By João Ventura
They were the ten richest men on the planet. Altogether, they owned over 95 percent of the Earth's wealth. They were responsible, through decisions made by their companies or by governments they controlled, for almost everything that happened to the inhabitants of the planet.
With a small portion of their immeasurable fortunes, they financed a Research Institute designed to study life extension.
After a few years, the Institute produced the first result: a perfect hibernation method. Experiments, first on animals, then on paid volunteers, showed that it was possible to safely place humans in suspended animation.
They decided to put themselves in that condition for a period of 500 years. According to the best projections, this period would be enough for the greatest geniuses in the world, working at the Institute, to discover the treatment that would result in immortality.
In a mountain's well-protected interior, a circular room housed the ten cryogenic sarcophagi, with their respective life support systems. A small nuclear power plant provided the necessary energy for the operation of the entire complex.
***
A programming error caused the awakening deadline to be fixed, not at 500, but at 5000 years.
***
Three thousand years after hibernation began, the planet was dying. Depleted resources, polluted air, land, rivers and seas, the population in rapid decline ... But those who had been the ten richest men on Earth continued in their centuries-long sleep ...
Another thousand years passed, and the auction of the solar system gave the result that was predicted.
The best pieces — the asteroid belt with its extremely valuable minerals, the hydrocarbon-rich moons of Jupiter — were purchased by powerful planetary confederations. The third planet from the sun, practically dead, was bought by a distant planet, for a value marginally higher than the base bid price.
***
The project leader was examining the construction plans for the offshore unit that was going to be assembled to extract metals from the seawater. Waste recovery on a planetary scale was a complicated activity, meeting deadlines using second-rate equipment and unskilled labor — no one wanted to come and bury themselves on a dead planet, light-years away from home. In this particular case, the only favourable point was that, due to the stupidity of the natives — who had disappeared themselves in the meantime — the levels of valuable metals in the oceans were extremely high.
His line of thought was interrupted by the appearance of a subordinate who, after a hurried ritual greeting, reported: “Boss, we found out the source of the signals we were getting. It is a radioactive unit which still has hundreds of years of useful life!”
“At last some good news! Remove it from where it is and mount it on the new extraction unit.”
“But there is a problem, boss. The unit is feeding the life support system of ten sarcophagi that are in a chamber dug in that rocky block ...”
"And what's in the sarcophagi? Organic material, right? Discharge the contents into the feed tanks of the hydroponic plant. On this miserable planet we need all the nutrients we can get!"
About the Author
João Ventura
João Ventura writes short fiction, which has appeared in several websites (AntipodeanSF and Bewildering Stories among them), and also in printed form: Somnium, in Brazil; Dragão Quântico, Hyperdrivezine, Phantastes (Portuguese fanzines); Universe Pathways (in both the English and the Greek versions).
He had short stories in several Portuguese and Brazilian antologies: A Sombra sobre Lisboa (2006), VaporPunk (2010), Antologia de Ficção Científica Fantasporto (2012), Lisboa no ano 2000 (2013), Lisboa Oculta - Guia Turístico (2018), O resto é paisagem (2018), Almanaque SteamPunk (2019), Winepunk (2019), Regiana Magna (2020).
In 2018, a collection of his short stories (in Portuguese) came to light, with the title Tudo Isto Existe.
He likes reading, writing (surprise!), has a blog and is a university professor (now retired).
He is married, with two children and he lives in Lisbon.
Those who read Portuguese can have a glance at some of his stuff in Das palavras o espaço.
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
Mark is an astrophysicist and space scientist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Following this he worked in computer consultancy, engineering, and high energy research (with a stint at the JET Fusion Torus).
Sarah Pratt is an avid fiction writer and a Marketing Consultant.
Geraldine Borella writes adult short stories and stories for children and has been published in anthologies for both. In 2018, one of her children’s short stories placed second in The Buzz Words Short Story Prize and she won an ASA Emerging Writer’s Mentorship. She currently works part-time as a hospital pharmacist and as an online creative writing tutor.
Garry Dean lives on the Mid Coast of New South Wales Australia, and has been a fan of SF for most of his natural life. Being vision impaired, he makes good use of voice recognition and text to speech in order to write. Many of his stories have appeared in AntipodeanSF over the years, and his love of all things audio led him to join the narration team in 2017.
Pixie is a voice actor, cabaret performer & slam poet From the Blue Mountains in NSW.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Alistair Lloyd is a Melbourne based writer and narrator who has been consuming good quality science fiction and fantasy most of his life.
Tim Borella has never lost his childhood passion for SF and writing in general and has been lucky enough to have worked most of his life as a pilot — in other words, he’s never properly grown up.
Nick works as a freelance writer out of Perth, Western Australia, where he likes to read unsettling fiction and complain about the sun.
Callan J. Mulligan was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1988.
Louis Evans is a sci-fi writer living in Brooklyn with his partner and two cats named after fictional European detectives, Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey.
Kaoru Sakasaki lives with his family in Yokohama, south of Tokyo.
Neil A. Hogan has been writing space fiction on and off since the '80s.
João Ventura writes short fiction, which has appeared in several websites (AntipodeanSF and Bewildering Stories among them), and also in printed form: Somnium, in Brazil; Dragão Quântico, Hyperdrivezine, Phantastes (Portuguese fanzines); Universe Pathways (in both the English and the Greek versions).
An emerging writer, James Patrik enjoys exploring the existential themes.
Steven Fritz graduated from the University of Maryland, became a Naval Aviator and flew helicopters and maritime patrol aircraft in the US Navy.
Brian has published over sixty short stories in the United States as well as internationally.
Pretty much a life-long fan of speculative fiction, Edwina Harvey is a writer, editor, silk painter and ceramic artist.
Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.