The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [74]
Gaunt squinted against the brightness of the room's lighting, momentarily adrift from his memories.
"Where am I?" he asked. His voice came out raw, as if he had been in a loud bar the night before.
"In a room, being woken up," the woman said. "You remember going under, right?"
He grasped for memories, something specif c to hold on to. Green-gowned doctors in a clean surgical theatre, his hand signing the last of the release forms before they plumbed him into the machines. The drugs flooding his system, the utter absence of sadness or longing as he bid farewell to the old world, with all its vague disappointments.
"I think so."
"What's your name?" the man asked.
"Gaunt." He had to wait a moment for the rest of it to come. "Marcus Gaunt."
"Good," he said, smearing a hand across his lips. "That's a positive sign."
"I'm Clausen," the woman said. "This is Da Silva. We're your wake-up team. You remember Sleepover?"
"I'm not sure."
"Think hard, Gaunt," she said. "It won't cost us anything to put you back under, if you don't think you're going to work out for us."
Something in Clausen's tone convinced him to work hard at retrieving the memory. "The company," he said. "Sleepover was the company. The one that put me under. The one that put everyone under."
"Brain cells haven't mushed on us," Da Silva said.
Clausen nodded, but showed nothing in the way of jubilation in him having got the answer right. It was more that he'd spared the two of them a minor chore, that was all. "I like the way he says 'everyone'. Like it was universal."
"Wasn't it?" Da Silva asked.
"Not for him. Gaunt was one of the first under. Didn't you read his file?"
Da Silva grimaced. "Sorry. Got sidetracked."
"He was one of the first 200,000," Clausen said. "The ultimate exclusive club. What did you call yourselves, Gaunt?"
"The Few," he said. "It was an accurate description. What else were we going to call ourselves?"
"Lucky sons of bitches," Clausen said.
"Do you remember the year you went under?" Da Silva asked. "You were one of the early ones, it must've been some time near the middle of the century."
"It was 2058. I can tell you the exact month and day if you wish. Maybe not the time of day."
"You remember why you went under, of course," Clausen said.
"Because I could," Gaunt said. "Because anyone in my position would have done the same. The world was getting better, it was coming out of the trough. But it wasn't there yet. And the doctors kept telling us that the immortality breakthrough was just around the corner, year after year. Always just out of reach. Just hang on in there, they said. But we were all getting older. Then the doctors said that while they couldn't give us eternal life just yet, they could give us the means to skip over the years until it happened." Gaunt forced himself to sit up in the bed, strength returning to his limbs even as he grew angrier at the sense that he was not being treated with sufficient deference, that - worse - he was being judged. "There was nothing evil in what we did. We didn't hurt anyone or take anything away from anyone else. We just used the means at our disposal to access what was coming to us anyway."
"Who's going to break it to him?" Clausen asked, looking at Da Silva.
"You've been sleeping for nearly 160 years," the man said. "It's April, 2217. You've reached the twenty-third century."
Gaunt took in the drab mundanity of his surroundings again. He had always had some nebulous idea of the form his wake-up would take and it was not at all like this.
"Are you lying to me?"
"What do you think?" asked Clausen.
He held up his hand. It looked, as near as he could remember, exactly the way it had been before. The same age-spots, the same prominent veins, the same hairy knuckles, the same scars and loose, lizardy skin.
"Bring me a mirror," he said, with an ominous foreboding.
"I'll save you the bother," Clausen said. "The face you'll see is the one you went under with, give or take. We've