by Natalie Zutter

Content Warnings: Imprisonment, Medical Experimentation, Prion Disease

My hope, my heaven, my trust must be
My gentle guide, in following thee!
—Sir Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake

Emerging from the cryo pod for the first time feels like a reverse-spooling film of the polar plunge: icy water viciously sucked out of her open nose and mouth, leaving Noemi choking as oxygen invades her orifices, gas replacing the liquid molded to the space of her nostrils and shape of her tongue. The sudden chill prickling her exposed skin—was she naked when they put her in the pod? why would she have let them—raising goosepimples in its wake, and then searing pain. Wet hair suddenly dropping to her cheeks and neck in slimy hanks with a damp splat.

“Greetings, Lady of the Lake,” says the boy crouching before her. It’s not Lin. Her sluggish brain dredges up his promise, as he personally sealed her into the pod what feels like mere moments ago: “I’ll be there when you wake up.”

“Will you still be alive?” she had teased, light ribbing that belied the genuine panic pulsing beneath her flushed skin. He was already twelve years older than her; the scruffy mentor would be downright grandfatherly. When she had asked why he wouldn’t also be undergoing the freeze, his mouth had quirked up in that familiar self-deprecating half-grin. “I’m not nearly as precious as you are, my dear.”

“I come to you seeking wisdom,” the boy says, his voice cracking embarrassingly on wisdom, to the point where his acne-pockmarked face flushes bright red. Noemi’s gritty eyes take an eternity to blink, but it does little to ground her in this bizarre situation. There were no children aboard when they left Earth. No pregnant crew, either.

“Wisdom,” the boy says again, with an impatient edge giving her the sudden sharp sense of the man he will grow into. All Noemi can think of is the party the night before launch, sour gulps of champagne and grandiose speeches from the captain, foolishly optimistic. Wisdom certainly bandied about, but also the unspoken sentiment that they were offering themselves up as test subjects. Herself more so than anyone.

Movement at the corner of her vision, as one of the silent bodies jerkily steps forward. Her reflexes are too slow to flinch as the stranger roots around in the cryo-liquid as if they have misplaced a lucky coin in a fountain. Their hand sweeps impersonally along her petrified ass-cheek and right thigh until they shove something metal into her ice-clawed fingers.

As the ship’s air slowly warms her skin, Noemi’s arm begins to quiver with the effort of holding it up. Gingerly, the youth pries open her fingers and takes the wrench. Blood climbs up her face in a warm, spiky flash, and her lips part.

“Thank you,” he says, and then shoves her back into the pod. Muscles still rusty from disuse, Noemi flails in the shallow cryo bath, her spine hitting the bottom of the pod with a dull bang that makes her torso seize up in sudden agony. She struggles to push herself up on shaky arms, but the pod cover is already sliding into place with a pleasant, ominous hum. The surface ices over in beautiful, deadly fractals like every nightmare, paralyzing in its shocking familiarity; she thinks, desperately hopes, that maybe she’s only dreaming.

Time enough to snatch at those words—what did he mean, Lady of the—before her consciousness refreezes mid-thought.

𓆟

“Two truths and a lie:

You might’ve heard me called ‘Lady of the Lake’ in the lab; that’s because I’m always finding the shit everyone else seems to lose.

There is a protein in my brain that has already spelled my doom; one day I’ll wake up and never be able to go to sleep again, an insomniac until I die.

I love the water.”

A corporate ice-breaker that, when delivered by her, is a dead-weight mood-killer. Only Lin huffs a quiet laugh, because he’s heard this one before and is primed for her dark sense of humor. The almost-quaint childhood tale of the lake ice buckling beneath her booted feet, Noemi slipping beneath the surface before she could so much as gasp. The slow-dawning horror of watching the ice stitch itself back together above her head, slowly obscuring her brother’s face screaming at her don’t just watch! break it! as he frantically smashed at the slushy would-be coffin until it gave her back up.

The polar plunge had been about reclaiming her relationship with cold—but not icy—water, about jumping in and out on her own terms. Lin yelping beside her, his waterlogged hair and shouted blue streak making her double over with laughter that warmed her from the inside, better than the foil blanket draped over her shoulders.

𓆟

—Lake? Noemi’s question thaws itself out the next time she is unceremoniously dragged back into wakefulness. She retches not-water directly into the lap of the same boy, who recoils clumsily, all gangly limbs. Noemi braces for him to push her away again, but instead he regards her with wary… Is that reverence?

“What,” she croaks around an excruciatingly dry throat, “the fuck is happening.”

His Adam's apple bobs in his spindly neck. “Lady of the Lake, I come to you humbly to ask for your guidance.”

He’s mad. “Why are you calling me that?” she demands. They are in fucking outer space. Just this chamber—Noemi cranes her neck, muscles seized up like too many late nights in the lab hunched over slides—filled with identical pods standing at forty-five-degree angles. But even with her limited range of motion she can tell that the other pods aren’t fogged over with condensation. They are clear. Open. Empty. All except hers.

The youth’s voice snares her attention. “Because he told us to search for you.” The shiny lure of a puzzle, her brain snagging on he. “Only you possess what I need to guide the ship.”

“You’re the…” She eyes him groggily. “Captain?”

He puffs out his thin chest. “I will be. It’s my destiny.”

She is the Lady of the Lake. He needs her to help him rule, which makes him… Arthur? Her stomach drags up bile past a hammering heart. This isn’t happening. “Who told you?” His eyes go wide with uncertainty, a child realizing too late that he has misbehaved.

With all of her strength she grabs him by the lapels of his tunic—this style nothing like what they were wearing when they blasted off, not even the mission-supplied uniforms. Her slimy hands slide over the rough fabric; it doesn’t feel like sleek crepe, more like a hand-me-down washed and worn to anonymous nubbiness. “What year is it?”

“Year 30!” he shouts, fingers locked around her wrists hard enough to bruise, if there were enough blood circulating in her arms. Noemi is so shocked that her hands unlock. She was supposed to be woken up in only a decade. Did the pods malfunction? But no, everyone else seems to have woken up on time. Why not her?

Why—here another swell of nausea—only her.

She ices over her voice. “Where. Is. Lin.” The spark of terror in his eyes tells her that he knows to fear her reaction.

But that trepidation is anchored by something deeper. Grief. “He died, before my time.” The knowledge shouldn’t surprise, but Noemi hadn’t let herself fathom the reality that she is well and truly alone, everyone she has ever known now long dead and gone. “The me before me knew him. He passed his teachings on.”

Noemi can’t stop shaking her head. Or maybe her head is still, her entire body wracked with ugly shivers. “But it was only supposed to be ten years.”

Impossibly, he is crying. Fury sparks within her; he has no right. “Please,” Arthur—a supposed king, an expected captain—whines. “I can’t do the spacewalk without the hook. I can’t do this without you.”

“No!” she snaps, appalled that she has to mother him.

Klaxons screech, drowning out even this small bit of power she wields. The room is plunged into red light—the hue of the myriad false emergencies they drilled so frequently that Noemi dreamed of them up until blastoff. But this is no drill, as the ship lurches so sharply that Noemi is pitched half out of her tank, her ribs bashing into the open edge of the pod hard enough to knock the remaining air out of her. The surrounding crew’s breath-held reverence dissolves into action, hands slamming control panels, shouted orders. The never-ending sirens reverberate through her head in an anxious echo, until they have melted into the wail of the ambulance that couldn’t revive her mother once she was well and truly gone, open eyes boring into an impossible distance.

“Lady!” Arthur snaps, the leader shining through like a sudden light through cloudy ice. “The hook!” Fumbling, she thrusts the metal hook at him, anything to stop the awful blaring. The moment his fingers close around it, the klaxons stop as if a switch has been flipped. Noemi tries to take a step, but slips on spilled cryo-liquid. Back into her tank she tumbles, the familiar whir of the lid shutting back over her head, and she is sinking back, helpless.

𓆟

Each wake leaves her more and more sluggish. Noemi resolves to collect her thoughts like treasured pebbles, worn smooth by repeated rubbing and turning over. She will keep her wits about her, so that next time she will emerge fully from the cryogenic liquid, mind clear and able to break this strange spell.

But after the near-disaster of that second wake, they seem to have learned their lesson. They only barely thaw her, just enough that she is able to offer up whatever tool she’s been buried with the time before.

One time, she awakens to a needle in the crook of her arm. Whatever she gives this generation, they don’t even pretend that it’s not against her will.

Water. Arm. Sword. King. What choice does she have but to hand it over?

𓆟

She has always been Nimue, she decides, and it was just that brief interlude on Earth that was the dream. That sounds more like the fairy tale, after all: girl survives near-drowning, only to discover that there is already a time bomb implanted in her family’s genetics. Stumbles upon it when her mother wakes up one morning, then never goes to sleep again. Woman changes jobs, transforming from city planner to scientist, in order to study the prions that stole her mother from her. Woman undergoes magical spell (blood draws, so many minute invasions) to find out what she has secretly always suspected, that she has inherited the same sleepless curse. Loses her brother, unwilling as he is to unlock the same answer, sinking beneath his own ignorance.

Instead, Noemi dreams herself backward in time. She meets Arthur in feudal Japan, bestows upon him a naginata. In the Dark Ages, she places a quill into his hand. A flash drive! In the not-so-distant past, when information was the most precious and cutting blade.

She has always been the Lady of the Lake. She must have, for them to come to her like this, over and over. To trap her like this.

𓆟

“Some are born great,” she burbles in a cryo-waterfall as she lurches upright, “some become great, some have greatness thrust upon them. But”—and she can already see them stealing glances again at the readout, wondering if they should refreeze her before she’s fully thawed out—“but some exist only to thrust greatness upon others. What of them?”

Her dreams can’t fit around Lin. If she has always belonged to a lake—even if it changes form—then how can she explain meeting him in the lab? Him singling her out, praising her prion research. Encouraging her to apply for the mission. “There is nothing left for you on Earth anymore,” and it hurt, but it was true, her mother’s body long-cremated save for the spliced brain cells she still stared at through the microscope lens, her brother lost to her so that she had no idea how he slept at night, if he even still did. “Trust your body to the cryo, and your mind will be able to solve this in a future your body would never have made it to.”

Trust. Thrust. Trust. Thrust. She cannot stop rhyming the two, is in fact screeching them like some twisted siren forcing people to recoil away rather than lure them to her. Except that she must have thrown out some bait without meaning to, because the air before her sparkles and flickers, until…

“Noemi.” Suddenly Lin stands before her, between one drenched blink and the next. Except it’s not his body, not his broad-shouldered bulk or shaggy gray-streaked hair or penchant for surreal Hawaiian shirts. Those are all rendered in three dimensions, but it’s a projection at half-size. A hologram, her mind struggles to process. Like something out of science fiction.

“Lin?” she gasps, and is furious to discover her cheeks are suddenly hot with tears that she didn’t even feel slipping down her numb skin. “Lin, what did you do?”

She should be mortified that she’s naked before him, but she has the odd sense that he isn’t actually seeing her. His gray eyes seem to stare through her body as if she is the insubstantial one.

“My dear,” this not-quite-Lin says, “I made you immortal. Or as close as I could. You are the most important part of this voyage. This ship literally cannot keep turning without you.”

His words don’t make sense; it’s his usual bullshit spin, first to procure funding, then to secure their spots on the mission. So instead all she can think to ask is, “Why is he always the same? You keep waking me up later and later, but he never ages.”

“He does age,” Lin corrects her, “while you’re asleep. But every time you wake up, he must be the same age.” But that can only mean… “We have almost perfected the cloning process.” And then she realizes why Arthur looks familiar: he has the same shadow of the jawline that belongs (belonged) to their captain. The boisterous bravado with which he boomed out his big speech, their last night on terra firma, about how they would be the first of many generations venturing forward into the inky black. How they would humbly set the course and then give way to the next generation. She thought he was overdoing it a bit, even for a night where they all were putting on brave faces for one another. But the real act must have been obscuring how vital he thought he was to the mission, to copy himself over and over.

No wonder they make such good company. “Why clone him and not yourself?” But Lin has never been interested in repetitive cycles. He was always thinking himself forward. She answers herself: “You figured it out. How to map your brain. Your consciousness.”

He’s nodding, smiling proudly, the beaming mentor. “It was my life’s work.”

It should have been their work, side-by-side. Her lips tremble despite her best efforts to clench her jaw until she feels like she’ll break a tendon. Yes, her specialty had the personal dimension of racing a clock to save her own brain and then her body, but the solution was the same: map the human consciousness onto a digital framework, smooth out the proteins that fold themselves into fatal knots.

“The ship needs this,” Lin explains. She keeps her mouth shut because every minute that he talks is another greedy gulp of ship-air. Her skin is finally beginning to warm. It is a welcome agony. “This pageantry. A familiar figure. A myth built into the framework of the ship itself from liftoff. That never changes. A clear quest to fulfill.”

We have an entire mission, she wants to spit back. Or we had one. What comes out instead is the thin, reedy plea of a child: “How could you let them do that?”

“You let them do that,” Lin says. But as she unleashes outraged screams upon him and claws at the spot where he’s projected, he simply, infuriatingly, disappears. And then she’s back on ice.

𓆟

Woken once a generation. Some useless trinket, more symbolism than utility, placed within reach. Sometimes she is just a hand and an arm, held aloft, offering. As the generations go on, more and more empty-handed; Excalibur is a pass-key, a string of code: 13XC958. What is the point? She is but a conduit, passing on obscure information. Choosing someone already chosen by the powers-that-be.

Tossed back into the water like a fish, an act of mercy that’s anything but. Her mind, wasted. Her body, misappropriated.

𓆟

She dreams Lin into a crystal cave, glittering facets of chunky quartz hanging from the ceiling or jutting up from the uneven ground. Locked inside a tree, his fingerprints fused with the whorls of wood. Buried in an empty pit, fated to stare up knowing that no one will climb in after him.

She kicks kicks kicks her feet as if they are webbed with fins, or fused into a tail. She clenches her hands into fists, pounds pounds pounds like knocking on an icy door. Except that one hand is wrapped around something cold and hard, a promise forged in metal and myth.

𓆟

The idiots buried her with an actual sword this time.

Noemi lunges forward, putting all of her momentum into lifting her arm. Her fingers are already wrapped around the hilt; it feels more like an extension of her hand, like something that has always belonged to her. Excalibur slides into Arthur’s midsection like his flesh is water. She would feel guilty if she didn’t know there were a half-dozen of him waiting on ice. In all of the yelling frenzy she hauls herself out of the pod. Though the momentum in her sleep was mostly in her mind, the mantra propels her forward onto shaky, atrophied legs. She leaves the sword wedged in there, for someone else to pull out.

She drunkenly stumbles through the ship’s corridors, a clumsy ghost. All these decades—over a century since her feet last touched this ground. Her skin can’t adjust to the thermostat; constant chills crawl across her flesh. Her steps are plodding, heavy when she is accustomed to buoyancy. She is humiliatingly naked without the opacity of the cryo-freeze.

Whether it’s the design or the orbit, everything seems circular; she never doubts which direction she is meant to go, toward the center. When her muscles tremble, she pushes herself to take just one more step. She conjures up memories, wraps them around herself like a blanket. Bedtime stories, curled around her mother’s warm body, lulled by her deep and steady voice.

At every turn, smoky panels bounce light back from every available surface, above and below and at eye level or within arm’s reach. This is how Lin moves through the ship, how he projects himself from surface to surface. She knows now where to find him.

The ship archives didn’t interest her on the tour as much as the labs (single-minded fool), but to her flooded eyes they dazzle: tricks of the light conjuring up Lin’s form in his true-to-life size, towering over her. Wracking full-body shudders as she struggles to stand her ground before him.

“Noemi.” He doesn’t look surprised in the slightest. “You found me.”

“You can’t put me back to sleep!” She hates how shrill her voice sounds, not even dipping a toe into hysterics but completely submerged. Panic is an anchor dragging her back down into those dark depths.

Except that then Lin says, “You’ll never sleep again,” like an infuriating riddle.

“What are you talking about?” she snaps. “Every time, you put me right back to—”

A single tone cuts her off, as her own image materializes between them, in miniature: A hologram of her and Lin, shot at such an angle that she must not have realized he was recording this for posterity.

“How long?” the other Lin asks—tender, concerned. Resigned.

Her hologram-self’s face is haggard, bruise-purple circles beneath eyes that already look glassy. Noemi’s heart clenches around the anxiety, but this happened long ago. “Three days,” the other her says.

“It’s early,” Lin tries, striving for the authority that came to him so easily on Earth. “Your body is still adjusting to the lack of a circadian rhythm—”

“Mine and no one else’s?” she retorts, voice ragged with fatigue. “I’ve tried everything, Lin. Melatonin. Booze. Exercise. Orgasms. I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep. I’ve been walking the corridors every night. Staring out at space.” A tremble that starts in her chin and ripples throughout her slumped frame. “I was supposed to have more time.”

Lin hanging his shaggy head in grim acceptance. Then—the spark of an idea. “You can have more time.” Hope animating his frame as he steps closer to her. “Trust your body to the cryo.”

“Again?” she asks sardonically, but this younger, living Lin nods emphatically. “It’s the best chance you have.”

Daring to hope, beseeching. “Can you—”

“I have to stay awake,” he says gently. “I’ll make sure there is a world for you to wake up in. I promise. No matter what.” The hologram tableau flickers, then snuffs itself out.

“Why don’t I remember any of this?” she challenges.

He shrugs, the rare concession of not possessing every answer. “You might have had a poor reaction to the sedative that we injected you with. Or it could be the cryo liquid itself.”

“Especially since you’re not supposed to defrost and refreeze people,” she snaps. “I didn’t give you permission to do any of that!”

“I kept you alive,” he snaps back, the first time he’s lost his cool. “I kept my promise. And now that you’ve decided on this, it’s time for us to resume our work.”

The fucking gall. “When has it ever been ours?” He abandoned her in their lifetime. “You’re just a shadow, old man.” It’s saying it aloud that makes her realize the one bit of power she has over him: she is alive—for however long she has left—and corporeal. This room is temperature-controlled against moisture. She is drenched.

“No!” Lin shouts as she touches her hand to the nearest panel. All it takes is the merest press of her frozen fingerprints, and one station sputters out. Lin’s avatar tries to intercept her as she lunges out of the entrance to the archives, her bare feet smacking wet footprints along the floor. Lin hops from panel to panel, but only manages to materialize briefly before she short-circuits it. Stubborn to the end, he trails her from one sparking panel to the next, halfway down the ship, before he finally stops reappearing.

Noemi pauses, hand outstretched, and clenches it in a fist, drawing her rage back in. She slowly retraces her steps back to the archives, toes and heels pressing back into her slowly-drying footprints.

Inside, Lin hovers sullenly over one of the few remaining panels.

“This is what you get,” Noemi tells him, gesturing around. “If I see you anywhere on the rest of the ship, I will force you into an even smaller cage.”

“You can’t—” he starts, but she cuts him off. “Yes. I can. You got whole generations on this ship. It’s my turn.” Her voice wobbles. “You owe me this little bit.”

His face softens, which makes it worse. “But what will you do now?” he asks, voice horribly gentle.

She takes a deep breath. “I will tell you when I figure that out. Maybe.”

And she leaves him behind in his crystal cave.

𓆟

She will never sleep again.

Today is the last day of her life. How long it lasts is out of her control—a matter of space-time, of time dilation, of ship rotations. But she will remain awake for every minute that is hers.

Natalie Zutter (she/her) is a playwright and pop culture critic living in New York. Her nonfiction work has been published at Reactor (formerly Tor.com, where she was previously a staff writer) and in their collection Rocket Fuel, as well as NPR Books and Lit Hub. Her SFF short plays have been performed at geek theater festivals in New York City and elsewhere; her immersive romantasy play “Garters” premiered at Chicago's Otherworld Theatre Company during Pride 2024. She has been a writer-in-residence with the Amtrak Residency and is an alum of Viable Paradise 2025. Find her online @zutsuit (Bluesky/Instagram) and @nataliezutter (Twitter).