Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

says, “we will try to find him. But Al’s right. It doesn’t look good.”

“Well, that’s what I should be doing then,” Quinn insists. “I should be in Paris, with Henrietta, trying to find whoever is going to start all this.”

“We already have people on that,” Moretti says. “What we need are people who can execute Plan B.”

“Plan B,” Quinn repeats. “You mean people willing to murder innocent people.”

“There’s that word again,” Moretti says with distaste. “Innocent.”

“What if I refuse?”

“Go ahead,” Moretti says. “Go to Paris if you want. Go back to your apartment, open another bottle of wine, take another fistful of pills. I’m not ordering you to do this. I’m not even asking.”

“Then why the hell am I here?”

“You’re here because I already know that the day comes when you trade your identity for this flash drive. When the two of you take these cases and get to work. I figured maybe we could dispense with all the drama and get a head start.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“The only thing that makes me sure of anything anymore. Proof. From the future.”

“What kind of proof?”

“The prologue,” Moretti says. He holds up the flash drive so that it hangs in the space between them. Quinn recognizes the expression on his face from the basement of Swiss Fort Knox—from the moment he holstered his pistol, stepped forward, and identified his prize. “We know what we are,” he enunciates clearly, “but know not what we may be.”

Quinn has an image of pieces precariously stacked until they converge beneath the final gentle placement of a wedge-shaped cap. She is the keystone set at the arch’s apex—the meticulously chiseled missing middle that turns walls of wobbly, rough-hewn stone into a vast, weight-bearing dome. The buttress that must uphold the future.

Everyone in the room is focused on her, and she knows they are all thinking the same thing: the question was never how it was going to end for Quinn, and always how it would begin.

But there are two distinct and seemingly paradoxical interpretations of Quinn’s favorite quote from Hamlet. In fact, its subtle ambiguity is what drew her to it in the first place. We know what we are, but know not what we may be. Seen from one angle, it appears to emphasize the inevitability of the future—that we have little say in who and what we become. But lean slightly to either side, and it suddenly seems to reflect back at us the possibility of ultimate agency.

“There’s one thing I want,” Quinn says.

“Oh?” Moretti asks with sudden amusement. “Are we negotiating now?”

“I want access to Kilonova.”

“What, you want me to make you a key? You want to keep a toothbrush and a change of clothes here?”

“I want to store something.”

“That would make this place the single most expensive storage unit on the planet,” Moretti says. “You sure you can’t rent a U-Haul?”

“Not here here,” Quinn says. She steps forward and places both hands back on the electric surface of the plasma glass. “Before I can do this, there’s something I need to be able to leave in the past.”

39

  OVERWINTER

HENRIETTA YI IS filling with antifreeze. The pale-yellow cryoprotective cocktail is being introduced through a vein in the back of her right hand while her body temperature is gradually lowered to exactly zero degrees.

She is on the Atlantic coast of South America, in French Guiana, just a few kilometers from the European Space Agency’s primary equatorial launch site. More specifically, she is in Project Overwinter’s underground cryobiology lab, entombed within a spacious trapezoidal hibernation pod obviously designed for future astronauts of far larger statures, monitored by a distributed team of off-site cryo-anesthesiologists. Fractal ice crystals creep in from the edges of the plasma glass lid to where they will finally close over the last remaining opening.

She is wearing a hooded, fitted, custom-printed bodysuit with a web of embedded electrodes and soft polymer tubing threaded throughout, everything gathered and tethered at her middle like a thick synthetic umbilical cord. The tightly bound, twisted bundle exits the side of the pod through an airtight port, where it is separated into its individual concerns and distributed across a wall of telemetric equipment. No metaspecs to exorcise her ghosts, but Henrietta’s eyes are already closed. Her Noctowl plush is cradled securely against her, swaddled in its own wings like a silent, watchful infant.

Project Overwinter was formed through a partnership between the world’s remaining space agencies. Cryopreservation is a critical missing component in the game of interplanetary exploration, since frozen astronauts do not need to be fed, kept warm, or stimulated during long flights through the void. The experimental technology is being developed in coordination with scientists studying organisms like the North American wood frog and Antarctica’s only insect, the wingless midge—both of which have unique biologies that allow them to survive being frozen nearly solid.

Henrietta is being transformed into an extremophile.

It was assumed that one of Project Overwinter’s primary challenges would be finding subjects willing to participate in long-term, high-risk studies. Prison systems were prepared to offer inmates the option of serving the reminder of their sentences in cryogenic stasis, and researchers even started eyeing patients in persistent vegetative states. But an open call for volunteers was met with an unexpectedly enthusiastic response. It used to be that the only axis along which you could distance yourself from tragedy and trauma was space, but Overwinter was now offering the promise of time.

One of the keys to feeding the ongoing study with a consistent, diverse, and statistically significant stream of subjects was, unsurprisingly, money. One thousand USD for every month you slept, usually direct-deposited into a bank account or crypto wallet anywhere in the world, from which otherwise destitute families withdrew enough to cover food and rent. In principle, it wasn’t much different from fathers leaving their families in search of economic opportunity, then wiring money back home. But instead of celebratory visits and video streams, the family’s main provider would sleep through milestones