I, Cassandra

54 | RYAN MADDOX

A pod. One that somehow, impossibly still beats with life, its window over the face of its occupant frosted over. But the code on the side when I finally excavate it isn't Blue's. It's another's. A life carried over the millennia, a life I immediately hate. I can't help myself. I punch the fuck out of it. Its shell is tough as hell. I don't even leave a mark.

Back on my feet, I pace, infuriated, driven by a sense of injustice I cannot contain. A string of expletives erupt from me and fill the air, filthy with vulgarity in this pristine world. It doesn't help. I kick the pod. Not even a dent. I kick it harder. Nothing. Fuck this shit.

Why couldn't this have been Blue's pod? Why does everything have to be so hard? Enraged, my fury boils over, overwhelming me with the total bullshit that is my destiny. Of Blue's. Everything is pointless. All of it. That is, except for G-II-0782, whoever the fuck they are tucked up like a baby in their eternal, untouched sleep.

Eternal sleep. Wait. I am surprised how long it takes me to connect the dots. Ashamed, even.

Blue. Hope hits me with the force of a tidal wave. If this bastard managed to survive, maybe Blue has, too. I can't believe I wasted the last four and half thousand years in hibernation when I could have been searching for Blue. But there's no time for regret. I have wasted enough time.

I force my anger into a cold, harsh point of focus. If this pod wasn't here four and half thousand years ago, then something must have happened while I was hibernating, either the ground pushed up what was buried beneath, or an earthquake hit, or shit was happening I can't begin to understand, either way, to find this here is better than anything I could have expected. If this one has surfaced, there will be others. And one of them might belong to Blue. The thought is enough. I lunge after it like a starving animal. I have twelve weeks of darkness before me. I never felt happier in my existence.

'Hold on Blue,' I shout into the weird trees, startling the water bears who haven't been shot into space for ten thousand years and are probably pretty happy about it, 'I'm coming for you. It's not over yet.'

And in my heart, I hear it: 'I'm waiting. I'm here. Dreaming of you.'

It might be bullshit I have made up in my head after being alone for so long, but I don't care. It's Blue's voice I hear and it's all I need to go on. To keep searching, and not give up. To never give up. No more fucking hibernating.

There are other pods. In the days that follow I find them everywhere, dozens of them, most are empty. Each time I pick out the outline of one buried under the vegetation, something ignites inside me, a spark, so hot with incandescence I can taste it. Hope. I can taste hope. And every single time, I get my hopes battered to hell.

Some of the pods are in pieces, torn apart by the power of the Earth regurgitating them from wherever they ended up in the cataclysm of 2087. But no others turn up with their light still beating—carrying the single precious cargo my entire existence hinges on. As the days and weeks pass, I widen my search towards the crater rim, long since eroded to a low mound and prickly with the strange trees. Out here there are fewer pods.

So far, I've uncovered sixty-seven more, either empty or wrecked. Not since the night I came out of hibernation have I seen another active pod. Sometimes I go back just to look at it, to reassure myself I didn't imagine it. And I always find it, sitting there, a silent sentinel to a time long lost, its light beating on and on, quiet, and purposeful. And inside. A human being. Life.

Of course, it pisses me off it isn't Blue's but then again whoever is in there survived all this, so I allow it must mean something, what exactly, I don't know. Just something. So I don't kick it anymore. I could revive them if I wanted with the protocols I downloaded the day I put Blue under. But I am in no hurry. I want Blue, not whoever this is. Anyway, what if I can't stand them and they won't go away? I'd have to kill them. I don't even know what kind of -cide it is when you kill the last human left alive. I push my way through the trees whose thin trunks bend with a flexibility I still haven't adapted to, and tell the water bears it would be suicide if they were the last human, but because I'm here, we'd need a new word for it. I ask the water bears what the word should be while I scan for a light in the darkness, or the telltale sign of a pod's straight lines, like a perfectly carved ashlar under a twisted blanket of vines.

Of course, the water bears don't answer. But I like the irony of them getting to name it after all the shit we did to them.

The thought of water bears naming shit soon ceases to entertain me and my ruminations gravitate to darker places as I consider how many passengers could have used the pods that day. Fifteen, maybe twenty at the most—there was only ever a skeleton staff in G-II. Twenty-one lives, max. And I found the wrong one.

As I shove my way deeper into the trees and up the side of what's left of the crater, I can't stop myself from thinking it: out of one thousand pods, I found one of the rare ones that was occupied and still active and it wasn't Blue's. I never believed in religion, an afterlife or gods, but right now, I think maybe there is one, a horrible, sadistic fucker who would be the poster child for kids who enjoy pulling the wings off bees and torturing puppies.

After twenty-three days of methodical searching, I'm well aware of how fucking lows the odds are of even finding a pod; how much lower finding one with a passenger is and of the utter improbability of finding Blue. One out of a thousand.