Cryonic

by Travis Bradberry

  Alex stood up and took a step toward the hallway. “We should make our way back to your room. I’m supposed to be helping you to get back on your feet. They’re going to question why we’ve been in here so long.”

  I placed a firm hand on Alex’s shoulder. “Hold on a minute. You said I was the first successful reanimation. Are you saying they tried on some other saps and it didn’t work?”

  “We really should be moving along.”

  “We can talk about it here, or we can talk about it in front of them. It’s your call.”

  Alex stepped back reluctantly. He spoke nervously, looking over my shoulder as he spoke. “Yes, there were others before you, none of which were successful. They had a breakthrough on your case. Now they believe they can successfully reanimate all of the other cryonics stored here. You’re going to have company.”

  “Company?”

  “Today, in fact. They are reanimating several cryonics right now who are going to be joining you once they are stabilized.”

  “Are any of them Ted Williams?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “You know Ted Williams?”

  “Of course I do. He’s the greatest hitter of all time.”

  At least something was right with the world.

  “You know, Al, the thing I don’t understand is why the Chinese even care about this business of bringing frozen people back to life. Why does it matter?”

  “They need more troops.”

  I swallowed. Alex smiled. “No, not you. They want to freeze soldiers who die in battle. This way, they can send them back to base to have them treated and reanimated. It will allow them to fix a person just like they would a tank. Think about it. Soldiers are scarce commodities when you’re fighting wars on three continents.”

  “Wow. Just like putting another quarter into a video game.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “We really do need to go.”

  “Hold your horses, Al. Just one more question.”

  “All right, just please make it quick.”

  “Where do you stand in all this?”

  “Where do I stand in all of what?” he spat.

  It was curious Alex was such a knowledgeable and compliant participant in a Chinese lab. His petulance at my question amplified my suspicion. I leaned forward carefully and spoke with accentuated base, “Well, Al, seems to me you are well versed in the interests and activities of the Chinese. And here you are, in their lab, helping them with their little science project. So, I need to know what your deal is. What kind of traitor are you?”

  Alex sighed deeply before he spoke. “I am not any kind.”

  Then he stood up and worked his way toward the hallway, speaking hurriedly while motioning for me to follow.

  “Things are far more complicated now than when you were alive. You’ll fare better once you can settle on that fact. And you’d be wise to trust me. I seriously doubt you’ll find a better option.”

  5.

  Alex led me down the hallway past my room. I figured he was just taking me out to stretch my legs. Then we turned the corner at the end of the corridor. The hallway stopped in front of a massive observation room. We stood before the oversized pane of glass and watched the busy operation on the other side. The men in white coats were hard at work. They gathered at stations with corpses in various stages of reanimation. It was an assembly line, of sorts, but instead of widgets, they were making people.

  On the left side of the room, a row of tall silver canisters like oversized water heaters had been polished to a reflective sheen. A sticker affixed to the side of each canister read: CAUTION. BIOMATERIAL. KEEP BELOW -150° CELSIUS AT ALL TIMES. It gave me the chills to think that I had been frozen inside one of those gleaming, silver tubes just days before.

  Two of the Chinese scientists approached the canister closest to us. They wrestled the lid off, and vapor hissed. The scientists maneuvered a small crane that looked an awful lot like an engine hoist above the cylinder. The crane had a rubberized metallic claw that reached down into the cylinder and retrieved the wrinkled, frozen corpse. They maneuvered her gingerly with the claw, like a child retrieving a stuffed animal from a machine. She looked more like an extra-terrestrial than a person. Her shriveled skin pulled taut against her bony frame, and her face was mummified in a fixed, lifeless expression. Vapor emanated from her body. They placed her in a specialized incubator. Alex explained that it would thaw her flesh in preparation for the next stage of the process. God himself couldn’t breathe life into something so wretched, but the men in white coats were doing it all over the room, right before our eyes.

  Three scientists worked on a freshly defrosted man lying on a gurney. His skin was so moist it was weeping. The woman next to him was further along in the process. Scientists were transplanting a heart. So many men in white coats surrounded the body on the far right that I could only see the bottoms of gangly male feet. This one at least looked like a person. The skin was plump and firm, albeit pale. I spotted the man in charge shouting orders at the others. Tubes snaked out in all directions, and a trio of refrigerator-sized machines dutifully thumped away behind the scientists.

  And then I heard it—the same violent screaming I had succumbed to upon being reanimated. The twisted feet started shaking and writhing in agony. The screams grew louder and more primal. Smiling widely, the man in charge observed the patient carefully and then ordered the men in white coats to sedate him. The screaming finally stopped.

  “Are you feeling all right?” Alex asked.

  His question pulled me out of the room. Once again, I saw the glass in front of me.

  “Um, I think so. Why?”

  “You’re sweating.”

  Beads of perspiration had collected on my forehead, and my collar was soaked. I hadn’t even noticed. I wiped my hand across my forehead, and the sweat dripped down my palm onto the linoleum. I began feeling light headed.

  “Yeah, I . . . I guess this was a little much.”

  “Too soon? I’m sorry. I thought it would help. I should have realized.”

  “It’s OK, Al.”

  We turned and walked back toward my room. When we returned to the room, I was actually happy to lie down on that cardboard bed. Thinking about the shriveled skin, the canisters, the twitching feet, the screaming, I started sweating again. To put it out of my mind, I thought of Colt. I pictured him living on the beach in San Diego with a beautiful wife and family. I imagined a little boy toddling around them who looked just like my boy did when he was in diapers. Hope that he was still alive was the only thing that put my mind at ease enough to sleep.

  6.

  The beep of the door woke me up. The lights turned on, and through cracked eyelids, I saw white lab coats scurrying back and forth. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. I felt groggy and heavy, like I’d overslept. Two orderlies supervised by a man in a white coat wheeled in a guy on a bed. The man in the bed was sleeping, and they positioned him next to some machinery and left the room. He looked like hell. Not because of being frozen, at least as far as I could tell, but because he was decrepit. He looked to me about seventy, but like he’d either had some serious illnesses later in life, lived hard prior, or probably both. Watching him breathing there in his bed—all wrinkled and frail—I wondered why he had bothered to get frozen at all. Even the mad Chinese scientists were only going to be able to squeeze a couple more years out of him.

  Next they brought in a much younger woman that couldn’t have been more than forty. She looked pretty healthy and a bit plump. Her skin was firm, she had a smooth complexion, and her large bosom overflowed under her gown. I wondered what she had died of. I could come up with a laundry list of possibilities for the grandpa lying in the bed next to hers, but she was a toughie. I didn’t have much time to ponder the possibilities before our final companion was wheeled in. I realize a man who lives in a glass house shouldn’t throw stones, but this guy was a heart attack for certain. Restora must hav
e customized an extra-large cryogenic container for him because he looked like a beached whale on that gurney. I couldn’t gauge his age from across the room because his enormous belly obscured his face.

  The orderlies and men in white coats left the room. It was just us cryonics. I sat on my bed and watched nervously while they slept. It surprised me how I longed for their companionship. I felt like a boy again, waiting impatiently outside my teenage brother’s room for him to wake up. Here were some people that were just like me—my fellow lab rats. They would get my jokes. They would be shocked and furious to find out what happened to the world, and together we would find a way out.

  One by one, the butterflies emerged from their cocoons. Each one looked around the room, confused and sedated. Then they smiled when they saw me, and started chatting. Barry was the first to wake up. Boy, did he have some stories to tell. Barry was the frail gentleman I’d thought was in his seventies. Turns out he was only in his early sixties when he died. Barry was the only child of a heavy-drinking oil tycoon who succumbed to alcoholism at an early age. That left Barry a trust fund baby, and he sure would’ve made Papa proud. Every moment of his life was spent drinking, doing drugs, and chasing women. He had died just twelve years ago. Barry signed up for cryonics when alcoholism had taken its toll and he knew he didn’t have much time left. Medicine at the time Barry was dying could treat alcoholism easily. Organ farms produced petri dish livers and whatever you needed replaced, unless you were an alcoholic. A conservative movement in the government banned organ transplants for alcoholics. So, Barry found a loophole. The research at the time suggested they’d be reanimating cryonics in a hundred years’ time. Barry was shocked to find himself alive and rebuilt a little more than a decade after kicking the bucket.

  Elliott awoke next. It wasn’t five minutes before he and Barry were carrying on like a couple of frat boys. Elliott was an investment banker born in nineteen eighty-one. He’d amassed great wealth by running a large brokerage house through what he and Barry called “the greatest bull market in history” during the “roaring twenties.” Elliott was so into cryonics that he had set aside investments carefully selected to mature in the long term. He figured once he was reanimated, and people knew cryonics worked, they’d be signing up for it in droves. So, Elliott planned on building a cryonic estate planning business. He’d help people build an investment portfolio that would serve their needs from the great beyond. Upon reanimation, his clients would be far wealthier than when they died. Elliott didn’t die of a heart attack. By the time he died in twenty thirty-five, heart attacks had been all but eradicated by non-invasive laser cleaning of the circulatory system. So, he was a glutton most of his adult life with little consequence. Elliott did have trouble sleeping, though, and he was pretty sure he kicked the bucket by drowning in a pool while on sleeping pills. At least that’s the last thing he remembered.

  By the time Janet joined the fray, we had a regular party going. The youngest of the group, Janet died in twenty thirty-one at the age of thirty-eight. She’d worked as a chief nursing officer for a hospital system, and had signed up for cryonics because she wanted to see the future of medicine. Janet was visibly disappointed when I told them it was twenty forty-seven. I suppose the people at Restora who figured reanimation would be possible at the end of the century didn’t count on the Chinese military developing the technology half a century sooner.

  Janet was such a nice lady—a real spark plug. She got over her disappointment pretty quickly. And why shouldn’t she? She had a second chance at life and didn’t know she was a prisoner of the Chinese military. The three of them were all so happy to be alive. I couldn’t spoil that. When they asked about the world, I told them I’d just been reanimated myself and didn’t know much. I figured they’d have plenty of time for despair. Plus, I hated being a buzz kill. Lord knows Alex was plenty good at that. He’d be in soon enough to set them straight.

  Or so I thought. No one came back to our room until people started getting sick. Elliott came down with it first. It was that same evening, a little while after we’d all fallen asleep. Elliott was moaning so loudly we all woke up. He said his arms and legs ached terribly. The machines near the bed must have sent data to the men in white coats because a couple of them came into the room shortly thereafter. They dismissed Elliott’s pain as a side effect of being reanimated. Those two were clearly the incompetent members of the bunch. They didn’t even bother to take a good look at him. The other men in white coats were probably too busy scheming how to make frozen soldiers to pay Elliott any attention.

  The side effect explanation calmed Elliott down. We reminded him of the horrible burning sensation we all experienced upon being reanimated and postulated he was having some sort of after-effect from that. I lay awake for a couple of hours. In time, Elliott’s grunts and groans subsided, and Janet and Barry fell asleep. I didn’t see how I could possibly rally those three to rise against the Chinese. They seemed too complacent, too slow to question. I hoped Alex breaking the bad news to them would provide enough motivation to buck authority.

  7.

  I was still lying there thinking when the tootling started. It was the oddest sound. Definitely not something I would associate with an alarm. I sat up in bed, and the lights in the room turned on. The noise was coming from the machinery near Elliott’s bed. I rushed over. He’d taken a turn for the worse. He was barely conscious and sweating. His skin was puffed and clammy.

  A man in a white coat came in robotically, unconcerned by the alarm. As soon as he saw Elliott draped across the bed like a wet rag, he did an immediate one eighty and headed out the door. He came back with the entire team of lemmings who rushed into the room behind the man in charge. He pulled the body-scanning device from his pocket, and it projected a hologram of Elliott. I looked over at Barry with a raised brow, hoping to recycle my Star Wars joke, but the grave look on his face shut me down. I felt bad for wanting to goof around while Elliott was gravely ill, but I knew the men in charge were about to work some magic on him. As the hologram scrolled through various perspectives of Elliott’s innards, the men in white coats pensively grunted and pointed.

  True to form, the man in charge shouted instructions at one of his minions who left the room and returned with a large metal pen. The man in charge took the pen and placed it against the side of Elliott’s neck. It made a loud popping sound like the flashbulb of an old-fashioned camera. He looked at Elliott’s face and grunted with self-approval. Then he tried to leave the room.

  “Is Elliott going to be all right?” Barry asked.

  The man in charge paused in the doorway and spun around on one leg to face Barry. “Mister Elliott has a viral infection.”

  “What kind of virus?” Barry prodded.

  “It is nothing for you to be concerned about. We can cure any virus quickly. You will see very soon.”

  “But what does he have? He seems very sick—” Janet chimed in.

  “No more questions!” the man in charge roared. He turned and left the room.

  “He sure is a barrel of laughs,” Barry quipped.

  “You ought to see him when he’s really pissed.”

  “Who is he?” Janet asked.

  “Look guys, it’s a long story. I mean, we can get some information in the morning. Let’s get some rest. I’m sure Elliott will be fine.”

  8.

  Later that evening Barry and Janet fell ill. At first I could hear them writhing in their beds, breathing heavily through their noses. Then they started moaning and grunting just like Elliott had.

  One of the men in the white coats returned and gave them each a shot in the neck. He didn’t speak any English so I couldn’t get any answers out of him.

  Being stuck in a room with three violently ill people made me antsy. I may not have had much to live for, but something visceral kicked in, a survival instinct if you will. It made me want to get the hell out of there.

  I knew the door was locked, as it had been since my arrival. It a
lways opened for Alex and the men in white coats without any discernible effort. I groped the walls and crawled across the floor in vain, hoping to find an activation switch. I got back into my bed, which suddenly felt like it was made of stone. I listened to them squirming beneath their sheets. Sleep was out of the question. I was trapped.

  9.

  Alex arrived first thing in the morning. He must have thought I was still asleep because he went right to his work. I sat up and tried to attract his attention, but he ignored me.

  “Al, hey Al.” Nothing. He had his back to me and tinkered away on the dials. He didn’t seem concerned that I was living in a leper colony. “Alex!”

  Alex looked over his shoulder. “Oh, good morning, Royce.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “Me? I don’t sleep here.”

  “Listen, Al, you gotta tell me what’s going on with these people. They’re dropping like flies in here.”

  “I don’t want to scare you, but they’re not entirely certain. They should be coming in shortly to have a look. Perhaps Dr. Feng will give you an update.”

  “Dr. Feng?”

  “He’s the lead physician on the cryonics team.”

  “The asshole?”

  “Right. I have to run.” Alex headed out the door.

  I looked across the room at my three companions. They lay on their backs in their beds in dead silence. I could see Janet and Barry’s abdomens rising with each breath, but Elliott’s was not. I stepped slowly toward Elliott’s bed to have a look. Elliott looked hideous. His vapid skin had a charcoal gray undertone punctuated by black hemorrhagic blotches. His throat was covered with large blistering sores. Some oozed a milky fluid that trickled down his neck. His eyes were closed, and I couldn’t hear him breathing. I was afraid he was dead. I moved in closer to see if he was breathing. I turned my head so my ear was beside Elliott’s mouth and I could look up at the rest of his face. I felt a gentle burst of cold air from Elliott’s nose. At least he was alive.