She had never understood why so many people came out of cryosleep in need of counselling. Not if they’d been unconscious for only a few weeks or months, not long enough for temporal displacement to be its own understandable source of devastation.
She had watched them shudder and stare, blinking around the cryo chamber as if their eyes were having to add up every line and grey shadow separately, every flickering light an equation they couldn’t remember how to solve. She had watched some of them collapse in tears.
But she had never closed her eyes for the long sleep herself. Not until then.
She couldn’t open her eyes. She couldn’t remember why she had let them lay her down like that, but she knew, all at once, out of the dark, that it was the long sleep she was waking up from. Cryostasis, which meant she might still be much further from waking than she felt.
The machines would bring her back slowly. The long thaw. Hours to restore her vital functions to the point where they could actually sustain consciousness. Turning the lights back on in her brain, coaxing her heart to beat again, and she knew in a textbook way, in a watching-strangers-sob way, that it was normal to be at least somewhat aware of the process.
Like the ordinary seconds between sleeping and waking, unspooled. Stretched to a black limbo, and that hadn’t sounded so bad. A slow surfacing, time to understand what was happening to her, so the light and grey and chill space of the cryo chamber wouldn’t be jarring. She reached out for her hands, to flex and clench them, and couldn’t find them through the dark.
That was normal. It would take time for sluggish blood to start flowing again, for feeling to come back. She didn’t have to do anything at present except wait for it. She could try to think of it as a little more sleep, time to rest and muse while she waited for enough of her brain to light up that she could remember why, where she was.
She could wait. She had no choice but to wait. Her lungs were still a solid mass, the machines must not have started to drain them yet, and her heart…
Her heart hadn’t yet beat once. She knew the timetable as well as anyone who had ever watched long sleepers wake – the first distinct contraction of the heart came between sixty and sixty five seconds after the revival process had started.
She had watched lines on monitors start to spike, slow and shallow at first, quickening over the course of hours to the panic in which most sleepers woke. She had watched them sob, and heard them cry.
A man who had been in stasis for all of three weeks, for medical reasons, demanding to know why they’d abandoned him for so long. A woman waking from four months of travel, wailing into her hands that it’s been years, it’s been years.
No amount of pointing at calendars or describing the timetable to them had ever dissuaded them. It felt as if she’d been waiting at least fifteen minutes already, at least, and perhaps-
Perhaps it was just the start of her first heartbeat she felt, a contraction so slow it seemed to start miles away in the dark and crawl towards her heart. How long would it take, from her unspooled, stretched perspective, to arrive? How long before she would feel the second one?
How long before the waking hours passed and she would finally wake, and sit up, and what would she have left to say through sobs by then?
