The thermal blanket crinkled reassuringly as Hayden Jones pulled it tighter around his shoulders. Across from him, a man in a loose-fitting tunic set a metallic cube about the size of an eyeball on the table.
“Where am I?” Hayden asked.
“You’re in New Tigard,” the man explained.
Hayden’s pulse accelerated. He remembered being diagnosed with an inoperable glioblastoma, and Peggy agreeing without hesitation to the his-n-hers cryogenics package — Find Your Future in the Future!
“My wife’s cryopod —”
“Yours was processed first. When you woke up, we had to suspend operations …”
Hayden lost track of what the man was saying because the movement of his lips didn’t match the words he heard, as if they were trapped in a poorly dubbed foreign film.
Sensing his confusion, the man motioned towards the cube on the table. “A language translator. It took us time to reconstruct a grammar for twenty-first-century English. We apologize for the incontinence.”
Hayden smirked, but the man continued.
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“We missed a failsafe while down-powering your cryopod. An emergency revival subroutine clicked in and viola!”
Hayden’s eyebrows pinched together, creating a vertical fissure in his forehead.
The man cleared his throat. “Your revival was an unfortunate antecedent.”
“You mean, an accident?”
“Our first mistake in more than a century — an impressive record, considering the thousands of cryogenic eunuchs we’ve down-powered.” A friendly smile showed shockingly white teeth.
Hayden’s forehead crease deepened.
The man’s smile collapsed. “What did you expect?”
“That you’d revive us?”
“That’s awfully presumptuous. You freezer-boomers throw yourselves into cryopods because you’re riddled with cancer, degenerative heart failure and inflated self-importance, and then expect us to thaw you out and cure what ails you?”
“Well …”
“A suitable analogy: you buy a house in the suburbans. A year later the previous owner appears from the basement and expects to sleep in your bed and eat your tasty snacks.”
That didn’t seem a fair comparison to Hayden.
“It’s taken 300 years to fix your generation’s mess. Only in the past decayed have we been able to go outside without respirators or prospective suits.”
Hayden didn’t like the man’s tone. As a simple small-claims lawyer, he didn’t have any influence or power over things like that.
“Right, right. You were just an innocent sick man who was hoping to wake up in a brighter future after a cure for your cancer had been found.”
“Has it?”
“Have you been hearing? You have been charged with a serious crime —”
“Crime?” Hayden sat up straight.
“Yes. I’m your barista.”
“My what?”
The man frowned as he reconsidered his words. “Your advocate in legal proceedings — your barista.”
“You mean my barrister? My lawyer?”
“That is what I said. You are charged with temporal trespass. As a society of laws, we held administrative proceedings, found all you freezer-boomers guilty, and were carrying out the down-powering sentence. When you awakened, the judge threw out the convictions and required new travails for everyone. You face the termination penalty, but we hope you will consider — how do you put it — ‘policing an entreaty’.”
Stuck on the prospects of a ‘termination penalty’, Hayden struggled to keep up. “Are you offering a plea bargain?”
With a flourish, the man tapped the cube. The tabletop lit up, displaying a digital document. “The court is willing to accept a plea to disorderly conduct. That does not carry a termination penalty.”
“Alive is good,” Hayden conceded.
“The sentence is solitary incarceration for not fewer than 100 years and not to exceed your natural life. If you’ll just notate …” The man pointed to the bottom of the form.
