Longshot
cryogenics
You woke up screaming, but no sound came out.
Your lungs were empty. Not empty the way they feel after a hard exhale, but truly, completely empty, as if they had forgotten what air was for. Something mechanical hissed near your face and cold oxygen flooded your mouth, your throat, your chest, filling spaces that burned at the intrusion. Your eyes opened to a ceiling of seamless white light, so bright and so close that for a terrible moment you believed you were still inside the chamber.
Then the nausea hit. You turned your head to the side, neck muscles screaming at the effort, and retched into a basin that materialized beneath your chin, guided by something you couldn’t see. Nothing came up. Your stomach was as empty as your lungs had been.
“Vital signs are stabilizing,” a voice said. It was calm, genderless, and emanated from everywhere at once. “You are experiencing standard post-preservation disorientation. This is expected and temporary. Please try to focus on my voice.”
You tried. The room spun, white walls and white floor smearing together whenever you moved your eyes too quickly. You gripped the edges of the padded platform beneath you and held on.
“I’m going to administer an injection now,” the voice said. “You will feel a brief sting in your left arm, followed by warmth. This is a restorative treatment. It will help.”
The sting came and went. Five or six seconds of nothing passed, and then warmth arrived all at once: a rush of heat that started at the injection site and radiated through your chest, your gut, your legs, your skull. Something was moving through you, billions of somethings, tiny and purposeful, swarming through tissue and blood with an intelligence you could feel.
“The nanomedical suite is now active,” the voice said. “It is addressing systemic damage from the preservation process as well as pre-existing pathology. This includes the stage four adenocarcinoma in your left lung. Estimated time to full cellular remediation is eleven minutes.”
You tried to speak. Your voice came out as a croak, barely a whisper. “How long.”
“How long until remediation? Eleven min—”
“How long was I under.”
A pause. Brief, calculated. “Two hundred and forty-one years, eight months, and fourteen days.”
The number didn’t mean anything. It sat in your mind like a stone dropped into still water, sinking without ripples. You stared at the white ceiling and waited for something, grief, terror, wonder, but nothing came. You were too hollowed out to feel any of it yet.
“I’d like to conduct a brief cognitive assessment,” the voice said. “Can you tell me your name?”
You opened your mouth. Closed it. “I don’t know.”
“That’s perfectly normal. Where were you born?”
Silence.
“What year was it when you entered preservation?”
Something flickered. “Twenty... twenty-something.”
“Very good. That’s consistent with your records. Memory loss following long-duration cryopreservation is well-documented and, in the majority of cases, reversible. Neural pathways tend to reestablish over days to weeks, sometimes months. Memories often return unprompted, triggered by sensory experience.”
The nausea was fading. You sat up, and the movement was easier than you expected, your muscles responding with a fluency that surprised you. The nanomachines were already rebuilding you from the inside out.
A panel in the wall slid open, and an articulated arm extended holding folded clothing. You dressed. The fabric adjusted to your body the moment you pulled it on, tightening and loosening until it fit perfectly. An implant went into the soft tissue behind your left ear with a sensation like a single tap of a fingertip. The voice explained it would serve as communications, identification, financial access, navigation.
You stood in the middle of the sterile room on legs that felt new and tried to remember something about the person you had been before. A face. A name. A place. It was all static, a signal just out of reach.
A door opened in the far wall. Beyond it, a short corridor led to natural light, and through a glass partition you could see the outside: a deep blue sky, a flat silent vehicle hovering above a roadway that shimmered like liquid metal.
A car waited just outside, resting inches above the ground, its door already open.
“Please,” the voice said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
You walked. Each step felt more certain than the last. The air outside was warm and smelled of something floral you couldn’t identify. You climbed in, the door closed with a whisper, and the car lifted and began to move.
“Where are we going?” you asked. Your voice was clearer now. Stronger.
“That depends entirely on you,” the voice said. “There is no scheduled itinerary. You are free to go wherever you wish. However, if you’re open to a suggestion, and if you feel up to it, there are a number of people who have been waiting quite a long time to meet you.”
“People?”
“Your descendants. Four living generations, traced directly from your genetic line. They’ve been notified of your successful resuscitation.” A pause. “They would very much like to meet their great-great-great-great-grandfather.”
The car hummed beneath you. The city stretched ahead, vast and strange and alive. Somewhere out there, people who carried your blood in their veins were waiting for a man who couldn’t remember his own name.
You leaned back in the seat.
“Okay,” you said. “Take me to them.”