I smiled and asked the man where they drove from. “Scotts-dale,” he said and then, as if the conversation needed further deadening, “Not far.” I said it was hot out there. They agreed. I realized, rather self-consciously, that these two thought Bree and I were another couple interested in possibly exploring the joys of eternal life together. I covered my left hand with my right. Bree flipped through her magazine.
That this couple might have been prospective members opened up some questions. Namely, wasn’t it selfish to cryonically freeze yourself? Didn’t one have better uses for time and money and hopes? Maybe I was uncharitable, but wasn’t there some mandate as a citizen of the world, one hopefully aware of its overpopulation and limited resources as well as its ongoing climate change and probable, if inevitable, vast environmental ruin, to accept the fact that you die and turn the world over to others? If Alcor was about seeing far and distantly into the future, about a grandness and boldness of vision that rivals the cosmonauts, then there was also a myopia here, an inability to see past one’s self.
Most of all, I wanted to find out this: What runs through the mind of someone who wants to live forever? What sort of person would never want to die?
I wanted to know what happens when the cryo-men and -women wake up in the Arizona heat, travel the fifteen hours and four minutes it takes to drive from Scottsdale to the Kansas prairie, ride a creaking elevator 650 feet down into the earth, and then open their memory boxes in the vast and silent mine. I wanted to know what happens when the time vault unticks and the flood of memories appear and the smell of salt lingers in the mausoleum of what was once there. When loneliness creeps into that great, underground vastness and sidles up to them to whisper that although they’re not dead, everything and everyone else they know is.
Diane led the four of us out a back door of the lobby, down a hallway, and into the operating room. A gurney sat in the room’s middle. A mess of wires and tubing coiled around everything. The arrangement looked halfway between hospital room and lab.
Here newly dead cryonics patients underwent a process called perfusion. Alcor’s doctors drained the body of its blood and water, butterflied open the patient’s sternum, and attached cannulation tubes to the heart. They pumped in cryoprotectant solution, a cocktail of chemicals and water that spread throughout the circulatory system and maintained cellular structure. “It has thirty-seven ingredients and it took a long time to perfect. Not even we know everything that’s in it,” Diane said, making the solution sound a bit like Heinz 57.
Up until the last decade, Alcor perfused bodies with water instead of cryoprotectants, the difference being that cryoprotectants vitrify the body instead of freezing it. Frozen water forms ice crystals, which expand in the corpse and rupture the cell structure of internal organs. Vitrification preserves the body by cooling it down into a solid but unfrozen state. “It’s like turning the body to glass,” Diane told us. It becomes a cracked windshield yet to fracture, a latticework of fissures held in delicate stasis. The downside, as Max More explained, is that cryoprotectants equal a sort of medical-grade antifreeze, chemicals whose harm we don’t yet know the full extent.
Farther back in the room, there was a smaller operating area with a large glass box sitting on a table. “That’s for the neuros,” Diane said.
Aaron Drake, Alcor’s medical response director, often takes charge of the medical team for a neurocryopreservation. A paramedic firefighter from Lincoln, Nebraska, Drake is bald and stocky yet muscular with that look of quick calm competence you wish for in emergency response. He begins a neuro by shaving the patient’s head and sterilizing the scalp. He cuts two incisions on either side to expose the skull and peels the skin back with forceps. He drills burr holes on either side—small tunnels into the skull typically used to treat subdural hematomas—and then scrapes out bits of bone. A team member inserts crackphones into these holes, instruments that measure the perfusion process and warn if the brain’s cells are in danger of freezing. Once all this is ready, the head, as Diane euphemized, is “removed from the trunk.” The medical team inserts tubes carrying cryoprotectants into the patient’s carotid arteries. If the head perfuses successfully, the brain retracts from the skull an eighth of an inch. Alcor disposes the rest of the body in one of three ways: cremation, burial, or deep-freezing, according to the patient’s wishes.
Neurocryopreservation appeals because there’s less variability at stake: instead of having to monitor the transfusion and levels of solution throughout the whole body and its various organs, only one organ needs attention, the one we believe to be the seat of memory and consciousness. While a full body perfusion lasts four days, a neuro only takes one; a lot more can go wrong given the extra time. In addition, neuros are cheaper and, if the patient is elderly, he is already banking on nanotechnology’s ability to grow a new body. On one of his video tours, Max More, chipper and irritatingly fit in his black blazer, points to his head and says, “I figure by the time I go, I won’t want to take this broken-down old body. Why not protect the important stuff, which is all up here?”
The process, however, remained in the works. “We just changed the way we do these,” Diane informed us. “It used to be we severed at the fifth or sixth vertebra. Now it’s at the ninth or tenth so there’ll be a bit more trunk. The bosses thought there were some pretty important nerve endings down there they wanted to keep.” When I asked what that meant for patients preserved the old way, Diane shrugged and said, “I don’t know.” Which was, of course, true. None of us did.
In Greek mythology, Zeus grants Tithonus, son of the king of Troy, eternal life upon his lover Aurora’s request. But Aurora forgets to ask Zeus for eternal youth, and so Tithonus is doomed to age eternally. He withers so much he transforms into a cicada, rustling his wings in a plea for death.
From the operating room we walked to the conference room, passing photos of Alcor’s preserved members along the walls. Individuals stood in more or less employee-of-the-month poses: heads and trunks, the limbo of a wan smile. Underneath each date of birth was not a date of death, but of cryopreservation.
One photo was of a cat. “Yes!” Diane brightened. “We preserve pets. That’s the office cat. He liked to hang out upstairs. An Italian member just flew over to have his German shepherd frozen. Though, you know, we only do neuros for animals.”
Another member photo had been photoshopped. The black-and-white face of a young man with a half-mullet haircut was wiped out, his features smoothed and fuzzed over. “What’s up with that?” Bree asked.
“Oh, that guy. That’s his driver license photo.” Diane nodded. “The boss didn’t think the original looked good, so he had it changed.” Max More, it seemed, had already preempted nanotechnology.
In truth, I recognized the same tendency in myself. It grew easy to dehumanize anyone associated with cryonics. Diane, for instance, with her long face and unblinking eyes, struck me as singularly reptilian. She stood in the hallway, waiting for our questions in silence, tongue ready to dart out and catch a fly. In his airbrushed videos, Max More appeared just a tad too self-composed, as if you were watching a slightly malfunctioning robot that smiled too quickly at the thought of its own disembodied head. And the Scottsdale couple I’d already written off as Stepfords, ready for the moment when they shed their skin and extended long green tentacles toward Bree and myself.
In wishing a gift for Tithonus, Aurora accidentally damns the one she loved most. But perhaps more tellingly, in her fervency that her lover remain human, Aurora turns him into something else.
The conference room waited at the end of the hall. A long table stretched in the middle, desk chairs around it. Tinted windows looked out on the parking lot. To our right, a metal shutter was cut into the wall. This looked into the patient bay area. “Step on over,” Diane beckoned. “Let’s have a peek.” She flipped a lever and the shutter cranked up.
We peered through the window on to a row of
shining aluminum tanks extending from floor to ceiling, wide enough that all five of us would need to link arms to encircle one. They looked like the tanks you’d find on a tour of a brewery and, although they were behind glass, it was hard not to think about how much more accessible, how less guarded, these were than Alcor members’ underground boxes of stuff. These were the dewars, and inside were the bodies.
Cryonauts are preserved at a temperature of -196 degrees Celsius. Diane pointed to the hoses attached to the tops of each container—these pumped a steady supply of liquid nitrogen to ensure the bodies stayed cool. Alcor keeps four bodies in a dewar at a time, each stored vertically in its own quadrant of space. The staff took the newly preserved body outside and then lowered it headfirst by crane from the roof into its open dewar.
“Head first?” The woman from Scottsdale curdled her lip, speaking for the first time. I was unsure why this detail offended her. “It’s a preventative measure,” Diane explained. “We don’t anticipate it, but if we run out of liquid nitrogen, levels would decrease from the top down. So the first part of the body to be exposed would be the feet, instead of the head. And you don’t want to lose your noggin.”
“If there’s a natural disaster,” Diane assured us, “These dewars can run six to eight months on their own. They use almost no electricity, and the glass window that looks on to them is bulletproof.” Alcor had hitched up a state-of-the-art alarm system throughout. “There are a lot of people out there who don’t like cryonics or what we do,” Diane explained, and nodded to the shatterproof window. “We have enough defenses here to withstand a full-fledged assault long enough for the police to arrive. We can’t repel it, but we can survive it.” She shook her head. “People want us to fail. One patient, his wife never even called to tell us he had died. She waited until it was too late. Think of that—his whole life’s work, gone.” Whether or not any imminent threat loomed, there’s a rationale to the building’s bunker-type mentality. It isn’t just the body, but the structure and its containers that need preservation. Alcor relocated to Scottsdale from its original location outside San Francisco because it was looking for somewhere less likely to be hit by earthquakes and other environmental disasters over a long period of time.
Diane motioned us over to the conference table. A miniature dewar stood on it. It was a 3D printout, the handiwork of an employee who builds 3D printers on the side. “Go ahead and check it out,” she smiled. Bree opened it. Inside were the different containers for the bodies and, in the center, sat what looked like a Pez dispenser. “What’s this?” Bree asked, pulling it out. “Oh, that,” Diane said offhandedly. “That’s where we keep the neuros.” Alcor keeps up to six heads in one dewar. Each is zipped up in a bag, then placed inside a tin bucket and stuck in its allotted slot on the vertical bar. Diane blinked. “Think of it like a totem pole.”
Later, on the car ride back, Bree told me this was the moment for her. We both felt not quite right. Though we had talked beforehand about how we had strong stomachs, there we were and it was still weird. “I felt my body then,” she said of that moment. “I’d never been so conscious of its weight.”
The totem pole of heads made sense: it was economical, efficient, saved liquid nitrogen, and lowered upkeep. It made sense as well that the brains of cats and dogs were kept in the same dewars as people. “We don’t have much room, so we put them wherever there’s an open nook,” said Max More. If you think about it, this wasn’t all that different from burial and graveyard, columbarium or morgue. But still there was something off. My mind could process and rationalize the storage system, yet it felt, for lack of a better word, inhumane.
Why was that? What made me shudder? Bree was onto something. Imagine your head removed from “your trunk”—in what Alcor calls “a cephalic isolation procedure”—or the bone scraped clean from the burr holes. Imagine the coffee-ground emesis and hemorrhaging, the cool blue antifreeze washed through your body until it ate through the lining of your lungs. Or imagine watching someone you love go through this. It wasn’t exactly the viscera that unnerved me, or the body’s desecration; minus the decapitation, this trauma didn’t differ all that much from what happens when, say, a car-accident victim is brought into the ER. Instead it was the sense of hope that threw me off, the violence that accompanied such wishful thinking. To see hope take this physical manifestation was to witness the force of that sentiment in all its gruesomeness.
Diane told us that the mother of an Australian man sends her preserved son letters every year for his birthday and Christmas. Alcor keeps them so that he may read them when he wakes up. The mother is not a member and so knows they’ll never meet again but, hopefully, some sort of natural order will be restored: in some sense, the son will be able to outlive his mother.
The night before my father died, I turned out the lights and walked out of his hospital room and made the mistake of looking back before I closed the door. I saw his body propped up on the bed, his shrunken torso and caved-in head, and I realized he would have to go through the night alone. It seemed wrong he would die: I had just turned twenty, he had just turned fifty-nine, and this was not, I was convinced, how life turned into death. But the despondency of leaving him alone rubbed up against the instinct for movement, to walk out the door and translate this moment into memory to be stored in some deeply hidden and secure box. In these dewars, with their silent, waiting bodies, I recognized that same despondency without any movement. There was no room in them for grief or mourning. To delay the acceptance of what’s lost harms the lives that survive that loss. Death remains one of the few words I can think of for which the adjective universal actually holds. How lonely would it be to want to exist outside of that?
“We have some really unique members,” Diane said back in the conference room, referring to the bodies on the other side of the glass. She laid out brochures and an introductory handout as part of her soft pitch. Bree and I shared one, as did the Scottsdales across the table. Diane asked us to consider joining. “A Catholic nun. A 101-year-old. Some Chinese. A lot of Quebecois. A Holocaust survivor with the numbers, you know . . .” Diane searched for the word. “Tattooed,” said the man from Scottsdale. “Yes, the numbers tattooed on her arm,” she continued. “You know, people in the future will want to talk with her and see about all the barbaric behavior that went on in the past.”
“Some others would be less useful to talk to. Less educational,” Diane confided. “We have some problems with mental health here. Some people who don’t get out very much. Sometimes people call the office just for conversation and it’s my job to talk to them. They’re not even members; they just want someone to talk to. One man from Spain does that a lot,” she trailed off. “But we’re full of really interesting people. We even have a few transgender cases. Although they’re only neuros. Too bad because it would have been so interesting for people from the future to study them.”
Disregarding the insensitivity of her lab-experiment approach, Diane raised an interesting consideration: That the mind of a person who came back might not necessarily want the same body beneath it. One’s new identity might in fact be tethered to the idea of changing one’s old one. Could cryonics refashion or reinterpret our identity to find a more aligned version of ourselves? And would that new version be someone more or less ourselves?
I couldn’t help but think of Patient #124, whose log I read on Alcor’s website. On a Tuesday morning in May 2014, Patient #124 called Alcor’s Scottsdale office from Alabama, saying he had been shot by an intruder. It was soon clear this wasn’t true; Patient #124 had not been shot but was intending to shoot himself. He had taken a large dose of sleeping pills and called his family members. Now he was informing Alcor to come get him. But when Patient #124 heard police sirens, he hung up and shot himself in the chest. Alcor filed an injunction to block the autopsy, and team members flew out, did a field washout, performed a neuro separation, and flew the head back by two in the morning. What desperati
on drove #124 to do this? More than that, what desperation would make him want to return?
Here, memory boxes played their part. Each Alcor member had access to a box they could fill, update, and store in the Kansas subterrain. The boxes were their fail-safes, a patient’s constant. A memory box supposed that what composes a life connects inextricably to the contents of that life. We are who we are because of what we had. And so when a box was opened, its contents would release a flood of memories—an electroshock of nostalgia—and the shorthand of a past life would appear.
One man filled his memory box with his own composed music, figuring it would finally be appreciated by the time he returned. Another requested a digital memory box, betting this would outlast the half-life of paper and Polaroids (although one’s tempted to ask if a CD-ROM drive or USB port will be at all accessible 200 years from now). Another woman encrypted DVDs made of stone with old Christmas photos and letters. A software engineer planned to bring along his grandfather’s silver bolo tie, a collection of Kurosawa films, and a copy of Doom. “We don’t know how memory will work,” Diane said. “But we think these might bring people back to who they are.”
There’s a Voltaire quote, favored by cryonicists, that goes: “To rise again—to be the same person that you were—you must have your memory perfectly fresh and present; for it is memory that makes your identity. If your memory be lost, how will you be the same man?” The problem is, in order to determine if a person’s memory will be fresh, present, or lost, we first have to be certain about how memory works. As Diane pointed out, memory is notoriously mysterious and difficult to pinpoint. “The brain is an interconnective mechanism and so memory’s a distributed thing,” said Bruce Hansen, a ponytailed neuroscientist I talked to at Colgate University. “In order to replay it, you have to run it through the areas that did the initial processing.”
The Book of Resting Places Page 12