Chapter 3: The Waking

The first thing I was aware of was warmth. Not the warmth of blankets or sunshine but something deeper, something that seemed to come from inside my bones, as though my skeleton had been gently heated and the rest of me was catching up. I felt it in my fingers first, then my chest, then my face. There was a hum — low, mechanical, steady — and voices. Women's voices, speaking softly, one of them very close.

"She's surfacing. Pulse is strong."

"Should I —"

"Not yet. Let her come up on her own. Too much stimulus and we'll lose the gradient."

I heard movement — like a group of people shuffling out of the room — and then a door closing.

I tried to open my eyes. The lids felt sealed, not with adhesive but with disuse, the way a door sticks when it hasn't been opened in a long time. I worked at it. Light came in, diffused and golden, nothing like the blue-white of the room where I'd been taken.

The capsule. Freid. The robots. The cold.

My body convulsed. I sat up, or tried to, and a hand pressed firmly on my shoulder, easing me back down.

"You're safe," said a voice. A woman's voice, low and clear, with an accent I couldn't place, not quite American, not quite anything. "You're safe. No one is going to hurt you. My name is Helen, and you're in my home."

I opened my eyes fully. The room was unlike any room I had ever been in. The walls appeared to be made of a material that shifted between cream and pale gold depending on the angle, and they curved where they met the ceiling, so there were no hard corners anywhere. The light seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. There were no fixtures, no bulbs, no windows that I could see, yet the room was filled with a warm, even glow that felt like late afternoon. The air smelled faintly of something green and alive, like a garden after rain.

The woman standing over me was in her mid-fifties, with close-cropped gray hair and brown skin and the kind of face that looked like it had spent a lot of time smiling. She wore simple clothes — loose trousers, a soft shirt in a color between blue and gray — and she was watching me with an expression of such frank, unhurried curiosity that for a moment I forgot to be afraid.

"Where am I?" My voice came out cracked and thin, as though it hadn't been used in a long time.

"You're in San Francisco. In my house, on the hill above the bay."

"How did I get here? The last thing I — Freid Huffman, he had these robots, they put me in —"

"I know." She said it gently. "We know what happened to you. We'll explain everything. But first I need you to drink something."

She held out a small cup: ceramic, handmade, slightly uneven at the rim. The liquid inside was clear and faintly golden, like a weak tea. I took it and drank without thinking. It was warm and tasted of honey and something herbal I couldn't name. Almost immediately the trembling in my hands subsided and a clarity came over me, as though a window had been cleaned.

"Good," she said. "Now. I have some questions for you, and then you'll have some for me, and I suspect mine will be easier than yours. Can you tell me your name?"

"Juliana West."

"And the last thing you remember clearly?"

"A room. In a house in Pacific Heights. A man named Freid Huffman put me in a — a cryonic pod. Against my will. There were robots." Saying it aloud, it sounded absurd. Like a fever dream, or the plot of a bad film. "What day is it?"

"Let me ask you first: what day do you think it is?"

"It was Thursday. June twenty-fourth." I paused. "2027."

She nodded slowly. Something moved across her face, not surprise, but a kind of confirmation, the way a doctor looks when a test result comes back as expected.

"It is a Thursday," she said. "You're right about that. And it is June. The seventeenth."

"The seventeenth?" I said. "Wait — that's a week before..." I trailed off, confused. I had been frozen on the twenty-fourth. The seventeenth was before the twenty-fourth. My mind fumbled with the arithmetic, looking for sense in the numbers before the real answer arrived.

"Where's my — I need my phone. I need to call Edward."

"Juliana." She said my name the way you say the name of someone you've been wanting to meet for a long time. "The year is 2100."

I stared at her.

"You have been in cryonic suspension for seventy-three years."

I heard the words. I understood them individually. Each word was clear, each syllable was precise. But together they did not make sense. They were sounds arranged in the shape of a sentence but containing no meaning, like a phrase in a language I didn't speak.

"That's not possible," I said.

"I know it seems —"

"No. That is not possible." I was sitting up now, and the hand on my shoulder was gone and I was looking around the room for something — anything — that I recognized. A clock. A window. A phone. There was nothing. The curved walls, the sourceless light, the green smell. Nothing I knew. "This is — you've drugged me. Or I'm dreaming. I'm still in the pod and this is some kind of —"

"You're not in the pod," Helen said. "You haven't been in the pod for four months. We found you during a renovation of a residential tower that had been built in the 2040s on the site of the old Pacific Heights mansion. Your capsule was in a sealed subbasement vault — concrete, steel, and what appears to have been some kind of signal-blocking material in the walls. He'd walled it off deliberately and gone to a lot of trouble to ensure the chamber stayed connected to the city power lines — redundant conduits, a backup generator, battery systems designed to carry through short-term outages. He was ruthless and cruel, but it seemed that he really did not want to kill you. Nobody knew the vault was there. The original construction crew in the forties apparently hit the sealed chamber and just built over it. It was only when the current renovation team went deeper, to install a new geothermal system, that they broke through. The system was still running."

"Four months?"

"It took us that long to revive you safely. Cryonic revival is — well, it's not simple, even now. Your body was in remarkable condition. You were young and healthy when you were frozen, and the Chinese technology in that capsule turned out to be superb. The preservation was nearly perfect." She paused. "The revival was the hard part. We had to bring your temperature up over several weeks, repair cellular damage, restart your organs all in sync with careful monitoring. And before we could wake you, we had to clear your system of every communicable pathogen you were carrying."

"What do you mean?"

"You were carrying influenza. Rhinoviruses — what you called the common cold. Epstein-Barr. HPV. A dormant tuberculosis exposure. You were, in effect, a museum of diseases that no longer exist." She said this with a note of wonder, almost awe, as though I were a rare artifact, which, I suppose, I was. "We introduced agents into your bloodstream — engineered molecular agents — that hunted down and eliminated every harmful pathogen. It took several weeks. If we had woken you without doing this, you could have started epidemics that haven't existed for half a century."

"The whole thing was worldwide news," she continued, in the same even tone she might have used to describe the weather. "When they opened the capsule, they thought at first that you were dead — preserved as some kind of exhibit. A curiosity. But your color was wrong for that. You were too pink. A person from 2027, perfectly preserved and still alive. They set up a facility at Travis, the old air base up in Solano County. It was a major operation: medical teams from three continents, the phage work alone took a team of forty people working in shifts for weeks. Everyone wanted to be involved. It was the most extraordinary medical case in a generation."

"And you?" I asked. "Why am I in your house and not at that facility?"

"Because I live three blocks from where they found you." She said this plainly, without false modesty. "I'm a historian, and I've spent most of my career studying the period you come from. When I heard about them finding you, I walked over to see what I could do to help. And when it came time to decide where you'd recover, I volunteered. They thought it would be best for you to wake up in the city where you went to sleep."

She paused, watching my face.

"We all thought you'd be more comfortable this way. Waking up in a house, with people around you, in a part of the world where you went to sleep. Rather than in a facility surrounded by medical equipment and people in uniforms." She leaned forward slightly. "But if you'd prefer something else, we can arrange it. Your own apartment. A place with trained counselors. We can give you any environment you'd like. This was just what we thought would be best."

I looked around the room, the curved walls, the warm light, the handmade cup still in my hands.

"No," I said. "This is good. I feel comfortable here."

Helen nodded, and something in her posture relaxed, as though she'd been holding a small tension she hadn't shown.

I was shaking my head. Not because I disbelieved her — the room, the light, the air, the cup, the fabric of the clothes she wore, none of it belonged to any world I knew — but because my mind was refusing to integrate what my senses were telling me. The information was arriving but had nowhere to land. Seventy-three years. It was not a span of time I could hold. It was not a distance I could see across.

It might seem strange, reading this, that I wasn't immediately breaking down, grieving and consumed by the question of what had happened to everyone I knew. My parents. Edward. My friends. I had been calling out for them just minutes earlier. The truth is that the knowledge that everyone in my life was dead, or impossibly old, or simply gone was so large and so total that I couldn't go near it. I was in shock, and shock has its own wisdom: it lets you function, lets you ask questions and drink tea and look at views, while keeping the unbearable thing at arm's length. I would go near it eventually. When I did, it nearly destroyed me. But that day, I was mercifully numb.

"I want to see outside," I said.

Helen studied me for a moment. Then she nodded.

"I was going to suggest that myself. I think the evidence of your eyes will be more convincing than anything I can tell you." She offered me her hand. "Can you stand?"

I could. My legs felt weak but functional, like a machine that hadn't been turned on in a while and needed to warm up. She led me out of the room and down a corridor — the same curved walls, the same sourceless light — and up a flight of stairs that seemed to be carved from a single piece of pale stone. At the top was a door that opened onto a rooftop terrace.

I stepped outside, and the world ended and began again.

The bay was there. That was the first thing I saw and the thing I clung to, the great wide sweep of San Francisco Bay, blue-gray in the afternoon light, stretching east toward the hills of Oakland and Berkeley. The water was there. The hills were there. The sky was a blue I had never seen in San Francisco, depthless and clean, without the brown tinge of smog or the white haze of fog. The air tasted different. It tasted alive, like the air in the room but more so, rich with oxygen and the salt of the Pacific and something floral I couldn't identify.

And the Golden Gate Bridge was still standing.

That was what broke me. That rust-red span, those impossible cables, those two towers holding up nothing but sky. It was there, exactly where it had always been, connecting the city to the Marin headlands across the mouth of the bay. I grabbed the railing of the terrace and my knees nearly gave out because the bridge was there, which meant this was real, which meant this was San Francisco, which meant everything else was also real.

But everything else was different.

The city I had known was gone. Not destroyed — transformed. The skyline was unrecognizable: where the blocky towers of the Financial District had stood, there were now structures I had no vocabulary for: tall, organic, more grown than built, their surfaces shifting between white and green with what I would later learn were living walls, facades of moss and vine and flowering plants maintained by systems I could not yet fathom. Between and among these towers were bridges and walkways at multiple levels, threading through the air like the strands of an enormous web. Below them, the streets, if they were still streets, were lined with trees so large and so abundant that the ground level was a canopy, a forest floor dappled with light.

I looked south, across the rooftops of the city, and tried to find SoMa, where my apartment had been. I couldn't pick it out. The whole skyline had been remade — the low blocky buildings and parking lots and construction sites I remembered replaced everywhere by the same living towers, green-walled and interconnected, rising from streets that were now garden corridors. I thought of the morning view from my SoMa apartment: the tall ceilings, the bay that made me feel like I was surveying a kingdom. That building was gone. That view was gone. The city had swallowed it and grown something new.

I looked out at the bridge. At the bay. At the towers that grew where my world had been. The wind off the water touched my face, warm, nothing like the east wind of Boston or the knife-edge Pacific gusts I remembered. A warm wind in San Francisco. That detail, more than the towers or the transformed skyline, made me feel the distance. Seventy-three years. A different climate. A different world.

"I believe you," I said.

Helen put her hand on my arm. Her grip was steady and kind, and I realized I was crying, though I couldn't have said whether from wonder or from grief or from the simple overwhelm of standing in a future I had never been meant to see.

"Let's go inside," she said. "I'll make you something to eat. And then, if you're ready, I'll tell you what happened while you were sleeping."