The Exo Project Read online

  Text copyright © 2017 by Andrew DeYoung

  All rights reserved.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, please contact [email protected].

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Boyds Mills Press

  An Imprint of Highlights

  815 Church Street

  Honesdale, Pennsylvania 18431

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-62979-610-9 (hc) • 978-1-62979-799-1 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951174

  First e-book edition

  H1.1

  Designed by Barbara Grzeslo

  Production by Sue Cole

  Text set in Joanna

  For Sarah, who loved and supported me as I was writing this story;

  and Maren, the baby girl who slept in the next room as I finished it, and who I hope will read it and enjoy it someday

  PART 1

  EARTH

  1

  matthew

  The sun sizzled red in the sky as the front gate to the compound hissed open. Matthew squinted into the glare and checked his wrist meter. The temperature read 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Even with his radiation suit on he could feel sweat trickling down his neck, his skin beginning to burn under the solar radiation. Matthew gave a glance at the two others who were with him, his best friends Silas and Adam. Then, armored against the sun, they stepped out onto the cracked ground and began trudging toward the freeway.

  Decades before, thousands of cars had streamed in and out of the city on this road, but now it was completely empty. The three boys gazed up at the fading billboards as they walked, signs advertising businesses that once catered to travelers: gas stations, restaurants, hotels. In the far distance, the towering skyscrapers of the city loomed on the horizon, the tips of the buildings wreathed in smog. Every few minutes, a transport train slid by on a track between the two lanes of the abandoned highway, windows tinted black against the sun.

  Soon, panting, their skin burning, the boys found a station where they could catch the next train into the city.

  At the station, a homeless man without a radiation suit was slumped over a bench.

  “Give me your suit,” he grunted, putting his hand on Silas’s arm.

  “No,” Silas said, pulling away. “Get your own.”

  “Come on,” said the man. “Just for a few minutes. I’ll give it right back.”

  Sweat poured from the man’s body and soaked through his yellowed shirt. His uncovered skin was beet-red and knotted through with black dabs of cancer. Matthew looked away, his stomach lurching with the sudden fear that the man would drop dead before their eyes.

  At that moment, a transport train came sliding down the track toward them. It drew to a stop and the doors hissed open.

  Silas stepped on first, then Matthew.

  “Two for the Core,” Silas said, then jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “I’m getting his fare.”

  “No,” Matthew said. “Let me pay for myself.”

  Silas shook his head. “No way. You’re not paying for anything tonight.”

  Matthew opened his mouth again to object, but Silas had already stripped back the sleeve of his radiation suit and passed his bare forearm below the scanner. His ident photo blinked on the screen, along with his account balance, showing a debt of more than 7,000 units. Matthew quickly glanced away and walked down the aisle, pretending not to have seen.

  Silas took a seat next to Matthew as Adam paid his own fare. When it was the homeless man’s turn, he held out his arm and the screen blinked red: a negative balance of nearly 100,000 units.

  The driver shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “Too much debt. You can’t ride.”

  The homeless man pleaded, his voice rising. “Please. Please, I can’t go back out there. You don’t understand. You have a suit. I have nothing!”

  The driver stood and put one gloved hand on the homeless man’s arm, tried to guide him off the transport.

  “No, don’t! I can find the money.” His eyes darted around the compartment, his face pleading. “One of these boys can pay for me!”

  Silas and Adam looked into their laps, but Matthew didn’t look away.

  The driver pushed at the homeless man harder, finally shoving him through the open doors. The homeless man’s heel caught on a crumbled piece of concrete, and he stumbled backward onto the platform.

  The transport jerked forward, and Matthew turned his eyes to the front of the transport, did his best to put it out of his mind. Tried not to think about whether the homeless man would still be there when they got back, in the exact same spot: dead, his skin baking to a cracked brown in the merciless sun.

  At that moment, Matthew couldn’t wait to ship off to space. To leave Earth behind. To get as far away as possible from this godforsaken, dying planet.

  2

  They called it the Exo Project.

  It had been almost a year ago now that the announcement had come in over the web. Matthew had been sitting in his bedroom at the time, doing homework and wondering what to make for dinner for himself and his little sister, when his tablet buzzed with an incoming transmission.

  Matthew glanced at it. A blue crest flickered onto the screen: the logo of OmniCore, the global Earth government. Matthew snatched the tablet from the desktop, his back going straight.

  An official announcement. Everybody on the planet was probably watching it.

  There was a silent moment—then the OmniCore logo faded from the screen, replaced by an image of the sun burning hot in the sky. The music in the background was ominous, threatening. Over the music came a man’s voice.

  “Earth is dying,” the voice said, “burning up. Crops are failing, fresh water is becoming harder to find, and the future of the human race is at risk.”

  The camera panned down from the sun to a vast desert. Antlike humans staggered across the dunes in radiation suits.

  “But there’s a new hope for humanity: the Exo Project.”

  The screen filled with images of serious-looking scientists hunched over lab tables, engineers drawing up 3-D blueprints with their fingertips in holographic computer environments, half-constructed spaceships in hangars, surrounded by scaffolding and showers of sparks.

  “Exoplanets are worlds outside our solar system, and scientists have identified thousands of them that might sustain life. Now, with new innovations in cryogenics and lightspeed travel, these planets are within our reach, ready to be explored. There’s just one thing missing: You.”

  Now the music swelled, and the next image that came on the screen was a close-up of a person’s face: a young woman looking off-camera, hopeful and determined, the faintest trace of a smile on her lips. Slowly, the camera pulled back to reveal that she was marching across a flat expanse of concrete, carrying an OmniCore flag that flapped in the wind above her head. She wasn’t alone. One by one, other people joined her, men and women of all ages, races, and ethnicities, smiling and nodding to each other as they came to march at her shoulder. Soon, the camera had pulled back far enough to reveal hundreds of people, maybe thousands, and the image panned around to reveal what they were marching toward: a spaceport with thousands of ships lined up on the tarmac.

  “The Exo Project is seeking volunteers now. The future of the human race lies in your hands.”

  And with that, the announcement was over. The tablet screen blinked back to the normal view. In the lower left-hand corner, Matthew saw that he had a new message. He tapped it open with
his fingertip. It was a message from the Exo Project. It must have come through with the announcement. Matthew scrolled past a photograph of a young man gazing boldly toward the skies, past the banner commanding him to “Sign Up Now!”, and squinted at the fine print at the bottom of the message.

  Exo Project participants will be chosen by lottery, Matthew read. The volunteers selected for participation will be cryogenically frozen for the lightspeed expedition. There is no means of return to Earth. Participants who find habitable planets will be refrozen until the first settlers arrive. Those who do not will take mission-termination pills.

  Matthew’s skin felt cold. He wasn’t certain what “mission-termination pills” referred to, but he had an idea.

  The Exo Project was a suicide mission.

  Then Matthew’s eyes fell on the last line of the fine print.

  The families of Exo Project participants will receive a reward of one million units.

  Matthew’s stomach dropped.

  He had to volunteer. He had to put his name in the lottery.

  So he did. And months later, Matthew learned that he’d been chosen randomly from millions of applicants to be part of the Exo Project.

  He was going. He was leaving Earth, never to return.

  3

  At the Core, the three boys climbed off the transport under the shade of the tall buildings and made for the closest entrance. Past the doors, people coming from outside stowed their suits and immediately bought antiox treatments to offset the radiation they’d absorbed from the sun. The boys were low on units, though, so they walked past the antiox kiosk into the tangle of interconnected tunnels and skyways and made their way to the main promenade—a massive indoor thoroughfare of shops and restaurants. They went down to the lowest level and slipped into the darkest bar they could find.

  Matthew and Adam sat in a booth out of the bartender’s sight while Silas walked up to the bar and pitched his voice low to order three beers. He’d told Matthew about the scam on the transport on the way over—his cousin’s friend’s husband was a low-level hack at the public information office, and Silas had supposedly bartered a short-term change in the age on his ident.

  The bartender wasn’t buying it, though. From where he sat on the other side of the room, Matthew saw him shake his head, point at Silas, and begin to speak sharply. Silas’s face turned red and he looked like he was about to pick a fight; Adam got up and tried to pull him away from the bar. Somewhere in all the arguing, Silas or Adam must have let slip that they were just trying to show their buddy a good time before he shipped off to space, and the bartender’s face softened immediately.

  “Well, hell,” he said, his voice booming over the din of the bar. “Why didn’t you say so? Get him over here!”

  At the bartender’s prodding the three sat at the bar while he poured them drinks on the house. After the first round, a man sitting at the other end of the bar ordered them another round of beers, then moved closer and slid into a stool right next to Matthew.

  “Thanks for the drinks,” Matthew said, grimacing at the bitter taste of the beer on his tongue.

  “No problem,” the man said. “You can pay me back by finding a new planet for us. For all of us. This one’s had it.”

  The man looked at Matthew’s face a moment under the glare of the lights just behind the bar. He squinted, cocked his head.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “You’re just a boy. I thought the minimum age for the Project was seventeen. Are you even that old, son?”

  Almost, thought Matthew.

  Matthew was sixteen, but he’d be seventeen tomorrow—the same day he was scheduled to go into the freeze.

  When Matthew had received his orders summoning him to report for cryostasis on his birthday, he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. He’d known about the Exo Project’s age minimum, so he figured they wouldn’t freeze him and launch him into space until he was seventeen—but he hadn’t imagined they’d schedule his departure on his birthday. It was so soon. He thought he’d have more time to say good-bye.

  On the other hand, he’d been the one to sign up for a suicide mission, hadn’t he? If he was going to die, he might as well get on with it.

  Besides, Matthew had never cared much about his birthday. At school, he had friends who made a big deal of their birthdays every year, threw huge parties with drinks and dancing and tons of gifts. But to Matthew, his birthday was just another day. In a way, getting frozen and being launched into space would make this his most memorable birthday ever.

  Then Matthew looked at the postcard again. This time his eyes skipped past the departure date and fell on the destination they’d chosen for him.

  Planet H-240, orbiting a star named Iota Draconis. One hundred light-years away. Even traveling at the speed of light in an Exo Project spaceship, it would take a century for Matthew to arrive at the planet. By the time he came out of the freeze, he’d still have only just turned seventeen. But Silas and Adam, his mother, his sister—everyone he’d ever known—would be dead.

  Matthew blinked and shook his head.

  Best not to think about it.

  These thoughts flashed through Matthew’s mind in the space of a moment; if the man had been paying attention, he’d have seen it in Matthew’s face as a flinch, a microexpression of pain before returning to neutral.

  What Matthew said was, “I’m old enough.”

  4

  After Matthew, Silas, and Adam finished their beers, the man bought them a round of shots. Before Matthew could protest, a small glass of brown liquid was sitting in front of him on the bar. The man clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Whiskey,” he said. “Drink up, kid. Might be your last chance.”

  The whiskey tasted awful, burning as it sloshed down Matthew’s throat to his stomach. He coughed, grimaced; the man laughed and bought him another, then cajoled him into drinking it down. As soon as the second shot hit Matthew’s stomach, his head went fuzzy. The lights on the ceiling seemed to spin around his head like moons. His stomach lurched. Mumbling some words of apology, Matthew stood and ran out into the blinding lights of the promenade.

  He staggered along the walkway, dimly aware of people clearing to the right and left as he passed. Finally he spotted a wastebin, lurched to his knees, and grabbed it with both hands as he heaved into it, the smell of his own retch wafting back up to his nose.

  Still gripping the bin with pale knuckles, Matthew rested his forehead on the back of his hand and gasped. He closed his eyes and listened to the footsteps of passersby sound distantly around him as if echoing through layers of water.

  The taste of bile coated Matthew’s tongue. He lay sprawled in the promenade, his back propped against the wall and his arm still hooked over the edge of the wastebin in case his stomach heaved again. He took deep breaths, willing his gut to be still. Soon, his head cleared, and he opened his eyes to the harsh light. People glared at him and wrinkled their noses in disgust as they passed by.

  Dripping with sweat and shame, Matthew dragged himself to his feet. He walked back toward the bar and stopped just outside, looking in the door. At the bar, Silas and Adam bellowed drunkenly at some joke the man was telling while he ordered yet another round of shots. They clinked their glasses together and threw their heads back in unison.

  Matthew turned and walked away from the bar as fast as his feet would take him. He didn’t know where he was going. All he knew was that he wanted to be somewhere, anywhere else.

  Let Silas and Adam have their fun. His friends would be better off without him.

  Matthew’s stumbling feet took him nearer and nearer to the heart of the city, weaving through the network of indoor tunnels and windowed walkways. Gradually Matthew realized that he was walking to the cryocenter, the place where he would go to be frozen tomorrow.

  The glass doors of the cryocenter opened with a hiss and let Matthew into a massive, abandoned waiting room. The only person there was a bored-looking woman sitting behind a curved metalli
c desk.

  Matthew walked to the desk and held out his arm for scanning. The woman frowned at her screen.

  “You’re not due until tomorrow. It really would be better to wait. Especially in your … state.” She wrinkled her nose as she caught the scent of alcohol and bile on Matthew’s breath. “Hangovers are never pleasant, but after a decade or two in the freeze, they’re apocalyptic.”

  “I’m not here for that,” Matthew said. “I’m here to see someone.” He gave her the name.

  The woman checked her computer, then stood. She led Matthew out of the reception room through a small metal door and into a long, fluorescent-lit corridor. The walls of the corridor were lined with white square compartments, each with a silver button set in the center. Each compartment was labelled with a name.

  “You don’t have to show me,” Matthew said. “I’ve been here before.”

  The woman returned to the waiting room, and Matthew kept walking down the corridor. The compartments on his left were arranged alphabetically by last name; he kept going and going until he reached the Ts.

  Tilson, Abigail.

  Matthew stopped in front of the compartment and pressed the button. With a hiss and a burst of cold steam, the cryochamber came open and extended into the corridor in front of him. He looked down at the person lying inside.

  A woman. His mother.

  The indicator panels on her cryochamber blinked green and yellow. Matthew gazed at her face through glass and clear blue cryoliquid. It looked exactly as it had a year ago when he and his sister put her in the freeze—gently wrinkled, laugh lines fanning out from the corners of her eyes and mouth, thin lips, tufts of gray in the hair at her temples.

  Here, laid out in front of him, was Matthew’s reason for signing up for the Exo Project. Months before the Project had been announced, his mother had been diagnosed with cancer. It was everywhere; her body was riddled with it. The cure was simple. Just a short course of nanotreatments to get rid of the tumors. But the cure was also expensive: nearly one million units. They didn’t have the money. So they put her in cryostasis instead, to halt the spread of the disease.