This’ll be the last time I wake up before we land. The rest of the crew is still asleep in
their cozy little pods. Mine is set so that I wake up every few hundred years. Even though this is a suicide mission, being captain has its privileges. The fact that I know we are all going to die is not one of them. A part of me feels that I should tell the crew, though I know that I can’t. They will kill Julia if this mission fails. Hell, she’s already centuries dead. Whichever way you slice it I’ll never see her again. That much was for certain as soon as this ship took off... Bastards. When I was a boy my Daddy always told me not to be greedy. “Retire young, set some time aside and be happy” he would say. I took his advice, and it turns out all it made me was a liability. They couldn’t take the chance that I would talk, so I got sent on one final mission. Guess they figured that if I retired guilt would set in and I would try to make amends. Who knows? They may have been right.
THE LONG SLEEP
Written by Robert Lefebvre Illustrated by David Valente
It’s a shame I always seem to spend my time awake pissed off. I gotta keep it short too. Those cheap bastards barely pay for enough power to pump oxygen the whole flight. It’s tempting to just stay awake and turn the whole mission into a big fat red mark in their books. I think of Julia and I know I can’t.
As I sit here reflecting on the way things turned out, I can’t help but marvel at the ingenuity of it all. Some years back the Corporation mastered the arts of time travel and teleportation. Both awe inspiring in their own right, combined they created a fortune in interplanetary travel. Just send out a crew full of saps in a shiny new ship with an easy job and the promise of a fat paycheck waiting at home. All the crew has to do is set the ship on auto-pilot and go to sleep for a couple of centuries.
The ship acts as a time machine. The only thing there is to do once you reach the destination is set the teleporter and ride the whole thing back to the day after you left. The only catch is that any organic material comes back deader than hell. That’s the part they forget to mention. And why would they? The Corporation gets an instant express way worth trillions a year and they don’t even have to pay for the labor.
Once I heard an old man say that dying is like going to sleep. God, I hope he was right. Julia and I never got a chance to say goodbye. In my head I tell her and the kids that I love them as I hold them in my arms one last time. To my littlest one I give a kiss on her forehead and whisper in her ear, “Goodnight.”