As a God

You and your crew have been selected for a 1500yr Cryo Sleep journey to a possible first encounter. You enter your pod and the cryo sleep process starts, you never lose consciousness. After hundreds of years of mental torture in a frozen body, your psyche begins to evolve.

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I’ve never been able to sleep on planes. Puddle-jumpers and sixteen-hour flights alike, everyone else would be sleeping and there I’d be, wiiiiide awake, just me and the flight attendants. For a while I went to my doctor and asked for increasingly stronger sleeping pills. Melatonin supplements did nothing. Ambien was worthless. Even those supposed “horse-tranquilizer-level” pills just left me angry and awake. I wonder if she thought I was Humbert Humbert or something.

So it’s no surprise that the cryo-sleep process didn’t work on me.

I really should’ve thought it through better. For seven hundred years, I was stuck, awake, staring out through the window in my pod, watching my fellow crew members doze happily. I tried all the tricks to make myself sleepy and nothing worked. By three months in, I was panicking. Six months and I had an all-out breakdown, hallucinating constantly, screaming incoherently in my mind.

By the one year mark I was a broken man. I heard nothing but the constant low hiss of oxygen being pumped into my pod. My brain had shut down entirely. For years I was catatonic, locked in, still conscious and thinking but just barely.

Then, around year three hundred, something changed.

Something else took up residence in my brain. Something very much not me.

I didn’t notice it at first; hundreds of years of cycling misery and extreme panic will override your spidey-sense real hard. But then I started hearing thoughts and seeing ideas, things I should never have been able to know in languages I didn’t speak, languages I didn’t even recognize. For a few weeks I let things come as they did, settling into my mind.

Then Carrow died.

One day, across the hall from me, I saw Carrow’s eyes open behind the window of her pod. I wanted to cry out to her, use my mouth for the first time in a hundred thousand days, but my body was still very much frozen. Slowly, her eyes focused on mine and I tried to smile through my gaze. There was no recognition there. Moments later, her mouth flew wide open in a scream I couldn’t hear and blood streamed from her nose and eyes. She shook so violently that the pod vibrated in its setting, the vital signs on the monitor going haywire.

It only took four minutes.

One by one, the other members of my crew died the same way. Some I could see, others I merely knew about from the beeping monitors and the shaking that rattled my pod. Every instant, I thought I would be next. But when weeks, then months, went by after Yong died, I started to wonder if maybe I would be the sole survivor.

Through it all, those same intrusive thoughts kept popping up in my mind. I began to fight back, twisting the intruders with my own memories. An image of some alien thing with metal skin was transplanted into a bikini, sunning itself on the beach. Words in a language I didn’t know were set to Broadway show tunes. Anything I could do to stop whatever these thoughts were trying to do, I did it.

By year seven hundred, things changed. The thoughts no longer came unbidden. The language was at home in my mind, like I’d grown up speaking it. The pod became a throne from which I could feel things happening somewhere far away. And as the timer outside ticked down, I became aware of 

things, things inexplainable in the puny languages of Earth.

At last, when the numbers on the timer were almost all zeroes, I guided the ship down onto the planet. I told it where to land. I told the fyr’alas to clear the way, to make ready a welcome for me. When the ship was safely on the ground, I released myself from the pod. The pod hissed as the air warmed to thaw my frozen body. I’d expected my limbs to be flabby and useless, but they felt as strong as if I’d never stepped foot in the ship. And when I stepped out onto the surface of Chn’o’tekin, the fyr’alas welcomed me as a god.

Because that is what I have become.