“I heard this story one time. A fella in suspension-sleep trips the cardio alarm. Emergency technicians wake him, and he swears there’s a ghost in the pod trying to kill him. So the techs check the diagnostics, laugh it off and put him back under. A few days later, the same thing happens. This time the guy rants about how the ghost was trying to rip his face off. Creepy, right? So they put him under again. After the third time, the tech’s think the guy is just plain nuts, but fed up with having to go all the way down there, they move him into a reserve pod. Years pass without further incident until the ship arrives. The technicians wake the passengers and get to the reserve pod last. Opening it, they find the man stone-cold dead, desiccated, dried to the bone, mouth open in what someone chillingly described as an endless desolate scream. Imagine that! When moving him to the reserve, they must’ve wired up the pod wrong, or some such, so the alarm didn’t sound. Anyway, whatever this ghost was, it had gradually frightened him to death, dream by dream, night by night, for years on end. Scary stuff, am I right? Wait for it, though. This shoe will drop, I promise. It turns out, as they discovered later, a stowaway had got onboard, impressively staying hidden for the entire trip, living off the scraps in the food recyclers. Get this, the hitchhiker gets totally bored, stuck on the ship all on their own, so they took to roaming through the suspension cabins wearing a white sheet to fool the internal sensors. Can you believe that? Take my advice. Next time you go into sus-sleep, bribe the technicians to paint over the window.”
