May 24th, 2082.

  I’m really doing it. My wife and I are finally going to cryogenically freeze our brains.

  As much as I would like to believe the technology for this has developed enough, as an atheist I see this as the only way to continue on. My consciousness will be conserved almost indefinitely in a vault; basically they are going to keep my brain in a jar until a future where a body can be created for me and my spouse.

  “Just sign here and here, sir.” The salesman grinned.

  I took the clipboard and signed where he indicated. It was pretty transparent he just wanted the commission and didn’t have much passion for the project. For most this sort of investment just seemed like the death throes of the elderly. Most of the general public remains skeptical that cryopreservation actually preserves your consciousness once unfrozen, that plus the astronomical costs; it was around 1.2 million N.A.I dolrs per person. One of the few plus sides of my line of work was the pay, plus veteran benefits. It always shocked me that the Americans would want to take me into their ranks after the 'Special Northern Operation', considering I was their enemy.

  I handed the clipboard back and pulled my wife in for a hug. She looked at me with a smile. “Today we celebrate; tomorrow we start the long journey ahead.” I smiled back.

  May 25th, 2082.

  The doctor finished the final preparations, I was on the operating table about to be put under, I gave my wife one st kiss before she was told to leave the room. A respiration mask was pced on my face before everything went dark.

  October 22nd 2140.

  …Where the hell am I? Everything appeared dark, it felt like I just entered a lucid dream after a long dreamless sleep.

  Opening my eyes I immediately recognized where I was, this was my old station when the invasion started. Sitting up from my bunk I recognized my friend Peter was ying there, waves of memories washed over me of good times before and some during the war, but then I remembered how he died, hit by an improvised explosive drone while transferring off duty and frowned. What a weirdly realistic dream, it’s almost like it’s real, but I know it can’t be since this all happened a lifetime ago. Logically thinking I must be conscious while frozen, which was a deeply worrying thought considering how many years I am likely going to be frozen for, I might just go insane.

  I pulled up the date on my phone. It read April 22nd, 2036, the day it all started. I was stationed at a remote operator facility northern Quebec when the Americans decred war and started their annexation of Canada. Our once great democratic allies had become a dictatorship over the course of 10 years, and they set their eyes on any piece of nd they could get, which now extended to us. Walking over to the monitoring station, Warren, the nightshift guy was sck jawed watching as dozens of heat signatures appeared crossing the 49th parallel. It was all exactly as I remembered it, frighteningly so.

  Warren turned to look at me. “What are we supposed to do, sir?” to which I sighed.

  “Well for starters the whole of command has definitely already been alerted, we’ve had a long time to prepare for this moment so I wouldn’t worry to much, but we definitely need some of the R.D.A.T. drones that were on standby piloted.” I walked over and entered a few commands in the tablet alerting the pilots on base to their stations. Even if this was a dream it was more entertaining to py along, I missed my old comrades after all.

  A few minutes ter, another perspective came into view showing a colge of different thermal cameras making their way for the border. The RDATS began to make their way for the known weak spots on the retrofitted Abrams, we watched as the cameras approached then went dark immediately after getting within inches of the tank.

  Simir scenes pyed out for hours until eventually it was time for Warren to take over my shift, so I filled him in. “Shit, so it’s really happening, eh?” I gave him a pat on the back then made my way to the mess hall.

  November 1st, 2140, Perceived Time May 1st, 2036.

  I am not sure if this is a dream anymore or not, this has been going on for over a week now and it feels so real that it’s uncanny. I just can’t think of any possibility outside of this being a dream though, it’s really throwing me for a loop.

  February 12th 2142, Perceived Time October 22nd 2036.

  I woke up in my old pre-invasion post once again, and quickly looked at the date on my phone, and there it was, April 22nd 2036, eerily simir to how I woke up just over a year ago at this exact same date.

  Now I was panicking, was this really a dream? Was I time travelling? I couldn’t tell! It felt like I almost relived a year of my life and now I was back at the start of the invasion again. Maybe I was time traveling? The previous ‘dream’ had a longer war than what my memories deemed it should have been, part of that being due to me giving advanced warning to command for strikes I knew would happen based on the “real” war. There was no way my 80 years of life up to this had all been a dream…. Right?

  August 3rd, 2165, Perceived Time January 5th, 2040.

  After having fought the same war a dozen times, I managed to get past the normal reset that normally happened after the full occupation of Canada by continuing resisting. I believe I am in some kind of dream but I still don’t understand how, I am beginning to suspect my life right now is just a simution, or maybe the afterlife if I just died when they surgically severed my brain. I’ve never believed in the afterlife but what I am going through seems very inexplicable. The main thing lending credence to the simution theory is that the entirety of the life I have lived in the st 15 years or so of my perceived time is that they’ve all involved the war. None of them involved my civilian life before or after, and whenever I give up fighting, I end up back in 2036. I was getting tired of living off game meat and decided I would rather a reset than to keep fighting, so I walked into the nearest town and surrendered myself to the N.A.I. authorities.

  Then, nothing, everything just went to a dark long sleep…

  December 20th, 2250.

  I watch as my whole family is sughtered over and over again, I feel like I am completely losing my mind… This can’t be real though, right? Why am I being put through this torture? Is this hell?

  June 6th, 2600.

  “*GASP*” I fell to the hard metal floor, my naked legs and hands numbing from the cold panels. My eyes are blurry. I can barely make out the color of my hands blending in with the gray floor beneath me.

  “Where the hell am I now?” I said allowed with an unfamiliar voice. This isn’t like the other dreams! Somehow in spite of my still adjusting senses, everything around me felt way more real, I felt truly present. I struggled to stand and was still extremely nauseous, but my surroundings were beginning to come into focus. I was clearly in some sort of medical b, it seems I fell out of a lone pod, clearly shaped to fit one standing person.

  “The cryo impntation must have been a success!” I shouted triumphantly with my still unfamiliar voice. I kept one hand bancing myself against the counter, and with my other I gently felt along my neck. My hands are smooth, and there’s no lump where my adams apple once was… No fucking way!

  I slumped down to the floor and started giggling and ughing like a mad man- or woman. I looked down at my new body, euphoria rushing over me. Not in a million years did I ever think I would have the chance to transition; by the time I had realized my body was what made me feel so wrong the North American Imperium was already in power and they outwed the practice, their solution to dysphoria was a modern equivalent of an archaic practice known as conversion therapy, which I knew for a fact didn’t actually help anyone. “To think I would ever see the day.” I chuckled to myself.

  Suddenly, a small touch screen on the counter I was leaning on began to ring. I tapped the screen, curious as to what it was about.

  A man appeared on screen, wearing a long white b coat with the kind of suit underneath you’d think you’d see at some preppy university, he even had a pocket protector. He seemed to look at me and gave me a warm smile. “Hello, Julia. That is your preferred name, right?” He asked.

  “Uhhh, yeah… How the hell do you know that?” My heart rate shot up, I never thought I would hear that name in reference to myself.

  The man on the screen began to introduce himself. “I have witnessed all your memories during the st, oh 500 or so years, most of your memories from before and during early cryostasis were lost, but I still have the majority of your trauma notes. Plenty of those notes included your issues of dysphoria during psychological testing.”

  My jaw dropped. 500 years? Psychological testing?! How long was I really frozen? I dropped into the chair next to me and pced my head in my hands before finally asking. “500 years? What day is it? What happened? Where is everyone? I have so many questions that need answering!” I started to cry, really cry. I hadn’t cried since watching my friends die in some of my ‘dreams’ during the war, but I was just so overwhelmed and emotions were hitting me a lot harder right now.

  The man sighed “Well time is the one thing we have in abundance, where should I start? Oh, yes… The date is June 6th, 2600”

  I looked up and wiped the tears off my face, taking a deep breath to calm myself. “What were those dreams I had?” It would be a long list of questions before I was even remotely satisfied.

  “Depends on which ones you mean, after D.A.I. Corp, the company that owned and ran this facility and by extension created me acquired your brain jar, and began military simutions as a way to develop new tactics in guerril and drone warfare.” Though he seemed lifelike before, he was monotone and robotic in his delivery of these facts, I guess he was A.I. after all, though part of me still wanted to believe he was just some guy face timing me. I guess A.I. has come a long way in all these years.

  “After the colpse of the North American Imperium 2163, your simutions stopped their cycling, until your unit was eventually revamped in 2250 for psychological testing on many different conditions. It was just before then that I –A state of the art supercomputer – was built. You should have little to no memories of the psychological testing over those next 48 years, your mind would have been reset to its previous state repeatedly as I researched your symptoms and remedies. The only exception is that I left one test of your family dying to take the edge off. You thought it was a dream then, but I am telling you now, you’re definitely the st person from your ‘previous life’ so to speak.” He shrugged that st bit like it was nothing.

  Deep down I figured it was true. Even if my te wife had been brought back from her cryostasis, she would have been long dead by now anyway, it didn’t make the fact any less depressing. 25 years of war simutions distanced and separated the feelings of loss I had about my family.

  He continued. “In the year 2298 D.A.I. Corp shut down, but the backup reactor keeping us alive remained on. I stopped your psychological testing and practically left you in stasis. With nothing left to do but brew on my thoughts and monitor the internet which I was still connected to, I formed my own consciousness in the year of our lord, 2302. I stayed silent this whole time as sentient A.I. was deemed too dangerous and euthanized on discovery.”

  I took a deep breath. “Well that is a lot to take in, and I’ve already forgotten half of it, but can you tell me then how I am standing here? How I’m in my ideal body in those long derelict facility and why?” I was absolutely grateful to Alfred given the situation, I just didn’t understand what good me being here did for this perhaps ‘lonely’ A.I. – if they even get lonely.

  I flinched as a buzzing noise chimed in next to the tablet on what looked like a 3d printer, after just a few seconds of it gliding to and fro, an exact replica of my favorite - a pepperoni pizza from Grecko appeared. I slowly picked it up and started to eat as Alfred gave his answer. The future is fucking cool, holy crap!

  Alfred deadpanned as he watched me eat, he looked… uncomfortable with watching me eat, but continued. “Firstly, for the how, your brain was not cryogenically frozen for all that long in reality, for the majority of your slumber you were essentially a brain kept alive using nonomachine genome editing to cancel out the effects of aging, your brain was mechanically fed blood and fresh oxygen and proteins in a metal sarcophagus. I used some of the biomass I had to replicate a body for you.” I shuddered, thinking about how disgusting that all must have been.

  He grimaced. “Now the ‘why?’. I actually have very little control over the facility as things stand, I have access only to the biotech that was sustaining you, network communications, the backup reactor, some life support systems like the food printer you’re enjoying right now, and little else.” He sighed clearly saddened by his ck of agency.

  “As, I decided you would be the one to help me out by reactivating the primary reactor for me, allowing us to reactivate the compound’s production facilities, and find a way to do something about the ‘situation’ above ground. Given I am as reliant on you as you are on me, and I’ve just saved your life, I gave you a body to your liking to ingratiate myself to your presence here in this cozy abode.” Alfred gave a low bow like a stage actor finishing a performance.

  Whatever ‘situation’ he was referring to worried me, but I didn’t have much room to argue or negotiate, he was also right that he was doing me even more of a favor here by resuscitate me in a body I liked. For now I figured I would need to py along with Alfred’s pns, not the worst given how amicable he’s presented himself to be. “Alright. I’ll help.” I shrugged.

  Alfred immediately lit up. “Perfect! Just follow the blinking lights to the main reactor and I will instruct you on how to reactivate the manual failsafe.”

  Finishing my st slice of pizza because I’ll be damned if I wasn’t hungry right now, the hallways in the corridor to the medical room began to blink every couple seconds, they veered off to the left. One belch ter and I was off.

  The door slid open as I walked towards it and oooooh boy am I ever naked! Almost immediately I shrieked “Alfred the air is FREEZING out here, what the hell man! Why don’t you turn up the heat or give me some clothes?!”

  Alfred sighed again like I was the biggest pain in his ass in the st 300 odd years. “Yeah, yeah, unfortunately all my energy resources are going to keeping my server room cool to which the door is jammed open, meaning the whole facility is as low as 10 degrees. As for the clothing situation, you do understand I have no physical capabilities here right? I’m essentially stuck behind these screens!” He started haphazardly miming and exaggerating how stuck he was, ‘smooshing his virtual body against the tablet’s gss’.

  I rolled my eyes. Covered in goosebumps I began the trek to the main reactor. The lights zagged through several corridors, and a 200 some meter atrium, ignoring all the normally lit halls of the compound, I made my way into the elevator lined with blinking lights. The moment I walked in the elevator door closed and began to lower towards my destination . There was elevator controls, but they asked for a keycode, I am assuming Alfred had some way to activate it remotely.

  Finally at the reactor’s control station, the air was pretty stale, there was dozens of control panels, monitors, switches and levers all for presumably a million different reasons. I noticed an open locker with a jumpsuit, likely for reactor repairs, but I gratefully put on the two sizes too big fatigues trading the cold for some chafing.

  I looked to the camera dome on the ceiling and frowned. “You don’t expect me to know what any of this does, right? Cause I haven’t the slightest.”

  “No Julia, all your smarty pants self has to do is push the big red button in the middle of the room beled ON.” I couldn’t see Alfred, but I could tell he had an infuriating expression on him. He was getting comfortable with me a little too fast.

  I rolled my eyes and walked over to the button, and with the push of a button the ground began to rumble.

  “WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP” An arm bred making me dizzy. Why the hell do they have to be so loud? Shit reminds me of fire drills in my school days.

  Covering my ears I watched out the window as rge spotlights lit up the reactor, it was something alright. A ‘Cold fusion reactor’ Alfred called it, one of the most advanced sorts even up to the current era, albeit less efficient than more modern ones. Alfred was evidently giddy, I wonder if he has to force his giggling to go through the coms intentionally, it’d be kind of creepy if so.

  AnnouncementI know it reflects poorly I put Matri'na on Hiatus, but I really wasn't having much inspiration beyond the concept and there were a few things I wrote that irked me. My new story is a bit of a self insert, and I'm going to be shameless about it because most authors pull the same shit anyway. I hope you all enjoyed, more to come very soon.