Story © by Mark Cotterill 1998
All Rights Reserved
page by Jilli

PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN GLASS HOUSES
SHOULDN'T BUY WALLPAPER

BY:   Mark Cotteril

When I finally got back to Earth,   I swore I was going to have a good time.  I had spent the last ten years cooped up inside a metal tube no bigger than a tourist bus with seven of the most boring,   lifeless and uninteresting people humanity had ever created. They were the world's foremost scientific specialists on Human Cryogenic Hibernation and such related stuff, all just waiting around for the day we could go back, when the Earth had recovered from the impact.

Everything before we left had happened so fast that it's hard to remember how I got involved in it all, needless to say I was available when it happened, and so was the vessel. It had been designed for eight people to travel to Mars, set up camp and then return. With a few modifications it was turned into the   'Ark'   that it was now, a ship that could sustain eight people for ten or eleven years then bring them back, that was the plan.

The asteroid had hit right on schedule, though several kilometres away from where they said it would land, not that that had made much difference. It hit the Pacific Ocean with the force of innumerable atomic bombs, wiping out billions of people, almost everyone in fact, but it was nothing as compared to what followed. A nuclear winter lowered the Earth's surface temperature to minus three-hundred degrees, which killed off the rest. The entire population of the planet was dead, mankind had ceased, save for us and the select few who had been accepted into   'storage'.

This huge freezer had been the accumulation of the worlds current Cryogenic technologies, very much in their infancy, and the handful of scientists that knew that technology had suddenly become the most important people in the world. The various survival plans had come down to one. Any attempt to preserve a group of people was dependent not just on avoiding the immediate results of the asteroid's impact, but on the events of the years that followed. When the necessary supplies and resources were taken into consideration there was only one option; cryogenic storage.

This way the largest number of people could be saved and no time limit needed to be set, just so long as the revival team was still around. That was our part in the plan. The storage chambers, buried deep inside the caves of the one of the world's highest mountains, ran on automatic. The revival process, however, was not. It was a complicated process, one that the world's best minds on the subject would be needed to complete.

As the early morning sun rose, our small shuttlecraft touched down on the icy mountaintop near to the entrance for the storage chambers. We were all eager to return home, to breathe real air and see the sun shining in the sky. We also wanted to see what condition the planet was in after its horrific ordeal. Way up here, in the small village close to the underground complex, things didn't seem too bad. Whatever had happened during the days following zero-hour had mostly missed the village, and the thick ice had melted, leaving some buildings intact, though of course no people. We were alone on this newly cleansed planet, it was obvious. The eight of us were the last humans alive, under any meaningful definition of the word.

The group set to work, first locating the site of the cryogenic storage facility further down the mountain on foot, then slowly carving a road out of the fallen rocks and ice with an old earth-mover we'd found in one of the more well preserved buildings. With a little more searching we found other supplies, electrical generators and even a couple of other vehicles. A small truck, which the scientists used to drive from our base in the village down to the storage site, and a sports car, which I claimed for myself. I figured that I had deserved it.

My work was done; I had achieved the mission that I had been given, the science team had survived the term, though a couple of times we had almost killed each other, and they were back to revive the others. When my superiors had thawed out they would no doubt thank me. So while the technicians worked I tinkered with the car, it had become my new passion. Within a few weeks I had it running like a dream.

Now I really was enjoying myself, but driving around the village soon became boring and I yearned for a more challenging sport. The mountain road was the perfect place for me to really test the car's performance. Unfortunately, things were not to last. It was on one of the particularly sharp turns where I had been perfecting my cornering techniques that the accident happened.

Knowing that the road would be clear I took the curve at speed, perhaps a little too fast if I am honest, but it was a very unlucky coincidence that the only other road vehicle in the world, the truck, coincidentally filled with the only cryogenic scientists in the world, happened to be coming up in the other direction. Luckily I managed to stay on the road and save the car from plummeting down the side of the mountain where it would surely have been smashed to pieces, but the driver of the truck was not so adept.

I found something that looked like part of the truck several days later at the bottom of a ravine. Evidently the drop was every bit as dangerous as I had thought, it had been a lucky escape for me. On reflection I suppose I had been a little careless, but I'd been so bored for so long, and that car was my only entertainment. I haven't driven it since then, of course, I've been too busy. I have a new pass-time now, well it's more of an obligation I suppose. I'm trying to study the manuals on Cryogenic storage techniques that the scientists left behind.

END