Blue Gender DVD Boxset Winner - The More Things Change

The More Things Change...
by Eugene Myers

I woke slowly, the sound of a clock radio seeping through the thick fog of my dreamless sleep. I fumbled to switch it off, but found that I couldn't move my arm, couldn't feel my body. It was a cold morning, but I was beginning to feel the sunlight warm my face. Scattered words from the radio gradually resolved into a morning news report.

“... standing here witnessing history in the making. Are you getting this, Bob? Good. Focus on the head of his coffin. That's right. At this moment the last of the '03 Frosties is being awakened from his decades-long slumber. Shh... he's stirring.”

I cracked open my eyelids with difficulty, wincing at the bright light and flinching as tiny flakes of ice crystal dropped into my eyes. I fluttered my eyelids until they were clear and darted my eyes left and right as my vision adjusted.

“So what does it mean if he sees his shadow?”

“Shut up, Bob. We're on the air.”

A head moved into view, hovering over mine. It was a woman, her face shadowed, long auburn hair haloed by the bright artificial light behind her.

I moved my chilled lips voicelessly, air rasping in my raw throat. A ghost of a whisper croaked, “Amanda?”
A sob escaped from the woman's throat. “Oh, thank God.”

Voices around me chorused and cheered. “He's alive! Alive!”

“I can't believe he made it.”

“He's awake!”

“Amanda, what's going on?” My voice was coming back. It sounded strange to my ears, like the voice of an old friend you haven't seen in a long time. The light behind her shifted to illuminate her face and shine directly into my eyes. I realized it was the light from a tiny handcam floating in midair. The woman blinked, then leaned closer to me. She spoke, her breath fogging in the cool air.

“No, Dad. It's Julie.”

“Dad?” I don't have a daughter, but this woman was the spitting image of my wife Amanda.

“It's a long story.”

“You can read about it in tomorrow's NewsNet,” a woman interrupted. She pointed a finger at me, miming a gun, and with an arm jostled Julie out of the way. “Excuse me. Mr. Blackford, do you have any words for the future?”
“The future? What do you mean the future? Where am I?”

I struggled to sit up, painfully, muscles burning from the effort and stiff joints creaking loudly in protest. Several people gasped. Some feeling was coming back to my skin, a prickly sensation, as though every limb had fallen asleep. I gently flexed my fingers and stretched noisily.

“Terry,” Julie said. “I know you're very confused, and we'll explain everything, but first we have to make sure you're all right.”

“Am I really your father?”

“Yes,” she smiled, taking my hand. Her hands felt burning hot against my still thawing flesh.

“Then it's okay to call me Dad.”

“We should get you into one of these thermal suits as soon as possible. Dad.” She grinned and held up what looked like a pair of long johns. "It should help repair any surface damage to your skin, and speed the recovery process from the stasis, help your muscles to strengthen, let you walk around, that kind of thing. It'll also monitor your vital signs and alert the medics if you're in any danger from the extended exposure." She held the suit out to me.

That was when I realized that I was completely naked, though covered in a thin layer of frost, like a steak that has been left too long in the freezer. The ice was already melting though, and I was very cold. I took the bundle of material gratefully and placed it in my lap, trying not to look too embarrassed.

Bob used a remote hand-unit to maneuver the camera into my face, and there was the woman's finger again, shoved right under my nose. This close I could see a tiny silver dot on the tip of its long red fingernail. That must be a microphone, I figured. I blinked in the bright light, shielding my eyes with one hand visored over my face.

“Wait a minute, is this going to be on TV?”

“It will be on the demand-video feed. We don't have TV, as you remember it, anymore.”
Good riddance, I thought. Still, I didn't relish the thought of my naked blue ass being displayed on video screens for everyone to watch.

“Could I have a little privacy, do you think?”

“Not a chance, Mr. Blackford,” the reported smirked. “You belong to the people now.”



“So you're saying Amanda had you after I was frozen?”

Julie nodded. “Artificial insemination. There was an ample supply of your genetic material, on ice, as it were.”
It was hard to believe that I had a daughter. Before I'd even known about her she had grown up into a beautiful young woman. She was the same age her mother had been when we got married two years ago. No, that would be twenty-four years ago. I had been frozen for the past twenty-two years. It was now 2025. I was in the future.

“Where is she?”

Julie looked down at her feet as we walked down the street. It was amazing how little everything had changed. "The more things change, the more they stay the same," wasn't that the saying? The future was disappointing. The future was boring. Of course there had been little improvements. The city streets were cleaner, thanks no doubt to the tiny mechanized sweepers whirring along the sidewalks and ditches, smartly dodging pedestrians and quickly removing all the paper litter, blackened gum, and discarded bottles while scrubbing the surface with an antiseptic spray and spinning brushes. There were fewer cars, and they ran silently, cleanly. Electric power? Or had some other fuel been devised in my absence? Where had all the people gone? Midtown Manhattan was as empty in the early afternoon as it used to be at five in the morning.
“What are you looking for up there?”

I lowered my head, realizing I had been straining my neck looking for upper street levels, or flying cars, or a hovering UFO overhead. None of those things were evident, but the skyscrapers reached higher than I remembered, looked sturdier and somehow even less friendly than before. Yet the sky was the bluest blue I had ever seen.

“I don't know. Maybe God.”

“You won't find him in New York,” she laughed.

“No, I guess not. What about a McDonald's?" I could always count on McDonald's being there when I needed it.
“McDonald's?” she asked blankly.

“Yeah, they used to be on every block. I haven't seen a single one since we left the hospital.”
“There's a McKing's up ahead. Do you really want to eat there? I thought we should celebrate, have a nice meal. Get to know each other.”

“I could really go for some Mc... King's fries, right about now. I'd like something familiar. In my day, kids used to beg their parents to go to fast food restaurants.”

Julie made a face. “Whatever you want, Dad.”



An hour later I staggered out of Julie's bathroom, wiping my clammy face with a damp hand, the automatic toilet gurgling behind me.

“Feel better?”

"Sorry about that.”

“The doctors said you might have problems keeping solid foods down for a day or so. Your stomach is still adjusting. You haven't eaten anything in over twenty years, you know.”

“Yeah. But now that I think about it, I used to hate fast food.” I sat on the couch and rubbed my hands together vigorously. I still felt cold, even though the thermostat was set to ninety degrees Fahrenheit. Tiny drops of sweat flecked Julie's forehead as she leaned over something in her lap. “What's that?”

Julie held up a frame. “A picture of me and Mom, on my sixteenth birthday.”

She pointed the frame at a blank wall and an image flickered to life on the white plaster. I turned and stared at it. It was about thirty seconds of video. Amanda looked as beautiful as ever, though she had clearly aged and put on a little weight since I had last seen her. A perfect younger version of her stood beside her, smiling broadly and jingling a set of car keys. I thought I noticed something sad in Amanda's eyes as she turned to look at Julie proudly then pasted a smile on her face for the camera.

“I'm sorry I missed it.”

“Me too.”

“She loved you, Dad.”

“Then why did she leave me there? The doctors say my cancer was curable ten years ago! I should have been released a lot sooner. I don't even remember going under. The last I remember I was in the hospital for surgery to try to remove the cancerous tissue, and the next moment I'm waking up with my wife missing and a daughter I never knew.”

“She told me you were dead. I didn't know you were in storage until Frigidaire went out of business and they started calling about uncollected Frosties.”

"What's a 'Frosty'?"

"You are. It's a term that came into vogue for those that chose cryogenic stasis to extend their lives. There are worse nicknames. 'Freaky Freezies,' for one."

"Cute. But I didn't choose to be put in there."

"Mom must have chosen for you. She had your coffin locked until she left Earth last year for the Jupiter colony. I didn't know it was there, and if I had, I wouldn't have been able to open it. I inherited her assets, including the passcodes, when she left."

"That still doesn't explain why she... abandoned me."

Julie put the frame down and the image faded from the wall, like a vague memory. I almost asked her to flash it back up there. She swept her hair away from her face and leaned back on the sofa, crossing her legs.

"I've been thinking about that since she left. I think she had a few reasons. First, when she decided she wanted to have a child, she must have figured it would be easier to pretend that you were simply dead."

"At least she didn't tell you I had run out on you."

"She wouldn't do that. She always spoke highly of you. Second, she had a hard time being away from you. The access records for your coffin indicate she visited every other weekend, and every year on your anniversary and your birthday. She had it opened occasionally and she talked to you, but I suppose you don't remember that. It would only be like a dream. She went there regularly for almost ten years."

"Why did she stop?"

Julie closed her eyes and drew in a breath. I found myself leaning forward in my seat, as though it would bring me closer to the past she was relating.

"She met someone."

Ah. Now I was beginning to understand.

"Who?"

"Someone at the warehouse where they stored you. He watched her come and go for eight years before he finally talked to her, asked her out. They're still together. He's my stepfather."

I collapsed backward in my chair. "She divorced me?" Then I really had lost her. "Do you have a picture of him? No, never mind."

"I'm sorry, Dad. She didn't want to bring you out of stasis because she knew it would break your heart."

"No. She knew it would break her heart."

"That's not fair."

"Don't tell me what's fair. My life was taken away from me. I never made any of these choices. I never asked to be put in stasis, I never asked for a divorce, I never asked for a daughter."

Tears sprang to Julie's eyes.

"Julie, I'm sorry. I didn't mean that."

"I know," she sniffed. "She did love you. She wanted you to live. She left instructions that if something were to happen to her, I or another relative would be given the passcodes to release you so you could be given treatment. I suppose she figured if she were gone, it would be easier on you."

"But what was she saving me for? What's the point in living if you don't have something worth living for? She was my life." I paused, watching Julie as she wiped her face leaving streaks of her face makeup smeared around her eyes. "But I suppose now I have you."

She smiled her mother's smile at me, and my heart ached.



The world hadn't changed much in twenty years, though my world had been irrevocably altered. I toured my old neighborhood on the upper West Side, which looked much the same as I recalled it. Trees lined the sidewalks, people walked their dogs, cars drifted down the streets. Phone booths had been replaced by all-purpose digital kiosks, which could be used as an emergency call for police and fire, NewsNet terminal, videophone, advertising space, ATM. Everywhere I looked I saw my face flickering across the screen as I insisted to the reporters that I had nothing to say, that it was too soon to know how I could fit into this strange new world.

There was a certain amount of celebrity, being the last of the '03 Frosties. Cryogenics had been banned in 2020, and it had taken five years to shut down the assorted facilities, track down family of the unclaimed clients, and thaw them out. I was the last case, and the media had latched onto me as the poster child for the entire project. First in, last out.

A dark shape flitted past overhead: it wasn't a bird or a plane, but a security surveillance hovercraft, traveling on "tracks" generated by crisscrossing magnetic fields in the air. It had just photographed me as it passed, transmitting my image instantly to a database at the central intelligence hub, where it was crosschecked against their records. Julie had filled me in on these measures, but I found I didn't really care about the details. It was just a new way of doing what the government had always done, and I was tired of it.

I was tired of all of it.

I came to my old building, or rather where my old building had been. A sleek new complex had sprouted up in its place, a forbidding onyx fortress stretching high into the sky. Julie had said everything from my apartment was being kept in Amanda's storage locker, but it wasn't time yet to go through the old things yet, to pick up the pieces of my old life, puzzle pieces that would never quite fit again.

What was there for me in this world? My mind was stuck in 2003, when the world was on the brink of war. I had missed the war, and the peace that followed. Almost a third of the world's population had migrated to the stars, stars that I couldn't even see because of the bright lights of this city.

I could follow Amanda up there, but what would be the point? She already had someone. I could go somewhere else, start a new life, but I couldn't face that while I still wanted the old one back. No, I would stay on Earth, with Julie, and find out what life had left to offer me.

"Dad?"

I turned, and saw Julie standing in the gentle glow of a streetlight drifting above her. "I thought I'd find you here," she said. "Are you all right?"

"I think so."

"I was worried."

"Why? Where could I go? What could happen?"

"The city can still be dangerous. Anyway, tomorrow morning you have an early appointment with Dr. Case, to have the last of the cancer removed. You should get some sleep."

"I've had all the sleep I need for a while."

She took a hesitant step forward, reaching one hand out. "Do you want to walk around some more out here?"

"No," I said, looking around one last time. "I've seen everything there is to see. Let's go home. We have a lot of catching up to do."

THE END