Suspension chamber
Suspension chamber is a sealed tank that holds a human in cold sleep. The crew call the chambers coffins. Holsten Mason says he would like to hate them, except that no member of the human race has that option.
Description
A chamber is a coffin shaped tank with a clear cover, long enough for one person and not much more. The sleeper wears a light suit that opens at the back where the tubes go in. Waking is mechanical. Fine needles withdraw from the skin and tubes pull free of more intimate places, and the chamber has already prepared the body before it lets the mind surface.
Each chamber has a panel on the outside. A cool blue glow means good function. Green and then yellow mean a chamber in trouble, and the panel carries a host of small alerts that Holsten takes for bad news. Inside, a status readout says the same thing in blue bars.
The Key Crew room is cramped, with ranks of coffins and barely space for two people to stand between them. Most of the ship’s people sleep in cargo chambers instead. The Gilgamesh carries five hundred thousand humans in suspension, and the word cargo covers a very large fraction of them.
Cold sleep
Sleepers do not dream. Cooling brings brain activity down to an absolute minimum, including the subconscious movements of the mind, because so long an idleness with an active brain would drive the sleeper insane. Holsten reckons that dreaming in a chamber means a faulty machine. Lain, who has spent more of her life inside one than out of it, tells him you dream young dreams and wake to disappointment, and he corrects her.
The process leaves marks. Suspension is not kind to human hair, so sleepers come out with cropped heads. Some are malnourished, some bloated, a few have pale mottling on the skin, and drugs stay in the blood for a while. Karst refused to lose his beard for the chamber and comes out raw and peeling.
Failure and repair
Chambers fail. After one thousand eight hundred and thirty seven years the Gilgamesh reports a four per cent failure rate among the cargo, and the figure climbs with the centuries. On the approach to Kern’s World, Engineering thaws about five hundred coffins from cargo so the chambers can be repaired, then sends the same five hundred people back into the freezer, which brings security in to keep order. The longest anyone has stayed awake is two years.
The ship cannot build replacements. When Holsten asks whether they have put in new chambers, Lain shows him a specimen chamber holding a few hundred organic samples instead, and he works out what they are for.
By the ship’s return to Kern’s World the chambers are failing past any repair, and the Gilgamesh has a sizeable population of people born outside suspension, raised by Lain’s line of engineers. Holsten’s own chamber goes unstable and the rescue team tears the lid off, then calls it irreparable. In the last battle aboard the ship, tens of thousands sleep in the hold and never learn that it is being lost.
Other chambers
Doctor Avrana Kern rides out the destruction of Brin 2 in the Sentry Pod’s single tank, and wakes in it fourteen years later when the hub needs a command decision.
On the old terraform station Guyen and Holsten find a coffin shaped unit built head first into a wall, and Holsten compares it to a suspension chamber. It turns out to be an emergency upload facility.
The last chamber in the story belongs to Lain. Her engineers keep it in a storeroom and treat it as a shrine to a living goddess, with small plastic figures at the foot of the pedestal and scraps of shipsuit cloth carrying written messages. Holsten wonders whether they altered it so that she could sleep the ages lying on her side.
Unanswered questions
- How a chamber is built, and what it runs on.
- How many of the cargo never woke.
- Why the chambers holding crew failed differently from the chambers holding cargo.