by Allen Steele
Twilight sets in as the luminescent filaments in the sky gradually fade out; lights are coming on within the windows of the empty palace below us. Through the hazy lines in the sky, I can make out the faint glimmer of starlight, except in the middle where that broad, mysterious mass blots out everything else. I’ve never witnessed this time of day before; by now, I would usually be sitting down to dinner in the servants’ quarters.
So now I’m sitting in a comfortable chair, hearing the faint huff of the cappuccino machine as it brews something I hadn’t tasted in…well, a hundred and four years, although subjectively it’s been a lot shorter than that…and wondering why the guy who owns all this wants to know about my father.
“He wasn’t a bad guy,” I reply, not knowing what Mister Chicago meant by this question. “He was…well, he was rich. He owned a company that made stuff…electrical stuff, I mean…”
“Stuff?” Mister Chicago leans forward to rest his elbows on the desk and cup his chin in his hands. “What sort of…stuff, Alec?”
“Household appliances. Refrigerators, microwave ovens, clocks, lamps…” I shrug. “Y’know, stuff like that. His company manufactures…” I have to remind myself that I’m speaking about the past. “…I mean, his company used to make it for other companies that put their brand names on them and then goes…went out and sold them in department stores and…”
“Stuff.” He chuckles. “I like that word. So archaic.”
“Well, that’s what it is. Just…stuff, y’know?” I force a smile and wonder if he was really listening to anything I just said.
“So did your father invent this stuff?”
“Oh, no. My great-grandfather started the company, back in the twenties…the 1920s, I mean.” I sit up a little straighter. “He was an inventor, see, and even though he didn’t come up with the basic items…y’know, like the refrigerators or the table lamps…he invented a lot of the supporting equipment that’s used in them, and when he died his family inherited the patents and the company…Tucker Enterprises, that is…and when Grandpa Bill died, my dad took over as CEO, and he…”
“So you come from a wealthy family. Hmm.” Mister Chicago nods his head within his hands. I can’t tell whether he’s interested or just making conversation. “So what was he like, your father? Was he a good man?”
I shrug. That’s not a question many people ask about Dad. Or didn’t. Whatever. “I guess. I mean, I didn’t see him much, so…”
“Why?”
“He wasn’t home a lot. Tucker was a Fortune 500 company, so he…uh, do you know what Fortune 500 is?”
“I know what it was. Go on.”
No more Fortune 500. Jeez…“Well, I saw a lot of him when I was a kid and he was still married to my mom, but when they broke up and he started building up the company, trying to make it go multinational…”
“He divorced your mother? Sorry to interrupt again, but I find this rather intriguing. Who was your mother, and why did your father divorce her?”
“I dunno. It happened when I was about six or seven, and I didn’t see her very much after she left.” My seat is beginning to feel warm; I squirm a bit. “She married another St. Louis businessman who then moved out to LA…that’s Los Angeles, y’know?” He nods; yes, he’s heard of Los Angeles. Glad to know some things haven’t changed. “…and a couple of years after that she left that guy for a TV actor she met at some Hollywood party, and after they were married he got elected to the California state senate as a Republican, so…well, y’know, I’ve gone out to visit her a few times, but we don’t…I mean, didn’t really get along.”
“Hmm. I see.” He settles back in his chair. “So was it your father who arranged for you to be placed in neurosuspension?”
I don’t know what he means by that. Before I can ask, though, John places a cup of cappuccino on the coffee table in front of me, then walks over to Mister Chicago to gently set another cup on his desk. The cup is frothy with steamed milk; I pick it up and take a tentative sip. Best cappuccino I ever tasted. Mister Chicago ignores his cup; he frowns impatiently at John until he retreats back behind the bar. “Was it your father who had you placed in neurosuspension?” he asks again.
“I don’t know. What’s neurosuspension?”
“You don’t know?” There’s faint astonishment in his eyes; he folds his hands together on the desk. “What about the Immortality Partnership?”
I almost shake my head, then something tugs at my memory: that name sounds familiar. “My dad gave me a dog tag for my birthday last…I mean, the last birthday I had. It had that name engraved on it, but I didn’t know what it was for.” I assay a sheepish grin. “I kinda wasn’t paying attention at the time.”
“You weren’t…paying attention?” Mister Chicago is incredulous; I’m not about to tell him that I had blown a joint on my way to the restaurant that evening. “But there were papers that you had to sign. You don’t recall that either?”
I shrug as I lick the froth off my lips. “I signed a lot of papers for Dad. Life insurance forms, bank stuff, things like that. I never asked what they were. His secretary would call me, and I’d drop by his office and sign ’em, and that would be it. The company lawyer would notarize them.” And I was usually stoned or hungover when I did that, too. “Why, what’s the deal with the Immortality Partnership?”
“The Immortality Partnership was…” He stops, then sighs. “Your associate can tell you better than I can. Ask it. I’ll wait.”
He picks up his cappuccino and half-turns his chair to me. “While you’re at it,” he adds, “tell it to inform you of the circumstances of your death. You may access your personal files now.”
I don’t really want to, but there’s no question that this isn’t a request. I take a deep breath, blink three times, and ask Chip to tell me how I died, and to define neurosuspension for me.
This time, my MINN doesn’t inform me that this file is sealed. That doesn’t make me any less sorry that I’ve asked.
What’s the spookiest thing I’ve ever seen? My own death certificate.
It’s in my file. Chip displays it to me. I died in the ambulance on the way to the Barnes Hospital emergency room, where I was pronounced DOA at 10:17 P.M. on July 11, 1995, from massive internal injuries caused by a vehicular accident. Don’t ask me for the details, because I didn’t read most of the document. Some goths I used to know might have gotten a rise out of reading about how their lives came to an end, but it’s a little too gruesome for my taste.
The pertinent facts, though, are these:
Before my body was taken down to the morgue, one of the ER doctors found the small metal pendant around my neck. Recognizing it for what it was, he called the 1-800 number on the back of the tag. The phone number was that of the Immortality Partnership’s headquarters in Pasadena, California. The operator on duty got the information from the doctor, then immediately phoned the company’s nearest Emergency Response Center, which was located in Chicago. Two paramedics on call at the ERC immediately boarded a charter jet and flew to St. Louis; they arrived at Barnes Hospital less than two hours after I had been pronounced dead.
Dad was out of the country at the time (another business trip, as usual) and Mom couldn’t be reached (probably on a political junket with her Sonny Bono wannabe) but the Emergency Response Center faxed copies of the paperwork that my father and I had signed in advance that would allow the parameds to claim custody of my body. Everything was perfectly legal, thanks to Dad’s cadre of attorneys, so the hospital let the Immortality Partnership have my corpse.
A private ambulance transported the parameds, along with yours truly, back to Lambert International, where the charter jet had been refueled and was awaiting takeoff. Back in Chicago, an Emergency Response Team was awaiting its arrival with another ambulance, this one specially equipped with all the medical apparatus needed to stabilize—yes, this is the term used in the company report—my condition. The Chicago team had already downloaded my medical information via
satellite from the company’s database in Pasadena; they now had everything on me, down to blood type, shoe size, and the minor case of herpes I had contracted while in college. No one was thinking about bringing me back to life, at least not at that point; I was as dead as the sixties. No, they were mainly concerned with making sure that my brain didn’t deteriorate any more than it had already.
By now—I have to assume this, because there’s no record of these tangential events available to Chip’s records—someone had finally located my parents and given them the news. Mom was probably so upset, she dropped her martini glass; Dad might have temporarily suspended his plans for global conquest for a full forty-eight hours. I don’t imagine any flags were flown at half-mast, although I like to believe my friends had a wake in my memory. Wow, total bummer, man. Hey, did anyone score R.E.M. tickets? Alec was supposed to get me some…
I didn’t stay in Chicago very long. Didn’t even get a chance to call Erin’s folks to tell them that their fondest wishes for my future had come true. Once my body had been stabilized, it was put on another charter jet, this time to Pasadena, where it was transported by another ambulance to the Immortality Partnership itself: a windowless, one-story building located in an anonymous office park in the ’burbs. Chip showed me a picture of it on eyes-up: it resembled a small warehouse. Which, in essence, was exactly what it was.
Here’s where things get a little Frankenstein. I don’t pretend to understand most of it, but this was what was done to my body.
Technicians at the center administered calcium channel blockers, blood anticoagulants, and a cocktail of free radical inhibitors. When my remaining blood was able to flow freely once more, they drained it out of my body, along with as much water as possible, and substituted it with glycerol, which Chip described to me as a cryoprotective agent—antifreeze, if you will, although much more benign than the stuff I used to put in my car—and they cut a tiny hole in my skull so they could watch my brain and make sure that it didn’t shrink or swell past certain allowable parameters.
And then they cut my head off.
It wasn’t quite the Marie Antoinette treatment. They used electric bone saws and tourniquets and alligator clips, all very sterile and germ free, and my head was deftly separated from the rest of my body by a cut between the sixth and seventh vertebrae of my spine. I know this for a fact, because the company even had someone videotape the procedure as it was going on, presumably to prevent Dad’s attorneys from attempting to file a lawsuit later.
I manage to watch about the first ten seconds before I ask Chip to skip this part.
Chip’s records show that my decapitated body was shipped to a crematorium. My head, on the other hand (no pun intended), remained in Pasadena, where it was carefully swathed in layers of thermal blanket before it was placed in a large envelope that looked much like a bowling-ball bag. Then they carried the bag, with my noggin safely sealed inside, into a large room whose walls were lined with stainless steel cylinders that vaguely resembled oversized gas water heaters. There was nothing warm about these dewars, though; they contained liquid nitrogen that had been reduced to 196 degrees below zero Centigrade. The dewars had room for three “patients”—you’ve got to love that choice of term—but the one in which I was placed still had its vacancy sign lit, and free HBO to boot.
And in I went.
And out I came…here.
My cappuccino is stone cold by the time I come out of eyes-up. Not quite as cold as liquid nitrogen, but chilly enough. I don’t care; I pick up the cup and slug down half of it before my stomach threatens to toss it all over Mister Chicago’s carpet.
As for the man himself, he’s now standing behind his desk, his back turned to me, his hands clasped behind his back as he gazes through a glass pane at the night world below him. He waits patiently until I’m through gagging.
“Understand?” He’s studying my reflection in the window.
“Yeah…” Then I reach up to my neck, feel the bottom of my throat. No, there isn’t a scar I haven’t noticed before. “No, I don’t. What happened to my…y’know, my…”
“Your head? Recycled. Ground up for fertilizer a long time ago.” He motions toward the gardens below the windows. “Good source of nutrients for the roses. You probably spread it there yourself a few weeks ago, I imagine.”
The bastard is trying to make me sick. Determined not to give him the satisfaction, I choke back the bile in my throat. “But not before you removed my brain,” I say, and he nods. “Then how did…I mean, my body…?”
“Cloned from a tissue sample.” He glances at John and raises two fingers, then moves back to his desk. “I’ll spare you the trouble of asking Chip for another technical brief. Your new body was produced over the course of forty-two months in a laboratory…we prefer to call it the nursery…located on the same level as the ward where you woke up. Its growth was rapidly accelerated by nanoassemblers, but it remained in a virtually decerebrate condition under external life support until its skull was sufficiently large enough for your brain to be transplanted. When this occurred, we inserted the MINN unit within your cerebral cortex…ah, thank you, John.”
John has placed a brandy snifter on his master’s desk; he hands another one to me, then goes back to the bar. “One of the benefits of being able to produce a clone,” Mister Chicago continues, “is that we’re able to make in vitro biogenetic improvements over the original body. Your double-eyelids, for instance…a molecular optical display which interfaces directly with your MINN, giving you an eyes-up readout of whatever data Chip downloads from our central AI system, a 100,000-teraflop DNA computer. Within certain imposed limits, your associate can directly access this system via the subcutaneous comlink that’s been built into your ear canal and vocal chords. Indeed, your own MINN is a much smaller version of the same wetware. It’s only about the size of your pituitary gland, but it has approximately the same memory capacity as a desktop computer from your time.”
That’s a chilling thought. “Does it run on Windows?”
Mister Chicago smiles as he picks up his glass and takes a sip. “We also took care of a few other flaws in your original body’s genome. Did you have any allergies?”
“Umm…hay fever.” That’s one of the few things he had just said that I completely understand.
He smiles. “Well, I don’t imagine that’ll bother you anymore. Smell the flowers all you want, my dear Alec.” He motions to my glass. “Try the brandy. It’s not quite as old as you are.”
My stomach is still a little rocky, but I pick up the glass anyway. The liquor burns my tongue, but I don’t drink enough to make me sick. “So everyone else I’ve met, all the other people I met in the White Room…”
“Is that what you call it? The White Room? Have to remember that.” Mister Chicago cradles the snifter in his hands as he reclines in his chair. “Former clients of the Immortality Partnership. Original ages between twenty-five…which makes you among the youngest…and eighty-one, the eldest we’ve brought up so far. They’ve all been revived in cloned bodies that are approximately twenty-one years of age, a difference which shouldn’t matter much to you but will be a godsend to the older fellows. If and when they fully recover, that is.”
“If?”
Mister Chicago looks away. “A tricky business, the resurrection of the dead,” he muses. “It took us a long time to master the process. Considerable trial and error…and even then it hasn’t always been a complete success. We’re still learning how to cope with the complications.” His eyes dart toward me. “Are you familiar with complexity theory? No? Never mind…even with nanoassemblers rebuilding your neural cells from the osmotic damage they suffered during cryonic neurosuspension, there’s also the question of the ratio of identity-critical brain damage versus—”
“Hold on. Time out.” I put down my glass and give him the ref signal with my hands, which he blinks at in puzzlement. “I’m not an Einstein, man…I mean, sir. I mean, you’re using words that I don’t know
.”
He closes his eyes and slowly lets out his breath. “Of course. I’m talking to a product of the late twentieth-century American education system. I should know better.” He opens his eyes again. “When human brains are frozen in liquid nitrogen for long periods of time, there’s always some damage due to ice crystallization between the cell walls.
This means that, even if the brain is fully healed, there can be chronic or acute memory loss. Understand so far?”
I’m doing better. “Yeah. Go on.”
“Not only that, but there is also the problem of psychological readjustment. Despite the fact that nearly everyone went to the Immortality Partnership in hope of receiving a second chance at life, some apparently believed that they would be reborn in some Judeo-Christian-Islamic version of an afterlife…”
“Heaven, Saint Peter, the pearly gates…”
“Mohammed, Jesus…exactly. So coming out of it here has been something of a shock to many deadheads. They…”
“What? What did you call them…us, I mean?”
“Deadheads?” he asks, and I nod. “Something of a slang term, carried from earlier in the century. Why, does it mean something different to you?”
I cough in my hand. Wait till Shemp hears about this. “Does anyone come out wanting a tie-dyed T-shirt?” He gives me a puzzled look. “Never mind. Bad joke. Go on.”
He stares at me for a moment, then continues. “We’ve tried to compensate for this shock by keeping revived sleepers in a drugged condition for a while, giving them an adjustment period while they learn to use their new bodies while we observe their reactions. A few never recover their identities, and they remain imbeciles unable to bathe or feed themselves. Most regain only partial memories of their past lives, and they’re locked in a state of mental retardation of various degrees. Only a relative handful recover their full mental capabilities much as you have, although never quite so quickly. Which is why I’m so interested in you.”