I've been scraping salt off the lettuce beds on Shift 749. Same task for nineteen years. My hands are white with it. Today I'm half asleep when the wall-screen flickers behind me. MOTION 4,114: TERMINATE THE SLEEPER IN BAY 9. A vote counter appears. 200. 201. 202. It climbs fast. I freeze. The ship doesn't have a Bay 9.

I don't move. Just watch the vote counter climb. 250. 275. 300. And something clicks. What if it's not someone else? What if the sleeper is me? / But first I need to know: what's Bay 9?

I head to the lower decks. The corridors down here are quiet. Dark. My footsteps echo wrong. There. Between Bay 8 and 10, a door. It's old. The panel is dark. When I press my palm, something in the wall hums.

The door opens slow. And there's Bay 9. Full of cryo-pods. Rows of them. All dark except one at the far end. The light inside is still on. The window is frosted. I walk toward it with salt still on my hands.

Inside the frosted window, a face. And slowly the frost clears. The face looks back at me. It's my face. But older. Weathered. Different in ways I can't name. The pod beeps. Numbers flash on the screen: 05:47. 05:46.