Now I lay me down to sleep
May the tech my body keep
Should I wake before I die
I hope the cold to retry
-hypersleep prayer
***
I’ve never liked hypersleep. I know it’s safe and I’ve done it dozens of times. Maybe it’s because it’s not really sleep. That’s just how the company has sold the idea to the public. “Sleep your way to a new world!” Hypersleep. Suspended animation. Cryonics. It all amounts to the same thing. The cessation of bodily functions followed by the preservation of the body for later revival. In layman’s terms: we kill you, freeze you, and bring you back to life later. The tech has gotten better over the years but the basic idea is the same.
As a Hypersleep Supervisor, I’ve done the procedure to hundreds of people and had it done to myself a few dozen times. Everyone is a little rowdy before we begin. They’re nervous about going to “sleep” for several years. I let them think of it as just a long nap, it’s easier that way and most of the will only undergo hypersleep once in their life. Step one is to induce coma in the sleepers. I make sure everyone is down before I start freezing the first batch. It worries people when their friends or family flatline. Step two, before the heart stops but after there’s no danger of brain hypoxia, I flush their blood stream with anti-freeze compounds to prevent cell damage. Step three starts when their hearts stop and their bodies are cooled to final storage temperature. I repeat this until everyone is dead, frozen, and stored away.
After everyone else is tucked away, I get into my tube, attach all the monitoring pads, hook in the blood exchanging lines, and activate the automated freeze and preservation program. I could set a timer and sedate myself but knowing that I’m going to die in my sleep is worse than facing it head on. It doesn’t take long. I feel the intense cold and then I black out. This seems to last a few seconds and then I’m awake again. Still cold but rapidly warming. My veins burn for a few minutes until the anti-freeze is completely flushed out. I let the others sleep through that part before bringing them out of their comas. They wake up never realizing that they were dead for years.
I could give it up. Settle down on a colony. Plenty of work for a doctor on these new worlds. But as much as I hate hypersleep, I never feel more alive then when I’ve just come back from the dead.