Excerpt: A Long, Long Sleep

“Miss Fitzroy, how does it feel to wake up in a new century?”
I swallowed again. I didn’t know how I felt, yet. It was too much, too soon. I’d had too many shocks to an already weakened system. If it wasn’t for the extreme advances in medical science in the sixty years I’d been in stass, I would probably have spent the next week in a hospital being fed intravenously. Once the press knew of my existence, though, they’d sped up my recovery with little nanobots and pushed me out the door. The hospital hadn’t wanted the media to descend upon them.
So they left me to face the swarm.
I took another deep breath. “It’s good to be back,” I said, handing them their sound bite. Cameras flashed. It was a lie, but that didn’t matter. That’s all they wanted to hear.