Short Stories

The Sun Rises

Perun's sun was setting, a blaze of orange and gold that Grace could witness only by pressing her face against the tiny plexiglass viewport in her room.

Stay inside, her mother had told her. Inside there were endless spacious white hallways for her to explore. There were VR rooms to take her back to Earth-prior if she felt homesick. There were nature-rooms that played hyper-realistic holograms of emerald forests, complete with the sounds of birdsong and babbling brooks, fans that simulated gentle breezes, perfumes that replicated the smell of dew-drenched grass.

But Grace was bored and she had already seen most of the place. A "hotel," her mother had called it, as if any day now another shuttle would come and take them back to Earth's scorched surface. She'd swam in the indoor pool, read all the books that had been provided for her. She'd stared at the sky and wondered if her house back on Earth was still standing, if her room was still the mess she'd left it— books and posters scattered on the floor that had been ripped out of her hands by her frantic mother when she'd tried to take them with her, drawers yanked open and emptied of as much clothing as could fit in her suitcase.

Grace turned from the window, hopping off her bed. The double doors slid open automatically as she approached them, lights dimming behind her as she left the room. She passed dining rooms lit by chandeliers dripping with icy diamonds, filled with soft chatter and the clinking of wine glasses; she passed the ballroom where her parents were currently taking a dancing lesson; she passed the entrance to the cryo-chambers where she had awoken only a few weeks prior, a frigid glow emanating from underneath the giant doors.

"I need a map," she muttered, looking around the white-tiled hallway identical to every other, soft fluorescent lights studding the walls. Right on cue, a shimmering hologram popped up on the wall, displaying a map of the building. With its help, she found a route that led her downstairs, through a winding hallway, to a set of doors that towered above her. A thin viewport showed a sliver of burnished gold from the sun outside.

Grace reached up and swiped her keycard, but the machine just flashed a bright red light and the doors stayed closed.

So instead, she walked through the building to a room towards the back. At one point she stopped to lean against the wall and catch her breath, her legs shaking from the short exertion. Ten years frozen in a deep cryo-sleep had stolen all her muscle mass, and despite her doctor's promises, she had yet to regain most of it. She had asked him if that meant she was twenty-two years old now, but he'd said the cryo-tank had kept her body physically the same age as before. That was too bad: adults got way more freedom.

At the back of the building she found a grate and grinned: back on Earth, grates had been her favorite way of escaping from underneath her parents' noses. She unscrewed it and pulled it back, and then she shimmied through the cramped metal tunnel. It made her face heat up, but the faint light at the end kept her going.

When she reached the end of the tunnel, her fingers scrabbled at the grate to pull it aside. She  fell, hard, onto the ground.

The heat started pressing down on her all at once, and a thick stench hung in the air, something bitter but also sugary. Then she looked around.

"Woah . . ."

The first thing she saw was that the sunset had apparently fallen to the ground: Brilliant bursts of alien flowers, fuchsia and purple and blood-orange, shot up from the ground, and they were glowing in the darkening air. Surrounding the flowers, white buildings shaped like mushroom heads towered above her, and white walls gleamed in the distance. At first she thought the ground was white, too, covered with tiles like the inside of the building, but it was only a thick mat of spongy white fuzz covering patches of dirt, like snowbanks.