Planet Redemption: Episode One - 1. CryoSleep

Living within the confines of the white space was like living in purgatory. No, it is purgatory. It was a dream in which he was neither asleep nor awake but somewhere in between. It was not supposed to be so. But it had been this way for the last century. It was a prison. But that was okay because he had been a prisoner all his life in one way or another.

He was not supposed to be aware. But he was aware, and he was alive. He couldn’t move, and his heartbeat gave the faintest twitch of life, but he could see, and he could feel. It’s like being a ghost, hanging in the air, looking down upon the world. Outside of his cryotube the doctors and scientists worked, monitoring him as they do all the other prisoners on the Redemption 5S77, as they had done for the last one hundred years. He can feel the movement of the massive ship as it drifts silently through space, past an infinite field of blackness sprinkled with slowly dying stars. As with the white space in which he found himself there was a cold, clinical beauty to space. He knew that he was heading for the new planet, his new home, his new prison. His father, Alexander Aamodt had called it the new Australia. A penal colony, or in this case a penal planet.

He was frozen in a CryoSleep chamber, naked and frozen. It was basically a refrigerator. Long and rectangular. The top was made of glass so that you could see the person inside. The scientists that monitored him had a perfect view of his nakedness. They had done nothing to preserve his modesty. CryoSleep. Capital C, capital S, all one word. It was the new thing. There was no such thing as death row anymore. The great United States of America had come by the revelation that to kill someone through injection was morally wrong; after all, according to the Bible, murdering people even by law was a sin. So CryoSleep was developed, a new project. Thanks to the power of religion, which had done something right for once, life amounted to something again. When he woke up he would be on a new planet in a new century.

A concoction of memories, dreams, and thoughts cut through his consciousness (or was it his subconscious, who knew?) like a scalpel. They are layered on top of each other, seamless, making it impossible to tell what is memory and what is dream, what had really happened and what had not. He did not know what the cause of this strange phenomenon was and the people monitoring him didn’t know it was happening at all.

Most people don’t remember the day that they were born. Most.

The light around him was bright. Blinding. Excruciating, after seeing nothing but darkness. The light burned his newly developed eyes. The air was cold and so were the hands that grabbed him. Blurry shapes loomed out of the light. Heads. Eyes. Faces. Hidden by blue surgical masks and dressed in matching colored garments. Aliens. Freaks of nature.

Their excited voices rung in his ears. Laughter. One creature in particular held him. He lifted him up, his face large and superimposed across his vision. The shape of his eyes were vague shapes. Blurry. All he could do was scream helplessly. His mouth was unable to form the words that popped into his head. Unable to beg. All he wanted to do was go back into the world that he had been in just seconds before. That world was dark. Warm. Safe. But his cries went unheeded.

“It’s a boy,” the man said, his mask moving slightly. His voice was loud. Deafening. “Let me cut the umbilical cord.”

The man held up something silvery and metallic, sharp, with two separate pieces that were separate. Scissors. Somehow he could identify what these objects were without ever having seen them.

No! he thought. Don’t cut the umbilical cord! Because the umbilical cord was how he got what he needed. Food. Nutrients. Life. To sever him from the umbilical cord would be to sever him from life. He would starve, unable to feed himself. He would die. He heard the snip of the scissors. Gloved hands pried him away from his life support.

I’m going to die. I’m going to die before I even get the chance to live. The thought simply added to the fear that he had in the left side of his chest, where the heart rested, circulating blood through his body. How his brain was aware of such thoughts, able to understand such feelings and to possess such knowledge was beyond him. These were things that he shouldn’t be able to do for another four, five, six years.

The world shifted again. He continued to scream and beg inarticulately. He might not have to worry about starving to death because the cold would kill him first. A nurse wiped the blood off him with a towel, crooning. “You’re a handsome fellow,” she says. She wraps him up in something.

Something soft.

A blanket.

Ahhh, warmth, he thought happily.

“Should we call the father?” the doctor asked

“No,” a woman croaked. Her voice sounded dry and tired. “He’s out of state, in New York.”

“I understand he’s a very busy man, Coralina, but his son was just born. Are you sure you at least don’t want me to give him a call?”

“I’m sure.”

Again the world shifted and he found himself in the arms of someone else. A woman. She looked down at him with a grin. Her dirty brown hair was tied back into a ratty pony tail and her dark blue eyes shone with an instant warmth. Even though he had never seen this woman’s face he knew who she was. He had lived in her body, developing for nine months. She was the one of the two people who had given him life. And now I’m in her arms and she’s beautiful. He instantly felt a sense of comfort. Calm. He stopped crying. He felt an instant love for her.

“Hi,” she said, showing him perfectly white, even teeth. “Do you know who I am?”

He didn’t have the ability to tell her that he knew who she was with words so he tried to tell her with his eyes.

“I’m your mama,” she said. “You look just like how I saw you in my dreams. Exactly how I saw you. I already know what I’m going to name you. Danni. Danni Aamodt. Yes, I like that name. Danni.”

He liked it too.

Somewhere, a frenzied beeping sound.

“You look just like me,” she said. Then her face flushed of all color, became as white as a piece of paper. Her eyes widened and flashed with sudden pain “Oh God...”

“Her heart beat is rising, she’s going into cardiac arrest!”

A spike of fear dug into his heart, another shifting of the world and Mom’s face is gone.

It’s the first and last time he got to see it.

In his whitespace Danni Aamodt remembered the last conversation he’d had with his father.

Before transporting Danni to the Redemption 5S77 they had put him in a white room with white walls and a white floor and a table made from transparent plastic. His arms were handcuffed to the arms of his chair so that he couldn’t move from his chair. The jumpsuit he wore like the room he sat in was also white. Two guards stood outside of the room armed with pulse rifles that fired a jelly-like non-lethal ball of plasma that would paralyze. His father sat in the chair opposite him wearing a suit. The suit was pressed. He smelled of Old English Leather and aftershave. Not a single hair on his head was out of place.

Alex Aamodt: Genius, philanthropist, the richest man in the planet, hero. These were the things that Alex Aamodt was known for. When people spoke of him it was only with praise. He was a legend. A god in the world of science and discovery. It was he who was credited for the greatest scientific discoveries over the last three centuries. It was he who had discovered how to extend the human lifespan from decades to centuries. It was he that had discovered the planet that Danni would be transported to to start his exile. It was he that had come up with the name of the program: Planet Redemption.

Danni knew him as father, as God.

And God had condemned him for doing what all creations do: rebelling against their creator.

They had the same light blonde hair, high cheekbones, and icy blue eyes. In fact, they were the same. Danni was Alex’s clone, a nineteen-year-old version of Alex. The only individual thing that he had from his mother was his name. Other than that, she had been nothing more than a human incubator.

“Why are you here?” Danni asked.

“I wanted to see you before they sent you off. This will be our last time seeing each other.” Alex wouldn’t look at him. He kept his eyes focused on the table. His voice was on the edge of breaking. The crack spread with each word he spoke. The only person that he had ever shown affection to was Danni. But now he was disappointed and seeing that disappointment hurt Danni; it hurt more than anything had ever hurt in his life.

Danni tilted his head back a centimeter so that his chin was level with Alexander’s. “Won’t you look at me, Father?”

“I can’t.” Danni thought he saw a tear run down his father’s cheek, but Alexander wiped it away with a quick swipe of his hand.

“Because I’ve failed you?”

“Because I failed you.” Now Alexander looked at him, meeting his gaze, but it was only for a moment. Then he looked away again. “You were supposed to be special. Superior. You were supposed to be better than I could ever hope to be. Better than anyone could ever hope to be. But I was wrong. Instead I made a freak. A freak of nature.”

Was Danni a freak of nature? Yes, he supposed he was.

Danni had psychic abilities. By the time he was one Danni was able to read at a college level, speak every language known to man, and do jumping jacks. By the time he was seven he had graduated high school top of his class. He could look at something once, a diagram, something he’d seen on TV and remember it for the rest of his life. When he stepped into a room he could sense things: emotions that had been left behind like residue or a person’s presence when they’d been in a room, even after they’d been gone for a long time. And he saw things, things that no one else could see or explain. He called them ghosts because he didn’t know what else to call them. Most of the times he saw them in his dreams-they showed him things, how to find things. On many more occasions he saw them when he was awake.

His father had made him, engineered him. Every detail of his biology had been created by his father. But his emotions, his motivations, his thoughts - those were all his own - and they had created unforeseen consequences that Alexander had not anticipated.

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. What did he expect me to do? What would any animal held in captivity try to do? They would try to escape for the outside world. They would try to be free.

He didn’t know where that thought had come from or what had made him think it - he just knew that he felt ashamed of himself. By breaking out of the facility and making a run for the outside world he had disappointed his father to the point that he was being exiled to the penal colony a hundred light years away. And there was nothing that he could do to take it back.

The idea of being sent to another planet frightened him, of being ripped away from his Father. This world was already a cruel place. But where he was being sent to was even crueler. The planet was populated by the rejects of society: thieves, murderers, rapists. Generations of the world’s rejects. Their children too, and the children that came after. Evil breeds evil, insanity breeds insanity. He supposed that it was a mercy that he was being sent to prison and not destroyed altogether.

Destroyed, executed.

Machines were destroyed, even if that machine was made of human flesh and bone. Cloned flesh and bone.

Danni could feel tears of his own trailing down his cheek. He resisted the urge to catch them with his tongue, to stop their descent and taste their salt. Then he thought of the two men that had tried to kill him in the alley. They’d worked at the facility under his father. Security. They’d cornered him in the alley.

And then one of them was holding him from behind and the other was coming towards him with a stun baton. Before he could feel the agony of electricity passing through his body, terrible darkness had enveloped him, smothering all sensation, blocking out the world. It had been thick, stretching over his mind like a dark mist. When he came to he was covered in blood and the two men were lying dead at his feet. He had stared at them, shocked. It wasn’t just the fact that they were dead. It was the way he had made their arms and legs twist in painful directions as if they were nothing more than toy dolls to do whatever he wanted with. And somehow even though he couldn’t remember doing it he knew that he had done it. Who else could have done it?

He thought of the only time that he had seen his mother, Coralina. She was so beautiful. And she loved me. I could see it in her face that she loved me. And because of me she’s dead. She died giving birth to me. Tears of guilt and grief swelled in his eyes. He remembered what it had felt like to be held in her arms. He could remember it, every sensation, as if it had just happened seconds ago. He was doomed to remember everything he saw or felt or touched. Everything.

Human beings aren’t supposed to remember everything. There are some things that they’re meant to forget for their own protection. But I’m not human. Not really.

“I’m sorry,” he said. It was all he could think of to say. There was no word that could be used to describe how sorry he was for shaming his father. For causing him pain.

Alexander looked him in the eye again and this time he didn’t look away. He was really crying now. “It’s okay,” he said as the guards came into the room to take Danni away. “I will make another one just like you. And this time I won’t make any mistakes.”

After a century of flying through space, Redemption 5S77 finally reached Planet Redemption.

Planet Redemption was essentially an ice planet. All year around, the planet was covered in snow and ice. To look at it from an aerial view the first thought that would come to mind would be of the Arctic Circle. Or Colorado. But it’s always cold on this planet, even in the summer season. The closer to the equator you get the colder it gets. What passes for spring and summer is short while the winter season is long. Too long. During the winter the trees are dead, the ground covered in treacherous patches of ice. The branches of the trees are bare.

There is not an innocent man or woman on the planet, not in the eyes of Earth’s people. Planet Redemption was full of men and women who have done things so bad that they must be exiled from earth. Well not everyone on this planet was here because they were convicted of a felony back on Earth. For some it was their parents, their grandparents, their ancestors. Condemned for something someone else did before they were even born. To the people of earth, it didn’t matter. Filth was filth, and to make sure you didn’t get a roach infestation, you had to throw out the garbage or else they would spread.

Planet Redemption was seen as a second chance. A chance for eternal reflection. See? This is what happens when people make stupid decisions and don’t follow the law. Cause and effect. It is the people of Earth’s way of saying: We are letting you keep your lives, scum, and that’s more than you deserve. But that’s okay so long as they don’t have to deal with the moral obligations of execution. They can just ship all of their problems away to another planet that’s far, far away. So far away that they no longer have to worry about it. So what if the constant cold weather and featureless landscape drives everyone to rape and kill each other? Not the people of Earth’s fuckin’ problem.

There were colonies of prisoners all over the world, spread miles and miles apart. There were two dozen colonies in all. Each colony held roughly two thousand people. The one that Danni was being sent to was simply known as Colony Twelve. The colony consisted of one and two-story buildings made out of steel, a toy city constructed by the imagination of a child. The colony had no name. Snowmobiles were parked outside of some the buildings, but no one was walking the icy streets. The streets were practically nonexistent they were covered under so much ice. No one was willing to deal with the freezing below-zero temperatures unless they absolutely had to. Colony Twelve was separated by a large formation of snow-capped mountains. The only way to get to Colony Eleven was by helicopter.

If anyone were to stand up and look at the sky they would be amazed at the immense size of the Redemption 5S77, the way it seems to fill the sky, a merciless design of steel. The front part of the ship was thin, growing thicker as it spread out. The best way to put it would be that the ship looked like a weapon. A rifle. A weapon of mass destruction rather than a prisoner transport, Aethyx’s personal touch. It was next to the mountains that the prisoner transport landed.

Aethyx scientists dressed in white waist-length thermal coats designed specifically to protect them from the cold weather wheeled a single CryoSleep chamber off the ramp of the Revelation 5S77 and boarded the ship. Normally the Redemption 5S77 brought hundreds of prisoners. But Alexander Aamodt had paid billions of dollars to have his son transported to the penal colony as a priority.

The scientist set Danni’s CryoSleep chamber and headed back towards the Redemption 5S77 without looking back once. None of them cared that they were leaving Alexander Aamodt’s son stranded on a planet with the worst human beings imaginable. They weren’t paid to care. They would get back on the ship and make their one-hundred-year journey back to Earth.

By the time the Redemption 5S77 left, a snowmobile had finally reached the CryoSleep chamber. Two men sat inside, the heater rattling, keeping the inside of the snowmobile warm. One of the men was Dave “Duke” Ruiz (he insisted that everyone just call him Duke) and the other one was Mike Myze. They were the eyes and ears of the warden. It was their job to enforce whatever passed for law and justice in the colony.

The wind was relentless and cruel. In just the few seconds it took them to climb out of the snowmobile and run over to the chamber, Ruiz’s cheeks and fingers were numb despite the layers of clothing he wore underneath his parka. Damn it, I should have grabbed gloves. But in the excitement of seeing what the transport was doing here he had completely forgotten.

“How many of ‘em did they bring?” Myze panted.

Both men were tall, broad shouldered, and fit. Both lifted weights like it was a religion-and to be quite frank it was part of the job description. They were supposed to look menacing so that whatever order they gave was followed immediately. Still, trudging through an ocean of snow that almost went up to your hips was a work out that neither of them were prepare for even if they were both born and raised on the planet.

Ruiz was the first one to reach the CryoSleep chamber. He couldn’t believe his eyes. One? They only brought one of them? They never bring just one. They always bring hundreds of them. “There’s just the one of them,” he said, frowning.

Myze squinted and turned his baseball cap so that it was facing backwards; this was a habit he did whenever he was nervous, excited, or stressed. The baseball cap was so tattered that you could barely read the red RED SOX writing on it. Of the two of them he was the oldest - five years older than Ruiz. And of the duo he was the leader, the sheriff while Ruiz was the deputy. He was also the most feared, the one with the worst temper. Ruiz had seen the man do things that would forever haunt him in his dreams. But then again, he’d done several things himself that he would never forget. No one on this planet is innocent. No one.

“This is...interesting.” Myze whistled. “Whoever it is must have done something really bad...must have killed a lot of people or something.”

Ruiz wasn’t listening. He was too fascinated with the CryoSleep chamber. It looked just like all of the other ones he had seen. He’d seen thousands of them in his time. Thousands of them possibly. For as long as he could remember. But it wasn’t so much the chamber itself that fascinated him, that peaked his curiosity. It was the person that was inside of the chamber that fascinated him as well as the circumstances at which the chamber had arrived. Just the one. It both excited him and frightened him.

He approached the CryoSleep chamber slowly. The top of the chamber was covered in snow. Doing his best not to get any on his hands, he brushed the snow off with the sleeve of his parka. He had to squint to make out any detail of the man’s face: long, blonde hair, high cheek bones…There was something about the boy’s face that was angelic. Hypnotic.

“Fuck me!” Myze exclaimed. “He’s just a kid! Since when did they start sending kids here? They’ve never sent children here, not like this. All of the kids are born here.” He shook his head and said something else, but Ruiz didn’t hear it. He was too lost in thought, too busy studying the boy. He was frozen, naked, his hands crossed over his private parts as if to shield himself from exposure. His face was soft, relaxed. He looked to be asleep. He looked as if he was dreaming.

For the first time in...was it weeks or months?...he thought of the boy. Ben. Whoever their new prisoner was he looked just like Ben. Ben had had blonde hair. Just thinking about Ben made him hard. He could literally feel his cock hardening at this very second. Running his fingers through his hair as he fucked him from behind, as he raped him. Did looking at him have the same effect on Myze? Was Myze thinking of Ben the way he was now?

“Duke!” Myze’s voice pulled him out of his reverie. The man glared at him with his beady black eyes. “If you want to freeze to death that’s fine but help me get this boy to the clinic first.”

Duke nodded wordlessly, wanting to say something but unsure of what. There was a lump in his throat. A big, guilty lump. It was probably best that he didn’t say anything; he didn’t want to be the victim of Maize’ carnal temper. He went to the front end of the CryoSleep chamber and pushed. His muscles strained, and a vein bulged in his forehead as Myze and he heaved the chamber out of the snow. They wrestled it onto the snowmobile and began to make their journey to the clinic.

The clinic was at the end of the cluster of buildings, a two-story rectangular building. Myze was the first to reach the double doors. The nurse’s desk was empty which meant that there was only one person on staff. That meant that Natalia Patel was working. She was the best damned clinician in the colony; Ruiz would have gone as far to say all twelve colonies.

“Doc!” Myze bellowed.

There was no reply. They pushed the CryoSleep chamber through the double doors into a long white hallway. There were several doorways on their left and right. The building smelled strongly of antiseptic and something else that was citrus yet unidentifiable.

Ruiz peeked into one of the rooms on his right. Dimitri Traviss stared back at him from a hospital bed; his head was propped up against a lumpy white pillow. His forehead was covered in bandages. His wild red curls sprouted from his scalp like the head of a fiery mop.

“What happened to you?” Ruiz asked.

“I was working at the slaughterhouse trying to spray the shit off a pig. Covered in shit it wa’. And fat too. The god damn’ thing went wild and trampled me, split my forehead right open!” The look of surprise and belligerence mixed with Traviss’ strong Irish accent was comical. Ruiz had to bite his lip to keep from laughing. His attention was caught when Natalia Patel came walking down the hallway.

Natalia was short, pretty, and petite with skin the color of dark mocha. Both of her parents were Indian; both worked at the slaughterhouse. She stood just over five feet. Her hair was long, black, and glossy. Her eyes brimmed with intelligence. She was a third-generation colonist which meant that she was paying for her grandfather’s crimes. She had a filthy mouth and a good sense of humor.

“What’s with all of the fucking noise?” she demanded not unkindly. Her lips were spread in a sardonic smile.

“A prison transport just showed up, Doc,” said Myze.

Her smile died. “Diana didn’t say a transport was coming. Is that it there?”

“Yep.”

“Where are the rest?”

“This is the only one they brought.”

She snorted and scanned the two mens faces; she had to crane her head back to be able to do so. “Are you guys dicking around with me? Because you know I don’t like to be dicked around with.”

“This is the only one,” Ruiz said.

She shook her head with the expression of someone who was trying to wake herself up from a dream. “Why didn’t Diana tell me?”

Myze grunted. He was getting impatient. “How the fuck should I know? We’re just as clueless and confused as you are.”

“Fuck. Never mind, I better start getting him thawed.” Patel hooked a thumb over her shoulder. “Roll it in there for me, won’t you?”

Ruiz and Myze moved the chamber next to the bed and watched Patel work.

There was a loud whooshing noise as she popped the lid of the CryoSleep chamber open. A cloud of vapor escaped from the chamber, filling the clinic. Patel efficiently went about taking the kid’s vitals and scribbled them down on a clipboard.

“Someone help me get him on the bed,” she said.

Before he knew what he was doing, Ruiz immediately stepped forward and lifted the boy into his arms. It wasn’t hard to carry him over to one of the beds. The boy was light, extremely light. He couldn’t have been more than a hundred and fifty pounds. He stepped back and studied the boy’s face.

It’s not Ben. You know that. Ben’s dead. Ben’s dead and it’s your fault.

But it sure as hell looked like Ben. The boy could have been Ben’s doppelganger. He looked like him enough to make Ruiz feel as though he were seeing a ghost. To make him want to die with shame.

Patel barked for the two lawmen to get out of the clinic. Ruiz was more than happy to do so, to get away from the new prisoner that had just arrived on Planet Redemption.

It wasn’t until they were out the door that Ruiz noticed the funny look that Mike had been giving him.

“What?” he said. It wasn’t until he spoke that he realized how guilty he felt. Like a man who had something to hide. Something bad. He knew that Myze already knew what he was thinking because Maize was thinking the same thing. He could see it on his face, in the black rubies of his eyes.

“Looks just like him, doesn’t he?” The sheriff adjusted the large bulge in his pants. “Goddamn if I don’t miss him sometimes. We had some good times with him, didn’t we?”