Endings

*Citizen Sleeper* has three endings, each with two or three variations, depending on your choice.

## Merging with the Greenway AIs

### Grow Vast and Strange

Cut the thread when talking with Gardener.

Nothing changes. You stand at a point of stillness. No, you don't stand. You have no legs, no body. You ARE a point of stillness, a point in the flow.
Your mind fizzes. A thousand new shoots break through the soil. They entwine with you, embrace you. Some part of you decays while something else feeds from that decay. The spores of your new thoughts float away in shifting clouds and settle in new soil.
Then you see Gardener out there, still planting. And they stop, like an old man resting in the fields, and they turn to face you.
And you join the chorus. And together you sing the song of growing things.

### Warmth and Light

Don't cut the thread and return to Riko.

The river whirls around you, but it doesn't pull, it isn't jealous. Neither does it understand. It is, after all, just a river. It isn't a person, a flesh and blood person, with wants, with desires, with the capacity for love and hate.
It doesn't understand you, and you don't understand it.
So you don't focus on it, you don't think about it, on what feels like such a long journey back through the dark. You set your mind on eyes instead. On hands. Things you can focus on, hold onto.
And then, after an age of crossing, you are there, settling back into the chair, into a body in a chair, and the overwhelming sensations that come with being a living thing with a rich and detailed sensorium.
For a moment you feel like you have made a terrible mistake. Who would choose this weight? This anxiety? This deep well at the center of existence.
But then you feel it. Riko's hand, gripped hard around yours, trembling a little, sweating a little. Riko's hand with its brittle bones and crumpled skin. Riko's hand.
And in that moment you understand why you made this choice. And then you squeeze Riko's hand, and you wake up.

## Leaving with Lem and Mina

### A Long Journey to a Small Unknown Planet

Leave the Eye with Lem and Mina.

Later, when you settle in your bunk, after Mina has finished running back and forth between you and Lem with an endless and infectious excitement, you find yourself looking at your ID film once more.
Somehow, since the last time you looked at it, the image seems to have changed. It is still a picture of the old you, the person that signed up to have their consciousness copied and placed into the ownership of Essen-Arp. But something else has crept into the image: an underlying sense of self-identification. This is also a picture of you. You now.
The you that survived the Eye, that made friends here, that found a way out, that escaped against all odds. The other you might never wake up, they might never live again. But so be it, they consigned you to a doomed life for their own gain. Their life is yours now. You will live it better than they ever could.
You lie back on your bunk as the thrust of the Sidereal's vast engines kick in. This feeling, this rumble, will be your constant companion for the next decades. It will be there when you work, when you watch Mina grow, when you dream of the planet at the end of the journey.
It will stay with you when your body starts to fail, despite the best attempts of Lem and Mina, as the years stack up, and it exceeds its safe operating period by a decade.
It will be the thing you wake up to in those rare moments of consciousness, between which Mina will keep you in a frozen state in the hope of preserving you until your destination is reached.
It will still be there when Mina wakes you, tears in her eyes, to tell you of Lem's inevitable death. And it will not relent, despite your desire for a moment of silence.
It will be the final thing you hear, as Mina shuts down all but the most vital of all your functions, and hopes beyond hope that you make it your final destination. All the while doubting that you will.
But for now, in this moment of departure. It is still a new sound, a new feeling. And because of this, it is filled with the promise of the future.
And so, you settle back on your bunk and close your eyes, and in moments you are sleeping a perfect, dreamless sleep. The most peaceful that you can ever remember.

### Left Behind

Let Lem and Mina leave onboard the Sidereal, but stay at the Eye.

The guard takes the ID film and slides it across a white machine, much like the one Castor printed them from. They urgently beckon Lem through the entrance. He turns back to face you.
"Thank you, Sleeper." And then they are gone. You turn away and kick off hard from the guard rail. Pushing your way through the crowd.
When you reach the far wall you turn back. The scene is chaos. The guards are closing the entrance, boarding complete, and the crowd is pushing against them. There are shouts and cries as the cordon is sealed, and the guards retreat back to the docking bridge.
And there are Lem and Mina, gliding up towards the docking bridge, bag in hand. Lem is facing away, focussed on the steady climb, but Mina is in his arms and is facing back towards you. You watch her face, confused, sullen, but twinkling with a growing excitement, as Lem carries her forward.
As you watch Mina you think about your future. About the future you might choose. You know one thing for certain, that future is on the Eye. You no longer have any enthusiasm for being carried forward by the dreams of others. For grand futures that unfold like angelic wings, across the horizon.
The future is being made now, on this spinning ring, among its people and its systems. You are sure of that.
But as you watch Mina disappear into the entrance of the Sidereal Horizon, and much later, when you watch the ship pull away, you feel a sense of longing. A longing to be carried. Not by the systems that spin the suns, or the corporations that run the colonies. But by love, towards an uncertain future. Just as Mina was.
That, you think, is the future you wish to make here, on Erlin's Eye.

### Solo Ticket

Don't give Lem the tickets, leave alone.

You reflexively rub the puncture mark on your hand, even though there is no trace of it now. It seems to be your destiny to be someone else's tool.
You move up to the entrance, refusing to look back. You keep moving, up into the docking bridge, then along that thin, glass-walled connector. It feels like you are gliding among the stars themselves. You stare wide-eyed at the vast hull of the Sidereal Horizon, and try to think of this huge machine as a home.
It is still a picture of the old you, the person that signed up to have their consciousness copied and placed into the ownership of Essen-Arp.
Impulsively, you decide you don't need to think about that person any more. You crumple up the film and let it drop. Then step through the threshold onto the ship.
Later, you lie back on your bunk as the thrust of the Sidereal's vast engines kick in. This feeling, this rumble, will be your constant companion for the next decades. It will be there when you work, when you sleep, when you dream of the planet at the end of the journey.
It will stay with you when your body starts to fail, as the years stack up, and it exceeds its safe operating period by a decade.
It will underscore the debate between the other crew members as they discuss whether they have enough resources to try to keep you alive.
It will be the final thing you hear, as they solemnly shut down all but the most vital of all your functions, telling you that they will awaken you on arrival at Celis 1.
But for now, in this moment of departure. It is still a new sound, a new feeling. And because of this, it is filled with the promise of the future.
And so, you settle back on your bunk and close your eyes, and in moments you are sleeping a perfect, dreamless sleep. The most peaceful that you can ever remember.

### Three Body Problem

Destroy the IDs or don't choose to take them in the first place, staying at the station.

Then the Sidereal Horizon leaves, the spectacle of a vast machine doing the job it was built to do hypnotizing half the crowd into stunned silence. But, despite the scale of the endeavor, and your part in it, you can't feel proud, or even impressed.
What you see instead, as Mina clings onto you for comfort, is that same system Lem just described for you. In it, the Sidereal, and the Celis Foundation, are as vast as a sun, around which millions of other bodies orbit. Their scale is terrifying, and the breadth of their influence impossible to conceive.
Yet here, in this small, nested system of Lem, of Mina, of you; of the Eye with its orbits and transits, and the people that are linked to it, those vast forces can be countered. They shift you, yes, and the people around you. But they do not negate the pull of friendship, the orbits of community.
As the Sidereal moves away from the dock you think of the bodies on it, those thousands of cryo-sleepers that, like the person you once were, have given themselves over to that system.
You imagine each of them has their reasons, their dreams, their fears. But you worry for them, you worry that they have shackled themselves to something so much bigger than themselves that it would crush them without a thought.
The thought makes you bring Mina closer, holding her too. And as you do Lem puts an arm around you both. And you stand together like that for a while, until the bright spots of the Sidereal Horizon's drives have faded into the dark, and it is time to go home.

## Leaving with Bliss and Ankhita

### Starward Passage

Choose to leave.

"Bliss is next door. Though I think she's in the hold right now, she said she wants to make sure the warheads are locked down tight." Ankhita observes your nervous response. "I mean they are. Obviously." She gives you a look.
Ankhita slips away, and you look around the room. You go over to the porthole and place a hand on the wall and feel Amber purr. You think you are going to like it here.
You stay like that for a while, looking out the porthole, one hand on the wall, feeling the ship. It is through that porthole that you will watch the Eye getting smaller and smaller, drowning in the black.
At some point it will become so small that you could hold it in between your thumb and index finger, and then it will wink out, and you won't be able to see it any more.
And it is at that moment that you will finally exhale and collapse onto your bunk. In moments you will be asleep, and when you wake up, it will be among friends.
On your way to somewhere new.

### Fixed Stars

Choose to stay.

In your time on the Eye you've realized there's nothing out there waiting for you, no fresh starts, and no bright futures, just a whole load of problems you haven't found yet. No, your place is here, among the people you know and the problems you know.
You wish Ankhita and Bliss the best of luck out in the Belt, but as you do you focus on the Eye, on the vast spinning rim that rotates around its hub, on its buildings and flashing lights, on its people and places.
This is your home and, for now, it contains all the futures you need.