Harbinger: A Journal of Art & Literature | 2018-2019

was the morning of his crash. He always called her before he did a test flight.
“I’m going up in a new ship today, Mom.”
“Be safe and come home, Travis. I will pray for you.”
“We’ve talked about this, Mom. If you can’t let Catholicism go, can you at least accept
that it doesn’t exist anymore? Or that it isn’t legal?”
She was silent for a moment, her face drawn tight, and Travis imagined that he could
feel her anger across the telecom.
“You may be brainwashed by the military, Travis, but I know my God is real.”
He had pressed his face in his hands then, frustration rolling over him. “I can’t do this,
Mom. Bye.”
She held her silence, looking at him expectantly through the telecom.
“I love you.”
“I love you too, Travis.”
Passing as a believer in the required religious system was easy enough for him, Travis
had been born into that new world, a world of secret beliefs and people passing as faithful
followers of the Church of Science. Growing up in a home with parents who did not
agree on religion had allowed him to learn the skills to play along. He did not believe any
of it, even his proclaimed devotion to the Divine Cosmos. That was just a requirement
of his job, and it was not a difficult religion to follow. You paid your tithes, preferably as
a direct draft from your check, just like you paid your taxes. You appeared at ceremonies
in your military uniform and promised to obey the orders of the Divine Cosmos as
directed by the leaders of the Holy Roman Church of Science. His mother had called it
the unholy union of Satan and the corruption of the Vatican, but Satan never came up
in the Church of Science. The Divine Cosmos did not have time for standards of good
and evil.
Travis sat up, pushing his back against the wall, and looking down at his body. The
seam between the old and the new, the organic and the machine, looked like the bead of
a weld where the nanobot technology meshed with his body. There were memories in
his head of the crash, they haunted his sleep, but he could not recall them in his waking
moments. No, his memories were jumbled, one of machines and cold, just a flash, and
then nothing again. His doctor, James Larson, told him that was when they had taken
his body out of cryogenic storage, let his brain thaw enough to see if there was anything
left. His brain scans had returned no response. His brain had been dead.
He had been frozen for twenty years, his body meant to be a science experiment for
the Research Technology Center, but never meant to be brought back to life.
The memory of his awakening was vivid, the real nightmare he lived.
Cold. Cold breath fogged above him, his eyelids dragging as he opened them. Bright