Unnatural
Page 78
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Hydaburg, Alaska. Much colder than the milieu at which Marshall Patterson had discovered credible cryonics, but on the day Sabrina returned there on related business, there was a comparable front of rain clouds congregating. She had to agree, beholding the navy waters, that there was a sinister beauty to a storm. Besides knowing that technology – not just Jane, but the Libertas – had given him basic human happiness when no one else could, that was the closest she came to sympathy for a man who’d quite possibly instigated the Dethroning. When she had lived as him in the Mindscape, he’d had no sympathy for himself.
She didn’t know what society planned to do with Marshall once he was restored. Uriah had made sure, she hoped, that Jane wouldn’t revive him before the right time, but when the right time came, what then? Would he be able to live in peace knowing Jane had never really betrayed him?
And Livingston … well, he had perhaps gotten the better deal out of the two.
Sabrina found her parents’ house. By Transhuman-class standards it was superficially modest. Though inside there had always been the comforts of a wealthy household, the exterior was a rectangular edifice that wouldn’t even have impressed every Western citizen of the 2010s. No fountain or tennis court, but that didn’t make it easier to ignore how shamelessly it outclassed the dilapidated homes it overlooked.
It occurred to her just outside the door that she had no key with her. That was okay. The back deck was accessible from ground level.
A breeze whipped her hair across her face as she climbed the wooden steps, while Michael clung to her side for warmth. At the top landing, the sight of the family totem pole made her burst out laughing. It’s okay, no one can hear you.
To the left, that was what she had come for. The telescope. It was still the afternoon, but she couldn’t have cared less. Her right eye witnessed that faint, pale shape in the sky as a smile spread on her face, ear to ear.
It was missing something, of course. Someone. She turned toward the sliding door. Unlocked.
Sabrina’s heart nearly stopped when she saw the two people sitting on the couch.
How? As it happened, Livingston hadn’t transported the bodies to Cryonics Institutes. Not most of them, anyway. She had already known that. Still, to find them here, not situated as if they had been vitrified in this position …
She retrieved a vial from her pocket. This was the not so “normal” answer to the revival problem, but would it work?
Kenneth and Cheryl found their way into the chairs on the deck, not being looked in the face by their daughter, who put the narrow end of the telescope over her father’s eye. That was the easy part. It took a mountain of what some might call foolhardiness to tilt Cheryl’s head down and place her grandson on her lap. They weren’t old enough to get heart attacks from this, right?
Michael reached for the vial in vain as she removed its stopper. This was it. Revival.
The wait wasn’t as bearable as it had been with Uriah when their son had transitioned, especially as she recalled Uriah’s behavior in another room at the Nevada Cryonics Institute.
He had shot disturbed glances at the capsules of unfamiliar people he passed, but within a minute of entering he had frozen.
He dashed down a hallway of sorts separating groups of cryogenic chambers. When he stopped in front of one containing a tall, thin, serene-looking woman with dark hair that flowed beneath her shoulders, he broke down sobbing.
“God bless you, Isaac Livingston,” Sabrina said under her breath.