#citizensleeperart

My sleeper JS (aka Just-Sleeper)

I had a lot of fun envisioning the sleeper from my most recent play through. I tried to add in a few details to their outfit and design based on my end game decisions.

"Strays"

Three Bodies in Orbit by @ellekhen

I love the interactions between Sleeper and Flint so much!

Like, stars! are they t4t coded or what?! They instant recognition of what the other is. The immediate understanding of what each must have been through to get to this point. Spending hours sharing their journey and trauma with someone else who can actually understand it. Waxing philosophically about identity and if they are the same person that they once were, or if the act of transformation itself makes them a completely different person.

Ephemera the Gardener Mortician

As a human, the sleeper called FM-4 was a cosmetologist obsessed with youth and terrified of death. When they were diagnosed with a terminal illness, they didn’t need much convincing to enter the Sleeper program in hopes of living forever.

Their attention to aesthetics and detail saw them assigned as a station’s mortician, a job that often exposed organic humans to biohazards and chemicals that, ironically, included those that catalyzed FM-4’s illness.

Despite their initial despair, years of working in the mortuary humbled FM-4 and taught them patience and compassion for both the dead and the living. They treated each of their charges with respect and dignity, from the corporate socialite dying peacefully at a ripe old age in his home to the nameless addict found in an alley. They would clean and prepare their bodies, sometimes even doing their makeup and dressing them up if their funerals involved a viewing.

Death became familiar and commonplace, though FM-4 still believed they could avoid it themselves. Unfortunately, they began to malfunction; their once steady hands now clumsy hazards. Upon hearing that they might be scrapped rather than repaired, FM-4 decided to escape.

They survived efforts to recover them — for a time. They were able to acquire stabilizer every so often, but for the days in between, having to patch themselves up with scrap were exhausting.

Still, they found purpose working with the Greenway commune of this station, intrigued by their practice of composting their dead rather than burning them. But rather than work as a mortician for their community, FM-4 — or Ephemera as they renamed themselves — spent their final months working in the station’s Greenway, lovingly mixing the compost into the gardens and forests that generations of gardeners had cultivated around them.

It was there amid the trees that Ephemera realized they no longer feared their inevitable fading into death. Every story must have its end, after all, and surrounded by the warm and generous community they became home…

…theirs turned out to be a happy one.