Ford: first chapter

Cold. Cold and wet. That was all he could feel. He couldn't move, he couldn't see and the only sound he could hear was his own shallow, panicked breathing. Suddenly light seared his eyeballs as the world moved around him. He seemed to be lying in a sealed tube of some sort, but how he had got there and for what reason eluded him. Actually, everything eluded him.
The tube slid open and newer air flowed over him, making his sweat-drenched body feel like ice. He wanted to sit up, to run from this place and never look back, but he couldn't so much as lift a finger or wiggle his toes. A rhythmic clacking approached him-footsteps. Suddenly he saw a face peering down at him through a pair of spectacles. A woman… she was wearing a coat so white it nearly blinded him again. A doctor, maybe? Was he sick? He sure didn't feel well. She didn't ask how he was. Perhaps she knew he couldn't respond. Her hands were everywhere, prodding and poking at him, pulling back his eyelids, pressing cold metal to his chest… it went on. None of it felt pleasant. A sharp pain pierced the inside of his elbow, and he felt something being pumped into his veins. And then she was gone.
He had no idea how long he laid there. It might have been minutes. It felt like hours. But slowly, very slowly, as his skin began to warm he started to shiver. He could move, only a little at first, but after a while he could curl the fingers on his left hand in and then out again. Clenching them into a tight fist, he started to work on the rest of his body. Soon he had regained enough control to sit up, and had to keep himself from crying out. Nothing should hurt that much. His joints were so stiff that they clicked and snapped painfully as he found his feet, as though he hadn't moved in years.
He tried to comprehend his surroundings. The room was a fair size, much more open than that claustrophobic tube. But it was so sterile, so completely devoid of any personality that he almost wanted to return to the tube. The cylindrical prison from which he had just freed himself seemed to slide out from the wall, and there appeared to be many others inside the walls around and across from him. What was this place?
Footsteps again. Seeing what appeared to be a door, he stumbled over next to it and waited. The door soon opened and before the doctor had even entered the room far enough to see the empty tube, he grabbed her by the shoulders and pinned her to the wall.
'What have you done to me?' he rasped.
'Major, please!' cried a voice behind him. He turned his head sharply and saw another woman, a younger one. She looked afraid of him, and understandably so. But it was more than that, and as he realised this his hold on the doctor began to slacken. She looked… familiar.
'I know you,' he said, hardly able to believe it, and as though waking from a dream released the doctor.
'Yes, and if you'll come with me, everything will start to make sense.'
He nodded vacantly and started towards her, but the doctor put a hand on his shoulder.
'Sorry, Williams, you know the routine,' said the doctor, beginning to calm down now that her patient had, 'he can meet you in the mess hall once I've had a chance to look him over, just like everyone else.'
'Well then,' this Williams nodded, 'I'll see you there, Major.'
The doctor led him back to his tube and had him sit down.
'Major,' he repeated the word, 'what does that mean?'
'One thing at a time. My name is Dr Rothery. Can you tell me your name?'
He blinked a few times and stared past her.
'F… Ford,' he said uncertainly, 'Is that a name?'
Rothery looked at his chart, which read "Charles Buford." She smiled.
A relatively short interview and physical later-though relative to what, he wasn't quite sure-Rothery had let him out of the room and said she was leading him to the mess hall. Whatever that was. He caught a glimpse of his reflection as they passed a window. It was so strange to not recognise his own features, for the face looking back at him to be as much a stranger as any of the people he passed. But by the same token nothing about him looked wrong or out of place. Like Williams, there was a sense of familiarity to his reflection, even though he couldn't summon any actual memories about either. His hair was dark like the doctor's, but shorter than everyone's he had seen so far. Still, it seemed right. Same with the thin scar on his left cheek; he might not know how he got it, but it looked like it was supposed to be there.
Once they arrived at the mess hall, Rothery's hip beeped and she hurried off in the other direction. Ford didn't ask why. That was what he wanted to go by, Ford. Even though Rothery had told him his full name, he liked this better. It was… simpler.
He took a few cautious steps into the mess hall and looked around. It was the biggest room he had seen yet, filled with many people. They milled about, mostly clustered around uniform metal tables, some eating out of plastic rectangular trays, some just talking. Ford knew he had no basis for comparison, but that food didn't smell very good.
Spotting the woman from before sitting alone-Williams, he remembered-Ford carefully navigated his way through the quiet talkers and sombre eaters until he reached her table. He had noticed back in the tube room that she looked different from the doctor, but now he realised she looked different to just about everyone there. The woman looked more like a girl to him; she couldn't have been more that twenty-five, surely. She was also moderately attractive, he supposed, not that that was exactly a priority for him at the moment, or that he was entirely sure what attractive was meant to look like. She'd set up two trays of food, presumably one for herself and one for him-and had started eating hers with little enthusiasm.
Williams looked up from her tray and smiled as she saw him standing before her.
'Well come on, take a seat,' she invited him.
'Are we… are we friends?' Ford asked.
'No,' she shook her head with a smile, 'you're just the man who saved my life.'
'Huh. Seems like the sort of thing I'd remember,' he said testily. She gave an understanding nod.
'The memory loss is normal, and only temporary of course. Same with the paralysis, but I see you figured that one out for yourself. Nobody's ever recovered that fast before, not even you. I'll have Dr Rothery make a note of it.'
'What do you mean, before? What's going on here?'
'We had to take you out of stasis for a routine checkup, just like everyone else. This is actually your fourth revival.'
Ford shook his head, not sure if he could believe this.
'A checkup?' he asked as he sat down.
'We can only keep a person in cryogenic stasis a certain time before their body and mind begin to suffer permanent damage.'
'That's a bit of an oversight.'
Williams blinked a few times with irritation.
'Well obviously we'd all have liked more time to finetune the technology before…' she stopped herself and took a breath. 'But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm sure you have questions.'
'Uh yeah. A whole hell of a lot, actually.'
'Well then, fire at will.'
He wasn't sure where to start. There was so much he needed to know, so many thoughts swirling around in his head. Who was she? Who was he, for that matter?
'So how did I save your life, exactly?' he asked. He figured it was best to start with some common ground and work from there.
'You were a soldier, the one who led his team to recover me from enemy forces, and secure some vital prototype technology I had just completed.' She was being careful not to give him any actual details, he noticed, probably to keep from overwhelming him.
'Vital prototype technology?' he repeated a dubiously as he looked her over. 'You?'
'I was taking apart supercomputers when I was ten, Major,' she said with a smirk, 'A real child prodigy. Heck, the only reason this ship flies is because of me.'
'Ship?' he repeated and she closed her eyes, brow furrowed with regret.
'Every time, I let the cat out of the bag too soon. You'd think I'd have learnt by now.'
'So we're on a ship,' he said, having trouble digesting this news, 'a… space ship?'
She nodded. Ford swallowed as he approached his next question.
'Why?'
'Well it's not as though we could just get out and walk to a new solar system,' she said earnestly.
'I'm not an idiot,' Ford snapped, 'I mean what's wrong with the old solar system that we had to leave?'
Williams sighed and slumped a little in her chair.
'We blew it. All the technology of the world at our fingertips, and we couldn't save it from ourselves.'
'Let me guess. Pollution.'
'For a start. The bigger problem was overpopulation. Nobody had enough food and water to go around, or even enough space to house everyone. We had to start firing our garbage into space, it was that bad.'
'Sounds familiar,' Ford murmured solemnly.
'World leaders tried to take steps to control the people. Even the most privileged and so-called civilised countries introduced really hardline policies. Citizens were detained without charge, refugee boats were torpedoed on sight, and the death penalty became common practice everywhere. Not exactly humanity's highest point,' she said, looking down into her drink as though ashamed for being human. Ford closed his eyes and concentrated. He could hear something, a mere shadow of a sound, but he heard it. It was gunfire, interspersed with explosions. And screams. Lots of screams. He shook him head and looked over at Williams.
'Now I'm not so sure I want to remember.'
'The war, right?' she asked. He nodded. 'Well I guess it was more like a worldwide riot. Everyone wanted what everyone else had, and soon enough the bombs started falling. But our government had an escape plan. Our deep-space radar found a planet, a whole solar system in fact, that looked like it could support life. So to cut a long story short, they built the world's biggest lifeboat-the New Hope, it was christened-threw a couple hundred thousand volunteers in the deep freeze and took off before the other countries could bomb us back to Earth.'
'I'm sorry, you said this solar system we're heading to looks like it can support life? Did anyone think to send a probe first?'
'Maybe if we'd had a couple of hundred years to spare.'
Ford brought his hand down on the table in disbelief.
'Oh great, so this could all be for nothing.'
'Hey, everyone on board this ship knew it was a long shot right from the start,' she said sharply, 'we made no illusions about that. But it's better than the alternative.'
Ford thought for a moment.
'I don't want to be here,' he realised. Williams almost laughed.
'Take a look around, Major. Who would?'
'No I mean before, back on Earth. I wanted to stay.'
She looked at him as though he were mentally unstable.
'You have to be joking. There was nothing to stay for, nothing to-'
'Not even family?' he interrupted, 'I'm pretty sure I wasn't grown in a tube; I must have had some relatives.'
But she didn't have an answer for him. Ford sighed and picked at his food.
'What about you, then?' he asked, 'You leave anyone behind?' Williams was taken aback. 'Should I not have asked that?' Ford added uncertainly.
'No, it's okay,' she said, 'It's just… you've never asked me that before.' She cleared her throat. 'Truth be told, my work is really all I've ever been. This mission, this voyage, is a dream come true for me.'
'Lucky you,' he muttered, and she looked hurt. 'Okay, maybe that was out of line,' he admitted.
'You're damn right it was,' she said indignantly.
'But I can't believe we just up and left our home like that. It can't have been more than a few weeks; maybe we can go back.'
'Actually by now it's been more like a couple of years. Memory loss, remember?'
'Years?' He couldn't believe it.
'I should know. I've had to be awake for most of it. Hey, count yourself lucky, Major. Without my prototype drive, the one you helped me secure, this voyage would have taken centuries.'
They walked the ship and talked for the rest of the day. There was a lot to cover. Before long Williams led him back to the room where he had been revived. Dr Rothery looked relieved to see Ford returning to his tube so peaceably.
'So just one more sleep and this'll all be over, I promise,' said Williams as he lay down. He looked up at her as something occurred to him.
'I won't remember any of this, will I?'
'Maybe eventually. In the meantime, I'll remember for us both.'
'But I don't get it. If that's the case, why tell me anything at all?'
'Better than spending the day alone and scared like most revivals. I figure I owe you this much.' She gave a reassuring smile as the tube closed over him.
'See you on the other side, Major.'