The construction of 714 hibernation couches was accomplished over the next four months by a concentrated push on the part of the engineers, assemblers, and robots. Certain feedstocks were deficient, and it became necessary to strip the insides of Patagonia to get what they needed. From these and other salvaged materials they manufactured the beds, and the robotic equipment necessary to service the beds and their sleepers. Although the printers could print parts, and the robot assemblers assemble those parts into working wholes, there were still many moments in the process where human engineering, machining skills, and manual dexterity were crucial.
After many design discussions, they decided to arrange all the couches in the Fetch on Long Pond, and in Olympia, the biome next to it. They exiled the animals from these two biomes, to keep the towns from being damaged somehow. The few remaining animals were moved elsewhere, and would either be tended by robots and sheepdogs in teams, or left to go feral in certain biomes. We were going to monitor their progress, and move carcasses that didn’t get eaten into the recyclers, and do what we could to oversee a healthy feral ecology. For the most part it would become a big unconstrained experiment in population dynamics, ecological balance, and island biogeography. We did not mention it, but it seemed to us that things might go rather well in ecological terms, once the people were gone and the initial population dynamics played out and re-sorted the numbers.
It did not escape notice that the people of the ship were giving themselves over to many large and elaborate machines, which we would be operating without human oversight, except indirectly by way of instructions in advance. A living will, so to speak. This was a cause for concern to some people, even though the medical emergency tanks they gratefully entered when injured had long since been proven to be much more effective and safer than attention from human medical teams.
“How would it be any different from what we do now?” Aram would say to people who expressed reservations about this matter. And it was true that the bulk of the ship’s functions had been controlled by us from the very beginning of the voyage. It was as if we functioned for them as a kind of cerebellum, regulating all kinds of autonomic life-support functions. And regarded in that light, it was a question whether the concept of the servile will was appropriate; possibly it could better be regarded as a devotional will. Possibly there was a kind of fusion of wills, or even no will at all, but just an articulated response to stimuli. Leaps under the lash of necessity.
In the end, they established various protocols for monitoring the situation. If any sleeper’s vital signs dropped into zones deemed to be metabolically dangerous, that person and a small human medical team would be roused by us, and the patient’s problems addressed, if possible. The protocol was designed with fail-safe redundancies at every critical part of the system, which was reassuring to many of them. Often the suggestion was made that at least one person stay awake to serve as caretaker and oversee the process. Of course any such person would not live to the end of the voyage back. Eventually it became clear that no individual, couple, or group wanted to sacrifice the remainder of their lives to watching over the rest. To a certain extent it was an endorsement of our abilities as caretaker or cerebellum, a kind of gesture of trust, along with the more usual will to live, and a disinclination to starve in solitude.
And in the end Jochi volunteered to stay awake and watch things, admittedly from the vantage point of his ferry. “They’re not going to let me land on Earth anyway,” he said. “I’m stuck in here for good. I might as well use up my time sooner rather than later. Especially as there’s no telling what shape you all are going to wake up in, if you do. Anyway, I’ll take the first watch.”
Others volunteered to be briefly awakened to check on things, and schedules were drawn up. People involved with this knew the timing of their wake-up calls, which some called their Brigadoon moments. These plans were exceptions; most of them would stay dormant for the remainder of the voyage.
It was agreed that if there were a terminal moment of any kind, meaning any emergency that imperiled the existence of the ship, we would wake up everyone to face it together.
We agreed to all this. It looked like their best hope of making it home. We opened up our operational protocols to complete inspection, and continued with the preparations. There was much to arrange concerning the animals and plants, if the experiment in ecological balance were not to become a complete shambles. We planned robot farming, robot husbandry, robot ecology. An interesting challenge. Some in the biology and ecology groups expressed great interest in finding out on waking what would have happened in the biomes without humans around to tend things.
“A feral starship!” Badim said.
“It will probably work better,” Aram said.
The day came, 209.323, when they gathered in the two biomes where the couches were located, set in rows in the apartment building dining halls that would now serve as their hospitals or infirmaries or dormitories. They had feasted in a minor way for a couple of weeks, eating all the fresh food and much of the remaining stored food. They had freed the few domestic beasts left, to go feral and survive, or not. They had said most of their good-byes. Now they went to their couches, each one personally arranged for its occupant, and waited for their time to come.
The medical team moved down the rows of couches, quietly, methodically. Freya went with them, embracing people and reassuring them, comforting them, thanking them for all they had done in their lives, for taking this strange and desperate step into the unknown. Ellen from Nova Scotia’s farm. Jalil, Euan’s childhood friend. Delwin, old and white-haired. It was as if she were the steward on the boat crossing the Lethe. It was as if they were dying. It was as if they were killing themselves.
Never had it been more obvious how much Freya was the leader of this group, the captain of this ship. People needed her with them as a child needs a mother when going to bed. Some trembled anxiously; some wept; others laughed with her. Their metabolic indicators were all over the charts. It would take a while to settle them down in that regard. They clung to her, and to their family and friends around them, and then lay down.
In each row they treated the children first, as many of them were frightened. As someone remarked, it was the kids who still had the sense to be terrified.
When it was their turn, they undressed and lay on their refrigerator beds naked, and were covered by what looked like a duvet, but was in fact a complex part of the hibernautic envelope that would soon completely surround them. Heads too would be tucked under the covers by the time they were done, and they would be chilled to temperatures resembling those of fish swimming in Antarctic seas.
When they were ready, the needles were slipped into their arms.
Once the cocktail of intravenous drugs rendered them unconscious, the medical team finished wiring them to the monitors and the thermal controls, then stuck them with supplementary drips, feeds, catheters, and electrical contacts. When they were done with that, the beds began to cool the bodies, and each person slid down further into torpor, cocooned in their bed and their own cold dreams. No scan was going to be fine enough to tell what they would be thinking in the years to come.
Finally Freya joined Badim, who was sitting on his bed waiting. Freya had arranged with the ship and the medical team to go in the last group, and Badim had wanted to wait for her.
Now she sat wearily on her couch. It had been a very emotional day. Badim looked around the room with a troubled expression. “It reminds me of those old photos of executions,” he said. “For a while they did it by injection.”