Beth Revis

It was to apologize, and apologizing means he remembers what happened, and that means being trapped in a nightmare that__ already come true.

(D)reams are like that: they go in and out of memories and scenes, but they're never real. They're never real, and I hate them because they aren't.

FAILURE IS INEVITABLE. I will fail. We all will. And having failed, and gotten back up, and failed again, taught me that I can survive failure. This is a downfall in most modern stories: the hero always wins. Because while this story is inspiring, it__ also false. In reality, not everyone wins. It__ 100% true that no one wills all the time, and we expect that__very hero must fall at least once. But it__ also 100% true that some people never win at all, and that__ the thing we try so hard to ignore behind the pretty stories. I could spend the rest of my life trying to be a prima ballerina, and it would not happen. I would fail at that for the rest of my life. FAILURE TEACHES US WHO WE ARE. Because even though I know I would fail forever at being a prima ballerina, I also know that I am not someone who should be a prima ballerina. It__ not who I am, it__ not what I want. Of course I would fail at it.

Failure makes the success worth it.

We are, at least in part, who we remember ourselves to be. Take away our memories, and you take away our selves.

Choice or no, my heart is his.

Mom used to say that the thoughts in our heads were nothing more than electrical impulses. I remember Dad and her talking about this over dinner. It frustrated Dad that the human brain can fire electrical sparks and think, but that the electricity he__ pump into an android brain would never give it independent thought. The body isn__ that different from a machine. Humans and androids both run on electricity.That lightning spark of energy I saw in the reverie.That was my mother__ last thought, an echo of electricity, something that sparked when I entered her dreamscape.That spark is gone now. Her life is gone now. Everything that made her, her, is gone now. Faded into nothing.

I__e heard that when you__e in a life-or-death situation, like a car accident or a gunfight, all your senses shoot up to almost superhuman level, everything slows down, and you__e hyper-aware of what__ happening around you.As the shuttle careens toward the earth, the exact opposite is true for me.Everything silences, even the screams and shouts from the people on the other side of the metal door, the crashes that I pray aren__ bodies, the hissing of rockets, Elder__ cursing, my pounding heartbeat.I feel nothing__ot the seat belt biting into my flesh, not my clenching jaw, nothing. My whole body is numb.Scent and taste disappear.The only thing about my body that works is my eyes,and they are filled with the image before them. The ground seems to leap up at us as we hurtle toward it. Through the blurry image of the world below us, I see the outline of land__ continent. And at once, my heart lurches with the desire to know this world, to make it our home. My eyes drink up the image of the planet__nd my stomach sinks with the knowledge that this is a coastline I__e never seen before. I could spin a globe of Earth around and still be able to recognize the way Spain and Portugal reach into the Atlantic, the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, the pointy end of India. But this continent__t dips and curves in ways I don__ recognize, swirls into an unknown sea, creating peninsulas in shapes I do not know, scattering out islands in a pattern I cannot connect.And it__ not until I see this that I realize: this world may one day become our home,but it will never be the home I left behind.

And I try to remember if this happened before, because this is a memory I would want to keep.But there is no echo of it in my mind.

Ella!_ the voice yells, but I cannot tell where it is coming from. The sound wraps around me, spreading like spilt water and then evaporating into silence.__here am I?_ I whisper again.The darkness stretches out for eternity.I take a few steps forward, but the feeling is surreal__ cannot tell if I__e actually moved or not, because everything is nothing. I feel something wet and warm slide down my cheek, and I touch the tear with my fingertips, swiping it away.Representative Belles is dead. I__ certain of that now. He__ gone. I___ I__ in the place where he was, and now he__ gone, and now I__ stuck. I__ stuck in the nothingness of a dead body, and I don__ know how to get out.My heart thuds against my chest, and I gasp for air. What if I can never get out? What if eternity is nothing more than me, alone, in the darkness? Trapped in someone else__ death.I collapse, but it__ not like I fall on the floor. There is no floor. There was the illusion of one, but as my body gives way, I realize that I__ floating. I stretch out, my fingers and toes aching to feel, but there__ nothing, nothing at all, and I draw myself into myself, hugging my legs, my knees tucked under my chin.I__ alone.Maybe when Representative Belles died, I died too.Maybe this is it.

More than the sound of my own beating heart, I miss the sound of a ticking clock. Time passes, it must pass, but I have no more assurance of moving through time than I have that I am moving through space. In a way, I__ glad: this means perhaps 300 years and 364 days have passed, and tomorrow I will wake up. Sometimes after a cross-country meet or a long day at school, I__ fall into bed with all my clothes on and be out before I knew it. When I__ finally open my eyes, it would feel like I__ just shut them for a minute, but really, the whole rest of the day and half the night was gone. But. There were other times when I__ collapse onto my mattress, shut my eyes and dream, and it felt like I__ lived a whole lifetime in that dream, but when I woke up, it had only been a few minutes. What if only a year has gone by? What if we haven__ even left yet? That is my greatest fear.

I guess when someone's gone from your life for a while, all you think about are the big things. The big regrets, the could-have, should-haves. Or the big moments, the memories that are going to be with you forever, those life-changing moments, like first kisses and first confessions and first trusts. And you think about the lasts too: the last kiss, the last words, the last moments.

I can think of nothing but the stars. It is like a piece of my soul had been lost, empty, and it is now filled with the light of a million stars. They are all that I have ever dreamed of; they are nothing that I ever expected... I will never, never be the same. I have seen stars. Real stars.

Images of broken light dance behind my eyelids. How could this giant lamp compare to the sun?Everything is wrong here. Shattered. Broken.Like the light.Like me.I never thought about how important the sky was until I didn__ have one.I am surrounded by walls.I have just replaced one box for another.

As soon as I say the words, I know they were the right ones. My eyes dip down to Dad__ memorial plaque. Truth doesn__ lie in the heart of fortune_ it__ under Triumph Towers, where the labs are.

Be fearless. Write what you want. Write how you want. Create art.

Don__ you understand? You are Elder. When you take my role as Eldest, you must dedicate your whole life to this one idea: you are the caretaker of every single person on the ship. They are your responsibility. You can never show weakness in front of them: you are their strength. You can never let them see you in despair: you are their hope. You must always be everything to everyone on board.

The President called it the __pitome of the American dream._ Daddy called it the __nholy alliance of business and government._ But all it really was, was America giving up. Bailing out in order to join the Financial Resource Exchange. A multinational alliance focused on one thing: profit. Fund global medical care to monopolize vaccines. Back unified currency to collect planet-wide interest. And provide the resources needed for a select group of scientists and military personnel to embark on the first trip across the universe in a quest to find more natural resources__ore profit. The answer to my parents_ dreams. And my worst nightmare. And I know something about nightmares, seeing as how I__e been sleeping longer than I__e been alive. I hope. What if this is just a part of a long dream dreamt in the short time between when Ed locked the cryo door and Hassan pushed the button to freeze me? What if? It__ a strange sort of sleep, this. Never really waking up, but becoming aware of consciousness inside a too-still body. The dreams weave in and out of memories. The only thing keeping the nightmares from engulfing me is the hope that there couldn__ possibly be a hundred more years before I wake up. Not a hundred years. Not three hundred. Not three hundred and one. Please, God, no. Sometimes it feels like a thousand years have passed; sometimes it feels as if I__e only been sleeping a few moments. I feel most like I__ in that weird state of half-asleep, half-awake I get when I__e tried to sleep past noon, when I know I should get up, but my mind starts wandering and I__ sure I can never get back to sleep. Even if I do slip back into a dream for a few moments, I__ mostly just awake with my eyes shut. Yeah. Cryo sleep is like that. Sometimes I think there__ something wrong. I shouldn__ be so aware. But then I realize I__ only aware for a moment, and then, as I__ realizing it, I slip into another dream. Mostly, I dream of Earth. I think that__ because I didn__ want to leave it. A field of flowers; smells of dirt and rain. A breeze ... But not really a breeze, a memory of a breeze, a memory made into a dream that tries to drown out my frozen mind. Earth. I hold on to my thoughts of Earth. I don__ like the dreamtime. The dreamtime is too much like dying. They are dreams, but I__ too out of control, I lose myself in them, and I__e already lost too much to let them take over. I push the dream-memory down. That happened centuries ago, and it__ too late for regrets now. Because all my parents ever wanted was to be a part of the first manned interstellar exploratory mission, and all I ever wanted was to be with them. And I guess it doesn__ matter that I had a life on Earth, and that I loved Earth, and that by now, my friends have all lived and gotten old and died, and I__e just been lying here in frozen sleep.