my mother had managed it, while Daddy spent his time with UniCorp. It was all very familiar to me.

  Even though I was in my old apartment, it didn’t feel the same. Barry and Patty hadn’t seen any reason to redecorate, but the apartment had changed owners many times since my mother’s hand had arranged the furnishings. Mom had favored pastels and off- whites, leaving my home something of a blank canvas on which I could paint whatever I wanted to see. Now most of the apartment had been washed with earth tones, the formal crisp edges rounded into something quieter, homier. I did
like the previous occupants’ taste in artwork.

  Whoever they were, their taste favored large surrealistic Dalí- style landscapes and small striking portraits of historical figures, like Nehru and van Gogh. It reminded me of some of my own work. I liked it, but it didn’t feel like the same place I had lived with my mother and father.

  The first time I walked into my room, though, I nearly burst into tears. If my life was going to be different, if my world was going to be dead, I wanted everything to have changed. Maybe I could slough off whatever or whoever I had been before and become someone completely new. Or that’s what I’d been telling myself.

  But when Barry and Patty had opened the door to what had once been my room, I was shocked into a life I’d been carefully shutting out. Suddenly I was forced to remember who I was. And it hurt.

  My room was the same. Almost exactly. I wondered if they’d found a photo of it in some computer archive, because it was nearly identical to what it had been sixty years ago. There were subtle differences — the patterns on the rug had changed, the furniture was a slightly different shape —but the bed in the corner had a rosebud coverlet, just as mine had had. There was even a print from Monet’s water lilies sequence, though it was different from the one I’d had before.

  It actually hurt to see it, to stand on my rose- pink carpet-ing, looking up at Monet’s lilies, and know that when I turned around, it wouldn’t be Mom or Daddy or Xavier standing behind me, but Patty and Barry and Guillory, all watching me like I was some nature program. Then the sun slid through the clouds, and my eyes caught on one subtle but fabulous difference, something that had not been in my room before. In the window hung a tear- shaped prism. It caught the late- afternoon light and shattered it across the room into a thousand tiny rainbows. My tears died before they were born. I went to the prism and touched it, letting the rainbows dance around me.

  The pain faded a bit. Someone had hung this for me, only for me. I suspected Mrs. Sabah. It seemed as real as a kiss. This room wasn’t just some exhumed corpse of my old life. It was a gift. From Guillory or Mrs. Sabah or even the decorators, I didn’t care. It was kindly meant. Which meant . . . what? That I wasn’t alone?

  There was another gift across the hall, something I had never expected. A dream of another life come true in this one.

  It was a studio.

  Not just any studio. A full, complete artist’s studio, with an art sink and cups full of paintbrushes. A bookshelf stood at the ready, packed floor to ceiling with art books. Books on technique, on style, on history, from ancient Egyptian sculpture to Neo- Dadaism. A drying rack for paintings, followed by the strict geometric lines of a cutting shelf, for matting or collage, and tools for stretching my own canvases. The drawers beneath the windows held multicolored chalks, charcoal and blending tools, a vast array of untouched colored pencils, and ream upon ream of paper, from blacks for my chalks to rough watercolor blocks. An entire spectrum of tubes of watercolors. A smattering of little pots of acrylic. Best of all, a whole big drawer of oil paints, bright and new and untouched, just waiting for my hands. Another drawer held more brushes and paint knives and palates and everything I could possibly have desired.

  I could make masterpieces in this room. There were two easels and a drafting table, with a light fixture for night work. Behind them, against the wall, a vast tank of tropical fish brought the colors of the paints to vivid life. It was a dream. A vision. The heart of every secret wish, the one thing I’d known I could never have. Even looking at it, my whole dark, fathomless future seemed a little brighter.

  Things were hardest when I thought about my old life. How Mom used to take me to lunch, how Daddy would tousle my hair as he passed me on the way to his study —the same room that now held my studio. I missed Åsa, who would make me Earl Grey tea and drop terse one- word compliments in her smooth Swedish accent on my latest paintings or my most recent test scores.

  And I missed Xavier with a constant drone of pain, like the sound of the ocean, occasionally washing over me to leave me drowning. I didn’t know how I was supposed to get through without him. Deep down, I knew I could have endured losing Mom and Daddy and the world I was born into if I could just have Xavier back, the way he always had been.

  I’d tried typing his name into the net while I was still in the hospital, just to see if by some miracle he could still be alive. Not that I knew what I’d do if he was.

  But I wasn’t surprised when the name didn’t come back in the current population files. After all, if Xavier had still been alive, he’d have taken me out of stasis decades ago. I didn’t dig any further back; I didn’t want to know how he’d died. I didn’t want to know any more details about how Mom and Daddy died, either. They’d probably all died during those Dark Times that I still hadn’t caught up on. If I didn’t know how it happened, it was like they were still alive, if only in my head.

  Losing all of them hurt, but my love for Xavier was still as sharp and agonizing as a blade, and I was sliced on it. Of course, my friendship with Xavier had always been a problem sharp enough to wound. Even when he was a child, he could tear at my heart.

  There was one time back when he was five and I’d just come out of a stint of a few months. I couldn’t have been much more than ten. I came out to the gardens. Xavier and his mom were outside —his mother working on some project, him playing with a pile of sticks. It was awfully bright outside, and I’d only just gotten out of my stass tube. My eyes weren’t quite up to it. I was considering going back inside when I was bowled over by two- and- a- half feet of irrepressible energy.

  “Rose!”

  I blinked at the tornado of blond hair and freckles that had been the toddler I’d been playing with before I went into stasis. “Xavy?”

  “Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose!” Xavier began dancing around me, singing my name over and over. “Rose, Rose, Rose!”

  Mrs. Zellwegger looked up from the picnic table, where she was working on a portable screen. “Looks like you have a fan,” she said absently, before she turned back to her work.

  Xavier was so big I was surprised he even remembered me. “Look at you,” I said down to the little boy. “You’ve grown so tall.”

  “I’m five years old now,” he said proudly.

  “Really?” I had no idea how long I’d been in stasis this time, but I knew Xavier had been four the last time I played with him. He’d been only half- articulate before, his conversation difficult to understand and wandering off on tangents that I couldn’t follow. I’d played with him much the same way as I would have a dog, hiding behind trees and romping on the grass.

  “I had a birthday in June, and now I’m five years old, and I’m going to school in the September!”

  “Are you?” I asked.

  “Look what I got! Look what I got!” he demanded, pull-ing on my arm. I followed, amused, as Xavier led me across the lawn to a small pile of toys under a tree. “I got it for my birthday. It’s a treasure box.” Nestled in the grass was a toy pirate chest made of plastine infused wood, with a skull for a keyhole. He opened it up and started plying me with treasures.

  Xavier had put all his most precious items in this box, and now he set me on the ground and started piling them all in my lap, showing off his new alphabet computer game box and his monster doll with “Five sharp teeth! Five, like me.”

  And here was a box of crayons, and some kind of funny- shaped stick, and a feather, and his mother’s old cell, broken, but he could pretend, and a toy fish, and, “Rose? Why are you crying?”

  I blinked. “I’m not really crying,” I told him, wiping at my watering eyes. “The sun’s just really bright for me. My eyes hurt a little; it makes them watery.”

  Xavier stared at me for a long moment, his excited face turned serious. He frowned. “Here,” he said. He dug in the bottom of his treasure box and pulled out a pair of toy sunglasses. “Keep them.” They were made of plastic, and at least two sizes too small to fit on my face, but he h
anded them to me with such earnestness that I couldn’t refuse them. With dif ficulty, I pulled them over my eyes. They didn’t reach near my ears and hung wide on my temples, sticking to my head like mild vise, but it was a very sweet gesture. “Thank you, Xavy.”

  “Rose?” he asked, all earnestness. “Where were you?”

  I shook my head. “It’s hard to explain. I went to sleep for a little while, but I’m awake now.”

  “Can’t you come live with me?” he asked. “You can sleep in my room.”

  I smiled. “I have my own room.”

  “But then I could wake you up and you wouldn’t sleep so long and you wouldn’t miss my birthday.”

  “I’m sorry I missed your birthday,” I said. “I won’t be going to sleep like that for a while.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Xavier pulled the toys off my lap and then took their place. His little arm sneaked around my waist, and he buried his head in my shoulder. “Don’t ever go to sleep again, Rose,” he said. “Stay with me forever and ever and ever.”

  “Absolutely,” I told him, nuzzling his soft child’s face. “Forever and ever.”

  I’d been a child myself, and I didn’t understand how deeply I’d been lying to him. Now I’d been asleep for sixty- two years, and I’d missed every one of Xavier’s birthdays.

  Barry and Patty barely saw me those first few weeks. I wasn’t really there. My world dwindled to my bed and my studio. I sketched remembered faces —

  especially Xavier’s — and painted intricate landscapes. The stass fatigue made me slow, and I tired easily, but I realized quickly that my skills had actually improved as I’d slept. My artwork was the only thing I cared about. I showed up to meals when Barry and Patty asked me, and trotted off to buy underwear when Patty told me, and put away my laundry, because that was what was expected. And when Barry told me that I had an appointment with a psychologist, I dutifully climbed into the limo skiff and let him take me to a professional office in town.