Summertide

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A ninety-seven-year silence was ending.

For close to a century the ship’s interior had heard no human voice and felt no human footstep. The vessel whispered its way between the stars, passengers close to absolute zero in dreamless paradeath. Once a year their bodies warmed to liquid-nitrogen temperatures while shared experiences were fed to them from the ship’s central data bank: memories of a hundred years of interstellar travel, for bodies that would age less than one day.

As the final weeks of deceleration began it was time to start the awakening. When the destination was reached, decisions might be needed that went beyond machine judgment — a notion that to the ship’s main computer, the first of its kind to be equipped with the Karlan emotional circuits, was both insulting and implausible.

First warming was initiated. Interior sensors picked up the reassuring flutter of returning heartbeats, the initial sigh and murmur of working lungs. The emergency crew would be awakened first, two by two, on a last-in, first-out basis; only with their approval would others begin emergence.

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