While I waited to hear about my shore leave, the ship’s computer searched for records of Kathleen. As it did, I flashed back to one of the many arguments we’d had about cryogenic freezing. “Why wouldn’t they just throw you away once they have your money?” I’d asked. Well, they hadn’t.
“What makes you think the company will even last that long?” It had, almost. Apparently she’d been right about the power of compounding interest, if nothing else.
“What are the odds of any location surviving into the distant future?” The company had moved, I learned, a few decades after Kathleen’s death. The desert they’d originally chosen had become too hot for aboveground human habitation, and the water supply had dried up. One batch of heads was lost when climate rioters overturned a tanker of liquid nitrogen on its way there, but my sister’s wasn’t one of them. By then almost no new heads were being frozen, so the company moved first to the planet’s southern ice cap, where they manufactured their own liquid nitrogen, and then they sensibly relocated the whole operation into a hollowed-out asteroid once those became cost-competitive.
“Why would people of the future want to revive you?” They didn’t.
The heads’ final move had been back to Earth, after the supposedly eternal board of the company had called it quits and made off with the last of the money. When a mining crew discovered 3,289 frozen heads inside an asteroid that had been marked for extraction, it kicked off an ethical and legal debate that was still simmering on one of the Solar system’s political backburners, and the heads were back on metaphorical ice, having been farmed out to any museum, research facility, or university that would take them.
#
A shuttle planetside, six hours of quarantine, and two hyperloop rides later, I strolled through Washington DC with a 48-hour visitor chip.
Somewhere in the Solar system’s governmental bureaucracy, citizens might be petitioning officials to revive the 3,289 frozen heads —though I doubted it—but wherever such politics happened, it was no longer this place. DC had become a city of museums, broken up by placid pools and genetically engineered ever-blooming cherry trees, all sheltered by a massive seawall whose presence was betrayed by an uncanny shimmer as its camouflage tech tried to keep up with a changing sky.
All that remained of the capital of the nation-state Kathleen and I had lived in as Earthlings were memorials of white marble piled one on top of another, centuries of memories clamoring for dominance. I knew how that felt.
I swiped my ID chip for entry to the Museum of Religion, an architectural mélange that—my translation chip helpfully read for me off a plaque—incorporated the aesthetics of dozens of religions and sects (without achieving the gracefulness of any of them). It had bell towers and minuets, stupas and stained glass. It had statues in way, way, way too many styles. And that was just the exterior.
Past databases’ worth of informational plaques, upsetting renderings of violence, and armies of statues of men nailed to things was a small section with the title “Science Attempts to Address the Afterlife.” And there, through a window into a very thick boxy enclosure fed by pipes, I saw my sister’s face for the first time in centuries.
#
She didn’t look good. The window distorted my view somewhat, but even so I could see that she was as pale as the marble that formed this city of monuments. Her eyes had been taped shut during the freezing process, and the indentations on her eyelids remained. Her head, which had already been bald from the primitive medical treatments that failed to save her life, now had two small holes drilled into it, like reverse devil horns. He mouth was slackly open, making her look dumb.
And yet.
The memory of her hit me with a pain I had not expected. She looked so lonely.
I placed a hand against the glass, the nano-dissembler tucked between two fingers, armed and ready to chew through window and pipes and frozen flesh alike at my command.
Do you think there’ll be aliens? Kathleen’s voice in my memory is shaky and weak. In the future, when we both get unfrozen. Do you think there’ll be uplifted chimpanzees and aliens?
I hadn’t thought either one very likely. Of course, I’d said, already 80% sure I wasn’t going to join her in the icebox. And lunar colonies and wormhole travel to other star systems. Once we get unfrozen we’ll go everywhere together.
My fingers twitched, their tawny fur looking extra bright against her ice-white hairlessness. It was too much. I took a step back, then another, then whirled around looking for a place to sit before collapsing to the floor, wrapping my tail around me like a child’s blanket and purring to still my racing heart.
The few times since our life together that I’d thought of Kathleen and her quest for immortality, I’d laughed about it. Because obviously we were living the real immortality: we’d dismissed reincarnation because we’d been thinking too small, believing our planet had the only souls—if souls existed at all. What fools we’d been! What a big, marvelous universe it had turned out to be, even wilder than the distant future she’d believed in.
On the floor of the Museum of Religion my eyes were leaking and my heartbeat throbbed into my fingers and ears. Because while I’d been out living it up she’d been here the whole time.
I didn’t know much about the science of the soul—no one really did, not even the so-called “soul scientists”—but I felt that the immortal part of Kathleen hadn’t been freed with her death.
When I could look my sister in the face again, the plaque under her grotesque bloodless head answered it for me: “The process of what was then called vitrification,” it read, “was initiated in the moments between the subject’s heart stopping and brain death several minutes later.”
I could free her soul with the nano-dissembler, and if Astrill was right she’d be sucked back into me when I died. But I found I couldn’t go through with it. She deserved better than that.
#
The legal battle to acquire Kathleen’s head was brief but ridiculous. In the end I had the Chirrling ambassador to the Solar system pull rank for me. Did the humans really want to risk an interstellar diplomatic incident over one frozen head? They didn’t.
Once we’d loaded up the cargo hold with Earth handicrafts, salt, stasis-preserved pigeons, and one frozen head, we set a course for the Brontolli system, where the pigeons would net us a tidy profit (and no, I didn’t know what the Brontolli wanted them for; an interstellar trader learns quickly not to ask about such things).
“I can’t help but notice that your sister is in the freezer,” Astrill trilled, suctioning toward me up what our hard burn out of the Solar system had turned into a vertical shaft.
A twitch of the tail was all the response I gave.
“I thought you were going to destroy the head.”
“I am,” I said, not turning from the ship’s controls. “Today, tomorrow, in a hundred cycles. It’s all the same to her, so what’s your hurry?”
Ze let out the wheezy cough that Roptralians made when they laughed outside water. “Fair enough. No skin off my soul. Can’t see the profit in hauling a frozen chimp head all over the galaxy, though.”
“Don’t talk about my sister that way,” I mumbled, finishing my fine-tuning of the cargo bay’s scanner. “Computer, can you read the matrix now?” Its happy chirp told me it could.
“Then run program ‘Kathleen Carson.’”
I imagined the miracle that was about to happen in great detail. I’d argued with Kathleen about this, but the vanishingly slim chance she’d bet her immortal soul on had worked, and now here she was! I pictured her waking up, calling my name, and feeling as though only a minute had passed while she slept.
With no fanfare whatsoever, Kathleen appeared in my ship’s cockpit. Well, not the real Kathleen, not even the real Kathleen’s consciousness, but a full holographic simulation of her based on the scan of her brain. She was a little grainy around the edges, and she’d been generated in the body position her stopped brain last remembered, lying
on a bed. Since there weren’t any beds in the cockpit, she hovered in mid-air, torso awkwardly bisecting the pilot’s empty chair and feet somewhere inside the control panel.
But she snapped instantly upright, pulling her ghostly limbs inward, clutching a blanket that wasn’t there. “I’m not ready!” she shouted, the sound coming from the nearest speaker on the ship’s console. Kathleen looked around wildly as the computer subtly adjusted her position until it appeared she was sitting in the chair. Her image was still wearing a hospital gown, though oddly it also had hair.
I don’t know what she thought of the two of us, Astrill hanging from a handhold by two tentacles and me leaning toward her worrying my bushy tail between my hands. But it was enough to render her speechless as her eyes darted between us. The computer was feeding her visual information from as close to her position as possible, but I imagined the input felt pretty uncanny. She finally managed to squeak out, “Where am I?”
“You’re…” I started, my language download letting me use period-correct American English. “It’s a long story. Where do you think you are? What’s the last place you remember being?”
“The hospital. Oh fuck, I’m dying. It’s not how I thought it would be. No white light like in the NDE reports. And if I was wrong about heaven, then where’s the harp music? Plus, no offense, but you two really don’t look like angels.”
“I was an angel once,” Astrill interjected, unhelpfully, probably referring to zir life as a Terrawk, a humanoid race with giant feathery wings. I gave zir the signal to go back belowdecks and ze replied with a crisp, mocking salute before letting go with both tentacles and dropping down the shaft.
“You’re not dying, Kathleen.” She looked like she wanted to interject with a how do you know my name, but I barreled on. “It worked. We had your head frozen just like you wanted, and it’s the mid-43rd century as you reckon time, and here you are! Yes, there are aliens, and so many more things too.”
Kathleen’s hologram shook its head violently. “Not head freezing again! This must be a nightmare. Maybe it’s the drugs.” She ran her hand nervously through her hair, just like old times, then startled and brought some of the long black strands to her face to examine. Then she reached out to touch the ship’s console and her hand went right through it. This seemed to calm her down. “Oh good, it’s not real. What a weird dream.” She looked me up and down from my fuzzy ears to my sneaker-clad feet.
I was just about to try to tell her it wasn’t a dream when she went on, seemingly to herself.
“I hope to medical science I wake up from this one. Can’t let Shelby actually go through with that crazy head-freezing scheme.”
I let my tail drop and it hung limply off the back of my chair. “You can’t… what?”
Kathleen laughed. “When in Rome,” she muttered, then went on: “Okay, crazy space dream squirrel, since you asked. Back in the real world I’m dying of cancer, and my sister just cannot let go and insists I get my head vitrified. I actually said I’d allow it to make her happy, but I’ve never wanted to.”
I stared at her, openmouthed, as all my memories from our conversations ran through my head. They’d been so clear. “No,” I finally managed. “I ne—your sister never wanted to do it. It was your idea.”
“Hardly!” Kathleen snorted. “I know the science on brain freezing. Hell, I’m a neuroscientist. Waste of resources at best, disastrous at worst. I mean, I’m still 99.9% sure there’s no such thing as a soul, but some promising studies suggest that a small amount of energy leaves the body at brain death. Who knows what that might turn out to be? It’s got to be better than a frozen lump of meat in a jar. I just hope I wake up from this dream in time to put my foot down about it.” She turned her holographic head toward the front of the ship and its field of stars.
“I—that’s just not how it happened. This simulation must have errors, or the freezing process scrambled your—”
“What would you know about it, space squirrel?”
My heart was beating in my throat and my tail swished furiously. “I’m… I’m her. Your sister.” Kathleen turned toward me, a dreamlike look on her face. The only way I could get it all out was to rush through it, so rush I did. “It’s true. You did die, or not really die because your head was preserved. But surprise! It turns out there’s reincarnation and I’ve lived a couple dozen lives since I was Shelby, but I am her and I remember. I remember trying to talk you out of your insane head-freezing plan! But anyway it worked.”
“This is the wildest dream ever,” Kathleen said to herself, but I could tell she was starting to worry it wasn’t. “That’s not how it happened. I told her a thousand times that the idea was ridiculous. And let’s just say that if you were Shelby and you had let that mad scientist shit happen to me, well, you better be glad I can’t seem to interact with matter in this fucked-up cancer- and pain drug-fueled nightmare.”
Her holographic hands were bunched into fists. “Okay,” she said, screaming now, though the computer limited the volume to a dull roar. “I’m ready to wake up now!”
“Computer, end program,” I whispered, and she was gone.
All that remained was her unsettling recollection of the way our conversations had played out. I went over them again and again, but I just couldn’t believe that I’d argued the other position. It was, as Kathleen had just said, ridiculous!
I sat in the cockpit for I don’t know how long, just staring into space—staring into literal space, a field of stars like glittering sand out the window—running the ancient argument over again and again in my brain searching for clues to which of us was remembering properly.
The computer terminal in front of me dinged: a message from Astrill. It was a digitized file from ancient Earth, a payment record for the vitrification of head #742, one Kathleen Carson. And guess whose signature was at the bottom? One Shelby Carson.
“Astrill, you eavesdropping octopus!” I yelled. Ze couldn’t help it, though. Sound waves vibrated through the metal of the ship and right into zir tentacles.
Another ping. I told you to destroy it, this one said.
And don’t call me octopus.
#
For a long time I just refused to deal with the problem. And I mean a really long time. I left Kathleen in her chiller unit in the cargo hold, cutting into my profits for dozens, hundreds, thousands of trading runs. No matter where in the galaxy we were, her head was there weighing on me like a second conscience.
I’d cost her lifetimes of experience—of discovery, growth, adventure, mistakes, and love. I could do the “merciful” thing and free her, but even that would only bond her back to my own soul, and my soul felt weary at the thought of going on. I’d done my share of living and yearned for whatever enlightenment the Collective offered.
Even if Kathleen’s half of our soul forgave mine—could a part of a soul remain angry with the rest?—would her half also bring mine a new sense of curiosity to carry us both forward through dozens more lives? Or would my soul’s age weigh hers down and dull whatever joy she might have had? Would our halves even be able to merge back into one when mine had grown so much since the time of our shared life, while hers remained unchanged?
I couldn’t cope with what I’d done and I couldn’t decide what to do about it, so I did nothing. For almost a whole lifetime.
Kathleen’s head was there when Astrill finally got sick of me and transferred to a more profitable ship. The head was there when, on a run back to the home planet, I met a fantastic piece of tail who would become my wife. It was there when we settled down on a killer piece of creekside property, necessitating regular deliveries of liquid nitrogen to maintain the status quo of my guilty indecision.
The head was still there when my wife got sick, her now-silver fur thinning from treatments that only postponed the inevitable. The day she passed away I looked in the mirror and saw with a shock how gray my own fur had gotten. It was time to, as Astrill had been so fond of saying, “shit or get out of the pot.
”
I went out to the shed housing Kathleen’s chiller unit and brushed a thick layer of dust off her enclosure’s window. There she was, same as she’d been for centuries, her slack face judging me.
“What should I do?” I asked her, not for the first time. She didn’t answer.
Keeping her frozen wasn’t a good solution. For Gravity’s sake, it wasn’t even a possible solution: the only choices I could see were to destroy her head on purpose, or wait until I died and the liquid nitrogen deliveries stopped, to let her die from my cowardly neglect.
Staring at the tank, I realized I was again choosing my sister’s fate for her. I was making the same mistake all over again, even after all those lifetimes of experience.
And that thought made me realize the one true and fair option I did have.
A colony of cybians in the Sauran asteroid belt owed me a favor, which I cashed in for two things.
#
Kathleen floated in a wing of cold steel hallway in an honest-to-Clarke space station. At least that’s where the robots and disembodied AI voices calling themselves cybians had told her she was. The space station had no windows.
Yet she found herself staring through a thick portal at the frozen head of a giant rodent claiming to be her sister. Well, not exactly a rodent. The thing had an almost-human—though furry—face with tufty ears on top. Kathleen wished she could see its eyes, but they were frozen shut.
All told, it wasn’t the kind of family reunion she’d expected. Not that she’d expected one at all.
Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas Page 6