CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  “Microtech,” Fernandez said with the touch of relish that a specialist has when he sees an opportunity to hold forth about his life’s work. “We had already deployed cell-size repair agents to repair freezing damage, and losses from oxygen and nutrient starvation.”

  Susan asked, “What solvent did you use?”

  “Tetrafluoromethane—it stays liquid down to minus a hundred thirty degrees centigrade. We introduced the line-layers then, workhorse cells to spool out threads of polyacetylene.”

  “For electrical conductors?” Susan asked.

  “Right, to power the next generation of molyreps. Then—”

  “Uh—moly what?” Alex frowned.

  Fernandez said, “Oh, jargon, sorry. Molecular repair agents—smart cells, really. Like, uh, the smart bombs of your era.”

  “Except your molyreps bombed ice crystals?” Susan asked.

  “Gobbled them up, cleared your blood vessels, then laid down the electrical power lines.”

  “To run what?” Alex asked.

  “The programmed cleanup crew. They stitched together gross fractures. They were like good servants dusting a room, clearing out the dendrite debris and membrane leftovers that the big scavenger units missed. They had to move some of your molecular furniture around—to dust under it, sort of.”

  “At a hundred thirty degrees below freezing?” Susan asked. “How long did that take?”

  “Weeks. We had to be sure we didn’t let the molyreps work too fast, or else they’d heat you up all on their own, before we wanted it.”

  “But all that detail—I mean, how did they get the damaged stuff back in place, once they’d fixed it?”

  “We have special units—little accountants, really. They recorded where all your molecular furniture was, what kind of condition it was in. They look over the debris, tag it with special identifying molecules, then anchor it to a nearby cell wall. They file that information all away, like a library. Then we slowly warmed you up.”

  Susan was trying to visualize the designer molecules Fernandez was so blithely describing. Hordes of microscopic fanatics, born to sniff out flaws and meticulously patch them up. An army that lived for but one purpose, much as art experts could spend a lifetime restoring a Renaissance painting. But the body was a far vaster canvas than all the art humanity had ever produced, a network of complexity almost beyond comprehension. Yet the body naturally policed itself with just such mobs of molecules, mending the scrapes and insults the rude world inflicted. Humanity had simply learned to enlist those tiny throngs. That was true, deep technology—using nature’s own mechanisms, guiding them to new purposes. A miracle to Susan, but simple fact to these men.

  She asked, “Warmed us up? Until you could get good circulation in the cells again?”

  “Well, not good—just sluggish is enough. Brought you up to about minus a hundred degrees centigrade. We sent in the third team then, to bond your enzymes to cell structures. They read that library the second team had left and put all your furniture back into place. Just like the upstairs maid.”

  Susan realized Fernandez had given this same homey little Introduction to Molecular Repair for Poets lecture many times before. “How long did that take?”

  “Months. Fixing the hemorrhaged tissue, mending torn membranes, splicing back together the disrupted cellular connections—that was almost easy, but tedious.”

  Alex shook his head as though dazed. “You guys must’ve put the surgeons out of business.”

  Fernandez blinked. “But we are surgeons. Our tools are simply a million times smaller than a scalpel, these days.”

  “Cutting with chemistry,” Susan said. It was still hard to believe, to get her mind around such a huge yet simple fact. Medicine could now do what the body already knew—repair damage at the molecular level, but faster and better, with deft control. What kind of outside world did that imply?

  Blyer, who had been sitting quietly, said, “Thanks to Susan’s transglycerols, there wasn’t a lot of freezing damage in either of you.”

  “We were easier?” Susan asked.

  “Yes, because of your own work,” Dr. Blyer said. “You pioneered our entire approach.”

  “How many have been revived?” Susan asked.

  “Several hundred. Those frozen only a decade or two ago have less freezing damage, because our techniques got better. Some of those we can now cure, just like you.”

  “Several hundred.” Susan blinked. She had always thought that cryonics was a path into the distant future at best. But a working program, in only thirty-eight years! Then without warning, the stifling sense of being blocked swept over her again. The black granite barred her. It was like groping for something you know is there in memory, buried, yet so palpably close that you can sense its tingling presence. The sensation resembled times when she could see a face in her mind’s eye but could not recall the person’s name, or caught a smell and could not place the cause—but amplified a thousandfold, into a wrenching sense of being restrained by bonds only dimly felt, but cloying, smothering. She grasped for something related, for a path out of the constricting press. “I—I saw my treatment chart,” Susan said, feeling beads of perspiration break out on her forehead.

  Dr. Blyer frowned. “You’re not to bother yourself with details yet, doctor. This program is still experimental, and while we have some confidence in our medical procedures for revival, I’m afraid our therapy is still very tentative.”

  “There were serotonin-derived neurotransmitters in the treatments I’m getting. Why?”

  Dr. Blyer looked uncomfortable. “These are experimental—”

  “I realize your psychopharmacology is far advanced over what I knew, but I don’t see the need for those chemicals, doctor. My guess—just from their names I glimpsed on the nurse’s working clipboard—is that those are blockers.”

  Blyer covered his discomfort with formality. “Well, yes, they inhibit the switches in brain chemistry associated with emotional states.”

  “And that cuts off the memories correlated with those emotions, correct?” Susan bore in.

  “Yes, generally,” Fernandez broke in. “You should not be bothering with those details right now in your therapy. I suggest—”

  “We want your memories to focus on the events surrounding your death, doctor,” Blyer said sharply. “You may not realize it, but the series of killings at Immortality Incorporated is a major reason why this center exists. The public demands that your cases be solved. Whatever we need to do—”

  “That doesn’t give you the right to tamper with my own memories, damn it!” Susan said. “I—”

  “I’m afraid it does,” a voice came from the doorway. Susan looked up in surprise. The struggle within her had blinded her to the entrance of Detective Stern. He fetched a rolling chair and sat down, looking tired. “We have to clear up some things here. And right away.”

  12

  ALEX

  He was still feeling a little rocky, wan and passive, but Stern’s arrival jerked him into alertness. The hard-edged energy of the man was still there. The detective radiated a bunched, coiled energy as he intervened in the conversation with Susan.

  He had seen Stern already, once his inverted vision was straightened out. That whole incident was now foggy, like a dream. The specialists were still muttering about his temporary failure to store short-term memory. Alex wanted to forget it, to get on with this bizarre life.

  He had talked with Stern, then Ray Constantine. Their seemingly instant transformation into aging, heavier versions of themselves had been a jolt. But beneath the sagging jowls and graying hair of each lurked the same intense character he remembered. Ray, of course, had been overjoyed. He had lived through the rise of biological technology and had seen cryonics move in the public mind from being a crank, macabre pipe dream, into the sunny reality of an accomplished fact.

  Ray had broken the news to him of Kathryn’s death, too.

  That had rocked him. He had plunged into a black vorte
x of despair, until Blyer had administered some drugs. That had hauled Alex up into a sort of neutral, dazed calm—though murky currents swept through him, just below the surface. By then, Stern had finished his questioning and Alex had gotten irritated. Now they were finally letting him see Susan, and here was Stern again.

  “Look, can’t this wait?” Alex asked bitingly.

  “No.” Stern gave him an appraising look, eyes glittering. “You don’t understand the avalanche of public interest these revivals have brought down.”

  “Screw public interest. We’re patients, not prisoners. I want to talk to my old friend.”

  “And that’s exactly what I’m here to monitor,” Stern shot back.

  “Why?” Susan asked mildly. Or so it probably sounded to Stern; Alex had caught the clipped edge in her tone.

  “Because memory is tricky. The two of you meeting again, it may trigger—” Stern turned to Dr. Blyer. “What was that term?”

  “Spontaneous recollection,” Blyer supplied. “We have noted it in dozens of prior cases. The brain sometimes needs a visual or aural cue—such as meeting old friends, hearing their voices again—to provide a context for associations.”

  Stern slapped his knee in vindication. “Right. Look, we haven’t gotten anywhere on this case, and that’s what the public cares about.”

  Alex said sourly, “What public—the tabloid readers? Let ‘em wait.”

  Stern shook his head. “You’re shielded from the media here because we don’t want your memories influenced. So you don’t realize that you’re the crucial witnesses in the biggest unsolved murder story since Jack the Ripper.”

  “Why so big?” Alex scowled skeptically. “There are plenty of unsolved cases.”

  “It’s the only one where the victims were suspended.”

  “Despite you,” Alex added.

  “Yeah, okay.” Stern spread his hands in rueful dismay. “Look, you guys broke a lot of laws. And—hell, it was a different age.”

  “There’s another element, isn’t there?” Susan asked.

  Stern eyed her cautiously. “Right. The killer obviously targeted you all because you were cryonicists—but why the two other women in Santa Ana? Decades later, we still don’t have a clue.”

  Alex gritted his teeth. Maybe this guy thought the past was history, but to Alex the trouble with Stern and Detweiler was as fresh as last week. “I told you already, I can’t remember anything about who attacked me.”

  Stern nodded. “Post-trauma lapse, they call it. But something could come back. Especially when you two talk. After all, this guy hit you both. There may be some common element that will come out—”

  “Look, we’re just recovering.” Alex hesitated, then decided he had better get everything out in the open. “That panic I had, that should prove to you that you can’t rely on us to clear up your case.”

  “Panic?” Susan asked.

  Alex sighed. Might as well face up to it. “I went a little crazy while they were reviving me. I guess I’d been okay, responding to questions and all. But I woke up on a slab and, well, got into these…” He groped for the right word, but like most people, a hint of even momentary insanity was deeply embarrassing.

  Dr. Blyer supplied, “Delusional structures.”

  “Uh, yeah. I thought somebody was after me. So I got myself up, fumbled around, grabbed a scalpel to defend myself.”

  “My my,” Susan said cheerily. “You always were one who went through obstacles, not just over them.”

  “It was quite an accomplishment,” Dr. Fernandez said in measured tones. “We were not finished reorienting his sensory inputs, but he overcame that. It could have been very dangerous.”

  “What triggered it?” Susan asked.

  Alex licked his lips, feeling a familiar clammy sensation. Whenever he tried to focus on that incident, he felt the same fearful currents, a gnawing, cold dread. “I don’t know. A voice, I think. One of the attendants talking, maybe. But I can’t get it straight, can’t—can’t—”

  “No need to fixate, Alex,” Dr. Blyer came in smoothly. “We have had such trauma-induced hallucinations before in cryonics revivals. They probably arise from associations the mind makes between deep memories and simple cues—a sound, say, or a snapshot. During rebuilding of the neurotransmitter structures in your brain, some of the connections may get crossed.”

  “Um.” Alex pushed away the skating sensations of chilly unease. “Like telephone calls that get hooked up wrong?”

  “Yes. You heard a voice you thought you recognized, and that linked to some constellation of emotions—fear, free-floating anxiety. But it was an error. You were in no danger, lying there in a postoperative transition room.”

  “Suppose it happens again?” Alex asked apprehensively.

  “It shouldn’t. Your own mind will sort out those mistakes.” Dr. Blyer patted Alex paternally on the shoulder. “That’s one of the major tasks of the subconscious. It edits your daily memories that way, every night. Then it stores the results in your long-term memory. We all do that, just by sleeping.”

  “Then why do I have these dreams?” Alex asked. “Bad ones.”

  “They are a natural method of setting things right. They should go away soon.”

  “You’re not—well, inducing them some way?”

  Blyer looked offended. “Our methods are ethical, I assure you. We do not force interior states upon a patient.”

  Alex swallowed, finding a lump in his throat. Somehow this conversation, theoretical and distant though it was, had called up those emotions again. He felt a prickly unease, as though someone of malevolent intent were watching him.

  He glanced away from the others, let his eye rove over the peaceful scene projected on the walls. Oak trees swayed in a gentle summer wind, tossing their leaves in celebration against an eggshell-blue sky. He tried to let the image draw him away from the turmoil inside him, but the thin thread of anxiety persisted.

  It had returned again and again in the days since he had collapsed in the prep room. He never escaped the sensation of being watched—as though a thousand eyes hid in the shifting wall-views of his room, in corridors, in clinics. A classic symptom, of course, and his rational mind dismissed it immediately. But it returned, chewing at him. Something here had triggered a deep-seated alarm, one that clanged whenever he let his attention deflect its way—yet one he could not call up to conscious memory. Something nearby. Something wrong.

  “You aren’t doing anything to our mental states now, then?” Susan asked.

  “Well, there are some continuing medications, of course,” Dr. Blyer answered cautiously.

  “What are their effects?” Susan’s voice sharpened with more than professional curiosity.

  “I’m afraid fully describing them might well obviate their impact.”

  “As a patient, surely I have the right to know the probable effect.”

  “I would rather not discuss this until we are a little further along in therapy.”

  Alex could see the signs as Susan dropped her tactful manner—compressed lips, narrowed eyes. “I’m not asking for details about dosage. I want to know what you’re doing to my—”

  “I have to take the blame here, Dr. Hagerty,” Stern said. “Part of pursuing this case is to not disturb whatever memories you have. That means we can’t have you going through too much turmoil at once. We need to focus your thinking just a bit more, and then—”

  “Then you’ll let me have my mind back?” Susan shot to her feet, hands knotted at her sides.

  “That’s too extreme,” Blyer said. “I am operating within the scruples and standards of psychodynamics.”

  Susan shot back, “That includes lying to your patients?”

  “We are not lying. We are simply withholding.” Blyer looked pained, his mouth twisted in a regretful curve, as though he felt a deep professional conflict but was committed to staying his course.

  “Withholding what?”

  “Dr. Hagerty, I understand y
our concern,” Dr. Fernandez began in a conciliatory tone. “Still, I believe you must leave your full recovery from this enormous trauma you have suffered in our hands, even though—”

  “Look, I can help out here,” Stern cut in. “We all want this settled, one way or the other. Either you get more memories about the crimes back soon, or else they won’t come at all—right, doctor?”

  Blyer nodded. “That sort of traumatic event—I’m afraid so.”

  Stern said in a flat cop’s voice, “Don’t think the media won’t hound you once you get out of here, though.”

  Alex smiled sardonically. “Let’s see now. I’ve been beaten, tossed off a cliff, killed, frozen, unfrozen, revived by miracle-midget molecules, had my whole body put back together like a Tinkertoy set. Yeah, I believe I can withstand a TV interview.”

  Stern smiled. “Me, too. Point is, we’ve only got one more move left. You two have drawn a blank, so now we go on. Dr. Fernandez here, he’s been working night and day, and we’re about ready, he tells me. Dr. Blyer thinks so, too. It was a very difficult technical problem, I’m told.”

  Alex felt his apprehension rise. “I don’t want—”

  “I think you do, Alex,” Stern said, coming off his official voice and sounding a note of real warmth. “You do. They’ve brought Kathryn back.”

  13

  GEORGE

  Clouds flowed and churned across a dusky, leering moon. Gusty winds stirred the air with sweeping, sudden gales, playing with the sullen moonlight, making the world go erratically dark and bright. George wondered if God deliberately raked the clouds with windy fingers, like a small boy plunging a stick into an anthill to see what he could stir up. Then he felt a spike of guilt. That verged on blasphemy. A skittering dart of remorse laced through his already fevered mind.

  He stumbled in a sudden moment of darkness, and his shoulder slammed into one of the gnarled oak trees that fringed the Marble Cathedral. Pain spiked from his stab wound. Wind harassed the trees, lifting branches high like the rasping legs of giant insects. George remembered long ago the huge bright cockroaches Cowell had brought here, and something in these tossing limbs, now awash in piercing moonlight, made him lurch and stumble again. Something stirred his senses. The giant cross above had an orange halo, great bars of light glowing and vibrating against the roiling sky. The thrashing oaks threw sharp scents at him, cutting in his nostrils. The showers of worried leaves had veins of iridescent silver-green, and the rough-barked trunks swarmed with emerald luminosities. Winds howled among the flying buttresses and high arches of the cathedral.