Carthage opens his eyes. “Dr. Borden?”
“There is a risk.”
“Which is?”
Borden clasps his hands like he’s making here’s-the-church. “We could . . . possibly . . . set him on fire.”
“I am listening,” Billings calls into the audio feed. “Good morning, gents, the man in the oxygen-saturated room is paying attention here.”
Carthage ignores him. “How high would we be going?”
Borden runs his eyes down the row of switches. “This would be—I’m approximating here—about the voltage of an electric-chair execution.”
Dr. Kate spins with her mouth open, but Carthage speaks before she can: “Proceed.”
“Are you sure?”
Thomas speaks up: “Dr. Carthage is always sure.” And Carthage gives the slightest revelation of a smile.
“Really would hate to get roasted alive, you know.” Billings backs away from the tub, edging toward the door. “This is safe, right, lads?”
“You bet,” Gerber mutters. “If you like toasted marshmallows.”
And Borden throws the next switch.
The electric hum grows louder. The video feed shows water around Frank jiggling as though it were about to boil.
Dr. Kate shakes her head. “This cannot be right—”
But the beeping starts again. It’s stronger, the oscilloscope shows regular peaks and valleys, the counter reads 31 bpm.
“We’re getting blood pressure,” calls a postdoc whose desk faces the wall. The lights of his screen are reflected in his glasses. “Fifty over thirty-two.”
“Amazing,” whispers Dr. Kate, and I watch her return to the window beside Frank’s body. She touches two fingers to the glass. “This is a miracle.”
Carthage frowns at her. The beeps gain steadiness: 44, 54, 61 bpm.
“Dr. Carthage, we’re at ninety over sixty-six. And steady.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Carthage declares, “we have reanimation.”
Everyone roars. There is loud cheering, clapping of hands. Gerber yells “woo-hoo” and spins himself careening on his chair. Borden lets out a whoop: “We did it!” Billings puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles as loud as a fan at a hockey game. Thomas pumps Carthage’s hand like he’s a politician who just won an election. “Congratulations, sir. Congratulations.”
I stand there mute, feeling about as smart as a cow. Damn if I know what to do with my skepticism now.
Carthage waits till the noise subsides, then turns to Gerber. “Start weaning.”
“Whoa.” Gerber’s eyebrows rise. “Already?”
“Start.”
Gerber starts to speak, then catches himself. “You’re the boss. Your funeral.” And he turns down the pressure in the ventilator.
Immediately the beeping dips, the postdoc calls lower blood pressure numbers, everyone looks to Carthage. He holds one finger up and waits. Sure enough, a moment later Frank’s heartbeat recovers, gains ground, rises in tempo. And then Carthage, that egotistical genius, that bastard, smiles.
“What’s funny?” Gerber asks.
“We are playing him,” Carthage says, “like a violin.”
“This man is not a toy,” says Dr. Kate, though Carthage keeps smiling like a politician on his inauguration day.
With that, I discover something incredibly basic that I have been missing the entire time. I all but slap my forehead over it: these people hate Carthage. All of them. Yet they are here anyway. They are that hungry to be part of a discovery. How I will ever put this in an article I have no idea, but it is as clear as the beeping every time Frank’s heart beats.
Carthage lifts his chin at Gerber. “What portion is vent and what portion is him?”
Gerber scans his instruments. “We’re twenty percent. The rest is our icy sailor.”
“Cut him off.”
Dr. Kate turns. “It’s too soon—”
“Cut him off.”
“Easy now.” Gerber stands, moves away from his desk. “This is a lot all at once, here. Let’s catch our breath for a second.” His back to us, he shakes his hands as if to dry them. “You’ll gork him, you know.”
“Maybe.”
“But you’re supposed to be so almighty smart.”
“Do it now.”
Gerber turns to face us. “Just chill for one minute, would you?”
Carthage snorts. “And establish his dependency on life support?”
“How about we let him take fifty consecutive breaths?”
“Right. Now.”
I am writing all of this down, every word. And realizing that Gerber, in his domain, possibly has stature greater than Carthage has in his. No wonder he’s standing firm.
“Everyone is expendable,” Carthage says through clenched teeth. “Even the illustrious David Gerber.”
Gerber laughs. “Then so are you, dude. And if this experiment tanks, which of us do you think it will hurt more?”
“Everyone, please,” says Thomas, sliding into Gerber’s seat. “There’s no need—”
“Thomas, no,” calls Dr. Kate. And Gerber comes rushing.
But even a layman like me can see that it is done. The control is all the way down. In the chamber, the ventilator bellows have stopped. The beeps continue nonetheless. Thomas escorts his clipboard back beside the boss. “There.”
Carthage nods at him, a little silent attaboy. Creepy.
Gerber stands with shoulders drooped. “He’s breathing on his own.”
Dr. Kate moves near to him. “Yes.”
“Whoa,” Gerber whispers. He returns to his desk and flops in the chair. “Way to go, Mr. Frank. You just broke all the rules.”
Suddenly the breathing stops, the beeps cease, the EKG flatlines. The room goes as quiet as a cemetery.
“Well, there it is,” Gerber says to Carthage. “Now do you want the vent back up?”
Carthage holds out a hand. “Wait.”
But the machines are silent. There is no heartbeat.
“Blood pressure’s cratering,” a tech says.
“We’re losing him.”
“Body temp is ninety-two,” Billings calls. “Nearly thawed. Our window is closing.”
The room responds with silence. Carthage nods at Gerber. He presses buttons, the bellows recommence. Frank’s chest rises and falls as before. But the beeps do not restart.
“Give me more magnetics,” Carthage orders.
“Right away,” a technician replies. He spins the dial on his desk all the way to the right. “That’s everything we have, sir.”
Still no beeps. “We’re in trouble,” Dr. Kate says.
I’m scanning the room, ready to scribble whatever happens next, but there’s no action, no words. That little freeze goes on a long time. I cannot believe my story is going to be about how Carthage’s arrogance brought the whole thing down.
Finally he takes a deep breath. “Dr. Borden? More charge, please.”
“Seriously?”
Carthage does not answer. Borden considers his row of switches. “Erastus, each of these circuits carries ten times the power of the one before. If Subject One were alive, the present amperage would kill him. If we increase, there’s just no telling.”
“Excuse me, gents,” Billings says, waving one gloved hand. “Permission to leave the chamber, Dr. Carthage?”
“Erastus,” Borden says. “He may explode.”
“Unseal the chamber, please,” Billings says. “Right now.”
Carthage claps his hands once. “Senior team, quickly, I want your opinions.”
Thomas lowers his clipboard. “You do?”
“Dr. Philo, do we risk explosion or cease our experiment?”
She looks him in the face. “We say we are seeking answers. Nature is giving us one,
unequivocally clear and direct. People are not krill. Let him go.”
Carthage barely blinks. “Dr. Gerber?”
He runs fingertips over his keyboard. “We’re boiling him like a lobster. Stop it.”
“Dr. Billings?”
“You would risk my life for the chance to restore his? End the reanimation.”
“Dr. Borden?”
The little doc ponders. “I told you before that the heart wants to beat. Maybe this one has been stopped too long. Or maybe we should have kept him frozen till we’d tried more species between shrimp and something this huge. But today we cannot change what we do not know.” He stares at his switches. “Shut it down.”
“That leaves you, Thomas.”
“Oh, sir.” Thomas turns to Carthage. “What do you want me to say?”
“Ha.” Carthage claps a hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “You should be a diplomat.”
Thomas blushes, of all things. Now I’m dying to know the backstory. Did the guy grow up fatherless or something? Definitely investigate later.
Meanwhile Carthage pulls out a bottle of hand sanitizer. He squirts a blob into one palm, then puts the bottle away. Casually, without hurry, he wipes his hands one on the other, between the fingers, wringing the thumbs. You’d never guess what we’re in the middle of. At last he faces us.
“We are to stop, then? It is unanimous? Subject One cannot be reanimated? Let us be cold for a moment, and calculate. What would be harmed if we try and fail?”
“Our consciences,” Dr. Kate says instantly. “Our decency.”
Carthage sniffs in her direction. “Dr. Philo, always in earnest. And never shy about questioning the ethics of her boss. I remind you that Subject One is as full of potential as a fetus, if he receives our successful intervention. If we fail, the worst that can come of our efforts is that he will remain as the rest of the world sees him: dead. Meanwhile we have the slim but scientifically sound possibility that we might be right about cells’ latent life force. And that our being right could save humanity from untold future suffering. Perhaps your mighty ethics could soften somewhat, given that opportunity?”
“Well . . .” Gerber leans back. “There is such a thing as desecration of the dead.”
“We’re guilty of that already,” adds Dr. Kate.
Carthage waves them aside. “Superstition. Also, beside the point.” He faces the full staff, arms wide. “People. Aren’t you curious?” He laughs; it sounds like a bark. “This is the only thing that matters: Don’t you want to know what is possible? Aren’t you dying to find out?”
He gives them a moment to digest his argument. Then he turns, and if the man had worn a cape he would have flourished it. “Borden.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Now.”
Borden raises his hand, presses one finger against the switch, hesitates.
“Now,” Carthage repeats. And the little doctor flips the thing up.
At once every gauge tips all the way to the right, overrun by voltage. There are sparks among the wires overhead. Several computer monitors turn off. The lights flicker, then the room goes black. And there we all are, dumb as a box of rocks, standing in the dark. There is not even the sound of ceiling fans.
A few seconds later the lights blink back on, the fans start, computers reboot. Gerber pulls back his wild hair and faces Carthage. “Backup generator?”
Carthage nods. “Always have a Plan B.”
And the beeping starts again. There is no hesitating this time. It is steady, climbing, and sure. When it reaches 20 bpm Borden turns off that highest switch. The beeping continues. Now the progress is linear. One by one he lowers the switches, and Frank’s heart holds its pace, settling at ninety beats per minute.
“That’s it,” Borden says, throwing the last switch down. “He’s on his own.”
Billings slumps against the chamber door. “God in heaven.”
The counting clock shows 15:47 has elapsed since that frozen heart first started beating. At twenty minutes Gerber begins ventilator weaning, minuscule steps this time but reaching full withdrawal in half an hour. The other techs report steady blood pressure. Billings returns to the body and records his observations: finger twitches, eye motion.
No one is celebrating this time. It is a solemn business. I ask Thomas for a copy of the procedure list and he hands me the original—can he have no idea what this thing will be worth?—and tosses the bare clipboard on a desk. Then I slump in a corner and wonder what has just become of my worldview.
“Rock solid.” Gerber sits back. “Sixteen respirations per minute, ninety-two beats give or take, zero life support.” He clasps hands behind his head. “Baby’s all grown up.”
“Well . . .” Carthage tugs his collar like his tie is too tight. “I suppose I don’t need to tell you all how disappointed I am.”
“What?” It’s Borden this time. “What are you talking about? What better result could you possibly expect? What do you want?”
Carthage rubs his forehead with one hand, as if to say it is a shame the world is populated with imbeciles. Then he stares through the glass at the living, breathing, silent creature. “I want consciousness.”
CHAPTER 9
The Ancient Dictionary
(Kate Philo)
Within hours of reanimation Gerber had designed a way to stream the frozen man online live. It was a massive invasion of privacy, but after I’d committed the apparently unforgivable offense of questioning Carthage’s ethics in front of the whole staff, I remained too far in the doghouse to make an effective objection.
In fact he put me on the night shift. It was a clear comedown from supervising all the researchers on the ship, but truthfully I didn’t mind. I liked the quiet control room, the hum of machines, the silent body breathing away in its chamber. Whatever misgivings I felt about the project and my role, the frozen man had a reassuring presence.
Often Billings was there, toiling with his small specimens. Sometimes I’d convince him to take a break from cataloging, the drudgery of organizing chaos before experimenting on it. He’d been right about that giant berg. It contained a trove of small species, including hundreds of flash-frozen sardines.
Dixon now had a desk in the lab offices, where he sat most nights pounding the keys of his laptop. While he was working, the man had impressive focus: scowling, impervious to distraction, pausing to dig through his notes before plunging back in. When he took breaks I would engage him in conversation, hear war stories about his newspaper days. But the man had a particular habit, as if he could sense the moment I began to feel sympathy or connection with him. He would utter something vile, coarse, sexist, driving me away from him, back to my work.
Gerber was present most nights, too, as unsleeping as an owl, though I didn’t understand why. What more systems design work could there be? I supposed he was doing basic science, which is to say he was being paid to think.
I can’t say that I had many tasks myself. The electrodes remained securely in place, barnacles on the man’s chest and back. Computers monitored everything day after day without a single crash. I felt like a night watchman, everything but the flashlight.
Meanwhile the red digital clock counted up the frozen man’s new existence, nine days, nine hours, plus change. Gerber’s tracking program changed camera angles every thirty seconds. Simultaneously, vital signs, plus brain and heart activity readings, scrolled continuously across the bottom of the screen. Anyone wanting this data could download it for free. In the first twenty-four hours, our Web site had 14 million hits. Each visit lasted an average of twenty-six minutes, which Gerber declared exceptional for the Internet.
“Most people don’t even have sex for that long,” he said. Across the room, Dixon snickered into his coffee cup.
Gerber spent his nights trolling the blogs. Not surprisingly, the frozen man made the Web buzz like a hive
. Each morning Gerber e-mailed the wildest finds to all project staff, until people complained of the in-box clutter. After that, he hung a little bulletin board on the control room wall, with a scroll above: PERV DU JOUR. Periodically he thumbtacked his latest discovery there, which most staffers read each day the minute they arrived at work.
One night, for instance, Gerber hung screen captures from frozen mantwin.com: photos of our guy with imaginary siblings he might have had. One person posted an actor who’d played the grizzled sheriff in a sixties TV western, someone else suggested an Olympic swimmer with sharp cheekbones. Others were more inventive: a skinny monkey with wide facial hair vaguely like the frozen man’s sideburns, even the flared front grillework of a tiny, fuel-efficient car.
Not all responses to the reanimation were odd. Both of Massachusetts’s U.S. senators called with congratulations. The president of MIT sent flowers. I was meeting with Carthage when they arrived. While Thomas centered the arrangement on the credenza, I suggested to my preening boss that we invite sociologists to study who was following the reanimation online most fervently. Carthage glared at me, barked, “Focus.”
A cardiologist in Milwaukee said the frozen man’s EKG matched that of a person in deep rest. “It’s like the day after a marathon and his body is recovering,” he said. Dr. Borden, Carthage’s pet physician, calculated the frozen man’s appetite and wastes and said he had the metabolic rate of a hibernating reptile. I thought: How humanizing.
A Chicago epilepsy researcher downloaded encephalograms and declared that “Subject One is using as close to one hundred percent of his brain as has ever been measured for a human.” I wondered how she could draw such a broad conclusion with only three days’ data. But once she had told CNN it was “like he was shining a light in every corner of his mind,” the phrase replayed worldwide every thirty minutes for a day and a half. She may have rushed to judgment, but it made her a household name.
The popular culture backlash was close on her heels. Tabloids speculated on whether the frozen man was an alien. Religious conservatives held public prayer vigils, between calls to Congress to shut us down. “Lazarus was raised by the Son of God,” one congressman said, pointing at the sky. He had white hair and a fantastic speaking voice, nearly operatic. “Who do these Boston blasphemers think they are?”
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