A Fiction, Continued (Part B)

Part 1

It was hunger pains that awoke Louie the following day. Waiting for the cryotechs, he remained motionless, expecting them to arrive when ready.

A sense of Deja Vu overwhelmed him as the question "Do you dream in Cryo?" ran thought his mind and he recalled pondering that same question.

How long has it been since I last thought that? Do I wonder that every trip? Perhaps I've always dreamed in cryo, only to forget as I'm resuscitated.

The irony of a well performed cryogenic entombment and a thorough cryorecovery training program was that while it virtually eliminated frost ruptures, cellular ice crystal damage, and brittle fracture/shattering damage, it could easily lead to death from Ondine's Curse if medical assistance was not present to literally wake the frozen up.

WHUMP.

While his heart was beating, he couldn't feel it. The powerful anesthetic in the permeation jell numbed him to the point where he couldn't feel his heartbeat, couldn't hear his pulse in his ears, nor could he feel the expansion ruptures down the backs of both calves where some sloppy cryoentombment procedures led to freezing expansion differentials between his calf muscles and shinbones that resulted in Class II frost ruptures.

WHUMP.

At first Louie thought it was his heart he was feeling beating and he waited for the familiar feeling of the secondary contraction.

And he waited, but it didn't come.

WHUMP. The singular pulse, all by itself.

I have had stranger dreams.

Again, he waited for the pulse and it didn't come. So he waited and time drew out. The stillness suggesting to Louie that he was frozen, traveling through time and the sense of DejaVu became so immense

WHUMP.

that it imploded as his kinesthetic sense registered motion and his mind realized that it's been awake for some time.

In violation of protocol, all men would cup their genitals in the permeation jell dip and keep themselves protected till they got 'iced'. A good cryotech knew that the statistics showed this pose resulted in less fractures on the male anatomy then the officially accepted pose. Other cryotechs who wanted to follow the procedures to the letter soon learned that one couldn't win a fight with a naked drunk guy covered in permeation jell (Can't wait to see the google hits on this one).

This is how Louie woke. His hands cupping himself and he gently checked to see if he was intact (or perhaps he was just scratching).

Assured that he was OK, he slowly moved his hands up to his eyes to remove the optic cups that protected them from cryodamage. Feeling nothing to cause him concern, he crushed both bulbs, flooding his eyes with the saline based release agent and slowly counted to 200 before mimicking the back and forth motion of REM sleep Then to be safe, he slowly counted to 200 again before pulling on the release tabs and rolling the cups out of each eye.

And then Louie saw something few people see, the inside of a cryopod with the hatch closed, ambient light provided by the ships walls as they maintained the environment for occupied human habitation. The mixture of permeation jell and release agent blurred his vision, distorting it, magnifying the confinement and with it, the sense that he shouldn't be able to breath for long in such a small space. Before the urge to breath, to stave off the threat of suffocation heralded by the cramped space, Louie realized that he wasn't breathing, but instead relying on the respiration nanobots suspended in the permeation jell in his lungs to continue to strip the Carbon atoms off the Carbon Dioxide he was producing to keep the Oxygen levels in his blood high enough to keep him alive.

WHUMP.

Not his heartbeat, Louie realized, but more the heartbeat of the ship. Ships noise. Experienced crew who loved their ships would tell you that it could lull you to sleep like the gentle whispers of a lover or could call for help in times of need. Louie didn't know this ship, but he could recognize a call for help in most any language and this pulse, as much a sound as a motion, spoke of an urgency.

Don't forget to breath.

Permeation jell usually tastes sickly sweet, being rich in sugars to power the respiratory nanobots oxygenating the blood. Louie smacked his lips and licked the top of his mouth looking for the overpowering sweetness he was expecting to taste. Instead a celluloidal aftertaste dominated a slight sweet taste.

It should be sweet. And I should be hungover.

And then Louie realized just how long he'd be conscious. Long enough for the nanobots to nearly run out of sugar, long enough for him to sleep off a frozen hangover.

If it wasn't for the ship shaking him, he'd have slept right through the nanobots powering down as their chemical power source ran out. Since it takes less power to grab a hold of a CO2 molecule than it does to remove the Carbon atom, he knew that there wouldn't have been any free Carbon Dioxide molecules to trigger the air hunger feeling. Ondine's Curse was just probably a few hours away.

Pulling he release handles, opened the hatch and Louie slid out of the cryopod and used the mounting points for the cryotechs gear as hand holds to transition to standing in the corridor.

WHUMP

Feeling the whole ship move under his feet, Louie knew the was an eccentricity between the rotational axis of the ship and the distribution of mass and that a harmonic was being approached.

Louie knew that ships had been lost and analysis of the debris had shown that eccentricities small enough to be ignored by the crew had resulted in catastrophic failure as the stress imbalance was repeatedly cycled across the whole structure till the weakest part failed and that failure cascaded through the whole structure.

Such is the risk of spin induced gravity.

Don't forget to breath.

Louie coughed as deep and as hard as he could in an effort to expel as much jell as he could from his lungs. Out of habit he covered his mouth and was rewarded with a handfull of grayish jell. Looking up and down the corridor, he had few options and flung the goo to the floor as his body took over the task of expelling the jell from his lungs. With racking coughs, blacker and blacker jell was expelled as the nanobot fleet in his lungs communicated mission change and switched to the task of demobilization. First they would attack the jell polymer and break the polymer chains down to a minimal atomic weight, then once that is complete, they'd begin disassembling each other till only a minimal number were left.

When the coughing subsided, Louie's hands, mouth and chin were streaked in black. He half wished someone would appear with clothes and a towel and was partially relieved that no one was there to see him naked and streaked with carbon black, dripping cryojell.

WHUMP.

It was as if the ship nudged him, reminding him that there were bigger issues than his modesty and inconvenience at hand.

Louie picked a direction and headed down the corridor knowing that he'd hit a data station or a radial lift tube sooner or later, with the thought running through his mind that medical advances seem to largely consist of the ability to keep a man alive through a more barbaric procedure.