Thousand+ Words for Nov. 11, 2025

The Year is 2080. The World has run out of Fossil Fuels Years ago, and Now Everything....

The year is 2080. The world has run out of fossil fuels years ago, and now everything is electric.

The electricity is produced by safe, efficient nuclear fusion plants that pepper the country and the world. The fusion plants need helium-3 to make electricity most efficiently, and this material exists only in trace amounts on the Earth.

At first, the material is mined on the Moon—the top surface of the regolith is 0.3% helium-3. But the process is hard to automate and the material isn’t quite rich enough to justify the cost of maintaining a manned station on the Moon, so the corporation that owns most of the nuclear plants—Artois Corporation—decides to set up a station on the largest moon on Saturn, Titan.

Titan has an atmosphere and enough gravity to support human physiology for extended periods of time. The upper atmosphere of Saturn is 1.13 percent helium-3, and so the miners there use small ships called scoopers to fly from Titan to the upper atmosphere of Saturn, scoop up a load of the helium-rich gas, and return to Titan, where the material is purified to 7 percent and fired toward Earth in automated bullet-like containers. The bullets take 100 months to complete the return trip, but the station is able to launch one every third day or so, and so as long as the process continues, there is eventually a steady flow of helium-3.

The problem with the setup is rotating crew in and out. Even the fastest torpedo ship takes 54 months to make the journey. There’s simply no way a person can tolerate the close quarters for that long—and even if they could, it would be impossible to carry the food and water that would be necessary for such a long trip. So a state of chemically induced suspended animation is used to put the miner to sleep and support them in a sleeping status for the time it takes to make the trip. The technology isn’t very good; it’s hard on the miners’ bodies, and a high percentage of them get to the station with severe psychological damage that renders them unusable. After much experience and experimentation, it is discovered that the psychological damage is caused by the brain’s dreaming mechanism is interfered with by the harsh chemicals needed to keep them suspended for all that time.

Over a period of years, the process is improved and fine tuned, and a couple of breakthroughs are experienced to produce a process that make it possible for miners to dream while they are in hibernation. The new process needs to be tested, and a 38-year-old experienced research specialist named Marybeth Selzer, a medical doctor and epidemiologist, volunteers to be the testing subject.

Marybeth completes the two-week-long pre-hibernation protocol, then reports to the sleep facility in Houston for the insertion process. She enters the sleep chamber, the drugs are administered, and she falls asleep.

Then she wakes up, having not been conscious of the passage of time or any dreaming. She finds herself on a cot in a women’s shelter.
After some confusion, she discovers first that the year is 2027 and she is in Cleveland, Ohio. It develops that she was found semi-conscious in a city park four days previously wearing too-big jeans, a tee shirt with the words ‘Rock Star’ on the front, and barefoot, with no identification or any other possessions of any kind. After having been checked out in a local hospital, she was brought to the shelter to recover.

Over the next few days, Marybeth makes an effort to contact her colleagues at the facility in Houston, but they deny that they’ve ever heard of her. She discovers that the hospital she works at in Houston exists, but no one there knows her and they have no record of her being employed there. Marybeth manages to get driven to the base for a fingerprint check—but her fingerprints are not in anyone’s files. Her Social Security number turns out to be unassigned; none of the colleges she attended have any record of her, and none of her previous addresses or friends exist. No one knows her or has any record of her whatsoever.

Over the course of the next several years, she manages to get an identity established for herself, get a job, meet a man, get married, have two children, and establish herself in a life in a suburb of Cleveland. After a decade or so, her memory of her previous life starts to fade somewhat as her children grow up and build lives for themselves. Another decade passes—she retires from her job, gets a private pilot certificate, and buys and airplane. Her husband also retires, and they move to Florida, where the grandchildren visit and she gardens, runs the church bake sale twice a month, and volunteers at the local blood bank. One day she's reflecting on her previous life and realizes that she actually is pretty happy with things, despite the confusing way they developed.

Then one day a woman comes into the blood bank while she is working and sits down in the chair to give blood. Marybeth doesn’t recognize the woman at first—after all, she hasn’t seen her in over 20 years—but then she realizes who she is. She is one of the technicians who prepared her for the hibernation process. Marybeth starts to question the woman, and as she does so, she suddenly is overcome with dizziness, her surroundings fade, and the next thing she knows, she wakes up—in the hibernation chamber. In Houston. In 2080.

The 72 hours are over and the entire thing, her life in Ohio, all those years, her husband, children and grandchildren, all of it was a hibernation-induced dream.

Marybeth refuses to believe it at first--until she sees herself in the mirror. She’s 38 again.

The transition back to her old, half-remembered life is stressful and traumatic. Her sense of duty compels her to complete her commitment to the project, but she resigns her commission, sells her house and possessions in Houston, and the story ends with her getting on Interstate 59 north—toward Cincinnati.

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