Fear of Missing Out

by Kate McGovern

  “As you know, we have two different options for cryopreservation: whole-body and neuro only. Those obviously have different space requirements, so we do maintain separate rooms here.”

  “And the difference, again?” Mohit asks.

  “Just what it sounds like. Whole-body preservation is our standard package, and our recommended option, but we do offer neurocryopreservation—that’s the freezing of just the head, of course—at a lower price point, for those who want it.”

  Dr. Fitzspelt sounds awfully chipper, more like he’s selling levels of cable service than different options for keeping your dead loved one in a freezer for the foreseeable future.

  “We can talk more about the difference between those options once you’ve had a chance to see the facilities. We’ll start here.”

  He pauses in front of what looks like the door to a safe, thick and secured with multiple bolts. He enters a code in the lockbox, and I hear the bolts click open. I squeeze Mohit’s hand. Right behind me, I feel Chloe’s breath on my neck, anticipating whatever it is we’re about to witness.

  Inside the cold room are large white cylinders branded with the institute’s logo and arranged in three rows. Each cylinder is labeled with an alphanumeric code. The room itself looks like it could be a modern walk-in freezer for a restaurant, or anything, really. There’s nothing that says “Frozen bodies here!” No photos of the patients while they were living, no flowers or notes left in front of the freezers. I don’t know what I was picturing, exactly, but whatever it was, it wasn’t quite this. There’s nothing particularly pleasant about it; it’s not like the institute is making an effort to offer their preserved patients a nice stay while they’re here. But it’s not scary or grotesque, either. Mostly, it just looks like what it is: a scientific facility. A lab. A place where a grand experiment is taking place, quietly, out of view.

  I exhale with relief, letting go of tension I didn’t even realize I was holding in, and drop Mohit’s hand.

  “These are the whole-body freezers?” I ask.

  “Correct. These are what we call whole-body cryopreservation capsules. However, Astrid—and I’ll explain more about this later—I encourage you not to think of these simply as ‘freezers.’ The process of cryopreservation is quite different from that. We’re not in a Stephen King novel here. We’re scientists.” He gives me a gentle, sticky-lipped smile.

  “And the families of patients—do they ever come visit?”

  Dr. Fitzspelt chuckles, then catches himself, perhaps remembering suddenly that he’s talking to a sixteen-year-old who might well be residing here in a few months.

  He sighs. “We’ve had families tour the facilities, like you’re doing now. But to be honest—and I’m sorry this sounds so harsh—living loved ones know that our clients are dead. The families, for the most part, view them as gone and proceed with their lives accordingly. To my knowledge, most of our clients have had funerals. Many have grave sites. Occasionally, I do hear from relatives who want to check in on the progress of the science. Mostly, though, I believe people view our facility as…”

  He pauses, searching for the right words, which is almost surprising considering that he must have this conversation with prospective customers regularly. Or maybe he doesn’t.

  “I believe people view our facility as another way of putting their loved ones to rest. Just, rather than undergoing the absolute finality of a burial, the person is kept here, with the possibility for revival one day.”

  Next to me, Mohit sighs a little too loudly. I give him a quick shut-it-down look, but I don’t think Dr. Fitzspelt notices.

  I cast one last glance around the freezer room. “And what’s the process like for, like, what happens? After I … die?”

  Dr. Fitzspelt gives a quick nod. “Let me show you.”

  He leads us down the hall to a room that could pass for the set of a CSI spinoff—sterile fixtures, gray cabinets lining the walls, a stainless-steel examination table in the center. There’s a frame of sorts in one corner, six or seven feet long, with a deep canvas basket stretched across it. Lying in the basket, there’s a body.

  Okay, it’s not a real body. It’s a dummy, with a blue plastic pump affixed to its chest, connecting it via thick tubes to a machine with different-colored knobs.

  The demo body, I gather.

  “As you know, for cryogenic preservation to work, the body must be preserved at the moment of death, before the organs begin to atrophy. So with each client, we have a support team waiting in place. We send our team ahead of time, when the family lets us know that the end is imminent. The team members will wait, sometimes a week or more if that’s what it takes. It’s part of the package. As soon as the client is pronounced legally dead, the support team comes in and brings the body temperature down as quickly as possible.”

  “How do they do that, exactly?” Mohit sounds increasingly skeptical every time he opens his mouth.

  “We cover the body in crushed ice, plus some water. A hose works to spray water across the patient; that accelerates the cooling process. And this”—he points to the blue pump on the demo body’s chest—“this pump here keeps the heart pumping and oxygen flowing through the body.”

  “So the person is still alive, then? Her heart is pumping?”

  “Mo,” I say, a warning.

  Dr. Fitzspelt doesn’t look put off by Mohit’s questions, though. “Her heart has stopped naturally at the moment of death. We restart it manually, with the pump. But if we shut down the pump, the heart stops again.”

  Mohit swallows, hard. “Oh. Right.”

  “The client is kept in this state while the body temperature is brought down. In that time, she’s also given various medications—we use heparin to keep the blood from clotting, for example. This is all phase one. It happens right at the client’s bedside.”

  “And it has to happen immediately?” Chloe chimes in.

  “Yes,” Dr. Fitzspelt answers. “Otherwise the process doesn’t work. Preservation begins at the precise moment death is declared.”

  That hangs in the room for a moment. Maybe the three of us are all imagining the same moment. What is it like, the moment? Will I hurt, or will it be a relief from pain? Will I stink up the room with my smell of death, as I exhale my last putrid breaths over my unbrushed teeth and cotton tongue? Will they have to tear my mother away from me in the middle of her tears? Will she have time to say goodbye before I’m literally put on ice?

  After a pause that feels longer than it probably is, Dr. Fitzspelt clears his throat. “Once the body is cooled, we transfer the client to our facility. That’s when we begin the vitrification process.” He stops there and looks at me closely. “Is this a bit too much, Astrid? I have all this information in writing.”

  “I think we’d like to get it in writing,” Mohit says.

  It irks me a little that he’s speaking for me. At the same time, I do want it in writing. My head is swimming right now, partly from the influx of sobering information and partly with a general feeling of cloudiness. My lower back is starting to scream for a painkiller and a heating pad. I know I can’t stay on my feet like this much longer without needing a break.

  “Should we go upstairs, then? I’ll give you the paperwork and information to take home, and you can think this all over.”

  * * *

  We exit the elevator on the second floor, and the light of day pours in through windowed corridors, sending a sharp jab through my head, just behind my eyes. I blink it away.

  “These are our labs, on this floor. And our offices. Here we go.”

  Just as he’s about to open the door, it swings in the other direction and Dr. Carl Vanderwalk, the Doogie Howser of cryonics, emerges. He looks surprised and then pleased to see me.

  “Ah, Astrid Ayeroff, regular human! I was hoping I’d run into you while you were here. How are you?”

  “Still kicking.” I introduce him to Mohit and Chloe.

  “Dr. Vanderwalk is our associate medical direc
tor,” says Dr. Fitzspelt. “And one of the most promising new doctors in the field.”

  Carl brushes him off. “Stop, you’re making me blush. I’m just doing my job. Well, you enjoy the rest of your tour. And, Astrid?” He takes my hand and looks me straight in the eye with his own piercing blue ones. His palm is cool but a little clammy with sweat. “Best of luck to you. Whatever you decide to do with the end of your present life, trust your gut. You’ll make the right choices for you.”

  “Uh, thanks?” I’m unsure how else to respond, and take my hand back.

  Dr. Fitzspelt clears his throat and ushers us into a standard-issue office. There’s a cubicle by the door, occupied by a middle-aged white woman with an obvious line of caked-on foundation tracing her jaw. She smiles broadly at us and gestures toward a platter of doughnuts at the edge of her desk. “Hi there! Help yourselves. Dr. F., a few messages for you on your desk.”

  “Thank you, Charlene. Right this way, my friends.”

  I eye the doughnuts as we walk past, an assortment of glazed and powdered and chocolate frosted with rainbow sprinkles. Bright red jelly oozes from the center of one. My stomach turns.

  We follow Dr. Fitzspelt into the inner office, which looks out over the parking lot and, beyond that, the rusty landscape Sedona is famous for. The doctor’s workspace is so cluttered that it makes me wonder what his house looks like, and whether he might be a bona fide hoarder. There are piles of papers stacked high enough that I’m not sure I could see the little man if he was sitting behind them, along with coffee cups of varying sizes, books, yellow legal pads, old copies of Scientific American, and a half-eaten glazed doughnut on a napkin. I spy a familiar tote bag from the neuroscience symposium and three of the brain-shaped stress balls. He clears papers off three chairs and motions for us to sit down. Then he makes a space in front of his own chair and starts pulling up something or other on the screen of an ancient desktop PC.

  “All right, then.” Dr. Fitzspelt exhales deeply and grins at us. “It’s such a pleasure to have young people here, I can’t tell you. We really do believe this is the future of science, you see. But it’s mostly us oldies working here. I do have a few, um, what do they call you all now—millennials? A few youngsters, anyway, working in the lab. You met Dr. Vanderwalk already, of course.”

  “Dr. Fitzspelt,” Chloe interrupts, “do you mind if we do a quick interview with you on camera? For Astrid’s vlog?”

  “Her what? I’m sorry.”

  “Her video blog. It’s a website we’re using to raise the money for her cryopreservation. She has lots of followers—they just want to know what the process is like. I’m sure they’d love to hear from you. It could be good publicity for the institute, too.”

  I’ve gotta hand it to Chloe, she would make a good agent.

  “Oh, well, I suppose, yes.” Dr. Fitzspelt sits up a little straighter in his chair, looking rather enthused about the idea of an interview. “We have been featured on the news quite a few times, as a matter of fact. I know I have DVDs of the clips around here somewhere…” He trails off as he starts scanning the area around his desk.

  “That’s okay, but it’d be great if we could get some original footage.” Chloe holds up the camera bag. “Do you mind?”

  Within minutes, she’s got the tripod set up and Dr. Fitzspelt is sitting in front of it, his cluttered desk in full view. Chloe makes me sit in the shot, too, so my “fans” can see that I’m here in person with him.

  “Okay,” she says. “Ask him a few basic questions, Astrid.”

  “We already asked him the basic questions.”

  “Ask them again, then. Don’t be difficult.”

  My head is throbbing now; I’m ready for a nap and some water. But I train my focus on Dr. Fitzspelt and force a smile at him.

  “So a lot of people have been asking me, you know, is this possible? I guess that’s my big question, too. Is it possible?”

  The doctor chuckles, like he’s telling himself a private joke about these “people” and their “questions.”

  “Of course, we hear that a lot, too, as you can imagine,” he says. “Astrid, the thing is, this is already happening. Just recently—I don’t know if you saw this on the news—a young man’s body was recovered from under a snowbank where he had been trapped. Now, he had been dead for about twenty-four hours by the time he was found—that’s what his doctors said. Really dead, no heartbeat, no brain activity, all right? Dead. But those doctors were able to warm his blood and bring him back to life in the hospital. Cryopreservation relies on the same science. What we’re really doing here is simply learning how to take advantage of a process that already occurs in nature. If the body is brought to a sufficiently low temperature at the time of death, it opens all kinds of possibilities for revival.”

  I think about that. “So then … if that’s the case, do you view cryopreservation as the act of reviving a dead person—or saving a life?”

  Dr. Fitzspelt looks like he’s taken off guard by the question. He scratches his chin for a moment and stares into the distance. “There are different schools of thought on this, Astrid. I can only tell you what I believe. We’re not saving lives, per se. But the process does take advantage of the scientific reality of what happens in the moments immediately surrounding a natural death. Death isn’t a single moment. It’s a process.”

  Next to me, I sense Mohit tense up. I can practically hear the voice in his head screaming, Except it is a moment. But I like Dr. Fitzspelt’s description. Because if dying is a process, then there must be multiple ways to do it well.

  “Of course,” Dr. Fitzspelt continues without anyone asking him a follow-up, “bodies that have died from natural causes are, in many cases, diseased in ways that cannot be cured with today’s medical science. But there’s no reason that that will still be true a decade or two or three down the road. Your brain tumor, for example, could be cured with, say, genetic medicine or advances in surgery.”

  I try to imagine a world in which the astrocytoma blossoming in my skull and twisting its way irreparably around my healthy brain tissue could be someone else’s nuisance, a literal and figurative headache to be cured with some pills or an outpatient surgery. It sends a surge of anger through me. Why not now? Why not me?

  But then, perhaps, that’s exactly Dr. Fitzspelt’s point. If they preserve my body, it could be me. In a “now” I can’t even comprehend.

  I just wonder what that now will be like. Who I’ll be, yes, but more important, who everyone else will be. Let’s say it takes thirty years. Mohit will be middle-aged. He could be married to someone—someone very much alive—and have kids of his own. My mother could be a grandmother; my little brother, someone’s dad. Liam’ll barely even remember his once-dying sister. If the future of science can actually wake me up and make me healthy again, or at a very minimum bring back some piece of my consciousness, what world will I be coming back to?

  * * *

  “Is there anything else I can answer for you today?” Dr. Fitzspelt asks after Chloe has turned off the camera. He’s looking at me intently, as if he’s studying me.

  I shake my head. “I don’t think so. I mean, I might have some more questions later.”

  He nods curtly. “Of course, anytime. You have my information.”

  “I still have a question,” Mohit says.

  Leave it to Mo to be full of questions until the very last opportunity. Dr. Fitzspelt shifts his gaze to Mohit and waits.

  “You keep saying maybe this, maybe that. This all seems, at best, unlikely.”

  Dr. Fitzspelt starts to interject, but Mohit continues.

  “So what I’m wondering is, Is there anything you can do—or we can do—to up Astrid’s chances of the procedure working? Like, in her particular case? I understand that we don’t have any guarantees, but if we’re going to go down this path…” He leaves the rest of his sentence hanging in midair.

  Dr. Fitzspelt narrows his eyes a bit as he first takes in Mohit’s face, then
mine.

  “Well,” he says, then stops there. After what feels like a long pause, he parts his lips and waits still another moment before speaking. “There is one thing I would call a possibility. Something we’re in talks about. But it’s not part of our standard procedure at this time. I did think … Well, I wondered, when I heard from you, if you might be a good candidate for this. But I don’t want to pressure you, of course.”

  Mohit is frowning now.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  Dr. Fitzspelt stands up suddenly, a few papers drifting from his desk to the office floor. “Come with me, please. And please, I must ask that you keep what you’re about to see confidential, as we are still in the development phase.”

  We follow him back down the hallway to the elevators, and then all the way to the very lowest level, a floor deeper than we’ve gone before. He doesn’t say anything as he takes us down, and we don’t ask any more questions.

  Down the corridor, we reach a door that requires Dr. Fitzspelt’s key card and fingerprint ID to enter. The heavy door swings open automatically after his prints are approved, and he motions us through it. On the other side, there are several more laboratory doors on either side of the hallway. Dr. Fitzspelt stops in front of one.

  “This is our latest research. We don’t offer this to current clients because we have yet to test this process in humans.”

  My mouth goes instantly dry; my stomach churns. “What process?”

  He presses his fingertips to another ID pad, then motions us into the room after him. It’s the kind of laboratory I’ve seen a hundred times in movies—a cramped, windowless room with several rows of cages, packed on top of each other and labeled with numerical codes. It’s cold in the room, even colder than the labs upstairs. And all around us, the quiet, persistent squeaking of rats.

  I shiver as we follow Dr. Fitzspelt to the farthermost row of cages.

  “What is all this?” Mohit asks. I can tell from the low vibration of his voice that he’s not happy.

  “This is our most compelling possibility.” Dr. Fitzspelt runs a long, thin finger along the edge of the first cage, where a white rat with tiny red eyes scurries around industriously. “This rat, and the others in this row here, have all been previously cryopreserved.”