But what if, as Max More put it, “the important stuff” is not all “up there” in the head? The stomach’s been found to contain over 100,000 neurons as well as 95 percent of the body’s serotonin, a neurotransmitter. The heart holds over 40,000 neurons and inhibits or facilitates electrical activity in the brain. While Alcor researchers recently made a breakthrough in determining that long-term memories remained intact in nematode worms after freezing, we still have no idea how a human brain would respond to such a change much less the rest of the body.
Memory boxes might have one thing to their advantage. “There’s a theory, attractive but still unproven,” Hansen said, “that our ability to perceive surroundings is based on our memories. Our context, our experiences, our moods lead us to have unconscious expectations. And the new features we perceive happen because we’re tapping into stores of memories.”
If context then shapes our perceptions, could that work in the reverse? If we were a freshly revived cryonaut, could seeing a familiar face in a photo help retrieve our memory?
“Well sure, you could say that,” Hansen continued. “Just don’t get carried away.”
As for a life worthy or unworthy of living, Diane couldn’t see why anyone would want to return and then not keep living. She asked us to imagine it—you could come back and choose to live at any age you please with your loved ones, free of disease or death. “Most Alcor members choose their twenties,” she added with a wink toward me and Scottsdale guy. Nanotechnology, she said, would be just like Botox: a tightening up. Anything would be possible. Who would say no to more of life? I asked about Patient #124. “Well, things can always change,” Diane responded. “He might feel differently when he comes back. Just remember, don’t shoot yourself in the head.”
From the Alcor conference room, we headed to a second operating room, filing through an underlit hallway with more photos along the wall.
Here there hung a photo of Fred Chamberlain Jr., the father of Fred Chamberlain III who founded Alcor in the early 1970s along with his wife, Linda. Fred Jr. was Alcor’s first neurocryopreservation case in 1976, when the company consisted of only five members. Fred III performed the surgery in a two-bedroom California apartment turned impromptu operating room, the procedure hurried along by Fred Jr.’s declining condition.
As far as origin stories, Alcor’s was initially a race against time, a journey as far as possible to bring a father back and save a sick and damaged head. That the neuro procedures and preservation methods were still rudimentary, that the head was most likely separated at the wrong vertebra, and that there is now, realistically, no chance of Fred Jr. ever returning, fell beside the point. Diane grimaced and admitted as much when I asked her.
But still the possibility of Fred Jr.’s return tantalized me. It would be like giving birth—Fred III cooling his father’s head out of cryostasis—something out of Greek myth but rewritten, a future from the past.
When I was younger and believed in a heaven hidden in great white clouds, I daydreamed it as a great reunion: as long as I didn’t do anything too bad, I would show up and there I’d run across all the loved ones I had lost in life. The logistics at first troubled me—what if I were old and my father and grandparents, who had only known me when I was young, didn’t recognize me? What if they were still as sick as when they died or we had become strangers in the intervening years? What would I hold in my memory box to help remember them? But then suddenly these concerns no longer mattered. This was heaven, after all: the future would work the past out for itself.
This idea of heaven and Alcor doesn’t seem so far off. At a certain point, cryonics turns from science to religion. Several members indeed list it as such on their profiles. The decision to sign up seems not so much a faith in humanity as it is in a higher power: the transhumanist notion that human intelligence can create a sort of divinity. There’s logic and science behind cryonics, but there’s also a point where logic reduces enough so that probability, in cryonicists’ own estimates, fades into the unknown. And that’s closer to faith.
After my tour, I talked to Jay Lewis, a software engineer living in Phoenix. In 2006, while in his mid-thirties, doctors misdiagnosed Jay with an enlarged heart. He spent several days in a hospital bed, undergoing tests and reflecting on his life. His condition turned out to be caused by a chlorine allergy but still he started researching anti-aging methods. Eventually he landed on Alcor. He attended a conference in nearby Scottsdale and, to his surprise, the people he encountered gave smart, logical arguments. When I spoke with Jay over the phone, he told me: “You’d think there’d be more, but only a couple people there seemed crazy. It got me interested. It seemed plausible. I mean bacteria are practically immortal.” A few years later, he took out an insurance policy and signed up as a full-body member with Alcor. His fiancée was also a member; they met at a conference, her stipulation being that she only date other cryonicists. The previous year they froze their dog Nutmeg, a fourteen-year-old Australian shepherd, and Jay hoped he’d live long enough to see her unfrozen.
When I asked Jay what he looked forward to with cryonics, I did not anticipate his answer. “I’m excited to travel to other solar systems,” he said. “If you think about it, once the technology expands, we’ll be able to put people in and out of cryonics at will.” It was historic, a word Jay liked to use, in two senses: you’d not only be one of the first humans to prolong life through cryonics but you’d be able to witness events as an ancestor to them. Jay went on: “Imagine when we colonize the next solar system. That could take one hundred, even one thousand years to reach. With cryonics, we could freeze people for that and they would awaken when they reached their destination. We’d become time travelers. The technical possibilities excite me, the ones that don’t have anything to do with avoiding death. Say you wake up in the future and you’re bored. You could save up a lot of money, invest it, and then sign up for a hundred-year sleep. You wake up and you’ll be richer. You could see how all your favorite cities have changed.”
I told Jay it sounded like immortality with a fast-forward button, but I didn’t say what I really thought: that this seemed, if not delusional, then a strange mixture of conviction and hope. That, like Patient #124, the future was being used as a way to assuage or excuse the present.
I asked instead if Jay thought this might not work out. He stopped himself: “Well, what if no one wants to wake me up? What’s my skill set? I’m just a software engineer. That might not warrant my getting the best resuscitation method. And you’d want to go with some people but who decides who goes? If you take 500 of your friends, then each of them would want to take another couple hundred. But if you went alone, then it’d be a form of suicide. Your friends would have to wait a long while.”
None of his friends or family were upset with his choice, but Jay encountered resistance when he tried to recruit others to do it. “It seems like it wouldn’t be that hard,” he told me. “People convert religions all the time. Pagans to Christians, Christians to Scientologists. But cryonics is more functionally like an insurance policy. You don’t need to abandon a set of beliefs. Why wouldn’t you do it? You’re offering someone a 10 percent chance they wouldn’t die, something that would happen anyway.” Jay paused. Then he asked, “Have you talked with anyone that’s been able to sign people up? Do you know what they said?”
I told him, honestly, I hadn’t.
In Alcor’s second operating room, we crowded around another gurney with a mannequin on it. A 3D printer stood against the wall. Its progeny, a printout of a very large owl, sat on a shelf overlooking the room. It was missing, perhaps fittingly, the top half of its head.
The mannequin lay inside an open body bag, blue plastic cubes around him. “That’s the ice we use to cool the patient down in the field,” Diane said. “It’s like the inside of a beanbag chair.” The dummy comes hooked up to all the machinery needed for a field washout, a black rubber cooling mask stret
ched over the upper half of its face. Diane called this the Batman mask. She let me take a picture of it.
A patient’s last hours often become a race. If Alcor doesn’t reach a patient within twenty-four hours of death, edema and irreversible swelling set in. And while Alcor’s bullish about the endurance of chemical information in brain tissue (neurons are sometimes cultured as long as four to eight hours after death), it’s nevertheless imperative to begin cooling the brain at once. If after permanent cardiac arrest Alcor does not restore blood circulation and breathing within fifteen minutes, the patient is irretrievable as well.
How, when, and where we die is important. In its ideal world, Alcor would treat its patients in-house, easing them into and controlling their time of death. As it stands, Alcor must negotiate the uncertain health and critical state of its members to ensure that Aaron Drake and his team reach the body in time. If the patient doesn’t die in Scottsdale, Alcor navigates the terrain of unfamiliar hospitals and potentially unsympathetic doctors. They file injunctions against autopsies, contact local funeral directors, catch last-minute flights, carve out a space in the hospital to work, and plead with hospital staff to keep patients on life support.
But for all its seemingly idyllic security, Scottsdale provides one great problem: the heat. If a patient dies out of state, he’s usually flown in through commercial airliner. Though the Scottsdale airport is tantalizingly close, these flights are mandated to arrive into Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport. Because Alcor is a nonprofit and not a licensed mortuary, it’s not allowed to transport dead bodies back to its headquarters on its own. So Alcor has licensed a nearby funeral home to do so on their behalf. Phoenix, however, posts such high temperatures during the summer that law requires that remains travel only at night. During the day, the body carries too great a chance of decomposing. So the corpse, cooled down with its Batman mask and its body bag full of dry ice, must sit around till night before it can be transported back. And as Bree and I knew, it gets sweaty.
We returned to the lobby. The tour was almost over. Diane gathered us around a glass chamber built into the wall. Inside a horizontal cylinder stretched back, deep enough to hold a body, something like an MRI scanner. The cylinder was dark, though lights twinkled inside it, stars perhaps, miniature Alcors like the lights that line theater aisles so you can see your way through the dark.
We stared into the tunnel, all five of us. “You’re looking into the future,” Diane said. It was a rehearsed line, the kind you could tell she used to wrap up a tour. True, the lights did look a bit like stars, like some great and beckoning adventure, but mostly we saw our own reflections. I pointed that out and Scottsdale guy beamed with the irony.
If cryonics is a matter of faith, then like other religions, there is a group getting saved and a group left out. Alcor claims everyone can sign up—it even posts articles online theorizing how “Really Big Dewars” capable of holding millions of heads will be feasible and cheap to build one day—but that everyone is a slippery, hardly inclusive term. At the same time that cryonics and transhumanism make wonderfully expansive points about the human capacity for intelligence and achievement, they also make, whether they want to or not, certain choices about which humans should benefit from those capacities. The price tag remains $80,000 for a head and $200,000 for the whole body. Again, this is not necessarily its members’ fault; if cryonics were more mainstream, the expense might prove less an issue. But I couldn’t help but think of the advanced alarm system, the shatterproof glass, the bulletproof window, and the way the Scottsdale guy nodded when Diane mentioned federal bureaucracy and Alcor’s team of wealthy Florida investors dedicated to finding nonprofit tax loopholes.
I thought of this too even within Alcor. Jay Lewis worried that he wouldn’t have the historic value or support system there to wake him up. “Maybe they’ll need a guy who’s able to show people how things were done a hundred or a thousand years ago. A historical reenactor. That could be me,” he said. “The culture will have changed so much it’ll be like coming to another country—maybe some other cryos will wake me up since, you know, expats tend to stick with other expats.”
Perhaps the question wasn’t whether you’ll live forever, but whether you’ve been deemed worthy of it. There’s a rich and a meek on the other side of Alcor’s windows, VIPs and historical reenactors, though it seemed, if cryonics worked, that only one would be around to inherit the earth.
The Scottsdale couple shook Diane’s hand and left, but Bree and I stuck around. I rifled through the cryonics magazines. Bree asked Diane how she started working there. “Well, I used to work in healthcare, administrative stuff. Then I had five kids and I couldn’t anymore. But my husband had a heart attack when he was forty-eight. I had to go back to work and so I started here.”
“What does your husband think about your job?” Bree asked.
“Oh, he thinks it’s nuts. He doesn’t believe in the whole cryonics thing.”
I put the magazine back on the rack and looked at the photo of a woman on the wall outside Diane’s office. This was one of the yet-to-be-preserved patients, the wife of a board member. Diane walked over and stood next to it.
“She looks just like my mother. I asked for it to be placed there so I could see her whenever I walked in. She had hair just like that.” Diane swung her own braid around to gaze at the picture.
I wondered if Diane was one of the seven employees to be signed up, whether she thought some part of her would take this woman for her mother should they both come back. And perhaps this woman would treat Diane as her own daughter. Maybe this was the face that would go into Diane’s memory box and return her to herself. But at the same time, why didn’t she just keep a photo of her actual mother in her actual office?
A week after our tour, I met Richard Leis in a coffee shop near campus. One of Bree’s students from her undergraduate poetry workshop, Richard had raised his hand when Bree told her class about our visit and showed her his membership bracelet.
Richard was wearing his bracelet as I stood up to shake his hand. He worked at the University of Arizona as a specialist for the Mars Global Surveyor Orbiter Camera and, in his late thirties, he was finishing up his undergraduate degree. He was balding and his graying hair was kept short, but there seemed something endearingly childlike about him. He ordered a hot chocolate on a hot day. He still wore braces (“Though he’s about to get them off!” Bree insisted). Richard said he wrote mostly unrequited love poems and then laughed. He’d won the undergraduate award for poetry, and later, Bree quoted me one poem’s opening: “I am not the type of man who can wear a hat.”
Richard said he’d contemplated the idea of cryonics since childhood. He fell in love with pseudoscience—Bigfoot, UFOs, time machines—and when he was unhappy in college, he survived by listening to Coast to Coast, a radio show that specialized in fringe theories. It was the same path by which many cryonauts came to Alcor: an interest that originated in a cultural fascination with science fiction.
When I asked Richard what he planned to do when he was unfrozen, he said realistically he didn’t expect he would be. “I had enough money to do one weird thing with my life and this was it. It’s just a temporary storage space. In a sense, I don’t care where you put me. I just thought there should be another option besides burial and cremation.”
But while Diane trumpeted Alcor’s lowered dues, the company also required its longer-termed members such as Richard—who signed up back when full-body preservations only cost $150,000—to pay the $50,000 difference when the cost rose to $200,000. Some members pulled out, sacrificing what they had already spent; Richard stayed in and increased his life insurance.
As for a memory box, Richard didn’t want one. “When I was younger, I moved around the country a lot. I had to practice cutting off friendships, starting new in an unfamiliar place. I lived in Rochester, Oregon, Salt Lake, Phoenix, Tucson. I’ve grown to appreciate that disconnect. I�
�m not a collector; I’m not inclined to collect. I want whatever this pattern is here to continue on,” he moved his hands over his chest. “I want this consciousness to come back with me. If another me came back, then I wouldn’t have avoided death at all.”
It was back to that original, romantic notion of cryonics: of life and death as a grand experiment, and human life an experiment in form. Richard talked about taking beginner’s Spanish at the U of A. His professor was explaining the difference between ser and estar—the two different words for “to be”—one that applies to a temporary state or action, estar, and one that implies a more permanent one, ser. He’d used ser for everything, ascribing all actions permanence, and realized that he needed to start using estar. This, to him, was what cryonics and suspended animation were capable of doing: they make us reevaluate what we previously considered final.
When Bree and I drove back to Tucson, we kept to ourselves. Bree marked up poems for class and we discussed her thesis, a book of poems about the different heirlooms hidden throughout her family home in Pennsylvania, a house built in the 1700s.
We talked about what we’d put in our memory boxes. Bree said she kept imagining them and all she could picture was takeout menus and concert tickets.
“It makes me think about what I keep,” she said. “I have a collection of movie tickets. Of every single movie I’ve been to since 2005. Lela thinks it’s silly. And I can see how she’s right.”
Jay Lewis, the owner of the Kurosawa films, the first edition of Doom, the nanotechnology magazines, and the bolo tie made by his silversmith grandfather, plans to have two memory boxes. He will digitize three black-and-white photo albums belonging to his grandmother, pictures taken from an era near the camera’s invention. Then he’ll include the souvenirs from a two-week solo backpacking trip he took to Europe in his early twenties, the booklets and guides from museums in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, that he sometimes leafs through to remember what he saw.
The Book of Resting Places Page 13