Starry Night

Three jewels like beads of light on an invisible string, the full moon a pearl charm accentuating the alignment of Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. This was the last picture Rebecca feasted upon before retiring to her bed with crinkled solar system-patterned sheets. It wasn't long before she drifted off to a land of dreams, cat purring at her feet and fan buzzing quietly but constantly.

Rebecca's eyes jerk open suddenly after a peaceful sleep. It is still dark; the fan continues its buzzing. Wearily, she peers around her room. To her surprise, it is not her room at all. Gone are the planetary mobile and space posters, dresser and desk covered in charcoal sketches: these are all replaced with tall, clear sarcophagi holding sleeping people, deep breathing moving their simple silver-colored abdomens in and out. The soft breathing-sounds are muffled by the droning of a fan, likely cooling the computer system whose glowing monitor lights and control buttons line the ceiling in place of Rebecca's glow-in-the-dark constellation stickers.

"This must be a dream," Rebecca tries to convince herself, brain still addled by the disorienting stranglehold of sleep. She closes her eyes tightly, opening them to see not her room, but the same strange sight as before. She hesitates and coughs softly, hazarding the noise to gain an awareness of her own body. There is no doubt about it: she is awake, in a real but foreign and frightening place. Her cough has stirred none of the sleepers, bodies at relaxed ease, heads upright, clothed in skintight silver fabric.

Rebecca peers down at her own body. Her warm flannel pajamas are missing, replaced by the same synthetic silver as the other sleepers. Momentarily, she panics: her nine-year-old girl's body is now a curvaceous, mature woman's figure. Flat chest and narrow, boyish hips have transformed, fleshed out into a billowing golden ratio any woman would be proud to possess. Now she tries to move, to step out of her sarcophagus, an attempt to leave her own strange body, to fight her way back to the bedroom she is meant to inhabit, the life she knows she is meant to be in.

A laser pops on, instantly penetrating the clear, clean atmosphere of the room, so abruptly that the stunned Rebecca ceases her struggle, carefully regarding this intrusion into the calmness of the sarcophagi room. The pinprick of wise red begins its scan of the hold, an eye trying to detect the source of the minor disturbance. Its penetrating gaze skims Rebecca's face and skips back and forth across the length of her sarcophagus before drawing its conclusions and stopping the flow of invasive photons, receding once again into the wall from where it came.

A glance, a blink, a cough, a peer, a movement, a light, a realization. Rebecca smiles at her folly as a foggy gas floods her sarcophagus. This is not a dream, she knows; this is her reality, her home in the heavens, her destiny. The nine-year-old with flannel pajamas and charcoal sketches was a memory, and the young woman in this spaceship's hold is the real deal. She is one of a group with the passion and ability to step away from a doomed planet and seed the universe with the great gift they have to offer: the care and respect that these select few can grace the universe with in return for a new foothold and home for humankind. Several deep breaths of the misty gas and Rebecca sleeps, leaving the starship in a still, singly musical breathing peace.

...Uh, can you guys tell I wrote this in the throes of a possessed colon/semicolon/hyphen phase? Heh. Also, sorry about the long sentences. The original structures were much longer but I shortened several to make it, err, more readable...