VAI

I saw Callie for the last time 80 years ago. We spent the afternoon on a tour skiff, gliding over the herds of elephants that lived wild on the Jeddak savannah to the South of the city. Later that night, we were planning to meet up with our extended circle of friends for a celebration, but for now we wanted to be alone.

"Have you decided yet what you will be?" she asked. I knew what she meant, but she clarified anyway. "Now that they won't need you to fight the K'thaktra?"

"I'd like to be an elephant," I said. "Is that possible?"

"I'll be one, too." She leaned in and put her head on my chest. The breeze lifted some of her blonde hair up to tickle my face.

"You'd always lead the rest of us to the best water. The best . . . bushes. Tree bark. Fruit. What else do elephants eat?"

"Palm fronds," I said.

"What delicious palm fronds we would feast upon."

"Fine," I said in mock frustration, "whatever you want." I looked away to try to hide my smile.

"Now we're talking." She stood on her tiptoes for a kiss, so I leaned down and gave her one.

We passed over a small hill where a cluster of elephants stood apart from their herd.

"What's happening there?" Callie asked.

"Skiff, tardo," I said.

The skiff slowed and circled above them. A gray matriarch moved her trunk over a gargantuan bull lying unmoving in the pale grass. There was an eerie silence over the scene. The other animals investigated the deceased male in an elaborately mournful way, hanging their heads, making not a sound. Circling him in a strange procession of swinging trunks and stamping feet.

The silence infected us, too. When Callie finally spoke, it was in the smallest whisper. "Let's go back to the city. It's almost time to meet up with the others anyway."

The horrors of the war that we had lived with for so long had made her hypersensitive to death. I didn't know what those horrors had done to me.

She sat down and faced away from the elephants. I put my hand on her knee.

On the way back to the city, I thought about her question. Had I decided what I wanted to be, now that the war had ended, thus dashing my hopes of growing up to be a killer of the k'thaktra? It was my 16th birthday. I was approaching the age when a person was expected to know. But it was a question I had no answer for.

We went to an outdoor concert with Emilio and Posha and an extended group of friends. Ate cucumber sandwiches Posha had made. Drank cans of mineral infusers. Afterward we all went as a big group—I think there had been 16 of us—to eat at an all night restaurant and talk about the music. It was a pleasant night. Maybe the best I can remember.

I got home and found my dad sitting in the dark. "Nice night?"

"Oh, yes," I replied dreamily.

"Good." His manner was stiff. He sat in his favorite chair with his hands gently gripping the armrests. Something about his motionlessness seemed off. I remember thinking he must have been angry, and braced myself for another confrontation about Callie, and how he disapproved of my friends, and didn't want to see me throw away the opportunities he had worked so hard to create for me. But no confrontation came. After a silence, he said, in a slightly high tone, "Good night, Vai."

"Good night, Dad. Happy birthday," I said, to remind him that he hadn't wished me one.

"Happy birthday."

I had been relieved there was nothing more.

I had gone to sleep feeling excited to be so happy.

Then there had been a long, black deepness, and I awoke in my bedroom, thinking something smelled bad. There was a mustiness that hadn't been there before. A smell like mold and rotting wood. The time on my okulus said it was 9:30 in the morning, but it was dark. I glanced out the window and saw that it was partially covered by vines that I hadn't remembered being there. There were trees shadowing my window that had not been there the previous day. Yet the red sandstone garden wall looked the same, and the rocketship fountain sculpture was still there, gently streaming water from its thrusters into the font below.

I was groggy and confused and disoriented. I didn't know then that I was waking up after anesthesia, after being kept in an experimental stasis chamber for decades. I thought I was still dreaming. Even after my father's voice came over my okulus—I didn't remember accepting a call from him—and said, "I see you're awake, Vai. Hello, my son . . ." I still thought I was dreaming.

"Dad?" I noticed the sheets on my bed were different. I noticed I was dressed in strange pajamas that I had not been wearing the night before. "What's going on?"

"Son," he said.

"What's going on?"

"I have to explain some things to you now that you may find upsetting."

I left my okulus on the bed, got up and tried to exit the room, but the door was locked. I rattled the handle. Then in a state of panic I began jerking the handle and shoving against the door as hard as I could. I could feel the wood flexing but it wouldn't break. "WHY IS THE DOOR LOCKED?" I shouted. "What's going on!"

"You've been asleep," he said gently, "for a long time."

"What?" I asked incredulously. "What do you mean? How long?"

"Breathe," he said. "Just sit down and try to breathe."

Idiotically, I screamed "NO! I WON'T SIT DOWN!"

It was still a dream when I picked up my desk chair and tried to smash it through the window. Swinging it with all my might again and again against the graphene pane.

"Son?"

I let go of the chair, and it bounced back into the room, smacking into a wall.

"Son!"

I was in a dream. A dream of being trapped. A nightmare. Sometimes in a nightmare, you're afraid for no reason, like I was then. The ordinary can become a thing of dread and horror. I remembered something about being in a dream you didn't like. When I was younger, when I had my K'thaktra night terrors, my endless visions of those terrible faces floating weirdly out of their pink fogs, my dad had taught me that I could take control of my dreams. First I had to separate my conscious mind from what I was experiencing. I had to lift up, float out of myself, and observe, the way one might observe a play. That's all it took. Then I could make big, sweeping changes to the dream all at once. If I were lucid, I could take control. I could make anything happen.

In a dream you can fly over beautiful green valleys and endless fields. You can be a righteous king in an ancient castle. You can be surrounded by people who love you, lift you up, make you safe.

"I know this is hard."

It wasn't working.

"I know this is confusing and disturbing."

"I'm dreaming," I said meekly, finally beginning to understand that I wasn't.

"No," said my father's voice. "I'm sorry."

"Why am I locked in here?"

"I need to explain some things to you. I need to know that you understand what has happened. I locked the door so you couldn't come out and discover things in the wrong way. Please understand that you are my son, not my prisoner, and I will unlock the door in just a few minutes."

"Discover what?" I demanded.

"Vai, you have been asleep for a very long time . . .80 years."

Asleep was a euphemism. So was coma.

"A month before your birthday," he told me, "your okulus sent me a private alert informing me that it had detected a virus in your system. It had no cure. It was a terrible cruelty of random chance. Most humans were immune to its effects. But an exceedingly small number were genetically susceptible. And you were one of those.

"For a month, I wrestled whether or not to tell you you were sick with something for which there was no treatment.

"When I appealed to the Gathering Health Bureau to have you put into stasis until a cure could be found, they told me it would be impossible. The number of people affected by the virus was so exceedingly small, there were no plans to pursue a cure, and the expense to put you into stasis indefinitely could not be justified. They were sorry. But some diseases still existed for which there was no cure. And to put every citizen sick with those diseases into stasis was an unfortunate impossibility. Would that we lived, they told me, in less barbaric times.

"I couldn't bear to lose you," said my father. "Not after we lost your mother. So I did what I had to do."

He arranged to make a black market purchase of a deep-space stasis pod—a leftover, outdated piece of equipment from the early days of interstellar travel. He had secreted it into the house, into the small complex of rooms in the basement where I rarely went. That was his space. Where he worked on his endless experiments with supermatter computing, his attempts to splice K'thaktra vegetation with terran fruits, and the like. He had tested the stasis pod meticulously, replacing parts, upgrading conductors, making sure that it was in better-than-new condition.

He hadn't told me any of this? Because he didn't want to rob me of my fine times with my friends—he actually said that—didn't want to inject sorrow and fear into my life. He wanted me to be happy, like nothing was wrong, for as long as possible. So after I had gone to sleep that night, he had entered my room and injected me with an anesthetic, and placed me inside the stasis pod.

I was beginning to feel less groggy, less confused. I began to realize that he was telling me the truth. And a sick kind of anger began to take root inside me.

This was real.

I sat down heavily on the edge of my bed and stayed there for a long time before saying, "And now I'm cured?"

"Yes," he said.

I looked at my hands. I flexed them. I felt the same. My hands looked the same. I used the mirror function on my okulus to see if I was still me. I was.

"And I'm—still 16?"

"Yes. Physiologically, for you, only 12 hours have passed since you went to sleep last night." He sounded sad as he added, "80 years ago."

I loved him and I hated him at the same time. He had taken away my life. I knew that when my bedroom door opened, everything I cherished would gone. But he had done it to save me. I didn't want the door to unlock. I didn't want to exit the bedroom anymore. I didn't want to walk out there into a world that would be different from the one I knew.

"My friends?" I asked.

"They would be very old now," he said.

"And you? You're an old man now?"

"Yes, Vai. I'm an old man now."

I raised my okulus slowly, and tried to access my usual sources of news and information, but couldn't connect to any of them.

"I can't connect," I said quietly.

Then there was a click, and my bedroom door opened.

My father stood there, much older, and much thinner than he had been the day before. Wearing clothes that seemed peculiar to me. Fashion had gone in odd little directions I would not have anticipated. He had silver hair now. It didn't occur to me then how strange it was that he didn't look 120 years old, or even close to it. That would occur to me in the coming days, and we would talk, briefly, about the longevity treatments he had undergone while I was in the pod.

"Can I—hug you?" he asked.

"No."

A surge of anger. I tried to let it pass.