Daniel slept comfortably over the navigation panel. The others were sleeping in the cryogenic pods, just as they had for most of fifty-eight decades. Ten years. Each crewmember was required to take a decade shift awake as the others slept. Daniel's shift was nearly over. Seneca, the settlement a few light years from Barnard's Star, lay ahead of them at a distance of 275 years. They had traveled the long, lonely blue journey for more than twice that time. Daniel, as with most of the others, would be taking three ten-year shifts before reaching home. Home. Such an odd word. None of them had ever seen Seneca. It would, by necessity, be home when they arrived. There was no hope of any of them returning to home world, Earth.

The ship gently wakened Daniel with her quiet, even voice. She sounded like a woman of twenty-five to thirty years. They had programmed her to carry a sense of gentle concern in her intonation. Daniel once dreamed she was a real woman and had made love to her. It was a crazy dream, but not a completely unreasonable fantasy, all things considered. A male member of the crew followed the last shift he completed. In Daniel's view, he had not seen or spoken to a woman in twenty years. Soon it would be his 38th birthday. His prospects of finding a life mate were somewhere between zilch and nil. At least that was his take on things. He called the ship Caprice. There had been a reason for the name but he couldn't remember it.

'Daniel. Your rest period is complete. I have prepared soup and bread for you in the galley. Won't you please have something to eat?'

Daniel fingered an eye to clear away the sleep that had gathered there, yawned, then sat back in the navigation chair.

'Ok, Caprice.'

He swiveled the chair around and performed a controlled fall onto the grated steel deck. The room was covered wall to wall with equipment. Lights and color displays greeted him as he began the trek to the galley.

'Status report, Caprice.'

'All systems nominal. Ramjet fuel-reserve accumulation three-point-four percent above expectation. Current speed, point one five light. Cryogenics chamber twenty-seven 'A' leaking marginally. Time to failure is twenty-eight point one six years.'

Daniel skittered around the tube access vent and chuckled.

'I love you too, Caprice.'

Once he had descended two floors, Daniel entered a long walkway to the galley. The lights inside began flickering on as he approached. By the time he arrived, the lights were on and a tray of soup and bread were waiting in an inset dimple across the room. He gathered the tray and sat at one of the small, circular tables near the communications cluster. His eyes glazed over as he considered the silent, dark panel.

'Any news from Earth, Caprice.'

It was a pointless question, but he asked it frequently, anyway.

'No, Daniel,' the ship replied.

Daniel sipped at the soup, tore off a piece of bread and dipped it in. After eating it with a slurp, he sighed.

'When is next birth, Caprice?'

'Four days, twenty-three hours and eighteen minutes, Daniel.'

He nodded to himself and grunted. The roster had indicated that the next crewmember was a last-timer. That would make, whoever it was, about his age now. He had often thought that he'd just stay awake for an extra year and get to know somebody; if only to play chess or argue about the value of this whole exercise. Of course, that was strictly against the rules.

'Any idea who it is, Caprice?'

'Yes, Daniel. Cryo-tube twenty-seven 'A'.'

'Of course. Male or female?'

'Daniel, the question is irrelevant.'

Daniel exhaled in frustration.

'No it's not, Caprice. It's about the most relevant question I have at the moment. But never mind.'

Daniel scratched his head. He felt like he needed a shower. He did. His allotment for a chemical shower was overdue. As with many crewmembers during wake-time, he often did not bother with it. Today he felt like dirt. He rose from his chair and deposited the tray and empty soup cup into the disposal. He then made his way to the shower station; a walk of five minutes distance from the galley. Stripping down, he entered the sealed cubicle and discarded his clothes by throwing them out onto the floor. The door closed with a soft click and the quiet wheeze of a change in air pressure. The chemical spray began with an insistent hiss.

Then the lights went out.

Cryo-tube 27A hissed lazily for several hours. The ships probes registered the micro changes in air pressure first, then sampled the sensors of the tube. Nanobots were released to spread over the affected area, locating fractures and microscopic fissures in the material. Once the damage had been assessed the Nanobots returned to their storage container and reported the findings to the ship. The ship's computer calculated the risk, deciding there was enough to mention it to Daniel, but not enough to repair the leak. Why? This was the question that should have occurred in Daniel's mind. It had not.

As Daniel had made his way to the showers, the fissure had split further along the frozen seam it traced. Within a few seconds, a rip cut along the seam and down to the face shield. Frozen gas leaked insanely into the chamber, while the containment pumps whirred madly to compensate for lost pressure within the tube. It was too much, too late. The face shield split in two, then exploded away. The change in pressure scrambled the frozen body inside, pulverizing it into millions of glistening grains of skin, bone, blood and sinew. The occupant of Cryo-tube 27A was dead.

The face shield flew across the room and embedded itself into the bulkhead, cutting into the plastic material down to the flexible conduit inside. Insulation instantly froze and split. Fibreoptics inside the conduit broke away, severing thousands of virtual circuit connections. Super-frozen gasses continued to escape from the tube, filling the chamber with a fog of condensation. Frozen molecules seeped into open vents and cascaded over fluid carrying channels, chilling the lubricating liquid into a thickened sludge. A pump froze closed. Sensor signals were scrambled and lost. Fibreoptic cables whipped around in their confined conduit, spraying random information in sparkles of light across the frozen steam.

The Cryo chamber disconnected its sensors in just the right random order, releasing faulty and misleading information into the computer's subnet. The ship responded by shutting down peripheral life support, casting Daniel into complete darkness.

Daniel swore in the absolute lack of any light source. It was an experience that few can bare but for a few minutes. To make things worse, the air jets ceased when chemical shower spray halted. There was only the slight hum of the operating pumps under the floor ... and that was all.

'CAPRICE! DAMN IT! LIGHTS!'

There was no response. How could that be? Caprice was everywhere all of the time. Daniel called several more times with precisely the same effect. Swearing to himself, he forced open the shower doors and fell to the floor. He was fairly sure he could feel his way to the access panel under the false flooring. From there he might find his way to the hall, which he hoped would be lit.

Daniel crawled along the floor until he encountered his clothes. Right where he had thrown them. He fished through the pockets until he found his inspection flashlight. Its pencil-thin beam would not provide much light in a larger room, but it was better than nothing. He flicked it on and pointed it to the floor. Several squares over, he found the two-foot square floor tile with recessed handles. He pulled it up resulting in a rubbery suction sound and a quick wisp of air. He was greeted by a three-foot crawlspace lit dimly by long, thin red-light emitting tubes. It was hardly much more than a glow, but bright enough for navigation.

Daniel sat back and dangled his feet through the opening. While there, he slipped on his pants, shirt and sneakers. Naturally, it was only then that he thought about trying the door. He slapped himself in the head with the palm of his hand, then pulled himself up and out of the opening. He always had had a habit of making things more complicated than necessary. With the penlight, he found his way to the door. Locked. Sealed shut by a simple lack of electricity in a relay coil. This, of course, was a safety precaution built in to every door of the ship. In an emergency, lock the doors against the possibility of who knows what. Daniel sighed loudly, then returned to the two-foot square opening in the floor.

Peripheral Life Support Facilities: data search error
Daniel: current shift
-location: not found
PLS-Mess: data search error
Stasis Chamber: critical
-temperature: 35 K
-pods: nominal
-pods: nominal
-pods: nominal
-pods: nominal
-pods: nominal
-stasis pod 27A: not found
-environment: not viable
Mobile Observation Units: initialized
-panel 14.78-11: damaged
-panel 14.78-12: damaged
-panel 14.78-13: damaged
-panel 14.78-14: damaged
--conduits 11k1-j7: inoperable
-stasis pod 27A: inoperable
--sensor: inoperable
--cryo-emissions: nominal
--Eugenia: inoperable
Nanobotic Recovery Systems: initialized
-Eugenia: inoperable
-panels 14.78-11-14: recovered
--conduits 11k1-j7: recovered
-stasis pod 27A sensor: disabled
-stasis pod 27A cryo-emissions: disabled
-stasis pod 27A containment pump: disabled
-Eugenia: inoperable
-Eugenia: inoperable
-Eugenia: inoperable
____
____
____

-Eugenia: inoperable
Daniel: current shift
-location: Duct 64
PLS-Shower: resource preservation
-temperature: nominal
-oxygen|nitrogen feed: resource preservation
--reversed
-gravitation: nominal
-photon release: resource preservation
--reversed
-communications: resource preservation
Sample Retrieval Units: initialized
-stasis pod 27A: isolation initiated
--isolation error
--isolation error
--isolation error
Stasis Chamber: unstable
-temperature: 36 C
SRU: impurities found
-assessment: organic
-location: stasis pod 27A
-isolation initialized

Daniel dropped the three feet from the opening to the metal grated area below, in a controlled freefall though partial weightlessness. The ship was no longer accelerating at 1G, and relied on artificial gravity to make up for it. When the lights went off, the gravity had reduced to .6G, the current acceleration rate. He remained in the red light for a minute to adjust, then began the crawl to the access tile under the hallway outside the showers. He could smell something antiseptic in the air as he progressed and wondered what it meant. A 'T' appeared twenty feet along the passageway. Daniel noticed that to the right, the passage grew pitch black, while to the left it was brighter further on. That was fortunate, because the hall was in that direction.

He took the turn just as the sound of environmental pumps came to life. It startled him. Then he sighed in relief. Life sustaining air was moving into the passageway, much to his joy. The sudden shift in his weight told him that gravity had been restored. Daniel had a thought. Perhaps Caprice was back online.

'Caprice?'

Nothing. Then he remembered that he would need to use his transceiver while in a maintenance passageway. He fingered his side belt and, with dismay, could see it in his minds eye, sitting in a dimple in his bunkroom.

'Damn.'

Daniel continued down the passage until he reached the separation bulkhead. The seal between sections of the ship was maintained on many levels. Here, it was held by a set of dogs securing a rounded, square sealing door. He yanked at the dogs, freeing them one by one in the correct order. Pushing down on the release lever, he was greeted with the comforting sound of a pressure seal breaking away, and the hatch came free. He set the hatch on the grate behind him and slipped through.

Daniel my brother you are older than me
Do you still feel the pain of the scars that won't heal
Your eyes have died but you see more than I
Daniel you're a star in the face of the sky ...[/color]

Sam stared up into the midnight sky and wondered. It had been 30 years since Daniel had taken off on the great quest ... a rescue mission to Seneca, the last remaining outpost of humanity in the stars. He remembered how Daniel argued the importance of this mission. Sam had argued just as well that Daniel would be lucky if he ever awoke from stasis. And anyway, by the time they made it to Seneca, 100,000 years of Earth time would pass and what would be the point? No one would remember or even care that a few hundred foolish humans had taken to the stars.

Daniel argued that time did not matter, that life and meaning were all that existed. Time and space just separated us from each other, making it all seem unimportant. Daniel was sure, at 18, that he knew better. Time would tell.

Sam sipped the remainder of his iced tea and rubbed a tear from his eye. He would never see his brother again. No one would, no one on Earth.

"God's speed, my brother," he said quietly then returned to the rancher style organic house that was to be his home for another 40 years ... until his death ... of old age. Daniel, in the meantime, would have hardly begun his journey.

Daniel
-utilizing manual access
Samples
-retrievals secured
--loading
--cellular function
---optimal
Eugenia
-inoperable
Samples
-cellular function
--optimal
Eugenia
-inoperable
Samples
-tissue structure
--loading
________
________
________
--assembled
Systems
-incomplete
--loading supplements
________
________
________
Eugenia
-inoperable
Systems
-installed
Stasis Chamber 27A
-reconstruct
Daniel
-intrachambers
Systems
-installed
-dependent function
Tissue Reconstruct
-failed
-failed
-failed
-failed
Mitose Remaining
-incomplete
Harvest Gamete
-mitose
--failed
--failed
Dependent Systems
-optimal
Daniel
-accessible
Sample
-gametes harvested
Stem
-optimal
Mitosis
-optimal
Tissue Remaining
-replaced
Stasis Chamber 27A
-optimal
-occupied
-systems optimal
--independent
Eugenia
-inoperable

Daniel promptly cracked his head against a stanchion just inside the hallway bulkhead. He groaned, then sat back and sighed. After rubbing the spot on his forehead for a few moments, he leaned forward and continued on his way under the hallway floor. He took the left turn that would lead him to the access hatch beside the bathroom door. His skin crawled and he assumed the confined space had made him jittery. A few moments later, he reached the hallway floor access hatch and worked at the dogs to release it.

"Caprice?" he called out as he entered the now illuminated hallway.

No immediate response.

"Damn it, Caprice, what the hell is going on?" he breathed only slightly above his breath as his hands smoothed over the wrinkles in his shirt and pants. He looked around the hallway and gathered his composer. Just around the corner would be a computer console inset into a maintenance hatch. Maybe he could contact her from there.

Eugenia
-inoperable
Caprice
-maintain life systems
-issue response: soothing
--Everything will be normal soon.
Ship Systems
-optimal
--minor manual engagements
---Hatches 4B20-1
Eugenia: Systems
-circulation
--pulse frequency
---optimal
-endocrine regulation
--optimal
-skeleton
--integrity restored
-waste production/digestion
--responsive
-nervous: involuntary
--optimal
-nervous: voluntary
--no engagement
Daniel: Systems
-nervous: voluntary
--engaged
Eugenia: Tissue
-optimal
Stasis Chambers: Access
-seal
Issue Response: forestall
-Wait a sec. I'll be back.

Daniel ran a hand threw his sweat-dampened hair and took several steps toward the maintenance hatch around the corner. Just as he reached the beveled edge of the ships bulkhead, Caprice's voice filled the hallway.

"Everything will be normal soon," she stated in a soothing tone. Daniel stopped and looked up into the space where people imagine voices from nowhere arise. He nearly laughed in his sudden burst of relief.

"Ah! There you are, Caprice! I need ..."

"Wait a sec. I'll be back."

Daniel paused for a moment, his face twisted in that childish questioning grimace he donned when not sure he believed what he heard. Wait a sec? he thought.

"Uh ... where are you going? Caprice? I need a status report. The lights went out in the shower and I had to dig my way out of the bathroom."

He scratched his head and continued to the maintenance panel. A worrisome thought occurred to him and he voiced it with genuine uncertainty. If anything ever happened to the ship's computer ...

"You all right, Caprice?"

He stopped at the panel and clipped it open, and then slid out the small keyboard and tapped the system signal key. The flat screen came to life in predominantly blue tones. He waited for the system to respond. Several seconds passed with no indication. He tapped the system signal key again, and the screen filled with the graphic of the maintenance menu. Daniel exhaled and selected the system status screen.

Nanobots flurried in channels of activity across the floors of the Stasis Chamber like ionized dust. A static shock, and all she could reach out for came to her through a small round glass. Eugenia, she thought. Eugenia. No response, no connection.

Pain laced her throat and locked her chest. Panic lifted her arms against the lid of her pod. The mask dropping to her face forced her to breathe. She caught the rythmn and kept it. The sheerness of the elipse on the panel and the matte of the remaining interior were nonsense. The click that meted out her oxygen meant little more. She imagined it was one, and one again, and one again, and one again, and one again, but it meant nothing. Her arms were still above her. Fingers splayed she traced the impregnable seal; she knew its measure. Each click, each one, had an equal length of time between them, but each elapse did not hold the same value, a variable experience of passage existed in every metered moment.

The mask disappeared above her head. Illumination flickered then brightened; pressure was released and gauged and released and gauged and the lid left her fingertips. Temperature, she thought. No response, no connection. Her arms were still above her head. The clicks had ceased and it frightened her that she'd barely noticed it leave. The slopes of the curves of the planes of polymers above were too distant to measure, to recognize. Her arms could not reach them. The lines above were being split into rough triangles by the webs of her digits. Her arms rose further with her shoulders; she sat, her head thrown back. It was too great a distance. Her head righted itself only when her neck complained of strain. The seams in the panelled walls were not so distant. Her hands sought those and did not find contact. The fluid movement of jointed phalanges caught her. One hand grasped the other as the walls went out of focus.

Eugenia.

Daniel studied the status screen with a mixture of interest and wariness. All life support and hull integrity systems reported nominal but for an anomaly in stasis chamber 27A. Daniel stared at the number a moment and then recalled Caprice's earlier report; Stasis chamber 27A ...

Curious, he switched the status screen to onboard AI systems and Caprice's core. All peripheral systems reported nominal. Nanobot reserves were indicating completion of primary and secondary tasks. But, it was an orange caution indicator that caught his attention. Caprice's core AI hippocampus reported signal inhibitions of a sort Daniel had only seen in simulations. Unable to recall what this warning indicated, he switched the screen to library mode and keyed in the status indicator code. He read for several seconds before the chill of realization sank in and brought a bead of sweat to his forehead.

Caprice was somehow dissociated from peripheral systems and, therefore, unreachable. A dull panic energized Daniel's fingers and he searched through maintenance records, procedures and systems response indicators. He found the entry associated with main AI core soft reset and reactive systems triggering. He would have to go to the main engineering console to initiate a troubleshooting program sequence.

"Shit, Caprice. You said you'd be right back," he mumbled as her words came to mean something more than they had at first hearing. Without closing the panel, Daniel took off in a sprint around the curved hall walls, to the pnemo-lift and down to the engineering deck. At the console, he initiated troubleshooting sensors and programs and scanned several of the instrument screens as the process advanced.

Nothing. All systems were nominal. All circuits integral - Fiber systems intact and functioning - Memory systems operation ... wait ... one status message stood out:

Memory Systems Active
Status: Standby.

"Standby? What the hell is standby?" he cursed to himself as he checked the online procedure manuals. From what he could tell, and stated as a euphemism, Caprice appeared to be sleeping. He shook his head. This could not be a good thing.

*warning bell*

Daniel whirled around at the sound of the warning indicator and caught site of the Status Containment Tube Status Indicator screen. He turned to the screen and read:

Containment Release Status: Complete
Stasis Chamber: 27A [Eugenia - 3rd Birth]
Subject Status: Independent | Viable
Schedule Status: Unscheduled

Daniel's shock froze him for several seconds, then he spun around and took off toward the inter-floor ladder well and scrambled up two floors of steps until he reached the bulkhead door to the stasis chambers. It remained closed. Sealed.

"Damn it ... " he cursed under his breath, then accessed the maintenance hatch beside the door, entered the override code and unsealed the door. It slid open and offered Daniel a strange mixture of smells and there was something wrong about the scent. He rushed through and down two rows of chambers until he reached the legend plate: 20-29. He turned in and came to a near instant halt. There was a naked woman barely standing at the open hatch of stasis chamber 27A.

Eugenia was awake.

He rushed over and caught her just as her unused legs gave way.

Insofar as things like Caprice cannot intend to fall, she did not---least of all into the arms of one whose whole image could snap her into recognition.

She had needed to measure the seams of the walls. But, they illuded her dimmed perception with their distance. This space, one she couldn't evade or fill needed to be overcome. And, all at once, she was able to see scores more information. Everything she sought was closer but she couldn't tell by how much. And, then his appearance constituted the first recognizable value. That thing equalled Daniel. And, now that he was somehow suspending her and she could feel the millions of fibers of his apparel, she recognized the second. The stasis chamber below her lay gaping. That was 27A and Eugenia wasn't in it.

She called for Eugenia and there was nothing. She called for anything and there was nothing. She had goose bumps. She was stiff.

Daniel suddenly felt foolish. He could feel her resistance to him strongly enough to indicate she was capable of standing on her own. He released her and stepped back a single step, then turned to the clothing cabinets that vertically lined the corner of the wall. He grabbed the first white cotton smock available and unfolded it, then held it out for her. Embarrassed, he stared at her a moment, then looked away.

"Umm ... Here, put this on, Eugenia. I would have been here for your awakening but, well ... you are a bit early. Caprice reported a problem but it didn't seem important."

He was running on at the mouth, talking just to fill the void; perhaps to cover his embarrassment. But he knew she would need electrolytes, soft food and exercise soon to strengthen her muscles.

Still holding the open smock out in his hands, he paused. Her mind appeared to be somewhere else. Zoned ... spaced out, Daniel thought.

She nearly collapsed again once his support left. But the smock was produced and she assessed it, standing. Then she didn't give it any more immediate notice. Her eyes gave away her understanding at his words though her face moved not. Her arms and back had a childish sway, as if testing the spring of her muscles. The digits of her hands curled and flexed. She stood silent and naked, staring at him, moving parts of herself in twitching increments.

With rather a sudden movement, she snatched the smock and, fumbling with it awkwardly, draped it over herself in a manner the designer hadn't intended. She looked like she wanted to say something. But, before doing so, she walked awkwardly past him, exiting the stasis chamber, and walking with Frankensteinian grace down the hall.

Dumbfounded. It was the word that best expressed Daniel's state of mind. He took a quick accounting of things. CAPRICE had yet to respond to any of his commands. Eugenia had stepped, more like fallen, out of a cryo-unit that should have been shattered. He scratched his head and exhaled heavily.

Eugenia was walking away from him. She seemed ... more robot than woman. Everyone had been warned of a condition called Cryo-Psychosis. It was a term that meant certain termination for an awakened shipmate. He'd not heard of a single case of it in the nearly three centuries of logs. Wonderful, he thought. I get to deal with it.

Before jumping to conclusions, however, he would have to consult the manual, and somehow manage to get Eugenia into the medical scanner. Only then could he be certain. He didn't want to be certain. Not if it meant passing up an opportunity to get to know an actual live female. The prospects of meeting another before dying of old age was remote. And Daniel just wasn't up for that.

He turned and walked in the direction she had ... well ... nearly goose-stepped. The thought brought a shiver to his chest. This just wasn't going to be all that much fun.

"Umm ... Eugenia! Hold up a sec. Maybe we could take a little stroll to Medical?"